So, every election you write in "Jesus" for President? If all that Bible stuff I read was telling the truth, Jesus would make a much less evil candidate than Badnarhoweveryouspellit ever could. By voting for the least evil of the people actually on the ballot, aren't you compromising your own "don't vote for evil" policy?
Say that your private calculations have determined that Badnardik is less evil than Nader who is less evil than Kerry who is less evil than Bush. Let's say also that you live in a state where your vote, if cast for Kerry, could have a very real chance of giving Kerry the job. Now, how are you serving your own goals of a less evil government served by voting for someone who has no chance of actually getting into the government?
Even if Selective Service is used, I don't see that as implying a "military draft." The Selective Service already has a job of keeping track of young men of the appropriate age group, and it's much more efficient to use them than to set up an entirely separate system for national service.
The only problem I see is if service was mandatory, and there weren't enough civilian positions for young people to fill.
1) "Supporting the war" and recognizing that Iraq would be much worse off if we just pulled out now are two different things. I don't think Kerry would have gotten us into Iraq in the first place, and that if he had, he would have had a more effective and realistic plan.
2) There are provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were a good idea. It's not all about the Feds being able to look at your library account. One provision increased border patrols, and another allowed law enforcement to obtain a wiretap for an individual rather than a particular phone. It just doesn't make sense to require separate warrants for a home phone, a work phone, and a mobile phone.
Kerry has criticized portions of the PATRIOT Act as overly broad and abuse prone. He wants to revisit these portions. But each section of the act should be evaluated on its own merits. If Badnarik wants to jettison the entire thing, it would probably be better than leaving the entire thing as-is, but it doesn't strike me as a soundly-reasoned position.
3) In what sense does Kerry support the draft? When did he express such support?
Someone did. The congressman Bush was meeting corrected him (very politely and graciously, in his recollection). Bush just repeated his assertion that Sweden didn't have an army. The room went silent, until somebody changed the subject. It was only weeks later that Bush caught up with the congressman and admitted to the mistake.
It seems like the President just doesn't like having his facts questioned.
Weeks after the fact, George Bush was willing to admit the correctness of a fact that can be looked up in a dictionary. The question now is, did he do anything with the information? What I mean is, did he go back to the table and reconsider choosing the general that Tom Lantos recommended? If not, far too little far too late.
The problem here is, Bush was in the middle of a meeting of very high-level people. The time of every person at that table was valuable, including his own. But when he clung to a demonstrable falsehood, nobody on his staff was willing to correct him. That's a very strong indication that POTUS doesn't take correction graciously, and doesn't take much interest in facts that don't already fit his worldview. Both attributes are dangerous ones for the president to have.
Spin this all you like. Fight the reality-based community all you like. In the end, by protecting this numbskull, you only hurt yourself.
You're missing a crucial point: there are more important things than terrorists, even to those who would like to see "the destruction of Western Civilization by any means." They're real people with occupations, families, porn fetishes, occasional insomnia, the works.
Look at it this way: How many people on the conservative side of the aisle would like to see something terrible happen to John Kerry? Let's guess around 15% of the population would give a wry smile upon hearing the news of his untimely demise. Now, how many of them are so enamored of the idea that they're actively seeking to carry it out? Precious few.
In the same way, a great number of Middle Easterners hate the West for one reason or another. But if we pursue policies that don't aggravate their already difficult lives, most of them will pursue our utter destruction with less vigor than they will pursue household chores.
It's not calculus. Calculus is complicated, but the answers are verifiable. This is... well, sociology. Too many guesses masquerading as certainty.
I do agree that there is an equation here, and that getting rid of terrorists faster than they're being created is the way to "win" the war. But there's no clear picture of how this equation is actually behaving when you take it off the chalkboard and try to map to events in the real world.
On the one hand, many of the al-Qaeda leaders who were active at the time of September 11 have been "brought to justice" in the sense that they've been imprisoned or killed. We also know that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have provided very effective propaganda that helps al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorist organizations to recruit angry young Muslim men.
So we keep hunting and killing, and they keep recruiting and pushing for contributions. Since terrorists don't publish monthly newsletters, it's hard to tell if we're actually winning.
I'm a firm believer in bell curves. No, hear me out. I figure that the attitudes of the poor Middle Eastern populations where terrorists recruit lie along something akin to a gaussian distribution. The vast bulk of them hate us, which is unfortunate. But there are only a few on the tail of the distribution who would actually go out and act as suicide bombs. When our policies in the Middle East hurt those populations, the entire curve shifts a little towards that tail. While the average "person on the street" won't exhibit much change, the number of people crossing over that threshold and swelling the ranks of terrorist organizations might be enormous.
Conservatives often mock liberals on security issues, saying that we would have sat down with Osama bin Laden and asked him what behavior of ours was causing him to act out. bin Laden is a murderer who deserves no consideration (and a swift blow to the head with a Tomahawk Missile, if practical). But we do need to look to our own behavior. Maybe our security would be served better if we took a look at things from the view of a poor Muslim teenager, who was being offered a chance to rise beyond a hard and mundane life, to strike a blow at "The Great Satan."
I want him to have something to look forward to in this life, that will keep him from choosing to blow himself into the next. Job opportunities. Education. Hope.
Conservatives by and large seem to take the view that "the terrorists" hate us, have always hated us, and always will hate us. But I think that some policy changes would be enough to push many of these men back across the threshold, and firmly into the camp of "people who aren't actively trying to kill us." First, I think we need to be a bit less cavalier in our attitudes towards the rest of the world. We need to accept our mistakes, make amends, and stop defending PR debacles like Abu Ghirab.
The next thing on my agenda would be to promote economic growth in third world and developing countries, with a special eye on the health and well-being of the poorest people. There is a lot we could be doing in that respect. Here is a good place to start. The quick version is that the IMF (and to a lesser extent, the World Bank) is promoting bad policies across the globe, often at the direct request of American financial interests.
To the extent that calculus is an appropriate analogy, I believe that there are other ways than murder to remove terrorists from the equation. There should be no mercy for those who have already committed atrocities in the name of their cause, but I think that there are humane ways of lowering the replacement rate.
Bottom line: the popular thing isn't always the right thing, but being more popular could be in the interests of national security. Just something to consider.
I hope the teacher filed a wrongful termination suit. People certainly shouldn't be punished for private religious convictions. What were the grounds for his termination?
The U.N. wasn't failing. U.N. inspections discovered and destroyed more WMDs in the years after the first Gulf War than coalition troops did during the war itself.
Saddam had no missiles capable of hitting the U.S. When the invasion started, he was able to whip out what, three or four of his next-to-useless-even-fifteen-years-ago SCUD missiles? He had nothing. No WMDs. No delivery system.
Yes, it was insane of Saddam to think he could keep gaming the U.N. the way he did. But it was insane of Bush to throw together a plan based on wishful thinking, and storm into Iraq with a coalition based on us, a handful of Great Britain's finest, and fifty-seven other countries who showed their support by sending canned hams.
We forced a confrontation even as other options were begging to be pursued. For that decision, thousands died, and if there is the smallest measure of justice in this world, that decision will be the end of George W. Bush's political career.
What do you find appalling about putting Kerry in the White House? What specific actions do you think he would take that would be to the detriment of the country?
Condorcet voting is pretty cool, and from the end user perspective isn't any different from Instant Runoff. Just rank the candidates in order of preference.
Getting rid of the Electoral College isn't nearly as terrible a thing as I used to think. First, the biggest advantage of catering to metro voters is that you can reach a whole lot of them at once. TV and the Internet negate that advantage somewhat.
It can also be argued that if you don't live in a swing state, your vote doesn't matter.
Finally, the Democrats/Republicans seem to have fairly cleanly divided up the country, with Dems taking urban centers and Republicans taking rural and suburban America. Since the parties seem fairly well balanced, it's hard to argue that only urban votes would matter if the EC were jettisoned.
I disagree that government is trying to take away freedom of religion. I think it would be more appropriate to say that the government (quite properly) has to act neutrally with regards to religion, neither favoring one religion over another, or favoring religious persons over non-religious persons.
My theory is that, in striking a balance, the government is coming across as hostile to many people on both sides.
Students should be allowed to worship as they choose on school time. In areas where local policy follows judicial rulings, they do. However, the mere fact of the school setting requires that the students must do so in a way that doesn't compel others or infringe on their liberties.
With teachers, it's a whole different ballgame. They are in front of classrooms as a public service, not to promote their own political agenda. While I see some real harm in not allowing teachers to expose students to certain classes of ideas, it has to be balanced with the fact that, given half a chance, many teachers would gladly inject their own ideas into the classroom.
Funny story: My girlfriend signed up for a chemistry class at the beginning of this semester. The first day, the teacher asserted that evolution was unscientific, and in doing so demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding of the scientific method. My home state of Utah has also had some pretty famous cases of teachers pushing pro/anti-religious agendas over the years. I remember one teacher got fired for dissing the Book of Mormon.
Students should have as much freedom of religious expression as can be allowed without sacrificing the primary purpose of school, which is to crank out mindless automata for our corporate overlords.
The only way you can believe that only liberal judges "legislate from the bench" is if you only call it legislating when a ruling goes against your political agenda.
Conservative judges don't have a lock on "strict constructionism." Rather, they simply have a different idea of which areas the government should be butting its nose into.
It wasn't the liberals in the Department of Justice who eroded states rights by deciding that California couldn't have its own medical marijuana laws. It's not liberal judges who are blithely ignoring the spirit and letter of the Constitution by allowing the administration to detain prisoners without bringing them to trial. It wasn't a liberal Supreme Court which stepped in and stopped the Florida recounts.
As far as I'm concerned, when a Republican starts griping about "activist judges," they mean "judges whose rulings come down on the liberal side of the aisle."
It doesn't matter what good news comes out in America the Democrats and Kerry have to spin it into bad news.
And that would be cheap, political partisanship if it weren't so damned easy.
The news from Iraq isn't great. It's understandable that we keep hearing of the new attacks, new deaths of U.S. and Iraqi troops, and new civilian casualties while less attention is paid to progress in the country. But when the President of Iraq comes to the U.S. to report on the progress of his country, and gives them a speech basically written by White House operatives, you have to wonder if there is any progress being made at all.
Bush has refused to admit to any major blunders in his planning of the war, his execution of the war, his plans for winning the peace, or the way he sold the war to Americans. The first time I've heard him ask to wait for further analysis before drawing a conclusion was when Democrats started blaming him for the missing explosives.
"Where is Saddam?" was never as important a question as you make it out to be. It was pretty clear before his capture that he was no longer running the show. From a tactical standpoint, the capture of Hussein changed little. At best it served as a psychological blow to the enemy.
Plus, the question doesn't speak to our reasons for invading the way "Where are the WMD?" does. Hell, we already knew that Iraq was chock full of Hussein and family. But the WMDs were the proof that we were in imminent danger, and our justification for going in and removing Hussein ourselves, rather than building a decent coalition.
Nor is it the only question worth asking. Others include:
"Where was Hussein's nuclear program?" "Why weren't we welcomed as liberators like your administration repeatedly promised?" "Why didn't we send in enough troops to make sure that we could secure critical sites like the one from which the explosives disappeared?" "Knowing now that there was no connection between Iraq and 9-11, that there were no WMDs, that our invasion would spawn a tenacious and destabilizing resistance movement, that over a thousand of our servicemen and women would die, that our actions would alienate our allies, energize our enemies, and make it harder to gain the sort of international cooperation we need to defend ourselves against terrorism, why do you continue to say that you would have made the same decisions?"
You're advocating that, rather than participating in the sort of global, intergovernmental processes that would allow other countries to express their grievances and allow us to act on them, that America ignore these processes and keep doing exactly whatever it wants. If the rest of the world goes to war with us, then "Oops, we screwed up."
When Canada is sending fishing trawlers full of angry shotgun-wielding Cannucks into New York Harbor, it's well past the time when we should have been learning from our mistakes.
"If instead we look around the playground for people ready to throw rocks our way, why would the other kids care if we pummel the rock-throwers and take away the rocks?"
Again with the dumbness. Why would other kids care? Maybe because you pummeled a few dozen bystanders in your effort to pummel the kid with the rocks. Maybe because the kid you targetted didn't actually have rocks to begin with, and you never presented any convincing evidence that he did. Maybe because they don't like the idea that you can just go up to any kid on the playground and say, "I saw you touch that rock. You were planning on throwing it at us, so we're going to pummel you." Maybe because the kids have worked out a procedure for resolving just these sorts of disputes, and you keep ignoring that procedure even as you insist that the other kids have to use it.
Basically, the behavior you're advocating is nothing but "Lord of the Flies" on an international scale. We're supposed to be grownups. Except maybe Bush, who doesn't listen to anybody but his closest friends.
No, if you read the post, he said that the reduction was in the number of people who were able to access the website for defacing purposes. He said nothing about reduced incentive stemming from reduced audience.
Besides, once the hack is complete, you just know that hundreds of people will archive the new, improved site for posterity. Blocking connections outside the U.S. does absolutely nothing to reduce the fact that (until the post-election brawl settles out) georgewbush.com is one of the juiciest targets out there.
Anyhow, by the same philosophy, the site should only be accessible from battleground states.
1) Dividing by the total world population is irrelevant. At minimum, you should do [population who can access now] / [total population with Internet access]. The U.S. has way more connections per capita than the world average.
2) If someone is a passable script kiddie, they should know enough to be using open proxies to view the web page, and to launch their attack from a server located inside the U.S. So all this action does is remove the incompetent ones from the running (the ones they should be least worried about in the first place). It also invalidates your risk exposure analysis.
Wow. Your post just reeks of dumb. You're basically saying that the U.S. should be able to invade any country suspected of harboring terrorists, and nobody else should have a say in it. Not the invaded country. Not its allies. Not our allies. Nobody. We are judge, jury, and executioner.
As to your belief that police don't owe anything to the policed, that's just what a police state would want you to think. In theory, the police are supposed to be under the control of our elected representatives, who are voted in and out of office by the policed. It sounds like you don't think police should be held responsible for abuse of authority or police brutality, and that strikes me as an insane attitude.
If America continues its economic slide, it could get overtaken by China and India. Then you're going to wish you'd been a little less eager to popularize the idea that a country should be able to do preemptively invade another country if the invading country feels that it's in the interests of "national security" to do so.
My opinion is, if you don't want felons to vote, you shouldn't put voting booths inside the prisons.
Once someone leaves prison, their debt to society should be considered paid. The point of taking someone out of prison is to move them back into society, and make them participants.
But, accepting the fact that Florida doesn't allow ex-convicts to vote, the question that remains is whether the list was drawn up in a fair manner, or whether it was done in order to rig the election. If the latter--and I'm not convinced one way or the other--then telling Democrats to stop focusing on the negative is nothing more than covering for your party.
"Can so many of you really not see from this perspective? This blindness is amazing [...] Why is this so hard to understand? You people are so emotional you can't see straight."
I don't think that statistic proves that any sort of voter fraud is going on. It may just be that they're slow at removing old names from the list.
It's like the "controversy" going on in Philadelphia, which has an overall voter registration of 99% (and climbing). Republicans are crying fraud, but really it's a simple effect of their Motor Voter bill. The bill requires them to retain voter registrations for more election cycles.
Basically, people move into the city, register to vote, and eventually move back out, leaving their records behind.
You've been out of the loop for a while. The Republicans wisely got rid of "The Death Tax", and in their enthusiasm to eliminate it, they even voted down a Democrat proposal to keep the estate taxes only on money above and beyond the first billion of net worth.
Thanks to the foresight of our leaders in Washington, we are all safe to pursue the American Dream of working hard, skimming a bit off the top, sticking it to a bunch of pensioners, and ensuring your descendants to the fifth generation never have to do anything productive.
Damn straight. If a copyright holder decides to make full use of the vastly overinflated collection of "rights" that infest modern copyright law, I have no respect for their decision to do so.
Now, if copyrights were much shorter, and copyright law contained clear, sensible guidelines about derivative works that would allow for creativity, and all DRM schemes were required to uphold those guidelines, then the decision "not to share" would be a perfectly respectable one.
Creators should have a certain level of control over their work. By default, copyright law grants them "rights" far in excess of that level. In such a climate, the decision not to share amounts to being a complete and utter prick.
[This post licensed under the "Do Whatever the Hell You Want With It" License v.2.0 or later.]
If a farmer leaves a "legacy" to his kids, the children have to keep the farm running the way Ol' Dad used to. If a musician gets to leave a legacy of his "intellectual property," all they really have to do is sign the royalty checks, accept money in exchange for licenses, and keep enough money on hand to sue the living daylights out of every high school that uses your dearly departed's song in their video yearbook. There's nothing terribly romantic about leaving a "legacy" of a big ol' wad of cash.
If you want to leave your kids a bunch of money, save up the proceeds generated from your time-limited monopoly on your work, invest it, and distribute it in your will. But legal permission to lock up an artifact of culture for as long as it has the tiniest shred of market value (and beyond, for the vast majority of works) is not a legacy.
The way it was supposed to work, back in the day: An artist created something. Upon publication, she has fourteen years (with an optional fourteen year extension) in which nobody else had the right to make copies of the work. In that time, she was supposed to sell copies for whatever the market would bear. At the end of that period, the work became part of our shared culture, for everyone to use and enjoy.
Now we have copyright extensions to infinity and beyond*, DRM technologies that are aimed at making perfectly legal uses of music and video impossible (and will continue to do so even if the copyright it originally protected were to expire), people suing each other over similar chord progressions, vast archives of movies rotting away in vaults because copyright far outlasted market value, and multibillion dollar industries suing teenagers and vetoing promising new technologies instead of coming up with better ways to meet demand with supply.
Quite contrary to your assertions, I think most Slashdotters see musicians for what they are: fellow creative professionals. But there are some limits to the control that any creator should have over his or her work, and those limits are receding in our proverbial rear-view mirror.
You and I both know that when Kerry said "global test" (and he did in fact rephrase it as "truth test" in the third debate) he was not saying that we should do whatever the majority of the world seems to want. He specifically denied meaning that.
"Now I want to go back to something the vice president said just a minute ago. Because these distortions are continuing. He said, made mention of this global test. What John Kerry said is just as clear as day to anybody was listening. He said we will find terrorists where they are and kill them before they ever do harm to the American people, first. We will keep this country safe. He defended this country as a young man. He will defend this country as president of the United States.
He also said, very clearly, that he will never give any country veto power over the security of the United States of America. Now I know the vice president would like to pretend that wasn't said and the president would too. But the reality is it was said.
The "global test" merely means that, as a country, we should be willing to listen to the counsel of others. The Bush administration seems to make it a matter of policy not to listen to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
So, every election you write in "Jesus" for President? If all that Bible stuff I read was telling the truth, Jesus would make a much less evil candidate than Badnarhoweveryouspellit ever could. By voting for the least evil of the people actually on the ballot, aren't you compromising your own "don't vote for evil" policy?
Say that your private calculations have determined that Badnardik is less evil than Nader who is less evil than Kerry who is less evil than Bush. Let's say also that you live in a state where your vote, if cast for Kerry, could have a very real chance of giving Kerry the job. Now, how are you serving your own goals of a less evil government served by voting for someone who has no chance of actually getting into the government?
Even if Selective Service is used, I don't see that as implying a "military draft." The Selective Service already has a job of keeping track of young men of the appropriate age group, and it's much more efficient to use them than to set up an entirely separate system for national service.
The only problem I see is if service was mandatory, and there weren't enough civilian positions for young people to fill.
1) "Supporting the war" and recognizing that Iraq would be much worse off if we just pulled out now are two different things. I don't think Kerry would have gotten us into Iraq in the first place, and that if he had, he would have had a more effective and realistic plan.
2) There are provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were a good idea. It's not all about the Feds being able to look at your library account. One provision increased border patrols, and another allowed law enforcement to obtain a wiretap for an individual rather than a particular phone. It just doesn't make sense to require separate warrants for a home phone, a work phone, and a mobile phone.
Kerry has criticized portions of the PATRIOT Act as overly broad and abuse prone. He wants to revisit these portions. But each section of the act should be evaluated on its own merits. If Badnarik wants to jettison the entire thing, it would probably be better than leaving the entire thing as-is, but it doesn't strike me as a soundly-reasoned position.
3) In what sense does Kerry support the draft? When did he express such support?
Someone did. The congressman Bush was meeting corrected him (very politely and graciously, in his recollection). Bush just repeated his assertion that Sweden didn't have an army. The room went silent, until somebody changed the subject. It was only weeks later that Bush caught up with the congressman and admitted to the mistake.
It seems like the President just doesn't like having his facts questioned.
Weeks after the fact, George Bush was willing to admit the correctness of a fact that can be looked up in a dictionary. The question now is, did he do anything with the information? What I mean is, did he go back to the table and reconsider choosing the general that Tom Lantos recommended? If not, far too little far too late.
The problem here is, Bush was in the middle of a meeting of very high-level people. The time of every person at that table was valuable, including his own. But when he clung to a demonstrable falsehood, nobody on his staff was willing to correct him. That's a very strong indication that POTUS doesn't take correction graciously, and doesn't take much interest in facts that don't already fit his worldview. Both attributes are dangerous ones for the president to have.
Spin this all you like. Fight the reality-based community all you like. In the end, by protecting this numbskull, you only hurt yourself.
You're missing a crucial point: there are more important things than terrorists, even to those who would like to see "the destruction of Western Civilization by any means." They're real people with occupations, families, porn fetishes, occasional insomnia, the works.
Look at it this way: How many people on the conservative side of the aisle would like to see something terrible happen to John Kerry? Let's guess around 15% of the population would give a wry smile upon hearing the news of his untimely demise. Now, how many of them are so enamored of the idea that they're actively seeking to carry it out? Precious few.
In the same way, a great number of Middle Easterners hate the West for one reason or another. But if we pursue policies that don't aggravate their already difficult lives, most of them will pursue our utter destruction with less vigor than they will pursue household chores.
It's not calculus. Calculus is complicated, but the answers are verifiable. This is... well, sociology. Too many guesses masquerading as certainty.
I do agree that there is an equation here, and that getting rid of terrorists faster than they're being created is the way to "win" the war. But there's no clear picture of how this equation is actually behaving when you take it off the chalkboard and try to map to events in the real world.
On the one hand, many of the al-Qaeda leaders who were active at the time of September 11 have been "brought to justice" in the sense that they've been imprisoned or killed. We also know that our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have provided very effective propaganda that helps al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorist organizations to recruit angry young Muslim men.
So we keep hunting and killing, and they keep recruiting and pushing for contributions. Since terrorists don't publish monthly newsletters, it's hard to tell if we're actually winning.
I'm a firm believer in bell curves. No, hear me out. I figure that the attitudes of the poor Middle Eastern populations where terrorists recruit lie along something akin to a gaussian distribution. The vast bulk of them hate us, which is unfortunate. But there are only a few on the tail of the distribution who would actually go out and act as suicide bombs. When our policies in the Middle East hurt those populations, the entire curve shifts a little towards that tail. While the average "person on the street" won't exhibit much change, the number of people crossing over that threshold and swelling the ranks of terrorist organizations might be enormous.
Conservatives often mock liberals on security issues, saying that we would have sat down with Osama bin Laden and asked him what behavior of ours was causing him to act out. bin Laden is a murderer who deserves no consideration (and a swift blow to the head with a Tomahawk Missile, if practical). But we do need to look to our own behavior. Maybe our security would be served better if we took a look at things from the view of a poor Muslim teenager, who was being offered a chance to rise beyond a hard and mundane life, to strike a blow at "The Great Satan."
I want him to have something to look forward to in this life, that will keep him from choosing to blow himself into the next. Job opportunities. Education. Hope.
Conservatives by and large seem to take the view that "the terrorists" hate us, have always hated us, and always will hate us. But I think that some policy changes would be enough to push many of these men back across the threshold, and firmly into the camp of "people who aren't actively trying to kill us." First, I think we need to be a bit less cavalier in our attitudes towards the rest of the world. We need to accept our mistakes, make amends, and stop defending PR debacles like Abu Ghirab.
The next thing on my agenda would be to promote economic growth in third world and developing countries, with a special eye on the health and well-being of the poorest people. There is a lot we could be doing in that respect. Here is a good place to start. The quick version is that the IMF (and to a lesser extent, the World Bank) is promoting bad policies across the globe, often at the direct request of American financial interests.
To the extent that calculus is an appropriate analogy, I believe that there are other ways than murder to remove terrorists from the equation. There should be no mercy for those who have already committed atrocities in the name of their cause, but I think that there are humane ways of lowering the replacement rate.
Bottom line: the popular thing isn't always the right thing, but being more popular could be in the interests of national security. Just something to consider.
I hope the teacher filed a wrongful termination suit. People certainly shouldn't be punished for private religious convictions. What were the grounds for his termination?
The U.N. wasn't failing. U.N. inspections discovered and destroyed more WMDs in the years after the first Gulf War than coalition troops did during the war itself.
Saddam had no missiles capable of hitting the U.S. When the invasion started, he was able to whip out what, three or four of his next-to-useless-even-fifteen-years-ago SCUD missiles? He had nothing. No WMDs. No delivery system.
Yes, it was insane of Saddam to think he could keep gaming the U.N. the way he did. But it was insane of Bush to throw together a plan based on wishful thinking, and storm into Iraq with a coalition based on us, a handful of Great Britain's finest, and fifty-seven other countries who showed their support by sending canned hams.
We forced a confrontation even as other options were begging to be pursued. For that decision, thousands died, and if there is the smallest measure of justice in this world, that decision will be the end of George W. Bush's political career.
What do you find appalling about putting Kerry in the White House? What specific actions do you think he would take that would be to the detriment of the country?
Condorcet voting is pretty cool, and from the end user perspective isn't any different from Instant Runoff. Just rank the candidates in order of preference.
Getting rid of the Electoral College isn't nearly as terrible a thing as I used to think. First, the biggest advantage of catering to metro voters is that you can reach a whole lot of them at once. TV and the Internet negate that advantage somewhat.
It can also be argued that if you don't live in a swing state, your vote doesn't matter.
Finally, the Democrats/Republicans seem to have fairly cleanly divided up the country, with Dems taking urban centers and Republicans taking rural and suburban America. Since the parties seem fairly well balanced, it's hard to argue that only urban votes would matter if the EC were jettisoned.
I disagree that government is trying to take away freedom of religion. I think it would be more appropriate to say that the government (quite properly) has to act neutrally with regards to religion, neither favoring one religion over another, or favoring religious persons over non-religious persons.
My theory is that, in striking a balance, the government is coming across as hostile to many people on both sides.
Students should be allowed to worship as they choose on school time. In areas where local policy follows judicial rulings, they do. However, the mere fact of the school setting requires that the students must do so in a way that doesn't compel others or infringe on their liberties.
With teachers, it's a whole different ballgame. They are in front of classrooms as a public service, not to promote their own political agenda. While I see some real harm in not allowing teachers to expose students to certain classes of ideas, it has to be balanced with the fact that, given half a chance, many teachers would gladly inject their own ideas into the classroom.
Funny story: My girlfriend signed up for a chemistry class at the beginning of this semester. The first day, the teacher asserted that evolution was unscientific, and in doing so demonstrated an incredible lack of understanding of the scientific method. My home state of Utah has also had some pretty famous cases of teachers pushing pro/anti-religious agendas over the years. I remember one teacher got fired for dissing the Book of Mormon.
Students should have as much freedom of religious expression as can be allowed without sacrificing the primary purpose of school, which is to crank out mindless automata for our corporate overlords.
The only way you can believe that only liberal judges "legislate from the bench" is if you only call it legislating when a ruling goes against your political agenda.
Conservative judges don't have a lock on "strict constructionism." Rather, they simply have a different idea of which areas the government should be butting its nose into.
It wasn't the liberals in the Department of Justice who eroded states rights by deciding that California couldn't have its own medical marijuana laws. It's not liberal judges who are blithely ignoring the spirit and letter of the Constitution by allowing the administration to detain prisoners without bringing them to trial. It wasn't a liberal Supreme Court which stepped in and stopped the Florida recounts.
As far as I'm concerned, when a Republican starts griping about "activist judges," they mean "judges whose rulings come down on the liberal side of the aisle."
The news from Iraq isn't great. It's understandable that we keep hearing of the new attacks, new deaths of U.S. and Iraqi troops, and new civilian casualties while less attention is paid to progress in the country. But when the President of Iraq comes to the U.S. to report on the progress of his country, and gives them a speech basically written by White House operatives, you have to wonder if there is any progress being made at all.
Bush has refused to admit to any major blunders in his planning of the war, his execution of the war, his plans for winning the peace, or the way he sold the war to Americans. The first time I've heard him ask to wait for further analysis before drawing a conclusion was when Democrats started blaming him for the missing explosives.
"Where is Saddam?" was never as important a question as you make it out to be. It was pretty clear before his capture that he was no longer running the show. From a tactical standpoint, the capture of Hussein changed little. At best it served as a psychological blow to the enemy.
Plus, the question doesn't speak to our reasons for invading the way "Where are the WMD?" does. Hell, we already knew that Iraq was chock full of Hussein and family. But the WMDs were the proof that we were in imminent danger, and our justification for going in and removing Hussein ourselves, rather than building a decent coalition.
Nor is it the only question worth asking. Others include:
"Where was Hussein's nuclear program?"
"Why weren't we welcomed as liberators like your administration repeatedly promised?"
"Why didn't we send in enough troops to make sure that we could secure critical sites like the one from which the explosives disappeared?"
"Knowing now that there was no connection between Iraq and 9-11, that there were no WMDs, that our invasion would spawn a tenacious and destabilizing resistance movement, that over a thousand of our servicemen and women would die, that our actions would alienate our allies, energize our enemies, and make it harder to gain the sort of international cooperation we need to defend ourselves against terrorism, why do you continue to say that you would have made the same decisions?"
You're advocating that, rather than participating in the sort of global, intergovernmental processes that would allow other countries to express their grievances and allow us to act on them, that America ignore these processes and keep doing exactly whatever it wants. If the rest of the world goes to war with us, then "Oops, we screwed up."
When Canada is sending fishing trawlers full of angry shotgun-wielding Cannucks into New York Harbor, it's well past the time when we should have been learning from our mistakes.
Again with the dumbness. Why would other kids care? Maybe because you pummeled a few dozen bystanders in your effort to pummel the kid with the rocks. Maybe because the kid you targetted didn't actually have rocks to begin with, and you never presented any convincing evidence that he did. Maybe because they don't like the idea that you can just go up to any kid on the playground and say, "I saw you touch that rock. You were planning on throwing it at us, so we're going to pummel you." Maybe because the kids have worked out a procedure for resolving just these sorts of disputes, and you keep ignoring that procedure even as you insist that the other kids have to use it.
Basically, the behavior you're advocating is nothing but "Lord of the Flies" on an international scale. We're supposed to be grownups. Except maybe Bush, who doesn't listen to anybody but his closest friends.
No, if you read the post, he said that the reduction was in the number of people who were able to access the website for defacing purposes. He said nothing about reduced incentive stemming from reduced audience.
Besides, once the hack is complete, you just know that hundreds of people will archive the new, improved site for posterity. Blocking connections outside the U.S. does absolutely nothing to reduce the fact that (until the post-election brawl settles out) georgewbush.com is one of the juiciest targets out there.
Anyhow, by the same philosophy, the site should only be accessible from battleground states.
Problems with this "analysis":
1) Dividing by the total world population is irrelevant. At minimum, you should do [population who can access now] / [total population with Internet access]. The U.S. has way more connections per capita than the world average.
2) If someone is a passable script kiddie, they should know enough to be using open proxies to view the web page, and to launch their attack from a server located inside the U.S. So all this action does is remove the incompetent ones from the running (the ones they should be least worried about in the first place). It also invalidates your risk exposure analysis.
3) This doesn't make W look bad?
Wow. Your post just reeks of dumb. You're basically saying that the U.S. should be able to invade any country suspected of harboring terrorists, and nobody else should have a say in it. Not the invaded country. Not its allies. Not our allies. Nobody. We are judge, jury, and executioner.
As to your belief that police don't owe anything to the policed, that's just what a police state would want you to think. In theory, the police are supposed to be under the control of our elected representatives, who are voted in and out of office by the policed. It sounds like you don't think police should be held responsible for abuse of authority or police brutality, and that strikes me as an insane attitude.
If America continues its economic slide, it could get overtaken by China and India. Then you're going to wish you'd been a little less eager to popularize the idea that a country should be able to do preemptively invade another country if the invading country feels that it's in the interests of "national security" to do so.
Once someone leaves prison, their debt to society should be considered paid. The point of taking someone out of prison is to move them back into society, and make them participants.
But, accepting the fact that Florida doesn't allow ex-convicts to vote, the question that remains is whether the list was drawn up in a fair manner, or whether it was done in order to rig the election. If the latter--and I'm not convinced one way or the other--then telling Democrats to stop focusing on the negative is nothing more than covering for your party.
Indeed, someone does sound too emotional.
I don't think that statistic proves that any sort of voter fraud is going on. It may just be that they're slow at removing old names from the list.
It's like the "controversy" going on in Philadelphia, which has an overall voter registration of 99% (and climbing). Republicans are crying fraud, but really it's a simple effect of their Motor Voter bill. The bill requires them to retain voter registrations for more election cycles.
Basically, people move into the city, register to vote, and eventually move back out, leaving their records behind.
You're quoting from "page 2", which was actually a counterpoint article by Lawrence Lessig. Hillary Rosen didn't write this.
You've been out of the loop for a while. The Republicans wisely got rid of "The Death Tax", and in their enthusiasm to eliminate it, they even voted down a Democrat proposal to keep the estate taxes only on money above and beyond the first billion of net worth.
Thanks to the foresight of our leaders in Washington, we are all safe to pursue the American Dream of working hard, skimming a bit off the top, sticking it to a bunch of pensioners, and ensuring your descendants to the fifth generation never have to do anything productive.
Damn straight. If a copyright holder decides to make full use of the vastly overinflated collection of "rights" that infest modern copyright law, I have no respect for their decision to do so.
Now, if copyrights were much shorter, and copyright law contained clear, sensible guidelines about derivative works that would allow for creativity, and all DRM schemes were required to uphold those guidelines, then the decision "not to share" would be a perfectly respectable one.
Creators should have a certain level of control over their work. By default, copyright law grants them "rights" far in excess of that level. In such a climate, the decision not to share amounts to being a complete and utter prick.
[This post licensed under the "Do Whatever the Hell You Want With It" License v.2.0 or later.]
If a farmer leaves a "legacy" to his kids, the children have to keep the farm running the way Ol' Dad used to. If a musician gets to leave a legacy of his "intellectual property," all they really have to do is sign the royalty checks, accept money in exchange for licenses, and keep enough money on hand to sue the living daylights out of every high school that uses your dearly departed's song in their video yearbook. There's nothing terribly romantic about leaving a "legacy" of a big ol' wad of cash.
/me writes royalty check to Pixar.
If you want to leave your kids a bunch of money, save up the proceeds generated from your time-limited monopoly on your work, invest it, and distribute it in your will. But legal permission to lock up an artifact of culture for as long as it has the tiniest shred of market value (and beyond, for the vast majority of works) is not a legacy.
The way it was supposed to work, back in the day: An artist created something. Upon publication, she has fourteen years (with an optional fourteen year extension) in which nobody else had the right to make copies of the work. In that time, she was supposed to sell copies for whatever the market would bear. At the end of that period, the work became part of our shared culture, for everyone to use and enjoy.
Now we have copyright extensions to infinity and beyond*, DRM technologies that are aimed at making perfectly legal uses of music and video impossible (and will continue to do so even if the copyright it originally protected were to expire), people suing each other over similar chord progressions, vast archives of movies rotting away in vaults because copyright far outlasted market value, and multibillion dollar industries suing teenagers and vetoing promising new technologies instead of coming up with better ways to meet demand with supply.
Quite contrary to your assertions, I think most Slashdotters see musicians for what they are: fellow creative professionals. But there are some limits to the control that any creator should have over his or her work, and those limits are receding in our proverbial rear-view mirror.
*
From the transcript of the vice presidential debate (John Edwards speaking):
The "global test" merely means that, as a country, we should be willing to listen to the counsel of others. The Bush administration seems to make it a matter of policy not to listen to anyone.