This is the lamest attempt at political apologetics I've ever seen. "Sweden was neutral in the last two world wars" != "Sweden doesn't have an army."
Read the article again. The congressman was suggesting that a Swedish general would be a good leader for the proposed coalition. Bush dismissed the idea because "Sweden doesn't have an army."
A couple of weeks later, Bush took the congressman aside and said, "You were right, Sweden does have an army" in an offhanded, "aw, shucks" sort of way. Too little, too late. He was sitting in a high level meeting where important decisions were being made, and refusing to accept new facts that were critical to making proper judgments.
There's some profiteering. There's also the high cost of malpractice insurance, and the fact that a lot of money is spent on cutting-edge research. A lot of that research leads to expensive treatments that benefit those who can afford it, but don't "trickle down" to the poor for many years, if ever.
And hey, let's put some of the responsibility on people for not making healthy lifestyle choices, whether it be overeating, smoking, alcohol, lack of exercise. People often forget basic prenatal care, or fall for the vastly overhyped dangers of immunizations. These choices save a bit of time and money in the short term, but at the risk of requiring catastrophically expensive medical care down the road.
There are so many things beyond the medical field that have impact on health costs. If putting more cops on the street means fewer shootings and muggings, the cost of health care goes down. If insuring the uninsured means more people get problems taken care of before it requires an emergency room visit, again costs go down.
I don't doubt there's an embarassing amount of corruption and bad policy in the world of medicine. But it's not a simple matter of "more money spent --> longer life expectancy".
We all agree that the war in Iraq is imperfect. There are some serious flaws, but I think most people in this country believe that overall Iraq will be better off as a stable democracy.
The question now is, could it have been handled better, and is it reasonable to expect that it should have been? Much to Bush's embarassment, a sizeable chunk of the population thinks so. There was no imminent threat from Iraq, the WMD situation was much less clear than the administration claimed (especially its claims about Hussein's nonexistent nuclear weapons program), and there was time to develop a broader coalition, formulate a plan that would have minimized the looting and chaos that followed Hussein's departure, and make an honest case about why Hussein needed to go.
The problem is, there are any number of "insane assholes" running countries, each of whom would love to get themselves some nukes. There was no clear evidence that Hussein was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, but what little controversial evidence existed was latched onto by this administration and presented to Americans as a clear threat.
I'm not looking for a premature pullout from Iraq. Now that we're there, the best thing we can do is get things stabilized so that Iraq can be independent. But the judgment Bush showed in taking us into war is, in my mind, proof positive that he's not the man to finish the job.
The question isn't whether we are obligated to put the interests of the world at large ahead of our own. The question is, when most of our allies are telling us an action is foolhardy and ill-conceived, we should be willing to try and make our case. If we cannot, then there may be a chance that our plan really is foolhardy.
This is what Kerry meant by a "truth test" in the first debate. We're supposed to support and respect our allies. That's why they're called allies, not enemies. We listen to them, their opinions matter to us, and they accord us the same respect. Seriously, how many times have your friends talked you out of doing something tragically stupid?
Bush wants to live in a reality of his own creation, where America is always right and the decisions of its commander-in-chief are always the best decisions that could be made. In order to continue to live in this reality, he cut himself off from the press (his famous April 14, 2004 press conference was only the third of his administration), interacts primarily with those in his very insular clique, and refuses to accept expert opinions that disagree with him. For example, in this illuminating article, the author recounts an anecdote about an encounter between Bush and Congressman Tom Lantos during a roundtable on a peace plan for Israel:
One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.
''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
I don't want resolve from my president. I don't want someone who will "hold to his view." I want someone who will accept the fact that he might not always be right.
Great, another libertarian who believes that market forces will be our salvation. This is a very uninformed view, given that the last fifty-odd years of economics research have been devoted to showing the very real limits on Adam Smith's "invisible hand."
One of the most basic is the "tragedy of the commons," which basically says that if an individual can profit in the short term by overusing or damaging a communal resource, the "invisible hand" will end up destroying that resource.
It's very likely that the cost of alternative energies is already significantly lower than that of conventional fossil fuels. But since many of the costs of fossil fuels can be shoved off onto future generations, our collective atmosphere, etc., these costs don't end up on the pricetag.
The government is the only mechanism by which this disparity can be fixed. They can step in and regulate pollution, or provide subsidies for alternative fuels. Government regulation can make the invisible costs visible, and thus better subject these market forces to free-market economics.
So, what you're saying is that our planet can take anything we throw at it, that consumption for consumption's sake is a moral good, that any attempt to stem that consumption is an attack on our Star-Spangled Economy, and that newbie programmers should never be paired with experts for fear that they might learn something.
Where is all this untouched vastness of which you speak? We're using most of the potential farmland, we've colonized all the reasonably habitable areas, we're fishing the oceans beyond sustainable levels.
Your bogus analogy makes it sound like consumption of resources is analogous to the production of quality code. Consumption is not a good thing, but a necessary evil that should be done when the benefits outweigh the costs. All consumption requires some depletion of resources in order to create the good being consumed.
You can take your "environmental responsibility is un-American" attitude and shove it.
I tried reading the Condorcet Method summary. It's too complicated when compared to Instant Runoff. You're not going to get any support for a voting system which confuses the electorate.
I'm trying to imagine sitting down with your "average voter" and explaining how "A defeated B, B defeated C, C defeated A, and due to these complex and technical rules of ambiguity resolution, B is really the winner." She'll decide that the system is just picking the guy the ballot counters wanted, and never voting again.
Third parties are always seen as spoilers, which drives down the desire to vote for them. How much more support would Nader be receiving this election if Florida did IRV in the 2000 election, and he wasn't seen as the guy who put Bush in office? It takes more than four years to put together a political party, field candidates, drum up support, etc.
Perot was a bit of a nut, but I think the Reform Party might have gone somewhere if he hadn't been seen as sapping strength away from the '92 Bush Sr. campaign.
IRV is simple enough (just rank the candidates from favorite to least favorite) and it would keep people from having to vote tactically, thus weakening the two party system.
I'm also against a winner-take-all approach for the Electoral College. If I live in a state where 75% of people vote Republican and 25% vote Democratic (coincidentally enough, I do), then the best way to represent the will of our state is to divide the electoral votes proportionally.
The coward is correct about Peroutka. I was going to say that I would give Bush four more terms before letting this nutjob take the helm, but then I realized that the moment he took office, everyone would stop taking the presidency seriously. Having a complete loon occupying the White House would just be harmless entertainment.
If you see any difference between the two candidates at all, and you're in a close state, you should vote for the lesser evil, not the guy-you-really-want-but-doesn't-have-a-shot-at-get ting-elected. Try hopping over to Votepair.org, and support your candidate without turning him into a dreaded spoiler.
I'm all in favor of making voting fun and easy, but I have to stop short at the idea of bribing people to vote. A lottery would further cheapen an already cynicism-inducing process, and punish those who vote because they want a part in the decision by drowning their voices in a sea of people who are just too stupid to do math.
The solution, as some other fine poster said, isn't to get people who don't care to vote, but to get people to care more.
Final point: a lot of states have anti-gambling laws, and this idea would run afoul of them. Anyone in favor of states' rights should see the idea as an imposition on the agency of the states.
Why does a reduction in the number of genes make creationism any more probable? All it proves is that genes behave differently than we thought back in the dark ages (pre-2000) when we thought we had 100,000 of them. A few ignorant folk express disbelief: How could so few genes really account for all the diversity we see? But the fact is, we're learning that genetics is less of a blueprint, and more of a recipe where timing is absolutely critical to the finished product.
So even if there were a single gene for "intelligence" (there isn't), it might be enough to explain much of the spectrum of intelligence that we see today just because it was active for different lengths of time in different people. Genes sometimes accept signals from the environment as well, so the diversity a few genes could cover will probably be astounding when finally demonstrated.
If they came back and said, "Oops, we made a mistake. We actually meant eleven genes, not twenty-thousand," I would be no more likely to believe that some "Intelligent Designer" needed to be invoked to explain our uniqueness.
You misunderstand science and scientists when you dismiss the idea that scientists might actually care about how our genetics got so complex. It's also wrong to believe that an explanation of this complexity wouldn't really assist our understanding. It would, and tremendously so. Evolutionary theory has been able to provide rationale for many previously unexplained phenomena. For example, the bare-boned smallness of the Y chromosome is a complete mystery until you realize that it's an evolutionary advantage for it to carry fewer genes for the mother's immune system to attack.
That one is somewhere in Matt Ridley's "GENOME". Excellent read. The point is, understanding how our genetic code got to be the way it is will very likely lead to the discovery of new rules that can be used to explain a lot of mysteries.
It is true that neither evolution or creationism are "provable" in the strict sense. However, I feel that they are not provable in different ways. Evolution is not provable in the same way that no theory in science can actually be "proven." There is always the chance that some new observation will require a total rewrite of evolutionary theory.
Creationism isn't provable for a totally different reason: It takes as a premise the existence of an omnipotent actor whose existence cannot be studied with any certainty. The creationists I've encountered love to talk about how the decision to reject supernaturalism is just a matter of philosophical taste, a bias which secular science rejects for no good reason. But there is an excellent, compelling reason to reject all supernatural explanations when conducting science: The existence of God makes true science impossible.
In the secular view, everything works according to natural laws. Phenomena can be studied, catalogued, and logically analyzed to determine what those laws might be. Once you posit the existence of an omnipotent being, no experiment can be proven valid. God may have interceded in order to make the experiment come out the way it did. For example, a few of my acquaintances have asserted that it is very likely that God created the world in seven days a few thousand years ago, but in such a way as to make it look like there was a chain of new species over billions of years.
So every experiment a Christian performs is done under the assumption that, while God could have interceded at this particular time and place without us knowing, He allowed it to proceed normally. Now, this argument doesn't disprove God, but it does inject a certain fundamental uncertainty into the theistic worldview.
Even with the gratuitous "stupid or liar" comment at the end, this is a commendable improvement in both quality of evidence and quality of argumentation. I'm far less inclined to believe that a draft is possible than I was before reading your post. Well done.
The biggest question still lingering in my mind is, what happens if Bush stays in office, and throws a couple more potential quagmires into the mix. Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria? Unless Bush gets better at alliance-building and diplomacy (and I think despite his protests and "resolve", he's learned some things from this) the personnel shortages are going to get worse and the idea of having large masses of bullet catchers might start looking better to all parties.
Re:Calling all Ye Liberals!!!!
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think the "lesser of two evils" folks really do have a point. Say you're presented with the following ballot:
[ ][ ] Satan (expected 47% of vote) [ ][ ] GW Bush (expected 46% of vote) [ ][ ] Gandhi (expected 3% of vote)
Now, let's assume that a Bush administration is undoubtedly evil, but would be very much less evil than a Satan administration. Let us further assume that Gandhi (despite being, in the most technical sense, dead) would do the best job of the three.
If everyone who would have voted for Gandhi instead votes for Bush, it's very likely that Bush will win, making the world less evil than had Satan himself been elected. In that case, swallowing one's pride and voting for the lesser of two evils rather than the best candidate overall would make the world less evil, and hence be a good thing.
Here's how I think people should make their decisions: First, evaluate all the candidates, and rank them in the order of quality. Then check the polls and see who the two most electable candidates are.
If you don't see a compelling difference between the two leading candidates, vote third party. But take into account that, the closer the race, the less compelling the difference has to be. For example, if you end up casting *the* tiebreaking vote, even a 1% evil differential should be enough to make you choose the lesser evil rather than the best good.
If the race isn't even close in your state, feel free to vote for the best candidate running. I'm in Utah, where GW leads JFK 64% to 27%. In that case, why not vote Nader? A lot of people here are thinking that way, and it looks like he'll get about 4% of the vote.
I'm not following my own advice, in that I'm actually pretty comfortable with the idea that Kerry would do a better job than Nader. I'm also a little miffed about how he screwed up Florida in 2000. But I'm also in favor of third parties, and figure that a strong third party presence on the Left would force Dems to take interest in things like runoff ballots and splitting electoral votes (as is done in Maine, and as is being proposed for Colorado).
Okay, it's obvious that you're not interested in actually debating this. If you were, you wouldn't have latched onto the one correction I made that wasn't relevant to the discussion.
To get you back on topic: Your original post implied that it was ludicrous to think that our congresscritters were even considering reinstating the draft. You offered four points of evidence, and I refuted them in turn.
Rather than discuss the merits of my refutation, you decided the best response was to castigate the guy who introduced the bill, then restate without evidence that the Republicans don't want the draft.
Let me reiterate:
- Even if you can show the military feels a draft would be a bad thing, the military doesn't have authority to reject the draft if Congress demands one.
- The civilians running the DoD are Bush appointees, and would be unlikely to publicly favor a draft in an election year.
- A draft would be legal if Congress voted to make it legal.
- There is no reason to believe that the outcome of the vote you cited was a serious vote, that it reflected the actual beliefs of any representative, or that a similar proposal wouldn't get through if the situation in Iraq continues to degrade.
- The military is overextended and desperate for bodies right now. The situation in Iraq seems to be getting worse.
Now, you called anyone who believes that a draft is likely "too fucking stupid to vote." Yet all the evidence you offered is the evidence which the MTV letter rightfully dismissed: that our elected representatives claim they don't want a draft.
Re:Tell me again that Slashdot isn't biased...
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RNC and Voter Suppression
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Story 1 - Lone gunman Story 2 - Lone gunman Story 3 - People paid on a "per voter registration card" basis have incentive to turn in forged voter registrations. No indication that these people actually intended to make use of these fake registrations for voting purposes. Story 4 - Democrat governor wants his people to oversee elections. Republicans don't. Story 5 - Only story nearly as newsworthy as the one Slashdot is reporting.
As for your final story about the Democratic playbook, discussing voter intimidation and fraud before it happens is a sound preventative measure. Nowhere does it specifically say to allege voter fraud without evidence, and I don't believe that was their intent.
The military has little say in it. They take their orders from Congress and the Executive Branch.
the civilian DoD administration doesn't want it
Who do you mean, specifically? Rumsfeld? People with connections to the current regime^H^H^H^H^H^H administration aren't going to come out in favor of a draft in an election year.
it's illegal
It's illegal to reinstate the draft? According to who? Why are we bothering with Selective Service?
It's "illegal" because nobody has passed a law making it legal. But they could at a moment's notice. Which brings us to the next point.
and the law to make it legal -- which was submitted by the Democrats -- went town to defeat 402-2 including votes against even from the dolt who sponsored the bill in the first place
The "dolt" was actually being very clever. Crassly political, but clever. He managed to drum up anti-war sentiment by giving people the opportunity to say, "Psst! Did you hear that there's a bill in Congress reinstating the draft?" and giving the Powers That Be in Washington a taste of the outrage they would get if they seriously considered such a bill. But you make it sound like the "dolt" was just too stupid to keep himself from submitting a bill he disagreed with.
You cannot--by any stretch of rationality--consider this vote an indicator of the way a vote would go once the election year has passed and our congresscritters are suddenly faced with a very real choice between reinstituting the draft and losing Iraq altogether.
The military is suddenly overextended, desperate for bodies to the point that a "backdoor draft" is already happening as people are forced to reenlist under threat of being shipped off to Iraq for the remainder of their contract.
-- that doesn't prove the Republicans aren't trying to re-establish the draft.
You're absolutely right about that.
Look -- if you're stupid enough to buy this argument, you're too fucking stupid to vote.
It sounds to me like "pre-emptive strike" means "warn people about past intimidation efforts and warn those who would consider using such tactics." It doesn't mean "make up evidence of intimidation that doesn't exist."
Okay, say you were the FBI, and wanted to harass some political organization while keeping your hands clean? How hard would it be to go to some foreign law enforcement agency and say, "Could you gentlemen find some pretense for ordering us to take this group's server? And we wouldn't be offended if a copy of their hard drive were sent back to us."
If anyone asks, the FBI just says that they're assisting the counterterrorism efforts of their allies. Nobody in Switzerland is going to get worked up over a request to shut down an American server, and the FBI is in a position to return the favor.
Sure, it reads like an Oliver Stone bedtime story. But I think the time has come when it is a mistake to put too much faith in our government.
I think you speak for those who didn't bother to read the articles when you ask: "Who the heck is Indymedia and why should we care?"
From Yahoo! News:
"The website was established by organizations during the 1999 World Trade Organization (news - web sites) protests claiming the mainstream media failed to adequately cover the news."
"It calls itself 'a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate and passionate tellings of the truth.'"
In short, they're a site that helps coordinate and inform the worldwide anti-globalization movement.
As to the question of what they might have been involved in, they can only speculate on what exactly their servers were yanked for. But speculations abound. It could be a story they ran about the Swiss undercover police, or their publication of the names and addresses of RNC convention delegates, or their involvement with the Diebold memos.
But even if they were totally irrelevant, the fact is that they've had legal action taken against them and are unable to determine the parties or reasons for the legal action. That's honest-to-god police state stuff, and we should be asking our elected officials tough questions about it.
You could back your statement up with facts. Simply provide a list of which networks called Florida for Bush, and at what times.
According to the article I cited, the decision by FOX News to call the election for Bush was made by Bush's cousin, Dale Ellis. It was done at precisely a time when Bush's lead was shrinking rapidly. In fact, the lead evaporated in the few minutes between the time Gore's campaign announced that he would give a concession speech and the time Gore was scheduled to actually give it. That was the announcement that, more than any arguments before the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts, delivered the election to Bush.
The Green party also has interesting stands on worker protections, consumer safety, and globalization. I'm not in full agreement with them on everything, but they're not a one-issue party. Arguably, the libertarians are a one-issue party, with their solution to every problem being "more free enterprise, less government."
As to the horror of having numerous parties: look at Israel. You have several parties, with fragile coalitions between them regarding different issues. This means that you have to work with party A on issue B, party B on issue C, and so on. I don't know if that translates into less vicious politics, but it is a workable system.
Why IP multicasting? What real advantages does it give you? Aside from the "Ooh, look, this is happening *right now*" factor, it seems like live streaming just takes all the problems of regular broadcast television and imprints them on a much more flexible medium.
Live feeds have their purpose, but I'm having trouble seeing how they would work well under a bittorrent system. It could be set up under a telephone tree model, where node A feeds nodes B C and D, which each provide feeds to five or six other nodes. There could even be some redundancy built in so that a dropped packet to node D doesn't propagate to all its clients.
But for things where time isn't critical (read: 90% of what we watch on TV), Bittorrent is ideal. Unlike normal Internet broadcasts, supply scales with demand. Even a delay of a few minutes should be adequate for most purposes.
Want everyone to watch your thingy at exactly the same time? Send it out to all the nodes that want it in some encrypted format, then when enough nodes are seeded to meet demand, distribute the key.
Varying quality streams are possible within a single stream. For example, with Ogg Vorbis, you can get a low-quality stream from a high quality stream just by removing portions of the stream (no re-encoding necessary).
Slashdot Mirror
This is the lamest attempt at political apologetics I've ever seen. "Sweden was neutral in the last two world wars" != "Sweden doesn't have an army."
Read the article again. The congressman was suggesting that a Swedish general would be a good leader for the proposed coalition. Bush dismissed the idea because "Sweden doesn't have an army."
A couple of weeks later, Bush took the congressman aside and said, "You were right, Sweden does have an army" in an offhanded, "aw, shucks" sort of way. Too little, too late. He was sitting in a high level meeting where important decisions were being made, and refusing to accept new facts that were critical to making proper judgments.
Hmm. It managed to throw a pop-up at me when I closed the window. Thanks to Firefox, I haven't seen one of those in months, but it still managed.
There's some profiteering. There's also the high cost of malpractice insurance, and the fact that a lot of money is spent on cutting-edge research. A lot of that research leads to expensive treatments that benefit those who can afford it, but don't "trickle down" to the poor for many years, if ever.
And hey, let's put some of the responsibility on people for not making healthy lifestyle choices, whether it be overeating, smoking, alcohol, lack of exercise. People often forget basic prenatal care, or fall for the vastly overhyped dangers of immunizations. These choices save a bit of time and money in the short term, but at the risk of requiring catastrophically expensive medical care down the road.
There are so many things beyond the medical field that have impact on health costs. If putting more cops on the street means fewer shootings and muggings, the cost of health care goes down. If insuring the uninsured means more people get problems taken care of before it requires an emergency room visit, again costs go down.
I don't doubt there's an embarassing amount of corruption and bad policy in the world of medicine. But it's not a simple matter of "more money spent --> longer life expectancy".
The question now is, could it have been handled better, and is it reasonable to expect that it should have been? Much to Bush's embarassment, a sizeable chunk of the population thinks so. There was no imminent threat from Iraq, the WMD situation was much less clear than the administration claimed (especially its claims about Hussein's nonexistent nuclear weapons program), and there was time to develop a broader coalition, formulate a plan that would have minimized the looting and chaos that followed Hussein's departure, and make an honest case about why Hussein needed to go.
The problem is, there are any number of "insane assholes" running countries, each of whom would love to get themselves some nukes. There was no clear evidence that Hussein was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, but what little controversial evidence existed was latched onto by this administration and presented to Americans as a clear threat.
I'm not looking for a premature pullout from Iraq. Now that we're there, the best thing we can do is get things stabilized so that Iraq can be independent. But the judgment Bush showed in taking us into war is, in my mind, proof positive that he's not the man to finish the job.
The question isn't whether we are obligated to put the interests of the world at large ahead of our own. The question is, when most of our allies are telling us an action is foolhardy and ill-conceived, we should be willing to try and make our case. If we cannot, then there may be a chance that our plan really is foolhardy.
This is what Kerry meant by a "truth test" in the first debate. We're supposed to support and respect our allies. That's why they're called allies, not enemies. We listen to them, their opinions matter to us, and they accord us the same respect. Seriously, how many times have your friends talked you out of doing something tragically stupid?
Bush wants to live in a reality of his own creation, where America is always right and the decisions of its commander-in-chief are always the best decisions that could be made. In order to continue to live in this reality, he cut himself off from the press (his famous April 14, 2004 press conference was only the third of his administration), interacts primarily with those in his very insular clique, and refuses to accept expert opinions that disagree with him. For example, in this illuminating article, the author recounts an anecdote about an encounter between Bush and Congressman Tom Lantos during a roundtable on a peace plan for Israel:
I don't want resolve from my president. I don't want someone who will "hold to his view." I want someone who will accept the fact that he might not always be right.
Wow. Thanks for the link. I had no idea IRV was so problematic.
Great, another libertarian who believes that market forces will be our salvation. This is a very uninformed view, given that the last fifty-odd years of economics research have been devoted to showing the very real limits on Adam Smith's "invisible hand."
One of the most basic is the "tragedy of the commons," which basically says that if an individual can profit in the short term by overusing or damaging a communal resource, the "invisible hand" will end up destroying that resource.
It's very likely that the cost of alternative energies is already significantly lower than that of conventional fossil fuels. But since many of the costs of fossil fuels can be shoved off onto future generations, our collective atmosphere, etc., these costs don't end up on the pricetag.
The government is the only mechanism by which this disparity can be fixed. They can step in and regulate pollution, or provide subsidies for alternative fuels. Government regulation can make the invisible costs visible, and thus better subject these market forces to free-market economics.
So, what you're saying is that our planet can take anything we throw at it, that consumption for consumption's sake is a moral good, that any attempt to stem that consumption is an attack on our Star-Spangled Economy, and that newbie programmers should never be paired with experts for fear that they might learn something.
Where is all this untouched vastness of which you speak? We're using most of the potential farmland, we've colonized all the reasonably habitable areas, we're fishing the oceans beyond sustainable levels.
Your bogus analogy makes it sound like consumption of resources is analogous to the production of quality code. Consumption is not a good thing, but a necessary evil that should be done when the benefits outweigh the costs. All consumption requires some depletion of resources in order to create the good being consumed.
You can take your "environmental responsibility is un-American" attitude and shove it.
I tried reading the Condorcet Method summary. It's too complicated when compared to Instant Runoff. You're not going to get any support for a voting system which confuses the electorate.
I'm trying to imagine sitting down with your "average voter" and explaining how "A defeated B, B defeated C, C defeated A, and due to these complex and technical rules of ambiguity resolution, B is really the winner." She'll decide that the system is just picking the guy the ballot counters wanted, and never voting again.
Third parties are always seen as spoilers, which drives down the desire to vote for them. How much more support would Nader be receiving this election if Florida did IRV in the 2000 election, and he wasn't seen as the guy who put Bush in office? It takes more than four years to put together a political party, field candidates, drum up support, etc.
Perot was a bit of a nut, but I think the Reform Party might have gone somewhere if he hadn't been seen as sapping strength away from the '92 Bush Sr. campaign.
IRV is simple enough (just rank the candidates from favorite to least favorite) and it would keep people from having to vote tactically, thus weakening the two party system.
I'm also against a winner-take-all approach for the Electoral College. If I live in a state where 75% of people vote Republican and 25% vote Democratic (coincidentally enough, I do), then the best way to represent the will of our state is to divide the electoral votes proportionally.
The coward is correct about Peroutka. I was going to say that I would give Bush four more terms before letting this nutjob take the helm, but then I realized that the moment he took office, everyone would stop taking the presidency seriously. Having a complete loon occupying the White House would just be harmless entertainment.
t ting-elected. Try hopping over to Votepair.org, and support your candidate without turning him into a dreaded spoiler.
If you see any difference between the two candidates at all, and you're in a close state, you should vote for the lesser evil, not the guy-you-really-want-but-doesn't-have-a-shot-at-ge
I'm all in favor of making voting fun and easy, but I have to stop short at the idea of bribing people to vote. A lottery would further cheapen an already cynicism-inducing process, and punish those who vote because they want a part in the decision by drowning their voices in a sea of people who are just too stupid to do math.
The solution, as some other fine poster said, isn't to get people who don't care to vote, but to get people to care more.
Final point: a lot of states have anti-gambling laws, and this idea would run afoul of them. Anyone in favor of states' rights should see the idea as an imposition on the agency of the states.
Why does a reduction in the number of genes make creationism any more probable? All it proves is that genes behave differently than we thought back in the dark ages (pre-2000) when we thought we had 100,000 of them. A few ignorant folk express disbelief: How could so few genes really account for all the diversity we see? But the fact is, we're learning that genetics is less of a blueprint, and more of a recipe where timing is absolutely critical to the finished product.
So even if there were a single gene for "intelligence" (there isn't), it might be enough to explain much of the spectrum of intelligence that we see today just because it was active for different lengths of time in different people. Genes sometimes accept signals from the environment as well, so the diversity a few genes could cover will probably be astounding when finally demonstrated.
If they came back and said, "Oops, we made a mistake. We actually meant eleven genes, not twenty-thousand," I would be no more likely to believe that some "Intelligent Designer" needed to be invoked to explain our uniqueness.
You misunderstand science and scientists when you dismiss the idea that scientists might actually care about how our genetics got so complex. It's also wrong to believe that an explanation of this complexity wouldn't really assist our understanding. It would, and tremendously so. Evolutionary theory has been able to provide rationale for many previously unexplained phenomena. For example, the bare-boned smallness of the Y chromosome is a complete mystery until you realize that it's an evolutionary advantage for it to carry fewer genes for the mother's immune system to attack.
That one is somewhere in Matt Ridley's "GENOME". Excellent read. The point is, understanding how our genetic code got to be the way it is will very likely lead to the discovery of new rules that can be used to explain a lot of mysteries.
It is true that neither evolution or creationism are "provable" in the strict sense. However, I feel that they are not provable in different ways. Evolution is not provable in the same way that no theory in science can actually be "proven." There is always the chance that some new observation will require a total rewrite of evolutionary theory.
Creationism isn't provable for a totally different reason: It takes as a premise the existence of an omnipotent actor whose existence cannot be studied with any certainty. The creationists I've encountered love to talk about how the decision to reject supernaturalism is just a matter of philosophical taste, a bias which secular science rejects for no good reason. But there is an excellent, compelling reason to reject all supernatural explanations when conducting science: The existence of God makes true science impossible.
In the secular view, everything works according to natural laws. Phenomena can be studied, catalogued, and logically analyzed to determine what those laws might be. Once you posit the existence of an omnipotent being, no experiment can be proven valid. God may have interceded in order to make the experiment come out the way it did. For example, a few of my acquaintances have asserted that it is very likely that God created the world in seven days a few thousand years ago, but in such a way as to make it look like there was a chain of new species over billions of years.
So every experiment a Christian performs is done under the assumption that, while God could have interceded at this particular time and place without us knowing, He allowed it to proceed normally. Now, this argument doesn't disprove God, but it does inject a certain fundamental uncertainty into the theistic worldview.
How many years before we all have to drag ourselves off the couch and go out and readjust our satellite dishes?
Even with the gratuitous "stupid or liar" comment at the end, this is a commendable improvement in both quality of evidence and quality of argumentation. I'm far less inclined to believe that a draft is possible than I was before reading your post. Well done.
The biggest question still lingering in my mind is, what happens if Bush stays in office, and throws a couple more potential quagmires into the mix. Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria? Unless Bush gets better at alliance-building and diplomacy (and I think despite his protests and "resolve", he's learned some things from this) the personnel shortages are going to get worse and the idea of having large masses of bullet catchers might start looking better to all parties.
If everyone who would have voted for Gandhi instead votes for Bush, it's very likely that Bush will win, making the world less evil than had Satan himself been elected. In that case, swallowing one's pride and voting for the lesser of two evils rather than the best candidate overall would make the world less evil, and hence be a good thing.
Here's how I think people should make their decisions: First, evaluate all the candidates, and rank them in the order of quality. Then check the polls and see who the two most electable candidates are.
If you don't see a compelling difference between the two leading candidates, vote third party. But take into account that, the closer the race, the less compelling the difference has to be. For example, if you end up casting *the* tiebreaking vote, even a 1% evil differential should be enough to make you choose the lesser evil rather than the best good.
If the race isn't even close in your state, feel free to vote for the best candidate running. I'm in Utah, where GW leads JFK 64% to 27%. In that case, why not vote Nader? A lot of people here are thinking that way, and it looks like he'll get about 4% of the vote.
I'm not following my own advice, in that I'm actually pretty comfortable with the idea that Kerry would do a better job than Nader. I'm also a little miffed about how he screwed up Florida in 2000. But I'm also in favor of third parties, and figure that a strong third party presence on the Left would force Dems to take interest in things like runoff ballots and splitting electoral votes (as is done in Maine, and as is being proposed for Colorado).
Okay, it's obvious that you're not interested in actually debating this. If you were, you wouldn't have latched onto the one correction I made that wasn't relevant to the discussion.
To get you back on topic: Your original post implied that it was ludicrous to think that our congresscritters were even considering reinstating the draft. You offered four points of evidence, and I refuted them in turn.
Rather than discuss the merits of my refutation, you decided the best response was to castigate the guy who introduced the bill, then restate without evidence that the Republicans don't want the draft.
Let me reiterate:
- Even if you can show the military feels a draft would be a bad thing, the military doesn't have authority to reject the draft if Congress demands one.
- The civilians running the DoD are Bush appointees, and would be unlikely to publicly favor a draft in an election year.
- A draft would be legal if Congress voted to make it legal.
- There is no reason to believe that the outcome of the vote you cited was a serious vote, that it reflected the actual beliefs of any representative, or that a similar proposal wouldn't get through if the situation in Iraq continues to degrade.
- The military is overextended and desperate for bodies right now. The situation in Iraq seems to be getting worse.
Now, you called anyone who believes that a draft is likely "too fucking stupid to vote." Yet all the evidence you offered is the evidence which the MTV letter rightfully dismissed: that our elected representatives claim they don't want a draft.
Story 1 - Lone gunman
Story 2 - Lone gunman
Story 3 - People paid on a "per voter registration card" basis have incentive to turn in forged voter registrations. No indication that these people actually intended to make use of these fake registrations for voting purposes.
Story 4 - Democrat governor wants his people to oversee elections. Republicans don't.
Story 5 - Only story nearly as newsworthy as the one Slashdot is reporting.
As for your final story about the Democratic playbook, discussing voter intimidation and fraud before it happens is a sound preventative measure. Nowhere does it specifically say to allege voter fraud without evidence, and I don't believe that was their intent.
Who do you mean, specifically? Rumsfeld? People with connections to the current regime^H^H^H^H^H^H administration aren't going to come out in favor of a draft in an election year.
It's illegal to reinstate the draft? According to who? Why are we bothering with Selective Service?
It's "illegal" because nobody has passed a law making it legal. But they could at a moment's notice. Which brings us to the next point.
The "dolt" was actually being very clever. Crassly political, but clever. He managed to drum up anti-war sentiment by giving people the opportunity to say, "Psst! Did you hear that there's a bill in Congress reinstating the draft?" and giving the Powers That Be in Washington a taste of the outrage they would get if they seriously considered such a bill. But you make it sound like the "dolt" was just too stupid to keep himself from submitting a bill he disagreed with.
You cannot--by any stretch of rationality--consider this vote an indicator of the way a vote would go once the election year has passed and our congresscritters are suddenly faced with a very real choice between reinstituting the draft and losing Iraq altogether.
The military is suddenly overextended, desperate for bodies to the point that a "backdoor draft" is already happening as people are forced to reenlist under threat of being shipped off to Iraq for the remainder of their contract.
You're absolutely right about that.
Likewise.
It sounds to me like "pre-emptive strike" means "warn people about past intimidation efforts and warn those who would consider using such tactics." It doesn't mean "make up evidence of intimidation that doesn't exist."
How do you know it's not the FBI's fault?
Okay, say you were the FBI, and wanted to harass some political organization while keeping your hands clean? How hard would it be to go to some foreign law enforcement agency and say, "Could you gentlemen find some pretense for ordering us to take this group's server? And we wouldn't be offended if a copy of their hard drive were sent back to us."
If anyone asks, the FBI just says that they're assisting the counterterrorism efforts of their allies. Nobody in Switzerland is going to get worked up over a request to shut down an American server, and the FBI is in a position to return the favor.
Sure, it reads like an Oliver Stone bedtime story. But I think the time has come when it is a mistake to put too much faith in our government.
From Yahoo! News: In short, they're a site that helps coordinate and inform the worldwide anti-globalization movement.
As to the question of what they might have been involved in, they can only speculate on what exactly their servers were yanked for. But speculations abound. It could be a story they ran about the Swiss undercover police, or their publication of the names and addresses of RNC convention delegates, or their involvement with the Diebold memos.
But even if they were totally irrelevant, the fact is that they've had legal action taken against them and are unable to determine the parties or reasons for the legal action. That's honest-to-god police state stuff, and we should be asking our elected officials tough questions about it.
You could back your statement up with facts. Simply provide a list of which networks called Florida for Bush, and at what times.
According to the article I cited, the decision by FOX News to call the election for Bush was made by Bush's cousin, Dale Ellis. It was done at precisely a time when Bush's lead was shrinking rapidly. In fact, the lead evaporated in the few minutes between the time Gore's campaign announced that he would give a concession speech and the time Gore was scheduled to actually give it. That was the announcement that, more than any arguments before the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts, delivered the election to Bush.
Remember, last time Al Gore had the army of lawyers, and Bush had a premature declaration of victory from Fox News.
Guess who won.
The Green party also has interesting stands on worker protections, consumer safety, and globalization. I'm not in full agreement with them on everything, but they're not a one-issue party. Arguably, the libertarians are a one-issue party, with their solution to every problem being "more free enterprise, less government."
As to the horror of having numerous parties: look at Israel. You have several parties, with fragile coalitions between them regarding different issues. This means that you have to work with party A on issue B, party B on issue C, and so on. I don't know if that translates into less vicious politics, but it is a workable system.
Why IP multicasting? What real advantages does it give you? Aside from the "Ooh, look, this is happening *right now*" factor, it seems like live streaming just takes all the problems of regular broadcast television and imprints them on a much more flexible medium.
Live feeds have their purpose, but I'm having trouble seeing how they would work well under a bittorrent system. It could be set up under a telephone tree model, where node A feeds nodes B C and D, which each provide feeds to five or six other nodes. There could even be some redundancy built in so that a dropped packet to node D doesn't propagate to all its clients.
But for things where time isn't critical (read: 90% of what we watch on TV), Bittorrent is ideal. Unlike normal Internet broadcasts, supply scales with demand. Even a delay of a few minutes should be adequate for most purposes.
Want everyone to watch your thingy at exactly the same time? Send it out to all the nodes that want it in some encrypted format, then when enough nodes are seeded to meet demand, distribute the key.
Varying quality streams are possible within a single stream. For example, with Ogg Vorbis, you can get a low-quality stream from a high quality stream just by removing portions of the stream (no re-encoding necessary).
I think all your objections can be overcome,