That said, it's impossible to know how many, if any, of Bush's votes were due to voting machine errors
The point for me isn't that we can't know how many, if any, were stolen, but the bare fact that a private company led by a man who promised to help the Republicans win the election took deliberate, careful steps to make sure no one would be able to check.
Even if we had a God's-eye view and we knew that they didn't rig the election, deliberately removing oversight is evidence of ill intent. If I work in a bank vault and you found that I'd disabled the cameras and deleted/shredded the logs, it wouldn't matter if you couldn't prove theft. My intent would be obvious, as it was with Diebold.
I'm a medic, and I've seen parents try to talk three-year-olds into getting stitches or a shot. Doesn't work, because those kids lack the basic capacity to make that decision. 16-year-olds are, in my opinion, in much the same situation regarding their future. Kids, being people, are largely lazy. They don't have the context and experience to know that blowing off homework and studying to play Guitar Hero for 9 hours really is making a decision that, long-term, hurts them.
This whole "engaging the kids" meme avoids the fact that there is only one acceptable outcome--study, learn, don't take the easy way out, etc. We are trying to SELL them on the idea, not involve them in the process of decision-making. That's inherently dishonest, because we're only pretending to give their preferences (which consist of sleeping, video games, and manga) equal weight in deciding what their priorities should be.
Basically I think we're too nice to our kids. I'm not saying we should beat them (much), but I remember a conversation I had with a doctor I worked with (parents were Chinese) whose siblings also all had professional degrees. On a basic level, the kids all had the feeling that if they didn't do well in school their parents wouldn't love them anymore. It was never stated, but the feeling was there. Could I do that? No. But that inability translates into, if not academic mediocrity, then definitely a mentality that makes excellence a hypothetical option for my kids. They do well enough to get by, but there is no drive. I basically feel that I've let them down by being too nice.
Amazon has gotten more of my money for DRM-free music than I had previously spent on music my entire life. I'm not even that big on music, but somehow I ended up with about 25 Nina Simone albums, about the same number of Billie Hoiday, 15 CDs or so of Dinah Washington, and who knows what else. Never would've bought this stuff if they'd DRM'd it.
And then you realize that -oops- the bible is also the most accurately kept book of all times
So Jesus WAS born of a virgin, was he? Or was that a young woman? Or don't mistranslations count as errors? Do you think that may be kind of important?
The New Testament is a collection of what were considered the best sources available: mostly books and letters.
They weren't the "best sources available." They chose the books that supported a particular set of theological views. They destroyed the rest that they could find, and persecuted the sects that held different views. Historical accuracy was the objective.
Conspiracy theories have been discredited by movies and TV. Even talking about a conspiracy marks you as a credulous loon. But not all conspiracies involve smoke-filled rooms and gravelly-voiced, shadowy bad guys.
The fact is, police and prosecutors will happily send you to jail for life, or to death row, to further their own careers. They prosper from convictions, not from justice. This is a "conspiracy" in that they work together to convict the person they've chosen to convict, and they'll collude to make their evidence seem stronger, hide exculpatory evidence, rely on jailhouse snitches, plant evidence, or whatever it takes, short of planting a corpse in your trunk.
Not all of them are like this, probably not even most, but there are so many links in the chain, all of them being pressured to get a conviction, that somewhere shortcuts will be taken. They convince themselves that you are guilty and then make sure that the jury sees what they want them to see.
This is a human problem, not a cop problem. People aren't as moral as we like to think they are, and they will rationalize whatever is in their best interest to rationalize. Only vigilant oversight and a concerted effort to sustain the presumption of innocence will keep people honest. Problem is, those have been discredited as well. Government oversight and presumption of innocence are now grouped under "helping the terrorists."
There are no businesses in the 'burbs because zoning doesn't allow businesses in the burbs. Allow supermarkets and such, and let local economies develop on their own. Super-size behemoth stores may not be feasible on every block, but the milk, bread, and eggs run would be easier.
You don't have to come up with some civic plan to GET supermarkets and clothing stores into the suburbs. Just change the dang laws, and business will follow the money.
I'm not a gamer, but I just don't understand it. I know multiple women who can't get laid because their husbands won't stop playing video games. When a women tells me "He wouldn't even let me give him a BJ" that does not compute. There are no games that enjoyable.
I've come to the conclusion that part of the point of college is to prove that you can put up with pointless BS, and that you can work on a team with people you don't like or respect towards a goal in which you see no value.
Ideally, yes, we'd all like our academic and working lives to be challenging, interesting, and to mesh perfectly with our interests and abilities, but working life isn't actually like that. If you can only be bothered to put forth effort when the work is interesting, how much use are you to an employer who knows that work will often be routine and unchallenging?
You have to prove that you can still apply yourself, still act like you give a damn, even when the work gets boring and you don't really see a point to it. They are, after all, paying you. College is a screening process to see if you have what it takes to actually work in a real job.
Or so my theory goes. It's the only explanation I could find for 80% of my IFSM classes. I wish I was better at math, but then again I'm not sure that computer science would've been all that different.
Yes, I know the standard answer is that, if my current job isn't fascinating, challenging, heck if I don't reach self-actualization every single day, then I should quit immediately and go find something I love, but I don't find life to work out quite that simply. The people I've worked with who bailed as soon as they got bored basically were flakes who couldn't be depended on anyway.
The problem with peak oil predictions is that it never takes into account for more efficient production advances.
A sphere of finite volume can hold only a finite amount of oil. No matter how efficient or high-tech your extraction, finite is finite, unless you're using nanotechnology to make oil out of other stuff. Eventually we will run out, though I concede that technically there might be 1.5 cups squirreled away here and there in the crust.
Putting money into increasing efficiency of extraction (and even consumption, like the Prius) only extending the life of the oil companies; long-term, we need to put money into alternatives.
Yes, but moving to alternative fuels lowers your dependence on oil, and when it dries up:
Everyone who didn't plan is screwed
You are not
If we don't plan ahead by investing heavily in alternatives, we'll have to figure it out at a time when resources are more scarce, energy is vastly more expensive, foreign firms have already patented things out the wazoo, and our society is struggling to reinvent itself on short notice.
Surely it isn't controversial to say that you should generally plan ahead for a big, ugly change that you already know is coming. I'm not the smartest cookie, but even I know that.
Many, many environmentalists and left-wingers have been criticizing corn-based ethanol for some time. If you don't like food-based fuel for cars, then argue against that, and you might be surprized to find that a lot of people with different backgrounds, to include the crunchiest of the granola-heads, agreeing with you.
But if you want to just heap contempt on liberals without actually trying to help... well, continue what you were doing.
Colombia has done fine with private security forces. Somalia is also a good example. Weak government, easy access to firearms. It's a recipe for freedom.
Stop trying to reason with them. I've often thought that libertarianism would be a valid philosophical position, as long as you first shot all the young men who secretly thought of themselves as John Galt. Then I realized that there wouldn't be enough libertarians left to split a taxi fare.
I used to be a libertarian. I've read Mises and Rothbard and Hayek and Spencer and Spooner. It sounds great on paper. But basically it's like these national myths we have about the old west, back in the good old days when everyone was fiercely independent and self-sufficient.
Only they weren't, because the army came to shoot the indians, and the government bilked the taxpayers and gave favors to the railroad tycoons to build the tracks that made the westward expansion so profitable and inevitable. But people edit out those parts because they think of themselves as would-be self-sufficient pioneers. Behind every libertarian is a person who thinks that they really did do it all themselves. Meanwhile, if the government stopped mandating and paying for immunizations, we'd all die of the plague or something, because we really are in this together.
Bush has repeatedly said "we don't torture." Waterboarding constitutes torture. We have prosecuted people for war crimes because they waterboarded. And please don't get technical with me. This administration has sanctioned torture, detention without trial, "extraordinatory renditions," warrantless wiretapping, etc, all of which are illegal per written law. Bush openly said, on camera, that he would continue to support warrantless wiretapping. We have laws covering that sort of thing. We have the constitution. Saying "you know, I just don't think that law applies to me" doesn't magically mean that it doesn't.
Egads... I'm politically a progressive but I wish I could whack many of my fellow-travellers with a stick. Calling him a "mass murderer" is so hyperbolic, so over-the-top, that it makes it impossible to bring up points like the signing statements, violation of human rights/anti-torture treaties, warrantless wiretapping, etc.
I think you can calmly make the case that many of the decisions of this administration were morally repugnant and in violation of written law, but you can't make this case with a wacko, however well-meaning, screaming "mass murderer!" right next to you.
I'm completely flabbergasted that you have no sense of proportion. Bill Clinton lied--about a blowjob. The other guy was and is lying about torture. The two are not remotely of the same magnitude or moral concern. Clinton was trapped by a politically-motivated lawsuit about adultery, during which he lied about an blowjob. Wow. Stop the fraaking presses.
Adultery is not a Democratic monopoly--during the impeachment both Delay and Gingrich were having affairs. During! Do Republicans care? No, which shows that the whole sordid thing was, after all, only about politics.
Which do you consider more morally wrong--Clinton's blowjob, or people being tortured at Abu Ghraib?
Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. I've read the argument, too. It ignores the entirely plausible argument that the gospels were written decades after the events, by people whose identies are unknown, with the purpose of spreading the faith of the people who wrote the stories, and thus the NT can't be treated as a verbatim transcript of the events in question.
The "virgin" mistranslation alone is enough to establish that they deliberately wrote the NT with an eye to making sure that the story fulfilled OT prophecy. So after stories (legends, one might call them) circulated for decades, persons unknown, of a certain religious faith, wrote a collection of short books that systematically checked off some OT prophecies to show that their guy was "the" guy, to include a prophecy that had been mistranslated about him being born of a virgin. Lewis's false dichotomy just doesn't seem that compelling or interesting once you no longer consider the NT to be a verbatim account.
From what I've read, he asked the questioner to define sex. Sex was defined as intercourse. Ergo, he answered correctly. Oral sex is not intercourse. It's not lying just because he didn't answer the question he should've been asked.
And no, no one would've gone to jail over this. It was politics, pure and simple. During the impeachment, both Gingrich and Delay were having affairs (not with each other) and Republicans are still okey-dokey with both of them. Where is the moral outrage? Where are the lamentations that they have sullied the nation, and eroded our moral fabric? Basically Republicans don't care a whit about affairs by Republicans. They wanted to take down Clinton because he is a Democrat.
Person A: There is an invisible unicorn over there. He talks to me and watches over me. He's nice. Don't bother trying to detect him--he's too sly for that.
Person B: There is no reason to believe in that unicorn. There is no evidence at all! You can't see, touch, smell, or hear him. He doesn't even give off heat, doesn't make noise, doesn't show up on any kind of instrumentation, etc. There is not even detectable mass! I'm guessing you're just making it up.
Person A: Well, I can't prove I'm right, and you can't prove I'm wrong, so I guess we're in the same spot! Since you don't know any more than me, why are you acting like you're more rational than me?
See what I'm getting at? You have completely turned critical thinking on its head. Believing in something for which there is no empirical evidence (by evidence, I don't mean that which is evident only after you have faith) is not on the same footing as skepticism. Saying that there is no tooth fairy is not a statement of faith.
What the heck are we doing? If you want to build (or even research the feasibility of) mass transit (or solar power) or anything that would help our environmental situation, critics want a perfectly mapped out plan for profitability, because they're so conscientious in avoiding the bilking of the taxpayer. But do they bring even 10% of this skepticism to funds for Iraq or Afghanistan, or planning an attack on Iran?
Of course there will be boondoggle environmental projects, just as there are boondoggle no-bid contracts for non-environmental things. I get it that conservatives don't self-identify as environmentalists, but why do they resist funding for infrastructure in the USA so much more fiercely than they would 10 times more money for a bigger military base in Iraq? Do you really have to be an anti-environmentalist? Is there a point that I'm missing? And even if we don't turn a profit, why is it socialism to build infrastructure in the USA but they think it's "our responsibility" to build it in Iraq or Afghanistan? The cynic in me think that it's okey-dokey over there because the (ahem) right people are getting those contracts (i.e. friends of the right people), but an explanation that cynical can't (I hope) be the whole story.
because he's done it to appease extremist voters to his own benefit.
You ain't kidding. Just to get a seat at the table in that party, you have to say that torture is legal and moral, indefinite detention without trial is okay, 100 years of occupation in Iraq is okay, warrantless surveillance is legal and moral, etc, not to mention having to at least fake "skepticism" as to mainstream science regarding evolution and global warming, etc.
There are loonies to be placated in any political faction, but the current Republican party has ones I just can't abide by. I don't really want to hang out with the Vegans, NOW, and 9/11 Truthers, but I'll pick them over the Christian Dominionists any day of the week.
My point was that the script is exactly the same regardless of who is running. We hear of every D candidate that they're the "most liberal," etc. Do you get why everyone can't be THE "most liberal" in the group? Is everyone to the left of you in the radical, extreme left wing?
This hyperbole isn't exclusively a right-wing problem, but I didn't say that it was. McCain (IMO) isn't the moderate maverick he's touted to be, but neither is he a rabid far-right wacko, any more than Obama is a rabid far-left wacko. My only point was that, from the R side, the criticisms are always the same, verbatim, regardless of who they're running against. Even if I was a Republican (as opposed to just a fiscal conservative, which I am) I'd find that annoying because it shows that they're just pushing buttons with the true believers.
You could've said "Hey Misanthrope, I think you overgeneralized. There is always cross-party voting, and your post ignores this, which I personally find offensive because it paints all Rs at automatons." And you would've had a point, because in fact I did overgeneralize, which was sloppy thinking and writing.
But you didn't say that--you went straight for the black people/fried chicken analogy. And I'd bet you're one of those guys who can't figure out why people consider that racist. What's more, it's a bad analogy because voting R or D is a decision, whereas being black is genetic. Saying "Rs usually vote for Rs out of party loyalty" may be a generalization that ignores the exceptions, but it's not of the same nature as racist stereotypes.
How about you just disagree with me instead of going for the fried chicken jokes? Is that too much to ask? Did you just have to work that in there somewhere?
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The point for me isn't that we can't know how many, if any, were stolen, but the bare fact that a private company led by a man who promised to help the Republicans win the election took deliberate, careful steps to make sure no one would be able to check.
Even if we had a God's-eye view and we knew that they didn't rig the election, deliberately removing oversight is evidence of ill intent. If I work in a bank vault and you found that I'd disabled the cameras and deleted/shredded the logs, it wouldn't matter if you couldn't prove theft. My intent would be obvious, as it was with Diebold.
This whole "engaging the kids" meme avoids the fact that there is only one acceptable outcome--study, learn, don't take the easy way out, etc. We are trying to SELL them on the idea, not involve them in the process of decision-making. That's inherently dishonest, because we're only pretending to give their preferences (which consist of sleeping, video games, and manga) equal weight in deciding what their priorities should be.
Basically I think we're too nice to our kids. I'm not saying we should beat them (much), but I remember a conversation I had with a doctor I worked with (parents were Chinese) whose siblings also all had professional degrees. On a basic level, the kids all had the feeling that if they didn't do well in school their parents wouldn't love them anymore. It was never stated, but the feeling was there. Could I do that? No. But that inability translates into, if not academic mediocrity, then definitely a mentality that makes excellence a hypothetical option for my kids. They do well enough to get by, but there is no drive. I basically feel that I've let them down by being too nice.
Amazon has gotten more of my money for DRM-free music than I had previously spent on music my entire life. I'm not even that big on music, but somehow I ended up with about 25 Nina Simone albums, about the same number of Billie Hoiday, 15 CDs or so of Dinah Washington, and who knows what else. Never would've bought this stuff if they'd DRM'd it.
So Jesus WAS born of a virgin, was he? Or was that a young woman? Or don't mistranslations count as errors? Do you think that may be kind of important?
I meant "historical accuracy was not the objective." It's always nice to contradict yourself in the last sentence.
They weren't the "best sources available." They chose the books that supported a particular set of theological views. They destroyed the rest that they could find, and persecuted the sects that held different views. Historical accuracy was the objective.
The fact is, police and prosecutors will happily send you to jail for life, or to death row, to further their own careers. They prosper from convictions, not from justice. This is a "conspiracy" in that they work together to convict the person they've chosen to convict, and they'll collude to make their evidence seem stronger, hide exculpatory evidence, rely on jailhouse snitches, plant evidence, or whatever it takes, short of planting a corpse in your trunk.
Not all of them are like this, probably not even most, but there are so many links in the chain, all of them being pressured to get a conviction, that somewhere shortcuts will be taken. They convince themselves that you are guilty and then make sure that the jury sees what they want them to see.
This is a human problem, not a cop problem. People aren't as moral as we like to think they are, and they will rationalize whatever is in their best interest to rationalize. Only vigilant oversight and a concerted effort to sustain the presumption of innocence will keep people honest. Problem is, those have been discredited as well. Government oversight and presumption of innocence are now grouped under "helping the terrorists."
You don't have to come up with some civic plan to GET supermarkets and clothing stores into the suburbs. Just change the dang laws, and business will follow the money.
I'm not a gamer, but I just don't understand it. I know multiple women who can't get laid because their husbands won't stop playing video games. When a women tells me "He wouldn't even let me give him a BJ" that does not compute. There are no games that enjoyable.
Ideally, yes, we'd all like our academic and working lives to be challenging, interesting, and to mesh perfectly with our interests and abilities, but working life isn't actually like that. If you can only be bothered to put forth effort when the work is interesting, how much use are you to an employer who knows that work will often be routine and unchallenging?
You have to prove that you can still apply yourself, still act like you give a damn, even when the work gets boring and you don't really see a point to it. They are, after all, paying you. College is a screening process to see if you have what it takes to actually work in a real job.
Or so my theory goes. It's the only explanation I could find for 80% of my IFSM classes. I wish I was better at math, but then again I'm not sure that computer science would've been all that different.
Yes, I know the standard answer is that, if my current job isn't fascinating, challenging, heck if I don't reach self-actualization every single day, then I should quit immediately and go find something I love, but I don't find life to work out quite that simply. The people I've worked with who bailed as soon as they got bored basically were flakes who couldn't be depended on anyway.
A sphere of finite volume can hold only a finite amount of oil. No matter how efficient or high-tech your extraction, finite is finite, unless you're using nanotechnology to make oil out of other stuff. Eventually we will run out, though I concede that technically there might be 1.5 cups squirreled away here and there in the crust.
Putting money into increasing efficiency of extraction (and even consumption, like the Prius) only extending the life of the oil companies; long-term, we need to put money into alternatives.
- Everyone who didn't plan is screwed
- You are not
If we don't plan ahead by investing heavily in alternatives, we'll have to figure it out at a time when resources are more scarce, energy is vastly more expensive, foreign firms have already patented things out the wazoo, and our society is struggling to reinvent itself on short notice.Surely it isn't controversial to say that you should generally plan ahead for a big, ugly change that you already know is coming. I'm not the smartest cookie, but even I know that.
But if you want to just heap contempt on liberals without actually trying to help... well, continue what you were doing.
Colombia has done fine with private security forces. Somalia is also a good example. Weak government, easy access to firearms. It's a recipe for freedom.
I used to be a libertarian. I've read Mises and Rothbard and Hayek and Spencer and Spooner. It sounds great on paper. But basically it's like these national myths we have about the old west, back in the good old days when everyone was fiercely independent and self-sufficient.
Only they weren't, because the army came to shoot the indians, and the government bilked the taxpayers and gave favors to the railroad tycoons to build the tracks that made the westward expansion so profitable and inevitable. But people edit out those parts because they think of themselves as would-be self-sufficient pioneers. Behind every libertarian is a person who thinks that they really did do it all themselves. Meanwhile, if the government stopped mandating and paying for immunizations, we'd all die of the plague or something, because we really are in this together.
Bush has repeatedly said "we don't torture." Waterboarding constitutes torture. We have prosecuted people for war crimes because they waterboarded. And please don't get technical with me. This administration has sanctioned torture, detention without trial, "extraordinatory renditions," warrantless wiretapping, etc, all of which are illegal per written law. Bush openly said, on camera, that he would continue to support warrantless wiretapping. We have laws covering that sort of thing. We have the constitution. Saying "you know, I just don't think that law applies to me" doesn't magically mean that it doesn't.
I think you can calmly make the case that many of the decisions of this administration were morally repugnant and in violation of written law, but you can't make this case with a wacko, however well-meaning, screaming "mass murderer!" right next to you.
Adultery is not a Democratic monopoly--during the impeachment both Delay and Gingrich were having affairs. During! Do Republicans care? No, which shows that the whole sordid thing was, after all, only about politics.
Which do you consider more morally wrong--Clinton's blowjob, or people being tortured at Abu Ghraib?
The "virgin" mistranslation alone is enough to establish that they deliberately wrote the NT with an eye to making sure that the story fulfilled OT prophecy. So after stories (legends, one might call them) circulated for decades, persons unknown, of a certain religious faith, wrote a collection of short books that systematically checked off some OT prophecies to show that their guy was "the" guy, to include a prophecy that had been mistranslated about him being born of a virgin. Lewis's false dichotomy just doesn't seem that compelling or interesting once you no longer consider the NT to be a verbatim account.
And no, no one would've gone to jail over this. It was politics, pure and simple. During the impeachment, both Gingrich and Delay were having affairs (not with each other) and Republicans are still okey-dokey with both of them. Where is the moral outrage? Where are the lamentations that they have sullied the nation, and eroded our moral fabric? Basically Republicans don't care a whit about affairs by Republicans. They wanted to take down Clinton because he is a Democrat.
Person B: There is no reason to believe in that unicorn. There is no evidence at all! You can't see, touch, smell, or hear him. He doesn't even give off heat, doesn't make noise, doesn't show up on any kind of instrumentation, etc. There is not even detectable mass! I'm guessing you're just making it up.
Person A: Well, I can't prove I'm right, and you can't prove I'm wrong, so I guess we're in the same spot! Since you don't know any more than me, why are you acting like you're more rational than me?
See what I'm getting at? You have completely turned critical thinking on its head. Believing in something for which there is no empirical evidence (by evidence, I don't mean that which is evident only after you have faith) is not on the same footing as skepticism. Saying that there is no tooth fairy is not a statement of faith.
Of course there will be boondoggle environmental projects, just as there are boondoggle no-bid contracts for non-environmental things. I get it that conservatives don't self-identify as environmentalists, but why do they resist funding for infrastructure in the USA so much more fiercely than they would 10 times more money for a bigger military base in Iraq? Do you really have to be an anti-environmentalist? Is there a point that I'm missing? And even if we don't turn a profit, why is it socialism to build infrastructure in the USA but they think it's "our responsibility" to build it in Iraq or Afghanistan? The cynic in me think that it's okey-dokey over there because the (ahem) right people are getting those contracts (i.e. friends of the right people), but an explanation that cynical can't (I hope) be the whole story.
There are loonies to be placated in any political faction, but the current Republican party has ones I just can't abide by. I don't really want to hang out with the Vegans, NOW, and 9/11 Truthers, but I'll pick them over the Christian Dominionists any day of the week.
This hyperbole isn't exclusively a right-wing problem, but I didn't say that it was. McCain (IMO) isn't the moderate maverick he's touted to be, but neither is he a rabid far-right wacko, any more than Obama is a rabid far-left wacko. My only point was that, from the R side, the criticisms are always the same, verbatim, regardless of who they're running against. Even if I was a Republican (as opposed to just a fiscal conservative, which I am) I'd find that annoying because it shows that they're just pushing buttons with the true believers.
But you didn't say that--you went straight for the black people/fried chicken analogy. And I'd bet you're one of those guys who can't figure out why people consider that racist. What's more, it's a bad analogy because voting R or D is a decision, whereas being black is genetic. Saying "Rs usually vote for Rs out of party loyalty" may be a generalization that ignores the exceptions, but it's not of the same nature as racist stereotypes.
How about you just disagree with me instead of going for the fried chicken jokes? Is that too much to ask? Did you just have to work that in there somewhere?