Actually you measure the time-difference between the pattern and the button-press.
I have no idea what part of what experiment you are referring to, but it is not what I am talking about.
Consciousness is a cloudy thing that extends a few seconds into the past and the future. People cannot determine when exactly they become aware of something and they must always lag behind that moment.
Consciousness as a concept is pretty nebulous. When you "become conscious" of something is different thing with the same name. People can detect when they become conscious of something by definition. In fact people can *only* detect things they are conscious of.
That's not to say that precursor events of *something* can not be detected in the brain before people are conscious of them (i.e. when they are subconscious).
Scientists can just ask people wen they became aware of something (or have them push a button when they become aware of it). Humans are not authorities on many of the things going on in their own brain, but they are maybe the only authority on when *they* become conscious of something. So if you can predict what someone will become conscious of before they become conscious of it, that seems pretty interesting.
When done correctly it is very useful, it's just hard to do it correctly. Pokemon GO is not actually using augmented reality. It just calls what it is doing augmented reality, but really it is just super imposing cartoon characters on top of video from your phone's camera. There is a but of integration with your phone's accelerometers, but this is pointless, and most people just turn it off.
Augmented reality when it is done correctly will become an essential piece of technology. Imagine walking around with something resembling google glasses and having a poisonous snake identified and highlighted in your field of view. Not only can you run away in the correct direction, but you will know what kind of anti-venom to use if you do get bit. Or just imagine how fun it will be to walk around the zoo, having your AR freak out at all the poisonous snakes it identifies.
This is a pretty specific example that I thought of while at the zoo. There are countless applications for AR.
Some more mundane examples. Having your car show up in your glasses while walking in a parking lot, rather than having to correlate a gps position on your phone to a location in real life. Imagine having the names of everyone you see be super imposed on a virtual name tag, so you don't have to be embarrassed by forgetting their name.
Here is an application that is actually in use right now. Realtime translation. You can use your phone's camera to look at text in a foreign language and have it translated into your native language right on the object itself. This is super useful when in a foreign country.
You're not defending: 'Bush and co were a morons, look at the mess'?
I am not defending it. I happen to think it's a fucking disaster, but that was not the point of my argument. The point of my argument was that we don't know a Gore presidency would have been better than the mess (if you believe it to be such) we got.
And no my hate is not blinding me to anything, because I don't hate Bush, I just think he's an idiot.
I think you are projecting positions on to me that I never claimed to have. It seems like there is a particular position you want to attack. I suggest you find someone that actually has that position.
I'm not confused at all. 1. Bad stuff can happen to people who make good decisions (because a lot of stuff that happens is unpredictable). 2. You don't know what the skillset of a person is before you measure them. Gore was never measured.
And I think you are the one who is confused. I never claimed Bush was anything but terrible. We don't *know* who will be terrible before they show us. We can maybe have educated guesses that Bush, Trump, etc will be terrible, but that isn;t the same as knowing. We also don't know that Gore would not have been terrible. He had no leadership experience. He had experience winning elections and collecting a paycheck as a legislator.
The Sunnis and Shia are fighting each other. It's a 1000 year old war, so it's unlikely to stop soon.
It's a 1000 year old war that can apparently be suspended by a brutal dictator.So maybe the game isn't stopping it, but just temporarily suspending it, which is shown to be possible.
Bush played 'the idiot', while the Iraqis and Iranians did exactly what they were expected to.
And it's pretty easy to say they did exactly what they were supposed to do, 13 years after they did it, because now "what they did" has become solidified as history and what was meant to happen. As if nothing unexpected ever happens and has a ripple effect changing all future predicted decisions.
NO it's not, because there is no way to calculate or verify that confidence level. World events are pretty much the definition of a chaotic system (i.e. they are unpredictable over a span of 4 or 8 years).
I didn't say *all* things are unknowable. We know lots of things. I am saying we don't know what would have happened in a hypothetical Gore presidency. I don't even know why this is controversial.
I can already tell you that it's going to be really bad. Really, really bad. There's only two candidates highly likely to win, and they're both absolutely horrible, so there's almost no way for it to *not* turn out really, really bad.
I just meant that in general high turnout can be really good or really bad, depending on what the masses decide. I agree that this year there is no possible good outcome. Although maybe preventing ww3 can be considered relatively good.
We haven't had candidates this horrible in a long time (probably since 1968, which is before I was alive)
No, but we've had candidates that were more disliked than liked and higher turnout seems to correlate positively with dislike of candidates. Maybe it's not a line, and id candidates are *really* disliked the turnout goes down again, we will see.
and we didn't have the internet back then with all the polarization and extremism that's created, so I'm not so sure you can look for historical parallels like that.
Sure I can look for them, but we'll see if they are actually parallel in a few months.
I am hoping, however, that other parties will get a much higher portion of the vote than they did in the past.
Gary Johnson is poling at 8% of the popular vote right now. This is shaping up to be the best year for 3rd+ parties yet. If any get to 15% They are included in the debates (unless they change the rules, which they probably will).
The only thing keeping peace in Iraq was Saddam prior to the war.
So obviously if you intend to remove Saddam, you need to replace him with another source of order (I wouldn't call what he maintained "peace").
And in fact Bush tried to replace Saddam with a new Iraqi leader, it just was not a very good attempt. Clearly the Bush administration was overconfident in their abilities or underestimated the problem.
I think in retrospect the way the war turned out was a pretty likely outcome given how the war was executed, but it's not as if it's impossible to execute a war like this properly. Bush made a bunch of mistakes. I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that fixing some set of those mistakes and turning them into good decisions could have led to a much better outcome and maybe even an outcome that would have been better than not having the war at all.
My point is that the experts couldn't have known how bad Bush was going to fuck this up, because they didn't know what he was going to do before he did it. We didn't have experts criticizing the plan to disband the Iraqi Army before Bush did it, because none of the experts (outside Bush's circle) knew he was going to do that.
When you have an unknown player batting for the first time, you don't know if he is going to strike out, or hit a home run, or something in between. If you have seen him bat 100 times (and he has struck out 100 times), you still don't know what he is going to do, but you have a much better idea.
Once you know Bush is a shitty batter, it's safe to predict he will strike out. But predicting who is a shitty batter is not easy. Maybe Bush is an idiot, but idiots can still happen to surround themselves with competent people.
First American troops on the ground (yes, as "advisors")? Eisenhower. First American death? Eisenhower. Cancelled democratic elections leading to a civil war? Eisenhower.
None of those things required us to turn the situation in vietnam into a war with the US. And furthermore if you read my post, you would see that I was not even assigning blame. In fact I was doing almost the opposite (i.e. saying bad things can happen even if you don't fuck up).
Maybe next time before you through out the "narrative of lies" bullshit, try actually reading what is said first.
But now, instead of getting the under-30 crowd to actually register to vote like Obama did in 2008, Hillary has completely turned them off, so most likely they'll just stay at home.
As it turns out the only candidate less likeable than Hillary is Trump. One might expect a large share of Republicans that hate Trump to stay home and cancel out the large share of democrats that stay home, but in fact that data shows that historically the potential of a really hated candidate winning actually draws more turnout than the potential for a really beloved candidate winning. The lowest turnouts are when both candidates are liked, and the highest are when both candidates are hated.
I expect the highest turnout in recent history. That can be really good or really bad.
There were many good arguments for going into Vietnam, they were wrong in retrospect but it wasn't obvious.
The experts knew exactly what would happen in Iraq.
There is no way this is true because there are an infinite number of things that could have happened in Iraq depending on how it was executed. Maybe experts could have known what would probably happen if they knew exactly how Bush would have executed the war, but there was know way to know that he was even going to be in a war much less how it would be executed before he was even elected.
Trump is also outrageously wrong about a lot of things, it's just hard to hell whether he's deliberately lying or whether he's just wrong.
There is a big difference between those, and a third option that he just doesn't give a shit about being factually right or wrong.
People around Trump say he didn't expect to win either, he was supposedly banking on a respectable showing in a few primary and was caught off guard when he started winning.
That may be so, but he knew exactly what to do to give himself a pretty good shot. Whether he actually thought he would win or not is not actually relevant. He thought he had a good enough chance to try, and he was right.
He didn't strongly support it and he turned relatively quickly but he did support it.
I still maintain that it is intellectually dishonest to characterize Donald Trump as having supported the Iraq War, just for one qualified non-committal comment he made as a private citizen. As I said, there are *so* many issues where Trump can be legitimately criticized. Criticizing him for supporting the Iraq War trivializes other valid criticisms.
That's basically the same argument that saying that since wearing a seatbelt could potentially trap you in a burning car then wearing a seatbelt might be just as dangerous as not wearing one.
Yeah. it *might* be. It isn't in most cases, but it is false to say that wearing a seatbelt is safer than not wearing one in *every* situation. Furthermore I wouldn't equate electing Gore to wearing a seatbelt. I would equate it to playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet in the gun rather than 3. Yeah playing with 1 is much better odds than 3, but there is a very good probability of ending up dead in both.
We can't run an alternate history but we've seen the consequences of an ignorant president when Bush walked into an easily avoidable catastrophe.
No we can't, and I don't disagree that the Iraq war could have been easily avoided. Most of the wars we get into are avoidable.
It's possible that Trump won't be bad, or even that Clinton could be worse, but that's a terribly poor gamble.
I agree. But I wouldn't be shocked if you could look into a crystal ball and it turns out Clinton presidency was worse than a Trump presidency. I don;t think it's a million to one. I think it's like three to one.
Since you are having trouble distinguishing the difference between a proof and an argument, that is just further evidence you're off your groove today. Take a rest.
It is pretty clear to me that you aren't aware of what "proof" is beyond the folk sense of that word.
Bush campaigned as a common sense regular-guy, ignoring experts and following his gut is exactly what lead to the Iraq war.
Even if we assume that following his gut is what lead to the Iraq War, following your gut is not the only way you can end up in a terrible war. JFK was a democrat who wasn't an idiot who never listened to experts, how did we end up in vietnam?
Trump is basically tripling down on the ignore-experts follow-your-instinct philosophy.
I actually think they are quite different. I think trump follows his gut because he knows he is right about a lot of things. He is right that a lot people are racist, a lot of people don't care about the truth, and that a lot of people hate polished politicians. In this respect he is absolutely more right than the "experts" who said that he had no chance of winning the republican nomination.
Trump supported Iraq, has been much more hawkish on Libya and Syria, and his foreign policy framework consists of using US power to push other countries around. Assuming he'd be more likely to get in a bad war is a very good bet.
Trump did not support the Iraq war. In an interview in 2002, when asked if he supported the war answered "I guess so". While it is not true that he predicted the war would be bad (as he claims), it is well documented that trump opposed the war as far back as 2004.
I think he is certainly likely to get into a war, but I don't think it is fair to associate him with that particular war. And this is for a man that routinely takes both sides of every issue and is basically a compulsive liar. There is so much to legitimately criticize him for, there is no need to invent things.
I'm not saying it has to do with D vs R, I'm saying it has to do with seeing the scale of damage a bad president (Bush) did, and realizing the epic damage Trump could do.
Yes bad presidents can get us into bad wars. What I am saying is that even having a good president (much less a democrat president) is *far* from a guarantee of not getting into a bad war. And we don't even know if Gore would have been a good president. I don't think there is any good evidence for that. All I can confidently say about Gore is that he would have been a democrat president, which isn't saying much.
He might have started some wars in the way that Obama did Libya, some bombing and maybe some special forces but nothing major.
Iraq was a determined project by Bush and the neo-conservatives that surrounded him. That does not happen with a Democratic president.
I think you have a very short sighted view of history. Republicans being the warmongers of the 2 major parties is a new development with the neoconservative movement. That hasn't always been the case, and could easily change with one warmonger democrat president or a pacifist republican president.
In fact, Bush actually campaigned on a platform of "no nation building". You can look back in retrospect and call bullshit on that platform, but what you can't do is know that Gore wouldn't make some horrible foreignn policy mistakes equivalent to the Iraq war after a 9/11 type attack.
I think this underestimates just how awful a thing the Iraq war was.
We're looking at at least 250k deaths.
Trillions of dollars. A huge radicalizing factor for Arab Muslims.
The rise of ISIS, the refugee crisis in the EU.
Hell, even Brexit is ultimately a consequence of the Iraq war (though the refugee crisis).
No I think you are underestimating how potentially terrible a war that a Gore presidency might have started.
And this wasn't even unexpected, the foreign services of both the US and Britain knew that the Iraq war would be pretty much as bad as it was, but the Bush administration was so deadset on going forward they didn't even plan for the event that the experts were right.
Yeah. it was a giant disaster. I don't see any reason to assume that giant disasters can't happen during Democrat regimes. Maybe they are less likely. Maybe not.
To all those who think a Trump Presidency isn't a big deal, just look at how badly Bush screwed the world up, and he was a more or less typical politician who was perceived as a not quite as smart but otherwise really nice regular guy.
I don't know why we would associate Trump with the Iraq war. At least he actually claims (now) that it was a giant disaster. The only thing linking Trump to the Iraq war is that he's a republican. But Trump isn't really a republican. He could have just as easily been a democrat, if he decided that was better for his chances.
Trump is in the midst of a presidential campaign and he can't be bothered to act like he's taking the job seriously or turn down the extremism. If the system couldn't keep Bush from being such an epic disaster then why do they think it can constrain Trump?
I don't. I just don't see what any of this has to do with democrats vs. republicans. Trump is a disaster regardless of his party. Bush turned out to be a disaster. And we never really got the opportunity to know what a Gore presidency would have been like.
I don't think it's "hands down gore". I don't think we really know anything about how Gore would have handled anything. All we know is that Bush is a fuck up, so anyone better than a fuck up would have been better than Bush. Was Gore better than a fuck up? Who knows. If I could do everything over with Gore instead of Bush would I do it? Sure. I think that's a good bet, but I would be hopeful rather than confident that things would turn out better.
It could have very well been the case that Gore is just another legislator whose experience collecting a paycheck doesn't translate into leadership. I don't think he would have invaded Iraq, but "Invading Iraq vs. not invading Iraq" are not the only two possibilities.
I view it as rolling the dice. We rolled a 4 sided die by electing Bush and rolled a 1. Would we have rolled higher by picking a 6 sided die and electing gore? We can't know, but I would have taken those odds. Picking a 6 sided die is always better than picking a 4 sided die, even if you roll a 1 on the 6 sided die. What I am saying is that I would have picked gore, but we could have still rolled a 1 with a pretty reasonable probability (e.g. 1 in 6)
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't surprise me from a company that can't comprehend that there is a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents.
Maybe it encourages belief in somebody's theory of evolution, but it sure as shit isn't Darwin's.
Actually you measure the time-difference between the pattern and the button-press.
I have no idea what part of what experiment you are referring to, but it is not what I am talking about.
Consciousness is a cloudy thing that extends a few seconds into the past and the future. People cannot determine when exactly they become aware of something and they must always lag behind that moment.
Consciousness as a concept is pretty nebulous. When you "become conscious" of something is different thing with the same name. People can detect when they become conscious of something by definition. In fact people can *only* detect things they are conscious of.
That's not to say that precursor events of *something* can not be detected in the brain before people are conscious of them (i.e. when they are subconscious).
Scientists can just ask people wen they became aware of something (or have them push a button when they become aware of it). Humans are not authorities on many of the things going on in their own brain, but they are maybe the only authority on when *they* become conscious of something. So if you can predict what someone will become conscious of before they become conscious of it, that seems pretty interesting.
You seem really smart... Please tell us what all your hobbies are so we can be as awesome and smart as you.
Who the hell needs child soldiers? Poor countries that don't yet have robots (i.e. not Japan).
When done correctly it is very useful, it's just hard to do it correctly. Pokemon GO is not actually using augmented reality. It just calls what it is doing augmented reality, but really it is just super imposing cartoon characters on top of video from your phone's camera. There is a but of integration with your phone's accelerometers, but this is pointless, and most people just turn it off.
Augmented reality when it is done correctly will become an essential piece of technology. Imagine walking around with something resembling google glasses and having a poisonous snake identified and highlighted in your field of view. Not only can you run away in the correct direction, but you will know what kind of anti-venom to use if you do get bit. Or just imagine how fun it will be to walk around the zoo, having your AR freak out at all the poisonous snakes it identifies.
This is a pretty specific example that I thought of while at the zoo. There are countless applications for AR.
Some more mundane examples. Having your car show up in your glasses while walking in a parking lot, rather than having to correlate a gps position on your phone to a location in real life. Imagine having the names of everyone you see be super imposed on a virtual name tag, so you don't have to be embarrassed by forgetting their name.
Here is an application that is actually in use right now. Realtime translation. You can use your phone's camera to look at text in a foreign language and have it translated into your native language right on the object itself. This is super useful when in a foreign country.
Now the army spec ops guys just need to get their apps approved through the app store.
You're not defending: 'Bush and co were a morons, look at the mess'?
I am not defending it. I happen to think it's a fucking disaster, but that was not the point of my argument. The point of my argument was that we don't know a Gore presidency would have been better than the mess (if you believe it to be such) we got.
And no my hate is not blinding me to anything, because I don't hate Bush, I just think he's an idiot.
I think you are projecting positions on to me that I never claimed to have. It seems like there is a particular position you want to attack. I suggest you find someone that actually has that position.
I'm not confused at all. 1. Bad stuff can happen to people who make good decisions (because a lot of stuff that happens is unpredictable). 2. You don't know what the skillset of a person is before you measure them. Gore was never measured.
And I think you are the one who is confused. I never claimed Bush was anything but terrible. We don't *know* who will be terrible before they show us. We can maybe have educated guesses that Bush, Trump, etc will be terrible, but that isn;t the same as knowing. We also don't know that Gore would not have been terrible. He had no leadership experience. He had experience winning elections and collecting a paycheck as a legislator.
The Sunnis and Shia are fighting each other. It's a 1000 year old war, so it's unlikely to stop soon.
It's a 1000 year old war that can apparently be suspended by a brutal dictator.So maybe the game isn't stopping it, but just temporarily suspending it, which is shown to be possible.
Bush played 'the idiot', while the Iraqis and Iranians did exactly what they were expected to.
And it's pretty easy to say they did exactly what they were supposed to do, 13 years after they did it, because now "what they did" has become solidified as history and what was meant to happen. As if nothing unexpected ever happens and has a ripple effect changing all future predicted decisions.
NO it's not, because there is no way to calculate or verify that confidence level. World events are pretty much the definition of a chaotic system (i.e. they are unpredictable over a span of 4 or 8 years).
I didn't say *all* things are unknowable. We know lots of things. I am saying we don't know what would have happened in a hypothetical Gore presidency. I don't even know why this is controversial.
I can already tell you that it's going to be really bad. Really, really bad. There's only two candidates highly likely to win, and they're both absolutely horrible, so there's almost no way for it to *not* turn out really, really bad.
I just meant that in general high turnout can be really good or really bad, depending on what the masses decide. I agree that this year there is no possible good outcome. Although maybe preventing ww3 can be considered relatively good.
We haven't had candidates this horrible in a long time (probably since 1968, which is before I was alive)
No, but we've had candidates that were more disliked than liked and higher turnout seems to correlate positively with dislike of candidates. Maybe it's not a line, and id candidates are *really* disliked the turnout goes down again, we will see.
and we didn't have the internet back then with all the polarization and extremism that's created, so I'm not so sure you can look for historical parallels like that.
Sure I can look for them, but we'll see if they are actually parallel in a few months.
I am hoping, however, that other parties will get a much higher portion of the vote than they did in the past.
Gary Johnson is poling at 8% of the popular vote right now. This is shaping up to be the best year for 3rd+ parties yet. If any get to 15% They are included in the debates (unless they change the rules, which they probably will).
The only thing keeping peace in Iraq was Saddam prior to the war.
So obviously if you intend to remove Saddam, you need to replace him with another source of order (I wouldn't call what he maintained "peace").
And in fact Bush tried to replace Saddam with a new Iraqi leader, it just was not a very good attempt. Clearly the Bush administration was overconfident in their abilities or underestimated the problem.
I think in retrospect the way the war turned out was a pretty likely outcome given how the war was executed, but it's not as if it's impossible to execute a war like this properly. Bush made a bunch of mistakes. I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that fixing some set of those mistakes and turning them into good decisions could have led to a much better outcome and maybe even an outcome that would have been better than not having the war at all.
My point is that the experts couldn't have known how bad Bush was going to fuck this up, because they didn't know what he was going to do before he did it. We didn't have experts criticizing the plan to disband the Iraqi Army before Bush did it, because none of the experts (outside Bush's circle) knew he was going to do that.
When you have an unknown player batting for the first time, you don't know if he is going to strike out, or hit a home run, or something in between. If you have seen him bat 100 times (and he has struck out 100 times), you still don't know what he is going to do, but you have a much better idea.
Once you know Bush is a shitty batter, it's safe to predict he will strike out. But predicting who is a shitty batter is not easy. Maybe Bush is an idiot, but idiots can still happen to surround themselves with competent people.
First American troops on the ground (yes, as "advisors")? Eisenhower. First American death? Eisenhower. Cancelled democratic elections leading to a civil war? Eisenhower.
None of those things required us to turn the situation in vietnam into a war with the US. And furthermore if you read my post, you would see that I was not even assigning blame. In fact I was doing almost the opposite (i.e. saying bad things can happen even if you don't fuck up).
Maybe next time before you through out the "narrative of lies" bullshit, try actually reading what is said first.
But now, instead of getting the under-30 crowd to actually register to vote like Obama did in 2008, Hillary has completely turned them off, so most likely they'll just stay at home.
As it turns out the only candidate less likeable than Hillary is Trump. One might expect a large share of Republicans that hate Trump to stay home and cancel out the large share of democrats that stay home, but in fact that data shows that historically the potential of a really hated candidate winning actually draws more turnout than the potential for a really beloved candidate winning. The lowest turnouts are when both candidates are liked, and the highest are when both candidates are hated.
I expect the highest turnout in recent history. That can be really good or really bad.
There were many good arguments for going into Vietnam, they were wrong in retrospect but it wasn't obvious. The experts knew exactly what would happen in Iraq.
There is no way this is true because there are an infinite number of things that could have happened in Iraq depending on how it was executed. Maybe experts could have known what would probably happen if they knew exactly how Bush would have executed the war, but there was know way to know that he was even going to be in a war much less how it would be executed before he was even elected.
Trump is also outrageously wrong about a lot of things, it's just hard to hell whether he's deliberately lying or whether he's just wrong.
There is a big difference between those, and a third option that he just doesn't give a shit about being factually right or wrong.
People around Trump say he didn't expect to win either, he was supposedly banking on a respectable showing in a few primary and was caught off guard when he started winning.
That may be so, but he knew exactly what to do to give himself a pretty good shot. Whether he actually thought he would win or not is not actually relevant. He thought he had a good enough chance to try, and he was right.
He didn't strongly support it and he turned relatively quickly but he did support it.
I still maintain that it is intellectually dishonest to characterize Donald Trump as having supported the Iraq War, just for one qualified non-committal comment he made as a private citizen. As I said, there are *so* many issues where Trump can be legitimately criticized. Criticizing him for supporting the Iraq War trivializes other valid criticisms.
That's basically the same argument that saying that since wearing a seatbelt could potentially trap you in a burning car then wearing a seatbelt might be just as dangerous as not wearing one.
Yeah. it *might* be. It isn't in most cases, but it is false to say that wearing a seatbelt is safer than not wearing one in *every* situation. Furthermore I wouldn't equate electing Gore to wearing a seatbelt. I would equate it to playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet in the gun rather than 3. Yeah playing with 1 is much better odds than 3, but there is a very good probability of ending up dead in both.
We can't run an alternate history but we've seen the consequences of an ignorant president when Bush walked into an easily avoidable catastrophe.
No we can't, and I don't disagree that the Iraq war could have been easily avoided. Most of the wars we get into are avoidable.
It's possible that Trump won't be bad, or even that Clinton could be worse, but that's a terribly poor gamble.
I agree. But I wouldn't be shocked if you could look into a crystal ball and it turns out Clinton presidency was worse than a Trump presidency. I don;t think it's a million to one. I think it's like three to one.
He made an argument about it, not a proof.
Since you are having trouble distinguishing the difference between a proof and an argument, that is just further evidence you're off your groove today. Take a rest.
It is pretty clear to me that you aren't aware of what "proof" is beyond the folk sense of that word.
Bush campaigned as a common sense regular-guy, ignoring experts and following his gut is exactly what lead to the Iraq war.
Even if we assume that following his gut is what lead to the Iraq War, following your gut is not the only way you can end up in a terrible war. JFK was a democrat who wasn't an idiot who never listened to experts, how did we end up in vietnam?
Trump is basically tripling down on the ignore-experts follow-your-instinct philosophy.
I actually think they are quite different. I think trump follows his gut because he knows he is right about a lot of things. He is right that a lot people are racist, a lot of people don't care about the truth, and that a lot of people hate polished politicians. In this respect he is absolutely more right than the "experts" who said that he had no chance of winning the republican nomination .
Trump supported Iraq, has been much more hawkish on Libya and Syria, and his foreign policy framework consists of using US power to push other countries around. Assuming he'd be more likely to get in a bad war is a very good bet.
Trump did not support the Iraq war. In an interview in 2002, when asked if he supported the war answered "I guess so". While it is not true that he predicted the war would be bad (as he claims), it is well documented that trump opposed the war as far back as 2004.
I think he is certainly likely to get into a war, but I don't think it is fair to associate him with that particular war. And this is for a man that routinely takes both sides of every issue and is basically a compulsive liar. There is so much to legitimately criticize him for, there is no need to invent things.
I'm not saying it has to do with D vs R, I'm saying it has to do with seeing the scale of damage a bad president (Bush) did, and realizing the epic damage Trump could do.
Yes bad presidents can get us into bad wars. What I am saying is that even having a good president (much less a democrat president) is *far* from a guarantee of not getting into a bad war. And we don't even know if Gore would have been a good president. I don't think there is any good evidence for that. All I can confidently say about Gore is that he would have been a democrat president, which isn't saying much.
Actually I do. Descartes proved that. What I don't know is whether you or Descartes exist.
He might have started some wars in the way that Obama did Libya, some bombing and maybe some special forces but nothing major.
Iraq was a determined project by Bush and the neo-conservatives that surrounded him. That does not happen with a Democratic president.
I think you have a very short sighted view of history. Republicans being the warmongers of the 2 major parties is a new development with the neoconservative movement. That hasn't always been the case, and could easily change with one warmonger democrat president or a pacifist republican president.
In fact, Bush actually campaigned on a platform of "no nation building". You can look back in retrospect and call bullshit on that platform, but what you can't do is know that Gore wouldn't make some horrible foreignn policy mistakes equivalent to the Iraq war after a 9/11 type attack.
I think this underestimates just how awful a thing the Iraq war was. We're looking at at least 250k deaths. Trillions of dollars. A huge radicalizing factor for Arab Muslims. The rise of ISIS, the refugee crisis in the EU. Hell, even Brexit is ultimately a consequence of the Iraq war (though the refugee crisis).
No I think you are underestimating how potentially terrible a war that a Gore presidency might have started.
And this wasn't even unexpected, the foreign services of both the US and Britain knew that the Iraq war would be pretty much as bad as it was, but the Bush administration was so deadset on going forward they didn't even plan for the event that the experts were right.
Yeah. it was a giant disaster. I don't see any reason to assume that giant disasters can't happen during Democrat regimes. Maybe they are less likely. Maybe not.
To all those who think a Trump Presidency isn't a big deal, just look at how badly Bush screwed the world up, and he was a more or less typical politician who was perceived as a not quite as smart but otherwise really nice regular guy.
I don't know why we would associate Trump with the Iraq war. At least he actually claims (now) that it was a giant disaster. The only thing linking Trump to the Iraq war is that he's a republican. But Trump isn't really a republican. He could have just as easily been a democrat, if he decided that was better for his chances.
Trump is in the midst of a presidential campaign and he can't be bothered to act like he's taking the job seriously or turn down the extremism. If the system couldn't keep Bush from being such an epic disaster then why do they think it can constrain Trump?
I don't. I just don't see what any of this has to do with democrats vs. republicans. Trump is a disaster regardless of his party. Bush turned out to be a disaster. And we never really got the opportunity to know what a Gore presidency would have been like.
I don't think we really know anything about how Gore would have handled anything.
We can definitely get an idea of how different people would handle different situations.
Yeah. Having an idea of how someone might handle something is different than knowing how they would have handled something.
I think I am firmly planted in reality. I have some idea Gore would have been better. I don't know that he would have been better.
I don't think it's "hands down gore". I don't think we really know anything about how Gore would have handled anything. All we know is that Bush is a fuck up, so anyone better than a fuck up would have been better than Bush. Was Gore better than a fuck up? Who knows. If I could do everything over with Gore instead of Bush would I do it? Sure. I think that's a good bet, but I would be hopeful rather than confident that things would turn out better.
It could have very well been the case that Gore is just another legislator whose experience collecting a paycheck doesn't translate into leadership. I don't think he would have invaded Iraq, but "Invading Iraq vs. not invading Iraq" are not the only two possibilities.
I view it as rolling the dice. We rolled a 4 sided die by electing Bush and rolled a 1. Would we have rolled higher by picking a 6 sided die and electing gore? We can't know, but I would have taken those odds. Picking a 6 sided die is always better than picking a 4 sided die, even if you roll a 1 on the 6 sided die. What I am saying is that I would have picked gore, but we could have still rolled a 1 with a pretty reasonable probability (e.g. 1 in 6)