It doesn't really matter whether the photo was changed in Photoshop; just the photo itself, the lighting, the angle, and the subject matter are designed to manipulate the viewer's emotions. Press photography and photo journalism is probably the most dishonest form of reporting because it pretends to be authentic, but the the message is so strongly under the photographer's control and the picture and moment are so unrepresentative.
However... Once you start allowing a person to use his money to enhance the political position of a party/candidate then you are skewing and altering the playing field. You're basically making your single vote count more than the vote of the poor homeless man down the street, or whatever.
No, my vote still doesn't count any more than anybody else's vote, and everybody is free to vote the way you want.
Money gives me more power to influence other people in how they vote, but they still cast their votes the way they see fit. There are many other forms of power that allows one group of people to influence another: journalists, sitting governments and presidents, sports stars, actors, and Nobel prize winners all have more power to influence their fellow citizens than the average citizen or that homeless guy. Why do you obsess only about those with money?
But really, the problem is you're conflating democracy with freedom
No, I'm not "conflating" it. Freedom is a necessary prerequisite for democracy; without freedom, democracy cannot exist. And a necessary consequence of freedom is some degree of inequality, both in terms of wealth and power.
I'm no fan of democracy,
Well, that's obvious. I, however, am a fan of democracy, for the same reason as Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's an essential part of democracy because ultimately, you can't prohibit campaign contributions without interfering with free speech. If you prohibit me from giving money to a candidate, I will just run my own ads. If you try to limit that, you need some government or legal entity that tries to determine whether my political speech is acceptable or not subject to whatever arbitrary criteria the law sets down. It's a massive and intrusive system of government regulation of political speech, which is incompatible with democracy. In addition, the candidates themselves still need money from somewhere. So you need to come up with some sort of government campaign financing. But that kind of financing is going to be rigged in favor of parties in power and against new parties, as experience in other countries shows.
And what problem are you trying to fix in the first place? The idea that money can buy elections in the US is simply not supported by the data. And with new media and social networks, you need less and less money to get a campaign off the ground anyway.
1 that there is a correlation between gun ownership and murder rates. And 2 that you can't disprove a causal link with the data you claim to have posted but haven't given me a way to look at.
The "essential part of democracy" is deciding matters by *vote* --- "one person, one vote" --- as opposed to oligarchy (markets), which run on the "one dollar, one vote" principle.
The essential part of democracy is not just "one person one vote", it is free speech and freedom to engage politically. That means the freedom to use your own money to promote your own viewpoints. If you take away the ability of private citizens to promote their own views, the only views that end up getting promoted are the views of those already in power, namely the government itself. That is a prescription for totalitarianism.
Where have you been? Of course, Bush did something like this, from lying about WMDs in Iraq to torture, funneling money to religious organizations, and numerous violations of due process and invasions of privacy.
Yes, I did vote for Obama the first time around, both because he promised to end the abuses of the Bush era, and because the alternative was a doddering fool. The second time around, I voted for neither, because it turned out Obama had been lying through his teeth, and both had come right out saying that they didn't give a damn about the Constitution or limits on executive power. I don't apologize for my votes, they were correct given the information we all had.
And, no, I didn't "take sides" with my vote, no matter how much blind and dumb partisans like you want to turn a rational choice into some kind of childish us-vs-them game.
The patent on Roundup expired in 2000; anybody can make it, and you can get it cheaply from Chinese companies. If they reformulate Roundup, they'll just lose business.
The problem isn't with the president; we rarely get good presidents, and they are mostly interchangeable.
The problem is with Congress having abdicated much of its responsibility to the president, and with voters having unrealistic expectations of the president. The president can't fix the economy, he can't protect us from terrorism, and he can't make sure everybody gets a pony.
As for Lessig, his obsession with money in politics is the wrong focus. The problem isn't that rich people somehow remote control mindless voters, the problem is that voters are getting what they are asking for, they simply are asking for the wrong things and don't understand the consequences.
The root cause isn't the president, the root cause is Congress; the president is little more than a janitor for the nation. His job is to implement what the people tell him to do, subject to constitutional constraints and judicial oversight. It's Congress's job to limit and direct presidential power, but they haven't been doing their job. It should be a lot easier to make change happen in Congress, because we can do that one district and one representative at a time.
We have specific problems right now with presidential overreach by Obama and Bush, and the solution is political change and discussion. Cynicism like yours is part of the problem, not part of a solution. The solution is to kick out politicians responsible for this.
In all cases, the difference between bribery and a gift is approval by the controlling authority; in the case of politicians, that's the voter. Yes, disclosure to voters is sufficient. In addition, your definition talks requries "corruption", which means personal gain. Campaign contributions aren't personal gain, they are made to the campaign.
Sorry, but the act of financially supporting political candidates who represent my interests is not "corruption", it's an essential part of democracy.
I was not aware that the consensus opinion of the scientific community qualifies for "doomsaying".
That's mostly a testament to your ignorance. If you read up a little on the history of science, you'll find quite a few other instances.
Of course, in the case of AGW, except for the observed increase in CO2 and a small degree of warming, there is little consensus on anything else anyway.
Wait til the bodies start dropping, til the oceans refuse to take in any more carbon and there is massive crop failure, extinctions, mass migrations of starving people and societal chaos.
When those things start happening, we can worry about them. Right now, you and people like you are just spreading FUD.
History changes things for the losers. The people who were wrong. The people who hurt other people through their ignorance or malfeasance or ideological or religious beliefs or whatever.
Oh, if only it were true. But history is full of doomsayers, and they are rarely held accountable for the harm they cause with their erroneous predictions. I suspect much of this AGW FUD would end quickly if people were actually forced to make specific predictions and held accountable when those predictions fail.
After patent expiration, you can use the old soybeans royalty free. Or you can choose the newer, higher-yield varieties they have constructed since (and that will themselves expire at some point).
Seems to me the patent system here is actually working as it should.
Absolutely untrue. You can not prove or disprove either with specific examples.
Yes, strangely enough, scientific theories are not symmetric. Causation can be disproven with a single counterexample.
Correlation does not show causation. That does not mean that it shows nothing. I was not claiming that low gun ownership causes low murder rates. I claimed that there is a correlation, which you denied.
Gun control only makes sense if lower gun ownership actually rates likely cause lower murder rates. Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish causation. There is no correlation, but even if there were, it still wouldn't matter because counterexamples disprove causation.
I asked you to send me a link to your data. I don't see any links posted by you in this thread. I am not willing to go hunting for your scatter plots when you could just send me a link.
It's as much work for me to find the link as it is for you. So stop being so damned lazy. Even better, why don't you actually try to prove your point!
No, sorry, you haven't "got me the answer". The question is not whether candidates associate with an organization, it's whether the organization campaigns on behalf of the candidates.
As for the BTP, as I was saying it's a branch of the Libertarian party. What does that have to do with the Tea Party movement???
Instead of butting heads with Monsanto over this, why not create a new variety from scratch? These kinds of genetic manipulations have gotten a lot simpler and cheaper over the last two decades. A group of farmers or a non-profit should be able to do it.
Those are candidates friendly to goals of the Tea Party organizations, not official candidates of a "tea party". We don't strip tax exempt status from progressive organizations or environmental organizations because there are "progressive candidates" or "environmental candidates".
I didn't know about the BTP, but from its goals and name, it seems clear they were part of the tea party movement. Do you disagree?
The Boston Tea Party party predates the Tea Party protests by three years, and it was a spin-out from the Libertarian party.
Health insurance is public AND private. You only get to opt-in to a private plan if you make over a certain amount of money
The "public" option in Germany is merely a regulated private market. And Germany's health care system faces the same problems as the US system.
IIRC if you're poor, the cost of the insurance is subsidized.
It's complicated. Of course, in the US, if you're poor, you're generally covered by Medicaid too, so what's your point?
My point in all this is that being what a US reactionary would consider a "socialist" country does not translate into necessarily having a basket case economy.
Germany is in no way a "socialist economy". Germany has somewhat less of a free market than the US (mostly rooted in conservatism and corporatism, not socialism), and it pays for that with a lower standard of living and lower growth rates, just as you'd expect. Canada is a sparsely populated resource rich country; using it as an example to emulate makes about as much sense as using Saudi Arabia or Luxembourg.
If there's a smaller # of uni grads in the population (citation needed), maybe more people go into the trades than here, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
Gosh, you want to have it both ways: the sky is falling in the US because the government doesn't arbitrarily continue to fund excess useless college degrees, yet in Germany going into the trades is supposedly a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't really matter whether the photo was changed in Photoshop; just the photo itself, the lighting, the angle, and the subject matter are designed to manipulate the viewer's emotions. Press photography and photo journalism is probably the most dishonest form of reporting because it pretends to be authentic, but the the message is so strongly under the photographer's control and the picture and moment are so unrepresentative.
EOM
No, my vote still doesn't count any more than anybody else's vote, and everybody is free to vote the way you want.
Money gives me more power to influence other people in how they vote, but they still cast their votes the way they see fit. There are many other forms of power that allows one group of people to influence another: journalists, sitting governments and presidents, sports stars, actors, and Nobel prize winners all have more power to influence their fellow citizens than the average citizen or that homeless guy. Why do you obsess only about those with money?
No, I'm not "conflating" it. Freedom is a necessary prerequisite for democracy; without freedom, democracy cannot exist. And a necessary consequence of freedom is some degree of inequality, both in terms of wealth and power.
Well, that's obvious. I, however, am a fan of democracy, for the same reason as Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's an essential part of democracy because ultimately, you can't prohibit campaign contributions without interfering with free speech. If you prohibit me from giving money to a candidate, I will just run my own ads. If you try to limit that, you need some government or legal entity that tries to determine whether my political speech is acceptable or not subject to whatever arbitrary criteria the law sets down. It's a massive and intrusive system of government regulation of political speech, which is incompatible with democracy. In addition, the candidates themselves still need money from somewhere. So you need to come up with some sort of government campaign financing. But that kind of financing is going to be rigged in favor of parties in power and against new parties, as experience in other countries shows.
And what problem are you trying to fix in the first place? The idea that money can buy elections in the US is simply not supported by the data. And with new media and social networks, you need less and less money to get a campaign off the ground anyway.
Congress can do that. And the way to make that happen is to put people in Congress with the balls to stand up to the president.
Put up some data or shut up.
He is likely ill-informed about the country he is living in, because campaign contributions like the ones we are talking about are legal everywhere.
And they should remain legal because they are an essential part of democracy; that's why they are legal everywhere.
The essential part of democracy is not just "one person one vote", it is free speech and freedom to engage politically. That means the freedom to use your own money to promote your own viewpoints. If you take away the ability of private citizens to promote their own views, the only views that end up getting promoted are the views of those already in power, namely the government itself. That is a prescription for totalitarianism.
Where have you been? Of course, Bush did something like this, from lying about WMDs in Iraq to torture, funneling money to religious organizations, and numerous violations of due process and invasions of privacy.
Yes, I did vote for Obama the first time around, both because he promised to end the abuses of the Bush era, and because the alternative was a doddering fool. The second time around, I voted for neither, because it turned out Obama had been lying through his teeth, and both had come right out saying that they didn't give a damn about the Constitution or limits on executive power. I don't apologize for my votes, they were correct given the information we all had.
And, no, I didn't "take sides" with my vote, no matter how much blind and dumb partisans like you want to turn a rational choice into some kind of childish us-vs-them game.
I'm not establishing a trend at all. I'm saying that your statement, taken on its own, was wrong and unscientific.
Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about, and that's all there's to it.
The patent on Roundup expired in 2000; anybody can make it, and you can get it cheaply from Chinese companies. If they reformulate Roundup, they'll just lose business.
The problem isn't with the president; we rarely get good presidents, and they are mostly interchangeable.
The problem is with Congress having abdicated much of its responsibility to the president, and with voters having unrealistic expectations of the president. The president can't fix the economy, he can't protect us from terrorism, and he can't make sure everybody gets a pony.
As for Lessig, his obsession with money in politics is the wrong focus. The problem isn't that rich people somehow remote control mindless voters, the problem is that voters are getting what they are asking for, they simply are asking for the wrong things and don't understand the consequences.
The root cause isn't the president, the root cause is Congress; the president is little more than a janitor for the nation. His job is to implement what the people tell him to do, subject to constitutional constraints and judicial oversight. It's Congress's job to limit and direct presidential power, but they haven't been doing their job. It should be a lot easier to make change happen in Congress, because we can do that one district and one representative at a time.
We have specific problems right now with presidential overreach by Obama and Bush, and the solution is political change and discussion. Cynicism like yours is part of the problem, not part of a solution. The solution is to kick out politicians responsible for this.
In all cases, the difference between bribery and a gift is approval by the controlling authority; in the case of politicians, that's the voter. Yes, disclosure to voters is sufficient. In addition, your definition talks requries "corruption", which means personal gain. Campaign contributions aren't personal gain, they are made to the campaign.
Sorry, but the act of financially supporting political candidates who represent my interests is not "corruption", it's an essential part of democracy.
Campaign contributions like this are legal in most of Europe, so chances are you're just ill-informed.
Care to disclose where you live and where you think this sort of thing is illegal?
Bribery is something that's done clandestinely; this obviously wasn't.
If you don't like it, make an issue out of it next time these people run for Congress.
That's mostly a testament to your ignorance. If you read up a little on the history of science, you'll find quite a few other instances.
Of course, in the case of AGW, except for the observed increase in CO2 and a small degree of warming, there is little consensus on anything else anyway.
When those things start happening, we can worry about them. Right now, you and people like you are just spreading FUD.
Oh, if only it were true. But history is full of doomsayers, and they are rarely held accountable for the harm they cause with their erroneous predictions. I suspect much of this AGW FUD would end quickly if people were actually forced to make specific predictions and held accountable when those predictions fail.
Turns out, the patent expires soon. Monsanto seems to be pretty reasonable about it:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/roundup-ready-patent-expiration.aspx
After patent expiration, you can use the old soybeans royalty free. Or you can choose the newer, higher-yield varieties they have constructed since (and that will themselves expire at some point).
Seems to me the patent system here is actually working as it should.
Yes, strangely enough, scientific theories are not symmetric. Causation can be disproven with a single counterexample.
Gun control only makes sense if lower gun ownership actually rates likely cause lower murder rates. Correlation is necessary, but not sufficient, to establish causation. There is no correlation, but even if there were, it still wouldn't matter because counterexamples disprove causation.
It's as much work for me to find the link as it is for you. So stop being so damned lazy. Even better, why don't you actually try to prove your point!
No, sorry, you haven't "got me the answer". The question is not whether candidates associate with an organization, it's whether the organization campaigns on behalf of the candidates.
As for the BTP, as I was saying it's a branch of the Libertarian party. What does that have to do with the Tea Party movement???
Instead of butting heads with Monsanto over this, why not create a new variety from scratch? These kinds of genetic manipulations have gotten a lot simpler and cheaper over the last two decades. A group of farmers or a non-profit should be able to do it.
Those are candidates friendly to goals of the Tea Party organizations, not official candidates of a "tea party". We don't strip tax exempt status from progressive organizations or environmental organizations because there are "progressive candidates" or "environmental candidates".
The Boston Tea Party party predates the Tea Party protests by three years, and it was a spin-out from the Libertarian party.
The "public" option in Germany is merely a regulated private market. And Germany's health care system faces the same problems as the US system.
It's complicated. Of course, in the US, if you're poor, you're generally covered by Medicaid too, so what's your point?
Germany is in no way a "socialist economy". Germany has somewhat less of a free market than the US (mostly rooted in conservatism and corporatism, not socialism), and it pays for that with a lower standard of living and lower growth rates, just as you'd expect. Canada is a sparsely populated resource rich country; using it as an example to emulate makes about as much sense as using Saudi Arabia or Luxembourg.
Gosh, you want to have it both ways: the sky is falling in the US because the government doesn't arbitrarily continue to fund excess useless college degrees, yet in Germany going into the trades is supposedly a good thing.
As for statistics, ...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=percentage+college+graduates+by+country