Software will stop being buggy as soon as people stop putting up with it.
If people actually stopped buying Windows because it sucks, you can bet your sweet darned bippie Microsoft would stop making it suck. As it is, honestly, why should they care? People keep using Windows. It makes no business sense for them to focus on quality if quality doesn't sell.
<flamebait>There is already a company that caters to the niche market that actually gives a rat's ass about consumer software quality. It's Apple -- and oh, look at how they just dominate the desktop computer market....</flamebait>
Hmm, it looks like the researches only tested woman for perception of these features. I wonder whether men would be as good?
All the publicity makes this out as a kind of mate selection, battle of the sexes thing -- when there's nothing in this research to show that it isn't just that all humans are good at perceiving hormone levels and infant attentiveness.
So why did they only use women in their perception sample group? Sheesh.
I evaluated both JSF and Tapestry for my latest project, with a slight prejudice in favor of JSF, and ended up choosing Tapestry... by a mile, actually, and for some of the same reasons you mentioned: too hard to "break the mold" in JSF.
That's not to say that I haven't had some wrangling with Tapestry, but it was for genuinely unusual stuff. And it's a heck of lot more concise than JSF.
The Tapestry docs are rather mediocre; they're still a holdover from v3 in many parts, and make some things sound harder than they need to be. I wonder if you used Tap 4 on Java 1.5 to their full potential?
...will people stop pretending that "Java" is one giant monolithic thing that only works one way.
Look, these flagships specs like J2EE and EJB are designed to solve problems of writing massively distributed apps that need to have transactions spanning multiple servers running different OSes -- horrendous problems that you never, ever, ever want to have to solve. And if you do have to solve them, Java is the best way -- but if you take all that machinery and try to write a "hello world" webapp, of course it's going to take 30 bazillion lines of code.
Somebody writing the webapp he describes in 3000 lines of Java is either (1) utterly ignorant of how to use the Java frameworks (like Tapestry) that are appropriate for the task, or (2) deliberately spreading FUD on behalf of Python.
That is not to slight Python or the framework he's using. Python is very cool. I'm just sick of people complaining about "Java" when what they're really complaining about is "Java abuse."
I agree with the sentiment of this comment -- but Escherial, I think you saw the word "rapid" and made a bunch of bad presumptions about Tapestry. Tapestry is not a crutch; it is an excellent framework, one you're obviously ignorant of.
What Tapestry is emphatically not is a whizzy-ooey drag-and-drop autogenerated no-coding-necessary whiz-bang shill. Those are, by and large, a bunch of crap: they usually just make the easiest 90% even easier, and the "last 90%" even harder.
What Tapestry is is a very nice web framework, which has a lot of the same MVC capabilities as Struts and the code reuse possibilities of JSF, with far less configuration and unnecessary complexity than either of those options. The Tapestry team, much like the excellent Rails folks, have looked for ways to reduce redundancy, boilerplate code, and messy configuration -- especially in this 4.0 release. Roughly speaking, Tapestry is about 80-90% of the streamlined simplicity of Rails, but with a much richer framework underneath and all the existing libraries and machinery of Java at your disposal. It has the best mechanism for HTML fragment reuse I know of.
What the Tapestry team has not done is try to make an app that thinks for you. You've still got to code. It's just a lot less tedious than with most other frameworks.
My two latest webapps have been all Tapestry 4, and it's great how little code/config I have to write that isn't conveying useful information. I'm really quite impressed with the framework.
So yeah, I agree with your rant, but it's not appropriate to Tapestry.
mess-an-ger[from MESS + ANGER]: The emotional state induced by using any of a series of software products suffering from feature bloat, as typified by Microsoft Word. An "instant messanger" is a piece of software so obnoxious to the user that it induces rage immediately on contact.
And I'll bet you all just thought that Slashdot's editors don't spell check the articles! Silly readers.
In a way, yes. It's a feedback loop -- a carefully seeded one in the case of music, one determined by historical circumstance and clever business strategy in the case of OSes. Quality (whatever that is) is rarely a primary factor.
I used KDE full time at my last contracting job. The machine only booted into Windows once -- the first time I turned it on. KDE is sort of like a Windows 98 that never crashes: ugly, sort of crappy, many things are harder than they ought to be, but it most definitely gets the job done and your grandma could learn to use it.
I did spent all day at work longing for my home Mac, though. Familiarity again? Worth noting, though, that as somebody who works full time with either Windows or Linux, has a Mac at home, and is thus pretty familiar with all three options, I far prefer OS X to the other two.
Familiarity is by far the largest factor in ease of use.
Anything can start to feel comfortable given enough exposure. Why is popular music popular? Because they play it over and over and over. (People often confuse cause and effect in this one: it's usually popular because of the repetition, not the other way around.)
Use nothing but OS X for a year and everything else will seem awkward. Same goes for any other OS.
Comes up fine for me. That sounds like your browser kacking on the XSL, trying to parse it -- which makes sense, because you'd really run the XSL server-side and output a PDF or something (as SuperKendall pointed out), and your browser wouldn't normally even see this. So this may just be a case of user confusion.
The machine doesn't just print out a paper record internally; what voting rights groups are asking for is a voter-verifiable paper trail: the voter can inspect the paper record of their vote. This paper record goes into a ballot box, just like a normal ballot. If the result is disputed, it's possible to have a paper recount.
Of course, this is still subject to security problems -- e.g. what if an election judge discards some of the paper receipts? -- but they are problems shared by traditional paper balloting. The thing is, it's a lot harder to get a corrupt election judge in every precinct than it is to get one corrupt programmer in every voting machine company, so widespread rigging is more difficult and easier to discover.
Plurality votes are frustrating, because they give voters very little opportunity to express honest preference. In this election, the incredibly low third-party voting is, I think, a sign that people thought it was more important to defend/defeat Bush (probably more of the latter) than to bring new voices into the mix -- but they're clearly both things that people want.
I'm still of the opinion that third-party voting in national elections is futile until we use some better method of counting votes. Under a plurality system, if any third party actually managed to command enough support to elect a president, they'd either be a flash in the pan (like Jesse Ventura) or simply displace one of the existing two parties (as the Republicans did to the Whigs in 1850).
Either way, you'll still end up with two huge, sprawling coalitions that barely please anyone, even if they do have a new name, because that is really the only sustainable winning strategy in a series of plurality votes.
My wish is that the Libertarians, Greens, and Nader would put their energies into pushing Condorcet (or some other rank-order voting), instead of spending their energy on presidential candidates. Given the difficulty even of abolishing the electoral college, a federal-level switch seems unlikely in the near future. But a series of organized campaigns to get some cities and counties to start using it -- for mayoral elections, for example -- would be a great start.
Some argue that the two major parties would never support rank-order voting. I think it's possible. What you want to do is eventually turn it into a Nash equilibrium situation, where people overwhelmingly favor it, some politicians take it up as a cause, start using it to eek out wins in tight races, and thus forces their opponents to take it up as well. (This is how campaign finance reform laws passed even though they're contrary to the interest of most politicians.)
I don't buy that Bush believes he is some messenger of God (and a nytimes article is not going to convince me).
In that respect, then, you are like him: facts don't affect your beliefs. Fair enough. I think you should read the article before you dismiss it.
It amazes me how much everyone rationalizes the rampant corruption and lack of integrity of those they support just because it is so important to beat the "other guy".... This will only change when a critical mass decides to stop going "I really dislike both parties and want the government to change but this election is too important so maybe I will vote for who I really believe in next time"
No, even then it won't change. Plurality voting pretty much guarantees that we'll have two sprawling coalition parties that are big cesspools of power; no principled candidate can effectively manage a quorum in a plurality vote. (I really recommend reading that other thread I linked to if you haven't yet.) Until we switch to some kind of rank-order voting system that makes it strategically effective to vote for third parties, tactical voting for candidates who can win is the only rational choice.
Yes, you always get burned playing the lesser of two evils game. That is, unfortunately, the nature of our voting situation. But to twist the popular catch phrase: the lesser of two evils is still lesser.
My opinion: instead of wasting time and money running third party candidates who can't win (and who wouldn't really change the problem of unacceptable compromise if they could), we should put our energies into lobbying for a rank-order voting system (Condorcet is popular with the cool kids these days).
No, I'm basing my opinion on my observations of their behavior.
Kerry is cutting an electable middle ground in his rhetoric -- that is what politicians do. But based on how he has voted in the past, and what he has said when he wasn't under the limelight, I honestly believe that, had he been president for the last four years:
We would not have invaded Iraq. (His views on war, while much too hawkish for my taste, are at least practical and reality-based.)
The government would not have asserted the right to keep detain prisoners indefinitely without trial. (Kerry is a big fan of law enforcement, but also of the process of law.)
Congress would not have increased the tax burden (total amount of money that taxpayers will have to shell out) by passing massive tax cuts while increasing spending.
First up, they both are career politicians, they make decisions entirely based on what will be good for their political career, nothing more
Wrong. First, GWB is not a career politicians. He has only been in politics for a decade, and this is only the second elected office he's held.
Second, political expediency drives his speechwriters, but not his actions. Rather, he bends political expedience to match the actions he has also chosen. He honestly believes he is God's messenger and the United States is an empire with a divine mandate, and no facts -- neither political nor empirical -- change his mind when he is on one of his missions. No, I am not making this up.
Want to know what would make me feel dirty? Knowing that I had a chance to get that man out of power, and threw it away on a symbolic gesture so I'd feel "clean."
Bush and Kerry both have many serious problems, many of them the same problems -- but if you actually believe that they are identical, that which of them wins will not have a profound effect on the world -- then you are either living in a cave, or are blinded by ideology.
If nothing else, Kerry believes in making decisions based on discernable reality, and Bush believes that we are an empire that can create its own reality, because we're armed to the teeth and on a mission from God. That difference alone is profound.
I would love to have better candidates to vote for, and would love to have more room for more voices in the presidential election. But running and voting for third party candidates is not an effective strategy in theory or in practice -- neither for changing how politics work, nor for swaying the country to your point of view.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Just look at how effective the libertarians have been running their prez candidates for the last umpteen years: our civil liberties have never been safer! (There was that little trifle about habeus corpus, but who needed due process of law anyway?)
Until we start using a more intelligent algorithm for casting and counting votes, third parties in national elections will remain a losing proposition. There was a lengthy discussion on this topic attached to an earlier article.
I heard one of the authors interviewed on the radio yesterday. Some interesting points from him:
Even they were very surprised by the figures. They doubted the numbers, but in the end, trusted their own science enough to publish.
He emphasized that it's just an estimate, and we need more information.
One of the areas in their random sample happened to be Falujah. They ended up leaving it out of the estimate, because it would have given a much higher death toll.
They did actually ask a certain percentage for death certificates or other proof of death, in order to estimate how many people were lying, and took that into account.
Thanks for this post! I disagree with your ideas on marriage, and thus agree wholeheartedly on getting the state out of the marriage business. We should not need to play politics or fight each other in court for each of us to live marriage as we believe it ought to be lived. Like other matters of morality and faith, it should be an individual decision, and one where we attempt to sway each other not with laws, but with discussion (in the honorable tradition of my namesake, Paul).
The government should deal only in civil unions, and stop recognizing "marriage" altogether. It's too politically charged, too religiously entangled, and, frankly, too personal for the government to be messing with. Let people define their own marriages as they see fit, and if they want the legal benefits of a civil union, they can apply for one -- but they're separate things. Signing civil union documents would be a standard part of most marriage ceremonies, but neither would necessitate the other.
Yeah, it's just a linguistic trick, but it's really only the language that's hanging up the fundies in the first place.
(OT: If the doc your sig links to is supposed to justify the Iraq war, it's a lousy justification. I'm sure it would take you about 20 minutes to find some loon in northern Idaho who blows off the UN, cheats the government, and would really like to build a biological weapon, and he has about as much ability to follow through on that as Saddam did.)
Think of the current Democratic Party as a good example; all of the most influencial thinkers are Socialists and that philosophy, limited by what is politically possible, guides most of the Party's actions even though they can't even use that word in public.
I think you're projecting a bit too much of your own idealism onto the Democrats. They're not nearly that consistent, and your generalization doesn't hold well.
Right now that BIG issue is Capitalism vs Socialism.
Again, I think you're overgeneralizing, and projecting a bit of your own idealism into the big picture. The Republicans are really not particularly pro-capitalism -- think farm subsidies, think of all the tax favors -- and I know far more Democrats who would describe themselves as "capitalists" than "socialists." The split is over which parts of our society should be socialized: the Democrats emphasize socialized education and health care; Republicans tend to want socialized morality (e.g. gay marriage) and a heavily socialist military. (Think about it: whether you approve of the Iraq war or not, it is a hugely expensive government project designed to engineer a social end, namely a US-friendly Iraq. If that's not socialist, I don't know what is.)
Socialism and capitalism are mingling freely in both parties.
You're right about the coalitions, and I think it's inaccurate and even dangerous to try to sum up the two major parties in terms of a single grand philosophical struggle. I see no reason to presume that a shifting of the parties' political alignments would make them any more philosophically consistent than they are now.
You have to actually read the wikipedia link to know that Duverger's "law" is not absolute.
Yes, I actually read the link, and of course it is not absolute -- just like the "law" of supply and demand, it's not an absolute rule, but rather a general tendency that we can use to inform intelligent decisions.
If you say that a candidate is "stealing" someone elses votes
I said no such thing.
Our system was designed so that we could vote for the man (or woman) we think is best for the job.
Also a third party is healthy for the process because often if a third party threatens to steal the majority vote from a larger party, the larger party will offer an alliance, making consessions to the minority voice to get their support.
A valid argument, but is it the best tactic? Look at the amazing success the libertarians have had guarding civil liberties by voting for their candidate! Oh sure, they've made some sacrifices along the way... but who really needed habeus corpus anyway?
There are other tactics for shifting a party's platform that are much more effective, and much less risky, than running protest candidates. Just look at how Christian fundamentalists have changed the Republican party in the last 15 years -- in the 80s, it was still very much the party of Barry Goldwater, but I doubt he would recognize his party now!
Yes, but they won't be the SAME two parties. Not just the names will change, scramble things up badly and the new parties that emerge will not resemble the ones that exist now....
You're absolutely right, but...
On the other hand, if the Libertarians ascended they would acrete in a large chunk of the free market Republicans and that portion of the Democrats who still espouse Civil Rights as an individual concern.
...no party with a truly libertarian platform is going to command a quorum in the United States in the forseeable future. This goes for just about any ideologically strict group: religious fundamentalists, communists, whatever. Any party with enough support to run viable presidential candidates is going to have to do a lot of compromising. Flattening the multidimensional space of political opinion into any binary system is a problem, and there's no reason to think we'll be better off with one artificial political continuum than with another.
The problem is not Democrats and Republicans; it's that there are only two parties. It doesn't really matter what those two parties are. And the only way to change that is by casting and counting votes differently; as long as we're doing plurality votes, voting for third-party presidential candidates is an exercise in futility.
I'm not entirely sure but I think if any candidate manages to get 3% of the popular vote he'll receive some federal funding for the next campaign.
And then what?
Maybe if you're really, really, lucky, your candidate will gain popular support... and five, ten years down the road, they win!
A third party president! How exciting!
And then what?
The two major parties are going to start nipping at the heels of your platform, reorganizing their own positions to eat into your party's base. You'll have to compromise, build coalitions, to remain in power. Eventually, the political coalition-building will tip to the point where one of the three parties is no longer viable.
And, voila, after all your hard work, after all those votes that sacrificed immediate advantage for the long-term hopes, you're right back where you started: two parties, both of them sprawling coalitions that don't really please anybody all that much, but please about half the population juuuust enough.
Even if you win, you lose.
This already happened once. Back in the 1850s, the Democrats and the Whigs where the two major parties. A third party came along, got their candidate elected, chaos ensued, and within five years, the Whigs were defunct, with the political boundaries redrawn, but only two parties left. That third party was the Republicans.
Yes, ponder that: the Republicans were once a third party.
The problem is, you can't escape Duverger's law: as long as we have plurality votes, we'll only have two viable parties, except in times of extreme political chaos.
Kerry is not the perfect, ideal candidate of libertarians. Who'd have thunk it?
Next thing you know, some nutcase will be claiming that plurality voting requires voters to make compromises. Compromise is for weenies.
Sure, it's impractical and probably contrary to your interests in practical terms, but the symbolic gesture will buoy you with a smug sense of moral superiority for years: I say, cast your ballot for the candidate who you agree with completely on everything.
That's why I'm casting a write-in vote for myself.
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Software will stop being buggy as soon as people stop putting up with it.
If people actually stopped buying Windows because it sucks, you can bet your sweet darned bippie Microsoft would stop making it suck. As it is, honestly, why should they care? People keep using Windows. It makes no business sense for them to focus on quality if quality doesn't sell.
<flamebait>There is already a company that caters to the niche market that actually gives a rat's ass about consumer software quality. It's Apple -- and oh, look at how they just dominate the desktop computer market....</flamebait>
Hmm, it looks like the researches only tested woman for perception of these features. I wonder whether men would be as good?
All the publicity makes this out as a kind of mate selection, battle of the sexes thing -- when there's nothing in this research to show that it isn't just that all humans are good at perceiving hormone levels and infant attentiveness.
So why did they only use women in their perception sample group? Sheesh.
I evaluated both JSF and Tapestry for my latest project, with a slight prejudice in favor of JSF, and ended up choosing Tapestry ... by a mile, actually, and for some of the same reasons you mentioned: too hard to "break the mold" in JSF.
That's not to say that I haven't had some wrangling with Tapestry, but it was for genuinely unusual stuff. And it's a heck of lot more concise than JSF.
The Tapestry docs are rather mediocre; they're still a holdover from v3 in many parts, and make some things sound harder than they need to be. I wonder if you used Tap 4 on Java 1.5 to their full potential?
...will people stop pretending that "Java" is one giant monolithic thing that only works one way.
Look, these flagships specs like J2EE and EJB are designed to solve problems of writing massively distributed apps that need to have transactions spanning multiple servers running different OSes -- horrendous problems that you never, ever, ever want to have to solve. And if you do have to solve them, Java is the best way -- but if you take all that machinery and try to write a "hello world" webapp, of course it's going to take 30 bazillion lines of code.
Somebody writing the webapp he describes in 3000 lines of Java is either (1) utterly ignorant of how to use the Java frameworks (like Tapestry) that are appropriate for the task, or (2) deliberately spreading FUD on behalf of Python.
That is not to slight Python or the framework he's using. Python is very cool. I'm just sick of people complaining about "Java" when what they're really complaining about is "Java abuse."
I agree with the sentiment of this comment -- but Escherial, I think you saw the word "rapid" and made a bunch of bad presumptions about Tapestry. Tapestry is not a crutch; it is an excellent framework, one you're obviously ignorant of.
What Tapestry is emphatically not is a whizzy-ooey drag-and-drop autogenerated no-coding-necessary whiz-bang shill. Those are, by and large, a bunch of crap: they usually just make the easiest 90% even easier, and the "last 90%" even harder.
What Tapestry is is a very nice web framework, which has a lot of the same MVC capabilities as Struts and the code reuse possibilities of JSF, with far less configuration and unnecessary complexity than either of those options. The Tapestry team, much like the excellent Rails folks, have looked for ways to reduce redundancy, boilerplate code, and messy configuration -- especially in this 4.0 release. Roughly speaking, Tapestry is about 80-90% of the streamlined simplicity of Rails, but with a much richer framework underneath and all the existing libraries and machinery of Java at your disposal. It has the best mechanism for HTML fragment reuse I know of.
What the Tapestry team has not done is try to make an app that thinks for you. You've still got to code. It's just a lot less tedious than with most other frameworks.
My two latest webapps have been all Tapestry 4, and it's great how little code/config I have to write that isn't conveying useful information. I'm really quite impressed with the framework.
So yeah, I agree with your rant, but it's not appropriate to Tapestry.
In a way, yes. It's a feedback loop -- a carefully seeded one in the case of music, one determined by historical circumstance and clever business strategy in the case of OSes. Quality (whatever that is) is rarely a primary factor.
I used KDE full time at my last contracting job. The machine only booted into Windows once -- the first time I turned it on. KDE is sort of like a Windows 98 that never crashes: ugly, sort of crappy, many things are harder than they ought to be, but it most definitely gets the job done and your grandma could learn to use it.
I did spent all day at work longing for my home Mac, though. Familiarity again? Worth noting, though, that as somebody who works full time with either Windows or Linux, has a Mac at home, and is thus pretty familiar with all three options, I far prefer OS X to the other two.
Familiarity is by far the largest factor in ease of use.
Anything can start to feel comfortable given enough exposure. Why is popular music popular? Because they play it over and over and over. (People often confuse cause and effect in this one: it's usually popular because of the repetition, not the other way around.)
Use nothing but OS X for a year and everything else will seem awkward. Same goes for any other OS.
The reason it's not a big issue is that there's hasn't been a successful virus on OS X ... ever. (Well, there are some Office macro viruses, but....)
Eventually, somebody will manage to get a Mac virus out there, and then this will become an issue.
It was this over-stimulated buffoonery led to the disaster of the Great War.
In other news, New Kids on the Block were ultimately responsible for both Iraq wars, and the lack of harmony in medieval music caused the Black Death.
Their work was a step beyond the inflamed, blood-soaked, passionate, and sex-obsessed imagery of the 19th century
OK, I love Dalí, but we're talking here about the guy who painted The Great Masturbator.
Seriously, what planet are you from?
Comes up fine for me. That sounds like your browser kacking on the XSL, trying to parse it -- which makes sense, because you'd really run the XSL server-side and output a PDF or something (as SuperKendall pointed out), and your browser wouldn't normally even see this. So this may just be a case of user confusion.
The machine doesn't just print out a paper record internally; what voting rights groups are asking for is a voter-verifiable paper trail: the voter can inspect the paper record of their vote. This paper record goes into a ballot box, just like a normal ballot. If the result is disputed, it's possible to have a paper recount.
Of course, this is still subject to security problems -- e.g. what if an election judge discards some of the paper receipts? -- but they are problems shared by traditional paper balloting. The thing is, it's a lot harder to get a corrupt election judge in every precinct than it is to get one corrupt programmer in every voting machine company, so widespread rigging is more difficult and easier to discover.
Plurality votes are frustrating, because they give voters very little opportunity to express honest preference. In this election, the incredibly low third-party voting is, I think, a sign that people thought it was more important to defend/defeat Bush (probably more of the latter) than to bring new voices into the mix -- but they're clearly both things that people want.
I'm still of the opinion that third-party voting in national elections is futile until we use some better method of counting votes. Under a plurality system, if any third party actually managed to command enough support to elect a president, they'd either be a flash in the pan (like Jesse Ventura) or simply displace one of the existing two parties (as the Republicans did to the Whigs in 1850).
Either way, you'll still end up with two huge, sprawling coalitions that barely please anyone, even if they do have a new name, because that is really the only sustainable winning strategy in a series of plurality votes.
My wish is that the Libertarians, Greens, and Nader would put their energies into pushing Condorcet (or some other rank-order voting), instead of spending their energy on presidential candidates. Given the difficulty even of abolishing the electoral college, a federal-level switch seems unlikely in the near future. But a series of organized campaigns to get some cities and counties to start using it -- for mayoral elections, for example -- would be a great start.
Some argue that the two major parties would never support rank-order voting. I think it's possible. What you want to do is eventually turn it into a Nash equilibrium situation, where people overwhelmingly favor it, some politicians take it up as a cause, start using it to eek out wins in tight races, and thus forces their opponents to take it up as well. (This is how campaign finance reform laws passed even though they're contrary to the interest of most politicians.)
I don't buy that Bush believes he is some messenger of God (and a nytimes article is not going to convince me).
... This will only change when a critical mass decides to stop going "I really dislike both parties and want the government to change but this election is too important so maybe I will vote for who I really believe in next time"
In that respect, then, you are like him: facts don't affect your beliefs. Fair enough. I think you should read the article before you dismiss it.
It amazes me how much everyone rationalizes the rampant corruption and lack of integrity of those they support just because it is so important to beat the "other guy".
No, even then it won't change. Plurality voting pretty much guarantees that we'll have two sprawling coalition parties that are big cesspools of power; no principled candidate can effectively manage a quorum in a plurality vote. (I really recommend reading that other thread I linked to if you haven't yet.) Until we switch to some kind of rank-order voting system that makes it strategically effective to vote for third parties, tactical voting for candidates who can win is the only rational choice.
Yes, you always get burned playing the lesser of two evils game. That is, unfortunately, the nature of our voting situation. But to twist the popular catch phrase: the lesser of two evils is still lesser.
My opinion: instead of wasting time and money running third party candidates who can't win (and who wouldn't really change the problem of unacceptable compromise if they could), we should put our energies into lobbying for a rank-order voting system (Condorcet is popular with the cool kids these days).
No, I'm basing my opinion on my observations of their behavior.
Kerry is cutting an electable middle ground in his rhetoric -- that is what politicians do. But based on how he has voted in the past, and what he has said when he wasn't under the limelight, I honestly believe that, had he been president for the last four years:
- We would not have invaded Iraq. (His views on war, while much too hawkish for my taste, are at least practical and reality-based.)
- The government would not have asserted the right to keep detain prisoners indefinitely without trial. (Kerry is a big fan of law enforcement, but also of the process of law.)
- Congress would not have increased the tax burden (total amount of money that taxpayers will have to shell out) by passing massive tax cuts while increasing spending.
First up, they both are career politicians, they make decisions entirely based on what will be good for their political career, nothing moreWrong. First, GWB is not a career politicians. He has only been in politics for a decade, and this is only the second elected office he's held.
Second, political expediency drives his speechwriters, but not his actions. Rather, he bends political expedience to match the actions he has also chosen. He honestly believes he is God's messenger and the United States is an empire with a divine mandate, and no facts -- neither political nor empirical -- change his mind when he is on one of his missions. No, I am not making this up.
Want to know what would make me feel dirty? Knowing that I had a chance to get that man out of power, and threw it away on a symbolic gesture so I'd feel "clean."
Bush and Kerry both have many serious problems, many of them the same problems -- but if you actually believe that they are identical, that which of them wins will not have a profound effect on the world -- then you are either living in a cave, or are blinded by ideology.
If nothing else, Kerry believes in making decisions based on discernable reality, and Bush believes that we are an empire that can create its own reality, because we're armed to the teeth and on a mission from God. That difference alone is profound.
I would love to have better candidates to vote for, and would love to have more room for more voices in the presidential election. But running and voting for third party candidates is not an effective strategy in theory or in practice -- neither for changing how politics work, nor for swaying the country to your point of view.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Just look at how effective the libertarians have been running their prez candidates for the last umpteen years: our civil liberties have never been safer! (There was that little trifle about habeus corpus, but who needed due process of law anyway?)
Until we start using a more intelligent algorithm for casting and counting votes, third parties in national elections will remain a losing proposition. There was a lengthy discussion on this topic attached to an earlier article.
Thanks for this post! I disagree with your ideas on marriage, and thus agree wholeheartedly on getting the state out of the marriage business. We should not need to play politics or fight each other in court for each of us to live marriage as we believe it ought to be lived. Like other matters of morality and faith, it should be an individual decision, and one where we attempt to sway each other not with laws, but with discussion (in the honorable tradition of my namesake, Paul).
The government should deal only in civil unions, and stop recognizing "marriage" altogether. It's too politically charged, too religiously entangled, and, frankly, too personal for the government to be messing with. Let people define their own marriages as they see fit, and if they want the legal benefits of a civil union, they can apply for one -- but they're separate things. Signing civil union documents would be a standard part of most marriage ceremonies, but neither would necessitate the other.
Yeah, it's just a linguistic trick, but it's really only the language that's hanging up the fundies in the first place.
(OT: If the doc your sig links to is supposed to justify the Iraq war, it's a lousy justification. I'm sure it would take you about 20 minutes to find some loon in northern Idaho who blows off the UN, cheats the government, and would really like to build a biological weapon, and he has about as much ability to follow through on that as Saddam did.)
Think of the current Democratic Party as a good example; all of the most influencial thinkers are Socialists and that philosophy, limited by what is politically possible, guides most of the Party's actions even though they can't even use that word in public.
I think you're projecting a bit too much of your own idealism onto the Democrats. They're not nearly that consistent, and your generalization doesn't hold well.
Right now that BIG issue is Capitalism vs Socialism.
Again, I think you're overgeneralizing, and projecting a bit of your own idealism into the big picture. The Republicans are really not particularly pro-capitalism -- think farm subsidies, think of all the tax favors -- and I know far more Democrats who would describe themselves as "capitalists" than "socialists." The split is over which parts of our society should be socialized: the Democrats emphasize socialized education and health care; Republicans tend to want socialized morality (e.g. gay marriage) and a heavily socialist military. (Think about it: whether you approve of the Iraq war or not, it is a hugely expensive government project designed to engineer a social end, namely a US-friendly Iraq. If that's not socialist, I don't know what is.)
Socialism and capitalism are mingling freely in both parties.
You're right about the coalitions, and I think it's inaccurate and even dangerous to try to sum up the two major parties in terms of a single grand philosophical struggle. I see no reason to presume that a shifting of the parties' political alignments would make them any more philosophically consistent than they are now.
You have to actually read the wikipedia link to know that Duverger's "law" is not absolute.
... but who really needed habeus corpus anyway?
Yes, I actually read the link, and of course it is not absolute -- just like the "law" of supply and demand, it's not an absolute rule, but rather a general tendency that we can use to inform intelligent decisions.
If you say that a candidate is "stealing" someone elses votes
I said no such thing.
Our system was designed so that we could vote for the man (or woman) we think is best for the job.
No it's not.
Also a third party is healthy for the process because often if a third party threatens to steal the majority vote from a larger party, the larger party will offer an alliance, making consessions to the minority voice to get their support.
A valid argument, but is it the best tactic? Look at the amazing success the libertarians have had guarding civil liberties by voting for their candidate! Oh sure, they've made some sacrifices along the way
There are other tactics for shifting a party's platform that are much more effective, and much less risky, than running protest candidates. Just look at how Christian fundamentalists have changed the Republican party in the last 15 years -- in the 80s, it was still very much the party of Barry Goldwater, but I doubt he would recognize his party now!
You're absolutely right, but...
On the other hand, if the Libertarians ascended they would acrete in a large chunk of the free market Republicans and that portion of the Democrats who still espouse Civil Rights as an individual concern.
The problem is not Democrats and Republicans; it's that there are only two parties. It doesn't really matter what those two parties are. And the only way to change that is by casting and counting votes differently; as long as we're doing plurality votes, voting for third-party presidential candidates is an exercise in futility.
I'm not entirely sure but I think if any candidate manages to get 3% of the popular vote he'll receive some federal funding for the next campaign.
... and five, ten years down the road, they win!
And then what?
Maybe if you're really, really, lucky, your candidate will gain popular support
A third party president! How exciting!
And then what?
The two major parties are going to start nipping at the heels of your platform, reorganizing their own positions to eat into your party's base. You'll have to compromise, build coalitions, to remain in power. Eventually, the political coalition-building will tip to the point where one of the three parties is no longer viable.
And, voila, after all your hard work, after all those votes that sacrificed immediate advantage for the long-term hopes, you're right back where you started: two parties, both of them sprawling coalitions that don't really please anybody all that much, but please about half the population juuuust enough.
Even if you win, you lose.
This already happened once. Back in the 1850s, the Democrats and the Whigs where the two major parties. A third party came along, got their candidate elected, chaos ensued, and within five years, the Whigs were defunct, with the political boundaries redrawn, but only two parties left. That third party was the Republicans.
Yes, ponder that: the Republicans were once a third party.
The problem is, you can't escape Duverger's law: as long as we have plurality votes, we'll only have two viable parties, except in times of extreme political chaos.
Kerry is not the perfect, ideal candidate of libertarians. Who'd have thunk it?
Next thing you know, some nutcase will be claiming that plurality voting requires voters to make compromises. Compromise is for weenies.
Sure, it's impractical and probably contrary to your interests in practical terms, but the symbolic gesture will buoy you with a smug sense of moral superiority for years: I say, cast your ballot for the candidate who you agree with completely on everything.
That's why I'm casting a write-in vote for myself.