Well, this is certainly research I'd clear with a lawyer before doing. I assume they did so.
In any case, I think you'll have a hard time hanging "conspiracy" on them, if they had no contact or involvement with the malware planters. Furthermore, US law does not recognize a fundamental right of information privacy. Once "the cat is out of the bag", you're SOL as far as privacy is concerned. People still have to be responsible with respect to how they use that information (e.g. identity theft), but they can use it for purposes that don't infringe on the rights you do have (e.g., research).
Well, anything that smacks of group derived determinism is invalid, in my view.
I try not to use the word "racism", because that only makes the conversation get stupider, e.g. "It can't be racist because I believe such and so and I"m not racist," or "Here is a piece of statistical evidence which supports a statistical generalization which I will now proceed to extend into a logical generality."
The problem with racism is that you can't refute it; it can't be disproved because it's too broken even to be wrong. Any sort of data can be tossed into the sausage mill of bigotry and what comes out will be indistinguishable after it has been mixed with other meats.
The root of bigotry is not even stupidity, it is laziness -- laziness in holding, justifying, and applying our opinions. Suppose, for a moment, that "the black race" is a meaningful construct; or perhaps let us define an unassailable (and therefore empirically meaningless) proxy such as "black culture". Let us accept for a moment some proposition to be statistically true of people in that that group, e.g. "they reject learning".
Does this absolve us of the duty to treat the person in front of us as and individual? Or any group of such people?
Suppose we know somebody is "an American". There are non-typical Americans after all, Moslems, or Communists, or maybe intellectuals. We can't conclude that any group of Americans will conform to our ideas about what it means to be American.
Well, there is a hypothesis that a land bridge at the Bosporus was breached around 5600 BC, causing a massive flood event creating the Black Sea. While the origins of the Jewish people did not occur for several thousand years after that, even a "mild flooding event" taking years or decades would be a story handed down by people living in the region, and spread throughout the world in subsequent millennia.
Of course, this doesn't make the Biblical, world wide flood historical in any sense.
This is exactly what I would do. On the other hand, I'm insane.
I'm not sure whether doing this sort of thing made me insane, or whether insanity makes me do this sort of thing. It's very much a chicken or egg question. I wouldn't recommend this course of action to somebody to whom it didn't immediately recommend itself. There's almost no way it's worth the time to do.
Now some will say that no enterprise like this is wasted, on the grounds that the person trying will learn something. That's undeniable. The problem is this ignores opportunity cost. There are other things one can do with one's time that are more educational. In my opinion it is perfectly sane to convert the hulk into something novel, like a carputer or a home automation controller or the control unit for a robot, but anybody who puts that level of effort into to obtaining an old laptop is surely suffering from malignant compulsions.
I'm allowed to say that, because fixing the stupid thing is just what I'd do.
If the target of the link is one point in a larger process potentially involving many such pages. Google Image Search is a perfect example of this.
Note, though, that Google Image search gives you a link that allows you to exit the process. That's more guts than most site developers have. They want your eyeballs on their page as long as possible. Letting the user escape the task demonstrates confidence that what you are doing for them is valuable.
i know feeding the trolls - but he wanted to be impressed
You mean -- he wants a squad of royal marines marching behind a drummer boy to haul him out from behind his plough, slip the King's shilling into his pocket when he ain't looking, then send him off to see the world with His Majesty's Navy?
The margin of error is the numerical magnitude by which, within a specified degree of statistical certainty, the true value of a figure for a population may vary from a specific statistical estimate of of it. due to the effects of chance on the composition of the sample population used to calculate that estimate.
Well, I think you are partially correct. There was definitely a "Ming the Merciless" look in TOS Klingons, and Ming in turn was just Fu Manchu with space ships.
But the Klingons were depicted has having considerable technological capability. TOS Klingons are war-like, but the warrior culture thing was much more of a TNG graft. The race was rehabilitated, made into a kind of race of spacefaring Vikings, and so became a lot more interesting.
TOS Klingons engaged in violence, not for personal honor, but political reasons. In "Errand of Mercy" the commander orders mass executions, They are brutal, devious and without much principle other than advancing the power and scope of their empire. This always struck me as consistent with the American views on the Soviets, so much so that it could hardly be a coincidence.
In any case, I was also struck by the Vulcan/Romulan pairing. The Chinese, back then, came in two flavors.
As much as I admire the swashbuckling spirit of TOS, it isn't about kicking butts. It is about liberation, a specific kind of liberation that turns on this proposition: "Kirk is always right"
Kirk never asks for advice, except to make a point of ignoring it. Kirk has effectively absolute power. He is not restrained (like a political leader would be) by having to take the advice of lesser men, even if they might have narrow technical expertise. If Kirk says fire the phasers, they fire the phasers. If he calls "General Order 24", the ship will destroy all life on a planet. Kirk has ostensible superiors, but they can't restrain him, and they don't bother because even though he flaunts the rules, he always succeeds because Kirk is Always Right.
It's almost crypto-fascist; it would be if it weren't a fantasy. It's a fantasy of complete liberation from any restraint.
A mature and rational human being, if confronted with a real life Spock or McCoy, would find much to admire. If confronted with a real life Kirk, he'd be revolted, because a real person who was anything like Kirk would be an ethical monster. But this not realistic storytelling. It is a fantasy. Kirk is not a monster, because Kirk is Always Right. If you accept that, then everything he does is justified.
I dunno. I remember the sixties, man. A lot of it was about letting "it" all hang out.
You thought "Austin Powers" was farcical exaggeration, well, maybe not so exaggerated. Imagine you were born in, let's say 1949. It is now 1967, and you're in San Francisco. You are eighteen years old, it's the "Summer of Love". This is an era where contraception was available, practically all known STDs were curable with penicillin, and free love was royal road to higher spiritual existence.
I think Roddenberry approved of "sexual liberation"; I think it part of his concept of a future Man (yes "Man") freed from superstitious and archaic limitations on his freedom. The only reason you didn't see more was because this was network television with sensors and sponsors who didn't want controversy. If cable networks existed back then (the way they do now), I'd bet you'd have seen a lot more than babes in sprayed on catsuits.
I don't know if he was on board with the whole drug aspect of the counter-culture. In any case it would be superfluous in TOS. You see, it's exploration that's the drug that takes you to new experienced you could never have imagined. That's just another facet of liberation: to boldly go where no man has gone before on one hand, on the other do the same where probably quite a few men have gone before.
You ought to learn how that stuff works for the same reason you ought to be able to get past the Pons Asinorum in geometry. It's important training on how to do a certain, extremely valuable kind of thinking.
The Internet has created a new need for algorithm design. Databases of unprecedented size exist; or data distributed across the Internet forms a virtual database; or vast numbers of users create endless special cases unless novel abstractions can be discovered (if you're a Platonist, otherwise we'll say invented). A lot of that work, of course, may be graph theory-ish, but sorting teaches different kinds of intellectual lessons, about things like entropy and curious special cases to be found in certain kinds of data. If you can't cross that particular bridge, you probably aren't ready to deal with approximation algorithms. And I predict those will be the foundation many a future brilliant career: creating imperfect solutions that are, nonetheless, slightly less imperfect than the other guys have. Any company where there are vast quantities of data, or where tiny financial improvements to vast numbers of transactions are possible, in short any kind of interesting place to work needs the kind of people who aren't daunted by heapsort.
Of course, actually coding sorting algorithms is for library developers or fools.
For the record, my favorite sort algorithm is Shell sort. Why? Because it's interesting. Oh, Quicksort is more elegant, and more efficient provided you work around its horrible worst special case, but I like Shell sort. It is just more interesting. First of all, it take a known bad insertion algorithm (insertion sort) and improves it by the application of numerical insight. Secondly, Shell sort has a curious sequence of numeric parameters (gap size) associated with it that have no real justification other than that they work better than other equally unpromising looking sequences. That's a charming property, in my opinion.
Heapsort is my second favorite, not because it is beautiful (it is not), or efficient (it is), but because it is the only sort algorithm (that I know of) that is ironic.
With respect to other things in the list, I'm not entirely sure we've seen the end of self-modifying code. There are still computation constrained environments. Usually, we encounter them as the result of poor advance planning, and for better or worse the world has a plentiful supply of that. A few years ago I was asked to examine the feasibility of implementing encryption on an embedded sat tracking device that was comparable in computation power to some of the first microcomputers I ever worked on in the early 80s (eight bit instruction set, sixteen bit address, and about 6K of RAM free). Of course, if I had to really do self-modifying code like in the bad old days, it would be a lot better than that code ever was. I'd break down everything into test cases and run it in simulation on a real computer. I might even create some kind of higher level abstractions that compiled into self-modifying code. I wouldn't just rewrite pages of memory with code or mess with the stack at the end of a long day of coding and pray I understood what I just did in the morning.
And as for Hollerith cards, we still use them around my house. They make dandy little dust-pans when you're sweeping up something extra fine, like concrete dust or flour. They're actually a hell of a lot more useful than all those old floppies AOL used to send out. Old CDs at least make reasonable coasters, or edging for flower beds. I haven't found a use for paper punch tape yet. It makes rather dreary bunting. Old hard disks can be disassembled. The platters make a workable shaving mirror.
Speaking as a totally ignorant (and thus opinion-entitled) person, I'd like to know why you couldn't combine parachutes and rockets. I'm imagining something like a powered paraglider.
My ignorant mind can think a of a number of apparent advantages to that over rockets alone.
Well, your experiment just shows the shoe is on the other foot for now.
The problem with the leadership of the Republican party now is that they're looking at the current situation politically. It's a legitimate dimension to consider, of course. But this is also a time of crisis, and people want to see them in the thick of things, rather than waiting for the Democrats to fail.
I personally think this country needs a healthy conservative movement. Unfortunately, the Republican party is not a conservative party, although it has conservative members. It's certainly not a socially liberal party either.
It's a party which has been hijacked by radical right wingers who'd like to see American institutions blown up so they can be reengineered in a more ideal form.
I think conservatism (and liberalism) are more than political dogmas. In fact, it doesn't really make sense to to think of them that way. Every cherished institution of the conservative was a horrifying innovation at one point, and the most successful scheme of the liberal will be a barrier to progress in the future.
They're attitudes, even character traits. They're ends of a continuum. No institution can survive if it is the enemy of half the human race; nor can progress exist if it is at the expense of half of humanity.
I think what went on here isn't that we had conservatives in charge. We had intellectually lazy and shallow people who thought they were pursuing a conservative agenda. I think the country I grew up in was pretty good. It's not perfect, it could certainly be better, but I could live with people who just preserved two hundred years of achievement.
Exactly how many neocons are there? I don't think there are enough of them to give any party electoral success. I don't even think there are enough of them to even run a party.
I'll tell you who the neocons were. They were the intellectual dregs of the old liberal movement, the very nation-building nutcases old time conservatives loved to hang around the liberals' necks. Then the Republican party brought all the anti-intellectuals into the fold, and in fact elected one to the presidency. George W. wasn't a neo-con. He wasn't interested enough in the world to have a position. But you have to have positions, and so he turned to the neo-cons because they had an intellectual agenda that sounded just the ticket for a president who wanted to go down in history. He was right, in an ironic way. In any case, he and his other conservative advisors apparently didn't realize these people were the ancient enemies of conservatism, but you can't blame the neo-cons if people choose to listen to them.
You're right that "social conservative" is perhaps far too broad a brush. It's really the anti-intellectuals in that movement that are to blame. C.S. Lewis was a social conservative, but he also said "When a nation thinks its cause is God's cause, it's wars become wars of annihilation." He'd have known better.
At least, not until provoked, and then only at resources demonstrably being used in actual operations against the US.
The reason is that we don't want politically motivated cybervandalism to be legitimized.
This is what I had against the whole neo-con "spread democracy" program. I'm all for spreading democracy, but it won't work unless you spread the values and institutions necessary to make democracy work. One of those is freedom of thought and expression. It makes no sense to promote democratic government in a country where you are conducting psyops campaigns and are complicit in or actually performing suppression of free speech.
That may be true on Republican legislation, but I haven't been able to find any data on whether he has broken with his party caucus on cloture votes. It would be unusual to invoke cloture against a fellow caucus member, in which case they might better have kicked him out of the caucus rather than allow him the dignity of quitting.
I want the Democrats to have to own what happens the next few years. After all the years of hearing them harp on Bush deficits I want them to have undeniable majority so they are undeniably responsible for the economy busting budgets they are signing off on.
Lord preserve us from such conservative wishing.
There was a time when conservatives saw this country as something more than a wall for spraying political graffiti onto, or fuel for their rally's bonfire They used to care for traditions, principles, and institutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is certainly research I'd clear with a lawyer before doing. I assume they did so.
In any case, I think you'll have a hard time hanging "conspiracy" on them, if they had no contact or involvement with the malware planters. Furthermore, US law does not recognize a fundamental right of information privacy. Once "the cat is out of the bag", you're SOL as far as privacy is concerned. People still have to be responsible with respect to how they use that information (e.g. identity theft), but they can use it for purposes that don't infringe on the rights you do have (e.g., research).
Well, anything that smacks of group derived determinism is invalid, in my view.
I try not to use the word "racism", because that only makes the conversation get stupider, e.g. "It can't be racist because I believe such and so and I"m not racist," or "Here is a piece of statistical evidence which supports a statistical generalization which I will now proceed to extend into a logical generality."
The problem with racism is that you can't refute it; it can't be disproved because it's too broken even to be wrong. Any sort of data can be tossed into the sausage mill of bigotry and what comes out will be indistinguishable after it has been mixed with other meats.
The root of bigotry is not even stupidity, it is laziness -- laziness in holding, justifying, and applying our opinions. Suppose, for a moment, that "the black race" is a meaningful construct; or perhaps let us define an unassailable (and therefore empirically meaningless) proxy such as "black culture". Let us accept for a moment some proposition to be statistically true of people in that that group, e.g. "they reject learning".
Does this absolve us of the duty to treat the person in front of us as and individual? Or any group of such people?
Suppose we know somebody is "an American". There are non-typical Americans after all, Moslems, or Communists, or maybe intellectuals. We can't conclude that any group of Americans will conform to our ideas about what it means to be American.
Well, there is a hypothesis that a land bridge at the Bosporus was breached around 5600 BC, causing a massive flood event creating the Black Sea. While the origins of the Jewish people did not occur for several thousand years after that, even a "mild flooding event" taking years or decades would be a story handed down by people living in the region, and spread throughout the world in subsequent millennia.
Of course, this doesn't make the Biblical, world wide flood historical in any sense.
As exciting as this seems at first, I'm sure it gets real old real fast, and isn't nearly as cool as it seems.
The trick is to get paid to watch porn once or twice a day for about five minutes.
This is exactly what I would do. On the other hand, I'm insane.
I'm not sure whether doing this sort of thing made me insane, or whether insanity makes me do this sort of thing. It's very much a chicken or egg question. I wouldn't recommend this course of action to somebody to whom it didn't immediately recommend itself. There's almost no way it's worth the time to do.
Now some will say that no enterprise like this is wasted, on the grounds that the person trying will learn something. That's undeniable. The problem is this ignores opportunity cost. There are other things one can do with one's time that are more educational. In my opinion it is perfectly sane to convert the hulk into something novel, like a carputer or a home automation controller or the control unit for a robot, but anybody who puts that level of effort into to obtaining an old laptop is surely suffering from malignant compulsions.
I'm allowed to say that, because fixing the stupid thing is just what I'd do.
If the target of the link is one point in a larger process potentially involving many such pages. Google Image Search is a perfect example of this.
Note, though, that Google Image search gives you a link that allows you to exit the process. That's more guts than most site developers have. They want your eyeballs on their page as long as possible. Letting the user escape the task demonstrates confidence that what you are doing for them is valuable.
i know feeding the trolls - but he wanted to be impressed
You mean -- he wants a squad of royal marines marching behind a drummer boy to haul him out from behind his plough, slip the King's shilling into his pocket when he ain't looking, then send him off to see the world with His Majesty's Navy?
Well, it takes all kinds I guess.
The margin of error is the numerical magnitude by which, within a specified degree of statistical certainty, the true value of a figure for a population may vary from a specific statistical estimate of of it. due to the effects of chance on the composition of the sample population used to calculate that estimate.
But that's not important now.
Well, I think you are partially correct. There was definitely a "Ming the Merciless" look in TOS Klingons, and Ming in turn was just Fu Manchu with space ships.
But the Klingons were depicted has having considerable technological capability. TOS Klingons are war-like, but the warrior culture thing was much more of a TNG graft. The race was rehabilitated, made into a kind of race of spacefaring Vikings, and so became a lot more interesting.
TOS Klingons engaged in violence, not for personal honor, but political reasons. In "Errand of Mercy" the commander orders mass executions, They are brutal, devious and without much principle other than advancing the power and scope of their empire. This always struck me as consistent with the American views on the Soviets, so much so that it could hardly be a coincidence.
In any case, I was also struck by the Vulcan/Romulan pairing. The Chinese, back then, came in two flavors.
As much as I admire the swashbuckling spirit of TOS, it isn't about kicking butts. It is about liberation, a specific kind of liberation that turns on this proposition: "Kirk is always right"
Kirk never asks for advice, except to make a point of ignoring it. Kirk has effectively absolute power. He is not restrained (like a political leader would be) by having to take the advice of lesser men, even if they might have narrow technical expertise. If Kirk says fire the phasers, they fire the phasers. If he calls "General Order 24", the ship will destroy all life on a planet. Kirk has ostensible superiors, but they can't restrain him, and they don't bother because even though he flaunts the rules, he always succeeds because Kirk is Always Right.
It's almost crypto-fascist; it would be if it weren't a fantasy. It's a fantasy of complete liberation from any restraint.
A mature and rational human being, if confronted with a real life Spock or McCoy, would find much to admire. If confronted with a real life Kirk, he'd be revolted, because a real person who was anything like Kirk would be an ethical monster. But this not realistic storytelling. It is a fantasy. Kirk is not a monster, because Kirk is Always Right. If you accept that, then everything he does is justified.
You guys have to stop posting over analog modems; either that or get better phone lines.
I dunno. I remember the sixties, man. A lot of it was about letting "it" all hang out.
You thought "Austin Powers" was farcical exaggeration, well, maybe not so exaggerated. Imagine you were born in, let's say 1949. It is now 1967, and you're in San Francisco. You are eighteen years old, it's the "Summer of Love". This is an era where contraception was available, practically all known STDs were curable with penicillin, and free love was royal road to higher spiritual existence.
I think Roddenberry approved of "sexual liberation"; I think it part of his concept of a future Man (yes "Man") freed from superstitious and archaic limitations on his freedom. The only reason you didn't see more was because this was network television with sensors and sponsors who didn't want controversy. If cable networks existed back then (the way they do now), I'd bet you'd have seen a lot more than babes in sprayed on catsuits.
I don't know if he was on board with the whole drug aspect of the counter-culture. In any case it would be superfluous in TOS. You see, it's exploration that's the drug that takes you to new experienced you could never have imagined. That's just another facet of liberation: to boldly go where no man has gone before on one hand, on the other do the same where probably quite a few men have gone before.
"Travesty" refers to the Kirk-Spock relationship thing. Apparently, cross-dressing was involved.
I thought I'd heard everything. Next thing, you'll be telling me the words of Kahless are written on the subway walls.
Well, with respect to sorting...
You ought to learn how that stuff works for the same reason you ought to be able to get past the Pons Asinorum in geometry. It's important training on how to do a certain, extremely valuable kind of thinking.
The Internet has created a new need for algorithm design. Databases of unprecedented size exist; or data distributed across the Internet forms a virtual database; or vast numbers of users create endless special cases unless novel abstractions can be discovered (if you're a Platonist, otherwise we'll say invented). A lot of that work, of course, may be graph theory-ish, but sorting teaches different kinds of intellectual lessons, about things like entropy and curious special cases to be found in certain kinds of data. If you can't cross that particular bridge, you probably aren't ready to deal with approximation algorithms. And I predict those will be the foundation many a future brilliant career: creating imperfect solutions that are, nonetheless, slightly less imperfect than the other guys have. Any company where there are vast quantities of data, or where tiny financial improvements to vast numbers of transactions are possible, in short any kind of interesting place to work needs the kind of people who aren't daunted by heapsort.
Of course, actually coding sorting algorithms is for library developers or fools.
For the record, my favorite sort algorithm is Shell sort. Why? Because it's interesting. Oh, Quicksort is more elegant, and more efficient provided you work around its horrible worst special case, but I like Shell sort. It is just more interesting. First of all, it take a known bad insertion algorithm (insertion sort) and improves it by the application of numerical insight. Secondly, Shell sort has a curious sequence of numeric parameters (gap size) associated with it that have no real justification other than that they work better than other equally unpromising looking sequences. That's a charming property, in my opinion.
Heapsort is my second favorite, not because it is beautiful (it is not), or efficient (it is), but because it is the only sort algorithm (that I know of) that is ironic.
With respect to other things in the list, I'm not entirely sure we've seen the end of self-modifying code. There are still computation constrained environments. Usually, we encounter them as the result of poor advance planning, and for better or worse the world has a plentiful supply of that. A few years ago I was asked to examine the feasibility of implementing encryption on an embedded sat tracking device that was comparable in computation power to some of the first microcomputers I ever worked on in the early 80s (eight bit instruction set, sixteen bit address, and about 6K of RAM free). Of course, if I had to really do self-modifying code like in the bad old days, it would be a lot better than that code ever was. I'd break down everything into test cases and run it in simulation on a real computer. I might even create some kind of higher level abstractions that compiled into self-modifying code. I wouldn't just rewrite pages of memory with code or mess with the stack at the end of a long day of coding and pray I understood what I just did in the morning.
And as for Hollerith cards, we still use them around my house. They make dandy little dust-pans when you're sweeping up something extra fine, like concrete dust or flour. They're actually a hell of a lot more useful than all those old floppies AOL used to send out. Old CDs at least make reasonable coasters, or edging for flower beds. I haven't found a use for paper punch tape yet. It makes rather dreary bunting. Old hard disks can be disassembled. The platters make a workable shaving mirror.
Speaking as a totally ignorant (and thus opinion-entitled) person, I'd like to know why you couldn't combine parachutes and rockets. I'm imagining something like a powered paraglider.
My ignorant mind can think a of a number of apparent advantages to that over rockets alone.
"I hear what you are saying."
But I think the Republicans should do more than sit on their hands. It is a time of crisis, after all.
Well, your experiment just shows the shoe is on the other foot for now.
The problem with the leadership of the Republican party now is that they're looking at the current situation politically. It's a legitimate dimension to consider, of course. But this is also a time of crisis, and people want to see them in the thick of things, rather than waiting for the Democrats to fail.
People like me?
I personally think this country needs a healthy conservative movement. Unfortunately, the Republican party is not a conservative party, although it has conservative members. It's certainly not a socially liberal party either.
It's a party which has been hijacked by radical right wingers who'd like to see American institutions blown up so they can be reengineered in a more ideal form.
I think conservatism (and liberalism) are more than political dogmas. In fact, it doesn't really make sense to to think of them that way. Every cherished institution of the conservative was a horrifying innovation at one point, and the most successful scheme of the liberal will be a barrier to progress in the future.
They're attitudes, even character traits. They're ends of a continuum. No institution can survive if it is the enemy of half the human race; nor can progress exist if it is at the expense of half of humanity.
I think what went on here isn't that we had conservatives in charge. We had intellectually lazy and shallow people who thought they were pursuing a conservative agenda. I think the country I grew up in was pretty good. It's not perfect, it could certainly be better, but I could live with people who just preserved two hundred years of achievement.
Exactly how many neocons are there? I don't think there are enough of them to give any party electoral success. I don't even think there are enough of them to even run a party.
I'll tell you who the neocons were. They were the intellectual dregs of the old liberal movement, the very nation-building nutcases old time conservatives loved to hang around the liberals' necks. Then the Republican party brought all the anti-intellectuals into the fold, and in fact elected one to the presidency. George W. wasn't a neo-con. He wasn't interested enough in the world to have a position. But you have to have positions, and so he turned to the neo-cons because they had an intellectual agenda that sounded just the ticket for a president who wanted to go down in history. He was right, in an ironic way. In any case, he and his other conservative advisors apparently didn't realize these people were the ancient enemies of conservatism, but you can't blame the neo-cons if people choose to listen to them.
You're right that "social conservative" is perhaps far too broad a brush. It's really the anti-intellectuals in that movement that are to blame. C.S. Lewis was a social conservative, but he also said "When a nation thinks its cause is God's cause, it's wars become wars of annihilation." He'd have known better.
I'm glad you are amused. I'd be happier, though, if you understood.
I'm pointing out to the poster that he probably in fact cares whether the country succeeds or not.
At least, not until provoked, and then only at resources demonstrably being used in actual operations against the US.
The reason is that we don't want politically motivated cybervandalism to be legitimized.
This is what I had against the whole neo-con "spread democracy" program. I'm all for spreading democracy, but it won't work unless you spread the values and institutions necessary to make democracy work. One of those is freedom of thought and expression. It makes no sense to promote democratic government in a country where you are conducting psyops campaigns and are complicit in or actually performing suppression of free speech.
That may be true on Republican legislation, but I haven't been able to find any data on whether he has broken with his party caucus on cloture votes. It would be unusual to invoke cloture against a fellow caucus member, in which case they might better have kicked him out of the caucus rather than allow him the dignity of quitting.
I want the Democrats to have to own what happens the next few years. After all the years of hearing them harp on Bush deficits I want them to have undeniable majority so they are undeniably responsible for the economy busting budgets they are signing off on.
Lord preserve us from such conservative wishing.
There was a time when conservatives saw this country as something more than a wall for spraying political graffiti onto, or fuel for their rally's bonfire They used to care for traditions, principles, and institutions.