A person who lived through the collapse of the soviet union once pointed out that in America, the only relevant political parties are the Capitalist party and the Capitalist party.
It's called consensus. You might as well say that it's a choice between the anti-slavery party and the other anti-slavery party, or between the pro-Social Security party and the other pro-Social Security party. If you're far, far down the spectrum in either direction, you'll see the two parties to be interchangeable; libertarians think they're both statist, racists think they're both for the destruction of the sweet sweet white race, fundies think they're both secularists, and so on.
If America wanted serious change, change that was not just superficial, then one of the third party candidates would have one.
It's a plurality-wins system. Third parties cannot gain power on a one-axis political spectrum, because if a constituency is split, it loses. Spoiler candidates, Nader in 2000, that sort of thing, remember? It's a structural problem with the system of government.
First off, MPEG2 video, MPEG4 video, VP3, VP5 and VP6 are all in the same codec family. They're all block-DCT codecs with motion-compensated inter-frame block prediction. Exactly how they lay the bits into the stream differs, but the foundation math is all the same. They all use the same battle strategy. In fact, if you generalize 'DCT' to 'transform', even Dirac and Snow are typical members of this video codec family. (Tarkin differed significantly and was not a technical success).
Here's some double-blind listening tests comparing the perceived quality of various MP3 encoders. At 128kbps, LAME 3.95 beat the encoders from Adobe Audition 1.0, iTunes 4.2, Gogo-no-coda 3.12, Audioactive 2.04 and Xing 1.5. Sure, the test is more than four years old, but unless there's something more recent, that'll stand.
So unless you have specific examples of I-TU chasing down people who implement their (publicly available) specifications, I consider H.264 to be free...
Sure, you can consider it to be free, but boy is that ever not what free means.
And a publically available spec means little or nothing. Patents are publically available, but try implementing those and see if you manage to escape the long arm of the litigator.
I've been following the development of Theora since Monty started posting the results of his Thusnelda branch. After two release candidates, more than four years after the bitstream freeze, we're finally here. (Much like cdparanoia, development of which lay idle for about four years, which has recently put out a new release as well.) The work is gladly received, with an eye toward further improvements in the future.
Now, according to Monty, work begins on merging the experimental Thusnelda branch onto the mainline, to make it stable and usable. In addition to being freedomlicious, the new branch apparently provides reasonably competitive quality.
I'm quite pleased by all this; maybe I'll drop a few bucks to Xiph.org by way of congratulations.
Oh, hell, how about the features promised for Cairo? This is their third iteration of the standard bait-and-switch; any announcement of ridiculous new features in Windows that doesn't append "Windows has a long history of selling vaporware it never had a chance of shipping" (as this one does) isn't worth the bits it's made of.
But it would at least be nice if someone pretended to remember all the vaporware we were promised for the last couple of big releases.
I'm glad there's a non-Silverlight link, as well, but isn't it astonishing how quickly "this technology will make your web browsing experience niftier!" shades into "something that was possible before is now impossible unless you install our crapware!"?
I remember seeing her at a conference. (I don't remember which one.) She was going on about how the domain name system was innovative because it provided a flat address space for everyone on the planet. I'm not sure why phones, postal addresses or even email didn't make a better fit, but I suppose she doesn't run those.
She talked about all the delightful services that whatever she was hawking would provide. When she took Q&A, I asked if it wasn't indicative of something that people had gone to great lengths to avoid all this "value" she wanted to add to the network, and that the true value of the internet was at its endpoints. Damn it, now I wish I remembered it better. Still, I can feel my hackles rise whenever she's mentioned. It makes me think of "The Guy I Almost Was" and Mondo 2K and all that other hucksterism.
There's no reason not to have a user agent header, just as there's no reason not to have a 'Server' header. User agent sniffing, on the other hand, is one of the many, many, many things that we have because the internet is an amalgamation of non-standardized crap. Sites do it because they can't just send standards-compliant data, because browsers don't all render it the same. (See: box model bug.) You can't say "fuck those people", because they're the vast majority of the internet (at least, until quite recently); if you're making a public-facing website, to almost everyone who comes there, your site is broken. This is, needless to say, not an option if you want visitors.
The fundamental problem is that writing standards-breaking browsers doesn't come back to bite the authors of said browsers; they have no incentive not to do it, and in fact, if they're being anticompetitive, they have an incentive to make it even worse.
It's rather miraculous that the internet works at all.
I notice that you're currently sitting at +5, Interesting.
Well, there's certainly a bias toward endless whining about bias. It seems oddly familiar--sort of like those wacky all-powerful liberals who are the secret masters of this world, despite spending the last eight years either out of power or chasing after the ruling party's coattails.
Unfortunately, as Vixie admits, DNSSEC has intractable problems [...]
So... why is Vixie recommending it? It's about as secure as using PGP without the web of trust, or using HTTPS without the PKI.
It would make sense if he didn't admit that there were intractable problems, and then told people to use it. Or if he said that there's really nothing you can do, and that the DNS vendors dropped the ball somethin' fierce by failing to secure the system in the decade since the problem was described.
But what is he even thinking?
Bah; enough dithering. It's time to cue the folks who're going to point out that djb is a big meanie, therefore nobody should rag on Vixie. Flying monkeys, away!
The 16-bit subsystem. It's time. Ten years ago you could run NT 3.51 without loading the 16 bit subsystem, and it worked fine. Some legacy apps wouldn't run. Any of those left?
You'd apparently be surprised, given the lengths that MS goes to to maintain backwards compatibility. (Example.Another example.) Now, not starting up Win16 unless someone does run an old app is one thing. (I think they already do this, don't they?) But it would be an insanely bad idea for MS to drop it.
Trusted drivers other than ones that need to do DMA directly. Drivers for USB devices should be running as user level services, without the ability to crash the machine. Printer "drivers" have no need for privileges; they're just filters. Only drivers that need to do DMA should have any special memory access privileges.
Like all Linux USB drivers use libusb, and the only ones in the kernel are class drivers, right?
Non-USB mouse and keyboard port support. Again, it's time.
Why on earth would you drop support for old hardware, especially if it costs you little or nothing to keep it in? It's not like unused drivers eat memory.
Codecs running in kernel mode. No, the codecs and the DRM do not need to run in kernel mode.
Given that the OS is designed to not let you control your own system, I'd say that DRM does have to run with super-duper permissions. But since when do codecs run in kernel mode? Admittedly, my Windows knowledge is pretty rusty, but this seems like a really weird thing to do.
Implicit Internet Explorer invocation. The user's browser of choice is invoked when necessary, not IE.
I can see potential problems when help documents are rendered in possibly-wrong ways depending on your browser. Most of the time--when you're specifically clicking a web link or opening a.url shortcut--it does open your browser of choice, if I recall correctly.
Hidden files. More of a headache than a feature, and too popular with attackers.
You can already enable viewing of hidden files in Explorer. If you want to blame an OS feature which seems to have no purpose whatsoever other than working as an attack vector, try NTFS forks. (It's used in XP SP2 to store information on where an executable was downloaded from, apparently.)
Autorun for media. No running stuff from an inserted disk until a dialog has asked the user if they want to run it.
Users pretty much invariably click "okay" to dialogs that pop up--adding a dialog, in general, makes users crankier and doesn't improve security. Autorun was introduced, despite being a security nightmare, because telling people to run start, run, "D:\SETUP.EXE", got very, very old.
19. XP Virtual Machine 'Virtual Machine' is a big buzzword, but the truth is you're going to hit issues with drivers and this situation, and with software that does a lot of heinouss stuff on XP, and with games that hate running on VM, and no matter how much you'd like it to be the case, someone would be whining about how hard it is to sync files to and from the XP VM.
Ah; you left out the fact that MS makes their bones on backwards compatibility; when you can't recompile some old piece of software, you're stuck with emulation or with backwards compatibility.
If MS makes a clean break, then they won't have a leg up on other operating systems; why not emulate XP under some other OS, if you'll be taking the same performance hit under Windows 7?
Don't be ridiculous. Slavery has been gone from everywhere in the world except Mexico since the 1800s, and it's not coming back.
So what? I ask again--do you believe that the issue of slavery should have been left to the states?
Yeah, it sucks, but what's your alternative? Have environmental regulations apply over the whole country, so that all the industry goes to China, resulting in no net change in pollution? Because that's exactly what's happening right now.
Countries have trade barriers and tariffs between them. The lowering of these barriers as an integral part of globalization means that capital moves much more easily than people do. As trade barriers between states are pretty much nonexistent, this state of affairs is the norm within a country. Externalities like pollution become a problem when the mobility of capital and people are grossly different.
While lowering trade barriers around the world (thus bringing us closer to that one-world system which bothers you so much when it's people who are doing the moving) replicate the problem on a larger scale, it still exists on a smaller one.
Just because you think certain regulations should apply everywhere doesn't make it so. Should strict environmental regulations apply everywhere? I think so, but others do not. Should strict religious regulations (requiring women to wear burqas and banning divorce) apply everywhere? Some people think so. Why should your environmental regulations apply everywhere, but not strict religious regulations that you probably don't agree with?
Because people's weird religious beliefs in neighboring states don't affect me. Poison being dumped into the river does.
Answer me this: should abortion be legal? People in California say yes, people in Mississippi say no. Who's right? Right now, there's a tug of war going between the groups, and it's been going on for decades, with no sign of stopping. The pro-choice people think things are ok, because RvW has allowed abortion since 1973. But what happens when a new Supreme Court revisits the issue, reversing that decision? (You can see I'm assuming you're pro-choice here, based on your environmental stance.) Are you still going to be OK with a strong centralized government, where the same rules apply everywhere? If you're ok with environmental rules being strict everywhere in the USA, then you have to be ok with anti-abortion laws applying everywhere as well.
Banning abortion on a state-by-state basis would have the effect of banning it for poor women, while making it slightly more expensive for the wealthy, who'll have to take a trip. (It's like this in El Salvador, where the government employs uterus inspectors. Seriously.)
So an argument could be made that it'd burden the surrounding states, but it's a very tenuous one. So no, if you're arguing from abstract principle rather than a consideration of how a change in policy would actually affect people, there's no real justification for federally regulating abortion.
(Unless, of course, you figure that it's a question of bodily integrity covered under the right to privacy, and that, just as states can't establish official churches, they can't chuck individual rights guaranteed under the feds.)
You also have to be ok with anti-marijuana laws applying everywhere, including California and Oregon where medicinal marijuana is legal according to the states, but not according to the Federal government.
It would be extremely difficult to ban the sale of a drug in one state and allow it in another; drugs can be smuggled around in a number of disturbingly clever ways. While I think public health decisions like these should be left to the states, I'm doubtful that it'd be effective to do so. (States regulating the sal
I saw a laptop some years back which had a CD player separate from the computer; if you had a CD in the drive, you could spin it up and plug in headphones to get tunes out of it without powering up the whole machine.
Sounds pretty similar, I think. I didn't see the point of it then, either.
You've given an example of a strong federalized government which exerted oppressive control over its constituents. You've given an example of smaller states which seem to do okay on their own (though they've been federating more in recent years).
But you haven't given a reason as to why that applies to the central government, other than that the central government has made some rules which make you cranky.
I mean, would you prefer the Union to consist of half slave and half free states? Would you prefer that environmental regulations be passed on a state-by-state basis, so that any state which did so would be giving its neighbors all of its industry, resulting in no net change in pollution? These are actual problems, and you'd sweep them all away because you don't like speed limits?
Of course I do, anyone in favor of the war does - it's called a self sustaining Iraqi government. People like you were saying progress we have seen to date was simply impossible, yet here we are.
I think I do remember people saying that it was impossible that a million dead civilians and several million refugees would result from an invasion and ensuing occupation, but I think they were in the pro-war camp. That's some corpse-alicious progress, there.
That's the way out, to let the Iraqis govern themselves as they will. And you can't have it both ways, if they are a puppet government then how come the leader is making noises about having the government ask us for withdrawl?
The Iraqi people (71% as of last year) want the US to withdraw its forces. The US has not withdrawn, and shows no sign of doing so. The recent agreement splitting up Iraq's oil reserves among foreign oil companies is grotesquely unpopular among the people whose resources are being stolen from under their feet, but quite popular among those who own the companies.
Given all this, it's blindingly obvious--unless you have some reason to stubbornly refuse to see what's right in front of you--that the US holds much more influence over the Iraqi government than the people it supposedly represents do. The Iraqi government is a puppet; the hand up its figurative ass is Uncle Sam's.
It follows from this that the US will not want to let Iraqis determine their own fates. This happened before, with Iran under the Shah, who also didn't represent the wishes of his people, and was ousted by a theocratic revolution, the result of which has not been quite as freedomlicious as you seem to think the wake of an imperial colonizer's departure should be.
Since it potentially empowers the lives of hundreds of millions (when you figure in side effect) for decades to come, I'll just chalk up your statement as being very bad at mather rather than a heartless short-sighted pessimist.
You gloss over millions of dead and displaced Iraqis, and I'm the heartless one because I won't engage in your utterly baseless fantasies of a free Iraq that just happens to act like a good client state for the US? Your fantasizing has only the most tenuous relevance to reality; the only function it has is to provide an excuse for the bloodbath to continue. You disgust me.
You urge others to take a realistic appraisal of the situation out of one side of your mouth, while handwaving away a million corpses--I'm going to repeat that: handwaving away a million corpses--in your urge to spin utopian fantasies out of the other.
I'd extend your method of analysis to explain how thankful we should be for the Holocaust in depth, but I can't quite bring myself to do so.
As always, you may have the last word since you kind just will not have it any other way.
Yes, I suppose "me kind" have a thing about responding when someone is wrong on the internet. Especially when someone is grossly, murderously wrong.
Your transparent attempt to head off criticism should be beneath you, though. We left grade school behind some years past, didn't we?
I know the guy made his bones by pursuing lost causes, and that's why he seems not to know when to call it a day, but the rest of you people have no excuse.
Obama will appoint judges with this set of views. Why? Because he's a Democrat, and he'll appoint Democrats, and Democrats have this set of views. Does it matter if he, a Democrat, expresses views outside of this set? Of course not, because Democrats have this set of views. It makes a perfect little logical loop.
Take heed, folks; this is why caving in doesn't make you look more palatable to the other guys.
Obama, pandering, said that the Supreme Court was wrong. He has no authority, nor will he have authority, as President to change this sort of thing. I suppose that rhetoric matters, but I can't muster much outrage about it. Defending child rapists from the death penalty is about as politically feasible as raising the federal gas tax while ending the war on drugs. I suppose he didn't have to say anything, but I don't really see how it matters anyway.
Can you explain to me how a loose confederation of states like you envision can possibly stand up to forces like multinational corporations or emergent mafias? How does the massive weakening of the state that I describe differ substantially from the massive weakening of the state that you describe?
Could you go into a bit more detail about why a strong federal government is "stupid", and why the states "need" to be independent?
War spending comes from magical pony money! We need to be super hard-headed about spending money on things like doctors and hospitals and roads and bridges and research and the environment, but war is practically free!
Does anyone remember that peace dividend we were supposed to score from the end of the Cold War? Anyone?
As opposed to the humanitarian disaster that will occur when whatever puppet regime we set up falls? Do you have some sort of realistic idea as to how the occupation can be ended without some kind of humanitarian collapse over there? If so, why wasn't it done years ago? If not, why is it a good idea to keep occupying the place?
And please, drop the "humanitarian" bit. Supporting an invasion that's killed a million people and created at least twice as many refugees bars you from playing that card.
Not infinite, but yes I support some use of the military in the use of propagating freedom for other people to also choose to be libertarians. It just makes sense to be a good neighbor, it's the same reason I donate to charities that technically will never be doing anything to help myself.
So... as long as it's dressed up with a "humanitarian" sticker, you'll vote for bombings, invasions, occupations and all the rest, while calling yourself a libertarian. Are you aware that Japan said that it invaded Manchuria for humanitarian reasons? That Mussolini said the same when rolled into Ethiopia, and Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland?
I mean, wow. I couldn't be that ingenuous if I took lessons. One might think that a self-described libertarian might be a smidge more skeptical of what the government says.
I'm not making over $25k per year but I'm 100% certain that Obama isn't just going to raise income taxes, and furthermore that attempts to impose government control over the economy will have impacts that mean in practical terms I would be worse off.
Well, that's vague and reference-free enough to be impossible to rebut. Care to expand on that, or does Obama simply give you a squishy feeling in your socks that you just don't like?
Silly Grendel. Tax cuts are for EVERYONE. It's Obama proposing to help out people making between $100k and $200k which I consider to be pretty well off.
Wait, what? You started by claiming that McCain's tax policies would be better for you. More freedomlicious, or somesuch. I pointed out that there was roughly a one-in-twenty chance of this being the case, since nearly everyone in the country is better off under Obama's plan, since it makes the tax system more progressive, rather than more regressive, as McCain's would.
And now you're complaining that Obama's tax plan isn't progressive enough? I'm trying to unpack what you mean by that last paragraph, and I'm coming up blank. Please explain at further length why you believe that a tax plan which raises taxes on nearly everyone is better than a tax plan which cuts taxes on nearly everyone, from a libertarian perspective.
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It's called consensus. You might as well say that it's a choice between the anti-slavery party and the other anti-slavery party, or between the pro-Social Security party and the other pro-Social Security party. If you're far, far down the spectrum in either direction, you'll see the two parties to be interchangeable; libertarians think they're both statist, racists think they're both for the destruction of the sweet sweet white race, fundies think they're both secularists, and so on.
It's a plurality-wins system. Third parties cannot gain power on a one-axis political spectrum, because if a constituency is split, it loses. Spoiler candidates, Nader in 2000, that sort of thing, remember? It's a structural problem with the system of government.
As Monty said:
Here's some double-blind listening tests comparing the perceived quality of various MP3 encoders. At 128kbps, LAME 3.95 beat the encoders from Adobe Audition 1.0, iTunes 4.2, Gogo-no-coda 3.12, Audioactive 2.04 and Xing 1.5. Sure, the test is more than four years old, but unless there's something more recent, that'll stand.
Sure, you can consider it to be free, but boy is that ever not what free means.
And a publically available spec means little or nothing. Patents are publically available, but try implementing those and see if you manage to escape the long arm of the litigator.
I've been following the development of Theora since Monty started posting the results of his Thusnelda branch. After two release candidates, more than four years after the bitstream freeze, we're finally here. (Much like cdparanoia, development of which lay idle for about four years, which has recently put out a new release as well.) The work is gladly received, with an eye toward further improvements in the future.
Now, according to Monty, work begins on merging the experimental Thusnelda branch onto the mainline, to make it stable and usable. In addition to being freedomlicious, the new branch apparently provides reasonably competitive quality.
I'm quite pleased by all this; maybe I'll drop a few bucks to Xiph.org by way of congratulations.
Oh, hell, how about the features promised for Cairo? This is their third iteration of the standard bait-and-switch; any announcement of ridiculous new features in Windows that doesn't append "Windows has a long history of selling vaporware it never had a chance of shipping" (as this one does) isn't worth the bits it's made of.
But it would at least be nice if someone pretended to remember all the vaporware we were promised for the last couple of big releases.
I'm glad there's a non-Silverlight link, as well, but isn't it astonishing how quickly "this technology will make your web browsing experience niftier!" shades into "something that was possible before is now impossible unless you install our crapware!"?
I remember seeing her at a conference. (I don't remember which one.) She was going on about how the domain name system was innovative because it provided a flat address space for everyone on the planet. I'm not sure why phones, postal addresses or even email didn't make a better fit, but I suppose she doesn't run those.
She talked about all the delightful services that whatever she was hawking would provide. When she took Q&A, I asked if it wasn't indicative of something that people had gone to great lengths to avoid all this "value" she wanted to add to the network, and that the true value of the internet was at its endpoints. Damn it, now I wish I remembered it better. Still, I can feel my hackles rise whenever she's mentioned. It makes me think of "The Guy I Almost Was" and Mondo 2K and all that other hucksterism.
Get your talking point right; he's "Obamessiah". Sheesh. Can't these people at least afford high-quality dittoheads?
Go be enlightened; there's no excuse not to be.
There's no reason not to have a user agent header, just as there's no reason not to have a 'Server' header. User agent sniffing, on the other hand, is one of the many, many, many things that we have because the internet is an amalgamation of non-standardized crap. Sites do it because they can't just send standards-compliant data, because browsers don't all render it the same. (See: box model bug.) You can't say "fuck those people", because they're the vast majority of the internet (at least, until quite recently); if you're making a public-facing website, to almost everyone who comes there, your site is broken. This is, needless to say, not an option if you want visitors.
The fundamental problem is that writing standards-breaking browsers doesn't come back to bite the authors of said browsers; they have no incentive not to do it, and in fact, if they're being anticompetitive, they have an incentive to make it even worse.
It's rather miraculous that the internet works at all.
I notice that you're currently sitting at +5, Interesting.
Well, there's certainly a bias toward endless whining about bias. It seems oddly familiar--sort of like those wacky all-powerful liberals who are the secret masters of this world, despite spending the last eight years either out of power or chasing after the ruling party's coattails.
Unfortunately, as Vixie admits, DNSSEC has intractable problems [...]
So... why is Vixie recommending it? It's about as secure as using PGP without the web of trust, or using HTTPS without the PKI.
It would make sense if he didn't admit that there were intractable problems, and then told people to use it. Or if he said that there's really nothing you can do, and that the DNS vendors dropped the ball somethin' fierce by failing to secure the system in the decade since the problem was described.
But what is he even thinking?
Bah; enough dithering. It's time to cue the folks who're going to point out that djb is a big meanie, therefore nobody should rag on Vixie. Flying monkeys, away!
You'd apparently be surprised, given the lengths that MS goes to to maintain backwards compatibility. (Example. Another example.) Now, not starting up Win16 unless someone does run an old app is one thing. (I think they already do this, don't they?) But it would be an insanely bad idea for MS to drop it.
Like all Linux USB drivers use libusb, and the only ones in the kernel are class drivers, right?
Why on earth would you drop support for old hardware, especially if it costs you little or nothing to keep it in? It's not like unused drivers eat memory.
Given that the OS is designed to not let you control your own system, I'd say that DRM does have to run with super-duper permissions. But since when do codecs run in kernel mode? Admittedly, my Windows knowledge is pretty rusty, but this seems like a really weird thing to do.
I can see potential problems when help documents are rendered in possibly-wrong ways depending on your browser. Most of the time--when you're specifically clicking a web link or opening a .url shortcut--it does open your browser of choice, if I recall correctly.
You can already enable viewing of hidden files in Explorer. If you want to blame an OS feature which seems to have no purpose whatsoever other than working as an attack vector, try NTFS forks. (It's used in XP SP2 to store information on where an executable was downloaded from, apparently.)
Users pretty much invariably click "okay" to dialogs that pop up--adding a dialog, in general, makes users crankier and doesn't improve security. Autorun was introduced, despite being a security nightmare, because telling people to run start, run, "D:\SETUP.EXE", got very, very old.
Ah; you left out the fact that MS makes their bones on backwards compatibility; when you can't recompile some old piece of software, you're stuck with emulation or with backwards compatibility.
If MS makes a clean break, then they won't have a leg up on other operating systems; why not emulate XP under some other OS, if you'll be taking the same performance hit under Windows 7?
So what? I ask again--do you believe that the issue of slavery should have been left to the states?
Countries have trade barriers and tariffs between them. The lowering of these barriers as an integral part of globalization means that capital moves much more easily than people do. As trade barriers between states are pretty much nonexistent, this state of affairs is the norm within a country. Externalities like pollution become a problem when the mobility of capital and people are grossly different.
While lowering trade barriers around the world (thus bringing us closer to that one-world system which bothers you so much when it's people who are doing the moving) replicate the problem on a larger scale, it still exists on a smaller one.
Because people's weird religious beliefs in neighboring states don't affect me. Poison being dumped into the river does.
Banning abortion on a state-by-state basis would have the effect of banning it for poor women, while making it slightly more expensive for the wealthy, who'll have to take a trip. (It's like this in El Salvador, where the government employs uterus inspectors. Seriously.)
So an argument could be made that it'd burden the surrounding states, but it's a very tenuous one. So no, if you're arguing from abstract principle rather than a consideration of how a change in policy would actually affect people, there's no real justification for federally regulating abortion.
(Unless, of course, you figure that it's a question of bodily integrity covered under the right to privacy, and that, just as states can't establish official churches, they can't chuck individual rights guaranteed under the feds.)
It would be extremely difficult to ban the sale of a drug in one state and allow it in another; drugs can be smuggled around in a number of disturbingly clever ways. While I think public health decisions like these should be left to the states, I'm doubtful that it'd be effective to do so. (States regulating the sal
I saw a laptop some years back which had a CD player separate from the computer; if you had a CD in the drive, you could spin it up and plug in headphones to get tunes out of it without powering up the whole machine.
Sounds pretty similar, I think. I didn't see the point of it then, either.
You've given an example of a strong federalized government which exerted oppressive control over its constituents. You've given an example of smaller states which seem to do okay on their own (though they've been federating more in recent years).
But you haven't given a reason as to why that applies to the central government, other than that the central government has made some rules which make you cranky.
I mean, would you prefer the Union to consist of half slave and half free states? Would you prefer that environmental regulations be passed on a state-by-state basis, so that any state which did so would be giving its neighbors all of its industry, resulting in no net change in pollution? These are actual problems, and you'd sweep them all away because you don't like speed limits?
I think I do remember people saying that it was impossible that a million dead civilians and several million refugees would result from an invasion and ensuing occupation, but I think they were in the pro-war camp. That's some corpse-alicious progress, there.
The Iraqi people (71% as of last year) want the US to withdraw its forces. The US has not withdrawn, and shows no sign of doing so. The recent agreement splitting up Iraq's oil reserves among foreign oil companies is grotesquely unpopular among the people whose resources are being stolen from under their feet, but quite popular among those who own the companies.
Given all this, it's blindingly obvious--unless you have some reason to stubbornly refuse to see what's right in front of you--that the US holds much more influence over the Iraqi government than the people it supposedly represents do. The Iraqi government is a puppet; the hand up its figurative ass is Uncle Sam's.
It follows from this that the US will not want to let Iraqis determine their own fates. This happened before, with Iran under the Shah, who also didn't represent the wishes of his people, and was ousted by a theocratic revolution, the result of which has not been quite as freedomlicious as you seem to think the wake of an imperial colonizer's departure should be.
You gloss over millions of dead and displaced Iraqis, and I'm the heartless one because I won't engage in your utterly baseless fantasies of a free Iraq that just happens to act like a good client state for the US? Your fantasizing has only the most tenuous relevance to reality; the only function it has is to provide an excuse for the bloodbath to continue. You disgust me.
You urge others to take a realistic appraisal of the situation out of one side of your mouth, while handwaving away a million corpses--I'm going to repeat that: handwaving away a million corpses--in your urge to spin utopian fantasies out of the other.
I'd extend your method of analysis to explain how thankful we should be for the Holocaust in depth, but I can't quite bring myself to do so.
Yes, I suppose "me kind" have a thing about responding when someone is wrong on the internet. Especially when someone is grossly, murderously wrong.
Your transparent attempt to head off criticism should be beneath you, though. We left grade school behind some years past, didn't we?
Clearly, John Titor has gotten into the eerily-precognitive spam business.
Oh, come on. Y'all know that a war's coming. We're all fucked.
I know the guy made his bones by pursuing lost causes, and that's why he seems not to know when to call it a day, but the rest of you people have no excuse.
Obama will appoint judges with this set of views. Why? Because he's a Democrat, and he'll appoint Democrats, and Democrats have this set of views. Does it matter if he, a Democrat, expresses views outside of this set? Of course not, because Democrats have this set of views. It makes a perfect little logical loop.
Take heed, folks; this is why caving in doesn't make you look more palatable to the other guys.
Obama, pandering, said that the Supreme Court was wrong. He has no authority, nor will he have authority, as President to change this sort of thing. I suppose that rhetoric matters, but I can't muster much outrage about it. Defending child rapists from the death penalty is about as politically feasible as raising the federal gas tax while ending the war on drugs. I suppose he didn't have to say anything, but I don't really see how it matters anyway.
Can you explain to me how a loose confederation of states like you envision can possibly stand up to forces like multinational corporations or emergent mafias? How does the massive weakening of the state that I describe differ substantially from the massive weakening of the state that you describe?
Could you go into a bit more detail about why a strong federal government is "stupid", and why the states "need" to be independent?
War spending comes from magical pony money! We need to be super hard-headed about spending money on things like doctors and hospitals and roads and bridges and research and the environment, but war is practically free!
Does anyone remember that peace dividend we were supposed to score from the end of the Cold War? Anyone?
As opposed to the humanitarian disaster that will occur when whatever puppet regime we set up falls? Do you have some sort of realistic idea as to how the occupation can be ended without some kind of humanitarian collapse over there? If so, why wasn't it done years ago? If not, why is it a good idea to keep occupying the place?
And please, drop the "humanitarian" bit. Supporting an invasion that's killed a million people and created at least twice as many refugees bars you from playing that card.
So... as long as it's dressed up with a "humanitarian" sticker, you'll vote for bombings, invasions, occupations and all the rest, while calling yourself a libertarian. Are you aware that Japan said that it invaded Manchuria for humanitarian reasons? That Mussolini said the same when rolled into Ethiopia, and Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland?
I mean, wow. I couldn't be that ingenuous if I took lessons. One might think that a self-described libertarian might be a smidge more skeptical of what the government says.
Well, that's vague and reference-free enough to be impossible to rebut. Care to expand on that, or does Obama simply give you a squishy feeling in your socks that you just don't like?
Wait, what? You started by claiming that McCain's tax policies would be better for you. More freedomlicious, or somesuch. I pointed out that there was roughly a one-in-twenty chance of this being the case, since nearly everyone in the country is better off under Obama's plan, since it makes the tax system more progressive, rather than more regressive, as McCain's would.
And now you're complaining that Obama's tax plan isn't progressive enough? I'm trying to unpack what you mean by that last paragraph, and I'm coming up blank. Please explain at further length why you believe that a tax plan which raises taxes on nearly everyone is better than a tax plan which cuts taxes on nearly everyone, from a libertarian perspective.