He was labeled a conservative when he was elected. When he was popular, every bit of the conservative movement that could speak heaped praise on him. Now that he's not, he's being disowned by the same people who really liked him when he was popular, who are now claiming that, since he failed, he was never a conservative, and they never said he was. It's grossly dishonest.
Whether or not you happen to have some wacky Platonic ideal of conservatism in your head has little to do with the actual conservative movement in this country.
Oh, you're too kind. No, really; you're too kind. When was the last time you heard the fact of the massive civilian deaths in Iraq referred to outside of the initial report? Do you see it on the news? Did you hear it from any of our brave, brave Democratic congresscritters who occasionally mention the dead troops (with appropriate reverence) and the hundreds of billions of bucks flushed away on this monstrosity (also with plenty of reverence)? I'd be quite surprised if you could find someone who made it on CNN or MSNBC or on the editorial page of the Times arguing against the continuation of the war because it's caused levels of deaths that, were they someone else's fault, would be labeled genocide. But no, those are dead brown people, so we as a nation tiptoe around that question, while the corpse-heap grows ever taller.
Also, apropos nothing, this makes three thousand comments for me. It's been an interesting couple of years, Slashdot.
Medicare is federally-administered and for old people; Medicaid is state-administered and for poor people. (There's some overlap--Medicaid pays your Medicare copays if you're poor and old.) It's been a few years since I did paperwork at a doctor's office, where Medicare paid relatively reasonable rates (I think other insurers paid better), and Medicaid paid so little that it was hardly worth sending out the bills for it.
In every other arena, the legislative branch creates policy, and the executive branch implements and enforces it. For instance, Congress makes drugs illegal, and the DEA enforces that. Congress legislates air quality standards, and the EPA makes it happen.
Except... war, in your opinion, seems to be different. Rather than Congress voting that a war should be fought, and the President commanding the execution of that war, it appears that, from your point of view, Congress's job is to rubber-stamp any decisions on when and where to go to war that the Emperor should hand down from the mountaintop. Do I have that about right?
Republicans want the government to have the rich stay rich so it can enable the poor to become rich.
it actually makes a kind of sense!
See, when taxes are cut on the rich, they get richer. This necessitates a cut in services to the rest of us, so we get poorer. But because we're poorer, we pay less in taxes! And as any good libertarian knows, there's nothing on this earth more important than paying less in taxes. And when this glorious, I say glorious plan reaches its throbbing climax of spurting libertarian wonder, we'll be so poor that we won't pay taxes at all--we'll be lucky duckies! Which makes us actually super rich.
So the Republicans really do have our best interests at heart, you see.
Where were you back in 2001 or 2002, when Bush was hailed as the second coming of Saint Ronnie? I see a lot of this crawling out of the woodwork--now that Bush's policies have led to outcomes that can best be described as ruinous, he's not really a conservative, because No True Conservative could have failed.
Medicaid has arguably been a major source of the problems that exist
I'm curious as to what you mean by this. The primary problems with healthcare in this country, as far as I know, are that a lot of people don't have it, and it's ridiculously expensive even if you do have it. Medicaid provides healthcare and reimburses providers at ludicrously low rates, which would seem to address both of these concerns. So it seems that there's something wrong with healthcare here that I'm not aware of.
As for the rest, I'd say that a government that did all that is looking to return to the halcyon days of the late 19th century, when nations tottered on the brink of socialist revolution because the accretion of wealth became so damned acute that the people at the bottom of the pyramid were willing to die to change it.
Or perhaps to the 1990s in Russia, where once the government bowed out (in accordance with your utopian vision), it was replaced by a gigantic mafia, which provided all the violence and coercion of government cranked up to eleven without those pesky social services. Funny how that works out in practice. (Oh, but everyone can carry guns there! Too bad the mafia will always outgun you.)
It's funny how whenever libertarian goals get implemented, it ends up looking a lot like an oligarchy--where liberty belongs to everyone in theory, but only the privileged few in practice.
Wow, it's as if the Republicans' fantasies about unlimited executive power and the Democrats' fantasies about Obama's goodness had a baby. A baby with fetal alcohol syndrome, who will never even be able to comprehend the SchoolHouse Rock version of "how a bill becomes a law"...
Gloriously well put.
It's astonishing how anyone can look at the headlines today, laced with verbs like "cave", "surrender", "give in" and "capitulate" and conclude that, boy, Anthony Fremont did a good thing there.
On the other hand, one vote on a measure that passed with more than a two-thirds majority doesn't really mean much of anything. It does make Obama as much of a cowardly weasel as the rest of them, but, seriously, you've got to blame just about the entire Republican party and roughly a third of the Democratic party for this one. They can't all be Chris Dodd, unfortunately.
It's depressing that if all of the Republicans vanished from Congress, we'd still only have a rough majority of sane folk there.
Republicans get voted in, usually, on Conservative principles and then betray those principles once they hit DC. Conservatives aren't forgiving of their representatives that do this. In the 2006 election, they let their representatives lose.
Oh, give it a rest. When Bush strode into office and was flying high, he was the second coming of Reagan. When his Norquistian policies bore bitter fruit, suddenly No True Conservative could be so unpopular.
In reality, that mandate to end the war was not the case. Congress could have cut funding to the war, and if the mandate were true, would have suffered little backlash from it.
They could have cut funding. They would have enjoyed popular support for doing so. Reasons why they didn't range from (at the cynical end of things) that Democrats are just as bloodthirsty a party of warmongers seeking global dominion as Republicans, or (at the less cynical end) Democrats are so inexplicably scared out of their wits whenever a Republican threatens to call them unpatriotic that they can't help but give the opposing party everything they asked for and more, or maybe they're just as out of touch with the people of this country as you are. (See following paragraph.)
Most people support the war
"Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Iraq?" As of about two weeks ago, the war's approval rating is only slightly north of the President's, and is hovering around the proportion of Americans who think that Saddam Hussein personally plotted the 9/11 attacks.
The war is not popular, and has not been for some time now. I can't imagine how you got the idea that the majority of Americans think the war was a good idea.
I'm rather impressed that you can inveigh against profligate spending and support infinite imperial military ventures overseas under the "libertarian" banner. (Please drop the figleaf of concern over human rights. It's gone past laughable at this point and straight into grotesque.) And also that you can pretend that the unprovoked and murderous invasion of another country is going to "reduce spending".
Also, unless you're making over $225k per year, you'll do better tax-wise under Obama than McCain. (Source.) But, I mean, if you want to shill for rich people to keep more of their money, that's fine. You should just be a bit more honest about it.
Remember, kids, it's strong-jawed libertarianism when rich people get their taxes cut, but it's "shiny candy from the government" for the rest of us.
But it's the way that it is. If you're wondering why your Congressfolk don't pay attention to you, it's because you're not sending them money. You, individually, could not pay them enough to take your opinion seriously, in any case. You can't afford to bribe them. You could always donate to a lobbying group, which will pool your bribes with those of your like-thinking fellow citizens, which might be more effective. The EFF and ACLU have been pretty good on the whole FISA thing.
I should be more rigorous. I can't back up that it was the largest shift in history; I do remember reading that it was unprecedented that all of the Congressional seats which flipped did so from red to blue, none in the opposite direction. A clear mandate, regardless.
I suppose I hardly need point out that now isn't a good time to be making pseudonymous threats against elected officials over a wiretappable communication channel.
Exactly. The only power you have over a candidate is not voting for him.
Wrong. If this were true, the telecoms wouldn't have been able to buy off Congress for something like nine grand a vote. Money is power. If everyone sent a monthly twenty-dollar check to Congresscritters they approved of and stopped sending it when they pulled some crap like this, I assure you that Congress would notice.
It is, of course, grossly unfair that normal folks don't have massive-corporation money. But we do outnumber them. It's a sad fact that your vote doesn't matter nearly as much as your wallet does. Donate to primary challengers against the Congressfolk who voted for this monstrosity; it's pretty much the only way they'll pay attention. But we'll see if anyone remembers that in two years.
Don't you remember 2006? When the largest upheaval in Congressional history happened, giving a clear mandate to our lawmakers to end the war? Somehow that didn't happen. Somehow the legislative groundwork got laid for another war in the meantime.
My congresscritters happened to be on the right side of this. If yours were not, I strongly suggest calling their offices and informing them that (if they're Democrats) your donations next election cycle will be going to their challenger in the primary. And then, of course, following through on that.
I understand that djb draws a lot of flack for being a legendarily caustic personality; I'm just a little bitter that the sensible parts of his advice get ignored as well. DNSSEC is an implausible mess with a single point of failure, IPv6 migration is a joke, and DNS without source port randomization is vulnerable to spoofing. Despite his other, wackier beliefs (a new format for FTP listings! a new format for mail transfer! blasting mail across parallel connections instead of one connection per server just because I like it that way!), there's some important stuff in there.
I work at a large university, which supposedly has security staff. They're running BIND 9.3 (I think--nmap -A says "ISC BIND (Fake version: 9.3.1)"), and they're vulnerable. I sent a note to the security staff, but haven't gotten anything back yet. They're serving less than a hundred zones--or were, when the status page was last updated during the Clinton Administration--so I can't imagine they'd have a performance problem with the patch. Perhaps they're busy reading our email and sending nasty letters to BitTorrent users.
Since djb released djbdns into the public domain earlier this year, Debian, at least, is distributing a package called "dbndns" with the IPv6-enabling patch included.
DNSSEC proposes a single point of failure for the security of the entire DNS system, and this is widely considered a good idea? How did that happen?
Not to mention that the current X.509 infrastructure as deployed in web browsers checks neither CRLs nor an OCSP service by default--good luck revoking a mistakenly issued DNS signature, especially when instead of a few cert checks per day, each and every client is doing possibly hundreds. And this is supposed to magically scale up? You'd have better luck getting everyone to run the whole system over TLS.
I'm sure the half-dozen people who are actually using IPv6 right now are terribly devastated by that.
Wait, no, there's not even that excuse. There's a patched version--since djbdns is now public domain, you can just grab Debian's dbndns package, which includes IPv6 support.
From this posting: "DJB was right. All those years ago, Dan J. Bernstein was right: Source Port Randomization should be standard on every name server in production use."
But I'm sure his acting like a jerk still means that nobody should ever take his criticisms of software design seriously. Heck, the BIND folks didn't, and it's not like people are going to stop using BIND.
[W]e now know that much of what appears to be synthetic really isn't, it's just a color-by-numbers photoshop job of a real picture involving real people.
Citation needed, please. No, government handwaving about what "may" be happening doesn't count. It makes no darn sense; why would people bother to rotoscope porn instead of just drawing it themselves, especially since it's far, far less risky to do the latter?
Slashdot Mirror
He was labeled a conservative when he was elected. When he was popular, every bit of the conservative movement that could speak heaped praise on him. Now that he's not, he's being disowned by the same people who really liked him when he was popular, who are now claiming that, since he failed, he was never a conservative, and they never said he was. It's grossly dishonest.
Whether or not you happen to have some wacky Platonic ideal of conservatism in your head has little to do with the actual conservative movement in this country.
Oh, you're too kind. No, really; you're too kind. When was the last time you heard the fact of the massive civilian deaths in Iraq referred to outside of the initial report? Do you see it on the news? Did you hear it from any of our brave, brave Democratic congresscritters who occasionally mention the dead troops (with appropriate reverence) and the hundreds of billions of bucks flushed away on this monstrosity (also with plenty of reverence)? I'd be quite surprised if you could find someone who made it on CNN or MSNBC or on the editorial page of the Times arguing against the continuation of the war because it's caused levels of deaths that, were they someone else's fault, would be labeled genocide. But no, those are dead brown people, so we as a nation tiptoe around that question, while the corpse-heap grows ever taller.
Also, apropos nothing, this makes three thousand comments for me. It's been an interesting couple of years, Slashdot.
Medicare is federally-administered and for old people; Medicaid is state-administered and for poor people. (There's some overlap--Medicaid pays your Medicare copays if you're poor and old.) It's been a few years since I did paperwork at a doctor's office, where Medicare paid relatively reasonable rates (I think other insurers paid better), and Medicaid paid so little that it was hardly worth sending out the bills for it.
Which one were you talking about?
In every other arena, the legislative branch creates policy, and the executive branch implements and enforces it. For instance, Congress makes drugs illegal, and the DEA enforces that. Congress legislates air quality standards, and the EPA makes it happen.
Except... war, in your opinion, seems to be different. Rather than Congress voting that a war should be fought, and the President commanding the execution of that war, it appears that, from your point of view, Congress's job is to rubber-stamp any decisions on when and where to go to war that the Emperor should hand down from the mountaintop. Do I have that about right?
When the GP says:
it actually makes a kind of sense!
See, when taxes are cut on the rich, they get richer. This necessitates a cut in services to the rest of us, so we get poorer. But because we're poorer, we pay less in taxes! And as any good libertarian knows, there's nothing on this earth more important than paying less in taxes. And when this glorious, I say glorious plan reaches its throbbing climax of spurting libertarian wonder, we'll be so poor that we won't pay taxes at all--we'll be lucky duckies! Which makes us actually super rich.
So the Republicans really do have our best interests at heart, you see.
Where were you back in 2001 or 2002, when Bush was hailed as the second coming of Saint Ronnie? I see a lot of this crawling out of the woodwork--now that Bush's policies have led to outcomes that can best be described as ruinous, he's not really a conservative, because No True Conservative could have failed.
The ideology cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Were she the nominee, I have a sneaking suspicion that their votes would be reversed.
I'm curious as to what you mean by this. The primary problems with healthcare in this country, as far as I know, are that a lot of people don't have it, and it's ridiculously expensive even if you do have it. Medicaid provides healthcare and reimburses providers at ludicrously low rates, which would seem to address both of these concerns. So it seems that there's something wrong with healthcare here that I'm not aware of.
As for the rest, I'd say that a government that did all that is looking to return to the halcyon days of the late 19th century, when nations tottered on the brink of socialist revolution because the accretion of wealth became so damned acute that the people at the bottom of the pyramid were willing to die to change it.
Or perhaps to the 1990s in Russia, where once the government bowed out (in accordance with your utopian vision), it was replaced by a gigantic mafia, which provided all the violence and coercion of government cranked up to eleven without those pesky social services. Funny how that works out in practice. (Oh, but everyone can carry guns there! Too bad the mafia will always outgun you.)
It's funny how whenever libertarian goals get implemented, it ends up looking a lot like an oligarchy--where liberty belongs to everyone in theory, but only the privileged few in practice.
Gloriously well put.
It's astonishing how anyone can look at the headlines today, laced with verbs like "cave", "surrender", "give in" and "capitulate" and conclude that, boy, Anthony Fremont did a good thing there.
On the other hand, one vote on a measure that passed with more than a two-thirds majority doesn't really mean much of anything. It does make Obama as much of a cowardly weasel as the rest of them, but, seriously, you've got to blame just about the entire Republican party and roughly a third of the Democratic party for this one. They can't all be Chris Dodd, unfortunately.
It's depressing that if all of the Republicans vanished from Congress, we'd still only have a rough majority of sane folk there.
Oh, give it a rest. When Bush strode into office and was flying high, he was the second coming of Reagan. When his Norquistian policies bore bitter fruit, suddenly No True Conservative could be so unpopular.
They could have cut funding. They would have enjoyed popular support for doing so. Reasons why they didn't range from (at the cynical end of things) that Democrats are just as bloodthirsty a party of warmongers seeking global dominion as Republicans, or (at the less cynical end) Democrats are so inexplicably scared out of their wits whenever a Republican threatens to call them unpatriotic that they can't help but give the opposing party everything they asked for and more, or maybe they're just as out of touch with the people of this country as you are. (See following paragraph.)
"Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Iraq?" As of about two weeks ago, the war's approval rating is only slightly north of the President's, and is hovering around the proportion of Americans who think that Saddam Hussein personally plotted the 9/11 attacks.
The war is not popular, and has not been for some time now. I can't imagine how you got the idea that the majority of Americans think the war was a good idea.
(Oh, and the war certainly was the defining issue of the 2006 elections.)
I'm rather impressed that you can inveigh against profligate spending and support infinite imperial military ventures overseas under the "libertarian" banner. (Please drop the figleaf of concern over human rights. It's gone past laughable at this point and straight into grotesque.) And also that you can pretend that the unprovoked and murderous invasion of another country is going to "reduce spending".
Also, unless you're making over $225k per year, you'll do better tax-wise under Obama than McCain. (Source.) But, I mean, if you want to shill for rich people to keep more of their money, that's fine. You should just be a bit more honest about it.
Remember, kids, it's strong-jawed libertarianism when rich people get their taxes cut, but it's "shiny candy from the government" for the rest of us.
But it's the way that it is. If you're wondering why your Congressfolk don't pay attention to you, it's because you're not sending them money. You, individually, could not pay them enough to take your opinion seriously, in any case. You can't afford to bribe them. You could always donate to a lobbying group, which will pool your bribes with those of your like-thinking fellow citizens, which might be more effective. The EFF and ACLU have been pretty good on the whole FISA thing.
I should be more rigorous. I can't back up that it was the largest shift in history; I do remember reading that it was unprecedented that all of the Congressional seats which flipped did so from red to blue, none in the opposite direction. A clear mandate, regardless.
I suppose I hardly need point out that now isn't a good time to be making pseudonymous threats against elected officials over a wiretappable communication channel.
Wrong. If this were true, the telecoms wouldn't have been able to buy off Congress for something like nine grand a vote. Money is power. If everyone sent a monthly twenty-dollar check to Congresscritters they approved of and stopped sending it when they pulled some crap like this, I assure you that Congress would notice.
It is, of course, grossly unfair that normal folks don't have massive-corporation money. But we do outnumber them. It's a sad fact that your vote doesn't matter nearly as much as your wallet does. Donate to primary challengers against the Congressfolk who voted for this monstrosity; it's pretty much the only way they'll pay attention. But we'll see if anyone remembers that in two years.
Don't you remember 2006? When the largest upheaval in Congressional history happened, giving a clear mandate to our lawmakers to end the war? Somehow that didn't happen. Somehow the legislative groundwork got laid for another war in the meantime.
My congresscritters happened to be on the right side of this. If yours were not, I strongly suggest calling their offices and informing them that (if they're Democrats) your donations next election cycle will be going to their challenger in the primary. And then, of course, following through on that.
I understand that djb draws a lot of flack for being a legendarily caustic personality; I'm just a little bitter that the sensible parts of his advice get ignored as well. DNSSEC is an implausible mess with a single point of failure, IPv6 migration is a joke, and DNS without source port randomization is vulnerable to spoofing. Despite his other, wackier beliefs (a new format for FTP listings! a new format for mail transfer! blasting mail across parallel connections instead of one connection per server just because I like it that way!), there's some important stuff in there.
I work at a large university, which supposedly has security staff. They're running BIND 9.3 (I think--nmap -A says "ISC BIND (Fake version: 9.3.1)"), and they're vulnerable. I sent a note to the security staff, but haven't gotten anything back yet. They're serving less than a hundred zones--or were, when the status page was last updated during the Clinton Administration--so I can't imagine they'd have a performance problem with the patch. Perhaps they're busy reading our email and sending nasty letters to BitTorrent users.
As djbdns is now in the public domain, Debian provides dbndbs, which supports IPv6 out of the box.
Since djb released djbdns into the public domain earlier this year, Debian, at least, is distributing a package called "dbndns" with the IPv6-enabling patch included.
DNSSEC proposes a single point of failure for the security of the entire DNS system, and this is widely considered a good idea? How did that happen?
Not to mention that the current X.509 infrastructure as deployed in web browsers checks neither CRLs nor an OCSP service by default--good luck revoking a mistakenly issued DNS signature, especially when instead of a few cert checks per day, each and every client is doing possibly hundreds. And this is supposed to magically scale up? You'd have better luck getting everyone to run the whole system over TLS.
Here's a description of pretty much the same attack, with pretty much the same solution recommended, back in 2001: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery-cost.txt
I'm sure the half-dozen people who are actually using IPv6 right now are terribly devastated by that.
Wait, no, there's not even that excuse. There's a patched version--since djbdns is now public domain, you can just grab Debian's dbndns package, which includes IPv6 support.
From this posting: "DJB was right. All those years ago, Dan J. Bernstein was right: Source Port Randomization should be standard on every name server in production use."
But I'm sure his acting like a jerk still means that nobody should ever take his criticisms of software design seriously. Heck, the BIND folks didn't, and it's not like people are going to stop using BIND.