I defend all legal free speech, and that includes these kinds of so-called "death threats", just like it includes communist, fascist, racist, homophobic, and any other legal speech.
Unlike the latter kinds of speech, which actually demands a response, when it comes to the kinds of rude E-mails that people like Mann receive, my advice to him is: throw it into the trash and stop worrying about it. When he trots it out in public and wallows in self-righteous indignation, it just makes him look even more pathetic.
So you consider "wanker you wanker you need to be killed" or "you are a fucking scumbag, a liar and a fraud. I hope someone puts a bullet between your eyes" a credible death threat? Get real. And that's of course, assuming that those E-mails are even real, instead of fabricated by the climate researchers themselves.
People like Mann are advocating policies that are (arguably) going to cost people thousands of dollars a year, if not their livelihoods. Not only that, Mann is misusing his academic credentials to engage in lobbying in areas he has no expertise in (public policy, economics). Yeah, big surprise: people are going to be very upset at him.
How many politically-motivated assassinations do we have per year? Mann is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed for his activism. This concern over "death threats" is pearl clutching, self-righteous indignation and political posturing. And it happens to all public figures.
Real death threats are criminal, but that's not what we are talking about here. What Mann and others received were rude E-mails, not actual, credible "death threats". Rude and aggressive language are a normal part of human interaction and political discourse.
If your side thinks that they need to issue death threats to rebut a scientific argument, this is basically evidence that they are not arguing with the science.
And you're absolutely right that they are not "arguing with the science" because when Mann is writing or speaking outside the academic community, he is acting as an activist, not engaging in a scientific argument. What people despise him for, and rightfully so, is that he is trying to translate his academic status into political influence and that is absolutely unacceptable.
Furthermore, it is not "my side" and this isn't an us-vs-them debate. And, whatever status you assign to these E-mails, everybody gets them, no matter what position they take on climate policy (or other controversial issues). For scientists, it is actually easy to avoid this kind of backlash: act professionally and don't mix your academic and scientific career with politics. Even if you believe that Mann walks on water scientifically, at most he is qualified to talk about temperature measurements and modeling (his domain of expertise); he has no demonstrated competency in public policy, economics, or any of the other areas that are important for the question of what policies we should adopt with regards to climate change.
The references I've seen show it as being surprisingly affordable, and the additional costs provide services above what the standard package is, so it's not paying for health care twice. This is in contrast to the US, where most working folks can't afford to pay for health care once.
Europeans pay about half as much per capita as Americans for health care, but also at substantially lower incomes. The difference between what people get for their money isn't something you can fix with add-ons. Getting US-style healthcare in Europe is disproportionately expensive, and in many cases involves simply leaving the country.
Furthermore, the problem in the US isn't lack of single payer; the US already has a huge single payer system accounting for about half of all health care spending. The problem is that the US single payer system is much more expensive per patient than the private system; moving more people onto it would increase per-capita health care spending in the US, not decrease it. The reason the US single payer system is so inefficient is that US politicians aren't willing to impose cost controls, and that willingness doesn't increase when more voters depend on the system. European healthcare systems spend less per capita because governments are willing to impose strict controls on them, something that is politically impossible in the US.
Wealth concentrates anyway. A wealthy person is free to figure out how to best invest money for income in the long term, while a poor person has to get money right now. A wealthy person can accumulate capital, unlike a poor person, and use that to attain greater wealth.
The term "concentrates" is misleading because it incorporates a zero-sum assumption. And that wealthy person is in competition for returns with other wealthy persons, so the only people who increase their wealth are those who know how to use it for the benefit of society (by investing in the right companies). Furthermore, that wealth usually does not get passed on for more than one or two generations in the US.
Wealth concentration and dynastic wealth occur when the political system gets corrupted, it switches from rewarding skill and performance to redistribution, and puts in place laws that created hereditary dynasties. That's the situation in much of Europe, but we don't yet have it in the US. And under such systems, even the poor do more poorly, again, as we find in Europe. Wealth and inequality are actually significantly higher in Europe than in the US; all Europe is doing is putting a layer of redistribution in place that largely affects the lower and middle classes and reduces the post-tax Gini index.
von Bismarck was trying to make Socialism look less attractive. Now, given historical hindsight, you and I realize that a Socialist revolution was not going to be good for freedoms anyway, but it was awfully tempting to lots of people at the time. People did have some freedom then.
Quite right: Germany was an autocratic, repressive state under Bismarck, and he bribed people with positive rights in order to stay in that system. Later, the communists and fascists bribed people with positive rights to accept their totalitarian systems. See a pattern there? The promise of positive rights is used to convince people to accept autocratic or totalitarian rule.
The promise of the classical liberal and Enlightenment, namely a state that offers only negative rights, has a hard time competing, both because people are afraid to take responsiblity for their own li
At 23 minutes, scientist Michael E. Mann, famous for co-discovering the "hockey stick graph" via eigenvector based climate field reconstruction (CFR), recounts how media like the Wall Street Journal demonized him for his research, how he received death threats from unknown sources, how Congress grilled him about whether his scientific methods are credible,
Yes, and those are entirely reasonable things to do when people come up with "new statistical methods" and demand immediate action. Just look at the mess Li's Gaussian Copulas caused in the financial and mortgage markets. New statistical techniques require many years and many different test cases to validate.
Now, what is this activist crap doing on Slashdot?
In at least several countries I'm aware of, you can get your health care the way you want by paying for it. Providing a service that has restrictions is in no way totalitarian if there's alternatives.
Hard as that may to believe, but most working folks can't afford to pay for health care twice, once for the mandatory programs, and once the way they want it. So, if you force them to pay for government provided services (healthcare, education, retirement), you take away their ability to make their own choices.
The natural tendency of wealth seems to be to concentrate, although there are resets every so often, and wealth translates pretty easily to political power.
Yes, wealth concentrates through political power. Therefore, the antidote to that is to reduce the power of politicians, not to increase it.
We see that large numbers of people were willing to trade their liberty for positive rights, because without them the system wasn't working for them. Otto von Bismarck introduced social programs into Germany in order to keep people from going Socialist.
Are you kidding? That was 19th century Germany; people didn't have any liberties to trade in. Bismarck was paying them off to keep them beholden to his totalitarian regime instead of switching to a different one.
I tried to think of societies as you describe, and the Roman Republic came to mind, featuring increasing economic disparity, massive increases in poverty, and big-time social unrest.
The Roman Republic was a slave-holding empire run by a small elite of people; it was never free.
There have been plenty of libertarian and free market societies throughout human history; individual liberties and economic freedom are the natural state for humans and they work. What has killed those societies is that they simply couldn't muster the same level of military aggression and disregard for human life as their unfree neighbors. And that's also why you see people like Clinton and Trump trying to fight wars around the world: external military threats are really the only kind of force that legitimizes the kind of centralized powerful government that these people want.
His manager told the employees around eight months ago that they would be laid off for voting Democratic in the Presidential election, because Democrats are trying to put coal out of business.
What the manager was saying was "if you vote for the candidate who has said 'I will put coal companies out of business', she will make it happen and you'll end up getting laid off". The candidate who threatened that happens to be the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. That's not "retribution", it's a simple statement of fact and an appeal to the self-interest of workers.
Amazingly, when Democrats get tough on business owners with new environmental regulations, requirements for medical insurance and parental leave, minimum wage, etc., it's the workers that end up getting screwed over, not the owners. And, believe it or not, the workers actually figure it out. It's the same thing with "financial regulations" that make mortgages and small loans increasingly hard to get. That is why so many low income workers are pissed off at the Democrats.
The coal mining industry couldn't actually afford to lay people off over how they vote; they have trouble finding workers. The value of an individual vote is at most a few dollars in local elections, and a tiny fraction of a cent in national elections, and the value of a worker to a company is a lot more than that. Any company that lays off people over how they vote is acting economically so irrationally that they will go out of business very quickly.
Note that this works both ways too. There are many companies that would fire people if they vote for Trump; after all progressives have been trying to oust Eich and Thiel. They don't seem to be smart enough yet to have figured out that if a company is too progressive, many of us just pack up and leave. And, frankly, I'd prefer if I didn't have to guess whether my employer is homophobic, progressive, or otherwise bigoted and if they would simply come right out and wallow in their biases and bigotry.
When you face retribution for your vote, then you are not actually free to vote your conscience.
People don't "vote their conscience", they vote their pocketbook, even if some of them fool themselves into believing otherwise. Furthermore, if you dislike your employer so much that you feel you need to vote for politicians that work against your employer's interests, the morally right thing to do is to quit your job.
So, a private citizen supported a candidate and offered free advice? Shocking.
Nobody is saying that he doesn't have a right to back whoever he wants to.
At the same time, voters should be aware of what's happening, and the fact that the company that serves much of their news, advertising, and information may be politically biased and motivated.
Was Cisco and CEO John Chambers backing John McCain [networkworld.com] in 2008 evil?
There is a big difference between "backing" and supporting a candidate with the resources of one of the biggest and most advanced companies in the areas of big data, analytics, publishing, and advertising.
Why? Any decent, well-behaved presidential candidate would have been steamrolled over by the highly experienced DNC propaganda and smear machinery and their allies in Silicon Valley and the media. And he couldn't have relied on the Republican strategists and propagandists because they seem to be incompetent. Whether it's by accident or design, the kind of crazy insane campaign and persona Trump has been using has been a long shot, but basically has also been the only path open to him.
I didn't say that other people taking cheap shots at you was a bad thing
Well, and I say it is. It is a bad thing because, among other things, we end up with insane lunatics like Clinton and Trump running for president: no reasonable, competent person wants to put up with this kind of bullshit.
I still have no idea what you are alleging. What kind of horribly nefarious activity is supposed to have happened there? If Trump wanted to have a conversation with Putin, why wouldn't he just call? Or are you alleging that Trump is paying off Putin, or that Putin is paying of Trump, or what?
This is just DNC bullshit to distract from highly embarrassing and damaging E-mails and from Clinton's proven financial connections with Russia and the Uranium One deal.
Clinton has always been a conspiracy theorist, but to accuse Trump simultaneously of wanting to start a nuclear war with Russia and being in league with Russia to sabotage her presidency is a new level of insanity even for her deranged mind. And as I was saying, what difference, at this point, does it make where the E-mails came from? They are what they are, either you care or you don't care.
News and it's profession should be protected not just from attacks from authorities but also being protected from becoming a propaganda channel. So a licened 'News Broadcaster' and licensed 'News journalist', get busted lying lose your licence and go to jail, don't like the risk, don't apply for the licence.
That was Item 23 on the NSDAP party program, after universal health care, shoring up public pension programs, and creation of a healthy middle class. It's amazing how fascists like you are always around and ready to kill democracy.
I won't even bother to try to explain to you why that is such a bad idea; people like you are inaccessible to reason.
Well, that may be true, but again you can't be surprised if the other side uses the ammunition you give them.
Which is why Trump hasn't released his tax returns, and why he is running such a crazy campaign: he was going to be vilified anyway, so why play the game at all? Why not be outrageous and loud? As for Romney, he was about as benign a politician we can ever hope to have; what the Democrats did to him was absolutely disgusting.
If journalists or the two party establishments think that after this election, it's going to be business as usual, they are going to be in for a rude surprise. The electorate is absolutely pissed off. Journalists and politicians are going to continue to be insulted, disrespected, and abused online and in public. And there may also be hell to pay for all the tech companies that got in bed with Clinton.
Working for? No. Why would they have to? All the banshees and trolls on Twitter or in the media who go to bat for Hillary and cover up her misdeeds don't "work for" her either. Politically biased? Probably, even the Republicans (most of whom hate Trump as well).
In any case, this is utterly irrelevant. It's an attempt to spread FUD and distract from Hillary's actual problems. Hopefully, it will backfire: Hillary is just proving over and over again that she is even more unsuitable for the office of president than Trump, and that's a very low standard indeed.
This is politics; if you leave yourself open to innuendo, you get shellacked. Trump could easily have avoided this by releasing his tax returns, just like Mitt Romney did.
And the Democrats wiped the floor with Romney and made him out to be the devil incarnate as well. You cannot placate these people (and they exist in both parties).
The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. [...] The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project
Yes. I do the same when I travel to Russia, China, or the EU and connect back to the US; those places are full of spies and crooks. My overseas bank does that when they contact me, and I do it when I contact my overseas bank. Friends and family do that when they contact me from overseas. What exactly do you think is suspicious about that?
These aren't political hacks
Given the statistics, any academic or security researcher should be assumed to be a political hack unless proven otherwise.
"Positive rights" doesn't make a state totalitarian. In most developed and developing countries, health care is a right, and nobody is forced to do anything except pay taxes.
Health care systems in most developed nations interfere strongly in people's personal lives, far beyond paying for them: they restrict what kinds of health care you can receive, what kinds of drugs are available, and what kinds of medical decisions you can make for yourself. (Most developed countries also don't pay for health care through taxes.) Most developed countries also received a massive social and political reset after WWII, so they haven't had much time yet to experience the long term consequences of adopting positive rights as a principle.
A state can collect taxes without being totalitarian, for any reasonable definition of "totalitarian".
Correct, but that observation doesn't support your argument. Just because positive rights require taxes to implement doesn't mean that taxes only pay for positive rights.
The lack of "positive rights" can be disastrous. With increasing concentration of wealth, people are being given the right to be homeless and the right to starve.
First, you are assuming that lack of positive rights leads to increasing concentration of wealth. Second, you assume that increasing concentration of wealth leads to homelessness and starvation. Both of those assumptions are unjustified (and, in fact, generally wrong.
This is neither desirable nor stable, since having too many desperate people around would lead to a lot of social unrest and likely a totalitarian government.
Here too you jump from "inequality" to "desparation" to "social unrest" to revolutions, which represents a pretty naive view of how totalitarianism arises. In fact, if you look at actual totalitarian governments (fascists, communists, etc.), positive rights were very high on their political programs. The NSDAP, for example, got elected on a program largely of positive rights: a right to a job, a right to old age pensions, a right to land, a right to education, a right to healthcare, a right not to be subjected to "incorrect" political information.
But, tell you what, try to come up with some historical examples where a classically liberal society--that is, a society that only recognizes negative rights--has followed the historical path you describe: increasing economic disparity, massive increases in poverty, followed by social unrest.
I pointed out (without judgment) how regulation raises the cost of labor and that that causes mine owners to consider automation. It's simple, uncontroversial economics that both the left and the right agree on.
My judgment was that replacing peoples in "replacing people in dangerous, boring, repetitive jobs" (like mining) is a good thing.
In response you accuse me of defending the "poor put-upon mine owners" and "choosing to forget that hundreds of workers were killed" etc. Your bigotry and partisanship blinds you to what people actually write, and in response to simple factual statements, you just rattle off political propaganda.
In fact, the implication from your vehement disagreement with my statement is that you actually prefer policies that force people to continue working "dangerous, boring, repetitive jobs". Now, you'll deny that because you view yourself as a champion of the poor and downtrodden, but in practice, that is what a lot of so-called "pro-worker policies" come down to: preservation of a status quo that is dangerous and harmful.
It works reasonably well... for what? I have never in my life seen anything interesting on Twitter. It's mostly people expressing their outrage at various things, and occasionally coming up with a pithy remark; unfortunately, the pithy remarks are rooted in people's prejudices, biases, and bigotry.
And so, since you might have written something similar 10 years ago, that means you know everything that's in my head?
I don't have to guess at what beliefs you have in your head about progressivism because you have stated them. I am saying I held pretty much the same beliefs, but after spending a lot of time reading up on economics, history, and politics, I have come to the conclusion that those beliefs are false. Furthermore, your statements fail to refer to even basic facts that knowledgeable defenders of progressivism would be aware of.
I might even be older than you, which would render your extrapolation quite invalid (it is, but more provably so, since you mind is made up and closed).
What difference does that make? Your problem seems to be lack of specific knowledge of history, economics, and political science related to progressivism; that knowledge doesn't magically materialize in your head without a lot of reading and thinking about the subject. What major books on history, economics, social science, and/or political science have you actually read in the last few years?
Given the example was a negative right, then why would you assume I'm the opposite?
Which part of this was unclear to you?
If you're a progressive, then "rights" includes "positive rights" and you're a statist and totalitarian. If you limit "rights" to "negative rights", then you're not a progressive.
I'm a "statist" in that I think the government should defend the rights of the people from itself, other governments, and those who would take them away. That my right to extend my arm ends at your nose apparently makes me a progressive statist. As the state exists to arrest me for assault if I violate your rights (among other things).
Whether that makes you a statist and totalitarian or not depends on your definition of "rights". If you're a progressive, then "rights" includes "positive rights" and you're a statist and totalitarian. If you limit "rights" to "negative rights", then you're not a progressive.
When you assert progressives are anti-progress, your definition of "progress" and/or "progressive" is wrong.
The progressives know that the government must lead progress. When progressives worked for sufferage, abolition, and basic worker rights, they were harassed (And sometimes even shot) for advocating progress. When the anti-progress groups are willing to kill to maintain their status quo, the government must be on the side of the progressives, or the conservatives will execute the undesirables.
Ten years ago, I might have written the same things.
You are so good at putting things in the bins they don't belong, you don't ever stop to think that you might have the wrong bin.
When your mouth flaps or your fingers twitch, does that have anything to do with what you actually believe?
Slashdot Mirror
I defend all legal free speech, and that includes these kinds of so-called "death threats", just like it includes communist, fascist, racist, homophobic, and any other legal speech.
Unlike the latter kinds of speech, which actually demands a response, when it comes to the kinds of rude E-mails that people like Mann receive, my advice to him is: throw it into the trash and stop worrying about it. When he trots it out in public and wallows in self-righteous indignation, it just makes him look even more pathetic.
So you consider "wanker you wanker you need to be killed" or "you are a fucking scumbag, a liar and a fraud. I hope someone puts a bullet between your eyes" a credible death threat? Get real. And that's of course, assuming that those E-mails are even real, instead of fabricated by the climate researchers themselves.
People like Mann are advocating policies that are (arguably) going to cost people thousands of dollars a year, if not their livelihoods. Not only that, Mann is misusing his academic credentials to engage in lobbying in areas he has no expertise in (public policy, economics). Yeah, big surprise: people are going to be very upset at him.
How many politically-motivated assassinations do we have per year? Mann is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed for his activism. This concern over "death threats" is pearl clutching, self-righteous indignation and political posturing. And it happens to all public figures.
Real death threats are criminal, but that's not what we are talking about here. What Mann and others received were rude E-mails, not actual, credible "death threats". Rude and aggressive language are a normal part of human interaction and political discourse.
And you're absolutely right that they are not "arguing with the science" because when Mann is writing or speaking outside the academic community, he is acting as an activist, not engaging in a scientific argument. What people despise him for, and rightfully so, is that he is trying to translate his academic status into political influence and that is absolutely unacceptable.
Furthermore, it is not "my side" and this isn't an us-vs-them debate. And, whatever status you assign to these E-mails, everybody gets them, no matter what position they take on climate policy (or other controversial issues). For scientists, it is actually easy to avoid this kind of backlash: act professionally and don't mix your academic and scientific career with politics. Even if you believe that Mann walks on water scientifically, at most he is qualified to talk about temperature measurements and modeling (his domain of expertise); he has no demonstrated competency in public policy, economics, or any of the other areas that are important for the question of what policies we should adopt with regards to climate change.
Europeans pay about half as much per capita as Americans for health care, but also at substantially lower incomes. The difference between what people get for their money isn't something you can fix with add-ons. Getting US-style healthcare in Europe is disproportionately expensive, and in many cases involves simply leaving the country.
Furthermore, the problem in the US isn't lack of single payer; the US already has a huge single payer system accounting for about half of all health care spending. The problem is that the US single payer system is much more expensive per patient than the private system; moving more people onto it would increase per-capita health care spending in the US, not decrease it. The reason the US single payer system is so inefficient is that US politicians aren't willing to impose cost controls, and that willingness doesn't increase when more voters depend on the system. European healthcare systems spend less per capita because governments are willing to impose strict controls on them, something that is politically impossible in the US.
The term "concentrates" is misleading because it incorporates a zero-sum assumption. And that wealthy person is in competition for returns with other wealthy persons, so the only people who increase their wealth are those who know how to use it for the benefit of society (by investing in the right companies). Furthermore, that wealth usually does not get passed on for more than one or two generations in the US.
Wealth concentration and dynastic wealth occur when the political system gets corrupted, it switches from rewarding skill and performance to redistribution, and puts in place laws that created hereditary dynasties. That's the situation in much of Europe, but we don't yet have it in the US. And under such systems, even the poor do more poorly, again, as we find in Europe. Wealth and inequality are actually significantly higher in Europe than in the US; all Europe is doing is putting a layer of redistribution in place that largely affects the lower and middle classes and reduces the post-tax Gini index.
As for the US, income and/or wealth inequality may or may not actually be increasing, but what is clearly increasing is the fraction of first generation billionaires among all billionaires. By now, the great majority of billionaires are self-made in the US.
Quite right: Germany was an autocratic, repressive state under Bismarck, and he bribed people with positive rights in order to stay in that system. Later, the communists and fascists bribed people with positive rights to accept their totalitarian systems. See a pattern there? The promise of positive rights is used to convince people to accept autocratic or totalitarian rule.
The promise of the classical liberal and Enlightenment, namely a state that offers only negative rights, has a hard time competing, both because people are afraid to take responsiblity for their own li
Yes, and those are entirely reasonable things to do when people come up with "new statistical methods" and demand immediate action. Just look at the mess Li's Gaussian Copulas caused in the financial and mortgage markets. New statistical techniques require many years and many different test cases to validate.
Now, what is this activist crap doing on Slashdot?
Hard as that may to believe, but most working folks can't afford to pay for health care twice, once for the mandatory programs, and once the way they want it. So, if you force them to pay for government provided services (healthcare, education, retirement), you take away their ability to make their own choices.
Yes, wealth concentrates through political power. Therefore, the antidote to that is to reduce the power of politicians, not to increase it.
Are you kidding? That was 19th century Germany; people didn't have any liberties to trade in. Bismarck was paying them off to keep them beholden to his totalitarian regime instead of switching to a different one.
The Roman Republic was a slave-holding empire run by a small elite of people; it was never free.
There have been plenty of libertarian and free market societies throughout human history; individual liberties and economic freedom are the natural state for humans and they work. What has killed those societies is that they simply couldn't muster the same level of military aggression and disregard for human life as their unfree neighbors. And that's also why you see people like Clinton and Trump trying to fight wars around the world: external military threats are really the only kind of force that legitimizes the kind of centralized powerful government that these people want.
What the manager was saying was "if you vote for the candidate who has said 'I will put coal companies out of business', she will make it happen and you'll end up getting laid off". The candidate who threatened that happens to be the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. That's not "retribution", it's a simple statement of fact and an appeal to the self-interest of workers.
Amazingly, when Democrats get tough on business owners with new environmental regulations, requirements for medical insurance and parental leave, minimum wage, etc., it's the workers that end up getting screwed over, not the owners. And, believe it or not, the workers actually figure it out. It's the same thing with "financial regulations" that make mortgages and small loans increasingly hard to get. That is why so many low income workers are pissed off at the Democrats.
The coal mining industry couldn't actually afford to lay people off over how they vote; they have trouble finding workers. The value of an individual vote is at most a few dollars in local elections, and a tiny fraction of a cent in national elections, and the value of a worker to a company is a lot more than that. Any company that lays off people over how they vote is acting economically so irrationally that they will go out of business very quickly.
Note that this works both ways too. There are many companies that would fire people if they vote for Trump; after all progressives have been trying to oust Eich and Thiel. They don't seem to be smart enough yet to have figured out that if a company is too progressive, many of us just pack up and leave. And, frankly, I'd prefer if I didn't have to guess whether my employer is homophobic, progressive, or otherwise bigoted and if they would simply come right out and wallow in their biases and bigotry.
People don't "vote their conscience", they vote their pocketbook, even if some of them fool themselves into believing otherwise. Furthermore, if you dislike your employer so much that you feel you need to vote for politicians that work against your employer's interests, the morally right thing to do is to quit your job.
Nobody is saying that he doesn't have a right to back whoever he wants to.
At the same time, voters should be aware of what's happening, and the fact that the company that serves much of their news, advertising, and information may be politically biased and motivated.
There is a big difference between "backing" and supporting a candidate with the resources of one of the biggest and most advanced companies in the areas of big data, analytics, publishing, and advertising.
Why? Any decent, well-behaved presidential candidate would have been steamrolled over by the highly experienced DNC propaganda and smear machinery and their allies in Silicon Valley and the media. And he couldn't have relied on the Republican strategists and propagandists because they seem to be incompetent. Whether it's by accident or design, the kind of crazy insane campaign and persona Trump has been using has been a long shot, but basically has also been the only path open to him.
Well, and I say it is. It is a bad thing because, among other things, we end up with insane lunatics like Clinton and Trump running for president: no reasonable, competent person wants to put up with this kind of bullshit.
I still have no idea what you are alleging. What kind of horribly nefarious activity is supposed to have happened there? If Trump wanted to have a conversation with Putin, why wouldn't he just call? Or are you alleging that Trump is paying off Putin, or that Putin is paying of Trump, or what?
This is just DNC bullshit to distract from highly embarrassing and damaging E-mails and from Clinton's proven financial connections with Russia and the Uranium One deal.
Clinton has always been a conspiracy theorist, but to accuse Trump simultaneously of wanting to start a nuclear war with Russia and being in league with Russia to sabotage her presidency is a new level of insanity even for her deranged mind. And as I was saying, what difference, at this point, does it make where the E-mails came from? They are what they are, either you care or you don't care.
And by "pathetic" you mean "he wasn't a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, corrupt prick" like Clinton, Obama, or Trump? Well, my point exactly.
That was Item 23 on the NSDAP party program, after universal health care, shoring up public pension programs, and creation of a healthy middle class. It's amazing how fascists like you are always around and ready to kill democracy.
I won't even bother to try to explain to you why that is such a bad idea; people like you are inaccessible to reason.
Which is why Trump hasn't released his tax returns, and why he is running such a crazy campaign: he was going to be vilified anyway, so why play the game at all? Why not be outrageous and loud? As for Romney, he was about as benign a politician we can ever hope to have; what the Democrats did to him was absolutely disgusting.
If journalists or the two party establishments think that after this election, it's going to be business as usual, they are going to be in for a rude surprise. The electorate is absolutely pissed off. Journalists and politicians are going to continue to be insulted, disrespected, and abused online and in public. And there may also be hell to pay for all the tech companies that got in bed with Clinton.
Working for? No. Why would they have to? All the banshees and trolls on Twitter or in the media who go to bat for Hillary and cover up her misdeeds don't "work for" her either. Politically biased? Probably, even the Republicans (most of whom hate Trump as well).
In any case, this is utterly irrelevant. It's an attempt to spread FUD and distract from Hillary's actual problems. Hopefully, it will backfire: Hillary is just proving over and over again that she is even more unsuitable for the office of president than Trump, and that's a very low standard indeed.
And the Democrats wiped the floor with Romney and made him out to be the devil incarnate as well. You cannot placate these people (and they exist in both parties).
Yes. I do the same when I travel to Russia, China, or the EU and connect back to the US; those places are full of spies and crooks. My overseas bank does that when they contact me, and I do it when I contact my overseas bank. Friends and family do that when they contact me from overseas. What exactly do you think is suspicious about that?
Given the statistics, any academic or security researcher should be assumed to be a political hack unless proven otherwise.
Hey, Slashdot gets visited by Russian IP addresses too! Maybe Slashdot is working with Putin to leak Clinton's E-mails as well?
Seriously, this bullshit coming from Clinton and her minions only shows how desperate they are.
Health care systems in most developed nations interfere strongly in people's personal lives, far beyond paying for them: they restrict what kinds of health care you can receive, what kinds of drugs are available, and what kinds of medical decisions you can make for yourself. (Most developed countries also don't pay for health care through taxes.) Most developed countries also received a massive social and political reset after WWII, so they haven't had much time yet to experience the long term consequences of adopting positive rights as a principle.
Correct, but that observation doesn't support your argument. Just because positive rights require taxes to implement doesn't mean that taxes only pay for positive rights.
First, you are assuming that lack of positive rights leads to increasing concentration of wealth. Second, you assume that increasing concentration of wealth leads to homelessness and starvation. Both of those assumptions are unjustified (and, in fact, generally wrong.
Here too you jump from "inequality" to "desparation" to "social unrest" to revolutions, which represents a pretty naive view of how totalitarianism arises. In fact, if you look at actual totalitarian governments (fascists, communists, etc.), positive rights were very high on their political programs. The NSDAP, for example, got elected on a program largely of positive rights: a right to a job, a right to old age pensions, a right to land, a right to education, a right to healthcare, a right not to be subjected to "incorrect" political information.
But, tell you what, try to come up with some historical examples where a classically liberal society--that is, a society that only recognizes negative rights--has followed the historical path you describe: increasing economic disparity, massive increases in poverty, followed by social unrest.
I pointed out (without judgment) how regulation raises the cost of labor and that that causes mine owners to consider automation. It's simple, uncontroversial economics that both the left and the right agree on.
My judgment was that replacing peoples in "replacing people in dangerous, boring, repetitive jobs" (like mining) is a good thing.
In response you accuse me of defending the "poor put-upon mine owners" and "choosing to forget that hundreds of workers were killed" etc. Your bigotry and partisanship blinds you to what people actually write, and in response to simple factual statements, you just rattle off political propaganda.
In fact, the implication from your vehement disagreement with my statement is that you actually prefer policies that force people to continue working "dangerous, boring, repetitive jobs". Now, you'll deny that because you view yourself as a champion of the poor and downtrodden, but in practice, that is what a lot of so-called "pro-worker policies" come down to: preservation of a status quo that is dangerous and harmful.
It works reasonably well... for what? I have never in my life seen anything interesting on Twitter. It's mostly people expressing their outrage at various things, and occasionally coming up with a pithy remark; unfortunately, the pithy remarks are rooted in people's prejudices, biases, and bigotry.
Twitter is an intellectual wasteland.
I don't have to guess at what beliefs you have in your head about progressivism because you have stated them. I am saying I held pretty much the same beliefs, but after spending a lot of time reading up on economics, history, and politics, I have come to the conclusion that those beliefs are false. Furthermore, your statements fail to refer to even basic facts that knowledgeable defenders of progressivism would be aware of.
What difference does that make? Your problem seems to be lack of specific knowledge of history, economics, and political science related to progressivism; that knowledge doesn't magically materialize in your head without a lot of reading and thinking about the subject. What major books on history, economics, social science, and/or political science have you actually read in the last few years?
Which part of this was unclear to you?
Whether that makes you a statist and totalitarian or not depends on your definition of "rights". If you're a progressive, then "rights" includes "positive rights" and you're a statist and totalitarian. If you limit "rights" to "negative rights", then you're not a progressive.
You write things like this:
Ten years ago, I might have written the same things.
When your mouth flaps or your fingers twitch, does that have anything to do with what you actually believe?