Hey, I'd love to believe they got voted out over civil liberties issues, but just because I'd like to believe it doesn't mean it's true. I haven't seen any evidence to the effect, and there were a large number of supporters of that sort of legislation who got reelected.
That's the damned problem with being part of the "reality based community", I feel like I need "evidence" to believe things.;-)
I was also skeptical that the comment, as summarized, was made by Newt. Whatever else one thinks of the man, he has not generally been one for increased government control. I'm glad you found this other story that seems to clarify. I imagine that people have a tendancy to take the report seriously, though, because there are many people who do feel that way (that we should give up fundamental rights with the promise that it will protect us from terrorism). Here are twoexamples from/. comments.
Think about it -- if the man is even THINKING of running for President in '08, he certainly isn't going to get elected if he runs on a platform of RESTRICTING basic freedom of speech.
Would this really be much of a problem? Has support of the USA PATRIOT act or its reauthorization been much of an issue for politicians seeking reelection? Not that I've seen. So I'm not sure there's really many negative consequences for politicians working to curtail basic liberties, as long as they use an appropriate boogie man. Besides, it seems like the prevailing political strategies at the moment are really just concerned with "wedge" issues. In many places, as long as you have the "right" viewpoint on abortion the voters don't much care what else you stand for.
The comment being attributed to Gingrich is outlandish enough that I'm a little skeptical that's what he actually said, but, unfortunately, these days it doesn't seem impossible that he did make comments to that effect. Either way, I'll respond to the idea, because even if Gingrich doesn't actually feel this way there are plenty who do (in fact so many that I can grab some parts from previous posts). I'm also going to leave aside for a moment the point that we probably don't have the ability to effectively squelch free speech world wide.
The freedom of speech is one of our most fundamental liberties. It is this (and arguably the right to bear arms) that underlies all other liberties. In order for a democracy to function properly, the people must be able to criticize the government and discuss all the different courses of action. If the government itself is allowed to regulate speech, this ceases to be possible. Without the freedom to speak out and rally support for ideas, all other freedoms can be taken away. At best, taking away the freedom of speech means that the only control the people will truly have over their government is the threat of violence. A principal virtue of democracy is that it allows us to peacefully settle our differences and protect our freedoms.
Over time, many Americans have died to protect our liberty: American revolutionaries fighting the mighty British empire, soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy, or civil rights protesters during Jim Crow who were beaten by police and sometimes killed by the Klan. Now it seems circumstances have called upon us to make a sacrifice, to take a risk, in defense of liberty. Terrorists seek to use our freedoms as a weapon against us, be it our freedom of movement or our right to privacy or our right to free speech. So now we are faced with a choice, do we abandon those liberties in order to deprive these terrorists of this weapon, or do we stand up for liberty and accept that with it may come risks?
If you think about it rationally, the statistical chance of you dying in a terrorist attack is quite low, by any reasonable estimate. You're far more likely to die from any number of causes, e.g. a car crash. The government and media have played up the threat and gotten people into an irrational frenzy over the matter, but really the threat is quite small for most of us. See, for example, this paper on the subject. If you say that the threat of terrorism is a good reason to give up freedom of speech, then what you are saying, rationally, is that you are willing to accept a larger risk for the privlege of driving a car than for having your fundamental liberties.
I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C., just a few miles from the White House. I often go into the city, ride the subway, etc. I am probably at a statistically greater risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack than 99% of Americans. I'm still a young man and in no hurry to die. However, there are a few things worth taking a risk for, and one of those is liberty. That was actually one of the few points I thought almost every American could agree on. If I have to accept these small risks to my life in exchange for my liberty, then I say it is a small price to pay, and I pay it gladly.
I am not trying to claim to be any sort of great patriot here. On the contrary, my point is that the sacrifice most of us are being called upon to make to uphold our liberties is so small that it is basically ludicrous in comparison to those that have been made by the patriots that came before us. So, I just can't see how I could possibly refuse to make that sacrifice and still have any respect for myself. As I said, I would have thought any American would feel the same. I'd like to continue to be able to think of America as, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
I'll close, as I have before, with the famous quotation by Patrick Henry:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
All voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. What makes these electronic systems different is that one or a very small number of individuals can engineer a fraud. However, their ability to execute a fraud is limited by the media polls (we will suspect something if the results are inexplicably different than polled) and knowledge of precinct history.
Haven't there already been several instances of claims of this kind? Isn't it the case that systematic problems with exit polling (and other polls) make it very difficult to make strong, credible claims about election results?
Thus the danger from individuals changing the vote seems to really be that they will shift a close race (say 10% apart) one way or another.
However, this sort of shifting close races doesn't greatly degrade the structural force of voting. All candidates will still try to enact policies to garner support whether they need 50% of the votes or only 45%. Much of voting is random, affected by things like personal charisma rather than policy questions so clearly the system doesn't work because we always have the person who 50% want but rather it works because of the structural pressure not to stray too far from what the people want. Or to put it in political science terms, what does all the work is the tendency of all candidates to shift to the middle so in the long run who actually wins each race isn't so important.
But now comparing the potential for electronic vote fraud to things like machine politics (with conventional ballot stuffing), safe districts, voter disenfranchisement efforts, felon lists etc.. etc.. it doesn't seem like it is such a big deal....
It seems like 10% is a fairly significant margin in most races, so I'm not sure why one would treat this as though it were a small thing. I do appreciate the point that somehow this may not change the structural correcting force arising from elections, but I do think that it can cause a situation where you have tyranny of the majority (or even a large minority). If a politician has a buffer zone of 10%, that may allow him to pander to one particular consituency while completely ignoring all others, as long as the buffer zone is enough to have him safely reelected. Persumably, in the fair election a politician has to aim to satisfy not just a majority of constituents but a sizable enough majority to ensure victory. So, it seems like such a vote buffer might still really lead to very significant qualitative change. If nothing else, one can look to how differently a legislature operates when the majority party has a margin of a few percent of seats versus when they have a margin of, say, 10%. In the latter case, one often sees compromise all but disappear.
I guess another way to look at it is that policy difference can be quite large, even between relatively similar political candidates. People thought, for example, that Bush and Gore were pretty similar, and in many of their policies they were (when compared to the larger spectrum of political ideologies, compare with people like Bernie Sanders or Pat Buchanan). If you believe, however, that the Iraq war would not have happened under a Gore presidency (seems at least plausible), then we're talking about thousands of U.S. soldiers dead, tens of thousands wounded, tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and the fate of an entire nation radically changed. No matter your feelings about the Iraq war, my point is only that this is, indeed, quite signficant. I'd have a hard time trying to argue to the families of all those dead and wounded that it isn't.
I appreciate the point that people aren't voting based on perfect (or, perhaps, even good) information anyway, and there are many other ways to steel elections, but it's hard to see how you can face up to facts like those just mentioned and not at least try. In any case, as Dr. Thompson alluded to, it's a false dichotomy. It's not as though you have to choose to fight only one source of fraud, and it will take different people with different expertise to combat each.
So, in true Slashdot fashion, IANAL but that sounds like it's saying precisely that you're allowed to, say, reverse engineer the word format for the purpose of creating a program that interoperates with that file format, invalidating dada21's original point on the matter. As far as I understood, that's the whole point of the section you've quoted.
Of course, that's doesn't preclude companies from trying to use patents or other methods to lock down their file formats. But I believe that original poster is correct, reverse engineering file formats and protocols is limited mainly by the complexity of the task, not by legal barriers.
if you find a mistake or something which violates your standards, you change it. Period.
I'm not arguing about that at all. My point is only that if you change it after you've published it, you need to somehow acknoledge that you've done so. If you don't do that, it's confusing and deceptive. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about that either. In this case, reruns are generally going to be assumed to be substantively the same as the original airing, so if they want to properly and honestly deal with their audience, they need to tell the audience when it's not. If they thought the content was important enough to be changed, then it's important enough to warrant saying that there was a change. As I said before, this could be the simplest text during the credits, which would be simple and take up no additional time. If you present an altered version as though it is the same thing, it may give the appearance that you are attempting to evade criticism and responsibility. For example, Bill O'Reilly, for example, has done similar things a number of times (e.g. in this instance).
Even books are sometimes changed in subsequent editions when errors of fact or judgment are made.
But this is precisely the point. Books clearly mark when they have altered the contents. Presumably because otherwise it would confuse customers or mislead them as to what they were purchasing.
So then you seem to be conceding the point that it's unethical and only arguing that it's not standard practice. You certainly haven't made any reasonable argument as to why omitting some acknowledgement that the piece has changed is more responsible or even why it is ethical. As I've said, it seems to be relatively standard practice to note revisions in published material. Moreover, it seems to be standard practice among many reputable news organizations from what I've seen of corrections online or on the radio that are appended to pieces rather than just editing out the offending material. I'm sure that there are many less reputable organizations at which ethical standards are more lax. I don't think that's any sort of basis for excusing such unethical behavior, however.
You seem to be restating your claim but without any more evidence or argument to back it up. In response, let me clarify what I said in the GP post. If you remove portions before publishing, then it's called editing. If you do it after publishing, when you are republishing, and you don't at least acknowledge that is what you've done, it becomes deception rather than editing. If you rerun a TV show (in the normal rerun slot, no less) your audience will ordinarily assume it to be the same piece. If you make slight changes, you are therefore decieving them. Deception, particularly if it's in some form of news or quasi-news, is generally held to be unethical. At the very least it is confusing and thus bad practice.
If you wish to edit a piece before republishing, then the proper, ethical thing to do is acknowledge somehow that the re-edited piece is different than the original. Books and articles may carry a revision number to denote changes. Films put on television even note when they have been edited for length, format, content, etc. In this case, all that would have been required would be an onscreen note at the beginning or end of the segment noting an edit had been made. Presumably it would have to last no longer than the deleted comment. This is far more honest than sweeping your mistakes under the rug and pretending they never occured.
The best I can see is that you could claim that this is not how things are generally done. It would seem to be manifestly obvious that it is the way things should be done. It is easy, less deceptive, and less confusing. If the piece in question is supposed to be informative and factual, then it is vital to the integrity of the publishing organization. Moreover, as I alluded to before, it seems that in many places this is already common practice, including in the best news organizations.
There's a big difference between not including something in print or TV segment and removing it in later copies.
It is deceptive and therefore unethical to change the content of a piece after the fact and not acknowledge you've done so.
Plenty of print publications and some of the more responsible TV and radio news outlets (e.g. NPR) give retractions, corrections, or apologies when they say something incorrect or inappropriate. That's a good thing. I can even see editing something before re-airing or reprinting it to correct the problem, but then you must tell people that this is now a different piece, and you should say why. Simply changing a piece and pretending it's the same while throwing you mistakes down the memory hole is completely unethical.
I'm not so sure how true this really is for Physics either. Most of the books I used in 1st year courses in graduate school were decades old. For example, Sakurai's Quantum Mechanics was originally published in 1985, I think, and Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics in 1975. Sure, we were using newer editions, but the differences are small. And there are probably other passable texts that are a bit older. It's true that eventually to get up to date on recent developments you'll need newer books, but you can find decent books to get up to the 1st year graduate level that are quite old.
Freedom of Speech is the right to speak freely. It is NOT the right to speak without repercussion.
When we talk about the lack of Free Speech, we mean that the statements can't be made in the first place. As in, the controlling entity (usually the government) can prevent dissenting opinions from being published in newspapers, books, or webpages.
The concept of "freedom of speech" you're putting forward would be virtually meaningless. If you are not prevented from saying something but then you are harmed afterward, this is still an infringement of freedom of speech. If you got thrown in jail for criticizing the government, that would still be a violation of your first amendment rights, no matter if they allowed you to make the criticism initially. Generally this is how censorship is largely accomplished. It has the same end effect as blocking speech in the first place, because fear causes people to self-censor. In fact, this is probably the most effective form of censorship, because you can instill fear in far more people than you could ever effectively censor directly. Contrary to your claim about China, the threat of retaliation after the fact has been a major part of censorship in China, the USSR, Nazi germany, and virtually every other totalitarian regime. So, the distinction you're making is simply not the correct one to make.
You may be correct that this is not a freedom of speech issue in this case, but not for the reason you seem to be saying. The point is that freedom of speech, as it is understood in the US, is freedom from the government taking actions against you as a result of (or to prevent) your speech. It does not prevent others from taking actions in reaction to your speech, as long as those actions are lawful. In this case, one could say that it's not the government taking action against someone but government courts acting as arbiter in a dispute between individuals. More to the point, however, most people would admit that the freedom of speech (as any other freedom) is not absolute. If your exercising that right causes direct, demonstrable harm to others then their right not to be harmed must be weighed against your right of free speech. We attempt to craft laws that restrict speech only when serious harm is being done and the restriction on meaningful speech is minimal. It can be argued that libel laws fit this bill.
All that being said, unless the bar is set very high for proving slander or libel cases and the damages are set small, then the mere threat of such cases may allow people (or corporations) with a lot of money to scare people into not speaking, whether their speech is actually libelous or not. Because of this, I think one can legitimately question whether such laws do more harm than good in the end.
The point is that liberty is something very important. It is something that can be worth dying for. It is something that many people have suffered or died for. It should never be idly cast aside simply out of convenience or comfort. That is what that quotation from Patrick Henry underscores, and it is this that is, I hope, an American ideal. As I said, talking about unlimited liberty is just incoherent as long as the world has more than one person in it. There will always be some limits on liberty. The ideal I'm arguing for, though, is that liberty must be preserved as much as possible, meaning that we should only be willing to accept infringements on our liberty when they do not infringe upon a substantive liberty interest (i.e. they don't take away any really substantial liberty), they are limited in scope, and we should only accept them after we have a very strong argument that they will actually be effective in achieving some vital goal. It's only when all three of these conditions are satisfied that we should even consider allowing infringements upon our liberty. A large part of the difference then between the American model and the Chinese model, is whether you refuse encroachments on your liberties until it's been proved to you that they should be accepted or whether you accept them by default.
Now, lets consider your examples: Laws against drunk driving only limit your freedom to drive while intoxicated. None of us consider this a fundamental right or even a substantive liberty interest. They are limited, because there are clear criteria about what constitutes intoxication and under what limited circumstances one may be tested, so it doesn't give the government arbitrary power to infringe on our liberty. And, finally, we have direct evidence to believe they will be effective in preventing a significant number of deaths. A law against yelling "fire" in a theater is precisely the same. It limits only speech that has no meaningful, useful, content and only in very specific situations. There are relatively clear criteria under which it applies. And it's the case that without this law, people needlessly died from such incidents.
You take issue with the statement, "[I will] not surrender even a single liberty out of fear," but this is exactly the statement we should all hold to. If we accept any infringements on our liberties, we should do so based upon reason, not irrational fear, and this is precisely the problem with the argument you are making. You're presuming (without any proof) that this wiretapping will actually significantly decrease the risk of terrorism, and you therefore conclude that it's justified, but you can use this rationale to justify taking away any of our rights. Our 4th, 5th, and 6th amendment rights no doubt make it harder to prosecute criminals, for example, but we keep these rights around, even though we'd be safer from crime without them, because they are so important.
Now, if we try to rationally look at this wiretapping question based on the criteria I laid out, it fails on one and perhaps all of them. First of all, privacy is a central, fundamental right. It is evident from many things, including our 4th Amendment, that the framers thought so, and it is clear from the fact that warrantless wiretapping of domestic phone calls has been found unconstitutional in the past that it's still seen so today. My right to privacy is violated when someone listens in on a phone call I'm a party to. Who the other party is and where they are located is entirely immaterial. While you may not personally make international calls, I do, and so do many other Americans. There is also no good evidence that the scope of who is wiretapped is particularly small or specific. Given that countries such as England, Canada, and Germany have had Islamist terror cells, your implication that it'll only matter if you're calling Pakistan or Afghanistan is simply incorrect. Furthermore, if there were reasonable evidence to suggest that the person you
I'm afraid you already have. Go ahead and exercise your freedom of speech at the nearest biker bar and see what happens. Why don't you exercise your right to bare arms on an airplane? For that matter, go to the airport and talk about your bomb collection or even yell "fire!" in a crowded theatre.
The idea of rights as absolute in a society is essentially incoherent. It's simply a logical impossibility, as the "rights" of one person will intrude on the rights of another. No one believes in such a thing, so it's essentially a straw man. It does not follow that therefore any infringements on one's rights is acceptable, as you seem to imply.
As for the rest of what you said, it's basically the same as a thread from a previous article, so forgive me if I simply quote my previous response:
First of all, if you think about it rationally, the statistical chance of you dying in a terrorist attack is quite low, by any reasonable estimate. You're far more likely to die from any number of causes, e.g. a car crash. The government and media have played up the threat and gotten people into an irrational frenzy over the matter, but really the threat is quite small for most of us. Right now what you are saying, rationally, is that you are willing to accept a larger risk for the privlage of driving a car than for having your fundamental liberties.
I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C., just a few miles from the White House. I often go into the city, ride the subway, etc. I am probably at a statistically greater risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack than 99% of Americans. I'm also still in my twenties and in no hurry to die. However, there are a few things worth taking a risk for, and one of those is liberty. That was actually one of the few points I thought almost every American could agree on. If I have to accept these small risks to my life in exchange for my liberty, then I say it is a small price to pay, and I pay it gladly. After all, many have risked far more to protect the same.
If you don't feel the same way, that's your right, but I would say that you are not really suited to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There are some other places where their priorities might suit you better. In China, for example, most people accept that it's more important that the government have the power to protect them from dangerous people and ideas than that the people have freedom and privacy. If you wish to remain in the US because it provides you a cushy life, again that's your right and I respect it, but I think most of us would prefer you not to interfere in our politics, because you fundamentally don't understand what it is to be American. My hope is that, rather than ever leaving, you can learn one day what being an American is truly about. I'll close with a famous quotation from Patrick Henry that expresses what I'm talking about:
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Let me add two things: First, if you want to see further discussion of the statistical risks from terrorist attacks and rational versus irrational responses, I suggest checking out this paper published by the Cato Institute. I have no love for that (or any other) think tank, but I think that particular article is worth a read. Second, I am not trying to claim to be any sort of great patriot here. On the contrary, my point is that the sacrifice most of us are being called upon to make to uphold our liberties is so small that it is basically ludicrous in comparison to those that were made by American revolutionaries fighting the mighty British empire, soldiers who stormed the beach at Normand
Sure, the relative uncertainty is 1/sqrt(N), but the GP was comparing to the number of votes difference between the two candidates, so the appropriate thing was the uncertainty in the number, not the relative uncertainty. There's also the issue that the uncertainty in the vote differential is not equal to the uncertainty in one of the vote totals, but I decided to leave that issue asside for simplicity.
Another other issue that everyone conveniently ignores, of course, is counting error. Simply put, the likely error in any given count of N random items (as long as N is sufficiently large) is 1/sqrt(N). With a really close election, you simply can't know who the true winner is.
While in many instances you can think of counting as having a poissonian distributed "counting error" (the uncertainty of which goes like sqrt(N), not 1/sqrt(N)), one actually has to justify whether such a model applies before using. It doesn't seem clear that it does apply in this case. If what were concerned with is the number of recorded votes for a particular candidate (arising from a number of actual votes for a candidate), then what we'd be interested in is the number of errors. If there's a constant error rate (meaning voting errors are a poissonian stochastic process), then the mean number of errors would be proportional to N rather than sqrt(N), but the important point is that the proportionality constant could be arbitrarily small, depending on the reliability of the voting method. Now it's true that the standard deviation of the number of errors would be equal to sqrt(N), but that really isn't relevant to the question at hand. In short, there's no a priori estimate of the number of voting errors without some model for how those errors occur, and there's no reason to think it should go as sqrt(N).
Now, if you were viewing voting totals as a poll of populous at large, then assuming the sample was large but still small compared to the total population, you might image that the vote total would approximate the will of the populous with a sqrt(N) counting error; however, this reasoning is invalid for two reasons: the proportional of the population is not that small (though still, perhaps, smaller than we'd like), and the sample of people that turnout to vote is not random, and therefore not represenative. In any case, the vote is not a poll but is supposed to reflect the will of the people who actually votes, so again this sqrt(N) counter error is not relevent.
I think there is some sense in determining what the error rates are on voting systems (perhaps this is already done) and what things are, statistically, too close to call, but you simply can't say that was the case in Washington or anywhere else without more evidence.
First of all, if you think about it rationally, the statistical chance of you dying in a terrorist attack is quite low, by any reasonable estimate. You're far more likely to die from any number of causes, e.g. a car crash. The government and media have played up the threat and gotten people into an irrational frenzy over the matter, but really the threat is quite small for most of us. Right now what you are saying, rationally, is that you are willing to accept a larger risk for the privlage of driving a car than for having your fundamental liberties.
I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C., just a few miles from the White House. I often go into the city, ride the subway, etc. I am probably at a statistically greater risk of being the vitim of a terrorist attack than 99% of Americans. I'm also still in my twenties and in no hurry to die. However, there are a few things worth taking a risk for, and one of those is liberty. That was actually one of the few points I thought almost every American could agree on. If I have to accept these small risks to my life in exchange for my liberty, then I say it is a small price to pay, and I pay it gladly. After all, many have risked far more to protect the same.
If you don't feel the same way, that's your right, but I would say that you are not really suited to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There are some other places where their priorities might suit you better. In China, for example, most people accept that it's more important that the government have the power to protect them from dangerous people and ideas than that the people have freedom and privacy. If you wish to remain in the US because it provides you a cushy life, again that's your right and I respect it, but I think most of us would prefer you not to interfere in our politics, because you fundamentally don't understand what it is to be American. My hope is that, rather than ever leaving, you can learn one day what being an American is truly about. I'll close with a famous quotation from Patrick Henry that expresses what I'm talking about:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Seriously, if not being racist means pretending like there are no racial division, then everyone is a racist and you make the term meaningless. Clearly different races are different physically, if nothing else. That's why the whole concept exists in the first place. If we all looked the same, there'd be no concept of race like there is today.
The "races" are different in a few ways physically and a few other correlated traits, but generally that's about it in terms of scientifically well founded differences. After that it's all pseudoscience, prejudices, and anecdotal evidence, in short, bullshit. People want to believe certain things based on their prejudices, and they may even come up with some pseudoscientific justifications for it (as happened in the early 20th century, before WWII), but careful scientific examination of the facts generally shows such claims to be baseless, in reality.
Well, something else we know is that humans like to use generalities. We like to generalize traits, trends, whatever. Helps us deal with understanding overall patterns in data. Thus it should be no surprise that traits get generalized to races. Happens to other things too, you can see all the traits that get generalized to geeks (like not having girlfriends) here on Slashdot.
I agree, it is a natural outgrowth of our tendency to make generalizations, it's just not a good one. Humans are good at recognizing patterns, but we seem to get a lot of false positives, which is why superstition and pseudoscience are all over the place. We seem to be particularly bad about making false inferences based on insufficient, anecdotal evidence when it comes to people. I don't know why exactly, but it seems plausible there might be some evolutionary explanation related to the fact that we lived in much smaller more isolated groups until relatively recently. Racism is just a particularly destructive sort of false inference with a very ugly history, which is why people fear it so much. No one gets too bent out of shape about accusations of geeks not having girlfriends because not too many geeks have been rounded up and sent to death chambers based on that sort of thing.
So if you are going to get all bent every time someone makes a race related observation, ask yourself why. Is it because you think they are a bad person, with a malfunctioning brain? Or maybe is it because you yourself find that you generalize based on things like race, but don't want to admit or verbalize it?
Your idea that it all has something to do with people feeling bad about their own racist tendancies is interesting, but as far as I can see it's without proof. I also think it's mostly a red herring; if there are good reasons to dislike racist comments, then other possible motivations are irrelevant. It seems to me that, for example, a black person may be upset by racist comments about blacks because blacks have been and in some cases continue to be the targets of oppression and violence based on race. And others may get upset by it because, generally, racism is foolishness that leads to the worst forms of human ugliness, which no sane person wants in their society.
Look the answer to racial division in this country isn't to hide it, to try and pretend like we are all the same and make it taboo to talk about. The answer is to talk about it, to laugh about it, and to understand and accept it. We are all different, physically, mentally, socially, etc. We need to celebrate our differences and understand that they aren't a reason to hate. Trying to hide away from them and make them taboo won't do any good.
I can agree with you insofar as I generally think the best response to racism or other prejudice is to calmly debunk it, explain why it is nonsense. I don't think it's generally useful to jump down peoples' throats over it, as that just makes them angry and defensive.
Men are taller than women on the average. Is it an outrage to generalize "men are taller than women"? Yet the same reasoning you just used would supposedly invalidate this. Just replace races with genders.
It would be correct to say "men are taller than women on average." To simply say, "Men are taller than women" is dumb; it's just factually incorrect. It's probably not that offensive, because of the context. For one thing, your height is relatively easily proven, so preceptions about your height just aren't that important. Also, women probably don't like being called short, but it hasn't historically been a major reason for oppression of women or resulted in women being beaten or killed. It's the context that separates a merely dumb statement from an offensive one.
Saying that Puerto Ricans are "hot-blooded" is presumably to say they are violent or irrational or oversexualized. This is an observation that isn't based in fact, other than perhaps the vaguest sort of anecdotal evidence. In other words, it's a dumb statement because it's complete bullshit. What makes it go from being dumb to being offensive to some people is that ideas like those have historically been something white people have thought about non-whites and it has been the basis for denying them rights or even for things like lynchings.
As far as I know, the GP is correct that generally for many measurable characteristics there is more variance within a "race" than between "races". What this means is that it may be there are many differences that exist on average, but knowing a person's race is not a good indicator of whether it may be true for the individual. It's a situation where the population is not well described by the mean. Add to that the fact that many claims about races have no basis in fact, no scientific evidence behind them, and you can generally say that and statement of the form, "Race X has attribute Y" (without a modifier like "on average") is probably pretty stupid. If it also happens to be the case that race X was in the past oppressed, enslaved, or killed en masse with the justification given that they have attribute Y, then you also have a statement that's offensive. It's as simple as that.
In short, the argument you used is a common one, but its a strawman that's intended to trick those who are easily persuaded by arguements that justify their prejudices.
[The two party system is] a huge moderating force that assures that the largest number of the population will be represented. That is why we end up with moderate leaders like George W Bush and Bill Clinton instead of radical leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler.
But in the case of the election of Ahmedinejad, an election consisting of two choices, (one more moderate and one more extreme) resulted in the election of the far more extreme candidate. In fact, he was voted for by a much larger proportion of the population than were most recent US presidents. These is directly counter to the claim that a choice between two candidates will ensure moderation. The 20% vote was only in the primary, but I emphasize again that in the final election a larger proportion of of the population of Iran voted for Ahmedinejad than most recent US presidents got of the American population. So, if your claim was that parties effectively narrow the field and this causes the election of moderate leaders, the election of Ahmedinejad is a stark counterexample. In this case the field was narrowed, and one candidate was clearly much more radical than the other, and yet the more radical one was elected. You are perhaps claiming that neither candidate was acceptable to the populus, but that does not seem consistent with the high voter turnout, nor have you offered any evidence to that effect, so it hardly proves your point.
As far as the issue of the run-off, while we do not have official run-off voting, we do have primaries in the two party system. If approximately half (or less) of the voting public votes in each primary, and each one has at least two serious contenders, it's not at all improbable that the two major party candidates will have only garnered 20-25% of the total votes (of both parties) in the primaries. So, we do have a de facto run-off that can easily be one with the same level of support.
Basically, the example of the Iranian elections seems to either be inconclusive as far as your arguement is concerned or directly contradict it.
But the comment you were replying to stated that he won the runoff election against one other candidate with 62% of the vote (on a 60% turnout). So the majority of people who voted DID vote for him. This would appear to invalidate your point, since it seems he was much more extreme than his opponant.
Now, you could try to, of course, claim that the vote was fixed or something (though this is probably not necessesary, as the supreme leader simply blocks anyone he doesn't like from running and can essentially just overrule the president on everything anyway), but either way your claim that the events of the election prove your point is clearly erronious.
Not to seem too pessimistic here, but exactly what kind of enforcement is going to happen here? Is the judge going to order Bush arrested if they don't stop? Will the judge impound NSA's computers? Sure, it's a step in the right direction, but it seems much more symbolic to me that actually useful.
Look, I think Bush is a huge jerk and an incompetent leader, but I do expect that we will obey a court decision. His administration has become extremely "creative" in their interpretation of the law, I admit, but in the end this will come down to a decision by the SCOTUS on interpreting the constitution. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that they would dispute that ability of the SCOTUS. Moreover, even the gutless yes men that surround Bush would, no doubt, inform him that not abiding by the SCOTUS decision would fundamentally undermine the rule of law, destabilize our government, and do great damage to the country. That's something that Bush does not want, no matter who bad a president he may be.
So, if the supreme court rules against them, the Bush administration will abide by the decision, or at least some creatively interpreted version of it. Perhaps more likely is that they'll do as they did in the Jose Padilla case and have a sudden change of heart at the last minute if they believe the decision will not go their way, hope to avoid having the decision actually made against them. I don't know if that would work here.
This is not true. Where do you pull a figure like that from? Your ass?
Most people in the United States support the wiretapping program.
And yet, you say it's false without presenting any evidence of your own (or perhaps obtaining it from the same region as the GP). I'm not aware of a poll that asks a question like, "Do you trust the current administration?" I think it would be a poor question, because it's too vague to be meaningful. Most of the time, we'd trust people so far in a certain situation; trust is not a binary issue. For example, I trust Bush not to intentionally bring down the USA, but I don't trust him to make accurate statements about intelligence. There are some things we can say, however. We can say that according to polls most people disapprove of the overall job that Bush is doing (see almost any recent presidential approval rating poll), and we can say they're almost evenly split on the question of whether warrentless wiretaps are ok (see, for example, this Newsweek poll). Most of the polls I've seen, but not all, show a slight majority for the opinion that these searches are a bad thing. Perhaps if you're going to attack people for a lack of facts, you should at least try to offer some to support your own claims.
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Hey, I'd love to believe they got voted out over civil liberties issues, but just because I'd like to believe it doesn't mean it's true. I haven't seen any evidence to the effect, and there were a large number of supporters of that sort of legislation who got reelected.
That's the damned problem with being part of the "reality based community", I feel like I need "evidence" to believe things. ;-)
I was also skeptical that the comment, as summarized, was made by Newt. Whatever else one thinks of the man, he has not generally been one for increased government control. I'm glad you found this other story that seems to clarify. I imagine that people have a tendancy to take the report seriously, though, because there are many people who do feel that way (that we should give up fundamental rights with the promise that it will protect us from terrorism). Here are two examples from /. comments.
Would this really be much of a problem? Has support of the USA PATRIOT act or its reauthorization been much of an issue for politicians seeking reelection? Not that I've seen. So I'm not sure there's really many negative consequences for politicians working to curtail basic liberties, as long as they use an appropriate boogie man. Besides, it seems like the prevailing political strategies at the moment are really just concerned with "wedge" issues. In many places, as long as you have the "right" viewpoint on abortion the voters don't much care what else you stand for.
The comment being attributed to Gingrich is outlandish enough that I'm a little skeptical that's what he actually said, but, unfortunately, these days it doesn't seem impossible that he did make comments to that effect. Either way, I'll respond to the idea, because even if Gingrich doesn't actually feel this way there are plenty who do (in fact so many that I can grab some parts from previous posts). I'm also going to leave aside for a moment the point that we probably don't have the ability to effectively squelch free speech world wide.
The freedom of speech is one of our most fundamental liberties. It is this (and arguably the right to bear arms) that underlies all other liberties. In order for a democracy to function properly, the people must be able to criticize the government and discuss all the different courses of action. If the government itself is allowed to regulate speech, this ceases to be possible. Without the freedom to speak out and rally support for ideas, all other freedoms can be taken away. At best, taking away the freedom of speech means that the only control the people will truly have over their government is the threat of violence. A principal virtue of democracy is that it allows us to peacefully settle our differences and protect our freedoms.
Over time, many Americans have died to protect our liberty: American revolutionaries fighting the mighty British empire, soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy, or civil rights protesters during Jim Crow who were beaten by police and sometimes killed by the Klan. Now it seems circumstances have called upon us to make a sacrifice, to take a risk, in defense of liberty. Terrorists seek to use our freedoms as a weapon against us, be it our freedom of movement or our right to privacy or our right to free speech. So now we are faced with a choice, do we abandon those liberties in order to deprive these terrorists of this weapon, or do we stand up for liberty and accept that with it may come risks?
If you think about it rationally, the statistical chance of you dying in a terrorist attack is quite low, by any reasonable estimate. You're far more likely to die from any number of causes, e.g. a car crash. The government and media have played up the threat and gotten people into an irrational frenzy over the matter, but really the threat is quite small for most of us. See, for example, this paper on the subject. If you say that the threat of terrorism is a good reason to give up freedom of speech, then what you are saying, rationally, is that you are willing to accept a larger risk for the privlege of driving a car than for having your fundamental liberties.
I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C., just a few miles from the White House. I often go into the city, ride the subway, etc. I am probably at a statistically greater risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack than 99% of Americans. I'm still a young man and in no hurry to die. However, there are a few things worth taking a risk for, and one of those is liberty. That was actually one of the few points I thought almost every American could agree on. If I have to accept these small risks to my life in exchange for my liberty, then I say it is a small price to pay, and I pay it gladly.
I am not trying to claim to be any sort of great patriot here. On the contrary, my point is that the sacrifice most of us are being called upon to make to uphold our liberties is so small that it is basically ludicrous in comparison to those that have been made by the patriots that came before us. So, I just can't see how I could possibly refuse to make that sacrifice and still have any respect for myself. As I said, I would have thought any American would feel the same. I'd like to continue to be able to think of America as, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
I'll close, as I have before, with the famous quotation by Patrick Henry:
Haven't there already been several instances of claims of this kind? Isn't it the case that systematic problems with exit polling (and other polls) make it very difficult to make strong, credible claims about election results?
It seems like 10% is a fairly significant margin in most races, so I'm not sure why one would treat this as though it were a small thing. I do appreciate the point that somehow this may not change the structural correcting force arising from elections, but I do think that it can cause a situation where you have tyranny of the majority (or even a large minority). If a politician has a buffer zone of 10%, that may allow him to pander to one particular consituency while completely ignoring all others, as long as the buffer zone is enough to have him safely reelected. Persumably, in the fair election a politician has to aim to satisfy not just a majority of constituents but a sizable enough majority to ensure victory. So, it seems like such a vote buffer might still really lead to very significant qualitative change. If nothing else, one can look to how differently a legislature operates when the majority party has a margin of a few percent of seats versus when they have a margin of, say, 10%. In the latter case, one often sees compromise all but disappear.
I guess another way to look at it is that policy difference can be quite large, even between relatively similar political candidates. People thought, for example, that Bush and Gore were pretty similar, and in many of their policies they were (when compared to the larger spectrum of political ideologies, compare with people like Bernie Sanders or Pat Buchanan). If you believe, however, that the Iraq war would not have happened under a Gore presidency (seems at least plausible), then we're talking about thousands of U.S. soldiers dead, tens of thousands wounded, tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and the fate of an entire nation radically changed. No matter your feelings about the Iraq war, my point is only that this is, indeed, quite signficant. I'd have a hard time trying to argue to the families of all those dead and wounded that it isn't.
I appreciate the point that people aren't voting based on perfect (or, perhaps, even good) information anyway, and there are many other ways to steel elections, but it's hard to see how you can face up to facts like those just mentioned and not at least try. In any case, as Dr. Thompson alluded to, it's a false dichotomy. It's not as though you have to choose to fight only one source of fraud, and it will take different people with different expertise to combat each.
What in the world does that mean? Did you mean to say 0.4 GB of memory or 0.4 GHz of processor power* to work?
* I don't think that's really a good metric for processor power either, but at least I have some idea what it means.
Shouldn't it be possible to have the machine "Wake on LAN"? I've never used such a feature, but I thought it exists.
So, in true Slashdot fashion, IANAL but that sounds like it's saying precisely that you're allowed to, say, reverse engineer the word format for the purpose of creating a program that interoperates with that file format, invalidating dada21's original point on the matter. As far as I understood, that's the whole point of the section you've quoted.
Of course, that's doesn't preclude companies from trying to use patents or other methods to lock down their file formats. But I believe that original poster is correct, reverse engineering file formats and protocols is limited mainly by the complexity of the task, not by legal barriers.
I'm not arguing about that at all. My point is only that if you change it after you've published it, you need to somehow acknoledge that you've done so. If you don't do that, it's confusing and deceptive. I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about that either. In this case, reruns are generally going to be assumed to be substantively the same as the original airing, so if they want to properly and honestly deal with their audience, they need to tell the audience when it's not. If they thought the content was important enough to be changed, then it's important enough to warrant saying that there was a change. As I said before, this could be the simplest text during the credits, which would be simple and take up no additional time. If you present an altered version as though it is the same thing, it may give the appearance that you are attempting to evade criticism and responsibility. For example, Bill O'Reilly, for example, has done similar things a number of times (e.g. in this instance).
But this is precisely the point. Books clearly mark when they have altered the contents. Presumably because otherwise it would confuse customers or mislead them as to what they were purchasing.
So then you seem to be conceding the point that it's unethical and only arguing that it's not standard practice. You certainly haven't made any reasonable argument as to why omitting some acknowledgement that the piece has changed is more responsible or even why it is ethical. As I've said, it seems to be relatively standard practice to note revisions in published material. Moreover, it seems to be standard practice among many reputable news organizations from what I've seen of corrections online or on the radio that are appended to pieces rather than just editing out the offending material. I'm sure that there are many less reputable organizations at which ethical standards are more lax. I don't think that's any sort of basis for excusing such unethical behavior, however.
You seem to be restating your claim but without any more evidence or argument to back it up. In response, let me clarify what I said in the GP post. If you remove portions before publishing, then it's called editing. If you do it after publishing, when you are republishing, and you don't at least acknowledge that is what you've done, it becomes deception rather than editing. If you rerun a TV show (in the normal rerun slot, no less) your audience will ordinarily assume it to be the same piece. If you make slight changes, you are therefore decieving them. Deception, particularly if it's in some form of news or quasi-news, is generally held to be unethical. At the very least it is confusing and thus bad practice.
If you wish to edit a piece before republishing, then the proper, ethical thing to do is acknowledge somehow that the re-edited piece is different than the original. Books and articles may carry a revision number to denote changes. Films put on television even note when they have been edited for length, format, content, etc. In this case, all that would have been required would be an onscreen note at the beginning or end of the segment noting an edit had been made. Presumably it would have to last no longer than the deleted comment. This is far more honest than sweeping your mistakes under the rug and pretending they never occured.
The best I can see is that you could claim that this is not how things are generally done. It would seem to be manifestly obvious that it is the way things should be done. It is easy, less deceptive, and less confusing. If the piece in question is supposed to be informative and factual, then it is vital to the integrity of the publishing organization. Moreover, as I alluded to before, it seems that in many places this is already common practice, including in the best news organizations.
Two comments:
Plenty of print publications and some of the more responsible TV and radio news outlets (e.g. NPR) give retractions, corrections, or apologies when they say something incorrect or inappropriate. That's a good thing. I can even see editing something before re-airing or reprinting it to correct the problem, but then you must tell people that this is now a different piece, and you should say why. Simply changing a piece and pretending it's the same while throwing you mistakes down the memory hole is completely unethical.
I'm not so sure how true this really is for Physics either. Most of the books I used in 1st year courses in graduate school were decades old. For example, Sakurai's Quantum Mechanics was originally published in 1985, I think, and Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics in 1975. Sure, we were using newer editions, but the differences are small. And there are probably other passable texts that are a bit older. It's true that eventually to get up to date on recent developments you'll need newer books, but you can find decent books to get up to the 1st year graduate level that are quite old.
The concept of "freedom of speech" you're putting forward would be virtually meaningless. If you are not prevented from saying something but then you are harmed afterward, this is still an infringement of freedom of speech. If you got thrown in jail for criticizing the government, that would still be a violation of your first amendment rights, no matter if they allowed you to make the criticism initially. Generally this is how censorship is largely accomplished. It has the same end effect as blocking speech in the first place, because fear causes people to self-censor. In fact, this is probably the most effective form of censorship, because you can instill fear in far more people than you could ever effectively censor directly. Contrary to your claim about China, the threat of retaliation after the fact has been a major part of censorship in China, the USSR, Nazi germany, and virtually every other totalitarian regime. So, the distinction you're making is simply not the correct one to make.
You may be correct that this is not a freedom of speech issue in this case, but not for the reason you seem to be saying. The point is that freedom of speech, as it is understood in the US, is freedom from the government taking actions against you as a result of (or to prevent) your speech. It does not prevent others from taking actions in reaction to your speech, as long as those actions are lawful. In this case, one could say that it's not the government taking action against someone but government courts acting as arbiter in a dispute between individuals. More to the point, however, most people would admit that the freedom of speech (as any other freedom) is not absolute. If your exercising that right causes direct, demonstrable harm to others then their right not to be harmed must be weighed against your right of free speech. We attempt to craft laws that restrict speech only when serious harm is being done and the restriction on meaningful speech is minimal. It can be argued that libel laws fit this bill.
All that being said, unless the bar is set very high for proving slander or libel cases and the damages are set small, then the mere threat of such cases may allow people (or corporations) with a lot of money to scare people into not speaking, whether their speech is actually libelous or not. Because of this, I think one can legitimately question whether such laws do more harm than good in the end.
The point is that liberty is something very important. It is something that can be worth dying for. It is something that many people have suffered or died for. It should never be idly cast aside simply out of convenience or comfort. That is what that quotation from Patrick Henry underscores, and it is this that is, I hope, an American ideal. As I said, talking about unlimited liberty is just incoherent as long as the world has more than one person in it. There will always be some limits on liberty. The ideal I'm arguing for, though, is that liberty must be preserved as much as possible, meaning that we should only be willing to accept infringements on our liberty when they do not infringe upon a substantive liberty interest (i.e. they don't take away any really substantial liberty), they are limited in scope, and we should only accept them after we have a very strong argument that they will actually be effective in achieving some vital goal. It's only when all three of these conditions are satisfied that we should even consider allowing infringements upon our liberty. A large part of the difference then between the American model and the Chinese model, is whether you refuse encroachments on your liberties until it's been proved to you that they should be accepted or whether you accept them by default.
Now, lets consider your examples: Laws against drunk driving only limit your freedom to drive while intoxicated. None of us consider this a fundamental right or even a substantive liberty interest. They are limited, because there are clear criteria about what constitutes intoxication and under what limited circumstances one may be tested, so it doesn't give the government arbitrary power to infringe on our liberty. And, finally, we have direct evidence to believe they will be effective in preventing a significant number of deaths. A law against yelling "fire" in a theater is precisely the same. It limits only speech that has no meaningful, useful, content and only in very specific situations. There are relatively clear criteria under which it applies. And it's the case that without this law, people needlessly died from such incidents.
You take issue with the statement, "[I will] not surrender even a single liberty out of fear," but this is exactly the statement we should all hold to. If we accept any infringements on our liberties, we should do so based upon reason, not irrational fear, and this is precisely the problem with the argument you are making. You're presuming (without any proof) that this wiretapping will actually significantly decrease the risk of terrorism, and you therefore conclude that it's justified, but you can use this rationale to justify taking away any of our rights. Our 4th, 5th, and 6th amendment rights no doubt make it harder to prosecute criminals, for example, but we keep these rights around, even though we'd be safer from crime without them, because they are so important.
Now, if we try to rationally look at this wiretapping question based on the criteria I laid out, it fails on one and perhaps all of them. First of all, privacy is a central, fundamental right. It is evident from many things, including our 4th Amendment, that the framers thought so, and it is clear from the fact that warrantless wiretapping of domestic phone calls has been found unconstitutional in the past that it's still seen so today. My right to privacy is violated when someone listens in on a phone call I'm a party to. Who the other party is and where they are located is entirely immaterial. While you may not personally make international calls, I do, and so do many other Americans. There is also no good evidence that the scope of who is wiretapped is particularly small or specific. Given that countries such as England, Canada, and Germany have had Islamist terror cells, your implication that it'll only matter if you're calling Pakistan or Afghanistan is simply incorrect. Furthermore, if there were reasonable evidence to suggest that the person you
The idea of rights as absolute in a society is essentially incoherent. It's simply a logical impossibility, as the "rights" of one person will intrude on the rights of another. No one believes in such a thing, so it's essentially a straw man. It does not follow that therefore any infringements on one's rights is acceptable, as you seem to imply.
As for the rest of what you said, it's basically the same as a thread from a previous article, so forgive me if I simply quote my previous response:
Let me add two things: First, if you want to see further discussion of the statistical risks from terrorist attacks and rational versus irrational responses, I suggest checking out this paper published by the Cato Institute. I have no love for that (or any other) think tank, but I think that particular article is worth a read. Second, I am not trying to claim to be any sort of great patriot here. On the contrary, my point is that the sacrifice most of us are being called upon to make to uphold our liberties is so small that it is basically ludicrous in comparison to those that were made by American revolutionaries fighting the mighty British empire, soldiers who stormed the beach at Normand
Sure, the relative uncertainty is 1/sqrt(N), but the GP was comparing to the number of votes difference between the two candidates, so the appropriate thing was the uncertainty in the number, not the relative uncertainty. There's also the issue that the uncertainty in the vote differential is not equal to the uncertainty in one of the vote totals, but I decided to leave that issue asside for simplicity.
While in many instances you can think of counting as having a poissonian distributed "counting error" (the uncertainty of which goes like sqrt(N), not 1/sqrt(N)), one actually has to justify whether such a model applies before using. It doesn't seem clear that it does apply in this case. If what were concerned with is the number of recorded votes for a particular candidate (arising from a number of actual votes for a candidate), then what we'd be interested in is the number of errors. If there's a constant error rate (meaning voting errors are a poissonian stochastic process), then the mean number of errors would be proportional to N rather than sqrt(N), but the important point is that the proportionality constant could be arbitrarily small, depending on the reliability of the voting method. Now it's true that the standard deviation of the number of errors would be equal to sqrt(N), but that really isn't relevant to the question at hand. In short, there's no a priori estimate of the number of voting errors without some model for how those errors occur, and there's no reason to think it should go as sqrt(N).
Now, if you were viewing voting totals as a poll of populous at large, then assuming the sample was large but still small compared to the total population, you might image that the vote total would approximate the will of the populous with a sqrt(N) counting error; however, this reasoning is invalid for two reasons: the proportional of the population is not that small (though still, perhaps, smaller than we'd like), and the sample of people that turnout to vote is not random, and therefore not represenative. In any case, the vote is not a poll but is supposed to reflect the will of the people who actually votes, so again this sqrt(N) counter error is not relevent.
I think there is some sense in determining what the error rates are on voting systems (perhaps this is already done) and what things are, statistically, too close to call, but you simply can't say that was the case in Washington or anywhere else without more evidence.
First of all, if you think about it rationally, the statistical chance of you dying in a terrorist attack is quite low, by any reasonable estimate. You're far more likely to die from any number of causes, e.g. a car crash. The government and media have played up the threat and gotten people into an irrational frenzy over the matter, but really the threat is quite small for most of us. Right now what you are saying, rationally, is that you are willing to accept a larger risk for the privlage of driving a car than for having your fundamental liberties.
I live in the suburbs of Washington D.C., just a few miles from the White House. I often go into the city, ride the subway, etc. I am probably at a statistically greater risk of being the vitim of a terrorist attack than 99% of Americans. I'm also still in my twenties and in no hurry to die. However, there are a few things worth taking a risk for, and one of those is liberty. That was actually one of the few points I thought almost every American could agree on. If I have to accept these small risks to my life in exchange for my liberty, then I say it is a small price to pay, and I pay it gladly. After all, many have risked far more to protect the same.
If you don't feel the same way, that's your right, but I would say that you are not really suited to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There are some other places where their priorities might suit you better. In China, for example, most people accept that it's more important that the government have the power to protect them from dangerous people and ideas than that the people have freedom and privacy. If you wish to remain in the US because it provides you a cushy life, again that's your right and I respect it, but I think most of us would prefer you not to interfere in our politics, because you fundamentally don't understand what it is to be American. My hope is that, rather than ever leaving, you can learn one day what being an American is truly about. I'll close with a famous quotation from Patrick Henry that expresses what I'm talking about:
The "races" are different in a few ways physically and a few other correlated traits, but generally that's about it in terms of scientifically well founded differences. After that it's all pseudoscience, prejudices, and anecdotal evidence, in short, bullshit. People want to believe certain things based on their prejudices, and they may even come up with some pseudoscientific justifications for it (as happened in the early 20th century, before WWII), but careful scientific examination of the facts generally shows such claims to be baseless, in reality.
I agree, it is a natural outgrowth of our tendency to make generalizations, it's just not a good one. Humans are good at recognizing patterns, but we seem to get a lot of false positives, which is why superstition and pseudoscience are all over the place. We seem to be particularly bad about making false inferences based on insufficient, anecdotal evidence when it comes to people. I don't know why exactly, but it seems plausible there might be some evolutionary explanation related to the fact that we lived in much smaller more isolated groups until relatively recently. Racism is just a particularly destructive sort of false inference with a very ugly history, which is why people fear it so much. No one gets too bent out of shape about accusations of geeks not having girlfriends because not too many geeks have been rounded up and sent to death chambers based on that sort of thing.
Your idea that it all has something to do with people feeling bad about their own racist tendancies is interesting, but as far as I can see it's without proof. I also think it's mostly a red herring; if there are good reasons to dislike racist comments, then other possible motivations are irrelevant. It seems to me that, for example, a black person may be upset by racist comments about blacks because blacks have been and in some cases continue to be the targets of oppression and violence based on race. And others may get upset by it because, generally, racism is foolishness that leads to the worst forms of human ugliness, which no sane person wants in their society.
I can agree with you insofar as I generally think the best response to racism or other prejudice is to calmly debunk it, explain why it is nonsense. I don't think it's generally useful to jump down peoples' throats over it, as that just makes them angry and defensive.
It would be correct to say "men are taller than women on average." To simply say, "Men are taller than women" is dumb; it's just factually incorrect. It's probably not that offensive, because of the context. For one thing, your height is relatively easily proven, so preceptions about your height just aren't that important. Also, women probably don't like being called short, but it hasn't historically been a major reason for oppression of women or resulted in women being beaten or killed. It's the context that separates a merely dumb statement from an offensive one.
Saying that Puerto Ricans are "hot-blooded" is presumably to say they are violent or irrational or oversexualized. This is an observation that isn't based in fact, other than perhaps the vaguest sort of anecdotal evidence. In other words, it's a dumb statement because it's complete bullshit. What makes it go from being dumb to being offensive to some people is that ideas like those have historically been something white people have thought about non-whites and it has been the basis for denying them rights or even for things like lynchings.
As far as I know, the GP is correct that generally for many measurable characteristics there is more variance within a "race" than between "races". What this means is that it may be there are many differences that exist on average, but knowing a person's race is not a good indicator of whether it may be true for the individual. It's a situation where the population is not well described by the mean. Add to that the fact that many claims about races have no basis in fact, no scientific evidence behind them, and you can generally say that and statement of the form, "Race X has attribute Y" (without a modifier like "on average") is probably pretty stupid. If it also happens to be the case that race X was in the past oppressed, enslaved, or killed en masse with the justification given that they have attribute Y, then you also have a statement that's offensive. It's as simple as that.
In short, the argument you used is a common one, but its a strawman that's intended to trick those who are easily persuaded by arguements that justify their prejudices.
You said
But in the case of the election of Ahmedinejad, an election consisting of two choices, (one more moderate and one more extreme) resulted in the election of the far more extreme candidate. In fact, he was voted for by a much larger proportion of the population than were most recent US presidents. These is directly counter to the claim that a choice between two candidates will ensure moderation. The 20% vote was only in the primary, but I emphasize again that in the final election a larger proportion of of the population of Iran voted for Ahmedinejad than most recent US presidents got of the American population. So, if your claim was that parties effectively narrow the field and this causes the election of moderate leaders, the election of Ahmedinejad is a stark counterexample. In this case the field was narrowed, and one candidate was clearly much more radical than the other, and yet the more radical one was elected. You are perhaps claiming that neither candidate was acceptable to the populus, but that does not seem consistent with the high voter turnout, nor have you offered any evidence to that effect, so it hardly proves your point.
As far as the issue of the run-off, while we do not have official run-off voting, we do have primaries in the two party system. If approximately half (or less) of the voting public votes in each primary, and each one has at least two serious contenders, it's not at all improbable that the two major party candidates will have only garnered 20-25% of the total votes (of both parties) in the primaries. So, we do have a de facto run-off that can easily be one with the same level of support.
Basically, the example of the Iranian elections seems to either be inconclusive as far as your arguement is concerned or directly contradict it.
But the comment you were replying to stated that he won the runoff election against one other candidate with 62% of the vote (on a 60% turnout). So the majority of people who voted DID vote for him. This would appear to invalidate your point, since it seems he was much more extreme than his opponant.
Now, you could try to, of course, claim that the vote was fixed or something (though this is probably not necessesary, as the supreme leader simply blocks anyone he doesn't like from running and can essentially just overrule the president on everything anyway), but either way your claim that the events of the election prove your point is clearly erronious.
I can't see how this, in itself, proves your point.
Look, I think Bush is a huge jerk and an incompetent leader, but I do expect that we will obey a court decision. His administration has become extremely "creative" in their interpretation of the law, I admit, but in the end this will come down to a decision by the SCOTUS on interpreting the constitution. I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that they would dispute that ability of the SCOTUS. Moreover, even the gutless yes men that surround Bush would, no doubt, inform him that not abiding by the SCOTUS decision would fundamentally undermine the rule of law, destabilize our government, and do great damage to the country. That's something that Bush does not want, no matter who bad a president he may be.
So, if the supreme court rules against them, the Bush administration will abide by the decision, or at least some creatively interpreted version of it. Perhaps more likely is that they'll do as they did in the Jose Padilla case and have a sudden change of heart at the last minute if they believe the decision will not go their way, hope to avoid having the decision actually made against them. I don't know if that would work here.
And yet, you say it's false without presenting any evidence of your own (or perhaps obtaining it from the same region as the GP). I'm not aware of a poll that asks a question like, "Do you trust the current administration?" I think it would be a poor question, because it's too vague to be meaningful. Most of the time, we'd trust people so far in a certain situation; trust is not a binary issue. For example, I trust Bush not to intentionally bring down the USA, but I don't trust him to make accurate statements about intelligence. There are some things we can say, however. We can say that according to polls most people disapprove of the overall job that Bush is doing (see almost any recent presidential approval rating poll), and we can say they're almost evenly split on the question of whether warrentless wiretaps are ok (see, for example, this Newsweek poll). Most of the polls I've seen, but not all, show a slight majority for the opinion that these searches are a bad thing. Perhaps if you're going to attack people for a lack of facts, you should at least try to offer some to support your own claims.