Free speech is an ideal because it is about political speech and the right of dissent
No.
Correction, hell FUCKING no. I'm going to take the liberty to cut loose with crude offensive language while I proceed with vitally important political speech.
You, and the people who modded you up, are exactly the authoritarian puritanical asshats proudly trying to march this country forward into the 12th century.
Free Speech is about the fact that ideas do not break your leg or pick your pocket. Free Speech is about the fact that governmental censorship of unwanted views and ideas is a self-reinforcing road to totalitarianism.
Free Speech is about the fact that censorship of views and ideas and messages is absolutely incompatible with a free and healthy society.
It is free speech right to yell fire in a movie theater. The 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights in fact PROHIBITS the government from passing a content-based law against that speech. However you do not have the right to deliberately or recklessly endanger the lives of other people. The government can and does pass laws against injuring other people, and laws against willfully or recklessly placing people at risk of such injury. Those laws have absolutely nothing to do with speech, they do not target ideas or content. The fact that you happened to use speech in the movie theater to endanger or injure people is irrelevant, you can and will be prosecuted for endangering or injuring people. You do not have the right to break my leg.
You have every free speech right to say that a tin watch is made of solid gold. However you cannot fraudulently sell someone an empty box, and you cannot fraudulently sell someone a "gold" watch made of tin. You do not have the right to "pick my pocket" by fraud.
Free speech is not a right for minors to be lewd.
Awwwwww..... does it make you feel offended when you hear a minor be lewd? Does it make you feel sad or angry or maybe even disturbingly horny when a minor is lewd? Do those sorts of words upset your poor little sensitive feelings?
Well guess fucking what. The force of government and gun-toting enforcers and prisons are not here to protect your feelings. They are not here to shoot or imprison people who make you feel bad. They are not here to shoot or imprison people who offend you. Grow some fucking self responsibility. If something upsets your feelings or offends you then those are YOUR feelings and it's not up to the government to protect them.
You have no right to point guns at people and imprison them just because their words or their messages or their pictures or their ideas offend you or upset you or make you feel sad or make you feel angry or make you feel horny or make you feel anything else.
If I want to communicate a message by burning the US flag, or the flag of any other nation, Free Speech means that the government cannot imprison me for that message simply because it does not like that message. You have no right to point a gun at me or imprison me simply because my message upsets you or offends you. However the government can and often does have laws about fires. There can be and sometimes are laws against starting large open fires burning anything (even blank cloth) in the middle of the sidewalk. If there's a law criminalizing generic open fires on the public street then I can be arrested whether I burn a blank cloth or a flag. However you cannot write a law criminalizing flag burning simply because you don't like the message and it hurts your poor little feeeeeelings.
The student should be lucky she was only suspended, rather than being sued for defamation.
A school principal cannot abuse the powers of government position to punish anyone he sees fit to personally punish. I don't know if you shortsightedly overlooked that completely, or if you simply think it's swell for anyone with government powers to stomp down on anyone who offends you.
This is a Canadian college, so it's the CRIA that they have to deal with... though it's not like there's much different between them.
I have an idea for a great project that the article submitter could do, it would be great at any college. Most especially any college in the US. In fact I would like to thank the RIAA for essentially proposing the idea, and in fact having it passed into law here in the US.
(29) The institution certifies that the institution-- (A) has developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents; and (B) will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property, as determined by the institution in consultation with the chief technology officer or other designated officer of the institution.
I think it is in fact a FANTASTIC idea for colleges to "offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property". There are a multitude of sources across the internet for Creative Commons or other 100% legal music. I think you (and any other college) should set up a hosting site on your internal network. A huge easy repository of hundreds of gigs of 100% legal 100% non-RIAA 100% non-CRIA music. They want colleges to offer an alternative to the illegal downloading of their music? I say we damn well give them exactly what they want. The most effective way for a college to deter illegal downloads is to drown students in an overwhelming more-than-you-can-eat supply of legal downloads. Trying to block students from illegal downloads is a largely hopeless task because students are going to find ways to circumvent those blocks to get what they want. But if you get students hooked on more-than-you-can-eat legal music downloads, that is the most effective way to reduce or eliminate the desire for RIAA-music downloads. For any college in the US, I suggest this is the best and most effective way to comply with the law. If you are in Canada or anywhere else, I still say it's a great way to get a jump on things before the RIAA-CRIA-or-other-clone comes knocking. You can tell them that you already have an official school policy and program in place to minimize the downloading - illegal or otherwise - of their music.
The simplest system is just to have a basic server on the campus network hosting all of these files, but there are endless ways you can expand and improve upon that service and build a powerful community interest in it. You could have some sort of streaming service. You could have individual student accounts with some mechanism of tracking individual "collections" of the songs they like and playlists and maybe personal ratings of songs. You can have some simple way for students to recommend and "share" these songs with each other. You could set up some sort of streaming "radio channels", and maybe even a way for students to run "radio channels". You could use the data on student music collections or song rankings to to do intelligent recommendations of other songs they may like.
You can do something as simple as a minimalistic webserver just hosting the files, or you can build it as big and as advanced as you like. By having this on the campus internal network you cut down on external ISP bandwidth needs.
Oh, and the best part? Getting to bask in the delicious irony of giving the RIAA&friends exactly what they asked for with a big fat FUCK-YOU-UP-THE-ASS-SIDEWAYS-WITH-A-PING-PONG-PADDLE.
I read the post you linked. It provided a perfect example of what I was saying. If you read to the bottom it concludes with "However, people will not honestly vote. Hill-dogg supporters will look at Obama's slight lead, and since they'd much rather prefer Hill-dogg instead of Obama, they vote like this: Hill-dogg 10, Obama 1, McCain 0. Obama supporters, worried about their slight lead, vote the converse. McCain supporters vote McCain 10, Hill-dogg 0, Obama 0.
If you tweak that "Obama 1" into "Obama 0", you'll see that his example has degenerated exactly the way I said it would. It turns into approval voting with people using the limit values - 0 and 10.
His example was intended to prove what approval voting is BAD... intended to prove how and why approval voting will elect the worst candidate last choice candiate... but it also showed the min-max effect turning range voting into 0 1 approval voting.
I give a full explanation why there is never ever ever any valid reason to vote anything except 0 or 9 in this post.
The best voting system is called Condorcet voting. You put the candidates in order, like Hillary #1 Barack #2 and McCain #3. Condocet then look at it as a bunch of 1v1 races. It looks at Hillary-vs-McCain, Barack-vs-McCain, and Hillary-vs-Obama as three seperate races. With 60% Democrats, presumably Hillary would beat McCain in that race, and Obama would beat McCain in that other race. It would also look across all voters to decide Hillary-vs-Obama. Democrats might have some light preference one way or the other, but in fact it would likely be the Republicans overwhelmingly deciding that race based upon which candidate they found less offensive - which candidate they put in their second slot. Condorcet voting finds the best most "central" candidate.
By a variety of mathematically reasonable standards of measurement, Condorcet is provably the best voting system when there are more than two candidates
I highly recommend the website Accurate Democracy. They give an excellent discussion of Condorcet and a variety of other problems of democracy and solutions to building the best possible democracy. He have learned a lot about how political and election systems work in the last few hundred years. The authors of the US Constitution were brilliant guys, but there's a lot they just didn't know, and in a number of ways our system of government is flawed or just plain broken, and in many cases we do know how to fix it. It just tends to be politically impossible impossible to have our system vote to fix itself. The biases in place and those who benefit from the current power distribution have no interest in surrendering those selfserving advantages. For example it is virtually impossible to make any change to the presidential election process because any change will create a short term benefit towards either the Democrats or the Republicans, so the other side will always rationalize arguments to reject it.
If by any chance you found a new Democratic government from scratch somewhere else, I'd be more than happy to join up to use all of the accumulated knowledge from math and history and sociology and every other field of human knowledge to design the best possible mechanisms of Democracy we know how:D
P.S. If you wanted to make the link in your post a proper clickable link, it goes like this: <A href="address">text</A>
You write: <A href="http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=969061&cid=25081019">Hello there!</A>
Imagine it was an approval voting election - you can vote 0 or 1 for each candidate. You vote the best way you can trying as hard as possible to get what you want.
Now imagine you walk out and discover there's been some sort of glitch in the voter list. The poll worker says your name is on the list again, and you are allowed to go in and vote a second time.
So you go back in, and you again vote trying as hard as possible to get what you want. You cast the exact same vote as last time.
You come out, and your name is still showing up on the voter list again. In fact the voter list says you are allowed to walk into the voting booth nine times, you are allowed to vote 0 or 1 for each candidate, nine times.
Well, there are tens of millions of voters and you're trying as hard as possible to get the best possible result. Each time you go in you vote exactly the same best way.
At the end of the process for each candidate you have either voted 0 nine times or voted 1 nine times. In total you have voted 0 or 9 for each candidate.
It certainly possible for you to go in and throw away some of those votes, but you get less voting power. If you ever vote differently any of the nine times you go in, you are always mathematically worse off. By sometimes voting 0 for a candidate and sometimes voting 1 in order to create a "5" vote for him, either the 0 votes have a bigger chance of screwing you out of what you want or the 1 votes have a bigger chance of screwing you out of what you want. If you vote 5 for your second choice candidate you either risk pushing him ahead of your first choice candidate, or by voting 5 you risk letting him fall behind some candidate you hate. Out of millions of votes, one or the other of those two issues is will be more important. Out of millions of votes you either need to vote 0 so your second choice does not knock out your first choice, or you need to vote 9 for your second choice to keep some unwanted candidate from winning.
It is really hard to change the result of an election based on your individual vote. You need the maximum "volume" you can get trying to make your voting voice heard. Out of millions of votes you need the full 0 or full 9 "volume" to maximize the slim chance your vote will be heard, the the deciding vote controlling the election.
The only reason to muck around with any number from 1 to 8 is if there's some candidate you know has zero chance of winning, and you want to "send a message" by ranking your first choice a 9 and your second choice an 8. But if that candidate has no chance of winning, you can send a stronger message by ranking him a 9 anyway. Eight people ranking him 9 would send as strong a message as nine people ranking him 8.
Mr Supervisor, ok I did the research. What you want conflicts with all of the standard Open Source software licenses that are out there. It's a legal thing about how Open Source licenses usually work. The only way to do it would be to have a lawyer write a custom license. I'm not sure how much it would cost, but the real problem is that using custom untested license could be a real mess.
I do have some good news though, Mr Supervisor! A lot of academic software development like ours does get released under the standard licenses. It's standard practice for papers to give citations when they use software like ours, and citation is virtually always given when software comes with some polite non-license note that such citation is expected.
A citation request really works about as well as putting it into the license. We wouldn't want to actually go to court over it, would we? If not, then really isn't much difference anyway.
Sorry for the long below, but wow, your post touched across umpteen huge issues from Supreme Court philosophy to abortion to the budget to the candidates to Iraq and more, and stupid stupid me had to ramble on about each and every one them. Oh well. Chuckle.
Ok, you have a good point about the Commerce Clause being stretched to absurd lengths to allow the government to regulate things. And I'll grant you that Scalia and Thomas are the two Justices ruling strongly against such Commerce Clause stretches.
However I also seriously object to completely gutting a critical Article of the Bill of Rights, and trampling across most of the others, all fundamentally increasing government powers.
The Commerce Clause is a powerful weapon that can *only* be used to *increase* and justify government intrusion into our lives, but the 9th Amendment is an even more powerful weapon that can *only* be used to *prohibit* government intrusion into our lives. For example the word "privacy" cannot be found within the text of the Constitution - except within the 9th Amendment.
When the Constitution was being written and passed there was argument that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the government couldn't do anything not directly authorized by the Constitution. We now know that was incredibly naive. The basic Constitution directly or indirectly supplies creative politicians with endless opportunities to stomp across everything in the Bill of Rights.
Were it not for the ideas and contents of the Bill of Rights, all of the most finely crafted work that went into the rest of the Constitution would have left us with a government little better than China or the Soviet Union. The entire history of everything of value of our government could well be written with nothing more than the endless stream of acts passed by our legislature and struck down based upon the contents of the Bill of Rights, based upon the endless stream of acts of executive power that were struck down based upon the contents of tho Bill of Rights, based upon the endless stream of acts of Judical power that were struck down based upon the contents of tho Bill of Rights.
When they wrote the bill of rights they had no idea just how critical it would be for shaping and controlling our government. But one thing they did clearly recognize was that it was incomplete. That the rights laid out in the Bill of Rights were merely the examples they could think of at the moment.
(Another naive point was that the Bill of Rights originally only applied to the Federal government. You had a 4th Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, but only if someone was idiot enough to put a federal badge on the officer doing it. Just make the officer carry a state or local badge instead and the police get to fuck with you at will. Yeah, *that* is a real useful right. Doh!)
I don't like government just assuming powers.
Yes, but even more important is the government denying itself powers.
The 9th Amendment recognizes that there are equally important rights and protections that we need to keep the government from stomping on our lives, and that.... yes.... we would have to "make them up" as we go along because they aren't written into the Constitution. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
It is only in 9th Amendment privacy that you can find any privacy right, any idea that the government has no business peering into our bedrooms and imprisoning consenting adults, imprisoning them on no more basis than that 51% of the legislature finds certain styles of sex to be really really yucky.... ewww gross a man stuck his wiener in a man's (or woman's!) butt-hole or mouth. (Yeah sodomy laws generally criminalized a standard heterosexual blowjob, but of course it was only used to prosecute gays.)
The Commerce clause is used to let the Federal government meddle in our lives.... but *only* in ways
If we deflated it back down so California got 15, then Florida would have 9 and Wyoming would still have 3 and suddenly, we would have a number more useful swing states.
Holy crap. Under the current electoral system it only takes 50% of the vote in states representing 42.4% of the population to win the presidency... meaning that 21.2% of voters could appoint a president against up to 79.8% opposition.
If you made your suggested change, by my calculations it would only take 50% of the vote across states representing 22% of the population to win the presidency. Meaning that 11% of voters could appoint a president against up to 89% opposition.
Obviously it's nearly impossible for an election to hit those mathematical limits, current real elections only reverse the overall vote by minor margins. But the current system could reverse the overall vote by a much larger margin, and a "California got 15, Wyoming still have 3" system could and would result in absolutely insane reversals of the overall vote. It is already a mess when there is a 1% or 2% reversal of the popular vote, just imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if 2/3rds or more of the population revolted against a candidate that lost the overall vote by more than 2-to-1.
I think I'd almost favor state implementing a district election system, similar to senate seats, for electoral votes, allowing an even spread based on population clusters...
Senate? I think you meant House districts? That would be much more viable. But if we're going to change the system we seriously need a fix that cleans up the 3rd party problem. And I don't think there's any reasonably way to do that without also going to a direct popular vote system. You can't translate any 3rd party fix through any regional-vote then elector-vote-for-president two level system.
resulted in things like the blatant abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause, blackmailing states into accepting things like speed limits and Real ID, etc.
Yeah, right. Because everything would be sooo much better if only we had corrupt politicians appointing even more corrupt politicians to run things.
Wow! Freaky! That's like "I see dead people" supernatural vision like in that Sixth Sense movie! They're like totally missing dude.... but I still see them.
No, if we're going to re-write the election system then we we should go with the mathematically best one, and that is Condorcet. There are cases where Single Transferrable Vote clearly elects the "wrong" candidate in comparison to Condorcet.
In the voting booth the election process for Condorcet is exactly the same as Single Transferrable Vote. As you said, "place a 1 next to your first choice candidate, a 2 in your second choice candidate, and so on".
I strongly recommend the website accuratedemocracy.com. They give a full explanation and analysis of Single Transferrable Vote and Condorcet voting and many other issues and systems for building the best possible Democracy and escaping various problems of politics. Awesome site.
range voting... In short, you rate each candidate 0 to 9.
Range voting rapidly degenerates to approval voting - the obvious tactic is to vote either 0 or 9 for each candidate. It is seriously pointless to vote 1 or 5 or anothing else for a candidate.
people with otherwise socially liberal attitudes so often end up intolerant in practice.
I am intolerant of intolerance... yes, I look down on racists. I also look down on people who disparage education and wear ignorance as some sort of warped badge of pride.
Not all conservatives are racists. Not all conservatives are anti-intellectual. However I think it true that there is a disturbing and unfortunate correlation of those things with conservatism. There are areas where there can be respectful differences of opinion, areas where I may agree with the "conservative" side of an issue, however I do not accept racism and other discrimination as a respectable difference of opinion, nor do I accept pride-of-ignorance to be respectable.
which rights are important and which are not.
Some of the things you mentioned earlier are not such simple rights as you imply.
Most people who complain about hunting are mainly grossed out by the slaughter of cute little fuzzy-wuzzy bunny wabbits... while they are perfectly happy to have their nice clean steaks magically appear in the supermarket.
That aside, consider this. Someone goes out and hunts a deer on public land, shoots it, says "mine", and brings it home for dinner. Well waitaminute. What basis does he to have to claim that deer as his private property? To the extet that that deer is "owned", it is public property. I'm no communist, but yeah, the atmosphere can only be "communist-style" collective property. And yeah, government land is owned collectively by everyone in the country. And yeah, we all have equal ownership interest in wildlife. If wildlife walks onto private land you have a far better claim on it, but no, still not enough to automatically claim that that animal is your private property to do with as you please.
I am not anti-hunting, but there is no automatic right to go out hunting animals that you do not own. They are not your property to kill, not your property to bring home and eat. It is entirely reasonable for the government to regulate the hunting of "publicly owned" wildlife.
There is no "right" to hunt.'
As far as arms, yes there is a constitutional guaranteed individual right to keep and bear arms. Some people want to outlaw guns completely, however I assert that that is a pretty radical position and I would like to chuck it out the window for the rest of this discussion. I'm not really active on this issue, but the first thing that pops to my mind is "what about someone with a warehouse full of shoulder launched nuclear arms". Even if someone has no intent to illegally harm anyone, there is some point innocent ownership becomes a material danger to others. If I build a toxic-gas manufacturing plant in my backyard next to your house, my innocent ownership becomes a material danger to your life. No matter how innocent my ownership is, an accident or natural disaster or some mentally ill person messing with my toxic gas plant poses a material threat to you and everyone else in the neighborhood. My right to swing my fist ends at your nose... and even if I have no intent to hit your nose there comes a point where swinging my fist poses a material danger of unintentionally hitting your nose lethally. I can't build a toxic gas manufacturing plant in my backyard at will, I can't arm myself with nuclear weapons at will, I can't arm myself with a warehouse of dynamite or other heavy arms.
So as I see it, yes there's the right to arms, but I also think there is agreement that there is *some* sort of limit to that, somewhere short of nuclear weapons. (Or at least I've never seen anyone claim the 2nd Amendment extends to nukes.) As I see it the difficulty is where and how to draw that line. I really wish I had a good answer to that. I know many conservatives on this issue have no interest in "heavy arms" and are just afraid of sliperyslope slide of laws against ordinary rifles and handguns. I wish I could come up with some easy bright line definition here that both sides can rea
Looks interesting. I've saved a copy and will take a look. Hopefully it's not merely informative, but useful as well.
I would really like to see strong sociological and psychological research that would have been useful to 1940's Germans in averting or dismantling Nazism. What practical strategies tactics and arguments are effective in averting the rise of an authoritarian leader and in breaking authoritarian followers away from the authoritarian leader. If you have a fist full of photos of jews being slaughtered in concentration camps, how do you effectively break through when so many followers chose to ignore the photos and prefer to believe the story that the jews are merely being relocated to pleasant new all-jew communities for them to happily live together?
We have entire industries dedicated to researching the most effective way to influence people to buy products. I'd like to see big research into the most effective way to win conflicts that have pretty much turned into competing public relations campaigns, when one side indeed has the facts on their side and the other side is provably dishonest. What are the most effective methods for identifying and defeating dishonest manipulative public relations campaigns?
I'll admit I have a few current controversial subjects in mind, but even if I'm on the wrong side of an issue I still damn-well want research into the most effective way to reveal to me that I have accidentally sided with a bunch of liars:D
I think the real problem that conservatives have with academia is the unrelenting push to make students conform to what the professors believe.
Students spend far more time with each other than with professors. And that time is spent socializing. Class time is largely non-interactive, and generally spent on formal subjects.
I'll admit the two colleges I attended were more technically oriented, but I don't think any of my professors ever mentioned social issues at all. You don't often have any mention of gays in math class, and I'm pretty sure race wasn't even mentioned in my economics class where there is arguably a significant social connection to be made.
I have no doubt that there are isolated cases of professors using class time to push various agendas, but I don't think they are going to be particularly effective in brainwashing rebellious youth based on at best a hew hours per week of lecturing at them. It's hardly an effective way to change attitudes.
No, students develop social attitudes by interacting with other students.
The student body at most universities is less diverse than most local communities.
Only by age.
In a rural town pretty much everyone may attend the same church or maybe two. A community with uniform unchallenged social assumptions of what is normal or acceptable. A narrow range of experience, and a narrow experience of who is the inside-group "us" vs alien "them". A community that generally has some narrow range of national ancestry. Then the student goes off to a college with other students collected from a broader areas. Students from a far broader range of national ancestry. Students with different social experiences and expectations and ideas of what is normal and acceptable. Students with different religious experience and beliefs - even within Christianity and even within the same branch of Christianity there are differences and conflicts in the tenets taught by different churches. Depending on where they came from, students may for the first time in their lives run into the first real live asian or black or arab or hispanic or other ethnicity. The first first jew or hindu or muslim or wiccan or atheist they have ever met ion their life. They may meet the first openly gay person in their lives, not that small towns don't have gays, but small towns have little experience and tolerance of non-conformity and are notoriously hostile to any gay coming out of the closet.
And an important point s that all of these other students socially fall powerfully under the in-group social title of "us". The "us" identity social group was their home town, now the "us" identity social group is the student body. Suddenly they meet a black or an asian or a jew or a gay kid, and that other student is powerfully identified as part of the "us" social group. The in-social group is "us students" against the teachers, it's the "us students" social group talking and complaining about the out-group parents. It's a social group of "us students" surrounded by the out-group world at large. Socially that asian or black or jew or gay kid is "on the same team" socially. That other student is no longer part of some alien group, his is now identified as "us" and sympathetic. The other student is now someone who is socially accepted and differences are socially accommodated. Those differences are no longer freakish and wrong, no longer socially condemned. A more liberal attitude of social acceptance for differences... an attitude of "you're different but you're OK, you don't hassle me over my differences and I won't hassle you over your differences".
Ah, good to see yet another person who Has Never Been To Texas.
Actually I have been to Texas:)
However I base my comments on national statistics. Take a look at this data map. Unfortunately it only traces population density at the county level, so it is less than perfect at tracking tighter urban concentrations inside otherwise low population counties. It is easy to see that the tall higher population density counties are much bluer than the super-red low population counties. Yes, even in Texas. Note that the red-vs-blue is tracking Democratic-vs-Republican votes in the last presidential election, but I think we can all agree that that is a reasonable proxy for the "socially liberal attitudes" that I am talking about.
Which is exactly opposite of what we seem to do here in America.
The USA is big. HUGE. Those square miles give us a population density 14.8 times lower than theirs. Their country is virtually one big city in comparison to our isolated rural areas. And I echo everything from spindizzy's post.
(yes, I know - generalization....)
No problem there. Generalizations can be accurate fine and useful, so long as not abused as universals.:)
the conservative people vs the liberal laws they have
I've heard a bit about their drug and prostitution law. I'm curious, what is it that leads you to characterize them as particularly conservative despite liberal laws?
I'm giong to ask how you get to Socio-economic liberalism through cultural and ethnic diversity
I don't claim to do that. Take a look at this reply I wrote to someone else talking about this distinction.
how does this have anything to do with the abundance of liberal vs conservative viewpoints based upon population concentration?
Population concentration leads to a more diverse population, and far more passing interaction with far more people (and thus more diversity you come across). So concentration leads to what I discussed, but what I discussed does not lead to all things associated with population-concentration or with the "liberal" stereotype.
Population density may have other direct or indirect influences for some of the other things often lumped under "liberal". For example someone living in a city or even a light suburban area is unlikely to ever hunt and have no use for sport weapons. Thus they would have less sympathy and personal value for such things. Also someone living in a more urban area faces a far higher real danger from guns in general and especially assault-class weapons than someone in a rural area. That is not tied to diversity.
I said I was talking about "socially liberal attitudes", and I think I was reasonably clear on what sort of things I was discussing.
The word liberal is often used for a stereotypical collection of positions that are often correlated but not necessarily tied together, and which may have zero connection to the social-diversity-and-tolerance influence I was asserting for socially liberal attitudes.
against people's rights to arm myself, to hunt, to allow oil companies to drill on their land... welfare
I'm mentally playing around with some speculations on why those issues may have some correlation and commonly get lumped together with the "socially liberal attitudes" I was discussing, but I think any such correlation would be incidental. I do not think those four things have much if any connection to what I was discussing.
If some conservative student from some small conservative town were to go off to some out-of-state college with a diverse population, that student may well come back with more liberal attitudes but absolutely unchanged on any of those three issues. They may well come home and stock up on their guns and go hunting every weekend and keep the exact same position on drilling, yet be more accepting of an interracial couple or a jew or an atheist or a gay couple in town, may be vocal in defending the right of interracial marriage and might even fully equate it with gay marriage. Note that I am talking about an influence in that general direction. That influence might be small or limited to only some of the areas I mentioned.
Fifty-percent-plus-one thinks they should have the right to tell everyone else what they can an cannot do.
(1) Some people are more tolerant of differences and are willing to stand up for even things and people they dislike... and this is a cultural value that can be promoted.
(2) We have the Constitution and other mechanisms in place to place considerable barriers in place against people who want to do that.
impossible
I have this quote: I'm an optimist and a cynic. That is not a contradiction. The future is always getting better than past ever was, but people seriously suck and always have to fuck everything up as much as possible along the way.
I'd say intolerance and efforts at oppressive mob-rule are less of a problem than they they used to be, and that people still suck and still try (and sometimes succeed) at pulling all sorts of crap, but that thing are slowly improving. And I'd say that it tends to improve the situation has had a college education, and I'd say that it tends to improve the situation when someone has spending time in a diverse community (for which larger colleges generally qualify).
There is no magic wand, people tend to suck as a population, but there is better and worse. There is tolerance and intolerance. There is a dictatorial attitude and the attitude of defending the oppressed even if you dislike them.
Also keep in mind that I'm a libertarian. I probably have different priorities than you do.
I'd love to see a lot more libertarians in congress. If they got, say, an equal 1/3 of congress, then the overall 2/3rds vote across the three groups would do really well on the broad majority of issues. Some of the Libertarian platform goes too extreme though, so I wouldn't really want them to get a majority in congress or the presidency. Ron Paul is a great influence shifting congress in a good direction, but as president he'd be way to radical.
I'm wondering, in terms of the Supreme Court, what is it that you're seeing as your "different priorities"? As I understand it libertarian the position on most judicial issues - particularly social issues - lines up more with the kind of justices Obama would appoint than McCain's.
Did you notice that the Internet bubble (and the roaring economy it brought) just happened to occur during those 8 years? And did you notice that, right after the bubble collapsed, the 9/11 attack really hammered the economy?
Yeah, under booming economy and booming government revenues and the non-"gridlocked" Democratic president Democratic congress, we had the best controlled government spending in decades. Once you adjust for inflation it was actually a cut in spending.
All of the extra revenues and the constrained spending went to all of the unpaid bills left behind by Reaganomics-taxcut-and-bigspend and Bush-1 continuing that candyland credicard-based government expansion.
As for the bubble collapse and 9/11, that explains drops in revenues, but it does not justify wildly fiscally irresponsible expansions of spending on top of reduced revenues on top of tax cuts further strangling revenues.
You were talking about "gridlock" to control government spending. I was simply pointing out the fact that the last time we had double-democratic president and legislature we had the best restraint of spending on decades. Inflation-adjusted, a spending cut. Spending restraint that happened to be during a time of surging revenues. A budget surplus that... ahhh.... other politicians... would have taken as an irresistible invitation to just spend that handy cash on budget increases combined with tax cuts, and sitting on and inflating the debt. That would have left us seriously screwed when the bubble burst and 9/11 hit. That is why fiscal responsibility is so important. Controlling spending is important, but even more important is fiscal responsibility. The importance of not floating increased spending & tax cuts off of the government creditcard.
McCain is running the standard Republican campaigning playbook on the issue. For decades the rule for Republican has been to promise concrete tax cuts and lip service to spending cuts. When was the last time Republicans did anything but big increase to federal spending? McCain has promised concrete taxcuts and given lip service to cutting spending - without identifying a single concrete dollar hes proposes to cut. For example McCain has played up the "no more earmarks" issue and made it sound like those are dollars he's proposing to reduce the budget. It's a lie of misdirection. His own campaign officials have admitted that eliminating earmarks are *not* any part of his talk of cutting spending. Earmarks don't work that way. Earmarks assign how the dollars will be spent, but they do not affect the budget dollar number. Look at the Bridge To Nowhere for a perfect case in point. After the Bridge To Nowhere earmark was killed, the exact same dollar amount still went to the Alaska transportation budget. Eliminating earmarks is not reducing the budget, and McCain is deliberately deceiving the public with the implication that his earmark talk backs up his talk of spending reductions. He has not identified any concrete dollars to back up his talk of cutting spending.
That's the campaigning trick. Promising tax cuts is popular, but identifying anything to cut will offend at least some vot
The Supreme Court is more important than the presidency. The president will be gone in a few years but we're going to be pretty much stuck with the coming makeup of the Supreme Court for most of our lives. There will be two, likely even three appointments coming up.
Obama and McCain have both been quite clear in what sort of appointments they plan to make, and their plans are total opposites.
The current makeup of the Supreme Court is 2 Democratic appointments and 7 Republican appointments, but the real issue is that 4 of those 7 Republican appointments were explicitly radical right activist judges on a mission to overturn Roe vs. Wade. And all of the anti-social culture war issues go along with it. They have 4 of 9 votes. Just ONE more and they get to seize control and impose their culture war from the supreme court. And they are looking at appointing quite possibly THREE judges. McCain has committed to appointing Scalia-Thomas clone types to the court (both of whom even ruled in favor of sodomy laws to imprison gays), and god-forbid Palin gets into office - she is totally gung-ho for throwing rape victims in prison for getting abortions.
As far as gridlocking, the last time we had both Democratic president and Democratic legislature they controlled government spending and in 8 years damn near paid off the national debt racked up under 12 years of both Reagan and Bush1.
but I ended up unsubscribing because of the over-the-top sarcasm and overall negative tone. It just didn't feel healthy to *read* it.
Dude... paying attention to HUMANITY is not healthy. Sarcasm and a negative tone are the accurate description of society.
I have this quote I came up with for my philosophy: I'm an optimist and a cynic. That is not a contradiction. The future is always getting better than past ever was, but people seriously suck and always have to fuck everything up as much as possible along the way.
He said: >I look at history, instead of just numbers, and come up with interesting other conclusions
He knows that truth that comes from the gut, not books. Next time look it up in your gut, and you too can come up with interesting other conclusions. Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Slashdot Mirror
Free speech is an ideal because it is about political speech and the right of dissent
No.
Correction, hell FUCKING no. I'm going to take the liberty to cut loose with crude offensive language while I proceed with vitally important political speech.
You, and the people who modded you up, are exactly the authoritarian puritanical asshats proudly trying to march this country forward into the 12th century.
Free Speech is about the fact that ideas do not break your leg or pick your pocket. Free Speech is about the fact that governmental censorship of unwanted views and ideas is a self-reinforcing road to totalitarianism.
Free Speech is about the fact that censorship of views and ideas and messages is absolutely incompatible with a free and healthy society.
It is free speech right to yell fire in a movie theater. The 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights in fact PROHIBITS the government from passing a content-based law against that speech. However you do not have the right to deliberately or recklessly endanger the lives of other people. The government can and does pass laws against injuring other people, and laws against willfully or recklessly placing people at risk of such injury. Those laws have absolutely nothing to do with speech, they do not target ideas or content. The fact that you happened to use speech in the movie theater to endanger or injure people is irrelevant, you can and will be prosecuted for endangering or injuring people. You do not have the right to break my leg.
You have every free speech right to say that a tin watch is made of solid gold. However you cannot fraudulently sell someone an empty box, and you cannot fraudulently sell someone a "gold" watch made of tin. You do not have the right to "pick my pocket" by fraud.
Free speech is not a right for minors to be lewd.
Awwwwww..... does it make you feel offended when you hear a minor be lewd? Does it make you feel sad or angry or maybe even disturbingly horny when a minor is lewd? Do those sorts of words upset your poor little sensitive feelings?
Well guess fucking what. The force of government and gun-toting enforcers and prisons are not here to protect your feelings. They are not here to shoot or imprison people who make you feel bad. They are not here to shoot or imprison people who offend you. Grow some fucking self responsibility. If something upsets your feelings or offends you then those are YOUR feelings and it's not up to the government to protect them.
You have no right to point guns at people and imprison them just because their words or their messages or their pictures or their ideas offend you or upset you or make you feel sad or make you feel angry or make you feel horny or make you feel anything else.
If I want to communicate a message by burning the US flag, or the flag of any other nation, Free Speech means that the government cannot imprison me for that message simply because it does not like that message. You have no right to point a gun at me or imprison me simply because my message upsets you or offends you. However the government can and often does have laws about fires. There can be and sometimes are laws against starting large open fires burning anything (even blank cloth) in the middle of the sidewalk. If there's a law criminalizing generic open fires on the public street then I can be arrested whether I burn a blank cloth or a flag. However you cannot write a law criminalizing flag burning simply because you don't like the message and it hurts your poor little feeeeeelings.
The student should be lucky she was only suspended, rather than being sued for defamation.
A school principal cannot abuse the powers of government position to punish anyone he sees fit to personally punish. I don't know if you shortsightedly overlooked that completely, or if you simply think it's swell for anyone with government powers to stomp down on anyone who offends you.
Not to mention the fact that the stu
This is a Canadian college, so it's the CRIA that they have to deal with... though it's not like there's much different between them.
I have an idea for a great project that the article submitter could do, it would be great at any college. Most especially any college in the US. In fact I would like to thank the RIAA for essentially proposing the idea, and in fact having it passed into law here in the US.
H.R. 4137: College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, signed into law on Aug 14 2008, and mentioned here on Slashdot a few days earlier, contains the following requirement:
(29) The institution certifies that the institution--
(A) has developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents; and
(B) will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property, as determined by the institution in consultation with the chief technology officer or other designated officer of the institution.
I think it is in fact a FANTASTIC idea for colleges to "offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property". There are a multitude of sources across the internet for Creative Commons or other 100% legal music. I think you (and any other college) should set up a hosting site on your internal network. A huge easy repository of hundreds of gigs of 100% legal 100% non-RIAA 100% non-CRIA music. They want colleges to offer an alternative to the illegal downloading of their music? I say we damn well give them exactly what they want. The most effective way for a college to deter illegal downloads is to drown students in an overwhelming more-than-you-can-eat supply of legal downloads. Trying to block students from illegal downloads is a largely hopeless task because students are going to find ways to circumvent those blocks to get what they want. But if you get students hooked on more-than-you-can-eat legal music downloads, that is the most effective way to reduce or eliminate the desire for RIAA-music downloads. For any college in the US, I suggest this is the best and most effective way to comply with the law. If you are in Canada or anywhere else, I still say it's a great way to get a jump on things before the RIAA-CRIA-or-other-clone comes knocking. You can tell them that you already have an official school policy and program in place to minimize the downloading - illegal or otherwise - of their music.
The simplest system is just to have a basic server on the campus network hosting all of these files, but there are endless ways you can expand and improve upon that service and build a powerful community interest in it. You could have some sort of streaming service. You could have individual student accounts with some mechanism of tracking individual "collections" of the songs they like and playlists and maybe personal ratings of songs. You can have some simple way for students to recommend and "share" these songs with each other. You could set up some sort of streaming "radio channels", and maybe even a way for students to run "radio channels". You could use the data on student music collections or song rankings to to do intelligent recommendations of other songs they may like.
You can do something as simple as a minimalistic webserver just hosting the files, or you can build it as big and as advanced as you like. By having this on the campus internal network you cut down on external ISP bandwidth needs.
Oh, and the best part? Getting to bask in the delicious irony of giving the RIAA&friends exactly what they asked for with a big fat FUCK-YOU-UP-THE-ASS-SIDEWAYS-WITH-A-PING-PONG-PADDLE.
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I read the post you linked. It provided a perfect example of what I was saying. If you read to the bottom it concludes with "However, people will not honestly vote. Hill-dogg supporters will look at Obama's slight lead, and since they'd much rather prefer Hill-dogg instead of Obama, they vote like this: Hill-dogg 10, Obama 1, McCain 0. Obama supporters, worried about their slight lead, vote the converse. McCain supporters vote McCain 10, Hill-dogg 0, Obama 0.
If you tweak that "Obama 1" into "Obama 0", you'll see that his example has degenerated exactly the way I said it would. It turns into approval voting with people using the limit values - 0 and 10.
His example was intended to prove what approval voting is BAD... intended to prove how and why approval voting will elect the worst candidate last choice candiate... but it also showed the min-max effect turning range voting into 0 1 approval voting.
I give a full explanation why there is never ever ever any valid reason to vote anything except 0 or 9 in this post.
The best voting system is called Condorcet voting. You put the candidates in order, like Hillary #1 Barack #2 and McCain #3. Condocet then look at it as a bunch of 1v1 races. It looks at Hillary-vs-McCain, Barack-vs-McCain, and Hillary-vs-Obama as three seperate races. With 60% Democrats, presumably Hillary would beat McCain in that race, and Obama would beat McCain in that other race. It would also look across all voters to decide Hillary-vs-Obama. Democrats might have some light preference one way or the other, but in fact it would likely be the Republicans overwhelmingly deciding that race based upon which candidate they found less offensive - which candidate they put in their second slot. Condorcet voting finds the best most "central" candidate.
By a variety of mathematically reasonable standards of measurement, Condorcet is provably the best voting system when there are more than two candidates
I highly recommend the website Accurate Democracy.
They give an excellent discussion of Condorcet and a variety of other problems of democracy and solutions to building the best possible democracy. He have learned a lot about how political and election systems work in the last few hundred years. The authors of the US Constitution were brilliant guys, but there's a lot they just didn't know, and in a number of ways our system of government is flawed or just plain broken, and in many cases we do know how to fix it. It just tends to be politically impossible impossible to have our system vote to fix itself. The biases in place and those who benefit from the current power distribution have no interest in surrendering those selfserving advantages. For example it is virtually impossible to make any change to the presidential election process because any change will create a short term benefit towards either the Democrats or the Republicans, so the other side will always rationalize arguments to reject it.
If by any chance you found a new Democratic government from scratch somewhere else, I'd be more than happy to join up to use all of the accumulated knowledge from math and history and sociology and every other field of human knowledge to design the best possible mechanisms of Democracy we know how :D
P.S.
If you wanted to make the link in your post a proper clickable link, it goes like this:
<A href="address">text</A>
You write:
<A href="http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=969061&cid=25081019">Hello there!</A>
and it shows up like this:
Hello there!
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Imagine it was an approval voting election - you can vote 0 or 1 for each candidate. You vote the best way you can trying as hard as possible to get what you want.
Now imagine you walk out and discover there's been some sort of glitch in the voter list. The poll worker says your name is on the list again, and you are allowed to go in and vote a second time.
So you go back in, and you again vote trying as hard as possible to get what you want. You cast the exact same vote as last time.
You come out, and your name is still showing up on the voter list again. In fact the voter list says you are allowed to walk into the voting booth nine times, you are allowed to vote 0 or 1 for each candidate, nine times.
Well, there are tens of millions of voters and you're trying as hard as possible to get the best possible result. Each time you go in you vote exactly the same best way.
At the end of the process for each candidate you have either voted 0 nine times or voted 1 nine times. In total you have voted 0 or 9 for each candidate.
It certainly possible for you to go in and throw away some of those votes, but you get less voting power. If you ever vote differently any of the nine times you go in, you are always mathematically worse off. By sometimes voting 0 for a candidate and sometimes voting 1 in order to create a "5" vote for him, either the 0 votes have a bigger chance of screwing you out of what you want or the 1 votes have a bigger chance of screwing you out of what you want. If you vote 5 for your second choice candidate you either risk pushing him ahead of your first choice candidate, or by voting 5 you risk letting him fall behind some candidate you hate. Out of millions of votes, one or the other of those two issues is will be more important. Out of millions of votes you either need to vote 0 so your second choice does not knock out your first choice, or you need to vote 9 for your second choice to keep some unwanted candidate from winning.
It is really hard to change the result of an election based on your individual vote. You need the maximum "volume" you can get trying to make your voting voice heard. Out of millions of votes you need the full 0 or full 9 "volume" to maximize the slim chance your vote will be heard, the the deciding vote controlling the election.
The only reason to muck around with any number from 1 to 8 is if there's some candidate you know has zero chance of winning, and you want to "send a message" by ranking your first choice a 9 and your second choice an 8. But if that candidate has no chance of winning, you can send a stronger message by ranking him a 9 anyway. Eight people ranking him 9 would send as strong a message as nine people ranking him 8.
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Mr Supervisor, ok I did the research. What you want conflicts with all of the standard Open Source software licenses that are out there. It's a legal thing about how Open Source licenses usually work. The only way to do it would be to have a lawyer write a custom license. I'm not sure how much it would cost, but the real problem is that using custom untested license could be a real mess.
I do have some good news though, Mr Supervisor! A lot of academic software development like ours does get released under the standard licenses. It's standard practice for papers to give citations when they use software like ours, and citation is virtually always given when software comes with some polite non-license note that such citation is expected.
A citation request really works about as well as putting it into the license. We wouldn't want to actually go to court over it, would we? If not, then really isn't much difference anyway.
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Sorry for the long below, but wow, your post touched across umpteen huge issues from Supreme Court philosophy to abortion to the budget to the candidates to Iraq and more, and stupid stupid me had to ramble on about each and every one them. Oh well. Chuckle.
Ok, you have a good point about the Commerce Clause being stretched to absurd lengths to allow the government to regulate things. And I'll grant you that Scalia and Thomas are the two Justices ruling strongly against such Commerce Clause stretches.
However I also seriously object to completely gutting a critical Article of the Bill of Rights, and trampling across most of the others, all fundamentally increasing government powers.
The Commerce Clause is a powerful weapon that can *only* be used to *increase* and justify government intrusion into our lives, but the 9th Amendment is an even more powerful weapon that can *only* be used to *prohibit* government intrusion into our lives. For example the word "privacy" cannot be found within the text of the Constitution - except within the 9th Amendment.
When the Constitution was being written and passed there was argument that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the government couldn't do anything not directly authorized by the Constitution. We now know that was incredibly naive. The basic Constitution directly or indirectly supplies creative politicians with endless opportunities to stomp across everything in the Bill of Rights.
Were it not for the ideas and contents of the Bill of Rights, all of the most finely crafted work that went into the rest of the Constitution would have left us with a government little better than China or the Soviet Union. The entire history of everything of value of our government could well be written with nothing more than the endless stream of acts passed by our legislature and struck down based upon the contents of the Bill of Rights, based upon the endless stream of acts of executive power that were struck down based upon the contents of tho Bill of Rights, based upon the endless stream of acts of Judical power that were struck down based upon the contents of tho Bill of Rights.
When they wrote the bill of rights they had no idea just how critical it would be for shaping and controlling our government. But one thing they did clearly recognize was that it was incomplete. That the rights laid out in the Bill of Rights were merely the examples they could think of at the moment.
(Another naive point was that the Bill of Rights originally only applied to the Federal government. You had a 4th Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, but only if someone was idiot enough to put a federal badge on the officer doing it. Just make the officer carry a state or local badge instead and the police get to fuck with you at will. Yeah, *that* is a real useful right. Doh!)
I don't like government just assuming powers.
Yes, but even more important is the government denying itself powers.
The 9th Amendment recognizes that there are equally important rights and protections that we need to keep the government from stomping on our lives, and that.... yes.... we would have to "make them up" as we go along because they aren't written into the Constitution. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
It is only in 9th Amendment privacy that you can find any privacy right, any idea that the government has no business peering into our bedrooms and imprisoning consenting adults, imprisoning them on no more basis than that 51% of the legislature finds certain styles of sex to be really really yucky.... ewww gross a man stuck his wiener in a man's (or woman's!) butt-hole or mouth. (Yeah sodomy laws generally criminalized a standard heterosexual blowjob, but of course it was only used to prosecute gays.)
The Commerce clause is used to let the Federal government meddle in our lives.... but *only* in ways
If we deflated it back down so California got 15, then Florida would have 9 and Wyoming would still have 3 and suddenly, we would have a number more useful swing states.
Holy crap. Under the current electoral system it only takes 50% of the vote in states representing 42.4% of the population to win the presidency... meaning that 21.2% of voters could appoint a president against up to 79.8% opposition.
If you made your suggested change, by my calculations it would only take 50% of the vote across states representing 22% of the population to win the presidency. Meaning that 11% of voters could appoint a president against up to 89% opposition.
Obviously it's nearly impossible for an election to hit those mathematical limits, current real elections only reverse the overall vote by minor margins. But the current system could reverse the overall vote by a much larger margin, and a "California got 15, Wyoming still have 3" system could and would result in absolutely insane reversals of the overall vote. It is already a mess when there is a 1% or 2% reversal of the popular vote, just imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if 2/3rds or more of the population revolted against a candidate that lost the overall vote by more than 2-to-1.
I think I'd almost favor state implementing a district election system, similar to senate seats, for electoral votes, allowing an even spread based on population clusters...
Senate? I think you meant House districts?
That would be much more viable. But if we're going to change the system we seriously need a fix that cleans up the 3rd party problem. And I don't think there's any reasonably way to do that without also going to a direct popular vote system. You can't translate any 3rd party fix through any regional-vote then elector-vote-for-president two level system.
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Spoiler alert!
The candidate was "Shelley Sekula-Gibbs". Someone wrote in "Shelly DraculaCunt Gibs". And the election office counted that vote.
All I have to say is, there are two b's is Gibbs ya idiot!
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resulted in things like the blatant abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause, blackmailing states into accepting things like speed limits and Real ID, etc.
Yeah, right. Because everything would be sooo much better if only we had corrupt politicians appointing even more corrupt politicians to run things.
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I see the missing apostrophe.
Wow! Freaky! That's like "I see dead people" supernatural vision like in that Sixth Sense movie!
They're like totally missing dude.... but I still see them.
I see missing apostrophes.
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Single Transferrable Vote is what you want.
No, if we're going to re-write the election system then we we should go with the mathematically best one, and that is Condorcet. There are cases where Single Transferrable Vote clearly elects the "wrong" candidate in comparison to Condorcet.
In the voting booth the election process for Condorcet is exactly the same as Single Transferrable Vote. As you said, "place a 1 next to your first choice candidate, a 2 in your second choice candidate, and so on".
I strongly recommend the website accuratedemocracy.com. They give a full explanation and analysis of Single Transferrable Vote and Condorcet voting and many other issues and systems for building the best possible Democracy and escaping various problems of politics. Awesome site.
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range voting... In short, you rate each candidate 0 to 9.
Range voting rapidly degenerates to approval voting - the obvious tactic is to vote either 0 or 9 for each candidate. It is seriously pointless to vote 1 or 5 or anothing else for a candidate.
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people with otherwise socially liberal attitudes so often end up intolerant in practice.
I am intolerant of intolerance... yes, I look down on racists.
I also look down on people who disparage education and wear ignorance as some sort of warped badge of pride.
Not all conservatives are racists. Not all conservatives are anti-intellectual. However I think it true that there is a disturbing and unfortunate correlation of those things with conservatism. There are areas where there can be respectful differences of opinion, areas where I may agree with the "conservative" side of an issue, however I do not accept racism and other discrimination as a respectable difference of opinion, nor do I accept pride-of-ignorance to be respectable.
which rights are important and which are not.
Some of the things you mentioned earlier are not such simple rights as you imply.
Most people who complain about hunting are mainly grossed out by the slaughter of cute little fuzzy-wuzzy bunny wabbits... while they are perfectly happy to have their nice clean steaks magically appear in the supermarket.
That aside, consider this. Someone goes out and hunts a deer on public land, shoots it, says "mine", and brings it home for dinner. Well waitaminute. What basis does he to have to claim that deer as his private property? To the extet that that deer is "owned", it is public property. I'm no communist, but yeah, the atmosphere can only be "communist-style" collective property. And yeah, government land is owned collectively by everyone in the country. And yeah, we all have equal ownership interest in wildlife. If wildlife walks onto private land you have a far better claim on it, but no, still not enough to automatically claim that that animal is your private property to do with as you please.
I am not anti-hunting, but there is no automatic right to go out hunting animals that you do not own. They are not your property to kill, not your property to bring home and eat. It is entirely reasonable for the government to regulate the hunting of "publicly owned" wildlife.
There is no "right" to hunt.'
As far as arms, yes there is a constitutional guaranteed individual right to keep and bear arms. Some people want to outlaw guns completely, however I assert that that is a pretty radical position and I would like to chuck it out the window for the rest of this discussion. I'm not really active on this issue, but the first thing that pops to my mind is "what about someone with a warehouse full of shoulder launched nuclear arms". Even if someone has no intent to illegally harm anyone, there is some point innocent ownership becomes a material danger to others. If I build a toxic-gas manufacturing plant in my backyard next to your house, my innocent ownership becomes a material danger to your life. No matter how innocent my ownership is, an accident or natural disaster or some mentally ill person messing with my toxic gas plant poses a material threat to you and everyone else in the neighborhood. My right to swing my fist ends at your nose... and even if I have no intent to hit your nose there comes a point where swinging my fist poses a material danger of unintentionally hitting your nose lethally. I can't build a toxic gas manufacturing plant in my backyard at will, I can't arm myself with nuclear weapons at will, I can't arm myself with a warehouse of dynamite or other heavy arms.
So as I see it, yes there's the right to arms, but I also think there is agreement that there is *some* sort of limit to that, somewhere short of nuclear weapons. (Or at least I've never seen anyone claim the 2nd Amendment extends to nukes.) As I see it the difficulty is where and how to draw that line. I really wish I had a good answer to that. I know many conservatives on this issue have no interest in "heavy arms" and are just afraid of sliperyslope slide of laws against ordinary rifles and handguns. I wish I could come up with some easy bright line definition here that both sides can rea
Jeez, over 260 pages. hehe.
Looks interesting. I've saved a copy and will take a look. Hopefully it's not merely informative, but useful as well.
I would really like to see strong sociological and psychological research that would have been useful to 1940's Germans in averting or dismantling Nazism. What practical strategies tactics and arguments are effective in averting the rise of an authoritarian leader and in breaking authoritarian followers away from the authoritarian leader. If you have a fist full of photos of jews being slaughtered in concentration camps, how do you effectively break through when so many followers chose to ignore the photos and prefer to believe the story that the jews are merely being relocated to pleasant new all-jew communities for them to happily live together?
We have entire industries dedicated to researching the most effective way to influence people to buy products. I'd like to see big research into the most effective way to win conflicts that have pretty much turned into competing public relations campaigns, when one side indeed has the facts on their side and the other side is provably dishonest. What are the most effective methods for identifying and defeating dishonest manipulative public relations campaigns?
I'll admit I have a few current controversial subjects in mind, but even if I'm on the wrong side of an issue I still damn-well want research into the most effective way to reveal to me that I have accidentally sided with a bunch of liars :D
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I think the real problem that conservatives have with academia is the unrelenting push to make students conform to what the professors believe.
Students spend far more time with each other than with professors. And that time is spent socializing. Class time is largely non-interactive, and generally spent on formal subjects.
I'll admit the two colleges I attended were more technically oriented, but I don't think any of my professors ever mentioned social issues at all. You don't often have any mention of gays in math class, and I'm pretty sure race wasn't even mentioned in my economics class where there is arguably a significant social connection to be made.
I have no doubt that there are isolated cases of professors using class time to push various agendas, but I don't think they are going to be particularly effective in brainwashing rebellious youth based on at best a hew hours per week of lecturing at them. It's hardly an effective way to change attitudes.
No, students develop social attitudes by interacting with other students.
The student body at most universities is less diverse than most local communities.
Only by age.
In a rural town pretty much everyone may attend the same church or maybe two. A community with uniform unchallenged social assumptions of what is normal or acceptable. A narrow range of experience, and a narrow experience of who is the inside-group "us" vs alien "them". A community that generally has some narrow range of national ancestry. Then the student goes off to a college with other students collected from a broader areas. Students from a far broader range of national ancestry. Students with different social experiences and expectations and ideas of what is normal and acceptable. Students with different religious experience and beliefs - even within Christianity and even within the same branch of Christianity there are differences and conflicts in the tenets taught by different churches. Depending on where they came from, students may for the first time in their lives run into the first real live asian or black or arab or hispanic or other ethnicity. The first first jew or hindu or muslim or wiccan or atheist they have ever met ion their life. They may meet the first openly gay person in their lives, not that small towns don't have gays, but small towns have little experience and tolerance of non-conformity and are notoriously hostile to any gay coming out of the closet.
And an important point s that all of these other students socially fall powerfully under the in-group social title of "us". The "us" identity social group was their home town, now the "us" identity social group is the student body. Suddenly they meet a black or an asian or a jew or a gay kid, and that other student is powerfully identified as part of the "us" social group. The in-social group is "us students" against the teachers, it's the "us students" social group talking and complaining about the out-group parents. It's a social group of "us students" surrounded by the out-group world at large. Socially that asian or black or jew or gay kid is "on the same team" socially. That other student is no longer part of some alien group, his is now identified as "us" and sympathetic. The other student is now someone who is socially accepted and differences are socially accommodated. Those differences are no longer freakish and wrong, no longer socially condemned. A more liberal attitude of social acceptance for differences... an attitude of "you're different but you're OK, you don't hassle me over my differences and I won't hassle you over your differences".
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Ah, good to see yet another person who Has Never Been To Texas.
Actually I have been to Texas :)
However I base my comments on national statistics. Take a look at this data map. Unfortunately it only traces population density at the county level, so it is less than perfect at tracking tighter urban concentrations inside otherwise low population counties. It is easy to see that the tall higher population density counties are much bluer than the super-red low population counties. Yes, even in Texas. Note that the red-vs-blue is tracking Democratic-vs-Republican votes in the last presidential election, but I think we can all agree that that is a reasonable proxy for the "socially liberal attitudes" that I am talking about.
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Which is exactly opposite of what we seem to do here in America.
The USA is big. HUGE. Those square miles give us a population density 14.8 times lower than theirs. Their country is virtually one big city in comparison to our isolated rural areas. And I echo everything from spindizzy's post.
(yes, I know - generalization....)
No problem there. Generalizations can be accurate fine and useful, so long as not abused as universals. :)
the conservative people vs the liberal laws they have
I've heard a bit about their drug and prostitution law. I'm curious, what is it that leads you to characterize them as particularly conservative despite liberal laws?
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I'm giong to ask how you get to Socio-economic liberalism through cultural and ethnic diversity
I don't claim to do that. Take a look at this reply I wrote to someone else talking about this distinction.
how does this have anything to do with the abundance of liberal vs conservative viewpoints based upon population concentration?
Population concentration leads to a more diverse population, and far more passing interaction with far more people (and thus more diversity you come across). So concentration leads to what I discussed, but what I discussed does not lead to all things associated with population-concentration or with the "liberal" stereotype.
Population density may have other direct or indirect influences for some of the other things often lumped under "liberal". For example someone living in a city or even a light suburban area is unlikely to ever hunt and have no use for sport weapons. Thus they would have less sympathy and personal value for such things. Also someone living in a more urban area faces a far higher real danger from guns in general and especially assault-class weapons than someone in a rural area. That is not tied to diversity.
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"liberals"
I said I was talking about "socially liberal attitudes", and I think I was reasonably clear on what sort of things I was discussing.
The word liberal is often used for a stereotypical collection of positions that are often correlated but not necessarily tied together, and which may have zero connection to the social-diversity-and-tolerance influence I was asserting for socially liberal attitudes.
against people's rights to arm myself, to hunt, to allow oil companies to drill on their land... welfare
I'm mentally playing around with some speculations on why those issues may have some correlation and commonly get lumped together with the "socially liberal attitudes" I was discussing, but I think any such correlation would be incidental. I do not think those four things have much if any connection to what I was discussing.
If some conservative student from some small conservative town were to go off to some out-of-state college with a diverse population, that student may well come back with more liberal attitudes but absolutely unchanged on any of those three issues. They may well come home and stock up on their guns and go hunting every weekend and keep the exact same position on drilling, yet be more accepting of an interracial couple or a jew or an atheist or a gay couple in town, may be vocal in defending the right of interracial marriage and might even fully equate it with gay marriage. Note that I am talking about an influence in that general direction. That influence might be small or limited to only some of the areas I mentioned.
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Fifty-percent-plus-one thinks they should have the right to tell everyone else what they can an cannot do.
(1) Some people are more tolerant of differences and are willing to stand up for even things and people they dislike... and this is a cultural value that can be promoted.
(2) We have the Constitution and other mechanisms in place to place considerable barriers in place against people who want to do that.
impossible
I have this quote:
I'm an optimist and a cynic. That is not a contradiction. The future is always getting better than past ever was, but people seriously suck and always have to fuck everything up as much as possible along the way.
I'd say intolerance and efforts at oppressive mob-rule are less of a problem than they they used to be, and that people still suck and still try (and sometimes succeed) at pulling all sorts of crap, but that thing are slowly improving. And I'd say that it tends to improve the situation has had a college education, and I'd say that it tends to improve the situation when someone has spending time in a diverse community (for which larger colleges generally qualify).
There is no magic wand, people tend to suck as a population, but there is better and worse. There is tolerance and intolerance. There is a dictatorial attitude and the attitude of defending the oppressed even if you dislike them.
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Also keep in mind that I'm a libertarian. I probably have different priorities than you do.
I'd love to see a lot more libertarians in congress. If they got, say, an equal 1/3 of congress, then the overall 2/3rds vote across the three groups would do really well on the broad majority of issues. Some of the Libertarian platform goes too extreme though, so I wouldn't really want them to get a majority in congress or the presidency. Ron Paul is a great influence shifting congress in a good direction, but as president he'd be way to radical.
I'm wondering, in terms of the Supreme Court, what is it that you're seeing as your "different priorities"? As I understand it libertarian the position on most judicial issues - particularly social issues - lines up more with the kind of justices Obama would appoint than McCain's.
Did you notice that the Internet bubble (and the roaring economy it brought) just happened to occur during those 8 years? And did you notice that, right after the bubble collapsed, the 9/11 attack really hammered the economy?
Yeah, under booming economy and booming government revenues and the non-"gridlocked" Democratic president Democratic congress, we had the best controlled government spending in decades. Once you adjust for inflation it was actually a cut in spending.
All of the extra revenues and the constrained spending went to all of the unpaid bills left behind by Reaganomics-taxcut-and-bigspend and Bush-1 continuing that candyland credicard-based government expansion.
As for the bubble collapse and 9/11, that explains drops in revenues, but it does not justify wildly fiscally irresponsible expansions of spending on top of reduced revenues on top of tax cuts further strangling revenues.
You were talking about "gridlock" to control government spending. I was simply pointing out the fact that the last time we had double-democratic president and legislature we had the best restraint of spending on decades. Inflation-adjusted, a spending cut. Spending restraint that happened to be during a time of surging revenues. A budget surplus that... ahhh.... other politicians... would have taken as an irresistible invitation to just spend that handy cash on budget increases combined with tax cuts, and sitting on and inflating the debt. That would have left us seriously screwed when the bubble burst and 9/11 hit. That is why fiscal responsibility is so important. Controlling spending is important, but even more important is fiscal responsibility. The importance of not floating increased spending & tax cuts off of the government creditcard.
McCain is running the standard Republican campaigning playbook on the issue. For decades the rule for Republican has been to promise concrete tax cuts and lip service to spending cuts. When was the last time Republicans did anything but big increase to federal spending? McCain has promised concrete taxcuts and given lip service to cutting spending - without identifying a single concrete dollar hes proposes to cut. For example McCain has played up the "no more earmarks" issue and made it sound like those are dollars he's proposing to reduce the budget. It's a lie of misdirection. His own campaign officials have admitted that eliminating earmarks are *not* any part of his talk of cutting spending. Earmarks don't work that way. Earmarks assign how the dollars will be spent, but they do not affect the budget dollar number. Look at the Bridge To Nowhere for a perfect case in point. After the Bridge To Nowhere earmark was killed, the exact same dollar amount still went to the Alaska transportation budget. Eliminating earmarks is not reducing the budget, and McCain is deliberately deceiving the public with the implication that his earmark talk backs up his talk of spending reductions. He has not identified any concrete dollars to back up his talk of cutting spending.
That's the campaigning trick. Promising tax cuts is popular, but identifying anything to cut will offend at least some vot
Question: Have you considered the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court is more important than the presidency. The president will be gone in a few years but we're going to be pretty much stuck with the coming makeup of the Supreme Court for most of our lives. There will be two, likely even three appointments coming up.
Obama and McCain have both been quite clear in what sort of appointments they plan to make, and their plans are total opposites.
The current makeup of the Supreme Court is 2 Democratic appointments and 7 Republican appointments, but the real issue is that 4 of those 7 Republican appointments were explicitly radical right activist judges on a mission to overturn Roe vs. Wade. And all of the anti-social culture war issues go along with it. They have 4 of 9 votes. Just ONE more and they get to seize control and impose their culture war from the supreme court. And they are looking at appointing quite possibly THREE judges. McCain has committed to appointing Scalia-Thomas clone types to the court (both of whom even ruled in favor of sodomy laws to imprison gays), and god-forbid Palin gets into office - she is totally gung-ho for throwing rape victims in prison for getting abortions.
As far as gridlocking, the last time we had both Democratic president and Democratic legislature they controlled government spending and in 8 years damn near paid off the national debt racked up under 12 years of both Reagan and Bush1.
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but I ended up unsubscribing because of the over-the-top sarcasm and overall negative tone. It just didn't feel healthy to *read* it.
Dude... paying attention to HUMANITY is not healthy. Sarcasm and a negative tone are the accurate description of society.
I have this quote I came up with for my philosophy:
I'm an optimist and a cynic. That is not a contradiction. The future is always getting better than past ever was, but people seriously suck and always have to fuck everything up as much as possible along the way.
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Causation does not equal causation.
Cool!
I didn't know Colbert had an account over here!
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He said:
>I look at history, instead of just numbers, and come up with interesting other conclusions
He knows that truth that comes from the gut, not books.
Next time look it up in your gut, and you too can come up with interesting other conclusions.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
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