A fair description of the "leftist mindset" is that it assumes that the vast majority of people, if given the chance, will be morally good upstanding citizens, and that deviation from this is a product of bad circumstances or mental illness. And this permeates all their policy proposals and even practical decision-making. Some examples: - Dr Benjamin Spock's argument that kids will grow up best without heavy discipline from their parents, and that actions like spanking could actually be harmful. - Emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment in criminal cases. - An assumption that those asking for and getting government financial assistance are really in need of help (rather than lazy freeloaders). - Opposition to war efforts on the grounds that the people in the other army or country are misguided or even justified rather than irredeemably evil.
Another way of thinking about it: Leftists tend to believe most people are roughly equally moral, while rightists tend to believe that they and people like them are morally superior to others.
Democrats could have changed this between 2009 and 2010
Sort of: 2009-10 was when Republicans started filibustering absolutely everything in the Senate, which was a new tactic at the time. The Democrats have continued to be too scared of what will happen when they're the minority party to change the Senate rules to prevent the Republicans from doing this.
During the most recent sequester debate, and several rounds of the debt ceiling debate (including one going on right now), Republicans in the House used their control of the purse strings to threaten the Full Faith and Credit of the United States unless their demands were met. That left the Democrats in the Senate, and the President, with about as much control of the situation as a bank teller has during a robbery: while not completely helpless, their options boiled down to complying to demands they'd rather not, or far nastier consequences. Under those conditions, the Democrats allowed many measures through that they didn't actually support.
And no, that's not a partisan assessment: The Democrats loudly complained that that was what the Republicans were doing, while the Republicans proudly stated that that was what they were doing.
Gutting the USPS has always been a Republican idea. The Republicans who are pushing it are actually quite proud of those sorts of policies. The claim that Democrats are somehow causing or supporting these changes is simply false.
Yes, yes, evil republicans are to blame for everything.
I never argued that - I said that the Republicans were to blame for the gutting of the USPS, because they are.
I blame evil Democrats when they do stupid things too. I've never been a member of any political party, and have voted for candidates with 4 different party affiliations.
In July 2006, Republicans passed legislation that required the USPS to come up with $5.5 billion to pay for retirement benefits for people who hadn't retired yet within 6 years. 6 years later, conveniently right before the 2012 election, the USPS was able to cough up the money but ended up with a $0.5 billion shortfall in its budget without drastically reducing service. So, during the sequester fight, these same clowns made the USPS pre-fund the retirements of people expected to retire 75 years from now. In other words, Republicans have demanded that the USPS fund the retirements of workers who are 5 years from being born.
As far as I can tell, the Republicans in question believe that the USPS is not something that should exist. It may be because of campaign funding from FedEx, UPS, etc. Or it may be because they believe that anything that the federal government does domestically is overreach - this seems odd though, since creating a postal service was one of the specific things Congress was charged with doing in the Constitution.
The whole "[deity] is the god of [aspect]" is a little bit misleading when you're talking about ancient myth. Norse gods all have a bunch of different characteristics, and many of those characteristics were shared among more than one deity. For example, both Loki and Odin can be effective tricksters.
The idea of Thor as a fellow who is exceptionally strong but not particularly smart is fully in keeping with Norse myths about him, since he spends most of his time either whomping giants and monsters on the head with his hammer or getting fooled by smarter characters.
It's mostly format and structure for most languages.
Not quite: For wildly different families of languages, there's significantly different structures. For example, if you're proficient in Python, switching to Ruby isn't that big a deal, but switching to Haskell is challenging.
The talk that should occur when a parent catches a kid watching porn goes something like this:
What you're looking at isn't real. Just like you can watch the Wizard of Oz without Oz being a real place or Dorothy being a real person, what you're seeing here is made up. These actors and actresses often pretend to like things they probably don't like. What happens in the real world is completely different, and that real people have the right to decide what they will or won't do.
And this of course is followed by the standard sex education talk if the kid hasn't gotten one.
But that's very different from the talk the kid usually gets, which is something along the lines of "That's gross and wrong! Turn it off immediately!" (and also ignoring the protests of "But dad, I found it in your dresser!")
I gave him points for what he did, but they were loss by how he is just hiding across borders, because he doesn't want to face the consequences for his action.
This isn't like Martin Luther King Jr spending a few days in jail in Birmingham. The United States government has made it clear its intentions towards Snowden: They've already caused at least one major diplomatic incident involving violating the rights of a foreign head of state to try to get to him. I have every reason to believe Snowden is on the short list for getting the Anwar Al-Awlaki treatment if he goes to somewhere that the US can get a drone to, and the Bradley Manning treatment if he otherwise ends up in US hands.
Gnome had the right idea (merging tablet and desktop interfaces)
That's not the right idea at all.
Really easy to do on a tablet: - Poke a particular point on the screen - Swipe and other gestures - add your signature or otherwise scribble in cursive - turn the screen
Really easy to do on a desktop: - mouse click - move the mouse to a corner of the screen - mouse hover - press a key or a simple combination of keys
It's possible to do desktop-like things on a tablet, and some tablet-like moves on a desktop, but trying to use one kind of input on the other device is like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver - you can make it work, but it's a bit awkward and difficult. The only point of overlap is mouse clicks versus finger-pokes of large areas of the screen.
Different input methods implies different user actions implies different interfaces.
My suspicion is that NSA tightly holds most, if not all congressmen by the balls.
Case in point: Anthony Weiner and the famous picture of his junk. 3 interesting points about that: (1) When the scandal first broke, Weiner claimed that his phone was hacked. (2) Jon Stewart, who knew Weiner when they were younger, thought that the pictures didn't match Weiner's weiner. (3) The photos in question don't show his face or any other identifying characteristics.
I'm not a political supporter of Weiner, but it sure looks like he was set up by somebody.
I don't know how many skunks you've encountered in your time, but I can usually smell them from about 25 meters away. Now, it's conceivable the reason I can smell them is because they've sprayed something else and some of the spray ended up on their fur, but skunks don't really try to hide because they know predators just leave them alone.
So let me get this straight: you're a socialism-loving liberal who is advocating a free-market libertarian solution? Something suggests you might have mislabeled yourself.
For what it's worth, I'm in the unusual position of being able to compare electric service between a private utility and a public utility, because I'm on the private one while my buddy a few blocks away is on the public network. The public utility is cheaper, more responsive, and faster at getting power back on after an outage (which happen about equally frequently to both the public and private utilities). The private utility in question also has the distinction of being the prime cause of the 2003 Northeast Blackout. Suffice to say I'm not of the opinion that private utilities do better than publicly run utilities.
1. I've wandered around in forested areas at night fairly frequently, and never ran into those kinds of problems. Wild animals don't just hang out when they hear something big clomping towards them.
2. If you can't tell when a skunk is nearby, you have the worst sense of smell I've ever heard of.
That's not true: The RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, and quite a few other large organizations would very much like to control people who engage in creative work so they can extract a large portion of the revenue that fans are willing to pay.
For example, there are thousands of good independent musicians out there touring, selling their CDs at their gigs, and nowadays selling or giving away their tracks online. You probably haven't heard of most of them, because the RIAA ensures that radio stations only play music distributed by them, and major retailers only sell recordings from their artists.
Similarly, there are lots of independent filmmakers out there doing making films and selling DVDs. Many of them make a decent living at it by doing corporate promos and training videos and such, but they also sometimes try to have the next Clerks or Blair Witch Project. You probably haven't heard of them either, because they can't get widespread distribution.
What is bizarre are the people who advocate authoritarian measures and then reverse themselves when the other side gets into office.
It's not bizarre at all if you accept the notion that left-wingers and right-wingers have different goals and are each libertarian about some things and authoritarian about other things.
For example, many right-wingers will happily use state authority to force public school kids to read Of Pandas and People because that furthers their goal of increasing the influence of Christianity, but will resist using of state authority to force public school kids to read Silent Spring because that's opposes their goal of reducing regulation of business. By contrast, left-wingers will happily force public school kids to read Silent Spring because that furthers their goal of decreasing environmental damage of commerce, but will resist using of state authority to force public school kids to read Of Pandas and People because that opposes their goal of religious freedom.
So with devoted right-wingers and left-wingers, it's not about consistency. It's about forcing others to act the way that they want everyone to act, while allowing themselves and their way of acting to go unpunished.
Slashdot Mirror
A fair description of the "leftist mindset" is that it assumes that the vast majority of people, if given the chance, will be morally good upstanding citizens, and that deviation from this is a product of bad circumstances or mental illness. And this permeates all their policy proposals and even practical decision-making. Some examples:
- Dr Benjamin Spock's argument that kids will grow up best without heavy discipline from their parents, and that actions like spanking could actually be harmful.
- Emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment in criminal cases.
- An assumption that those asking for and getting government financial assistance are really in need of help (rather than lazy freeloaders).
- Opposition to war efforts on the grounds that the people in the other army or country are misguided or even justified rather than irredeemably evil.
Another way of thinking about it: Leftists tend to believe most people are roughly equally moral, while rightists tend to believe that they and people like them are morally superior to others.
How would you know if they have been rehabilitated?
That's easy: Make them sit on the Group W bench and fill out a form with the following words:
"KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?"
It's for disambiguation when 2 representatives share the same name. Some also use their first names, for instance Gene Green and Al Green.
Whoops, broken link. Try this instead: Official House vote
If you want to know how your congresscritter voted, check the Official House Roll Call vote.
the facts are they have used it just as much over the years
No they haven't: Filibusters since 1963
Hear that? Its Arooooogaaaaahgrumble!
Oh, must be Richard Nixon's head then!
Democrats could have changed this between 2009 and 2010
Sort of: 2009-10 was when Republicans started filibustering absolutely everything in the Senate, which was a new tactic at the time. The Democrats have continued to be too scared of what will happen when they're the minority party to change the Senate rules to prevent the Republicans from doing this.
During the most recent sequester debate, and several rounds of the debt ceiling debate (including one going on right now), Republicans in the House used their control of the purse strings to threaten the Full Faith and Credit of the United States unless their demands were met. That left the Democrats in the Senate, and the President, with about as much control of the situation as a bank teller has during a robbery: while not completely helpless, their options boiled down to complying to demands they'd rather not, or far nastier consequences. Under those conditions, the Democrats allowed many measures through that they didn't actually support.
And no, that's not a partisan assessment: The Democrats loudly complained that that was what the Republicans were doing, while the Republicans proudly stated that that was what they were doing.
Gutting the USPS has always been a Republican idea. The Republicans who are pushing it are actually quite proud of those sorts of policies. The claim that Democrats are somehow causing or supporting these changes is simply false.
Yes, yes, evil republicans are to blame for everything.
I never argued that - I said that the Republicans were to blame for the gutting of the USPS, because they are.
I blame evil Democrats when they do stupid things too. I've never been a member of any political party, and have voted for candidates with 4 different party affiliations.
It's worse than that.
In July 2006, Republicans passed legislation that required the USPS to come up with $5.5 billion to pay for retirement benefits for people who hadn't retired yet within 6 years. 6 years later, conveniently right before the 2012 election, the USPS was able to cough up the money but ended up with a $0.5 billion shortfall in its budget without drastically reducing service. So, during the sequester fight, these same clowns made the USPS pre-fund the retirements of people expected to retire 75 years from now. In other words, Republicans have demanded that the USPS fund the retirements of workers who are 5 years from being born.
As far as I can tell, the Republicans in question believe that the USPS is not something that should exist. It may be because of campaign funding from FedEx, UPS, etc. Or it may be because they believe that anything that the federal government does domestically is overreach - this seems odd though, since creating a postal service was one of the specific things Congress was charged with doing in the Constitution.
The whole "[deity] is the god of [aspect]" is a little bit misleading when you're talking about ancient myth. Norse gods all have a bunch of different characteristics, and many of those characteristics were shared among more than one deity. For example, both Loki and Odin can be effective tricksters.
The idea of Thor as a fellow who is exceptionally strong but not particularly smart is fully in keeping with Norse myths about him, since he spends most of his time either whomping giants and monsters on the head with his hammer or getting fooled by smarter characters.
It's mostly format and structure for most languages.
Not quite: For wildly different families of languages, there's significantly different structures. For example, if you're proficient in Python, switching to Ruby isn't that big a deal, but switching to Haskell is challenging.
The talk that should occur when a parent catches a kid watching porn goes something like this:
What you're looking at isn't real. Just like you can watch the Wizard of Oz without Oz being a real place or Dorothy being a real person, what you're seeing here is made up. These actors and actresses often pretend to like things they probably don't like. What happens in the real world is completely different, and that real people have the right to decide what they will or won't do.
And this of course is followed by the standard sex education talk if the kid hasn't gotten one.
But that's very different from the talk the kid usually gets, which is something along the lines of "That's gross and wrong! Turn it off immediately!" (and also ignoring the protests of "But dad, I found it in your dresser!")
I gave him points for what he did, but they were loss by how he is just hiding across borders, because he doesn't want to face the consequences for his action.
This isn't like Martin Luther King Jr spending a few days in jail in Birmingham. The United States government has made it clear its intentions towards Snowden: They've already caused at least one major diplomatic incident involving violating the rights of a foreign head of state to try to get to him. I have every reason to believe Snowden is on the short list for getting the Anwar Al-Awlaki treatment if he goes to somewhere that the US can get a drone to, and the Bradley Manning treatment if he otherwise ends up in US hands.
I'd be on the run too.
Yup: They won't use Contempt of Congress to deal with this, which is why I have Contempt for Congress.
Gnome had the right idea (merging tablet and desktop interfaces)
That's not the right idea at all.
Really easy to do on a tablet:
- Poke a particular point on the screen
- Swipe and other gestures
- add your signature or otherwise scribble in cursive
- turn the screen
Really easy to do on a desktop:
- mouse click
- move the mouse to a corner of the screen
- mouse hover
- press a key or a simple combination of keys
It's possible to do desktop-like things on a tablet, and some tablet-like moves on a desktop, but trying to use one kind of input on the other device is like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver - you can make it work, but it's a bit awkward and difficult. The only point of overlap is mouse clicks versus finger-pokes of large areas of the screen.
Different input methods implies different user actions implies different interfaces.
My suspicion is that NSA tightly holds most, if not all congressmen by the balls.
Case in point: Anthony Weiner and the famous picture of his junk. 3 interesting points about that: (1) When the scandal first broke, Weiner claimed that his phone was hacked. (2) Jon Stewart, who knew Weiner when they were younger, thought that the pictures didn't match Weiner's weiner. (3) The photos in question don't show his face or any other identifying characteristics.
I'm not a political supporter of Weiner, but it sure looks like he was set up by somebody.
I don't know how many skunks you've encountered in your time, but I can usually smell them from about 25 meters away. Now, it's conceivable the reason I can smell them is because they've sprayed something else and some of the spray ended up on their fur, but skunks don't really try to hide because they know predators just leave them alone.
So let me get this straight: you're a socialism-loving liberal who is advocating a free-market libertarian solution? Something suggests you might have mislabeled yourself.
For what it's worth, I'm in the unusual position of being able to compare electric service between a private utility and a public utility, because I'm on the private one while my buddy a few blocks away is on the public network. The public utility is cheaper, more responsive, and faster at getting power back on after an outage (which happen about equally frequently to both the public and private utilities). The private utility in question also has the distinction of being the prime cause of the 2003 Northeast Blackout. Suffice to say I'm not of the opinion that private utilities do better than publicly run utilities.
1. I've wandered around in forested areas at night fairly frequently, and never ran into those kinds of problems. Wild animals don't just hang out when they hear something big clomping towards them.
2. If you can't tell when a skunk is nearby, you have the worst sense of smell I've ever heard of.
no one wants to control people who create things
That's not true: The RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, and quite a few other large organizations would very much like to control people who engage in creative work so they can extract a large portion of the revenue that fans are willing to pay.
For example, there are thousands of good independent musicians out there touring, selling their CDs at their gigs, and nowadays selling or giving away their tracks online. You probably haven't heard of most of them, because the RIAA ensures that radio stations only play music distributed by them, and major retailers only sell recordings from their artists.
Similarly, there are lots of independent filmmakers out there doing making films and selling DVDs. Many of them make a decent living at it by doing corporate promos and training videos and such, but they also sometimes try to have the next Clerks or Blair Witch Project. You probably haven't heard of them either, because they can't get widespread distribution.
Well, to be fair, pies in the face can be fun. But it's obviously more fun with an actual plot and characters worth caring about.
Yes, along with the rest of the US troops over at Rammstein, our brave boys stand ready to defend West Germany from the USSR!
What is bizarre are the people who advocate authoritarian measures and then reverse themselves when the other side gets into office.
It's not bizarre at all if you accept the notion that left-wingers and right-wingers have different goals and are each libertarian about some things and authoritarian about other things.
For example, many right-wingers will happily use state authority to force public school kids to read Of Pandas and People because that furthers their goal of increasing the influence of Christianity, but will resist using of state authority to force public school kids to read Silent Spring because that's opposes their goal of reducing regulation of business. By contrast, left-wingers will happily force public school kids to read Silent Spring because that furthers their goal of decreasing environmental damage of commerce, but will resist using of state authority to force public school kids to read Of Pandas and People because that opposes their goal of religious freedom.
So with devoted right-wingers and left-wingers, it's not about consistency. It's about forcing others to act the way that they want everyone to act, while allowing themselves and their way of acting to go unpunished.