... it has an insurance take on things. People pay 30 bucks a month, I help you if your house catches on fire. Unlike *your* fire department, I don't have a financial motive to set houses on fire (so rational people should trust me more). If 30 is too high, then someone should be willing to come in for less.
The exception here is if the government starts putting onerous restrictions on things, at mine or your insistence. Firemen should have training every two to five years, and they need a special permit that only you can give. And the permit expires in five months if you aren't an active fireman, and it costs a pretty penny and hours of study. These ideas, put in place to "assure a level of confidence to the consumer", actually give me and you a monopoly, so no one can come in and charge 10 bucks a house a month to undercut my 30 and your "everything you own".
Now, I don't actually think that public roads and fire departments are a bad idea. Everyone pays X dollars a month for the insurance model (it's called taxes, though), and the government does it. They probably don't provide the best fire departments out of all possible worlds, but it's good enough. The nature of that market means that governmentalization doesn't hurt customers too much, and of course, the centralized model is always simpler. So I'm not calling for the privatization of fire departments and such.
But if it happened, the world wouldn't be the nightmare scenario you suggest.
I said to myself, well, they broke Mozilla, congrats punks. The content Nazis on Slashdot are all over this, saying "It's my content, I CONTROL WHAT HAPPENS TO IT CONSUMER", as if operations that are fundamentally occuring two feet to my left are somehow in their domain of things. They'll bravely fight reality itself for control over your browser!
But, what about Opera?
Well, my favorite trick (author/user mode toggle) switches it out and loses the image. But Save with Images As works fine, dumping a pleasantly print001.jpg in the specified directory. A search revealed that the fastest user level trick I'm aware of is sitting here at score 0.
Plus, there will always be a way to make your automated client as invisible as a user, so this is a complete nonissue. The content nazis don't get it and never will, so they'll never control information. I bet Moz/Firefox has a few new features eventually, and probably a plugin sooner.
The real question is, why does Google think this is appropriate behavior?
And probably sibling as well, just for the spiteful last paragraph.
1- "USians" is a pretty controversial term. The idea is that "America" is a continent, so the residents of the "United States of America" should not refer to themselves as "American" is behind it. While the term is imperfect, the reason is that the term "America" appears right there in the name of the country. While it's techinically a good point, in practice it's just an excuse for those who dislike Americans to insult them with a little term they coined for the purpose. It's as if I went around in a discussion involving gender relations, and instead of using any reasonable term for females, I constantly referred to them as "The Weaker Sex", and defended it with logic. Sure, I'd be right, what with testosterone and all, but I'm still being a jerk.
2- Americans don't really hate Europe, or pretend to. Most of the conservatives I know dislike the leftish atmosphere of Europe politically, and will usually verbally go after any nation that doesn't jump on whatever war bandwagon is newest. But they don't hate Europe or Europeans, and they still go there on their honeymoons;)
3- Let's start with the implication that good things only come from Europe. Now, instead of attacking America, go after Africa.
Um, *Texas* is not a democracy, the US is (well, a representative democracy, but everyone in this thread is happy with that so far).
Actually, I think it's unique among the states, but Texas still maintains the right to secede. No one takes it seriously, though.
The point is that being a smaller part of a larger, independent, non-democratic state means that you aren't really a democracy yourself. Sure, you make *some* decisions democratically and that's good, but this is a comment about democratic states, not subservient parts of nondemocratic states.
I mean, you can't qualify as a democratic nation if you are democratic but not a nation, right?
Yes, if you count being able to elect some people while a God-selected King sits on a divine throne, then England is in the running. At that point, I don't know. Maybe China is, too? I don't know enough about their imperial history to say one way or another whether any of their officials have been elected.
But I don't feel like I'm too crazy to say that if your chief executive gets his power from his royal blood or directly from God, then I'm not going to count you as a democracy.
As for the Iroquois Nation infuencing the founding fathers... I don't think we can be sure. Certainly they met before the revolution (the Americans entreated them to help them stand in the war on their side, the Iroquois eventually sided with England: it was probably in their best interest as a people and a nation for the English to win, so lacking prophecy this was the right call). But pretty much all of white America at that time was racist and proud enough that they wouldn't let that slip through into the histories as an inspirational source (or it would be sporadic when it was mentioned).
Hey, this site: http://web.syr.edu/~bmoriari/review1.html Shows the Articles of Confederacy a closer match with the Iroquis system of unanimity. Interesting. I'm not quite sure if I buy the conclusions (esp. as related to Jefferson), though.
I *think* that you are right about the revolution breaking down the system- after all, they did side with England in a war England lost. That wouldn't challenge the US in terms of age, but it would mean that it mostly broke down because of an external cause.
"It is kind of a joke of history that the currenty US democratic system resembles more the foul last days of roman democracy than anything else, given all the simbols the US government erected itself to resemble rome."
Yes, America is a republic, like old rome. And yes, the cracks about descent into empire are interesting, but people have been making these cracks for over a hundred years! It was definitely in the founding fathers' minds on how to prevent the fall to empire, hence the three units of government with checks and balances, and the devotion to the idea of neutrality and nonparticipation in foreign wars. The three branches idea has, overall, done a pretty fair job. The devotion to the idea of neutrality in the affairs of other nations was still strong up until WWII (the "America Firsters" are frequently charged with aspirations of Nazism, but a fair look at it reveals that they didn't really want to send their kids to go fight and die in Europe, which at that point had provided nothing but a boiling cesspool of battles). WWII, for better or for worse, sent America the message that the world needs it to be involved. How that message has been recieved (and in my opinion misinterpreted) is something I could type for an hour about.
"The US is not the most stable democracy because New Zealand had both universal women's sufferage and the right to stand for election to office one year before the United States."
Additionally, it didn't even offer anything new from my previous post, and echoed the exact same sentiment as the post I was replying to.
I guess could reply with the nitpick that no women were actually elected that year in NZ, while women where voting and in office in the US beforehand. But how is this relevant? The point is that the New Zealand claim of equality of sexes is as empty as the US making the same claim, plus one must remember that it's easier to include radical ideas like universal sufferage when one is founding a new form of government (and the 1850s were a lot more progressive than the late 1700s, for reasons like "it was over 50 years later").
"a long time ago" for Swiss democracy is 1848, when their constitution was locked in. Before that was, you know, war (not a very bloody war mind you, but war nonetheless).
And actually a little bit *after* that I think, but I wasn't able to find google confirmation.
I am amazed that a post I made, which I *thought* was honestly rather evenhanded, has been attacked by a bunch of "Europeon supremacists" who I have to assume are not European themselves. If they were, I'm sure they would know the facts that easily disprove their statements and are widely available on Google.
More disturbing is the implied personal attacks, as if by stating that the world was really different seven generations ago, and that that was a really long time ago, I'm somehow some kind of crazy American wacko with no education.
I don't want this to come across as an attack on the Swiss system, which is a very neat democratic implementation that is, I think (and feel free to slam me in ten responses that all get moderated +4 Informative if I'm wrong, or just get moderated +2 Interesting by implying I've never heard of Athens) the closest to a direct democracy that the world knows today.
First elected female to US House Of Representatives: Jeannette Rankin, 1917.
Females granted the right to even *stand* for parliament in New Zealand: 1919.
So they could vote, but couldn't actually go into office.
Not exactly modern yet.
But even without that fact, I think that's a bit unfair. I mean, that's not "the oldest democracy" because it's the first with universal sufferage. If a nation nowadays had a democracy but excluded females, we'd call it a bunch of names... but we'd still call it a democracy. Maybe "incomplete" or even "unfair", but if the vote is extended to a signifigant portion of the population in a manner that crosses social strata it's obvious what they are trying to do.
A better term would be, maybe, "oldest gender neutral democracy", "oldest fair democracy", or "first fully representative democracy".
Huh. Funny, considering that they have only been independent since last century.
And links in this very thread give the details: 1262-1380 they were under Norway. 1380-1944 they were under Denmark. 1944 to present they are independent.
Now, it does appear that they had a democracy locally, and that's actually really cool. But again, the fact that a cool tidbit is kind of relevant (but doesn't disprove the stated fact) is not worth "Have a look at other histories blah blah blah" as if I had never thought of, you know, looking around at other histories.
Additionally, if you actually read anything I've written, you'll note that I never actually claimed that the US was the oldest. I mentioned that the specific cases brought up don't disprove the statement. I also mention that that probably wasn't what was meant originally.
But by all means don't let my actual words get in your way if you are looking for someone to trash! I understand that's much more fun.
"only two years later" Ok, so the answer then would be, no.
Remember, the original statement wasn't my question, it was "the United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy'. You don't reply to that with "Well, except Canada", and then add a parenthetical "(which isn't either, but it's really close, and besides I don't like anything that smells like an American being proud of America for any reason whatsoever)".
"Most Americans like to think that they have some sort of corner on democracy - but they don't"
Can you really start statements with "most $NATIONALITY..." and really expect to be taken seriously?
That being said, I'll agree that there is a dearth of information about the rest of the world in the average American Joe's history lessons. That doesn't make most of us ignorant about democracy in Athens, for instance.
"don't forget that all the way into the 1960's, many southern states were still making African-Americans jump through near-impossible hoops to vote"
Right. The easier point is the whole "slavery" thing, and the high levels of disenfranchisement that went on after the civil war. Or the entire Native American thing, which had become a lot less genocidal by the 1900s but was still basically an attempt to utterly erase a culture.
I take a different look at this situation: it wasn't like the rest of the world knew racism was bad and that the US was the only nation crazy enough to engage in it. The rest of the world tended to be way racist to the point of extermination (though not in general European democracies, exceptions to that being obvious), or just plain segregated and happy with it (I include in that class societies like the Japanese, where virtually all citizens are of the same racial heritage- that wasn't by any modern decree, but simply via history). America took the strides and swallowed the bitter pill that it actually *was* doing wrong by discriminating and that racially different people really should all be treated equally under the law.
Most nations never had the chance- they either never had a diverse population or had "handled that problem" in antiquity.
"I (and most the rest of the democratized world) never hold up the US as being a paragon of democracy"
That's simply ludicrous. If the US is guilty of any recent crimes in the name of democracy, it's the kind of thing where we send a ton of troops and bombs and things to install a democracy (one that "just happens" to favor our interests). While the democratic principle does not, in my mind, excuse or justify this kind of behavior, the last 100 years have shown the US to largely be in favor of empowering people (exceptions being dubious covert actions, especially in South America- but often these were done to "prevent the spread of communism"- while this seems a silly bogeyman now, remember that we had ALL been told by the Soviets that we would be buried by history!). Other nations, generally by virtue of not having a strong army, have been exempt from these actions, both positive and negative.
While this is no reason to sneer at these other nations, neither is it a reason to claim that the US somehow does not put it's "money where it's mouth is" when it comes to democracy.
Now, perhaps when he wrote "world's most stable" he didn't mean that it has had the least unrest or the longest term of peaceful reign, but perhaps he meant a combination of those, and that the US has been vocal and active in promoting and defending its version of representative democracy?
Well, assuming that *is* valid, is there a democracy that has existed, say, since the civil war, besides the US?
There might be, I dunno. But the civil war happened a long time ago, and the other nations at that time were usually not really elected so much.
On the other hand, your point is also contestable based on the fact that the civil war resolved in favor of the status quo. I'm not sure if that's a valid point to argue on, though.
Hmm, here's another: ----------- Your party has ten key values. The third is "ecological wisdom", which states among other things that we need to set up a sustainable society. While this sounds reasonable, how much of this belief is provable science, and how much is a fondness for nature being potentially writ in national policy? Is the belief that nature is best left partially wild truly established as fact, or is this a kind of recieved wisdom? -----------
Not trying to be acidic, I love nature. But to state that as a given is something I'm kind of puzzled about, and if this one is answered he can address the occasionally leveled accusation that the Greens are sort of mystic in their outlook and core beliefs.
My question:
---------
Greens, by being a successful third party, are frequently attacked. What do you feel is the best solution to the situation?
---------
We've heard different voting systems, voting your heart, and that voting for the lesser of two evils always gives you evil (in Badnarik's answer). I'm personally sold on any of these to break the general morass, but I would really love to hear what the Greens are thinking on this.
"a bunch of unorganized gun-owners" are a big concern to police, who frequently push stronger anti-gun laws and definitely want a registry of everyone (and already *have* a registry of everyone who carries concealed). The implicit assumption is that the police officer is NEVER wrong, and that you are wrong (guilty) until proven right (innocent).
If the populace having guns didn't matter, then the police wouldn't generally press so hard against it.
What kind of attitude is "Bust them quick before they get smart", anyway?
I don't even know if it counts as an intrusion if someone's idea is log on and ask your machine politely for root. Heck, you were the one that set up your machine to sit there and *listen* to such requests, and (probably) to ignore them.
It's obviously malicious if they are actually trying real exploits, of course.
Given the possibility of compromised machines, isn't it possible that many / most of the IPs recorded are not, in fact, the guilty party? What if you end up getting some innocent family in trouble (who maybe have one kid smart enough to have a finger pointed at him), because their machine got owned by someone across the world- and *that* control was established by a library computer, effectively untraceable to the original malefactor?
Most of the tricks with the Dvorak keyboard are based on principles that hold in *any* Latin language. The big deal is the vowel/consonant pairs, where the vowels are under one hand and the most common consonants another.
I've heard this before, the assumption that Dvorak is tightly tied to English. Well, QWERTY is tightly tied to *nonsense*. Wouldn't you rather have a keyboard optimized for *some* human language? It isn't like other Latin languages lack vowels or consonents.
I mean, QWERTY and Dvorak both suffer from a *real* international problem, and that is the lack of enough keys! Many letters require meta instructions to enter.
I understand that the "Hey, we're ok not trying Dvorak" posts will always be ranked higher by the same QWERTY using public each time, but your argument was "Using Dvorak helps out my English typing slightly more (maybe) than it helps out my French typing, so we should all use something that sucks equally at all languages.". I don't think that's a very good argument.
The ergonomic Maltron *with the Maltron layout* should be better. Certainly in English it should be, given the letter "E" under the left thumb. But switching to Dvorak was a button in Control Panel and later a check box on the installer when I went to Linux. It doesn't *require* new expensive keyboards.
Though in fairness, Maltron keyboards would dramatically decrease in price if they were used commonly.
Using Dvorak in a QWERTY world makes me feel like the timecube guy: everyone else seems "educated stupid". Why do we teach QWERTY? Because that's what everyone knows. Why does everyone know QWERTY? Because that's what we teach. It's like a great reason to keep doing something retarded from a hundred years ago.
Vocal communication isn't going to be better than keyboards in many ways, at least one of which will be the fact that your voice can get sore. I don't know what the future of input devices will be exactly, but something that watches your eyes for movements or is closer to your nervous system (for instance, if just *twitching* toward the keys typed them) might be around in our lifetime.
This is just like DRM stuff running on your machine being made mandatory- here's software (heck, here's *hardware*), and the law prevents you from touching it (DRM has the DMCA). It's running on your property, on your dollar, and you even OWN it- but, it's illegal to modify your own property, because then the state's perfect witness would be in doubt.
Never mind that everyone who wants will have have a hack for this inside of a decade, and every drunken wacko will have it on *their* car. Ignore that- just like DRM, it only punishes the unlucky innocent and the stupid guilty.
I keep making the quip that government installed sentries on your property, of *any form, real or still sci-fi* (black box to record your driving, obfuscated code to block your digital freedom, camera in your bedroom, monitoring chip in your skull) should be illegal based on, in addition to the fourth amendment (illegal search), the third. I'm not entirely serious here, but a judge wouldn't be totally wacked in assuming that one of the reasons you can't quarter troops is because they aren't allowed to post distributed sentries in everyone's homes. Just because it's now feasible to have tiny electronic "soldiers" everywhere you can print them out or whatever doesn't make it ok.
But in seriousness, we can hope that this gets struck down by the fourth amendment.
The rightwing congresscritters keep mentioning lines like "the supposed right to privacy", and "the right to privacy that does not, in my opinion, exist...". The Constitution is a bit unclear on that. So where's our privacy amendment? Why do we always have to rely on clever judges to prevent 1984? Why is it them and the people against the two *elected* branches of government on this issue, constantly?
The "proper" thing to use is dmcrypt, not loopback. dmcrypt will enable you to encrypt whole partitions (you set it up with cryptsetup than access the device, or there are more manual steps for the pain lovers). You can of course, also use it as a loopback filesystem.
Fedora Core 2 has this, and I'm sure a couple others do. The standard loopback guy has been deprecated.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidence on elves still pending...
For it is a mighty, imperial color!
You are not worthy to insult such a suffusion of blue and red light!
... it has an insurance take on things. People pay 30 bucks a month, I help you if your house catches on fire. Unlike *your* fire department, I don't have a financial motive to set houses on fire (so rational people should trust me more). If 30 is too high, then someone should be willing to come in for less.
The exception here is if the government starts putting onerous restrictions on things, at mine or your insistence. Firemen should have training every two to five years, and they need a special permit that only you can give. And the permit expires in five months if you aren't an active fireman, and it costs a pretty penny and hours of study. These ideas, put in place to "assure a level of confidence to the consumer", actually give me and you a monopoly, so no one can come in and charge 10 bucks a house a month to undercut my 30 and your "everything you own".
Now, I don't actually think that public roads and fire departments are a bad idea. Everyone pays X dollars a month for the insurance model (it's called taxes, though), and the government does it. They probably don't provide the best fire departments out of all possible worlds, but it's good enough. The nature of that market means that governmentalization doesn't hurt customers too much, and of course, the centralized model is always simpler. So I'm not calling for the privatization of fire departments and such.
But if it happened, the world wouldn't be the nightmare scenario you suggest.
Mod parent up, please!
I said to myself, well, they broke Mozilla, congrats punks. The content Nazis on Slashdot are all over this, saying "It's my content, I CONTROL WHAT HAPPENS TO IT CONSUMER", as if operations that are fundamentally occuring two feet to my left are somehow in their domain of things. They'll bravely fight reality itself for control over your browser!
But, what about Opera?
Well, my favorite trick (author/user mode toggle) switches it out and loses the image. But Save with Images As works fine, dumping a pleasantly print001.jpg in the specified directory. A search revealed that the fastest user level trick I'm aware of is sitting here at score 0.
Plus, there will always be a way to make your automated client as invisible as a user, so this is a complete nonissue. The content nazis don't get it and never will, so they'll never control information. I bet Moz/Firefox has a few new features eventually, and probably a plugin sooner.
The real question is, why does Google think this is appropriate behavior?
And probably sibling as well, just for the spiteful last paragraph.
;)
1- "USians" is a pretty controversial term. The idea is that "America" is a continent, so the residents of the "United States of America" should not refer to themselves as "American" is behind it. While the term is imperfect, the reason is that the term "America" appears right there in the name of the country. While it's techinically a good point, in practice it's just an excuse for those who dislike Americans to insult them with a little term they coined for the purpose. It's as if I went around in a discussion involving gender relations, and instead of using any reasonable term for females, I constantly referred to them as "The Weaker Sex", and defended it with logic. Sure, I'd be right, what with testosterone and all, but I'm still being a jerk.
2- Americans don't really hate Europe, or pretend to. Most of the conservatives I know dislike the leftish atmosphere of Europe politically, and will usually verbally go after any nation that doesn't jump on whatever war bandwagon is newest. But they don't hate Europe or Europeans, and they still go there on their honeymoons
3- Let's start with the implication that good things only come from Europe. Now, instead of attacking America, go after Africa.
See how that's awful?
Needs more Badnarik, Cobb. Heck, Peroutka too, I guess.
What's the point of a condorcet system if mostly a bunch of demopublicans?
Any move toward trusting consumers and an industry standard is worthy of a smile. :)
Or at least, a colon and a close parenthesis.
Um, *Texas* is not a democracy, the US is (well, a representative democracy, but everyone in this thread is happy with that so far).
Actually, I think it's unique among the states, but Texas still maintains the right to secede. No one takes it seriously, though.
The point is that being a smaller part of a larger, independent, non-democratic state means that you aren't really a democracy yourself. Sure, you make *some* decisions democratically and that's good, but this is a comment about democratic states, not subservient parts of nondemocratic states.
I mean, you can't qualify as a democratic nation if you are democratic but not a nation, right?
+3 is from karma mod, my bad.
Yes, if you count being able to elect some people while a God-selected King sits on a divine throne, then England is in the running. At that point, I don't know. Maybe China is, too? I don't know enough about their imperial history to say one way or another whether any of their officials have been elected.
Shows the Articles of Confederacy a closer match with the Iroquis system of unanimity. Interesting. I'm not quite sure if I buy the conclusions (esp. as related to Jefferson), though.
But I don't feel like I'm too crazy to say that if your chief executive gets his power from his royal blood or directly from God, then I'm not going to count you as a democracy.
As for the Iroquois Nation infuencing the founding fathers... I don't think we can be sure. Certainly they met before the revolution (the Americans entreated them to help them stand in the war on their side, the Iroquois eventually sided with England: it was probably in their best interest as a people and a nation for the English to win, so lacking prophecy this was the right call). But pretty much all of white America at that time was racist and proud enough that they wouldn't let that slip through into the histories as an inspirational source (or it would be sporadic when it was mentioned).
Hey, this site:
http://web.syr.edu/~bmoriari/review1.html
I *think* that you are right about the revolution breaking down the system- after all, they did side with England in a war England lost. That wouldn't challenge the US in terms of age, but it would mean that it mostly broke down because of an external cause.
"It is kind of a joke of history that the currenty US democratic system resembles more the foul last days of roman democracy than anything else, given all the simbols the US government erected itself to resemble rome."
Yes, America is a republic, like old rome. And yes, the cracks about descent into empire are interesting, but people have been making these cracks for over a hundred years! It was definitely in the founding fathers' minds on how to prevent the fall to empire, hence the three units of government with checks and balances, and the devotion to the idea of neutrality and nonparticipation in foreign wars. The three branches idea has, overall, done a pretty fair job. The devotion to the idea of neutrality in the affairs of other nations was still strong up until WWII (the "America Firsters" are frequently charged with aspirations of Nazism, but a fair look at it reveals that they didn't really want to send their kids to go fight and die in Europe, which at that point had provided nothing but a boiling cesspool of battles). WWII, for better or for worse, sent America the message that the world needs it to be involved. How that message has been recieved (and in my opinion misinterpreted) is something I could type for an hour about.
Did that really get modded +3? Good grief people!
Let me rephrase that post to show why it's silly:
"The US is not the most stable democracy because New Zealand had both universal women's sufferage and the right to stand for election to office one year before the United States."
Additionally, it didn't even offer anything new from my previous post, and echoed the exact same sentiment as the post I was replying to.
I guess could reply with the nitpick that no women were actually elected that year in NZ, while women where voting and in office in the US beforehand. But how is this relevant? The point is that the New Zealand claim of equality of sexes is as empty as the US making the same claim, plus one must remember that it's easier to include radical ideas like universal sufferage when one is founding a new form of government (and the 1850s were a lot more progressive than the late 1700s, for reasons like "it was over 50 years later").
"a long time ago" for Swiss democracy is 1848, when their constitution was locked in. Before that was, you know, war (not a very bloody war mind you, but war nonetheless).
And actually a little bit *after* that I think, but I wasn't able to find google confirmation.
I am amazed that a post I made, which I *thought* was honestly rather evenhanded, has been attacked by a bunch of "Europeon supremacists" who I have to assume are not European themselves. If they were, I'm sure they would know the facts that easily disprove their statements and are widely available on Google.
More disturbing is the implied personal attacks, as if by stating that the world was really different seven generations ago, and that that was a really long time ago, I'm somehow some kind of crazy American wacko with no education.
I don't want this to come across as an attack on the Swiss system, which is a very neat democratic implementation that is, I think (and feel free to slam me in ten responses that all get moderated +4 Informative if I'm wrong, or just get moderated +2 Interesting by implying I've never heard of Athens) the closest to a direct democracy that the world knows today.
First elected female to US House Of Representatives:
Jeannette Rankin, 1917.
Females granted the right to even *stand* for parliament in New Zealand: 1919.
So they could vote, but couldn't actually go into office.
Not exactly modern yet.
But even without that fact, I think that's a bit unfair. I mean, that's not "the oldest democracy" because it's the first with universal sufferage. If a nation nowadays had a democracy but excluded females, we'd call it a bunch of names... but we'd still call it a democracy. Maybe "incomplete" or even "unfair", but if the vote is extended to a signifigant portion of the population in a manner that crosses social strata it's obvious what they are trying to do.
A better term would be, maybe, "oldest gender neutral democracy", "oldest fair democracy", or "first fully representative democracy".
Huh. Funny, considering that they have only been independent since last century.
And links in this very thread give the details:
1262-1380 they were under Norway.
1380-1944 they were under Denmark.
1944 to present they are independent.
Now, it does appear that they had a democracy locally, and that's actually really cool. But again, the fact that a cool tidbit is kind of relevant (but doesn't disprove the stated fact) is not worth "Have a look at other histories blah blah blah" as if I had never thought of, you know, looking around at other histories.
Additionally, if you actually read anything I've written, you'll note that I never actually claimed that the US was the oldest. I mentioned that the specific cases brought up don't disprove the statement. I also mention that that probably wasn't what was meant originally.
But by all means don't let my actual words get in your way if you are looking for someone to trash! I understand that's much more fun.
"only two years later"
Ok, so the answer then would be, no.
Remember, the original statement wasn't my question, it was "the United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy'. You don't reply to that with "Well, except Canada", and then add a parenthetical "(which isn't either, but it's really close, and besides I don't like anything that smells like an American being proud of America for any reason whatsoever)".
"Most Americans like to think that they have some sort of corner on democracy - but they don't"
Can you really start statements with "most $NATIONALITY..." and really expect to be taken seriously?
That being said, I'll agree that there is a dearth of information about the rest of the world in the average American Joe's history lessons. That doesn't make most of us ignorant about democracy in Athens, for instance.
"don't forget that all the way into the 1960's, many southern states were still making African-Americans jump through near-impossible hoops to vote"
Right. The easier point is the whole "slavery" thing, and the high levels of disenfranchisement that went on after the civil war. Or the entire Native American thing, which had become a lot less genocidal by the 1900s but was still basically an attempt to utterly erase a culture.
I take a different look at this situation: it wasn't like the rest of the world knew racism was bad and that the US was the only nation crazy enough to engage in it. The rest of the world tended to be way racist to the point of extermination (though not in general European democracies, exceptions to that being obvious), or just plain segregated and happy with it (I include in that class societies like the Japanese, where virtually all citizens are of the same racial heritage- that wasn't by any modern decree, but simply via history). America took the strides and swallowed the bitter pill that it actually *was* doing wrong by discriminating and that racially different people really should all be treated equally under the law.
Most nations never had the chance- they either never had a diverse population or had "handled that problem" in antiquity.
"I (and most the rest of the democratized world) never hold up the US as being a paragon of democracy"
That's simply ludicrous. If the US is guilty of any recent crimes in the name of democracy, it's the kind of thing where we send a ton of troops and bombs and things to install a democracy (one that "just happens" to favor our interests). While the democratic principle does not, in my mind, excuse or justify this kind of behavior, the last 100 years have shown the US to largely be in favor of empowering people (exceptions being dubious covert actions, especially in South America- but often these were done to "prevent the spread of communism"- while this seems a silly bogeyman now, remember that we had ALL been told by the Soviets that we would be buried by history!). Other nations, generally by virtue of not having a strong army, have been exempt from these actions, both positive and negative.
While this is no reason to sneer at these other nations, neither is it a reason to claim that the US somehow does not put it's "money where it's mouth is" when it comes to democracy.
Now, perhaps when he wrote "world's most stable" he didn't mean that it has had the least unrest or the longest term of peaceful reign, but perhaps he meant a combination of those, and that the US has been vocal and active in promoting and defending its version of representative democracy?
Well, assuming that *is* valid, is there a democracy that has existed, say, since the civil war, besides the US?
There might be, I dunno. But the civil war happened a long time ago, and the other nations at that time were usually not really elected so much.
On the other hand, your point is also contestable based on the fact that the civil war resolved in favor of the status quo. I'm not sure if that's a valid point to argue on, though.
Hmm, here's another:
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Your party has ten key values. The third is "ecological wisdom", which states among other things that we need to set up a sustainable society. While this sounds reasonable, how much of this belief is provable science, and how much is a fondness for nature being potentially writ in national policy?
Is the belief that nature is best left partially wild truly established as fact, or is this a kind of recieved wisdom?
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Not trying to be acidic, I love nature. But to state that as a given is something I'm kind of puzzled about, and if this one is answered he can address the occasionally leveled accusation that the Greens are sort of mystic in their outlook and core beliefs.
My question: --------- Greens, by being a successful third party, are frequently attacked. What do you feel is the best solution to the situation? --------- We've heard different voting systems, voting your heart, and that voting for the lesser of two evils always gives you evil (in Badnarik's answer). I'm personally sold on any of these to break the general morass, but I would really love to hear what the Greens are thinking on this.
"...what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak it [lojban] from birth?"
;)
Hopefully the female normally tasked with birthing your children would continue to make sure that they remain hypothetical...
"a bunch of unorganized gun-owners" are a big concern to police, who frequently push stronger anti-gun laws and definitely want a registry of everyone (and already *have* a registry of everyone who carries concealed). The implicit assumption is that the police officer is NEVER wrong, and that you are wrong (guilty) until proven right (innocent).
If the populace having guns didn't matter, then the police wouldn't generally press so hard against it.
What kind of attitude is "Bust them quick before they get smart", anyway?
I don't even know if it counts as an intrusion if someone's idea is log on and ask your machine politely for root. Heck, you were the one that set up your machine to sit there and *listen* to such requests, and (probably) to ignore them.
It's obviously malicious if they are actually trying real exploits, of course.
Given the possibility of compromised machines, isn't it possible that many / most of the IPs recorded are not, in fact, the guilty party? What if you end up getting some innocent family in trouble (who maybe have one kid smart enough to have a finger pointed at him), because their machine got owned by someone across the world- and *that* control was established by a library computer, effectively untraceable to the original malefactor?
Most of the tricks with the Dvorak keyboard are based on principles that hold in *any* Latin language. The big deal is the vowel/consonant pairs, where the vowels are under one hand and the most common consonants another.
I've heard this before, the assumption that Dvorak is tightly tied to English. Well, QWERTY is tightly tied to *nonsense*. Wouldn't you rather have a keyboard optimized for *some* human language? It isn't like other Latin languages lack vowels or consonents.
I mean, QWERTY and Dvorak both suffer from a *real* international problem, and that is the lack of enough keys! Many letters require meta instructions to enter.
I understand that the "Hey, we're ok not trying Dvorak" posts will always be ranked higher by the same QWERTY using public each time, but your argument was "Using Dvorak helps out my English typing slightly more (maybe) than it helps out my French typing, so we should all use something that sucks equally at all languages.". I don't think that's a very good argument.
The ergonomic Maltron *with the Maltron layout* should be better. Certainly in English it should be, given the letter "E" under the left thumb.
But switching to Dvorak was a button in Control Panel and later a check box on the installer when I went to Linux. It doesn't *require* new expensive keyboards.
Though in fairness, Maltron keyboards would dramatically decrease in price if they were used commonly.
Using Dvorak in a QWERTY world makes me feel like the timecube guy: everyone else seems "educated stupid". Why do we teach QWERTY? Because that's what everyone knows. Why does everyone know QWERTY? Because that's what we teach. It's like a great reason to keep doing something retarded from a hundred years ago.
Vocal communication isn't going to be better than keyboards in many ways, at least one of which will be the fact that your voice can get sore. I don't know what the future of input devices will be exactly, but something that watches your eyes for movements or is closer to your nervous system (for instance, if just *twitching* toward the keys typed them) might be around in our lifetime.
This is just like DRM stuff running on your machine being made mandatory- here's software (heck, here's *hardware*), and the law prevents you from touching it (DRM has the DMCA). It's running on your property, on your dollar, and you even OWN it- but, it's illegal to modify your own property, because then the state's perfect witness would be in doubt.
Never mind that everyone who wants will have have a hack for this inside of a decade, and every drunken wacko will have it on *their* car. Ignore that- just like DRM, it only punishes the unlucky innocent and the stupid guilty.
I keep making the quip that government installed sentries on your property, of *any form, real or still sci-fi* (black box to record your driving, obfuscated code to block your digital freedom, camera in your bedroom, monitoring chip in your skull) should be illegal based on, in addition to the fourth amendment (illegal search), the third. I'm not entirely serious here, but a judge wouldn't be totally wacked in assuming that one of the reasons you can't quarter troops is because they aren't allowed to post distributed sentries in everyone's homes. Just because it's now feasible to have tiny electronic "soldiers" everywhere you can print them out or whatever doesn't make it ok.
But in seriousness, we can hope that this gets struck down by the fourth amendment.
The rightwing congresscritters keep mentioning lines like "the supposed right to privacy", and "the right to privacy that does not, in my opinion, exist...". The Constitution is a bit unclear on that. So where's our privacy amendment? Why do we always have to rely on clever judges to prevent 1984? Why is it them and the people against the two *elected* branches of government on this issue, constantly?
The "proper" thing to use is dmcrypt, not loopback. dmcrypt will enable you to encrypt whole partitions (you set it up with cryptsetup than access the device, or there are more manual steps for the pain lovers). You can of course, also use it as a loopback filesystem.
Fedora Core 2 has this, and I'm sure a couple others do. The standard loopback guy has been deprecated.