You know, I'm not a fan of Russia and Putin, to put it mildly. But this whole outrage about "OMG how dare they influence our elections!", coming from Americans of all people, is rich. USA routinely does it all over the world, much more openly at that - and on occasion, it even sponsored military coups to overthrow a popularly elected candidate that was the "wrong choice".
Also, if you're worried so much about said influence, how about you tell your party and your candidate to not do any stupid shit that they can be blackmailed with later? Or if they do, at least don't put it in writing, on a poorly secured email server?
This isn't entirely true - primaries are regulated in many states in some respects. For example, a "white-only primary" would be illegal. Some states require primaries to be open. And so forth.
No one will be ruled by Trump even if he wins. The US government is actually designed to handle situations like this. There are three separate but equal branches of government that can stalemate the others.
Oh, really?
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
I can assure you, based on what I've seen in the Russian government, you won't get many smart techies working there.
And while Russia doesn't have a Silicon Valley, US does, and it's not all that hard to immigrate when you're in this industry.
The reason why Wikileaks wouldn't be particularly interesting in Russia is because there's already abundance of information about corruption, excesses, and outright crime that is collected by activists from public sources. For example, the country's general prosecutor is now definitively known to have been in cahoots with a gang of criminals that terrorized an entire village into submission and paying them "protection money", and killed an entire family, including little children, to make a point to the others. Government's reaction? They called it all lies, and Putin personally made a point that the guy will stay.
Personally, I agree. But I know too many people who are willing to take the risk of Trump just to stick a finger to Clinton and DNC. I think it's foolish, but nevertheless, if there are enough of them, it may just add up.
Of course, the other side has a similar problem. Which is why I think that it's basically a contest of who can motivate more to show up to vote against the other guy. And given the potential consequences, I'd rather not take chances, even when small quantities of votes are at stake. Brexit should be a lesson to us all.
Libertarianism is not just any limited government. It's government limited to those functions that are necessary to maximize individual liberties (or individual negative rights, to be more specific).
Libertarians also believe that all people, not just those that happened to be born in a "right" country, have said rights.
Now, go ahead and explain how government-sponsored economic protectionism (which borders are, at least in the context of this discussion) maximizes individual rights and liberties.
If this were two Hillary campaign staffers discussing it, it would be very sleazy, but not blatantly wrong.
The problem is that it's two DNC staffers. Since DNC effectively organizes the primaries on federal level, they're supposed to be neutral. Instead, we see people not only expressing a clearly non-neutral opinion on one of the candidates, but they are actually plotting to do something that would benefit one candidate by hurting another.
Contrasted with the official DNC claim that they were, indeed, neutral, this is pretty damning. Not illegal, most likely, but as far as reputation goes, it's going to hurt. And Clinton will be affected by it as well, simply because she was the beneficiary of it.
This sort of thing won't make anyone switch from Hillary to Trump (or vice versa). But the main danger isn't third parties - it's people simply not showing up to vote, because of disillusionment.
The power of government is what maintains borders - visas are government-issued documents, and immigration officers are government employees. In the absence of government regulations, people are free to move between countries as they see fit.
Impartial journalism is a fantasy. But with multiple sources, we can at least hope that their biases more or less cancel out. Even if it's not the case, at least as far as reporting (vs not reporting) on facts alone, various competing sources will offer a more complete picture, as well as pointing each others' inaccuracies - I can then piece the facts together myself to get something much closer to what's actually going on, and think for myself instead of relying on their analytics.
OTOH, with a single agency in charge of reporting on a particular topic, the only facts that I get is that which this agency chooses to report. I don't think I could ever trust such a thing to give me a sufficiently accurate picture, especially on a topic as political as that. There would also be extreme temptation for various power players (governments, wealthy private individuals and organizations etc) to try to shape the picture by influencing that agency behind the scenes. Again, they do it today with media outlets, but so long as they cannot do it with all of them at once on a particular topic, just one is enough to get some inconvenient facts out.
For what it's worth, Judaism didn't declare Levitical law invalid. They just created so many constraints around the more sinister applications of it that it's practically impossible to apply in practice. Which might provide a template for how this should be approached in Islam - rather than convincing them that stoning for adultery is a bad idea, convince them to raise the bar for its application, until it disappears in practice.
This only works if you trust said group of journalists to provide unbiased reporting (and not to e.g. omit facts as "irrelevant"). I'm not sure whether such an agreement can be achieved. For example, many right-wing-oriented media outlets make it a point to underscore the religion and ethnicity of the attackers, while some left-wing-oriented outlets omit or obfuscate them. Can they agree on a single unified reporting standard? If they do, will the audiences be happy?
On gay marriage, they have changed their tune from "it's evil and should be banned" (remember DOMA, and all the talk about the marriage amendment back in 90s?) to "let the states decide". As Republicans always do on every matter where they find themselves outnumbered on the federal level.
Also, they really want to overturn Roe, and the only way they can do so at this point is by appointing a very specific type of judges to SCOTUS. Such judges are very likely to overturn Obergefell, as well.
Not all Republicans hold these views, but most do.
And furthermore, one curious thing that the polls highlight, is that Republicans are far closer to each other on all these issues than Democrats. Which is not really surprising - they have been the doom-and-gloom "we're losing our country" party for the past few decades, and so they're much more prone to wagon circling.
Trump has been ambiguous on it - as he usually is when he doesn't have a specific plan in mind. However, conveniently for all of us, GOP has just adopted an official party platform - and it's very consistently social conservative on LGBT rights (and pretty much everything else you can think of). It's so extreme, it prompted the (tiny) pro-gay faction inside GOP to go all out denouncing it.
I'm not sure past experience will be predictive here. Republicans and Democrats weren't nearly as antagonistic in the Clinton era as they are today. It was certainly heading in that direction then - impeachment was a sign of things to come - but still.
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You know, I'm not a fan of Russia and Putin, to put it mildly. But this whole outrage about "OMG how dare they influence our elections!", coming from Americans of all people, is rich. USA routinely does it all over the world, much more openly at that - and on occasion, it even sponsored military coups to overthrow a popularly elected candidate that was the "wrong choice".
Also, if you're worried so much about said influence, how about you tell your party and your candidate to not do any stupid shit that they can be blackmailed with later? Or if they do, at least don't put it in writing, on a poorly secured email server?
This isn't entirely true - primaries are regulated in many states in some respects. For example, a "white-only primary" would be illegal. Some states require primaries to be open. And so forth.
No one will be ruled by Trump even if he wins. The US government is actually designed to handle situations like this. There are three separate but equal branches of government that can stalemate the others.
Oh, really?
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
This is far more true for someone like Cruz, who was the next most likeliest choice for Republican candidate.
I can assure you, based on what I've seen in the Russian government, you won't get many smart techies working there.
And while Russia doesn't have a Silicon Valley, US does, and it's not all that hard to immigrate when you're in this industry.
The reason why Wikileaks wouldn't be particularly interesting in Russia is because there's already abundance of information about corruption, excesses, and outright crime that is collected by activists from public sources. For example, the country's general prosecutor is now definitively known to have been in cahoots with a gang of criminals that terrorized an entire village into submission and paying them "protection money", and killed an entire family, including little children, to make a point to the others. Government's reaction? They called it all lies, and Putin personally made a point that the guy will stay.
Personally, I agree. But I know too many people who are willing to take the risk of Trump just to stick a finger to Clinton and DNC. I think it's foolish, but nevertheless, if there are enough of them, it may just add up.
Of course, the other side has a similar problem. Which is why I think that it's basically a contest of who can motivate more to show up to vote against the other guy. And given the potential consequences, I'd rather not take chances, even when small quantities of votes are at stake. Brexit should be a lesson to us all.
Libertarianism is not just any limited government. It's government limited to those functions that are necessary to maximize individual liberties (or individual negative rights, to be more specific).
Libertarians also believe that all people, not just those that happened to be born in a "right" country, have said rights.
Now, go ahead and explain how government-sponsored economic protectionism (which borders are, at least in the context of this discussion) maximizes individual rights and liberties.
Take this email, for example:
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emai...
If this were two Hillary campaign staffers discussing it, it would be very sleazy, but not blatantly wrong.
The problem is that it's two DNC staffers. Since DNC effectively organizes the primaries on federal level, they're supposed to be neutral. Instead, we see people not only expressing a clearly non-neutral opinion on one of the candidates, but they are actually plotting to do something that would benefit one candidate by hurting another.
Contrasted with the official DNC claim that they were, indeed, neutral, this is pretty damning. Not illegal, most likely, but as far as reputation goes, it's going to hurt. And Clinton will be affected by it as well, simply because she was the beneficiary of it.
This sort of thing won't make anyone switch from Hillary to Trump (or vice versa). But the main danger isn't third parties - it's people simply not showing up to vote, because of disillusionment.
The power of government is what maintains borders - visas are government-issued documents, and immigration officers are government employees. In the absence of government regulations, people are free to move between countries as they see fit.
As if H1Bs don't have rent and health insurance to pay. What do you think they are, incorporeal spirits?
He also supports a ban on late term abortions.
For what it's worth, in states that legalized weed, you can get "weed in a pill" as a product from the same manufacturers that do edibles etc.
Impartial journalism is a fantasy. But with multiple sources, we can at least hope that their biases more or less cancel out. Even if it's not the case, at least as far as reporting (vs not reporting) on facts alone, various competing sources will offer a more complete picture, as well as pointing each others' inaccuracies - I can then piece the facts together myself to get something much closer to what's actually going on, and think for myself instead of relying on their analytics.
OTOH, with a single agency in charge of reporting on a particular topic, the only facts that I get is that which this agency chooses to report. I don't think I could ever trust such a thing to give me a sufficiently accurate picture, especially on a topic as political as that. There would also be extreme temptation for various power players (governments, wealthy private individuals and organizations etc) to try to shape the picture by influencing that agency behind the scenes. Again, they do it today with media outlets, but so long as they cannot do it with all of them at once on a particular topic, just one is enough to get some inconvenient facts out.
For what it's worth, Judaism didn't declare Levitical law invalid. They just created so many constraints around the more sinister applications of it that it's practically impossible to apply in practice. Which might provide a template for how this should be approached in Islam - rather than convincing them that stoning for adultery is a bad idea, convince them to raise the bar for its application, until it disappears in practice.
FYI, fascism isn't banned in the USA.
This only works if you trust said group of journalists to provide unbiased reporting (and not to e.g. omit facts as "irrelevant"). I'm not sure whether such an agreement can be achieved. For example, many right-wing-oriented media outlets make it a point to underscore the religion and ethnicity of the attackers, while some left-wing-oriented outlets omit or obfuscate them. Can they agree on a single unified reporting standard? If they do, will the audiences be happy?
Have you ever heard the phrase "separate but equal"? Are you aware of its context?
On gay marriage, they have changed their tune from "it's evil and should be banned" (remember DOMA, and all the talk about the marriage amendment back in 90s?) to "let the states decide". As Republicans always do on every matter where they find themselves outnumbered on the federal level.
Also, they really want to overturn Roe, and the only way they can do so at this point is by appointing a very specific type of judges to SCOTUS. Such judges are very likely to overturn Obergefell, as well.
Not all Republicans hold these views, but most do.
And furthermore, one curious thing that the polls highlight, is that Republicans are far closer to each other on all these issues than Democrats. Which is not really surprising - they have been the doom-and-gloom "we're losing our country" party for the past few decades, and so they're much more prone to wagon circling.
Trump has been ambiguous on it - as he usually is when he doesn't have a specific plan in mind. However, conveniently for all of us, GOP has just adopted an official party platform - and it's very consistently social conservative on LGBT rights (and pretty much everything else you can think of). It's so extreme, it prompted the (tiny) pro-gay faction inside GOP to go all out denouncing it.
No, C++ programmers have been referring to it as boost::optional for over a decade now. It'll be std::optional next year.
No, of course not. You'll just have to give them your private key.
This seems to have a complete list of polls, but the highest number for Johnson there is 12%.
I'm not sure past experience will be predictive here. Republicans and Democrats weren't nearly as antagonistic in the Clinton era as they are today. It was certainly heading in that direction then - impeachment was a sign of things to come - but still.