> the only thing that simply CAN NOT be stuffed down people's throat, is freedom
I would slightly disagree; I would characterize "agreement" as a class of things that can almost never be successfully forced on a person.
To see this, consider the thousands of examples Slashdot serves up for our enjoyment: flame wars.
How often does insulting and berating someone elicit their agreement on the topic of discussion? Pretty damn rarely. How often does polite and inoffensive language cause a person to say "good point" or give some other indication of agreement? Less often than it should, but still vastly more often than flaming.
Consider how much less likely you'd be to agree---and not just to placate him---with someone flaming you if he gunned down your child halfway through his flame. How positively do you think you'd receive his arguments then?
You can't use force to make someone to adopt your beliefs and values; the most you're likely to accomplish is the opposite. Sadly, those who realize this are rarely those who try it.
> You can shove it down people's throats, because the majority of them want it.
Witness our current shining success in Iraq.
There are very few things you can shove down a person's throat without making them angry. You might gratefully accept chocolate if I offered it to you, but I bet you'd struggle like mad if I tried to shove it down your throat.
> Just check with anybody you meet who is an ex-national of Iraq, Iran,
> China, Cuba, Soviet era-Russia, etc. There aren't too many happy stories to be heard.
There's no need for hyperbole here. Offhand, I can think of friends from Soviet-era Ukraine and recent China whose childhood stories are fairly happy, so suggesting these countries were/are unremitting hellholes isn't useful - it just undermines your (very valid) point:
> kids were used to clear minefields. He wasn't lying- check Wikipedia
We live in a relatively safe and progressive country, but not all parts of the world are so gentle. Be careful.
(And work to preserve the freedoms we enjoy, as well as assisting others in obtaining them for themselves.)
For the record, (hot, ~20-year-old) women do not seem to follow that stereotype in real life. Said girls have said everything from "it's cute when a guy has a really beat-up car" to "if you get a used car I'll want you to bend me over the hood", so don't believe every stereotype you hear.
> Let's be perfectly blunt. The average human being is functionally retarded.
As a general rule of thumb, I find the main error in these statements is that people forget to include themselves.
Probably the most important ability to modern humans is to socialize well. Typically, running around calling everyone else "functionally retarded" is...not such a promising sign of great ability in that critical field.
Not to mention that one often fails to realize that those "functionally retarded" people may in fact be extremely skilled, smart, or well-educated, but simply in different fields. Electrician? Chef? Historian? Lawyer? None of them have great need of l33t computer skillz, but dismissing them all as "functionally retarded" is...well, we've discussed that already.
Modern humanity lives in a complex society where it is not optional to rely on and value the differing skills of others. To be unable to realize and do that is to be functionally retarded.
> The fact is that education has been geared primarily to teach men for a long time
Not the last few decades. People are getting increasingly worried that girls are pulling further and further ahead of boys in school, and are starting to believe that the teaching methods used are ill-suited to boys' needs. See, for example, this story.
> There's also, in my view, the utter absurdity of asking the question for the most part.
On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?
Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1link2link3link4link5
- your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.
The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.
That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.
There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.
> She was seen on a date, BY one of her students.
> There is no typo. This is honestly what I was told.
Then maybe---just maybe---you were told wrong.
There are a lot of people who get fired. There are a lot of people who go out on dates. Sometimes, just sometimes, there's someone who does both.
Considering the social climate I experienced in RI, if this was the known reason for her being fired, the guy doing the firing would have been in such deep shit he would have needed a snorkel. Odds are, it was coincidence.
Based on the comments here, it seems most everyone is throwing out a knee-jerk reaction, rather than responding to what the guy actually said:
He said people "prefer to believe" that the reason there are fewer women in science and engineering is due to social factors and discrimination, "but there are things that need to be studied."link
Although, to be fair, most of the news stories are just as guilty of not looking at what was actually said.
As one of the other participants pointed out, though:
Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, said the remarks did not offend her. "I think if you come to participate in a research conference," she said, "you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings."link
If you can't ask the question "what if there really are biological differences?" at an academic research conference, where the hell can that question be asked?
If there are differences, we do ourselves no favour by ignoring them; research into them could show us better ways of teaching to boys and girls so both learn better.
If there are no differences, we certainly do ourselves no favour by refusing to finally examine and dismiss the notion forever. Until there is clear research on the issue, there will always be the question lurking unasked in the background.
For fuck's sakes, people, how did "are boys and girls different?" get to be a verboten question?
(Disclaimer before someone whines: yes, I know plenty of excellent female scientists---I work for a couple of them---but thanks for trying to undermine the questioner instead of answering the damn question. True spirit of scientific inquiry, there.)
> the successful cloning of a human...means that either people don't
> need a soul to live and think...or the lab techs whipped up a soul in the closet
OR that whatever imbues regular babies with souls has also imbued this one with a soul.
If it's some God who creates souls, then the method by which the physical body is created---whether beakers or booty calls---may well have no bearing on the resulting soulfullness of the child.
Human cloning offers no evidence either way about the existence of souls, and claiming otherwise by knocking down a strawman argument does little to aid the cause of those of us advocating a reasoned and rational approach to viewing the world. Just because you're arguing against people who hold a belief you consider illogical doesn't mean you get to play fast-and-loose with logic yourself.
> Meanwhile countless americans don't have healthcare.
A counted number, actually; it's about 45 million Americans right this moment, and in a typical year ~75 million will lack health insurance for some of that year. (link)
Not only does the USA spend $35 billion/year to treat the uninsured, much of that is for emergency treatment that could be much more efficiently (and cheaply) handled with an earlier diagnosis. Moreover, the lack of health care costs the nation about $100 billion yearly in lost productivity. (link)
But it would cost too much to insure everyone, right?
At an average cost of $9,000 for family insurance and assuming families of three, the cost to insure those 45 million Americans would be $135 billion, or very nearly the amount saved in uninsured medical costs and lost productivity. At the very least, $35 billion of that is already being paid for (uninsured emergency care), and about $20 billion would come back to the government in taxes, representing a maximum cost of $80 billion.
$80 billion for 18,000 American lives; that's $4,500,000 per dead American. In other words, each $1 billion spent on missile defense is equivalent to 220 dead Americans. The $10 billion per year we're spending on missile defense could save as many lives in two years as all the terrorist attacks on US soil have taken since the nation was founded.
In the richest nation in the world, is that acceptable?
Up to you. But know the facts before you decide how many American lives a particular government program is worth to you, and which is the most efficient way to save American lives.
> Honestly, I'm not bothered by the US basically going at this alone. What I am
> bothered by, is that the rest of the civilized world did not want to do a
> damn thing to help shape what is normal seen as the humane thing to do.
Frankly, the rest of the world doesn't believe that the US has such pure and noble intentions.
The rest of the world believes the US is waging this war for purely selfish reasons, be they oil or the security of US citizens, with little or no regard for the effects of this war on the rest of the world.
The rest of the world thinks the US doesn't give a damn about anything but the US, and isn't convinced that it should spend its own blood and money doing the US's bidding.
Given the available evidence, is it any wonder the rest of the world thinks this?
> We've lost over 1,000 of our citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq over the
> last 18 months. We lost 3,000 of our citizens in 12 hours on 9/11/2001.
And we lost 40,000 of our citizens in car accidents in each of the last 4 years. If that's not a reason to declare a War on Cars, then losing 800 people per year to terrorist attacks over the last 4 years isn't a reason to focus on terrorism to the exclusion of all else.
There appears to be a lack of rational threat assessment in society today, and the Bush administration either seems to have fallen prey to the same flaw or (worse) is actively exploiting and even encouraging it (bouncing threat colors).
For that reason, I very much disagree with you that Bush is likely to ask the question "Is this threat severe enough to warrant immediate action?" Based on the Iraq war, it doesn't appear that this administration thought hard about any of the questions in your first group, which is---frankly---one of the main reasons I view the Bush administration as dangerous.
The Bush administration has a track record of not asking these crucial questions---or not listening to the answers, at least---and dropping someone who has failed to ask them for someone who might fail to ask them doesn't seem so absurd.
Worse yet, the Bush administration seems hampered by an intense unwillingness to admit when it makes a mistake, which impedes the learning process. I'd be very happy if the government learned from its mistakes and thought much more deeply about your questions in the future, but the unwillingness to take responsibility I've seen ("we didn't say it was about WMDs, we said it was about freedom!") makes me concerned.
> Republicans generaly realize that voting is only half of your responsibility
> as an American. The other half is trying to put aside your differences and
> making an attempt to work with the person in power.
Then how do you explain the amount of time and energy purposefully wasted by Republicans trying to impeach Clinton for having a shady private life?
You may realize that putting aside differences and working to get the job done is crucially important, but Republicans as a whole clearly have no idea. (Not that I'm going to argue Democrats do either...)
> "fiscal conservative and socially liberal"....the two are pretty much mutually exclusive.
Why on earth do you say that?
"Socially liberal" covers issues like gay marriage and separation of church and state that are fiscally neutral. "Socially liberal" sometimes includes issues like universal health care, which are potentially expensive (although the amount paid per person by countries like Canada, UK, and Australia suggests otherwise).
"Socially conservative" also includes issues that are extremely expensive, such as the War on Drugs, as well as more modestly expensive programs like FCC obscenity monitoring.
Both "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal" are popular policies. While any other policy does require some compromise when paired with fiscal conservatism, I agree with you that the Dems could gain significant ground by hammering away on these two points, particularly the former. "It's the economy, stupid" worked before, and would probably work again.
> As for the UN, I personally think Bush should have gone before the UN with the images and personal
> testimonies of those attrocities and said to the world "we won't stand for this."
I agree - many, many more people would have supported a war in that case.
The problem is that was not the stated cause for the war, leaving Bush looking deceptive and war-mongering. We shouldn't have believed the WMD story; why should we believe the current story?
It's hard to use lies to justify a war for moral principles.
Your numbers are completely bogus because they count different crimes:
There were about 309,000 violent crimes of all types in Canada in 2002, or about 1000 per 100,000 people. This total includes all forms of assault, and is about 2/3 "minor assaults" (no weapon, not serious - "aggravated" - assault).
(Source: StatsCan)
The rate of violent crime in the USA in 2002 was about 2500 per 100,000 people.
(Source: USA Today)
The rate of serious violent crime in the USA in 2002 was about 500 per 100,000 (Source: FBI).
Note that this only includes murder and manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault ("a reckless attack with intent to injure seriously (as with a deadly weapon)"), and so does not include all of the "minor assaults" that made up the majority of the Canadian violent crime rate.
In fact, those "simple assaults" happen at the rate of 1550 per 100,000 (Source: USDOJ), demonstrating why the comparable US violent crime rate is indeed the 2500 per 100,000 reported by USAToday, and not the artificially low number you used.
As the site you pulled your numbers from stated:
Different nations use different criteria to define "murder" and "serious assault," therefore ability to use this data to compare between nations is limited...
Using more comparable numbers seems to give very different results than you had suggested: Canada's violent crime rate is 40% of America's.
> I see no fundamental difference between people who choose the faith of *no faith* and
> people who are attached to some other established religion.
"No faith" is indeed a faith for some. It is not for every atheist, though.
For many atheists, it's a simple statement of "I don't know". That version of atheism is very different from any established religion, simply because religions are predicated on the notion that they do know (at least partly).
It's hard to have a religiously-motivated argument with someone whose beliefs are "I have no evidence on which to base a judgement".
(Of course, it's sadly true that there are a number of fundamentalist atheists whose belief is closer to "I don't know, and neither do you". Every big enough group has its share of arrogant fools, unfortunately.)
> We have to have a SPINE and show that we think they are wrong.
They already know we think they're wrong. They don't care.
Much more important than showing a bunch of terrorists that we have "spine" is effectively and efficiently stopping terrorism. Merely "having spine" isn't going to be nearly as effective as well-funded, well-manned, well-supported, and relentless pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Are those 140,000 troops in Iraq doing a damn thing to bring down bin Laden? No.
Would those 140,000 troops have provided much more effective coverage of Afghanistan, allowing us a much better chance to take down bin Laden, as well as providing actual security in the country? Yes.
Many people are angry with Bush not because he went to war, but because he went to war badly. If you're going to send someone's sons and daughters to their deaths, make sure you do it right.
The "Ohio voters identified themselves as born-again Christians" analysis is available in lots of American media. No need to go making up conspiracy theories.
But you don't have a different kind of occupation today, and that is where the numbers of troops are needed
The US military can flatten almost any country without breaking a sweat; nobody's arguing that.
The army's high-tech weapons don't do all that much to pacify an occupied country, though - they don't replace the GI marching down the street, making his presence known, helping where needed, keeping an eye and mind out for trouble.
Nobody's saying the US military's not big enough to fight a war. They're saying the US military's not big enough to win a peace.
> The reason that Americans like Canadians and vise versa is that we're almost identical.
I have spent years living in each country. I have enough experience with each culture to know that you are profoundly mistaken.
My standard line is that Canadians and Americans are more similar than Canadians would like to think, and less similar than Americans would like to think.
While we are indeed similar in many very important ways - linguistically, culturally, historically, societally - there are also very significant differences that are perhaps a little more subtle and require a little more thought to see.
Look at the attitudes of the two countries towards the domestic role of the government (universal health care vs. tax cuts), towards the international role of the government (UN peacekeeping vs. Iraq war), towards the role of the government in private life (gay marriage/decriminalized marijuana vs. anti-gay constitutional amendments and War on Drugs),...
The differences may be a little more subtle than "they speak a different language", but in many ways the differences are just as important.
Don't take this to mean I'm saying the American way is wrong, merely different. This isn't a competition, and the mere fact that I need to add such a disclaimer shows another cultural difference. Life is not unrelenting competition.
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I would slightly disagree; I would characterize "agreement" as a class of things that can almost never be successfully forced on a person.
To see this, consider the thousands of examples Slashdot serves up for our enjoyment: flame wars.
How often does insulting and berating someone elicit their agreement on the topic of discussion? Pretty damn rarely. How often does polite and inoffensive language cause a person to say "good point" or give some other indication of agreement? Less often than it should, but still vastly more often than flaming.
Consider how much less likely you'd be to agree---and not just to placate him---with someone flaming you if he gunned down your child halfway through his flame. How positively do you think you'd receive his arguments then?
You can't use force to make someone to adopt your beliefs and values; the most you're likely to accomplish is the opposite. Sadly, those who realize this are rarely those who try it.
Witness our current shining success in Iraq.
There are very few things you can shove down a person's throat without making them angry. You might gratefully accept chocolate if I offered it to you, but I bet you'd struggle like mad if I tried to shove it down your throat.
The analogy goes farther than you expect.
> China, Cuba, Soviet era-Russia, etc. There aren't too many happy stories to be heard.
There's no need for hyperbole here. Offhand, I can think of friends from Soviet-era Ukraine and recent China whose childhood stories are fairly happy, so suggesting these countries were/are unremitting hellholes isn't useful - it just undermines your (very valid) point:
> kids were used to clear minefields. He wasn't lying- check Wikipedia
We live in a relatively safe and progressive country, but not all parts of the world are so gentle. Be careful.
(And work to preserve the freedoms we enjoy, as well as assisting others in obtaining them for themselves.)
For the record, (hot, ~20-year-old) women do not seem to follow that stereotype in real life. Said girls have said everything from "it's cute when a guy has a really beat-up car" to "if you get a used car I'll want you to bend me over the hood", so don't believe every stereotype you hear.
As a general rule of thumb, I find the main error in these statements is that people forget to include themselves.
Probably the most important ability to modern humans is to socialize well. Typically, running around calling everyone else "functionally retarded" is...not such a promising sign of great ability in that critical field.
Not to mention that one often fails to realize that those "functionally retarded" people may in fact be extremely skilled, smart, or well-educated, but simply in different fields. Electrician? Chef? Historian? Lawyer? None of them have great need of l33t computer skillz, but dismissing them all as "functionally retarded" is...well, we've discussed that already.
Modern humanity lives in a complex society where it is not optional to rely on and value the differing skills of others. To be unable to realize and do that is to be functionally retarded.
Just sayin'.
Not the last few decades. People are getting increasingly worried that girls are pulling further and further ahead of boys in school, and are starting to believe that the teaching methods used are ill-suited to boys' needs. See, for example, this story.
On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?
Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.
The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.
That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.
There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.
> There is no typo. This is honestly what I was told.
Then maybe---just maybe---you were told wrong.
There are a lot of people who get fired. There are a lot of people who go out on dates. Sometimes, just sometimes, there's someone who does both.
Considering the social climate I experienced in RI, if this was the known reason for her being fired, the guy doing the firing would have been in such deep shit he would have needed a snorkel. Odds are, it was coincidence.
He said people "prefer to believe" that the reason there are fewer women in science and engineering is due to social factors and discrimination, "but there are things that need to be studied." link
Although, to be fair, most of the news stories are just as guilty of not looking at what was actually said. As one of the other participants pointed out, though:
Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University, said the remarks did not offend her. "I think if you come to participate in a research conference," she said, "you should expect speakers to present hypotheses that you may not agree with and then discuss them on the basis of research findings." link
If you can't ask the question "what if there really are biological differences?" at an academic research conference, where the hell can that question be asked?
If there are differences, we do ourselves no favour by ignoring them; research into them could show us better ways of teaching to boys and girls so both learn better.
If there are no differences, we certainly do ourselves no favour by refusing to finally examine and dismiss the notion forever. Until there is clear research on the issue, there will always be the question lurking unasked in the background.
For fuck's sakes, people, how did "are boys and girls different?" get to be a verboten question?
(Disclaimer before someone whines: yes, I know plenty of excellent female scientists---I work for a couple of them---but thanks for trying to undermine the questioner instead of answering the damn question. True spirit of scientific inquiry, there.)
> need a soul to live and think...or the lab techs whipped up a soul in the closet
OR that whatever imbues regular babies with souls has also imbued this one with a soul.
If it's some God who creates souls, then the method by which the physical body is created---whether beakers or booty calls---may well have no bearing on the resulting soulfullness of the child.
Human cloning offers no evidence either way about the existence of souls, and claiming otherwise by knocking down a strawman argument does little to aid the cause of those of us advocating a reasoned and rational approach to viewing the world. Just because you're arguing against people who hold a belief you consider illogical doesn't mean you get to play fast-and-loose with logic yourself.
A counted number, actually; it's about 45 million Americans right this moment, and in a typical year ~75 million will lack health insurance for some of that year. (link)
So, what does that mean?
It means 18,000 dead Americans every year.
It means a 9/11 every two months.
But why should you care? It's only lazy jobless bums dying, right?
Contrary to expectations, most of the uninsured are employed full-time.
But we're saving money, right?
Not only does the USA spend $35 billion/year to treat the uninsured, much of that is for emergency treatment that could be much more efficiently (and cheaply) handled with an earlier diagnosis. Moreover, the lack of health care costs the nation about $100 billion yearly in lost productivity. (link)
But it would cost too much to insure everyone, right?
At an average cost of $9,000 for family insurance and assuming families of three, the cost to insure those 45 million Americans would be $135 billion, or very nearly the amount saved in uninsured medical costs and lost productivity. At the very least, $35 billion of that is already being paid for (uninsured emergency care), and about $20 billion would come back to the government in taxes, representing a maximum cost of $80 billion.
$80 billion for 18,000 American lives; that's $4,500,000 per dead American. In other words, each $1 billion spent on missile defense is equivalent to 220 dead Americans. The $10 billion per year we're spending on missile defense could save as many lives in two years as all the terrorist attacks on US soil have taken since the nation was founded.
In the richest nation in the world, is that acceptable?
Up to you. But know the facts before you decide how many American lives a particular government program is worth to you, and which is the most efficient way to save American lives.
> Bush got more votes that REAGAN!!!
So did Kerry.
From the link you gave:
Kerry 2004: 55,638,551 votes
Reagan 1984: 54,455,472 votes
Reagan 1980: 43,903,230 votes
> bothered by, is that the rest of the civilized world did not want to do a
> damn thing to help shape what is normal seen as the humane thing to do.
Frankly, the rest of the world doesn't believe that the US has such pure and noble intentions.
The rest of the world believes the US is waging this war for purely selfish reasons, be they oil or the security of US citizens, with little or no regard for the effects of this war on the rest of the world.
The rest of the world thinks the US doesn't give a damn about anything but the US, and isn't convinced that it should spend its own blood and money doing the US's bidding.
Given the available evidence, is it any wonder the rest of the world thinks this?
> last 18 months. We lost 3,000 of our citizens in 12 hours on 9/11/2001.
And we lost 40,000 of our citizens in car accidents in each of the last 4 years. If that's not a reason to declare a War on Cars, then losing 800 people per year to terrorist attacks over the last 4 years isn't a reason to focus on terrorism to the exclusion of all else.
There appears to be a lack of rational threat assessment in society today, and the Bush administration either seems to have fallen prey to the same flaw or (worse) is actively exploiting and even encouraging it (bouncing threat colors).
For that reason, I very much disagree with you that Bush is likely to ask the question "Is this threat severe enough to warrant immediate action?" Based on the Iraq war, it doesn't appear that this administration thought hard about any of the questions in your first group, which is---frankly---one of the main reasons I view the Bush administration as dangerous.
The Bush administration has a track record of not asking these crucial questions---or not listening to the answers, at least---and dropping someone who has failed to ask them for someone who might fail to ask them doesn't seem so absurd.
Worse yet, the Bush administration seems hampered by an intense unwillingness to admit when it makes a mistake, which impedes the learning process. I'd be very happy if the government learned from its mistakes and thought much more deeply about your questions in the future, but the unwillingness to take responsibility I've seen ("we didn't say it was about WMDs, we said it was about freedom!") makes me concerned.
> as an American. The other half is trying to put aside your differences and
> making an attempt to work with the person in power.
Then how do you explain the amount of time and energy purposefully wasted by Republicans trying to impeach Clinton for having a shady private life?
You may realize that putting aside differences and working to get the job done is crucially important, but Republicans as a whole clearly have no idea. (Not that I'm going to argue Democrats do either...)
Why on earth do you say that?
"Socially liberal" covers issues like gay marriage and separation of church and state that are fiscally neutral. "Socially liberal" sometimes includes issues like universal health care, which are potentially expensive (although the amount paid per person by countries like Canada, UK, and Australia suggests otherwise).
"Socially conservative" also includes issues that are extremely expensive, such as the War on Drugs, as well as more modestly expensive programs like FCC obscenity monitoring.
Both "fiscally conservative" and "socially liberal" are popular policies. While any other policy does require some compromise when paired with fiscal conservatism, I agree with you that the Dems could gain significant ground by hammering away on these two points, particularly the former. "It's the economy, stupid" worked before, and would probably work again.
Tell that to the Hilton chain of hotels.
> 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Tell that to poor, starving Paris Hilton.
> 5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a
> national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Tell that to CitiBank, Citizen's Bank, Wells Fargo, BankOne, Sovereign Bank, ...
> 6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Tell that to Fox News, ABC, and Rush Limbaugh, or to USAirways, Ford, or Greyhound.
> 8. Equal obligation of all to work.
Tell that to Paris Hilton.
> 9. ...gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by
> a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Tell that to vanishing small towns in Kansas.
> Here's Marx's 10 points from his Communist Manifesto:...
> We are so there.
You are so deluded.
> testimonies of those attrocities and said to the world "we won't stand for this."
I agree - many, many more people would have supported a war in that case.
The problem is that was not the stated cause for the war, leaving Bush looking deceptive and war-mongering. We shouldn't have believed the WMD story; why should we believe the current story?
It's hard to use lies to justify a war for moral principles.
There were about 309,000 violent crimes of all types in Canada in 2002, or about 1000 per 100,000 people. This total includes all forms of assault, and is about 2/3 "minor assaults" (no weapon, not serious - "aggravated" - assault). (Source: StatsCan)
The rate of violent crime in the USA in 2002 was about 2500 per 100,000 people. (Source: USA Today)
The rate of serious violent crime in the USA in 2002 was about 500 per 100,000 (Source: FBI). Note that this only includes murder and manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault ("a reckless attack with intent to injure seriously (as with a deadly weapon)"), and so does not include all of the "minor assaults" that made up the majority of the Canadian violent crime rate.
In fact, those "simple assaults" happen at the rate of 1550 per 100,000 (Source: USDOJ), demonstrating why the comparable US violent crime rate is indeed the 2500 per 100,000 reported by USAToday, and not the artificially low number you used.
As the site you pulled your numbers from stated:
Different nations use different criteria to define "murder" and "serious assault," therefore ability to use this data to compare between nations is limited...
Using more comparable numbers seems to give very different results than you had suggested: Canada's violent crime rate is 40% of America's.
Then I humbly submit you didn't read what I wrote.
In what way is "very significant differences" the same as "almost identical"?
As I said: "Canadians and Americans are...less similar than Americans would like to think."
> people who are attached to some other established religion.
"No faith" is indeed a faith for some. It is not for every atheist, though.
For many atheists, it's a simple statement of "I don't know". That version of atheism is very different from any established religion, simply because religions are predicated on the notion that they do know (at least partly). It's hard to have a religiously-motivated argument with someone whose beliefs are "I have no evidence on which to base a judgement".
(Of course, it's sadly true that there are a number of fundamentalist atheists whose belief is closer to "I don't know, and neither do you". Every big enough group has its share of arrogant fools, unfortunately.)
They already know we think they're wrong. They don't care.
Much more important than showing a bunch of terrorists that we have "spine" is effectively and efficiently stopping terrorism. Merely "having spine" isn't going to be nearly as effective as well-funded, well-manned, well-supported, and relentless pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Are those 140,000 troops in Iraq doing a damn thing to bring down bin Laden? No.
Would those 140,000 troops have provided much more effective coverage of Afghanistan, allowing us a much better chance to take down bin Laden, as well as providing actual security in the country? Yes.
Many people are angry with Bush not because he went to war, but because he went to war badly. If you're going to send someone's sons and daughters to their deaths, make sure you do it right.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=223849
But you don't have a different kind of occupation today, and that is where the numbers of troops are needed
The US military can flatten almost any country without breaking a sweat; nobody's arguing that. The army's high-tech weapons don't do all that much to pacify an occupied country, though - they don't replace the GI marching down the street, making his presence known, helping where needed, keeping an eye and mind out for trouble.
Nobody's saying the US military's not big enough to fight a war. They're saying the US military's not big enough to win a peace.
I have spent years living in each country. I have enough experience with each culture to know that you are profoundly mistaken.
My standard line is that Canadians and Americans are more similar than Canadians would like to think, and less similar than Americans would like to think.
While we are indeed similar in many very important ways - linguistically, culturally, historically, societally - there are also very significant differences that are perhaps a little more subtle and require a little more thought to see.
Look at the attitudes of the two countries towards the domestic role of the government (universal health care vs. tax cuts), towards the international role of the government (UN peacekeeping vs. Iraq war), towards the role of the government in private life (gay marriage/decriminalized marijuana vs. anti-gay constitutional amendments and War on Drugs), ...
The differences may be a little more subtle than "they speak a different language", but in many ways the differences are just as important.
Don't take this to mean I'm saying the American way is wrong, merely different. This isn't a competition, and the mere fact that I need to add such a disclaimer shows another cultural difference. Life is not unrelenting competition.