Well, it sounds like you've got more confidence in Bush than his own people. Apparently Kerry's team was whooping and hollering through the first debate, and the Bush team just sat there in worried silence. Bush got his ass handed to him: Kerry looked like a president, and Bush looked like a spoiled child. Bush improved in the second two, but couldn't erase his initial, awful performance. The polls all say Bush struck out. The defining moment of debate #2 was when he couldn't name a mistake he'd made. He did say he might not have appointed some people: in other words, other people had failed him, but he hadn't failed. The guy just lives in a reality-proof bubble. As for his supposed "likeability", I remember thinking to myself in the third debate: "God, he is such an asshole." I mean I've never been a fan, but I was surprised by how much of a jerk he was. He just had this smug attitude, like he didn't have to answer to anybody because he was the president. And, for years that's been true: he hasn't had to answer to anybody because of his rich, powerful family. But now he's President- and that means there's no person above him he can turn to when his sorry ass needs bailing out.
It was like watching a professor debating a puppy.
While Edwards didn't blow me away, he held his own. Cheney just looked down and growled at the desk in front of him, exuding all the charisma of a grumpy musk ox. He looked tired- he debated well enough but I sensed weariness, like he didn't really care about what he was saying.
You'll notice that Kerry surged in the polls following the debates. If Bush/Cheney lose, it will be because of the debates.
Re:What Euros think of American politics???Huh???
on
The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
USA! USA! USA! Go isolationism!
The problem, of course, is that it *does* matter what the rest of the world thinks- if we want them to follow us or to at least cooperate with us. You can't be a leader if you aren't credible, and under Bush we're not. Terrorism is a global problem so it requires global solutions, like cooperation between American and European law enforcement, intelligence, and counterterrorist organizations. If we'd been able to get the French and Germans on our side in Iraq we wouldn't be in quite such a mess. Of course they might not have wanted to cooperate regardless- in which case, if we'd paid attention, we would be in even less of a mess. McNamara said it pretty well in _The Fog of War_:
"If we can't persuade nations of comparable values of the rightness of our cause, then we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
Sure, we did get international support... but the "Coalition of the Willing" consisted of nations like Mongolia and Micronesia. Not to diss Micronesia, it's very pretty, but what kind of assistance are we going to get from them? Stone wheel money to hurl at the enemy?
All the commercials that I have seen have simply portrayed Kerry as weak/indecisive.
So why are they saying that it's such an awful character flaw to be indecisive if the very people they are trying to court are the undecided voters (i.e. the indecisive ones)? I just can't make up my mind on this question!
ANWR has maybe 7-10 billion barrels of oil; the U.S. uses maybe 7 billion barrels of petroleum products a year. So it might keep us going for a year and a half. It wouldn't change things with the Saudis: demand is going up because of China's growth.
So he panders. But he panders to everyone. After four years of George W. pandering to a minority of right-wing religious extremists, having a president who will pander to everybody equally will be a welcome and refreshing change of course.
Hell, isn't that what we want in a president: someone who will promote our agenda over his own agenda?
So you are saying that you knew better than every Congressman on the intellgence committee, the CIA, British Intelligence, and the UN Weapons Inspectors?
1) The Cia was under a lot of pressure to produce evidence for an Iraq invasion. This was pretty clearly what the administration wanted to hear. Remember, they set up a special task force whose sole purpose was to look for evidence connecting Hussein and 9/11. For almost any viewpoint, right or wrong, if you look hard enough for evidence, and don't look for counterevidence, you'll get an argument. It may be wrong, but you'll get one.
2) The CIA and British Intelligence documents were both thoroughly massaged to remove the ambiguity and cautionary language contained in them.
3) Hans Blix thought that Hussein had WMD... INITIALLY. He's said as much. He also said he was pretty sure by the end that he didn't (go to npr.org and check out his interview on _Fresh Air_). The inspections process worked. The CIA gave the UN lists of sites where the weapons were supposed to be, when Blix went there, he found jack shit, so he (correctly) inferred that the intelligence indicating WMD programs was bullshit.
I'm not saying Saddam didn't need some handling. The guy was a pain in the ass. While he was under sanctions it starved the Iraqi people, but you couldn't remove the sanctions or he'd probably build up his military again. He kept taking potshots at US and British planes. He was a psychopathic Stalinist dictator. And yeah, you need to have force on the table as a stick to threaten him with. But in retrospect, none of this justifies the path that the Bush administration rashly chose.
I dunno about Arnold being the Republican party's next pick. He's already distanced himself by allocating funds towards cloning in California, a day or so ago I believe.
You're still not addressing the fact that he wasn't born here. Now, if he clones himself, and the clone is born in the United States...
Dude, don't wast your time on Naderites, because they're just as zealous and out of touch as Right Wing Christian lunatics who think that God talks to Bush.
But God does talk to Bush:
"Hey! YOU! Yeah YOU, DUMBASS! Blessed are the PEACEMAKERS! Does that ring any bells?! HELP THE POOR! Remember THAT part? Love others as you would love yourself? It's in a book I helped write! Maybe it would sound familiar if you actually read books! HEY! I'm talking to you! Are you paying ANY attention at all?? HEY! Come back here!"
There really wasn't much of a forseeable difference between the two candidates.
I dunno. It was pretty obvious to me that George W. Bush was for rich, privileged white people, and that he was one of those bible-thumping right-wing Born-Again hypocrites. Admittedly it would have been hard to predict just how far right he's gone, and how amazingly, astonishingly, and just how catastrophically he screwed up, but it was clear that there was a difference. Gore would have been far more centrist than Bush I'm sure, but I still think he's much more left wing than he let on in the election (he wrote Earth in the Balance). Both toned down their rhetoric and their agendas to appeal to the center. Actually, on the subject of screwing up: we knew when Bush was running that he had very little experience, and a lot of it wasn't terribly good. He had run several businesses into the ground but his rich and powerful daddy kept bailing him out. Not a good thing in a presidential hopeful. The astonishing incompetence with which the Bush administration has been run... well, it reminds me of that Dylan lyric: "I try to read your poetry/but I'm helpless, like a rich man's child." The guy always had his father to fall back on. But when you're president of the United States, you don't have any person more powerful to turn to for help.
This still falls somewhere short of a coherent answer. It'd be one thing if Kerry lied. But the thing is, Americans did commit crimes in Viet Nam. All he did was tell the truth about what was going wrong in Viet Nam- something that needed to be known. I fail to see how it makes you a traitor to criticize your government. In fact I think the real betrayal lies in supporting your government even when it's doing the wrong thing.
The democrats have been pulled much further to the left than they were in 2000.
Maybe so. But the fact of the matter is, the policies of the government have been going heavily to the right, and the country has been going down the drain, for the past four years. Why is that? Oh yeah- because Nader helped Bush win the election and Bush has been able to do whatever he wants with a Republican controlled Congress. And I'm going to guess that the polarizing policies of George W. had a lot more to do with the Dems heading left than Ralph Nader.
Am I going to need to crary jet fuel around with me, because that could become real inconvenient.
Yeah, getting ten hours on a canister of fuel sounds great compared to a few hours for my laptop on a battery, but there's the issue of the availability and cost of fuel, whereas AC is cheap and outlets are easy to come by. Unless my laptop ran off of ethanol. Then you'd just walk into a bar and be like, "one for me, and one for my computer".
America is generally altruist. Communist countries are generally selfish.
I'd say precisely the opposite. Communist countries expected everyone to work for the benefit of their fellow man and the society, instead of putting their own interests first. That's why they didn't work terribly well at distributing resources, money, and power: when push comes to shove, selfishness is more dependable than altruism. At least that's my simplistic take on things.
Western capitalism works on self interest: I buy something because I feel its in my self interest to pay money for it, and the other guy sells it because he feels its in his self interest to sell it. Each party acts selfishly but both end up ahead. It's far from perfect and open to abuses but it works better than communism at distributing resources because it is based on the (realistic) assumption that people tend to act in their own self interest.
Likewise, representative government works (or at least, malfunctions less than other systems)on the basis of self interest. When it's working, our elected officials act in our interest. Not because they are being altruistic, but because they are being selfish: their jobs ride on keeping us reasonably happy, or at least not too ticked off, so we'll keep sending them back to Washington. That's the trick that makes a republic work: it's in their interest to act in our interest.
Of course, that only works if we vote in an informed fashion, and actually have a reasonable idea of what is in our own interest.
If I understand, the scheme was never free oil. The idea was we were going to buy oil from them, just like we were doing anyway. The difference would be that under a pro-U.S. regime, all of these billions of dollars would then come right back to the United States as the Iraqis paid U.S. companies for the services and material to rebuild Iraq's crumbled infrastructure.
Another major consideration is that the U.S. just wants someone at the pump we feel we can deal with. The Saudis may oppress women, stifle free speech, promote radical Islam, and forbid other religions- however, they are a steady, American-friendly supplier of the black stuff that keeps our economy churning along, so we're willing to overlook all those little quirks.
Well, that and Cheney is about as warm and cuddly as an iguana, and makes Frankenstein look loose and extroverted. But it's not just his total lack of charisma which is a problem, it's the moral core thing. Bush comes across as believing the baloney he recites (or increasingly, like he desperately wants to believe it) but Cheney comes across as Machiavellian in a way that probably creeps out people on both sides. He just strikes you as the kind of guy where if you offered him a million bucks to whack his own mother, he'd turn you down- but he'd probably have to think for a couple of seconds to weigh the pros and cons.
Re:Nader is Nader, not a Democrat...
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The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
BTW, the argument could just as easily be made that the libertarians "steal" conservative votes. I've just never heard it.
Yeah, well, that's because this is a good thing. Is that hypocritical? Yes. But my take on things is that under the Bush administration, the nation is heading in a truly dire direction on a lot of fronts- civil liberties, corporate influence on government, the budget, the economy, the war in Iraq, disappearing separation of church and state- that I'm vastly more worried about the critical issue of getting Bush out of office than being a bit hypocritical.
Makes you think, of all the countries in the world, should the USA really be the one trying to spread democracy? They seem to have a really lousy grip on the whole concept right now. All of these events in the news surrounding votes should be about countries in the so-called "third world", not in the good old USofA.
As an American, my reasoned response to this comment is:
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
Re:Every political story on Slashdot has a Dem. sl
on
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My question to you, and every other Nader supporter: are you on crack?
Kerry and Bush came down on different sides of virtually every single issue in the debates. Taxes. Abortion. Foreign policy. Health care. Iraq. The environment.
But other than that, yeah. Both parties are the same.
I'm sorry, but I cannot respect your viewpoint. The Bush administration is simply a catastrophe. First of all, they fucked up on 9/11. They were warned about al Qaeda, instead Bush chose to antagonize North Korea and China and spend billions on National Missile Defense. The Afghanistan invasion was the right move, but since then the nation has fallen into the hands of warlords and drug lords. The invasion of Iraq has been a massive catastrophe. We've managed to kill thousands of civilians, destroyed our image abroad with Abu Graib, and given new motivation to anti-US terrorists worldwide. Plus, Bush has ruined the country financially by spending massive amounts on Iraq while cutting taxes on the richest of the rich. Oh, and let's not forget that this president who promised to be a "uniter, not a divider" has pandered to the radical fundamentalist Christians and Neocons and left the nation more polarized than it has been in a generation. By any objective standard, the Bush administration is a massive, catastrophic failure and he's one of the worst presidents in a century.
Maybe Kerry ain't perfect, but he's better. A lobotomized chimp would be better than Bush (and smarter). We've got to make realistic choices. Between bad and worse, I'll take bad. That's life. You have to make tough choices- it's part of being grown up and mature. Don't like it? Tough shit, that's life. Suck it up and deal.
Re:Nader has lost it
on
The Nader Factor
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Vote for Bad: he's not Worse!
It's nice to hear someone make that concession to reality. Kerry's not my dream candidate, but then who is? And could my Dream Candidate even get elected? My Dream Candidate would have the balls to stand up and say all kinds of honest and controversial things... which would then cause people to vote against him.
And I think pandering is underrated. Bush is principled, sure. But his principles represent a small, very conservative subset of the nation. From a practical standpoint, I'd rather have someone like Clinton who tests the political wind and then goes whichever way it's blowing. OK, maybe he's not being true to his values. But if he's being true to the values of the electorate, that's more important. Hell, isn't that why we elect them: to promote our values, not their own?
Re:McAuliffe likes Nader being in there
on
The Nader Factor
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· Score: 1
So... who does that leave? Jeb Bush?:-(
Ahnuld... IF they can push through a constitional amendment.
I can see the campaign commercials now: " 'Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women': strong leadership philosophy for our troubled times." Hell, is it any more improbable than the idea of Arnold as GOVERNOR?
you might as well chastise Intel every time they bring out a more powerful CPU. I mean I've seen terminator and consider myself an expert, it'll all end in man's subservience to our new electronic overlords.
Well, obviously, what will happen is that the intelligent machines will battle the tube-born superhumans. And then the victor will determine our fate.
...seem to favor stories about parties whose chances of winning are statistically indistinguishable from zero?
I'm not complaining about airing a diversity of views- particularly when the mainstream media won't- but the chance is >99% that a Democrat or Republican will control the White House for the next four years- so why haven't there been any discussions concerning the VP debates or the second presidential debate?
Last time, the differences between the two main candidates weren't so obvious, but the choice is pretty stark here. In the second debate, Bush and Kerry came down on different sides of almost every single issue. The only exception was that they both said they were against the draft. Given their differing views on foreign policy, taxation, gay marriage, and abortion, it's clear that they are laying out two very different ideas of what the next four years should look like. I'm not denying that the third-party candidates have something to bring to the table, but it would be worth having some discussion of the debates between the democrats and republicans.
You just don't get it do you. I PREFER to wander around a physical shop(sometimes with friends) looking at some physical goods, to sitting on my own in a room with a PC and a modem. If you can't understand why then theres no point in continuing this discussion
What is this "physical world" you talk about which exists outside the room with my PC? And what are these "friends" you speak of? Are they some kind of hardware device?
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Well, it sounds like you've got more confidence in Bush than his own people. Apparently Kerry's team was whooping and hollering through the first debate, and the Bush team just sat there in worried silence. Bush got his ass handed to him: Kerry looked like a president, and Bush looked like a spoiled child. Bush improved in the second two, but couldn't erase his initial, awful performance. The polls all say Bush struck out. The defining moment of debate #2 was when he couldn't name a mistake he'd made. He did say he might not have appointed some people: in other words, other people had failed him, but he hadn't failed. The guy just lives in a reality-proof bubble. As for his supposed "likeability", I remember thinking to myself in the third debate: "God, he is such an asshole." I mean I've never been a fan, but I was surprised by how much of a jerk he was. He just had this smug attitude, like he didn't have to answer to anybody because he was the president. And, for years that's been true: he hasn't had to answer to anybody because of his rich, powerful family. But now he's President- and that means there's no person above him he can turn to when his sorry ass needs bailing out.
It was like watching a professor debating a puppy.
While Edwards didn't blow me away, he held his own. Cheney just looked down and growled at the desk in front of him, exuding all the charisma of a grumpy musk ox. He looked tired- he debated well enough but I sensed weariness, like he didn't really care about what he was saying.
You'll notice that Kerry surged in the polls following the debates. If Bush /Cheney lose, it will be because of the debates.
The problem, of course, is that it *does* matter what the rest of the world thinks- if we want them to follow us or to at least cooperate with us. You can't be a leader if you aren't credible, and under Bush we're not. Terrorism is a global problem so it requires global solutions, like cooperation between American and European law enforcement, intelligence, and counterterrorist organizations. If we'd been able to get the French and Germans on our side in Iraq we wouldn't be in quite such a mess. Of course they might not have wanted to cooperate regardless- in which case, if we'd paid attention, we would be in even less of a mess. McNamara said it pretty well in _The Fog of War_:
"If we can't persuade nations of comparable values of the rightness of our cause, then we'd better reexamine our reasoning."
Sure, we did get international support... but the "Coalition of the Willing" consisted of nations like Mongolia and Micronesia. Not to diss Micronesia, it's very pretty, but what kind of assistance are we going to get from them? Stone wheel money to hurl at the enemy?
So why are they saying that it's such an awful character flaw to be indecisive if the very people they are trying to court are the undecided voters (i.e. the indecisive ones)? I just can't make up my mind on this question!
ANWR has maybe 7-10 billion barrels of oil; the U.S. uses maybe 7 billion barrels of petroleum products a year. So it might keep us going for a year and a half. It wouldn't change things with the Saudis: demand is going up because of China's growth.
Hell, isn't that what we want in a president: someone who will promote our agenda over his own agenda?
1) The Cia was under a lot of pressure to produce evidence for an Iraq invasion. This was pretty clearly what the administration wanted to hear. Remember, they set up a special task force whose sole purpose was to look for evidence connecting Hussein and 9/11. For almost any viewpoint, right or wrong, if you look hard enough for evidence, and don't look for counterevidence, you'll get an argument. It may be wrong, but you'll get one.
2) The CIA and British Intelligence documents were both thoroughly massaged to remove the ambiguity and cautionary language contained in them.
3) Hans Blix thought that Hussein had WMD... INITIALLY. He's said as much. He also said he was pretty sure by the end that he didn't (go to npr.org and check out his interview on _Fresh Air_). The inspections process worked. The CIA gave the UN lists of sites where the weapons were supposed to be, when Blix went there, he found jack shit, so he (correctly) inferred that the intelligence indicating WMD programs was bullshit.
I'm not saying Saddam didn't need some handling. The guy was a pain in the ass. While he was under sanctions it starved the Iraqi people, but you couldn't remove the sanctions or he'd probably build up his military again. He kept taking potshots at US and British planes. He was a psychopathic Stalinist dictator. And yeah, you need to have force on the table as a stick to threaten him with. But in retrospect, none of this justifies the path that the Bush administration rashly chose.
You're still not addressing the fact that he wasn't born here. Now, if he clones himself, and the clone is born in the United States...
I like that idea. I definitely want a voting system that involves monkeys.
But God does talk to Bush:
"Hey! YOU! Yeah YOU, DUMBASS! Blessed are the PEACEMAKERS! Does that ring any bells?! HELP THE POOR! Remember THAT part? Love others as you would love yourself? It's in a book I helped write! Maybe it would sound familiar if you actually read books! HEY! I'm talking to you! Are you paying ANY attention at all?? HEY! Come back here!"
I dunno. It was pretty obvious to me that George W. Bush was for rich, privileged white people, and that he was one of those bible-thumping right-wing Born-Again hypocrites. Admittedly it would have been hard to predict just how far right he's gone, and how amazingly, astonishingly, and just how catastrophically he screwed up, but it was clear that there was a difference. Gore would have been far more centrist than Bush I'm sure, but I still think he's much more left wing than he let on in the election (he wrote Earth in the Balance). Both toned down their rhetoric and their agendas to appeal to the center. Actually, on the subject of screwing up: we knew when Bush was running that he had very little experience, and a lot of it wasn't terribly good. He had run several businesses into the ground but his rich and powerful daddy kept bailing him out. Not a good thing in a presidential hopeful. The astonishing incompetence with which the Bush administration has been run... well, it reminds me of that Dylan lyric: "I try to read your poetry/but I'm helpless, like a rich man's child." The guy always had his father to fall back on. But when you're president of the United States, you don't have any person more powerful to turn to for help.
This still falls somewhere short of a coherent answer. It'd be one thing if Kerry lied. But the thing is, Americans did commit crimes in Viet Nam. All he did was tell the truth about what was going wrong in Viet Nam- something that needed to be known. I fail to see how it makes you a traitor to criticize your government. In fact I think the real betrayal lies in supporting your government even when it's doing the wrong thing.
The democrats have been pulled much further to the left than they were in 2000. Maybe so. But the fact of the matter is, the policies of the government have been going heavily to the right, and the country has been going down the drain, for the past four years. Why is that? Oh yeah- because Nader helped Bush win the election and Bush has been able to do whatever he wants with a Republican controlled Congress. And I'm going to guess that the polarizing policies of George W. had a lot more to do with the Dems heading left than Ralph Nader.
Yeah, getting ten hours on a canister of fuel sounds great compared to a few hours for my laptop on a battery, but there's the issue of the availability and cost of fuel, whereas AC is cheap and outlets are easy to come by. Unless my laptop ran off of ethanol. Then you'd just walk into a bar and be like, "one for me, and one for my computer".
I'm just imagining what would happen if I dropped my hydrogen turbine powered laptop just a little bit too hard: "Oh, the humanity!"
I'd say precisely the opposite. Communist countries expected everyone to work for the benefit of their fellow man and the society, instead of putting their own interests first. That's why they didn't work terribly well at distributing resources, money, and power: when push comes to shove, selfishness is more dependable than altruism. At least that's my simplistic take on things.
Western capitalism works on self interest: I buy something because I feel its in my self interest to pay money for it, and the other guy sells it because he feels its in his self interest to sell it. Each party acts selfishly but both end up ahead. It's far from perfect and open to abuses but it works better than communism at distributing resources because it is based on the (realistic) assumption that people tend to act in their own self interest.
Likewise, representative government works (or at least, malfunctions less than other systems)on the basis of self interest. When it's working, our elected officials act in our interest. Not because they are being altruistic, but because they are being selfish: their jobs ride on keeping us reasonably happy, or at least not too ticked off, so we'll keep sending them back to Washington. That's the trick that makes a republic work: it's in their interest to act in our interest.
Of course, that only works if we vote in an informed fashion, and actually have a reasonable idea of what is in our own interest.
Another major consideration is that the U.S. just wants someone at the pump we feel we can deal with. The Saudis may oppress women, stifle free speech, promote radical Islam, and forbid other religions- however, they are a steady, American-friendly supplier of the black stuff that keeps our economy churning along, so we're willing to overlook all those little quirks.
Well, that and Cheney is about as warm and cuddly as an iguana, and makes Frankenstein look loose and extroverted. But it's not just his total lack of charisma which is a problem, it's the moral core thing. Bush comes across as believing the baloney he recites (or increasingly, like he desperately wants to believe it) but Cheney comes across as Machiavellian in a way that probably creeps out people on both sides. He just strikes you as the kind of guy where if you offered him a million bucks to whack his own mother, he'd turn you down- but he'd probably have to think for a couple of seconds to weigh the pros and cons.
Yeah, well, that's because this is a good thing. Is that hypocritical? Yes. But my take on things is that under the Bush administration, the nation is heading in a truly dire direction on a lot of fronts- civil liberties, corporate influence on government, the budget, the economy, the war in Iraq, disappearing separation of church and state- that I'm vastly more worried about the critical issue of getting Bush out of office than being a bit hypocritical.
As an American, my reasoned response to this comment is:
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
Kerry and Bush came down on different sides of virtually every single issue in the debates. Taxes. Abortion. Foreign policy. Health care. Iraq. The environment.
But other than that, yeah. Both parties are the same.
I'm sorry, but I cannot respect your viewpoint. The Bush administration is simply a catastrophe. First of all, they fucked up on 9/11. They were warned about al Qaeda, instead Bush chose to antagonize North Korea and China and spend billions on National Missile Defense. The Afghanistan invasion was the right move, but since then the nation has fallen into the hands of warlords and drug lords. The invasion of Iraq has been a massive catastrophe. We've managed to kill thousands of civilians, destroyed our image abroad with Abu Graib, and given new motivation to anti-US terrorists worldwide. Plus, Bush has ruined the country financially by spending massive amounts on Iraq while cutting taxes on the richest of the rich. Oh, and let's not forget that this president who promised to be a "uniter, not a divider" has pandered to the radical fundamentalist Christians and Neocons and left the nation more polarized than it has been in a generation. By any objective standard, the Bush administration is a massive, catastrophic failure and he's one of the worst presidents in a century.
Maybe Kerry ain't perfect, but he's better. A lobotomized chimp would be better than Bush (and smarter). We've got to make realistic choices. Between bad and worse, I'll take bad. That's life. You have to make tough choices- it's part of being grown up and mature. Don't like it? Tough shit, that's life. Suck it up and deal.
It's nice to hear someone make that concession to reality. Kerry's not my dream candidate, but then who is? And could my Dream Candidate even get elected? My Dream Candidate would have the balls to stand up and say all kinds of honest and controversial things... which would then cause people to vote against him.
And I think pandering is underrated. Bush is principled, sure. But his principles represent a small, very conservative subset of the nation. From a practical standpoint, I'd rather have someone like Clinton who tests the political wind and then goes whichever way it's blowing. OK, maybe he's not being true to his values. But if he's being true to the values of the electorate, that's more important. Hell, isn't that why we elect them: to promote our values, not their own?
Ahnuld... IF they can push through a constitional amendment.
I can see the campaign commercials now: " 'Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women': strong leadership philosophy for our troubled times." Hell, is it any more improbable than the idea of Arnold as GOVERNOR?
Well, obviously, what will happen is that the intelligent machines will battle the tube-born superhumans. And then the victor will determine our fate.
I'm not complaining about airing a diversity of views- particularly when the mainstream media won't- but the chance is >99% that a Democrat or Republican will control the White House for the next four years- so why haven't there been any discussions concerning the VP debates or the second presidential debate?
Last time, the differences between the two main candidates weren't so obvious, but the choice is pretty stark here. In the second debate, Bush and Kerry came down on different sides of almost every single issue. The only exception was that they both said they were against the draft. Given their differing views on foreign policy, taxation, gay marriage, and abortion, it's clear that they are laying out two very different ideas of what the next four years should look like. I'm not denying that the third-party candidates have something to bring to the table, but it would be worth having some discussion of the debates between the democrats and republicans.
What is this "physical world" you talk about which exists outside the room with my PC? And what are these "friends" you speak of? Are they some kind of hardware device?