So your proof that Reaganomics didn't help the economy is based on a single indicator-- the national deficit.
Way to miss the point! You can always help an economy out by pumping money into it, but that means you are pumping money out of somewhere else -- in this case, the U.S. Treasury. The deficit in that chart isn't serving as an indicator of economic health, any more than the bill you get from a doctor serves as an indicator of your health.
Imagine taking a time machine back 150 years, and trying to get slaveowners and abolitionists to agree on some objective facts. Both sides will adhere to their values. What objective facts would you present? Suppose you said, "We abolished slavery, and have a better society as a result." But this is not objective, because what you consider a "better society" depends on your values. Pointing out that people should be free is also a value position. You might speak of specific economic changes but those changes will not appeal to the slaveowner's values (they'll want to keep their plantations). In contrast, the fall of the plantation economy will not have negative value to the abolitionists, so where is the common ground? How do both players gain?
From the point of view of the slave states, abolition was a forced social experiment. How do you justify any social experiment with objective facts? How do you justify maintaining the status quo with objective facts? Can a society make any critical decision in a value-neutral manner?
Yes, but that doesn't give you fun sentence structures such as the following:
Tron buildup with its nut/mother in the Gropiusstadt in the south of Berlin. Already at school times Tron was interested much in technical topics, whereas its achievements in are designated other subjects than rather on the average.
You do not understand how separation of powers works.
It is categorically unconstitutional for the government to conduct warrantless searches and seizures. Regardless of what Congress does (short of amending the Constitution), that will always be the case. By legal precedent, wiretapping is covered under the Fourth Amendment, so the executive branch must have a warrant in order to conduct wiretapping.
The Constitution does not provide a detailed procedure for the issuance of warrants, but this has always (and properly, I believe) been placed in the hands of the judicial branch.
The Constitution only explicitly establishes one court, the Supreme Court. However, it allows other courts to be established. Guess who gets to do this?
The U.S. Constitution: Article III. - The Judicial Branch
Section 1 - Judicial powers
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
Congress acted well within its authority in establishing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It is the President who is violating the separation of powers by going around the courts. The President is allowed to wiretap whomever he wishes, provided he gets a warrant from any court that has the authority and jurisdiction to do so. The FISC is actually there to make this easier, for cases involving national security where it would be risky to go before an open court. By failing to obtain a warrant, not only is the President acting unconstitutionally (in violation of the Fourth Amendment), but the President is assuming a power not vested in him. Once a President does this with impunity, we will have finally been robbed of the last vestige of the separation of powers. Let's not allow that to happen this time.
The Doomsday argument (DA) is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far.
Hmm, that's not quite right. It would also require a projection of current and future birth rates, would it not?
At any rate, it is a flawed argument. One common analogy to the Doomsday Argument goes this way: Two urns contain 10 and 100 balls each, and the balls in each urn are numbered with sequential integers starting at one. I select an urn, pull out a ball at random, and show it to you. It has the number 7. You calculate -- correctly -- that the ball has a 10/11 chance of being from the urn with 10 balls. When this analogy is stretched to fit the Doomsday Argument, the number on the ball is analogous to your birth number, and the number of balls in the urn is analogous the total population of the human race for all time. So if your birth number is 10 billion, the chances that the total number of humans that ever have lived or will live ever reaching, say, 10 trillion must be very small. Or so goes the argument, anyway.
But suppose I take the urn with 10 balls and dump it into the urn with 100 balls. Assume the 10 balls from the first urn are black, and the 100 balls from the second urn are white. After thoroughly mixing the balls together in the second urn, I reach in and pull out a ball at random, and read the number to you (but don't allow you to see its color). It has the number 4. What are the chances the ball is black? (Hint: The answer is not 10/11!)
The validity of the DA comes down to this: If we do the urn experiment, and I don't tell you whether I am drawing from a single urn or from two urns, why would you expect the balls to be presorted by color into separate containers? Or why, when you are assigned a birth number, do you expect the same probability that your birth number will be assigned to you from a large pool of birth numbers as from a small pool of birth numbers? A birth number pool represents a sentient species. There may be millions of sentient species in the universe, and if we assume that the frequency of species with (total for all time) population N is the same as the frequency of species with (total for all time) population 1000*N, then you are 1000 times as likely to be a member of the second species as you are likely to be a member of the first. This changes your prior distribution in a very significant way. Assuming you can justify your prior (uniform or otherwise) in the first place.
Yes, but by not pointing out the difference in size of the two cars, you understated your point. Just trying to help!
BTW, I'm looking forward to that Camry hybrid I mentioned. I've got a Prius so I won't buy a Camry for myself, but I think it would be a good car for my wife.
A recent article in the LA Times pointed out how the sloping lines of low-Cd cars is becoming a safety issue. Windows become lower and smaller, and the fat, sloping windshield posts block visibility. As a Prius driver I can confirm this. I've learned to move my head from side to side to see around the post on the driver's side so that I can see pedestrians entering a crosswalk before I proceed from a stop sign (the one on the passenger side, being farther away, doesn't consume as much of an angle).
So, I don't expect to see any 0.11 Cd production cars in my lifetime.
Nope, the current Prius gets better efficiency (60mpg city vs 51) than the current Civic - the Insight is much smaller than the Prius and thus isn't comparable.
Well, the Civic isn't comparable to the Prius either, unless you are talking about pre-2004 Prius. The Civic is a compact car; the 2004 and later Prius is mid-sized. A closer comparison to the Prius (in terms of size) is the Accord hybrid, but that car is engineered more for higher performance, so it still isn't comparing the two systems apples-to-apples. I think the most appropriate comparison would be between the Accord hybrid and the 2007 Camry hybrid (192 HP and 43 MPG).
The Prius's system might actually be theoretically less efficient than the Honda's since it uses a generator as the fulcrum of a torque split device - this means that the generator always has to be generating power for the car to be pushed by the gas engine - this entails doing an additional energy conversion step all of the time.
That's at least a little misleading. There are not one, but two motor/generators in the Prius, and yes, at least one will be generating when the engine is revving. But as I understand it, the result of this is that the IC engine has more load, which allows for greater efficiency. It is a bit counter-intuitive, but this efficiency increase in the ICE is supposed to offset the electro-mechanical conversion inefficiency of the generator.
Surely the Vette's Cd could be lowered more, though it might change the styling away from what Vette owners are accustomed to, but remember that the Vette has a very small cross-sectional area, so its drag force is already a fraction of the Prius's.
I don't know about the vehicles cited by grandparent, but the Honda Accord hybrid does have faster acceleration than the conventional Accord.
Anyway, if you look at 0-to-60 numbers, it may be misleading. A hybrid might outperform a similar conventional car in the 0-to-30, and the conventional car might outperform the hybrid in the 30-to-60 range, but if both are going the same speed at the end of 10 seconds, which will have traveled farther from a stop?
Granted, there are reasons to care about acceleration in the 60 MPH zone, but it isn't the whole picture.
The Prius does not reduce emmisions. It reduces emmisions at the tailpipe compared to a conventional system.
Actually, the Prius is classified as a PZEV. In order to get this rating, it must meet SULEV requirements at the tailpipe, and it must eliminate evaporative emissions. The Prius fuel tank uses a vapor-tight bladder to achieve this rating. This means that, while most cars will pollute just sitting in the garage with the engine off, the Prius does not.
I find it strange that you chose to reply by framing this as a debate over terminology. The meaning of "belief" is not at issue here. The issue is that some religionists are demanding that science prove this or disprove that. Science has no such obligations. The function of science is not to offer certainty, but to offer theories consistent with observations.
The trouble comes about not because science is functioning as it should, but because religion is trying to offer its self-assured certainty as theory. But no matter what arbitrary belief is put forward, if there is no observational basis for it, it simply does not rise to the level of theory. Attempting to prove or disprove beliefs is not in the realm of science, it is in the realm of philosophy. Which brings me back to your original question:
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
Failure to get along is not the fault of the scientific community. Science does not demand putting aside beliefs, nor does it demand unquestioning acceptance of any given theory. Science is dispassionate on the whole question of belief. Religion, however, has a long history of imposing its beliefs, and of demanding certainty. (Note that this is not true of all religions; it is far more prevalent in "Western" religions.) When religion acts in this way, it is asking for nothing less than the abolition of science, because, were scientists to oblige religion by claiming to offer certainty, they would no longer be doing science.
The scientific community has a strong theory of the Big Bang, but cannot prove it, nor find out what caused it. The religious community believe[s] that the Universe was created by a Creator, but have no answer as to what created the Creator (if such a question has any meaning).
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
Can you not see the difference between "has a strong theory" and "believes"?
I agree with you on the potential value of the networking capability, but I'm not so sure about the following (when compared to cable DVRs):
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
I'm not aware of anything for the user to tweak on the cable DVRs, outside of your own programming preferences, which (because they are *your* preferences) will require tweaking anyway.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Here I've found my Cox-supplied DVR does quite well. I can tell it to record only new episodes of "Sunrise Earth", and to capture reruns of "Seinfeld" in a particular time slot on TBS. I can record Gary Calamar's "The Open Road" off of KCRW, since local radio stations come in over digital cable, so that it doesn't keep me up until midnight every Sunday night. I can put in keywords such as "Evolution" and have it record any program whose description contains that word. I can prioritize recordings so that when there is a conflict between three or more programs, it knows which two I would prefer to see and ignores the other(s). That's about as specific as I can possibly be when telling my cable box to "only record exactly what [I] tell [it] to", unless I wanted to go through an entire series episonde by episode and check off certain ones (I don't!).
It's only $4.95 per month; the other $9.95 is for the receiver itself. There's another $6.50 for the digital gateway (whether or not you get high-definition). Since I don't think Cox's DVR is available with analog service, current analog subscribers are looking at about a $21 increase, which isn't worth it if they are only doing it for the DVR. But since I was already upgrading to digital in order to get high-def, the DVR was only a $4.95 adder, and it has been worth it.
Still, I'd rather buy my own and just pay the $6.50 (plus another $4.95 for Discovery's and ESPN's HD channels). So far Cox isn't allowing this but the rep I talked to indicated they will probably allow it in the future (maybe when they are forced to by legislation?). I figure I could pay up to $700 and the cost would be covered in savings on the monthly fees over about 4 years.
Exactly: The Democrats are liberal and authoritarian
Well, it would be more accurate to say that the Democratic party has some liberal members and some authoritarian members. But the more liberal members (people like Russ Feingold) are less authoritarian than the less liberal members (people like the Clintons and Joe Lieberman). I think you'll find this is generally true. Go read Daily Kos and see how many authoritarian viewpoints you find there. Then compare with what you might read on, say, Michelle "Japanese-American internment was a great idea" Malkin's blog.
the Republicans are conservative and authoritarian
While there are a lot of authoritarians in the Republican party, I find them more radical (i.e., not conservative) than the Democrats. Do you call invading Iraq, or running up gi-normous deficits, conservative? What truly conservative actions have the Republicans given us lately? (And yes, I know that the Democrats have been accomplices to the actions I cited.) As the now well-known quote from a Portland, OR newspaper put it, "Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of getting government out of our personal lives."
What we need is to somehow refocus the public's attention on the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum instead (which is orthogonal to the liberal/conservative one).
While I agree in principal with what you are saying, I take issue with the terminology. To me the usage of "liberal" and "conservative" as opposites sounds like gibberish. You might be using "liberal" to mean "leftist" and "conservative" to mean "rightist", although it's never quite clear to me what is meant by "leftism" and "rightism". Both sound like forms of authoritarianism to me. In other words, in a non-authoritarian society, this "left/right" split (what you call "liberal/conservative") probably does not exist.
When I use the word "liberal" I always mean the opposite of "authoritarian", sticking close to the original meaning of the term. A liberal believes the government is the servant of the people instead of the other way around; that rights are inalienable; that governments have no rights (only powers that are vested in that government to enable it to serve the people -- if these powers were "rights" then they would be inalienable); that "property rights" is an oxymoron because property is not inalienable (call them "property privileges", because that's exactly what they are). Liberals believe in separation of powers to ensure that the government can function as a protector of rights, not the consolidation of powers in the executive branch that has been happening gradually over most of the past two centuries. American government has strayed far from the liberal principals on which it was founded.
Some might claim that a belief in inalienable rights is a libertarian rather than a liberal ideal. But liberals do not share the libertarians' pessimistic belief that government cannot serve the people. Even regulating businesses that would otherwise infringe on individual rights is not a legitimate purpose of government, in the eyes of the libertarian. Most libertarians will also insist that there are indeed property rights (this might just be another matter of semantics). While I don't question the sincerity of libertarians when they claim a belief in inalienable rights, I've yet to understand how libertarians would try to protect those rights without government regulation.
What we need is a coalition between them. I admit that this would be hard to achieve,
The Democratic Party is a diverse coalition of civil rights proponents, environmental interests, some business interests (the entertainment industry, e.g.), labor interests, etc. The Republican Party is a less diverse but perhaps more unlikely coalition of business interests, fundamentalist/evangelical religious interests, and perhaps some other elements. So what's to stop a Green/Libertarian coalition?
However, I think it's in both parties best interests to stop the government's slide towards fascism first, and then resume fighting over social policy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think anyone actually watches CSPAN, you are out of touch.
Well said. That is so on-target.
...on that Jump to Conclusions Mat?
Way to miss the point! You can always help an economy out by pumping money into it, but that means you are pumping money out of somewhere else -- in this case, the U.S. Treasury. The deficit in that chart isn't serving as an indicator of economic health, any more than the bill you get from a doctor serves as an indicator of your health.
It's serving as a price tag.
From the point of view of the slave states, abolition was a forced social experiment. How do you justify any social experiment with objective facts? How do you justify maintaining the status quo with objective facts? Can a society make any critical decision in a value-neutral manner?
Tron buildup with its nut/mother in the Gropiusstadt in the south of Berlin. Already at school times Tron was interested much in technical topics, whereas its achievements in are designated other subjects than rather on the average.
It is categorically unconstitutional for the government to conduct warrantless searches and seizures. Regardless of what Congress does (short of amending the Constitution), that will always be the case. By legal precedent, wiretapping is covered under the Fourth Amendment, so the executive branch must have a warrant in order to conduct wiretapping.
The Constitution does not provide a detailed procedure for the issuance of warrants, but this has always (and properly, I believe) been placed in the hands of the judicial branch.
The Constitution only explicitly establishes one court, the Supreme Court. However, it allows other courts to be established. Guess who gets to do this?
The U.S. Constitution: Article III. - The Judicial Branch
Section 1 - Judicial powers
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
Congress acted well within its authority in establishing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It is the President who is violating the separation of powers by going around the courts. The President is allowed to wiretap whomever he wishes, provided he gets a warrant from any court that has the authority and jurisdiction to do so. The FISC is actually there to make this easier, for cases involving national security where it would be risky to go before an open court. By failing to obtain a warrant, not only is the President acting unconstitutionally (in violation of the Fourth Amendment), but the President is assuming a power not vested in him. Once a President does this with impunity, we will have finally been robbed of the last vestige of the separation of powers. Let's not allow that to happen this time.
Sky not falling
Area man not getting any younger
President not telling truth
Hmm, that's not quite right. It would also require a projection of current and future birth rates, would it not?
At any rate, it is a flawed argument. One common analogy to the Doomsday Argument goes this way: Two urns contain 10 and 100 balls each, and the balls in each urn are numbered with sequential integers starting at one. I select an urn, pull out a ball at random, and show it to you. It has the number 7. You calculate -- correctly -- that the ball has a 10/11 chance of being from the urn with 10 balls. When this analogy is stretched to fit the Doomsday Argument, the number on the ball is analogous to your birth number, and the number of balls in the urn is analogous the total population of the human race for all time. So if your birth number is 10 billion, the chances that the total number of humans that ever have lived or will live ever reaching, say, 10 trillion must be very small. Or so goes the argument, anyway.
But suppose I take the urn with 10 balls and dump it into the urn with 100 balls. Assume the 10 balls from the first urn are black, and the 100 balls from the second urn are white. After thoroughly mixing the balls together in the second urn, I reach in and pull out a ball at random, and read the number to you (but don't allow you to see its color). It has the number 4. What are the chances the ball is black? (Hint: The answer is not 10/11!)
The validity of the DA comes down to this: If we do the urn experiment, and I don't tell you whether I am drawing from a single urn or from two urns, why would you expect the balls to be presorted by color into separate containers? Or why, when you are assigned a birth number, do you expect the same probability that your birth number will be assigned to you from a large pool of birth numbers as from a small pool of birth numbers? A birth number pool represents a sentient species. There may be millions of sentient species in the universe, and if we assume that the frequency of species with (total for all time) population N is the same as the frequency of species with (total for all time) population 1000*N, then you are 1000 times as likely to be a member of the second species as you are likely to be a member of the first. This changes your prior distribution in a very significant way. Assuming you can justify your prior (uniform or otherwise) in the first place.
As for the Gott argument, please read Carlton Caves's rebuttal.
Yes, but by not pointing out the difference in size of the two cars, you understated your point. Just trying to help!
BTW, I'm looking forward to that Camry hybrid I mentioned. I've got a Prius so I won't buy a Camry for myself, but I think it would be a good car for my wife.
So, I don't expect to see any 0.11 Cd production cars in my lifetime.
Well, the Civic isn't comparable to the Prius either, unless you are talking about pre-2004 Prius. The Civic is a compact car; the 2004 and later Prius is mid-sized. A closer comparison to the Prius (in terms of size) is the Accord hybrid, but that car is engineered more for higher performance, so it still isn't comparing the two systems apples-to-apples. I think the most appropriate comparison would be between the Accord hybrid and the 2007 Camry hybrid (192 HP and 43 MPG).
The Prius's system might actually be theoretically less efficient than the Honda's since it uses a generator as the fulcrum of a torque split device - this means that the generator always has to be generating power for the car to be pushed by the gas engine - this entails doing an additional energy conversion step all of the time.
That's at least a little misleading. There are not one, but two motor/generators in the Prius, and yes, at least one will be generating when the engine is revving. But as I understand it, the result of this is that the IC engine has more load, which allows for greater efficiency. It is a bit counter-intuitive, but this efficiency increase in the ICE is supposed to offset the electro-mechanical conversion inefficiency of the generator.
Surely the Vette's Cd could be lowered more, though it might change the styling away from what Vette owners are accustomed to, but remember that the Vette has a very small cross-sectional area, so its drag force is already a fraction of the Prius's.
Maybe for overall performance including handling characteristics, but if you only want to compare two drivetrains?
I don't know about the vehicles cited by grandparent, but the Honda Accord hybrid does have faster acceleration than the conventional Accord.
Anyway, if you look at 0-to-60 numbers, it may be misleading. A hybrid might outperform a similar conventional car in the 0-to-30, and the conventional car might outperform the hybrid in the 30-to-60 range, but if both are going the same speed at the end of 10 seconds, which will have traveled farther from a stop?
Granted, there are reasons to care about acceleration in the 60 MPH zone, but it isn't the whole picture.
Actually, the Prius is classified as a PZEV. In order to get this rating, it must meet SULEV requirements at the tailpipe, and it must eliminate evaporative emissions. The Prius fuel tank uses a vapor-tight bladder to achieve this rating. This means that, while most cars will pollute just sitting in the garage with the engine off, the Prius does not.
I find it strange that you chose to reply by framing this as a debate over terminology. The meaning of "belief" is not at issue here. The issue is that some religionists are demanding that science prove this or disprove that. Science has no such obligations. The function of science is not to offer certainty, but to offer theories consistent with observations.
The trouble comes about not because science is functioning as it should, but because religion is trying to offer its self-assured certainty as theory. But no matter what arbitrary belief is put forward, if there is no observational basis for it, it simply does not rise to the level of theory. Attempting to prove or disprove beliefs is not in the realm of science, it is in the realm of philosophy. Which brings me back to your original question:
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
Failure to get along is not the fault of the scientific community. Science does not demand putting aside beliefs, nor does it demand unquestioning acceptance of any given theory. Science is dispassionate on the whole question of belief. Religion, however, has a long history of imposing its beliefs, and of demanding certainty. (Note that this is not true of all religions; it is far more prevalent in "Western" religions.) When religion acts in this way, it is asking for nothing less than the abolition of science, because, were scientists to oblige religion by claiming to offer certainty, they would no longer be doing science.
The scientific community has a strong theory of the Big Bang, but cannot prove it, nor find out what caused it. The religious community believe[s] that the Universe was created by a Creator, but have no answer as to what created the Creator (if such a question has any meaning).
Until one community disproves the other, why not let both live together?
Can you not see the difference between "has a strong theory" and "believes"?
one-time adj.
1 or onetime
a. Occurring or undertaken only once: a one-time winner in 1995.
b. Having been in the past; former: asked his one-time classmates for help.
2...
I think definition 1(b) will resolve your quandary.
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
I'm not aware of anything for the user to tweak on the cable DVRs, outside of your own programming preferences, which (because they are *your* preferences) will require tweaking anyway.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Here I've found my Cox-supplied DVR does quite well. I can tell it to record only new episodes of "Sunrise Earth", and to capture reruns of "Seinfeld" in a particular time slot on TBS. I can record Gary Calamar's "The Open Road" off of KCRW, since local radio stations come in over digital cable, so that it doesn't keep me up until midnight every Sunday night. I can put in keywords such as "Evolution" and have it record any program whose description contains that word. I can prioritize recordings so that when there is a conflict between three or more programs, it knows which two I would prefer to see and ignores the other(s). That's about as specific as I can possibly be when telling my cable box to "only record exactly what [I] tell [it] to", unless I wanted to go through an entire series episonde by episode and check off certain ones (I don't!).
Still, I'd rather buy my own and just pay the $6.50 (plus another $4.95 for Discovery's and ESPN's HD channels). So far Cox isn't allowing this but the rep I talked to indicated they will probably allow it in the future (maybe when they are forced to by legislation?). I figure I could pay up to $700 and the cost would be covered in savings on the monthly fees over about 4 years.
I've never had Tivo. Could you provide an example of program information you get, that the cable companies' DVR service doesn't provide?
Are you implying the length of his post has something to do with his ability to get/keep a girlfriend?
Well, it would be more accurate to say that the Democratic party has some liberal members and some authoritarian members. But the more liberal members (people like Russ Feingold) are less authoritarian than the less liberal members (people like the Clintons and Joe Lieberman). I think you'll find this is generally true. Go read Daily Kos and see how many authoritarian viewpoints you find there. Then compare with what you might read on, say, Michelle "Japanese-American internment was a great idea" Malkin's blog.
the Republicans are conservative and authoritarian
While there are a lot of authoritarians in the Republican party, I find them more radical (i.e., not conservative) than the Democrats. Do you call invading Iraq, or running up gi-normous deficits, conservative? What truly conservative actions have the Republicans given us lately? (And yes, I know that the Democrats have been accomplices to the actions I cited.) As the now well-known quote from a Portland, OR newspaper put it, "Other than telling us how to live, think, marry, pray, vote, invest, educate our children and, now, die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of getting government out of our personal lives."
What we need is to somehow refocus the public's attention on the libertarian/authoritarian spectrum instead (which is orthogonal to the liberal/conservative one).
While I agree in principal with what you are saying, I take issue with the terminology. To me the usage of "liberal" and "conservative" as opposites sounds like gibberish. You might be using "liberal" to mean "leftist" and "conservative" to mean "rightist", although it's never quite clear to me what is meant by "leftism" and "rightism". Both sound like forms of authoritarianism to me. In other words, in a non-authoritarian society, this "left/right" split (what you call "liberal/conservative") probably does not exist.
When I use the word "liberal" I always mean the opposite of "authoritarian", sticking close to the original meaning of the term. A liberal believes the government is the servant of the people instead of the other way around; that rights are inalienable; that governments have no rights (only powers that are vested in that government to enable it to serve the people -- if these powers were "rights" then they would be inalienable); that "property rights" is an oxymoron because property is not inalienable (call them "property privileges", because that's exactly what they are). Liberals believe in separation of powers to ensure that the government can function as a protector of rights, not the consolidation of powers in the executive branch that has been happening gradually over most of the past two centuries. American government has strayed far from the liberal principals on which it was founded.
Some might claim that a belief in inalienable rights is a libertarian rather than a liberal ideal. But liberals do not share the libertarians' pessimistic belief that government cannot serve the people. Even regulating businesses that would otherwise infringe on individual rights is not a legitimate purpose of government, in the eyes of the libertarian. Most libertarians will also insist that there are indeed property rights (this might just be another matter of semantics). While I don't question the sincerity of libertarians when they claim a belief in inalienable rights, I've yet to understand how libertarians would try to protect those rights without government regulation.
What we need is a coalition between them. I admit that this would be hard to achieve,
The Democratic Party is a diverse coalition of civil rights proponents, environmental interests, some business interests (the entertainment industry, e.g.), labor interests, etc. The Republican Party is a less diverse but perhaps more unlikely coalition of business interests, fundamentalist/evangelical religious interests, and perhaps some other elements. So what's to stop a Green/Libertarian coalition?
However, I think it's in both parties best interests to stop the government's slide towards fascism first, and then resume fighting over social policy.
I agree with that!
10 minutes from article to the first FP comment? That's got to be the longest ever!