Instead, test it formally, with double blinds, hoping that it works (so you don't subconsciously suppress data). Then if you find something, have others duplicate your work. That's the scientific method. Blindly assuming something is false is not.
On the other hand,
once proper tests HAVE been conducted, and
negative test results have been reproduced by many different people,
and no new evidence has been presented,
then it is perfectly valid to reject that stuff as bullshit from that point on.
Part of the point of performing rigorous experimentation is to be able to discredit competing theories.
Once a theory has been thoroughly discredited, you are not doing yourself or the state of human knowledge any favors by continuing to give it any credence, plus it leaves you open to manipulation by misinformation by either con artists or people who are just confident in their ignorance.
As the saying goes, "if your mind is TOO open, your brains will fall out".
Looks like you didn't get the gist of my argument.
If someone is making decisions that are important enough, you don't have to take into account whether they screw up deliberately or not. If they screw up, you punish them as if they were acting maliciously.
That's the only way you're going to make sure that high-level decision makers are going to do their best job, both in terms of not being malicious and in terms of not being incompetent.
The moment you start allowing high-level decision makers to get off for being incompetent, not only will you attract incompetents (since there is little or no personal risk for being incompetent), but you also open a loophole for people to get away with deliberately malicious acts.
The other way besides providing support & maintenance to make money off public domain code is to actually USE the public domain software to provide a service to your customers (i.e., you don't need to distribute the code or mods, just USE it to provide a service to your customers superior to your competitors).
At certain levels of decision-importance, it is no longer sufficient to use incompetence as an excuse to escape punishment.
If you allow people who are involved with such matters to use incompetence to escape punishment, then they can easily use the facade of incompetence to cover both honest mistakes and malicious activities, plus there is no incentive for them to try and improve their competence.
Once the decision-making power reaches a certain level of importance, then if you want your leadership to behave in a competent manner, then you MUST punish them for screwing up, regardless of whether they made a mistake or whether they were deliberately misbehaving.
My mother (special education teacher, now retired) had to "repair" a lot of kids who were home schooled. The parents invariably thought that they were teaching the kids enough "interpersonal skills", but it usually turned out that the parents themselves were socially defective & were incapable of judging whether their own kids had the proper skills to fit into society when "the time came".
I don't know you & your wife well enough to tell whether your family is an exception to that pattern, but when you are deliberately choosing to isolate your kids from the same experiences that every other kid in society goes through, then you'd damn well be prepared to unemotionally & critically analyze whether the choices you are making for your kids will place them at a net disadvantage when you aren't around to manage their social relationships anymore.
I think it should be every American's duty to spend at least one year living outside the country (preferably while they're adult enough to learn something). It might put a small dent in the ridiculously provincial attitude that a lot of Americans have.
Your scenario completely sidesteps the high likelihood that if your society is "enlightened" enough to have a independent organization responsible for properly running elections, then it is highly unlikely that large-scale beatings are going to be allowed without someone noticing & investigating such behavior.
For the sake of argument, I'll assume that your scenario is possible (and there is still an independent agency able to hold a reasonably corruption-resistant election process). So you make a big deal out of wanting to vote "the boss's way", and still vote however you want. As long as the voting procedures aren't compromised (which I acknowledge can be difficult to achieve), nobody is still going to be able to figure out exactly who is voting the "wrong" way.
Because the random beatings are being targeted randomly & will be catching people who really ARE voting the boss's way (which means that it doesn't really help to vote the boss's way), eventually the # of people being beaten will increase until everyone is going to decide that they'd better cooperate to beat the crap out of/kill the people who are ordering the beatings (since the people being beaten will have nothing to gain by voting the boss's way anymore, and it will be clear to everyone that they will be much better off by taking out the boss). (And it doesn't really matter who the boss is, as long as the "boss" can't be sure who voted for what.)
Anonymous voting really does do a good job of making it hard to intimidate or bribe voters with any degree of certainty. Its main weakness is when its implementation is broken (kind of like cryptography).
In any case, I hope you'll agree that it doesn't make much common sense to have an agency which might have a vested interest in the outcome of an election be responsible for actually running that election.
That's exactly what all of the procedures of anonymous voting are designed to protect. You have to make sure that the people running the election aren't connected to the people running the prison of course, but if the procedures are solid, then all the prisoners can lie right to the warden's face about how they voted, and there's no effective way that the warden will be able to verify anything.
As much as I enjoy the convenience of vote-by-mail here in the U.S. state of Oregon, it completely violates one of the tenets of anonymous voting: there's no way you can protect the vote process from intimidation or bribery with a vote-by-mail system.
Just remember that any technology developed that is effective against the insurgency will also be effective against our own local populations, and with reduced potential for pesky little details like human "conscience" to get in the way.
I'm a little uncertain as to why you think private insurance provides more efficient health care? If anything, private insurance makes more profit by denying as much health care as possible.
I think sociopaths fall into more the "lack of empathy" category, rather than "doesn't learn from mistakes". I suspect the scary sociopaths would be the ones that DO learn from mistakes.
*blink blink* I don't usually respond to Anon Cowards, but that's the first time I've had all my responses handled for me before I've even had a chance to log in:-)
Actually, the main "valid" reason for the government providing letter service is to provide services to those geographic areas where the "free market" would flat out decide that it wasn't worth servicing those areas. If this wasn't a requirement of the USPS, they could easily drop all their rural routes & compete with any of the normal package carriers.
Of course, whether or not we should be inefficiently supporting those remote rural areas is a whole 'nother area of debate. I'm sure there's a lot of small town supporters that would scream bloody murder if you argue that those small towns should be allowed to disappear by cutting off any form of government infrastructure subsidy for those locations.
Let's see, you cite one case where the official investigation reveals that one person in the Clinton administration made copies of some secret documents & took them home to work on, got caught, and then got "slapped on the wrist" as punishment. Somehow this supports a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors that the rest of the Clinton administration regularly got rid of emails, documents & memos. Something tells me that you don't have much training as a lawyer, or even in basic critical analysis.
Something also tells me that you're the type of person who thinks that all of the MainStream Media web sites have a "liberal bias". Given that the really wingnut websites that you probably DO like (like freerepublic.com, redstate.com or the Wing Nut Daily) are regularly shown to delete any stories they don't like, and to post complete and utter fabrications supporting their ideology, I'd probably find it a bit difficult to find anything on places like that which would satisfy your requirements.
Do you have any other major web sites which you depend on for news information which you might consider to be a relatively "neutral" source where you might accept a story from if I can find something supporting my position(s)?
Using the Wing Nut Daily as a source doesn't help your argument any, but thanks for making your neocon shill credentials so clear.
I will use a similarly biased web site (although it has a slightly better truthiness reputation) to rebut your claim: thinkprogress.org
Here is another article about the Sandy Berger incident, from a slightly more reputable news source. Note how right wing propagandists like to say that Berger "stole" or "removed" classified documents from the Archives, when he actually took home COPIES, which was still a big legal nono, but the difference in argument is typical of how neocons like to misrepresent facts.
Next time you try and put out neocon propaganda, I suggest making sure your statements can't be rebutted by web sites which show up on the first page of a Google search. You'll be able to fool more people that way.
Actually, all those things exist in nature (buckyballs & carbon nanotubes get formed whether anything organic burns or in the presence of lightning strikes, for instance), but they don't exist with the purity or at the concentrations that humans can make in the lab.
I'm not saying such materials are "safe", but you're overstating your initial premise.
There are two major legal paths that might be taken to break down 2-party control:
1. Unwind the power of the 2-party system from the bottom up.
1a. Get 3rd party candidates (or sympathetic-to-the-cause main party candidates) into local offices (a bit more likely than federal office).
1b. Change voting laws for any multiple choice situation (either by citizen initiative or by the newly-elected sympathetic officials) to any of the alternative voting methods (like "Approval Voting") which allow people to vote for 3rd party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote.
1c. Remove the laws that support mainly the 2 parties, like all the laws which have government pay for partisan activity if the parties are big enough, under the guise of using taxpayer monies to support "civic participation". Make the parties pay for their own damn partisan activities.
1d. As people get used to the changes in local political activities, push the changes to higher levels of government (county, district, state, region, federal, for instance).
Cons: This approach could take quite a few years & would need to have quite a large, dedicated group of people working the issue in all parts of the country. The 2 main parties would probably also try to sabotage progress at every stage of the game.
Pros: Slow & organic (from the roots) enough that you probably won't scare people into a frothing panic, and would build quite a bit of momentum by the time it reached the federal level.
2. Constitutional Convention
I think (although not entirely sure - perhaps a Constitutional scholar can correct me) that if you get 2/3s of the state legislatures to agree, you can convene a convention whose purpose & power is to Amend the Constitution, and then 3/4s of the states have to approve the resultant amendments.
Needless to say, this is a pretty high bar to reach, but it might be slightly faster than #1.
The important thing is that you can do this step without the permission or control of the federal government. If there's federal-level resistance to change, you could use strategy #1 until you can pack the state legislatures with reformers, then use #2 to bypass any resistance at the federal level.
Have you ever lived in a high-population-density urban environment with great mass transit? Cars are a major PITA in those conditions. Most of the major metropolitan areas around the world have already worked out practical solutions for these sorts of issues.
As the price of energy keeps going up, and populations keep contracting around urban centers, personal vehicles are going to be more of a hindrance than a luxury. America is way behind on this kind of living because of its massive exploitation of cheap oil, but that's not going to last much longer.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand,
then it is perfectly valid to reject that stuff as bullshit from that point on.
Part of the point of performing rigorous experimentation is to be able to discredit competing theories.
Once a theory has been thoroughly discredited, you are not doing yourself or the state of human knowledge any favors by continuing to give it any credence, plus it leaves you open to manipulation by misinformation by either con artists or people who are just confident in their ignorance.
As the saying goes, "if your mind is TOO open, your brains will fall out".
Looks like you didn't get the gist of my argument.
If someone is making decisions that are important enough, you don't have to take into account whether they screw up deliberately or not. If they screw up, you punish them as if they were acting maliciously.
That's the only way you're going to make sure that high-level decision makers are going to do their best job, both in terms of not being malicious and in terms of not being incompetent.
The moment you start allowing high-level decision makers to get off for being incompetent, not only will you attract incompetents (since there is little or no personal risk for being incompetent), but you also open a loophole for people to get away with deliberately malicious acts.
The other way besides providing support & maintenance to make money off public domain code is to actually USE the public domain software to provide a service to your customers (i.e., you don't need to distribute the code or mods, just USE it to provide a service to your customers superior to your competitors).
At certain levels of decision-importance, it is no longer sufficient to use incompetence as an excuse to escape punishment.
If you allow people who are involved with such matters to use incompetence to escape punishment, then they can easily use the facade of incompetence to cover both honest mistakes and malicious activities, plus there is no incentive for them to try and improve their competence.
Once the decision-making power reaches a certain level of importance, then if you want your leadership to behave in a competent manner, then you MUST punish them for screwing up, regardless of whether they made a mistake or whether they were deliberately misbehaving.
I'm definitely marking that package Return-To-Sender.
My mother (special education teacher, now retired) had to "repair" a lot of kids who were home schooled. The parents invariably thought that they were teaching the kids enough "interpersonal skills", but it usually turned out that the parents themselves were socially defective & were incapable of judging whether their own kids had the proper skills to fit into society when "the time came".
I don't know you & your wife well enough to tell whether your family is an exception to that pattern, but when you are deliberately choosing to isolate your kids from the same experiences that every other kid in society goes through, then you'd damn well be prepared to unemotionally & critically analyze whether the choices you are making for your kids will place them at a net disadvantage when you aren't around to manage their social relationships anymore.
Sounds like your children will make excellent cannon fodder for the bullies in society when you finally release them from your protective custody.
I think it should be every American's duty to spend at least one year living outside the country (preferably while they're adult enough to learn something). It might put a small dent in the ridiculously provincial attitude that a lot of Americans have.
Your scenario completely sidesteps the high likelihood that if your society is "enlightened" enough to have a independent organization responsible for properly running elections, then it is highly unlikely that large-scale beatings are going to be allowed without someone noticing & investigating such behavior.
For the sake of argument, I'll assume that your scenario is possible (and there is still an independent agency able to hold a reasonably corruption-resistant election process). So you make a big deal out of wanting to vote "the boss's way", and still vote however you want. As long as the voting procedures aren't compromised (which I acknowledge can be difficult to achieve), nobody is still going to be able to figure out exactly who is voting the "wrong" way.
Because the random beatings are being targeted randomly & will be catching people who really ARE voting the boss's way (which means that it doesn't really help to vote the boss's way), eventually the # of people being beaten will increase until everyone is going to decide that they'd better cooperate to beat the crap out of/kill the people who are ordering the beatings (since the people being beaten will have nothing to gain by voting the boss's way anymore, and it will be clear to everyone that they will be much better off by taking out the boss). (And it doesn't really matter who the boss is, as long as the "boss" can't be sure who voted for what.)
Anonymous voting really does do a good job of making it hard to intimidate or bribe voters with any degree of certainty. Its main weakness is when its implementation is broken (kind of like cryptography).
In any case, I hope you'll agree that it doesn't make much common sense to have an agency which might have a vested interest in the outcome of an election be responsible for actually running that election.
That's exactly what all of the procedures of anonymous voting are designed to protect. You have to make sure that the people running the election aren't connected to the people running the prison of course, but if the procedures are solid, then all the prisoners can lie right to the warden's face about how they voted, and there's no effective way that the warden will be able to verify anything.
As much as I enjoy the convenience of vote-by-mail here in the U.S. state of Oregon, it completely violates one of the tenets of anonymous voting: there's no way you can protect the vote process from intimidation or bribery with a vote-by-mail system.
Would it be more acceptable if you still had to pay about the same amount in taxes, but could control which social service providers it went to?
Just remember that any technology developed that is effective against the insurgency will also be effective against our own local populations, and with reduced potential for pesky little details like human "conscience" to get in the way.
That's hardly the same argument as companies directly passing on their expenses to their customers.
Actually, that's backward - only in a NON-competitive market can companies directly pass on the cost of additional taxes to their customers.
I'm a little uncertain as to why you think private insurance provides more efficient health care? If anything, private insurance makes more profit by denying as much health care as possible.
I think sociopaths fall into more the "lack of empathy" category, rather than "doesn't learn from mistakes". I suspect the scary sociopaths would be the ones that DO learn from mistakes.
Please do not confuse people who call themselves "compassionate conservatives" with people who can actually feel compassion.
*blink blink* I don't usually respond to Anon Cowards, but that's the first time I've had all my responses handled for me before I've even had a chance to log in :-)
Actually, the main "valid" reason for the government providing letter service is to provide services to those geographic areas where the "free market" would flat out decide that it wasn't worth servicing those areas. If this wasn't a requirement of the USPS, they could easily drop all their rural routes & compete with any of the normal package carriers.
Of course, whether or not we should be inefficiently supporting those remote rural areas is a whole 'nother area of debate. I'm sure there's a lot of small town supporters that would scream bloody murder if you argue that those small towns should be allowed to disappear by cutting off any form of government infrastructure subsidy for those locations.
Let's see, you cite one case where the official investigation reveals that one person in the Clinton administration made copies of some secret documents & took them home to work on, got caught, and then got "slapped on the wrist" as punishment. Somehow this supports a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors that the rest of the Clinton administration regularly got rid of emails, documents & memos. Something tells me that you don't have much training as a lawyer, or even in basic critical analysis.
Something also tells me that you're the type of person who thinks that all of the MainStream Media web sites have a "liberal bias". Given that the really wingnut websites that you probably DO like (like freerepublic.com, redstate.com or the Wing Nut Daily) are regularly shown to delete any stories they don't like, and to post complete and utter fabrications supporting their ideology, I'd probably find it a bit difficult to find anything on places like that which would satisfy your requirements.
Do you have any other major web sites which you depend on for news information which you might consider to be a relatively "neutral" source where you might accept a story from if I can find something supporting my position(s)?
Using the Wing Nut Daily as a source doesn't help your argument any, but thanks for making your neocon shill credentials so clear.
I will use a similarly biased web site (although it has a slightly better truthiness reputation) to rebut your claim: thinkprogress.org
Here is another article about the Sandy Berger incident, from a slightly more reputable news source. Note how right wing propagandists like to say that Berger "stole" or "removed" classified documents from the Archives, when he actually took home COPIES, which was still a big legal nono, but the difference in argument is typical of how neocons like to misrepresent facts.
Next time you try and put out neocon propaganda, I suggest making sure your statements can't be rebutted by web sites which show up on the first page of a Google search. You'll be able to fool more people that way.
Actually, all those things exist in nature (buckyballs & carbon nanotubes get formed whether anything organic burns or in the presence of lightning strikes, for instance), but they don't exist with the purity or at the concentrations that humans can make in the lab.
I'm not saying such materials are "safe", but you're overstating your initial premise.
There are two major legal paths that might be taken to break down 2-party control:
1. Unwind the power of the 2-party system from the bottom up.
1a. Get 3rd party candidates (or sympathetic-to-the-cause main party candidates) into local offices (a bit more likely than federal office).
1b. Change voting laws for any multiple choice situation (either by citizen initiative or by the newly-elected sympathetic officials) to any of the alternative voting methods (like "Approval Voting") which allow people to vote for 3rd party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote.
1c. Remove the laws that support mainly the 2 parties, like all the laws which have government pay for partisan activity if the parties are big enough, under the guise of using taxpayer monies to support "civic participation". Make the parties pay for their own damn partisan activities.
1d. As people get used to the changes in local political activities, push the changes to higher levels of government (county, district, state, region, federal, for instance).
Cons: This approach could take quite a few years & would need to have quite a large, dedicated group of people working the issue in all parts of the country. The 2 main parties would probably also try to sabotage progress at every stage of the game.
Pros: Slow & organic (from the roots) enough that you probably won't scare people into a frothing panic, and would build quite a bit of momentum by the time it reached the federal level.
2. Constitutional Convention
I think (although not entirely sure - perhaps a Constitutional scholar can correct me) that if you get 2/3s of the state legislatures to agree, you can convene a convention whose purpose & power is to Amend the Constitution, and then 3/4s of the states have to approve the resultant amendments.
Needless to say, this is a pretty high bar to reach, but it might be slightly faster than #1.
The important thing is that you can do this step without the permission or control of the federal government. If there's federal-level resistance to change, you could use strategy #1 until you can pack the state legislatures with reformers, then use #2 to bypass any resistance at the federal level.
Have you ever lived in a high-population-density urban environment with great mass transit? Cars are a major PITA in those conditions. Most of the major metropolitan areas around the world have already worked out practical solutions for these sorts of issues.
As the price of energy keeps going up, and populations keep contracting around urban centers, personal vehicles are going to be more of a hindrance than a luxury. America is way behind on this kind of living because of its massive exploitation of cheap oil, but that's not going to last much longer.