I broadly agree with what you're saying, but the following isn't right:
If they meant all types of arms then, do you think that would be appropriate now?
We shouldn't modify the meaning of the constitution based on what we think the founders would likely say about conditions today. If they meant all weapons then all weapons should be legal. If you don't want people carrying nukes around then the constitution should be modified to explicitly make exceptions for weapons that have extreme destructive power. I don't want individuals to have legal access to nukes, but we really should make an amendment to assert that desire.
Surely it would not be hard to pass an anti-personal-nuke amendment. If the supreme court didn't go around making reasonable assumptions about what the founders would have wanted then the constitution would end up reflecting what the law actually is and we wouldn't have to pick presidents based on whether they'll pick supreme court justices that we agree with.
Of course, we'd still have to pick presidents who would pick justices who treated the law with respect (which certainly hasn't happened during the last two presidential elections, so perhaps that's a pipe dream).
Well, except for those million dollar subs are largely being spent on American companies:) The military industrial complex consumes quite a bit of money, but so does the cosmetics industry. The point is that that "pork," while possibly wasteful for the country as a whole, is going to largely American jobs.</blockquote>
The Keynesian viewpoint does not take into account the inherent inefficiency of government spending. The people working in those military jobs would have to find other jobs if the military wasn't funding them. Perhaps they'd find jobs in other needed areas. If not then they can work crap jobs until they gain skills that are actually needed in an unrestricted economy.
<blockquote>I take issue with your basic principal that we shouldn't be spending money on high tech equipment.</blockquote>
There is a difference between a need and a want. Infantry funding is needed until we get them out of the dangerous situations they are in (many of which are pointless).
More high tech equipment is a want. If we were in a good economy then that's the time to splurge a bit. Our economy is heading into the crapper and we are way over our heads in debt. We need to cut back on extravagances. A new 4 billion dollar sub is definitely an extravagance when we have plenty of old subs that are more than capable of launching a nuke if it comes down to a major war to protect the homeland.
<blockquote>By that same logic, no one needed to invent tanks and machine guns for world war I, because you can conquer the African natives with black powder rifles just fine.</blockquote>
Not at all. If tanks were useful in that war then that's a justifiable expense if the war is justifiable. Right now we're spending hundreds of billions on unjustifiable expenses. Missile defense will never prevent a major power from attacking our country (it'll just reduce the percentage of missiles that get through which means the other side will just have to make sure to launch lots of missiles in a first strike). Missile defense will never prevent a self interested minor power from attacking us because any small attack would invite overwhelming response (with nukes if nothing else). Missile defense will never prevent a lone terrorist from blowing up a bomb in a crowded shopping mall. Missile defense is nothing but pork. It is a total and utter waste and should be 100% shut down right now. Its only purpose is to funnel money in inefficient ways (aka. pork).
<blockquote>Keeping our status as a superpower versus the next rising power to challenge us does.</blockquote>
What sort of rising challenge are you referring to? Terrorists don't have subs and even if they did, our current subs are more than adequate for the time being. We don't need new subs to defend our country. A new sub is only useful for going on the offense against another country that has naval power. All potentially dangerous countries with naval power are countries that we can simply nuke if it really comes down to defending our country. Sometimes we have to go without the latest toys when the economy turns down.
<blockquote>And finally - as much as robot technology has advanced, we are nowhere near having a UAV that is anything close to replacing an F-22 with a good pilot in versatility or performance</blockquote>
Perhaps, but the planes we have will do just fine for the time being. We don't need any new planes. It's not a justifiable expense at a time like this.
<blockquote>Not to mention the fact that I don't like the idea of completely robotic control systems for combat craft (not because of some doomsday "it becomes self aware" bs, but because I've worked on control routines for robotics, and there are plenty of dangerous emergent behaviors short of sentience).</blockquote>
*laugh* I was referring to remotely piloted aircraft, not automated aircraft.
Saying that the military is a valid and important use of government money does not imply that it should get a blank check. The military is right now spending hundreds of billions of dollars on projects that have nothing at all to do with the sorts of wars that we've been involved in in recent decades. This country simply does not have infinite money. Sure, it may be nice to get that new 5 billion dollar sub, but do we really need it? Do we really need to buy ANY new non-robotic aircraft? Do we really need an unbelievably expensive ineffective (both actually and theoretically) missile defense system to protect us against an enemy that is far more likely to just set off a few home made bombs in shopping centers or buses or concerts?
This country is in the poorhouse right now. We need to get back in the black and the first thing to do is slash pointless military programs which are nothing more than pork.
If you want quid-pro-quo then I'd be overjoyed if we could slash social spending too. But at least the social spending isn't money that's being thrown into a pointless pork filled black hole. (That would be/dev/null/pork)
How do you know that the wife wasn't ok with it? I've always assumed that due to Bill and Hillary's hippy past that she was ok with the whole free love thing. She just can't say so without being crucified in public. Perhaps the same is true of the latest guy to be caught paying for sex.
Your comment is only valid insofar as he wasn't willing to speak out in favor of legalizing prostitution. I agree that it's irritating that he'd partake in an illegal activity without doing what he could to try to legalize it.
The processes aren't at all related. The surface of the oceans has waves constantly created and destroyed. There's nothing surprising that a bunch of water has waves appearing and disappearing constantly. The fabric of the universe has a similar sort of thing going on.
I was with you up to the point you went off on single studiers with "This chem prof must be one of those jackasses who, while still in school, did all of his work alone and refused to lend assistance to any of his fellow students, especially if there was no tutoring credit. And he's probably justifying his own selfishness by imposing the same standards that he idealized as a student upon his students."
Studying by yourself makes you a selfish jackass? I was unaware that we all have a moral duty to help those lazier than us. I tried to be part of those groups a few times, but I found that people tended to spend most of the time chatting. I don't even know how they ever got any significant amount of homework done.
Even if what you said was true, you could always just deliver everything in separate trips. Why carry all the equipment and fuel there with the humans? Spend a couple of years tossing cargo ships toward mars. By the time we actually send humans there should be gobs of equipment there already.
You're probably just being funny, but just in case you're serious: Saying that a particle just appears is not the same as saying that a more complex entity just appears. These particles are just static (white noise) in the fabric of the universe.
Really? Do you have a link to somewhere that makes that sort of comparison? If the bet were between DVD and hard drives then I'd absolutely go with a hard drive. I've had plenty of DVDs which were unreadable (usually due to a tiny scratch) whereas I've never had a hard drive crash so badly that I couldn't get all the data off. Obviously it can happen, but all my hard drive "crashes" have been decays in performance (like requiring 10 times the length of time to get data off) which always allowed me to eventually copy the data off.
Are you claiming that BR will be much more reliable than DVD?
BR discs will be useless as a backup medium. They'll still be too expensive and you'll still need to swap discs to fully back up your hard drive.
I just did a quick search. The recordable Blu-Ray discs are 25GB and $20 each. You can get a 500GB SATA drive for $105. Right now that makes BR about 4 times as expensive as hard discs and 20 times as annoying (20 disc swaps to back up a 500GB disc). Sure, the price will go down on BR discs, but it'll go down on hard drives as well.
I bought a SATA hot swap bay years ago. One of those is going to save you a lot of money after just a couple of backups.
It has been many years since optical media was a practical way to back up large amounts of data. BR won't change that.
Electricity was expected to drop out a few times every summer, and until someone figures out how to tell lightning where to go, I expect it will continue to happen.
That's a good example. If the users of that electricity were willing to pay for it, they could prevent that downtime. You could install 100 foot lightning rods every 10 feet near every single electrical line. You could run a dozen different independent electrical lines from all directions. You could build a dozen underground lines with cables guarded by a 10 foot thick titanium shell.
But, people aren't willing to pay the price (either in money or in the other costs that would be incurred by covering the landscape with electrical wires. People accept the occasional outage in exchange for not building massive amounts of redundant excessive architecture.
In terms of uptime, each additional 9 probably requires an exponential increase in cost. In a good market, consumers decide what they're willing to pay and providers provide that amount of uptime.
They weren't hiding. They weren't told about it until AFTER the judgement had occurred. It's kind of hard to defend yourself when you don't even know that a trial is going on.
You're setting up a straw man. The only clients I work for are other departments in my company. I don't work in any sort of environment where I need to impress strangers. There are hundreds of people here and there are no suits in sight.
My original post was simply a reaction to all the other posts which talk about how not wearing a suit means you're a careless buffoon who is unwilling to do what needs to be done to get the company to succeed. That sort of attitude is ridiculous considering that they completely ignore the flip side where people can judge them negatively if they wear a suit.
Let me change it up a bit. Imagine you're trying to get into some sort of grunge rock band. A suit is unlikely to go over well. If you're not wearing torn up jeans and multiple studs in your ears then you might as well not apply. In some environments a pair of jeans and a T-shirt are the accepted dress code and those who deviate are seen as people who don't fit in.
Problems only occur when two cultures clash. Many posters here are obviously from other corporate cultures. I have no problem with that, but I do have a problem with their snotty belief that the lack of a suit means lack of seriousness. The opposite is true from my perspective.
The passionate belief that a suit is important is an indicator of a lack of flexibility. People like that are crappy managers. But that's just my cultural view. *smile*
Halloween is for dressup. That's fun. Leave the play clothes in the closet the rest of the year.
Some people are simply not up to the job of being a programmer. They cut corners and ignore good design in order to get the project done real quick. It may seem like they're getting the work done, and maybe they are, but crap code piles up. It takes time to work out the bugs. Over time it'll build up so much that it wouldn't even occur to people to refactor it.
I've worked with people like this. No matter how much you try to encourage them to follow good design, they will continue to just ignore all good sense. A typical example is a former coworker of mine who was asked to make a small change to an app that sent out email notifications. He needed to make a slight change to take care of one particular circumstance, so he copied an entire class (hundreds of lines of code) and changed exactly one line to do what he wanted.
When this code later broke (due to that single line) we asked him about it and he denied even writing it. We looked at source control and it was definitely him. (This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.) I asked him why he had copied an entire class just to change one line when it was trivially easy to modify the class to handle both situations. He said he just wanted to get it done. I told him it probably took him longer to do it the way he did it. He just shrugged.
How do you respond to someone like that? I'm sorry, but he will never be a good programmer. Some people just don't have it in them. He was a very nice guy, but he was a terrible programmer.
Thankfully, most of my coworkers do have it in them. I've been privileged to work with some great people. But it's pure fantasy to think that everyone is capable of being a decent programmer.
*laugh* Lighten up! I was merely pointing out the absurdity of the thinking that you need to wear a suit to be taken seriously. In some environments (like in my office where there are hundreds of people and no suits in sight) a suit will not only fail to help you fit in but will actually do the opposite.
I do not in fact immediately have strong negative feelings about people in suits. But, a suit is a first clue that they may be used to uptight environments. It's also possible that they may not feel as confident about their abilities as they should and thus need to add a suit to make themselves more confident.
But first impressions ARE important! I for one immediately judge suit wearers as uptight tools with great social skills and no brains. It can take a long time for me to change my mind and gain any respect for them whatsoever even if they spend every day afterward in jeans and a T-shirt.
Where does that leave jury nullification? In that situation the jury is explicitly judging the law itself to be unjust. That wasn't the case in this trial, but such a practice would seem to nullify nullification.
Perhaps Ralph Nader doesn't think the Democrats would be any better or worse than the Republicans. If this is the case, why should he or his supporters care in the slightest what Democrat supporters and Republican haters think?
If he thinks that then he bears even more responsibility for Bush. Yes, the Democrats have been enablers for Bush, but there is a big difference between both parties failing to make progress on lots of issues compared with one party smashing up the system while the other party looks on. If Gore had been the president then congress wouldn't have had anything to enable.
McCain certainly is no Bush. But, he's also strongly pro-war and not particularly motivated by civil rights. He voted in favor of telecom immunity (which I consider a treasonous crime all by itself).
We also need a liberal president so we can appoint some new judges to the supreme court if the opportunity arises. That court has been stacked by Bush. It needs more balance. I don't want a completely liberal or conservative court, but the court we have right now is stacked. There would be a world of difference between a McCain appointee and an Obama appointee.
I would love to get some opposing balance into the system. Get a president in there who will clean up the place with the same fervor that Bush destroyed it. But, that's not going to happen so it hardly seems like a good idea to put yet another ultra-conservative in there. McCain may not be an extreme neo-con, but he's also not someone who will clean up the place.
He's not particularly fiscally conservative either, but then again no electable politician is fiscally conservative.
Besides, if Nader continues to draw votes from one particular side of a two-party system, it might actually motivate that side to realise that the system is quite screwed up, and push for changes to fix it.
That's fantasy. There is already plenty of motivation to push for changes in the system. We don't need to hand neo-cons another victory to add to the pile. For instance, the electoral college got Bush elected. That should have been plenty of motivation to get a constitutional amendment passed to ditch that system. It's not going to happen and I'm not sure what would be required to make it happen.
I absolutely agree that the Democrats have been little more than enablers. However, that is because of the people in the party, not some magical aspect of the party itself.
A party does not magically cause someone to become something they are not. Ron Paul is not a typical Republican. Kucinich is not a typical Democrat. Voting your conscience in the general election may make you feel better, but it's guaranteed to be a wasted vote. You can chide people for not voting their conscience in the general election all you like, but a 3rd party candidate cannot win unless they are wildly popular personalities. Arnold could possibly pull it off (if it were constitutional for him to be president).
Also, keep in mind we're talking about the presidency here. That is a single person with tremendous power. Only a lunatic would think that the choice between Gore and Bush was a vote for the same sort of person. That vote made one hell of a difference in the course of events in the world. If more people had voted their conscience then perhaps the gap would have been even wider with Bush winning.
There is one corner case that I hadn't thought of until just now. What would happen if there was an even number of parties? What if, instead of one Republican and two Democratish people running, we had two Republicanish people and two Democratish people? What if in the next election we had Obama, McCain, Nader, and Paul all running with Nader and Paul being the 3rd and 4th parties? That might still be tricky if one of the two extras was more popular and thus screwed things up. But, what if we then added a 5th who had cross party appeal like Arnold (again, assuming a modification of the constitution).
I'll bet that a race like that truly would be up in the air.
Perhaps that's one way to do it. If we want another party to win then we'll need at least 3 popular candidates spread out across the ideological spectrum.
Nader would have no blame if he ran in the Democratic (or Republican) primaries. He does bear blame if he runs in the general election.
I don't know what your point is about Kucinich. He may not have won the primaries, but he was at least a choice. If you agreed with him then you absolutely should have voted for him. Having him run did not cause a terrible candidate to get in. But, if Kucinich was to announce a 3rd party candidacy in the general election then he would deserve fault for getting McCain into office if Obama loses.
I really don't understand your point of view. The place to vote your conscience is in the primaries. The worst case scenario is that a less than ideal person would get the nomination. If your favored candidate doesn't win, I fail to see how that proves that they should have run as a 3rd party which is a guaranteed way to lose and also helps your least disliked D or R party also lose.
We have a stupid two party system that, like it or not, cannot be changed directly. If you want change then you need to reform the primaries first. That's possible because you can do those one state at a time starting with small states. Reform them to have different types of voting procedures that allow for 2nd choice voting. Eliminate superdelegates. Eliminate the fraud that occurs at some primaries, etc.
But 99% of of you prefer to stick with the status quo.
No, 99% of us don't know how to get rid of the status quo. The system is strongly stacked against 3rd parties. There are 2 ways to make a 3rd party win. One is to put an immensely popular person in a third party. But, that's not going to happen because such a popular person would probably be able to be the candidate for one of the 2 main parties.
The other way is to get constitutional reforms passed which change how elections work. Good luck getting that to happen. That would require the help of at least one of the two existing parties and I don't see that happening.
So, the only purpose of a 3rd party is to draw votes from another party. Deciding to run in a 3rd party does not mean you're presenting a 3rd choice. It means that you're attempting to draw votes from the major party that agrees with you the most.
I don't like it. I very much wish we could alter the system to allow people to vote with some sort of multi-vote system as in I like person #1 but if they don't win then I prefer person #2. There are a variety of other voting schemes, any one of which would probably be better.
But, there is only one possible outcome of another Nader run. That is to draw votes away from Obama. If Nader runs and McCain wins then Nader bears the blame just like he bears the blame for getting Bush elected.
The only real possibility that I see for change is to push to get the primaries opened up more. That is where we have real choice. The primaries are corrupt in many ways. There are plenty of very undemocratic issues in the primaries for both major parties. That needs to change and it's the only way that change can occur.
I regretted this post after I made it. I should have made it clear that I was grinning at the time I posted it. It was not intended as a serious comment.
Here's a thought. Perhaps the satellite was launched with a detonator on board? The US gets to launch a missile and then hits the detonate button at the right time. This makes it look like missile defense works and they get another excuse to spend another half trillion on bottle rockets and DC prostitutes.
Heart Disease [cdc.gov] causes over 200 times that many deaths on a yearly basis, and we can't convince ourselves to hit up a gym?
Douglas Adams died of a heart attack while exercising at a gym. Clearly most people took that to heart and won't go near those death traps. A better solution would be to install nuclear powered pace makers in everyone when they are babies.
Well that damn well ensures who I'll vote for in the election. Hillary was at times enticing due to her possible fiscal conservatism. I was cautiously against her due to her being part of a dynasty, but if she's not going to bother to vote against immunity then I say fuck her and her corrupt ways. I will absolutely never vote for anyone so corrupt. All honest politicians should be up in arms over the very idea of telecom immunity. Anyone who isn't is corrupt and should be removed from office.
I was going to write some more stuff about how they should be deported to Syria with cartoons of Mohammed stapled to their foreheads, but I wouldn't want to go overboard. Simply removing them from office is sufficient.
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We shouldn't modify the meaning of the constitution based on what we think the founders would likely say about conditions today. If they meant all weapons then all weapons should be legal. If you don't want people carrying nukes around then the constitution should be modified to explicitly make exceptions for weapons that have extreme destructive power. I don't want individuals to have legal access to nukes, but we really should make an amendment to assert that desire.
Surely it would not be hard to pass an anti-personal-nuke amendment. If the supreme court didn't go around making reasonable assumptions about what the founders would have wanted then the constitution would end up reflecting what the law actually is and we wouldn't have to pick presidents based on whether they'll pick supreme court justices that we agree with.
Of course, we'd still have to pick presidents who would pick justices who treated the law with respect (which certainly hasn't happened during the last two presidential elections, so perhaps that's a pipe dream).
Saying that the military is a valid and important use of government money does not imply that it should get a blank check. The military is right now spending hundreds of billions of dollars on projects that have nothing at all to do with the sorts of wars that we've been involved in in recent decades. This country simply does not have infinite money. Sure, it may be nice to get that new 5 billion dollar sub, but do we really need it? Do we really need to buy ANY new non-robotic aircraft? Do we really need an unbelievably expensive ineffective (both actually and theoretically) missile defense system to protect us against an enemy that is far more likely to just set off a few home made bombs in shopping centers or buses or concerts?
/dev/null/pork)
This country is in the poorhouse right now. We need to get back in the black and the first thing to do is slash pointless military programs which are nothing more than pork.
If you want quid-pro-quo then I'd be overjoyed if we could slash social spending too. But at least the social spending isn't money that's being thrown into a pointless pork filled black hole. (That would be
How do you know that the wife wasn't ok with it? I've always assumed that due to Bill and Hillary's hippy past that she was ok with the whole free love thing. She just can't say so without being crucified in public. Perhaps the same is true of the latest guy to be caught paying for sex.
Your comment is only valid insofar as he wasn't willing to speak out in favor of legalizing prostitution. I agree that it's irritating that he'd partake in an illegal activity without doing what he could to try to legalize it.
The processes aren't at all related. The surface of the oceans has waves constantly created and destroyed. There's nothing surprising that a bunch of water has waves appearing and disappearing constantly. The fabric of the universe has a similar sort of thing going on.
I was with you up to the point you went off on single studiers with "This chem prof must be one of those jackasses who, while still in school, did all of his work alone and refused to lend assistance to any of his fellow students, especially if there was no tutoring credit. And he's probably justifying his own selfishness by imposing the same standards that he idealized as a student upon his students."
Studying by yourself makes you a selfish jackass? I was unaware that we all have a moral duty to help those lazier than us. I tried to be part of those groups a few times, but I found that people tended to spend most of the time chatting. I don't even know how they ever got any significant amount of homework done.
Even if what you said was true, you could always just deliver everything in separate trips. Why carry all the equipment and fuel there with the humans? Spend a couple of years tossing cargo ships toward mars. By the time we actually send humans there should be gobs of equipment there already.
You're probably just being funny, but just in case you're serious: Saying that a particle just appears is not the same as saying that a more complex entity just appears. These particles are just static (white noise) in the fabric of the universe.
Really? Do you have a link to somewhere that makes that sort of comparison? If the bet were between DVD and hard drives then I'd absolutely go with a hard drive. I've had plenty of DVDs which were unreadable (usually due to a tiny scratch) whereas I've never had a hard drive crash so badly that I couldn't get all the data off. Obviously it can happen, but all my hard drive "crashes" have been decays in performance (like requiring 10 times the length of time to get data off) which always allowed me to eventually copy the data off.
Are you claiming that BR will be much more reliable than DVD?
BR discs will be useless as a backup medium. They'll still be too expensive and you'll still need to swap discs to fully back up your hard drive.
I just did a quick search. The recordable Blu-Ray discs are 25GB and $20 each. You can get a 500GB SATA drive for $105. Right now that makes BR about 4 times as expensive as hard discs and 20 times as annoying (20 disc swaps to back up a 500GB disc). Sure, the price will go down on BR discs, but it'll go down on hard drives as well.
I bought a SATA hot swap bay years ago. One of those is going to save you a lot of money after just a couple of backups.
It has been many years since optical media was a practical way to back up large amounts of data. BR won't change that.
But, people aren't willing to pay the price (either in money or in the other costs that would be incurred by covering the landscape with electrical wires. People accept the occasional outage in exchange for not building massive amounts of redundant excessive architecture.
In terms of uptime, each additional 9 probably requires an exponential increase in cost. In a good market, consumers decide what they're willing to pay and providers provide that amount of uptime.
They weren't hiding. They weren't told about it until AFTER the judgement had occurred. It's kind of hard to defend yourself when you don't even know that a trial is going on.
You're setting up a straw man. The only clients I work for are other departments in my company. I don't work in any sort of environment where I need to impress strangers. There are hundreds of people here and there are no suits in sight.
My original post was simply a reaction to all the other posts which talk about how not wearing a suit means you're a careless buffoon who is unwilling to do what needs to be done to get the company to succeed. That sort of attitude is ridiculous considering that they completely ignore the flip side where people can judge them negatively if they wear a suit.
Let me change it up a bit. Imagine you're trying to get into some sort of grunge rock band. A suit is unlikely to go over well. If you're not wearing torn up jeans and multiple studs in your ears then you might as well not apply. In some environments a pair of jeans and a T-shirt are the accepted dress code and those who deviate are seen as people who don't fit in.
Problems only occur when two cultures clash. Many posters here are obviously from other corporate cultures. I have no problem with that, but I do have a problem with their snotty belief that the lack of a suit means lack of seriousness. The opposite is true from my perspective.
The passionate belief that a suit is important is an indicator of a lack of flexibility. People like that are crappy managers. But that's just my cultural view. *smile*
Halloween is for dressup. That's fun. Leave the play clothes in the closet the rest of the year.
Some people are simply not up to the job of being a programmer. They cut corners and ignore good design in order to get the project done real quick. It may seem like they're getting the work done, and maybe they are, but crap code piles up. It takes time to work out the bugs. Over time it'll build up so much that it wouldn't even occur to people to refactor it.
I've worked with people like this. No matter how much you try to encourage them to follow good design, they will continue to just ignore all good sense. A typical example is a former coworker of mine who was asked to make a small change to an app that sent out email notifications. He needed to make a slight change to take care of one particular circumstance, so he copied an entire class (hundreds of lines of code) and changed exactly one line to do what he wanted.
When this code later broke (due to that single line) we asked him about it and he denied even writing it. We looked at source control and it was definitely him. (This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.) I asked him why he had copied an entire class just to change one line when it was trivially easy to modify the class to handle both situations. He said he just wanted to get it done. I told him it probably took him longer to do it the way he did it. He just shrugged.
How do you respond to someone like that? I'm sorry, but he will never be a good programmer. Some people just don't have it in them. He was a very nice guy, but he was a terrible programmer.
Thankfully, most of my coworkers do have it in them. I've been privileged to work with some great people. But it's pure fantasy to think that everyone is capable of being a decent programmer.
*laugh* Lighten up! I was merely pointing out the absurdity of the thinking that you need to wear a suit to be taken seriously. In some environments (like in my office where there are hundreds of people and no suits in sight) a suit will not only fail to help you fit in but will actually do the opposite.
I do not in fact immediately have strong negative feelings about people in suits. But, a suit is a first clue that they may be used to uptight environments. It's also possible that they may not feel as confident about their abilities as they should and thus need to add a suit to make themselves more confident.
But first impressions ARE important! I for one immediately judge suit wearers as uptight tools with great social skills and no brains. It can take a long time for me to change my mind and gain any respect for them whatsoever even if they spend every day afterward in jeans and a T-shirt.
Where does that leave jury nullification? In that situation the jury is explicitly judging the law itself to be unjust. That wasn't the case in this trial, but such a practice would seem to nullify nullification.
McCain certainly is no Bush. But, he's also strongly pro-war and not particularly motivated by civil rights. He voted in favor of telecom immunity (which I consider a treasonous crime all by itself).
We also need a liberal president so we can appoint some new judges to the supreme court if the opportunity arises. That court has been stacked by Bush. It needs more balance. I don't want a completely liberal or conservative court, but the court we have right now is stacked. There would be a world of difference between a McCain appointee and an Obama appointee.
I would love to get some opposing balance into the system. Get a president in there who will clean up the place with the same fervor that Bush destroyed it. But, that's not going to happen so it hardly seems like a good idea to put yet another ultra-conservative in there. McCain may not be an extreme neo-con, but he's also not someone who will clean up the place.
He's not particularly fiscally conservative either, but then again no electable politician is fiscally conservative.
That's fantasy. There is already plenty of motivation to push for changes in the system. We don't need to hand neo-cons another victory to add to the pile. For instance, the electoral college got Bush elected. That should have been plenty of motivation to get a constitutional amendment passed to ditch that system. It's not going to happen and I'm not sure what would be required to make it happen.I absolutely agree that the Democrats have been little more than enablers. However, that is because of the people in the party, not some magical aspect of the party itself.
A party does not magically cause someone to become something they are not. Ron Paul is not a typical Republican. Kucinich is not a typical Democrat. Voting your conscience in the general election may make you feel better, but it's guaranteed to be a wasted vote. You can chide people for not voting their conscience in the general election all you like, but a 3rd party candidate cannot win unless they are wildly popular personalities. Arnold could possibly pull it off (if it were constitutional for him to be president).
Also, keep in mind we're talking about the presidency here. That is a single person with tremendous power. Only a lunatic would think that the choice between Gore and Bush was a vote for the same sort of person. That vote made one hell of a difference in the course of events in the world. If more people had voted their conscience then perhaps the gap would have been even wider with Bush winning.
There is one corner case that I hadn't thought of until just now. What would happen if there was an even number of parties? What if, instead of one Republican and two Democratish people running, we had two Republicanish people and two Democratish people? What if in the next election we had Obama, McCain, Nader, and Paul all running with Nader and Paul being the 3rd and 4th parties? That might still be tricky if one of the two extras was more popular and thus screwed things up. But, what if we then added a 5th who had cross party appeal like Arnold (again, assuming a modification of the constitution).
I'll bet that a race like that truly would be up in the air.
Perhaps that's one way to do it. If we want another party to win then we'll need at least 3 popular candidates spread out across the ideological spectrum.
Nader would have no blame if he ran in the Democratic (or Republican) primaries. He does bear blame if he runs in the general election.
I don't know what your point is about Kucinich. He may not have won the primaries, but he was at least a choice. If you agreed with him then you absolutely should have voted for him. Having him run did not cause a terrible candidate to get in. But, if Kucinich was to announce a 3rd party candidacy in the general election then he would deserve fault for getting McCain into office if Obama loses.
I really don't understand your point of view. The place to vote your conscience is in the primaries. The worst case scenario is that a less than ideal person would get the nomination. If your favored candidate doesn't win, I fail to see how that proves that they should have run as a 3rd party which is a guaranteed way to lose and also helps your least disliked D or R party also lose.
We have a stupid two party system that, like it or not, cannot be changed directly. If you want change then you need to reform the primaries first. That's possible because you can do those one state at a time starting with small states. Reform them to have different types of voting procedures that allow for 2nd choice voting. Eliminate superdelegates. Eliminate the fraud that occurs at some primaries, etc.
The other way is to get constitutional reforms passed which change how elections work. Good luck getting that to happen. That would require the help of at least one of the two existing parties and I don't see that happening.
So, the only purpose of a 3rd party is to draw votes from another party. Deciding to run in a 3rd party does not mean you're presenting a 3rd choice. It means that you're attempting to draw votes from the major party that agrees with you the most.
I don't like it. I very much wish we could alter the system to allow people to vote with some sort of multi-vote system as in I like person #1 but if they don't win then I prefer person #2. There are a variety of other voting schemes, any one of which would probably be better.
But, there is only one possible outcome of another Nader run. That is to draw votes away from Obama. If Nader runs and McCain wins then Nader bears the blame just like he bears the blame for getting Bush elected.
The only real possibility that I see for change is to push to get the primaries opened up more. That is where we have real choice. The primaries are corrupt in many ways. There are plenty of very undemocratic issues in the primaries for both major parties. That needs to change and it's the only way that change can occur.
I regretted this post after I made it. I should have made it clear that I was grinning at the time I posted it. It was not intended as a serious comment.
Here's a thought. Perhaps the satellite was launched with a detonator on board? The US gets to launch a missile and then hits the detonate button at the right time. This makes it look like missile defense works and they get another excuse to spend another half trillion on bottle rockets and DC prostitutes.
Well that damn well ensures who I'll vote for in the election. Hillary was at times enticing due to her possible fiscal conservatism. I was cautiously against her due to her being part of a dynasty, but if she's not going to bother to vote against immunity then I say fuck her and her corrupt ways. I will absolutely never vote for anyone so corrupt. All honest politicians should be up in arms over the very idea of telecom immunity. Anyone who isn't is corrupt and should be removed from office.
I was going to write some more stuff about how they should be deported to Syria with cartoons of Mohammed stapled to their foreheads, but I wouldn't want to go overboard. Simply removing them from office is sufficient.