Sarcasm aside, yeah, that's right. Texts (both typed and film) have minimum entry levels for knowledge-base, experiences, and intelligence. When a person is speaking or writing, often he or she has to just make a basic assumption that someone is minimally intelligent, informed, capable of critical thought, etc., and write off those that don't. Behind every statement of any worth is a trove of unspoken hypotheses and assumptions. Requiring that they be spelled out for the uninformed and the stupid is ridiculous and unfair unless the text is intended for those specific audiences.
And he can't say "whatever he wants" in the sense that you mean. He just doesn't have to spell out his points as if we were all born yesterday, and in that narrow sense he can take liberties with the expected intelligence of his audience.
So if membership in the "Cool kids club" is typified by being able to think even cursorily about what is being presented instead of being a passive receptacle for whatever you happen to view, that's the one I want to be in. Don't you?
Every door that M. Moore knocked on and opened during the Toronto segment was during the day. Kind of obviating the whole "but what about the thieves" aspect of the argument, since during the day while people are present in the house, thievery is unbelievably uncommon. I imagine that more (probably most) Torontoans lock their doors at night. His narrow point was that by-and-large, Toronto residents were not so reflexively paranoid and fearful of their fellow man to habitually lock their doors while at home during the day; the only reasonable motivation for locking a door in that circumstance would be to isolate oneself for fear of violent or personal crimes. And on that point, by-and-large, I think he's right.
Interestingly, he did interview a woman a little later in the film who had been burgled, (by a roving band of bored kids looking for booze) and she seems a little more blase about the whole experience than I would expect many Americans to be. She may be an exception in Canada too, but every experience I've had in Canada and with Canadians leads me to believe that even if rare, her reaction is more common there than here in America.
A decent if cynical point. However, if someone is that committed to a public lie (and he would have to be damn committed, since he is publicly very consistent in his demeanor and comments), the lie starts becoming functionally true. After all, if he seems in every way dedicated to an issue, and he acts in every way dedicated to that issue, to the world outside his own head I can't see how on Earth it would matter whether or not his internal and private feelings on the matter coincided with those public acts and exhortations.
OTOH, yes, marketing and business classes (and students) tend to creep me out too.
Okay, this is a criticism that I have a real hard time getting behind, because the implicit assumption that it requires is that everyone is simply too stupid to be trusted understanding that in a two-hour film, not every nuance or exception to a comment need be expressed aloud. Documentarians should be able to make the basic assumption that people don't turn off their brains while watching.
To put it mildly, you would have to be a fscking idiot to believe that *nobody* in Toronto locks their doors. You know that. I know that. Michael Moore knows that. Michael Moore also has only 120 miuntes to say everything he wants to say, and so he can generalize to a point where he *should* feel comfortable with assuming the audience knows that he is talking about trends rather than a hard law of behavior. Anybody with a reasonably functional mind would come away from that scene under the impression that Moore is making the point that Torontoans care less about locking their doors when home than Americans, who are by-and-large both the subject and audience of the film. That assertion anecdotally and for me experientially also seems eminently correct. If he were forced to qualify every statement to absolute precision, he wouldn't be able to say anything interesting or thought-provoking. Neither would anyone else.
I have my own criticsms of M. Moore, and they tend towards my perception that he uses manipulative tactics too often, I imagine intended to elicit sympathy through emotional appeals of pity or indignation, but for me it is simply distracting and wearying. For example, I thought that much of Bowling for Columbine was interesting and thought-provoking, but I hated the part where he badgered poor Mr. Heston, particularly the part with the photograph. Similarly, in F9/11, the end part with the mother wailing and gnashing her teeth was an off-key ending that marred his larger points with cheap and exploitative melodrama.
If that were true, its hard to see a motivation for him saying "I don't give a damn if people pirate my works so long as they see my message." Where's the "selling his books and movies are everything" profit motive in that?
Whereas the italicized line above is a near textbook quality lack of senses of humor, sarcasm, criticism, and irony. GP's very point was that Michael Moore is, whatever other flaws the man may have, honestly committed in the best way he knows how to address issues in contemporary American life, and is often faced with unfair criticism pretexted by the fact that the guy is physically unappealing and relatively uncharismatic, and not on more substantial issues. He looks and sounds like a buffoon, and so it is eaier to paint him as a buffoon.
Libelous trash! We Rhode Islanders do not, as a rule, make the heathen Red chowda, we make clear chowda, with 2nd place in state popularity being the standard white chowda. The tomato users are further south.
I have never been impressed by my Engineering friends' patience for the disturbing capacity of the human organism to frustrate expected error tolerances; they tend to expect things to work in regular and predictable ways (with easily twiddlable control values). Individual humans are bad enough in this respect, but in aggregate, human beings are frustratingly difficult to predict in their behaviors and constructing systems for channeling and mediating those behaviors have unexpected and often catastrophic failures.
When you stop and think about it, law and legislation is very much like engineering; just with none of the convenient physical laws and thresholds to depend upon when designing the machines for operation. The engineering mindset, however, tends to value efficiency above all other qualities, and efficiency is not the primary goal of legislation; there are other things of value to be preserved in human-government interactions that would undoubtedly be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
I do agree that this particular legislation sucks lots, though. Doesn't take an enginner to figure that out.
You aren't a credit to your cause. The outspoken existence of people like you get jackass nativist reactionaries elected here (jackasses whose campaign slogans sound something like "They hate us for our freedoms, but I'll kill them for you so you can safely enjoy them"), who then come and step all over your backyard. Hope you're happy.
Good point. Because nobody has ever lied or cheated for merely tens of millions of dollars. They usually hold out for the billions. But seriously, notwithstanding that there are people who stand to benefit from global warming theories being accurate and those who stand to benefit from the opposite, even if there are discrepancies in how grossly they will benefit, neither fact changes the reality of the situation whatever that turns out to be (survey says: almost definately Global Warming is goin' on). And thankfully there is enough of an independent science community not tied up in bed with one or the other camp of climate profiteers that a scientific consensus isn't as immediately suspect as President Havel seems to want to believe.
DOMA, no, and his occassional divergences from the Libertarian party line are in tune with social conservatism (sadly). Abortion, yes, there are good-faith Libertarians who, due to their belief that fetuses are human beings, believe that they are entitled to the protection of the law. Abortion is not a clear-cut Libertarian issue for precisely that reason.
I see only two problems with vote-by-mail. First, it lays the election system on top of the postal system, which introduces to the process of voting all the flaws and vulnerabilities of the postal system; flaws which are not gigantic, but are unnecessary to introduce. Second, there is no personal receipt of vote; I could not, as a voter, be sure my vote ever got to its destination (a similar problem with many in-person electronic systems today) the way I could by physically sticking the ballot in the counting box.
Serious kudos to Arizona for that. I wish more states got on the train with this one. I wonder how they do on awareness (among workers) of this law or enforcement, but regardless it's a great step.
Im sorry waiting 4 hours to vote, while a pain, is *not* hardship or risk and Americans need to wrap their minds around that. Living in a nation where you cant vote at all or will be killed if you vote for the wrong person *that* is hardship and risk.
Wow, I'm sorry but I refuse to accept your "Getting a finger amputated is no big deal when you could have lost an arm" sort of logic. Yeah, if this were one, giant, objective moral universe, Americans voting or not are at a great advantage over those who have no option to vote. But that is a big red herring which deceptively distorts the scope of the conversation. The topic is "Voting in the USA" and the point I was making was, roughly, "Due to a variety of reasons, poor people must pay more in the way of time and risk than rich people to vote" which is, I think, fairly evident. And fairly unjust. And, pointedly, within the scope of the conversation.
Yeah, waiting in line for four hours while your kids are at home (many poor families are single parent), probably w/o babysitters (thus violating child care laws) is a hardship, regardless how you slice it, as is losing a job for taking time off to vote, which has been known to happen. How are you supposed to feed your kids without a job? The only thing that an American who is supporting a family with $28,000 a year needs to wrap their head around is how much voting really matters to them, seeing what it can cost them to do it. All I'm saying is that it should cost less. Not less in the "look how lucky you are on minimum wage, at least you could theoretically vote" sort of way, but in a real, functional way so that a person would not need to think twice before deciding cost/benefit-like whether or not to vote at all. Voting should not be an either-or calculation of "vote or watch the kids" or "vote or keep my job". Making voting as practicaly unencumbered as possible is an unvarnished good thing.
As such, your point about polls being held open longer really doesn't solve the problems I am talking about. The wait is the problem, and that can only be solved either by increasing the number of stations or increasing the relative efficiency of the actual vote-casting process. Since the second option often means introducing technologies that increase the potential vulnerabilities of the system, I argue for the first option.
He's not very 'closet' about his Libertarianism. He was the '88 presidential candidate for the LP, and has almost unwaveringly voted consistently in Congress with guidelines best described as Libertarian. However, I have to disagree with your wider thesis. Reaction polling by CNN following the Republican debates named R. Paul the clear winner on many metrics; however, the pundits didn't even mention him when discussing who they thought 'won' the debates, with their comments uniformly gravitating towards the 'front-runners'. Much more attention and coverage was paid towards Giuliani's response to R. Paul's comments on terrorism than was paid to R. Paul's actual comments. And so forth.
Because a large group is somehow more untrustworthy than a small one? WTF? This is a distributed task; how many collection points has nothing (in and of itself) to do with how accurately the votes are counted at any one collection point.
All ten times as many poll workers would mean (ideally) is ten times as many polling places. Or, and here is a crazy idea, we abandon the idea that we have to know who won ten seconds after the polls close (or earlier. FU very much, network television), and take as long as is necessary to count with the personnel we have.
Im with you on the free but it takes more than 10 minutes now and why should 10 minuted or half an hour make a difference? should voting not have more of a commitment then say the dmv?
Problem is that since Election Day is not a holiday in the USA, taking an hour out of the day to vote can be nearly impossible if your boss is a prick. And job security is something that matters a great deal to the working poor (as it means nearly as much to the working non-poor). Further, bosses in jobs worked by the working poor tend to be more aware of the greater leverage they have over their workers, and are in this specific way more likely to be pricks. Not to mention the fact that in such jobs, bosses and workers have different political interests (due to different economic class) and consequently wildly divergent political affiliations, and so there is no earthy reason why such a boss would want to make it easier for their employees to vote.
As a result, in those communities that are enlightened enough to have polling hours extend significantly past the workday hours, those who must vote after work must vote along with everyone else in the same situation; polling lines swell precisely at the times that people leave work, and remain long from that time until polls close. People not so restricted in their schedule can easily vote during the day, enjoying a miniscule cost in time compared to their working compatriots.
It is not a question of commitment; it is a question of actual discrepancy in the degree of hardship, risk, and cost necessary to cast what is an equally-weighted vote. A vote that is equal in value should also be equal in cost. More numerous and strategicaly located polling places would make it easier to achieve equal cost by reducing line length and thus making it easier to justify work-leave to go vote (as time spent would be a great deal less), or barring that, relieve the after-work vote rush so that the person unlucky enough to have to work all day can vote with approximately as much ease as a person not so burdened.
You know, people really don't talk this way anymore, and that is a shame. Common discuorse vocabulary has lost most of its verve and spice, as we aim for ever more dull verbal constructions that, above all, avoid emotional reactions in our communicative subjects. I know this verges on off-topic, but I think that 'madness' is an appropriately gravitic and perjorative term for what most would simply describe as unfortunate or lamentable, even if they truly felt much deeper.
Veering back on topic, I think that either of your two theories as to why any judge would rule in this way are quite plausible, and I would only add a third that judges (in my admittedly limited experience) can often be ornery and fickle sorts who can take an irrational dislike to a particular lawyer (e.g. "he was young and had a saucy tone") and punish his side with impunity under the color of prima facie legitimate procedural decisions. This could be just judical crankiness that in this particular case, due to a lack of care often associated with anger, actually overreached by a good distance the legitimate bounds of procedure.
True enough on both counts, but I would say that 'approximating a democracy' counts for discussions like this. Otherwise, one might as well say 'unless you happen to live in the Swiss Alps, chances are you don't live in a democracy' and short-circuit all discussion on the relaive merits of popularly-elected governments.
An excellent point. My only problem is that policy makers are human beings, and as such are tempted to use the public's ignorance on subjects of concern to squeeze through what would be an otherwise unpopular law or policy agenda by attaching it to something that people are generally fearful of but possess little understanding. If you are tech-tarded parent, and you listen to the news and hear the OMG Child Pornographerz are HERE!!!!11!1! stories every fifteen minutes, you are not only scared of the big bad interweb, but you are likely as not wondering why the government isn't "doing something about it". In a state of such fear, concerns for free flow of information, civil liberties, or simply easy access to pornography for viewing pleasure take a way back seat to the protection of your child.
I think the cynic in me screams that a kind and friendly warning from our friends the Government all too often morphs into something a great deal more sinister down the road. And while it is the government's job to serve all of its citizens, not just the tech-savvy ones, I don't want that egalitarian zeal to ruin access to the various valuable experiences that can come with engaging in unhealthy and/or risky behavior. I can't even get fries with trans fats anymore, damn it!
But I'd be curious to know just how many senators actually showed up to vote for the damn thing. I didn't read TFA so I do not know if that info is available in the article (this is Slashdot, after all), but usually for this sort of nonsense, reps and senators don't go out of their way to vote on resolutions if they have something better to do.
I loved the first part of your comment. I was brought to a screeching halt by this sentence though:
...it has merits over the others based on the lack of mass imprisonments the innefective secret police and the slightly lower grade of corruption.
Of the countries with the largest imprisoned populations (total, and if I'm not mistaken, also per captia), two out of the top three are democracies (USA, Russian Federation). And anyone who has been to a protest in the US lately knows that mass arrests are quite the popular trend. The secret police aren't so much ineffective as they are underutilized, and operate on the pretense of the rule of law so that they can execute CYA procedures when necessary; practically speaking, though, they do pretty much what they want. And I would imagine that the corruption in democracies tends to be less direct, certainly, but no less endemic. In point of fact, I would argue that because of its discreet and low-key nature, corruption in democracies is more harmful because it is more difficult to combat.
Sadly, you are mistaken. He is relevant, but not because anything he says is accurate or valuable. It is rather because policy-makers take his statements (heck, sometimes solicit his statements) at face value and use them as justification for public policies. Whether we know he's an asshat is irrelevant; the sad part is he can get on a CNN talkshow or in a meeting with a mid-to-high level bureaucrat and the vast majority of sheeple nod compliantly along with his screed. As much as it pains you and me, he does need to be reported on, argued with, and neutralized. The whole ostrich strategy just doesn't seem to work well at that level; as much as replying to his arguments plays into his hand, not replying plays even more.
It would be nice if the media were capable of screening for asshats, but sad fact is even if they were capable they would not be willing as asshat-screed sells newspapers and ad space better than dispassionate, reasoned, and evidenced policy debate.
What I took your original comment as saying was that we have free access to public education in America because of the Communist Manifesto; that would be flatly ridiculous, so I'm glad you were firing off the cuff. Interestingly, in later editions of the CM, Marx and Engels rejected the ten-point plank as a necessary element of Communist reorganization, recognizing that the actual methods of bringing about their desired revolution would differ sharply from place to place.
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You sir/ma'am, are a breath of fresh air. Too bad you're an AC. Come out of the closet!
Sarcasm aside, yeah, that's right. Texts (both typed and film) have minimum entry levels for knowledge-base, experiences, and intelligence. When a person is speaking or writing, often he or she has to just make a basic assumption that someone is minimally intelligent, informed, capable of critical thought, etc., and write off those that don't. Behind every statement of any worth is a trove of unspoken hypotheses and assumptions. Requiring that they be spelled out for the uninformed and the stupid is ridiculous and unfair unless the text is intended for those specific audiences.
And he can't say "whatever he wants" in the sense that you mean. He just doesn't have to spell out his points as if we were all born yesterday, and in that narrow sense he can take liberties with the expected intelligence of his audience.
So if membership in the "Cool kids club" is typified by being able to think even cursorily about what is being presented instead of being a passive receptacle for whatever you happen to view, that's the one I want to be in. Don't you?
Every door that M. Moore knocked on and opened during the Toronto segment was during the day. Kind of obviating the whole "but what about the thieves" aspect of the argument, since during the day while people are present in the house, thievery is unbelievably uncommon. I imagine that more (probably most) Torontoans lock their doors at night. His narrow point was that by-and-large, Toronto residents were not so reflexively paranoid and fearful of their fellow man to habitually lock their doors while at home during the day; the only reasonable motivation for locking a door in that circumstance would be to isolate oneself for fear of violent or personal crimes. And on that point, by-and-large, I think he's right.
Interestingly, he did interview a woman a little later in the film who had been burgled, (by a roving band of bored kids looking for booze) and she seems a little more blase about the whole experience than I would expect many Americans to be. She may be an exception in Canada too, but every experience I've had in Canada and with Canadians leads me to believe that even if rare, her reaction is more common there than here in America.
A decent if cynical point. However, if someone is that committed to a public lie (and he would have to be damn committed, since he is publicly very consistent in his demeanor and comments), the lie starts becoming functionally true. After all, if he seems in every way dedicated to an issue, and he acts in every way dedicated to that issue, to the world outside his own head I can't see how on Earth it would matter whether or not his internal and private feelings on the matter coincided with those public acts and exhortations.
OTOH, yes, marketing and business classes (and students) tend to creep me out too.
Okay, this is a criticism that I have a real hard time getting behind, because the implicit assumption that it requires is that everyone is simply too stupid to be trusted understanding that in a two-hour film, not every nuance or exception to a comment need be expressed aloud. Documentarians should be able to make the basic assumption that people don't turn off their brains while watching.
To put it mildly, you would have to be a fscking idiot to believe that *nobody* in Toronto locks their doors. You know that. I know that. Michael Moore knows that. Michael Moore also has only 120 miuntes to say everything he wants to say, and so he can generalize to a point where he *should* feel comfortable with assuming the audience knows that he is talking about trends rather than a hard law of behavior. Anybody with a reasonably functional mind would come away from that scene under the impression that Moore is making the point that Torontoans care less about locking their doors when home than Americans, who are by-and-large both the subject and audience of the film. That assertion anecdotally and for me experientially also seems eminently correct. If he were forced to qualify every statement to absolute precision, he wouldn't be able to say anything interesting or thought-provoking. Neither would anyone else.
I have my own criticsms of M. Moore, and they tend towards my perception that he uses manipulative tactics too often, I imagine intended to elicit sympathy through emotional appeals of pity or indignation, but for me it is simply distracting and wearying. For example, I thought that much of Bowling for Columbine was interesting and thought-provoking, but I hated the part where he badgered poor Mr. Heston, particularly the part with the photograph. Similarly, in F9/11, the end part with the mother wailing and gnashing her teeth was an off-key ending that marred his larger points with cheap and exploitative melodrama.
If that were true, its hard to see a motivation for him saying "I don't give a damn if people pirate my works so long as they see my message." Where's the "selling his books and movies are everything" profit motive in that?
A near textbook quality ad hominem attack.
Whereas the italicized line above is a near textbook quality lack of senses of humor, sarcasm, criticism, and irony. GP's very point was that Michael Moore is, whatever other flaws the man may have, honestly committed in the best way he knows how to address issues in contemporary American life, and is often faced with unfair criticism pretexted by the fact that the guy is physically unappealing and relatively uncharismatic, and not on more substantial issues. He looks and sounds like a buffoon, and so it is eaier to paint him as a buffoon.
Libelous trash! We Rhode Islanders do not, as a rule, make the heathen Red chowda, we make clear chowda, with 2nd place in state popularity being the standard white chowda. The tomato users are further south.
I have never been impressed by my Engineering friends' patience for the disturbing capacity of the human organism to frustrate expected error tolerances; they tend to expect things to work in regular and predictable ways (with easily twiddlable control values). Individual humans are bad enough in this respect, but in aggregate, human beings are frustratingly difficult to predict in their behaviors and constructing systems for channeling and mediating those behaviors have unexpected and often catastrophic failures.
When you stop and think about it, law and legislation is very much like engineering; just with none of the convenient physical laws and thresholds to depend upon when designing the machines for operation. The engineering mindset, however, tends to value efficiency above all other qualities, and efficiency is not the primary goal of legislation; there are other things of value to be preserved in human-government interactions that would undoubtedly be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.
I do agree that this particular legislation sucks lots, though. Doesn't take an enginner to figure that out.
You aren't a credit to your cause. The outspoken existence of people like you get jackass nativist reactionaries elected here (jackasses whose campaign slogans sound something like "They hate us for our freedoms, but I'll kill them for you so you can safely enjoy them"), who then come and step all over your backyard. Hope you're happy.
Good point. Because nobody has ever lied or cheated for merely tens of millions of dollars. They usually hold out for the billions. But seriously, notwithstanding that there are people who stand to benefit from global warming theories being accurate and those who stand to benefit from the opposite, even if there are discrepancies in how grossly they will benefit, neither fact changes the reality of the situation whatever that turns out to be (survey says: almost definately Global Warming is goin' on). And thankfully there is enough of an independent science community not tied up in bed with one or the other camp of climate profiteers that a scientific consensus isn't as immediately suspect as President Havel seems to want to believe.
DOMA, no, and his occassional divergences from the Libertarian party line are in tune with social conservatism (sadly). Abortion, yes, there are good-faith Libertarians who, due to their belief that fetuses are human beings, believe that they are entitled to the protection of the law. Abortion is not a clear-cut Libertarian issue for precisely that reason.
I see only two problems with vote-by-mail. First, it lays the election system on top of the postal system, which introduces to the process of voting all the flaws and vulnerabilities of the postal system; flaws which are not gigantic, but are unnecessary to introduce. Second, there is no personal receipt of vote; I could not, as a voter, be sure my vote ever got to its destination (a similar problem with many in-person electronic systems today) the way I could by physically sticking the ballot in the counting box.
Serious kudos to Arizona for that. I wish more states got on the train with this one. I wonder how they do on awareness (among workers) of this law or enforcement, but regardless it's a great step.
Im sorry waiting 4 hours to vote, while a pain, is *not* hardship or risk and Americans need to wrap their minds around that. Living in a nation where you cant vote at all or will be killed if you vote for the wrong person *that* is hardship and risk.
Wow, I'm sorry but I refuse to accept your "Getting a finger amputated is no big deal when you could have lost an arm" sort of logic. Yeah, if this were one, giant, objective moral universe, Americans voting or not are at a great advantage over those who have no option to vote. But that is a big red herring which deceptively distorts the scope of the conversation. The topic is "Voting in the USA" and the point I was making was, roughly, "Due to a variety of reasons, poor people must pay more in the way of time and risk than rich people to vote" which is, I think, fairly evident. And fairly unjust. And, pointedly, within the scope of the conversation.
Yeah, waiting in line for four hours while your kids are at home (many poor families are single parent), probably w/o babysitters (thus violating child care laws) is a hardship, regardless how you slice it, as is losing a job for taking time off to vote, which has been known to happen. How are you supposed to feed your kids without a job? The only thing that an American who is supporting a family with $28,000 a year needs to wrap their head around is how much voting really matters to them, seeing what it can cost them to do it. All I'm saying is that it should cost less. Not less in the "look how lucky you are on minimum wage, at least you could theoretically vote" sort of way, but in a real, functional way so that a person would not need to think twice before deciding cost/benefit-like whether or not to vote at all. Voting should not be an either-or calculation of "vote or watch the kids" or "vote or keep my job". Making voting as practicaly unencumbered as possible is an unvarnished good thing.
As such, your point about polls being held open longer really doesn't solve the problems I am talking about. The wait is the problem, and that can only be solved either by increasing the number of stations or increasing the relative efficiency of the actual vote-casting process. Since the second option often means introducing technologies that increase the potential vulnerabilities of the system, I argue for the first option.
He's not very 'closet' about his Libertarianism. He was the '88 presidential candidate for the LP, and has almost unwaveringly voted consistently in Congress with guidelines best described as Libertarian. However, I have to disagree with your wider thesis. Reaction polling by CNN following the Republican debates named R. Paul the clear winner on many metrics; however, the pundits didn't even mention him when discussing who they thought 'won' the debates, with their comments uniformly gravitating towards the 'front-runners'. Much more attention and coverage was paid towards Giuliani's response to R. Paul's comments on terrorism than was paid to R. Paul's actual comments. And so forth.
Because a large group is somehow more untrustworthy than a small one? WTF? This is a distributed task; how many collection points has nothing (in and of itself) to do with how accurately the votes are counted at any one collection point.
All ten times as many poll workers would mean (ideally) is ten times as many polling places. Or, and here is a crazy idea, we abandon the idea that we have to know who won ten seconds after the polls close (or earlier. FU very much, network television), and take as long as is necessary to count with the personnel we have.
Im with you on the free but it takes more than 10 minutes now and why should 10 minuted or half an hour make a difference? should voting not have more of a commitment then say the dmv?
Problem is that since Election Day is not a holiday in the USA, taking an hour out of the day to vote can be nearly impossible if your boss is a prick. And job security is something that matters a great deal to the working poor (as it means nearly as much to the working non-poor). Further, bosses in jobs worked by the working poor tend to be more aware of the greater leverage they have over their workers, and are in this specific way more likely to be pricks. Not to mention the fact that in such jobs, bosses and workers have different political interests (due to different economic class) and consequently wildly divergent political affiliations, and so there is no earthy reason why such a boss would want to make it easier for their employees to vote.
As a result, in those communities that are enlightened enough to have polling hours extend significantly past the workday hours, those who must vote after work must vote along with everyone else in the same situation; polling lines swell precisely at the times that people leave work, and remain long from that time until polls close. People not so restricted in their schedule can easily vote during the day, enjoying a miniscule cost in time compared to their working compatriots.
It is not a question of commitment; it is a question of actual discrepancy in the degree of hardship, risk, and cost necessary to cast what is an equally-weighted vote. A vote that is equal in value should also be equal in cost. More numerous and strategicaly located polling places would make it easier to achieve equal cost by reducing line length and thus making it easier to justify work-leave to go vote (as time spent would be a great deal less), or barring that, relieve the after-work vote rush so that the person unlucky enough to have to work all day can vote with approximately as much ease as a person not so burdened.
In that direction lies madness...
You know, people really don't talk this way anymore, and that is a shame. Common discuorse vocabulary has lost most of its verve and spice, as we aim for ever more dull verbal constructions that, above all, avoid emotional reactions in our communicative subjects. I know this verges on off-topic, but I think that 'madness' is an appropriately gravitic and perjorative term for what most would simply describe as unfortunate or lamentable, even if they truly felt much deeper.
Veering back on topic, I think that either of your two theories as to why any judge would rule in this way are quite plausible, and I would only add a third that judges (in my admittedly limited experience) can often be ornery and fickle sorts who can take an irrational dislike to a particular lawyer (e.g. "he was young and had a saucy tone") and punish his side with impunity under the color of prima facie legitimate procedural decisions. This could be just judical crankiness that in this particular case, due to a lack of care often associated with anger, actually overreached by a good distance the legitimate bounds of procedure.
True enough on both counts, but I would say that 'approximating a democracy' counts for discussions like this. Otherwise, one might as well say 'unless you happen to live in the Swiss Alps, chances are you don't live in a democracy' and short-circuit all discussion on the relaive merits of popularly-elected governments.
An excellent point. My only problem is that policy makers are human beings, and as such are tempted to use the public's ignorance on subjects of concern to squeeze through what would be an otherwise unpopular law or policy agenda by attaching it to something that people are generally fearful of but possess little understanding. If you are tech-tarded parent, and you listen to the news and hear the OMG Child Pornographerz are HERE!!!!11!1! stories every fifteen minutes, you are not only scared of the big bad interweb, but you are likely as not wondering why the government isn't "doing something about it". In a state of such fear, concerns for free flow of information, civil liberties, or simply easy access to pornography for viewing pleasure take a way back seat to the protection of your child.
I think the cynic in me screams that a kind and friendly warning from our friends the Government all too often morphs into something a great deal more sinister down the road. And while it is the government's job to serve all of its citizens, not just the tech-savvy ones, I don't want that egalitarian zeal to ruin access to the various valuable experiences that can come with engaging in unhealthy and/or risky behavior. I can't even get fries with trans fats anymore, damn it!
But I'd be curious to know just how many senators actually showed up to vote for the damn thing. I didn't read TFA so I do not know if that info is available in the article (this is Slashdot, after all), but usually for this sort of nonsense, reps and senators don't go out of their way to vote on resolutions if they have something better to do.
I loved the first part of your comment. I was brought to a screeching halt by this sentence though:
Of the countries with the largest imprisoned populations (total, and if I'm not mistaken, also per captia), two out of the top three are democracies (USA, Russian Federation). And anyone who has been to a protest in the US lately knows that mass arrests are quite the popular trend. The secret police aren't so much ineffective as they are underutilized, and operate on the pretense of the rule of law so that they can execute CYA procedures when necessary; practically speaking, though, they do pretty much what they want. And I would imagine that the corruption in democracies tends to be less direct, certainly, but no less endemic. In point of fact, I would argue that because of its discreet and low-key nature, corruption in democracies is more harmful because it is more difficult to combat.
Sadly, you are mistaken. He is relevant, but not because anything he says is accurate or valuable. It is rather because policy-makers take his statements (heck, sometimes solicit his statements) at face value and use them as justification for public policies. Whether we know he's an asshat is irrelevant; the sad part is he can get on a CNN talkshow or in a meeting with a mid-to-high level bureaucrat and the vast majority of sheeple nod compliantly along with his screed. As much as it pains you and me, he does need to be reported on, argued with, and neutralized. The whole ostrich strategy just doesn't seem to work well at that level; as much as replying to his arguments plays into his hand, not replying plays even more.
It would be nice if the media were capable of screening for asshats, but sad fact is even if they were capable they would not be willing as asshat-screed sells newspapers and ad space better than dispassionate, reasoned, and evidenced policy debate.
What I took your original comment as saying was that we have free access to public education in America because of the Communist Manifesto; that would be flatly ridiculous, so I'm glad you were firing off the cuff. Interestingly, in later editions of the CM, Marx and Engels rejected the ten-point plank as a necessary element of Communist reorganization, recognizing that the actual methods of bringing about their desired revolution would differ sharply from place to place.