You have very cute and endearing notions about justice, fairness, police and prosecutorial discretion, the strength of constitutional principles, and probably life in general. And, I see, amazing technology that is able to crawl inside a person's head and determine intent...keep your damn headcrabs away from me, dammit!!!
Maybe I'm being mean. I am a bad person after all. But you were being pedantic, and that's never nice.;)
Well, they just got rid of Knock-and-Announce for all intents and purposes (for a cute current USSC highlight), so the question isn't what they are going to do. The question is how much. I dunno, you wanna take bets on how badly they bone the First Amendment? (For all you creepy-crawlies--that means you, Slashdot laywer lurkers!--I'm well aware that the First Amendment does not apply directly to the states, but is rather incorporated under the Fourteenth Amendment. Just so you don't gang-bang my post, you see.) My personal wager is that they find some way to justify this law using national security! Hah, wager! I crack me up.
But, here's my thing. Saying that a wildly successful artist (like Weird Al definitely is) is aggrieved by a distribution that, OMG, reduces the profit per sale of his songs, is like saying that professional baseball players are aggrieved when there is a absurdly high salary cap installed; yeah, its technically true in the sense that they aren't quite as filthy rich as before, but I won't weep that much for them.
OTOH, there are those artists, let us call them the 'filthy rabble (tm)' who aren't successful, and under normal circumstances wouldn't generate enough sales potential to justify to a record label the cost and risk of publishing their work. For these folks, an electronic distribution model is the only likely way for themto ever hope to get content to potential consumers.
Point the third, its not like sucessful artists don't have leverage when dealing with major labels. Volcano, which is Weird Al's label, was embroiled, for example, in a contarct dispute with Tool, another wildly successful band. Tool, after a protracted argument, prevailed in most of the ways that matter. Artists can leverage their potential future sales to benefit them in contract negotiations, and they do it all the time.
There is plenty to complain about in the music industry, and the RIAA and the labels on behalf of whom they lobby are in many ways foolish in their relatively unenlightened pursuit of bare self-interested greed, but this, I do believe, is not a good example of that trend. It is simply a successful artist going through the relatively painless 'pain' of adjusting to a new distribution paradigm. There are better thinsg to complain about (like pushing very short sighted DRM schemes that treat all customers like would-be criminals rather than treating them, oh I don't know, well). P.S., I like Weird Al's work; he's a hell of a satirist.
I tend to agree with your assessment. So, then the question remains, why are things the way they are? Sure, democrats and republicans may be 'dismayed' but they have yet to do anything about it. What about putting pressure on elected officials besides the president? What about impeachment? This is why the world is confused and annoyed and refuses to accept the excuse that America's government is soley to blame; America's people have taken no actions to rectify the situation.
While I'm not going to be as frothy at the mouth as the idiot AC who responded to you, I think it prudent to separate what 'Americans' have done from what 'America' has done. The two are not in any sense isomorphic. 'Americans' have, like you pointed out, invented polio vaccine and eletricity and all kind of other neat things which benefit our lives in a mixed but bascially good way. America, whose patronage of science and invention, just for the relevant example, has ebbed and flowed (done more ebbing, lately), and neither of the above inevntions was made with support from 'America' the nation-state, in any direct way.
In a phrase, entangling alliances. Sure, you may have a military made up of mounties and pop-guns, but England doesn't, nor the rest of NATO, and one NATO member invading another on any pretext would begin the quickest and most devastating political destabilization in world history.
And of course there's the fact that you kicked our ass the last time we invaded.
There are sites that are significant for only Sunnis or only Shi'ites, and then there are sites that matter to all Muslims. It's kind of like the Vatican: big deal for Catholics, but just another city to pretty much the rest of Christendom. In contrast, the Dome of the Rock is a Big Deal (tm) to all Muslims.
This behaviour is certainly not exclusive to Americans, it's just that's it's so incredibly obvious in their case.
I think it is not so much that it is more obvious, particularly (I can't think of the last time any nation didn't act in a manner that didn't stink to high heaven of unenlightened self-interest, nor can I think of any people or nation who hasn't had similar lapses of taste or sense as Redneck [tm] Americans). I think rather it is problematic because it matters more. Simply, when the next-door neighbor is a jackass, it isn't that big a deal...unless he's got fistfuls of dollars and 'guns, lots of guns'. Similarly, if Liechtenstein were as assholey as the US, nobody would particularly care.
This, incidentally, is why it is perfectly reasonable for people who are not Americans (disclaimer, I am an American) to take a great interest in, and criticize, US policy: it affects their lives, sometimes in ways more profound than the actions of their own governments (Think, in particular, Columbia, though there are other obvious examples). I do not think it appropriate to deny the legitimacy of the complaints of people who are aggreived by the actions of a neighbor.
And here, it is only 7:30 in the morning. Golly, I wish some other folks around here would embrace a less narrow view of what is and is not part of geekdom.
It would be "Rochambeau", and while Wikipedia offers your alternative as legitimate, this is one of those cases where I believe Wikipedia has been overtaken by rude, uncultured philistines bent on destroying all meaningful cultural reference and offering bland Americanized bastardizations in the place of perfectly good imported words.
And just for the mods, who occasionally can't figure this part out, 'I'm Kidding!(tm)'.
There are hybrid systems that allow parallel legislative paths, which include both legislative representatives and direct democracy. Witness, for example, the binding referendum, which is a direct democracy tool in many (mostly mid-western) American states. Now, whether their existence is a good idea or not, that's another thing entirely.
I suppose it is, like most copyright legislation in the digital age, funadamentally unenforceable against those with savvy or those who are crafty enough to learn from those who are savvy. However, the fact remains that those two groups are a vanishingly small minority; seriously, how many XP users even think about updates? (How many just have it set to go automatically; I'm willing to bet a majority.) The danger of legislation should not be measured against those with the expertise and will to foil its provisions; a true test of the legitimacy of this legislation would be what effect it would have on those who take no special precautions or go out of their way to circumvent it. And on that standard, this legislation is very poor indeed.
Not everyone can be as erudite as you. A geek may have gaps in his or her knowledge, such as in chemistry, or politics, or computer science, such that when someone says 'lower viscosity' they don't automatically think 'retains gas in solution poorly'. I thought for a one line post a little extra explanation for those who took chemistry more than a little while ago wouldn't be so much of a burden for those who happen to know that mostly irrelevant piece of trivia (at least irrelevant unless you work at a DuPont factory, or just perhaps a Coca-Cola bottling plant). Perhaps I thought wrong.
Also apparently diet sodas have a slightly lower viscosity due to the lack of sugar syrups, and so more poorly resist gas coming out of solution than regular sodas.
I must also take issue with your mixing the word politics and politicians. We are talking about politics not politicians. Politicians may or may not have a profound effect; but that does not take away from the profound importance of politics.
What is politics if it is not the process of deciding social issues (resource distribution, rules of behavior, etc.)? That process has machinery, usually spelled out on paper, and that part of the machine most essential to any political process are the humans engaged in the process, isn't it? I think you are drawing a distinction that is artificial.
I also take issue with your claim of the garbage collection (and other relatively trivial processes) have profound effects. In the first place philosophers and logicians would in the main, I think, have difficulty with the notion of something lesser giving birth to something greater [...]. At a pinch one might claim "significant effect, maybe worthy of study", but profound?
All objects of which we are aware are constituted of smaller discrete objects, which in turn of smaller objects, until (possibly) one arrives at photons, quarks that constitute baryons, and other such entities. You are trying to say, essentially, that it is difficult to imagine that gold, for example, is shiny or dense or conducts electricity well because any of the protons, say, that compose a certain quantity of gold lack any or all of those characteristics (or in fact would be indescribable in those terms at all). What makes gold have those properties? It is not any one lower order component that has any or all of its qualities, rather it is all the lower order components together that in the macroscopic world yield a substance that exhibits properties greater than each part. This is called the Reverse Compositional Fallacy in logic, that a whole necessarily has the same qualities as its parts. Thus, it is in fact quite easy to imagine things that seem trivial on their own having, dare I say it, profound impacts on the larger systems to which they are a part.
The moral/ethical dimension of rubbish collection is incidental not intrinisic. While stem-cell research deals directly with our fundamental nature it would be more than stretching matters to say that that is true of garbage collection.
I disagree with where you draw your lines of distinction. I would say, rather, that the moral issues of both garbage collection and stem-cell research are incidental. After all, what is stem cell research? Biological investigation and experimentation upon a certain class of sample cells. That by itself has little moral weight. What does have weight is how the reseacher obtains those cells, and what is done with the information he or she collects from the research. Similarly the moral issues incidental to garbage collection are not the fact that it is done, but rather in what manner and respectful of what interests is it done, such as where the waste is stored or destroyed. I suppose, in my opinion, the word 'incidental' is too light a word to use to describe the mechanics of an activity; I tend to think of them as equally important as the ideas and values that the process supposedly serves.
To continue the analogy : the question of how to dispose of rubbish and whether or not stem cell research is allowable aren't equivalent. There are three big differences that come to mind : firstly the stem cell question is "whether to", not "how to"...
That strikes me as relatively naive; the question about a technology is never 'whether to'; once it is possible to use a technology, it is already out of the bottle. The question is always 'how to', how best is the technology integrated into our society so that it reflects, or at least does not unduly harm those things we consider important.
...secondly stem cell is an instrisically moral/ethical question as it deals directly with the nature of
To generalize from the 'trash collector/highway' mode for deciding all important issues; I daresay that the point being made is that people's lives, in general, are molded far more profoundly by the systems that grind on almost underneath our notice, systems that maintain transportation, or waste removal, but also electricity and other utilities, information, etc.. Now, the political element of these systems that affect our lives so directly are very nearly trivial compared to the technical aspect. The same algorithms for determining the most efficient trash collection route will be the same in a democracy or a fascist state. Likewise, a transistor (and logic gates built from them) work the same in monarchies and in federal republics.
The underlying thrust is that ultimately the maintenance of these systems, and their improvement, are what really drive a society to attempt an answer to questions in the technological, ethical,and social dimensions. Politicians are a postscript to that process, the ones who codify and write down the decisions that were already made on a practical basis a good amount of time prior. The truth is that vastly more people care that their trash gets picked up, then by what decisions and technologies and moral choices went into the system that allows it to get picked up. (And if you think there are no moral decisions in dealing with trash removal, visit a local landfill.)
I've always found this sentiment extremely bizarre. So, you can tell, by watching a commercial, or listening to sound bites, which of the candidate field (if any) is saying the right things, is willing to do what they say, and stand on principle? If so, you truly have magical psychic powers of which we could all surely use! It amazes me any time anyone talks about voting for a candidate, as if they could really know anything about their integrity or character! (Of course, this criticism is moderated somewhat for well-seasoned politicians for which there is some actual record to go by, but even then it is a spurious and naive sentiment at best).
The whole point of parties was as an assurance that an individual politician would be bound to a certain platform of ideas and committed to executing them; if they did not, they would be punished politically by the party apparatus. Without parties, a given voter without magical psychic powers has basically no chance of knowing that who they vote for will stand for the same thing the day after the election as they did the day before.
Now obviously the party system works better in some places at some times better than others. Usually those conditions include, among other things, a sharp distinction betwen the party ideologies, and relatively strong party apparati. We may have the second in modern USA, but certainly not the first.
Your sarcasm aside, applying terms like left, right, and center to a particular position (when they mean anything at all) is meaningless without context. At risk of sounding like a cultural relativist, what is a moderate position in one political culture may be extreme in another. In the context of our highly statist USA, the nanny state position is moderate, not radical left. The vast majority of Americans believe that the state shoudl play a strong role in daily life. Despite thinking that position stupid (I do), it is nonetheless indicative of the middle, that is, the most commonly held, position, and so is rightly described as the center position. In the current crazy USA, Libertarians and small state folks of other sorts are the radicals, not strong statists.
WTF state are you in? And why haven't you sued them yet for equity? And why aren't there bloody mobs with bloody pitchforks storming the capitol? Though I believe you if you say so, I find this almost hard to believe. Boiling a frog with slowly rising taxes is one thing. Stabbing them in the eye with a skewer is something else entirely.
One of the best reasons to familiarize oneself with the classics (and I don't know why people keep putting that word in quotes; they are still defined as classics, regardless of one person's opinion as to their value) is to understand all the references from them which make up a great deal of popular culture. More often than not, a modern book, tv show, movie, or video game that is attempting to make a remotely serious point will employ a reference to something from classical literature, from the Bible all the way to 1984. As a somewhat overdone example, see the video game 'Deus Ex'; sure it is possible to understand it on a basic level without reading Chesterton, Locke, Voltaire, etc. but if you have, you discover the game has a great deal more depth than was first apparent.
I work part-time at a mid-sized family inn in Rhode Island, and one day while I was working the front desk, I answered a call from (supposedly) a police investigator from a nearby town attempting to ascertain if a particular person or her aliases had been a recent guest. Being a small family inn with a cantankerous old lady who doesn't put up with crap and isn't a particular respecter of authorities other than herself as the owner, we take privacy quite seriously and so I asked if he had a warrant. He said no, so politely declined his fishing expedition and told him that he could go get a warrant and either show up personally or fax a copy over.
I had never before or since heard a cop sound more absolutely shocked than he did. He asked why we required a warrant, and I started belting off the reasons that came to mind, starting with the fact that it would help a rgreat deal in proving that he was actually who he said he was (at hotels, we deal with all sorts of crap with people, mostly wives, fleeing abusive relationships and those bastards can be crafty in trying to track their victims down). It was quite apparent that the thought of us saying no to his request had never even entered his mind, which in turn indicates to me that the vast majority of companies and what-not put up no resistance whatsoever to these sorts of requests unless a direct interest of theirs is harmed. And that alone scares the crap out of me.
The postscript of the story was fairly banal. He was in fact a cop and he did eventually end up getting a warrant and it turned out that one of our guests was a convicted petty thief who was fleeing another prosecution. And of course she was polite and a model guest while she was there, which in the end is really all that I find myself caring about when they stay at the inn.
Slashdot Mirror
You have very cute and endearing notions about justice, fairness, police and prosecutorial discretion, the strength of constitutional principles, and probably life in general. And, I see, amazing technology that is able to crawl inside a person's head and determine intent...keep your damn headcrabs away from me, dammit!!!
Maybe I'm being mean. I am a bad person after all. But you were being pedantic, and that's never nice. ;)
Well, they just got rid of Knock-and-Announce for all intents and purposes (for a cute current USSC highlight), so the question isn't what they are going to do. The question is how much. I dunno, you wanna take bets on how badly they bone the First Amendment? (For all you creepy-crawlies--that means you, Slashdot laywer lurkers!--I'm well aware that the First Amendment does not apply directly to the states, but is rather incorporated under the Fourteenth Amendment. Just so you don't gang-bang my post, you see.) My personal wager is that they find some way to justify this law using national security! Hah, wager! I crack me up.
But, here's my thing. Saying that a wildly successful artist (like Weird Al definitely is) is aggrieved by a distribution that, OMG, reduces the profit per sale of his songs, is like saying that professional baseball players are aggrieved when there is a absurdly high salary cap installed; yeah, its technically true in the sense that they aren't quite as filthy rich as before, but I won't weep that much for them.
OTOH, there are those artists, let us call them the 'filthy rabble (tm)' who aren't successful, and under normal circumstances wouldn't generate enough sales potential to justify to a record label the cost and risk of publishing their work. For these folks, an electronic distribution model is the only likely way for themto ever hope to get content to potential consumers.
Point the third, its not like sucessful artists don't have leverage when dealing with major labels. Volcano, which is Weird Al's label, was embroiled, for example, in a contarct dispute with Tool, another wildly successful band. Tool, after a protracted argument, prevailed in most of the ways that matter. Artists can leverage their potential future sales to benefit them in contract negotiations, and they do it all the time.
There is plenty to complain about in the music industry, and the RIAA and the labels on behalf of whom they lobby are in many ways foolish in their relatively unenlightened pursuit of bare self-interested greed, but this, I do believe, is not a good example of that trend. It is simply a successful artist going through the relatively painless 'pain' of adjusting to a new distribution paradigm. There are better thinsg to complain about (like pushing very short sighted DRM schemes that treat all customers like would-be criminals rather than treating them, oh I don't know, well). P.S., I like Weird Al's work; he's a hell of a satirist.
I tend to agree with your assessment. So, then the question remains, why are things the way they are? Sure, democrats and republicans may be 'dismayed' but they have yet to do anything about it. What about putting pressure on elected officials besides the president? What about impeachment? This is why the world is confused and annoyed and refuses to accept the excuse that America's government is soley to blame; America's people have taken no actions to rectify the situation.
While I'm not going to be as frothy at the mouth as the idiot AC who responded to you, I think it prudent to separate what 'Americans' have done from what 'America' has done. The two are not in any sense isomorphic. 'Americans' have, like you pointed out, invented polio vaccine and eletricity and all kind of other neat things which benefit our lives in a mixed but bascially good way. America, whose patronage of science and invention, just for the relevant example, has ebbed and flowed (done more ebbing, lately), and neither of the above inevntions was made with support from 'America' the nation-state, in any direct way.
In a phrase, entangling alliances. Sure, you may have a military made up of mounties and pop-guns, but England doesn't, nor the rest of NATO, and one NATO member invading another on any pretext would begin the quickest and most devastating political destabilization in world history.
And of course there's the fact that you kicked our ass the last time we invaded.
There are sites that are significant for only Sunnis or only Shi'ites, and then there are sites that matter to all Muslims. It's kind of like the Vatican: big deal for Catholics, but just another city to pretty much the rest of Christendom. In contrast, the Dome of the Rock is a Big Deal (tm) to all Muslims.
This behaviour is certainly not exclusive to Americans, it's just that's it's so incredibly obvious in their case.
I think it is not so much that it is more obvious, particularly (I can't think of the last time any nation didn't act in a manner that didn't stink to high heaven of unenlightened self-interest, nor can I think of any people or nation who hasn't had similar lapses of taste or sense as Redneck [tm] Americans). I think rather it is problematic because it matters more. Simply, when the next-door neighbor is a jackass, it isn't that big a deal...unless he's got fistfuls of dollars and 'guns, lots of guns'. Similarly, if Liechtenstein were as assholey as the US, nobody would particularly care.
This, incidentally, is why it is perfectly reasonable for people who are not Americans (disclaimer, I am an American) to take a great interest in, and criticize, US policy: it affects their lives, sometimes in ways more profound than the actions of their own governments (Think, in particular, Columbia, though there are other obvious examples). I do not think it appropriate to deny the legitimacy of the complaints of people who are aggreived by the actions of a neighbor.
After all, a kickass military didn't save Rome. Or the British Empire. Or the Soviet Union for that matter. Hmm...bad news on the horizon?
That's, um...that's terrifying.
And here, it is only 7:30 in the morning. Golly, I wish some other folks around here would embrace a less narrow view of what is and is not part of geekdom.
It would be "Rochambeau", and while Wikipedia offers your alternative as legitimate, this is one of those cases where I believe Wikipedia has been overtaken by rude, uncultured philistines bent on destroying all meaningful cultural reference and offering bland Americanized bastardizations in the place of perfectly good imported words.
And just for the mods, who occasionally can't figure this part out, 'I'm Kidding!(tm)'.
There are hybrid systems that allow parallel legislative paths, which include both legislative representatives and direct democracy. Witness, for example, the binding referendum, which is a direct democracy tool in many (mostly mid-western) American states. Now, whether their existence is a good idea or not, that's another thing entirely.
I suppose it is, like most copyright legislation in the digital age, funadamentally unenforceable against those with savvy or those who are crafty enough to learn from those who are savvy. However, the fact remains that those two groups are a vanishingly small minority; seriously, how many XP users even think about updates? (How many just have it set to go automatically; I'm willing to bet a majority.) The danger of legislation should not be measured against those with the expertise and will to foil its provisions; a true test of the legitimacy of this legislation would be what effect it would have on those who take no special precautions or go out of their way to circumvent it. And on that standard, this legislation is very poor indeed.
Not everyone can be as erudite as you. A geek may have gaps in his or her knowledge, such as in chemistry, or politics, or computer science, such that when someone says 'lower viscosity' they don't automatically think 'retains gas in solution poorly'. I thought for a one line post a little extra explanation for those who took chemistry more than a little while ago wouldn't be so much of a burden for those who happen to know that mostly irrelevant piece of trivia (at least irrelevant unless you work at a DuPont factory, or just perhaps a Coca-Cola bottling plant). Perhaps I thought wrong.
Also apparently diet sodas have a slightly lower viscosity due to the lack of sugar syrups, and so more poorly resist gas coming out of solution than regular sodas.
Let's go backwards through your response...
I must also take issue with your mixing the word politics and politicians. We are talking about politics not politicians. Politicians may or may not have a profound effect; but that does not take away from the profound importance of politics.
What is politics if it is not the process of deciding social issues (resource distribution, rules of behavior, etc.)? That process has machinery, usually spelled out on paper, and that part of the machine most essential to any political process are the humans engaged in the process, isn't it? I think you are drawing a distinction that is artificial.
I also take issue with your claim of the garbage collection (and other relatively trivial processes) have profound effects. In the first place philosophers and logicians would in the main, I think, have difficulty with the notion of something lesser giving birth to something greater [...]. At a pinch one might claim "significant effect, maybe worthy of study", but profound?
All objects of which we are aware are constituted of smaller discrete objects, which in turn of smaller objects, until (possibly) one arrives at photons, quarks that constitute baryons, and other such entities. You are trying to say, essentially, that it is difficult to imagine that gold, for example, is shiny or dense or conducts electricity well because any of the protons, say, that compose a certain quantity of gold lack any or all of those characteristics (or in fact would be indescribable in those terms at all). What makes gold have those properties? It is not any one lower order component that has any or all of its qualities, rather it is all the lower order components together that in the macroscopic world yield a substance that exhibits properties greater than each part. This is called the Reverse Compositional Fallacy in logic, that a whole necessarily has the same qualities as its parts. Thus, it is in fact quite easy to imagine things that seem trivial on their own having, dare I say it, profound impacts on the larger systems to which they are a part.
The moral/ethical dimension of rubbish collection is incidental not intrinisic. While stem-cell research deals directly with our fundamental nature it would be more than stretching matters to say that that is true of garbage collection.
I disagree with where you draw your lines of distinction. I would say, rather, that the moral issues of both garbage collection and stem-cell research are incidental. After all, what is stem cell research? Biological investigation and experimentation upon a certain class of sample cells. That by itself has little moral weight. What does have weight is how the reseacher obtains those cells, and what is done with the information he or she collects from the research. Similarly the moral issues incidental to garbage collection are not the fact that it is done, but rather in what manner and respectful of what interests is it done, such as where the waste is stored or destroyed. I suppose, in my opinion, the word 'incidental' is too light a word to use to describe the mechanics of an activity; I tend to think of them as equally important as the ideas and values that the process supposedly serves.
To continue the analogy : the question of how to dispose of rubbish and whether or not stem cell research is allowable aren't equivalent. There are three big differences that come to mind : firstly the stem cell question is "whether to", not "how to"...
That strikes me as relatively naive; the question about a technology is never 'whether to'; once it is possible to use a technology, it is already out of the bottle. The question is always 'how to', how best is the technology integrated into our society so that it reflects, or at least does not unduly harm those things we consider important.
To generalize from the 'trash collector/highway' mode for deciding all important issues; I daresay that the point being made is that people's lives, in general, are molded far more profoundly by the systems that grind on almost underneath our notice, systems that maintain transportation, or waste removal, but also electricity and other utilities, information, etc.. Now, the political element of these systems that affect our lives so directly are very nearly trivial compared to the technical aspect. The same algorithms for determining the most efficient trash collection route will be the same in a democracy or a fascist state. Likewise, a transistor (and logic gates built from them) work the same in monarchies and in federal republics.
The underlying thrust is that ultimately the maintenance of these systems, and their improvement, are what really drive a society to attempt an answer to questions in the technological, ethical ,and social dimensions. Politicians are a postscript to that process, the ones who codify and write down the decisions that were already made on a practical basis a good amount of time prior. The truth is that vastly more people care that their trash gets picked up, then by what decisions and technologies and moral choices went into the system that allows it to get picked up. (And if you think there are no moral decisions in dealing with trash removal, visit a local landfill.)
I've always found this sentiment extremely bizarre. So, you can tell, by watching a commercial, or listening to sound bites, which of the candidate field (if any) is saying the right things, is willing to do what they say, and stand on principle? If so, you truly have magical psychic powers of which we could all surely use! It amazes me any time anyone talks about voting for a candidate, as if they could really know anything about their integrity or character! (Of course, this criticism is moderated somewhat for well-seasoned politicians for which there is some actual record to go by, but even then it is a spurious and naive sentiment at best).
The whole point of parties was as an assurance that an individual politician would be bound to a certain platform of ideas and committed to executing them; if they did not, they would be punished politically by the party apparatus. Without parties, a given voter without magical psychic powers has basically no chance of knowing that who they vote for will stand for the same thing the day after the election as they did the day before.
Now obviously the party system works better in some places at some times better than others. Usually those conditions include, among other things, a sharp distinction betwen the party ideologies, and relatively strong party apparati. We may have the second in modern USA, but certainly not the first.
Your sarcasm aside, applying terms like left, right, and center to a particular position (when they mean anything at all) is meaningless without context. At risk of sounding like a cultural relativist, what is a moderate position in one political culture may be extreme in another. In the context of our highly statist USA, the nanny state position is moderate, not radical left. The vast majority of Americans believe that the state shoudl play a strong role in daily life. Despite thinking that position stupid (I do), it is nonetheless indicative of the middle, that is, the most commonly held, position, and so is rightly described as the center position. In the current crazy USA, Libertarians and small state folks of other sorts are the radicals, not strong statists.
Thanks for the links.
The biggest polluter in the country is the US government, by the way.
It's not that I don't believe you, but you wouldn't happen to have a reference for that lying around, would you?
WTF state are you in? And why haven't you sued them yet for equity? And why aren't there bloody mobs with bloody pitchforks storming the capitol? Though I believe you if you say so, I find this almost hard to believe. Boiling a frog with slowly rising taxes is one thing. Stabbing them in the eye with a skewer is something else entirely.
One of the best reasons to familiarize oneself with the classics (and I don't know why people keep putting that word in quotes; they are still defined as classics, regardless of one person's opinion as to their value) is to understand all the references from them which make up a great deal of popular culture. More often than not, a modern book, tv show, movie, or video game that is attempting to make a remotely serious point will employ a reference to something from classical literature, from the Bible all the way to 1984. As a somewhat overdone example, see the video game 'Deus Ex'; sure it is possible to understand it on a basic level without reading Chesterton, Locke, Voltaire, etc. but if you have, you discover the game has a great deal more depth than was first apparent.
I work part-time at a mid-sized family inn in Rhode Island, and one day while I was working the front desk, I answered a call from (supposedly) a police investigator from a nearby town attempting to ascertain if a particular person or her aliases had been a recent guest. Being a small family inn with a cantankerous old lady who doesn't put up with crap and isn't a particular respecter of authorities other than herself as the owner, we take privacy quite seriously and so I asked if he had a warrant. He said no, so politely declined his fishing expedition and told him that he could go get a warrant and either show up personally or fax a copy over.
I had never before or since heard a cop sound more absolutely shocked than he did. He asked why we required a warrant, and I started belting off the reasons that came to mind, starting with the fact that it would help a rgreat deal in proving that he was actually who he said he was (at hotels, we deal with all sorts of crap with people, mostly wives, fleeing abusive relationships and those bastards can be crafty in trying to track their victims down). It was quite apparent that the thought of us saying no to his request had never even entered his mind, which in turn indicates to me that the vast majority of companies and what-not put up no resistance whatsoever to these sorts of requests unless a direct interest of theirs is harmed. And that alone scares the crap out of me.
The postscript of the story was fairly banal. He was in fact a cop and he did eventually end up getting a warrant and it turned out that one of our guests was a convicted petty thief who was fleeing another prosecution. And of course she was polite and a model guest while she was there, which in the end is really all that I find myself caring about when they stay at the inn.