Politik.

[FiZzO]

This is our ex-minister for finance representing our country (Latvia), when trying to get a loan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcTaaBeuEnY

[shadowgrin]

Why is it perfectly alright for a black person to say he voted for Obama because he’s black? On the other hand, if a white person said he voted for McCain for exactly the same reason, that Obama is black, that person is called a racist.

[cyanide]

Sadly, we should have been moving away from government power as technology has advanced and made it more and more irrelevant, but instead you have all those people who desperately want a strongman to order all life for everything.

So you're saying that government could be run by technology alone? That's pretty cool. We could create several models and selections that people can "vote" on how the country is run, and what rules and regulations are enforced/outlawed. That would eliminate human error, political parties, and political corruption for a better democratic society. I'm sure there there are flaws in this idea, though.

[benji]

No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying exactly what I said. That increases in technologies and capabilities has made government more and more irrelevant. Government should be receding as individual capacities grow, not getting larger, more involved and more powerful.

[benji]

This thread is dead, but let's discuss the political spectrum. It really grinds my gears when people say the US has "no true Left" which makes no sense to me as the entire US political system, and almost all political systems operate on what I consider the Left.

I've said it many times but the notions of Left as social freedoms and economic control, and Right as opposite do not make any sense, as you cannot ever have a sustainable system with either. And the middle being totalitarians and anarchists also makes no sense. I reject the dual-axis plots for the same reason. It can be useful to note the differentiation between the two to properly describe a regime, but in the end it doesn't matter.

I build off of defining the Left simply because of how they self define themselves, people of the Left are people of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, etc. And they admit it. Everything they advocate is centered around how to manage the lives of others. In this respect, I consider Bush, "the Religious Right" and many others to all be actors of the Left. This is not a new theory of mine, I'm still pissed that Goldberg stole a thesis with Liberal Fascism.

I'd also consider any notion of the Left to be destruction of the individual in the name of a collective or tribe. Which is, obviously resistance to human nature. We continue to cling to our tribal nature. Look at Yankee/Red Sox, Lakers/Celtics, PS3/360 and so on. It's about identifying yourself as the tribes you happen to belong to instead of as an individual.

This is why fascism continues to be appealing and is the practice of all Western states today. Hitler screwed it up identity-wise by going off and killing millions, and Mussolini screwed it up by jumping in bed with Hitler. But otherwise modern political debate is centered around the extent of fascism deployed on a society. FDR got away with internment because he was on the winning side, and some brave Supreme Court justices striking down some aspects of his fascist agenda before falling in line. Plus the whole looking the other way of the Progressive Era which indicts such "heroes" as Wilson and Teddy, and the deification of FDR and JFK (who LBJ used to shove through the Great Society) as cover.

The notion of a group of "betters" to dictate life for all has never left humanity. Where it was once Kings, Popes and Churches, now it's politicans, self-declared experts, and bureaucrats. Witches corrupted us once causing all our problems, now it's trans-fats or elements.

The totalitarian strain will never leave humanity. Humans hate that others live their lives differently than they do. They hate that they eat McDonalds, like the Yankees, play Xbox 360, play 2K, smoke marijuana, engage in gay sex, drink, worship a different or no god, etc.

As alluded in the above post, it's laughable in which a society where I can stand in a field and send you a message instantly, we are desiring ever more a feudal state based around a religion. That in a society were we demand a market for entertainment, we resist and seek to suppress and destroy markets in everything. In a society where we worry about Facebook selling our aggregate info to advertisers, we don't care about the state controlling our medical access and records. In a society where we bemoan those who provide what we want, we call for dominance by those we hate every other year.

Let's redefine the spectrum along collectivist vs. individualist lines. Maybe we'll stop pretending every solution is a State solution and that there's such a thing as "market failures."

[The X]

Mr Rudd isn't as calm a person as he made himself out to be. Doesn't surprise me.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26097791-5007133,00.html

[J@3]

According to sources present, Mr Rudd said: "I don't care what you f---ers think!"

I seriously can't imagine him saying that

That being said, I'm not such a fan of K-Rudd. I didn't vote but if I would have it would've been for him, definitely not now though. I liked his forward thinking and the fact that he was willing to invest so heavily in schools and internet infrastructure but his insane spending is bothering me. I don't really see what the benefit of putting us 40 billion in debt (after the previous government had spent 10 years putting us in the black) just for the sake of being able to say we're not in recession, like everyone else in the World.

[Andrew]

I can't say I'm bothered by stories of profanity laced tirades by Rudd. I'm sure John Howard and pretty much every politician ever has uttered some choice words behind closed doors. They're human beings, after all. Pompous, self-righteous, two-faced, untrustworthy, lying, coniving, egotistical human beings but human beings nevertheless.

[benji]

Fun post I saw elsewhere:

Steve Chu is one hell of a laser jock, but he is no more qualified to opine on the veracity of AGW than any random moderately intelligent citizen. His background -- low temperature quantum electronics, roughly -- tells him very little that is useful for evaluating climate modeling and the extrapolations from measurement that are part of the AGW theory. He's a smart man, to be sure, but there's nothing in his scientific background that gives him any greater authority to speak on this subject.

And, yes, as a person he is a bit arrogant. That certainly explains his comment to me.

But I also agree with those who point out that whether his comment is arrogant or not is far less relevant than whether it is true. Are the American public like unruly teenagers who wilfully disregard the ominous statistics, and refuse to wear the seat belt while driving drunk and simultaneously texting a break-up message to someone with whom they had unsafe sex?

Well, no, speaking as a scientist myself, I wouldn't say so. Not because AGW is not a plausible theory. It is. But unfortunately if there's one lesson empirical science teaches us, it's that plausible theories are far more common than factually true theories, and, alas, scientists are no less prone than nonscientists to fall in love with their theories and mistake their plausibility for their factual veracity.

Skepticism is, therefore, a reasonable public response. Hell, it's the appropriate scientific response, and I'm a little saddened to see so many in the academy respond with such low levels of skepticism.

Going ape-shit to try to "save the planet" from AGW, at enormous and unknown cost, might well be an advisable course of action if the forseeable consequences of AGW if it turned out to be 100% true were draconian, e.g. the extinction of life on the planet. But they're not. Without doubt, a few degree rise in the average temperature of the Earth would have spectacular consequences, and reshape the globe. Countries would rise and fall, agriculture would shift hugely, species would go extinct, and it could be (as someone said above) millions in the Third World would die.

Yeah, well, color me very unimpressed. This is not the KT extinction event, folks. If millions of people die over the next century from AGW, will that clearly stand out from the hundreds of millions that will die from heart disease, cancer, malaria, malnutrition, childbirth, diseased water supplies, wars and governmental malfeasance? I would suspect not. Would even the worst-case disruption caused by AGW cause as much misery and destruction as the drastic action required to avert it? That is not clear, not at all.

One thing I find contemptible about the discussion is when folks talk about the huge costs associated with mitigation of anthropogenic CO2 emission as "just" money. They forget that money -- wealth -- is what, and only what, brings health, long life, and safety to people the world over. It's wealth -- money from, e.g. selling products and services to the United States -- that lets poor folks in Indonesia buy better wells, vaccines, AZT to prevent mothers passing AIDS to their babies, or even to prevent AIDS spread in the first place. When you imagine a world that is economically far poorer -- but magically just as safe and healthy -- you are fantasizing. If the world becomes much poorer, it will revert to being less safe, less healthy, and far more miserable. These real human costs must be set against the human costs of any putative climate change.

[shadowgrin]

Obama should have just used the race card.

US President Barack Obama has gotten a blunt question from an unexpected quarter -- a daring nine-year-old boy who asked "why do people hate you?"

Obama, caught up in a divisive political row over his plans for health care reform, called on the boy, Tyren Scott, in a public meeting during his first visit to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as president.

"I have to say, why do people hate you? They supposed to love you. God is love," Tyren, from Paulina, Louisiana asked.Obama, appeared tickled by the question, saying "hey, that's what I'm talking about," adding "I did get elected president, so not everybody hates me now... I got a whole lot of votes."

"If you were watching TV lately, it seems like everybody's just getting mad all the time. And you know, I think that you've got to take it with a grain of salt. Some of it is just what's called politics."

[benji]

To be honest. I don't even care anymore, Obama is a joke, he's stupider than Bush. And that takes some effort.

Oh, and there's major problems coming. The U.S. is done. The grand experiment is over.

[el badman]

Well, that certainly justifies your custom title

[The X]

He definitely didn't deserve Nobel Peace Prize. Now that's what I call politics!