The idea that I have nothing at stake with regard to terrorism or Iraq is laughable.
Avram: That is my position exactly. Xopher: It certainly encourages more kidnippings, at the least.
Memorial Day is, indeed, supposed to be for mourning. Sadly, these days it seems mostly about buying stuff cheap.
I really, really want to write a lengthy response to Anna's post above, but I won't. Suffice it to say that I don't find paying ransoms to terrorists who will then use that money to kill many more people to be in any way, shape, or form morally defensible. It's about as far from morally defensible as one can get without pulling the trigger oneself.
It's also crazy on utilitarian terms; "The Italians keep paying up. Let's kidnap some more!"
Oops. Now I feel bad. I didn't mean to get him in trouble ;(
JVP: I was just poking a little fun. I find it kind of amusing, really, wondering how in any given thread you'll work in an anecdote about the time you had lunch with Harlan Ellison, Werner von Braun, and Elvis, during which you all talked about your lawsuit with NASA and the Bilderberg group.
If nothing else, this post answered the eternal question: Is there any topic so bland, innocuous, or uninteresting that it cannot be made about Jonathan Vos Post? The Answer? No.
I've just finished, as readers of RASFW will already know, Jacqueline Carey's _Banewreaker_ (yay, Tor!), Alastair Reynold's _Century Rain_, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's _Stamping Butterflies_. Now I'm busy complaining again about the paper used in British hardcovers after shelving the Grimwood and Reynolds and seeing exactly how much farther the pages in my 4 year old British books have yellowed. Next up: getting crumbly.
I'm not arguing anything, I have no idea. I simply wasn't convinced by your first blog post. That's not an argument, simply me saying that you hadn't quite convinced me based solely on the contents of your post.
I said twice that I considered the allegations in the BBC story to very probably be untrue. I'm not sure how that can be read as an argument that they probably are true!
Rivka's blog entry has received a front page post on Metafilter. The thread can be found here:
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/37476
They do raise some good points. For example, while Rivka does an excellent job showing that the analysis by the AIDS deniers is, well, utter crap, she doesn't actually address the allegations of neglect, child abuse, and the like except to say that "if it happened, we would have heard about it."
Given the utter imbecility of going to AIDS deniers for information of any sort, I am quite inclined to disbelieve the story. But Rivka doesn't actually address the most damning issue except to say "nah, I would have heard about it."
Like I said, I very much doubt the story. But I don't think Rivka's piece is equivalent to sinking a ship.
Can you identify the spammer via some IP sleuthing? This kind of DOS attack is a crime now, after all.
I agree with Will Frank. Just reading the transcript doesn't really give you a good sense of what happened. Everyone was pretty much shocked.
The claim that half the country likes Bush doesn't come from the right wing of the Republican party, it comes from every single legitimate polling company and media organization in the country. Including partisan Democratic polls.
Personally, I think the biggest danger to the outcome of this election is that roughly half of the country *really does like Bush*. Bush is likely going to win Wisconsin. He looks like he may win Minnesota, Iowa, and Ohio.
I don't understand how Wisconsin and Minnesota could go for Bush, but there it is.
Could it be that Rick Santorum is also a closeted self-loathing gay man? I don't know, I'm just asking the question...
http://www.electoral-vote.com is a pretty site, but almost useless as an actual look at the state of the election. The owner of that site takes the very latest poll he sees and changes the map, even if that poll is an obvious outlier which is contradicted by a half dozen other recent polls. Flashy, but useless. You need to look at the trend of things, not just one (sometimes clearly wrong) poll.
For example, Tennesee and Arizona should not be in Kerry's column by any stretch of the imagination. Nevada, Missouri, and Ohio should be in no-one's column.
Here is a much better site for this sort of thing:
http://home.comcast.net/~gerrydal/
One interesting possibility is that there are not-unlikely (even moderately probable) scenarios under which the electoral count ends up 269-269 and the election is thrown into Congress. Kerry takes Iowa, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and New Mexico whilie Bush takes Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, and Florida for example.
Scary. And we thought 2000 was contraversial?
I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII.
I assume you mean the "Western Allies"? Because once the Red Army hit Germany, they raped pretty much everything female and breathing.
Jim:
It's come out how they knew some of the hikackers so quickly. Flight attendants with cell phones were in contact with ground control and read off the seat numbers of the hijackers.
So it's not surprising that we knew who the hijackers were so quickly: The passangers and flight crew of the planes told us.
Doesn't anybody else reach for the medicine cabinet when they have a nasty head cold? I'm all for home remedies on a theoretical basis, but Dimetapp or the like (they all have essentially the same active ingredients) are cheap, they work, and they're perfectly safe as long as you aren't planning on taking a bunch of it and then going to Baseball Training Camp in 100 degree weather.
Pseudoepehdrine is a wonderful product. This is the 21st century after all...
How in heck is the Democratic party pandering to conservatism? Kerry received a liberal rating of 93 out of 100 from the ADA. *Ted Kennedy* only got an 88.
If your friend thinks nominating Kerry is pandering to conservatives, he or she needs to recalibrate their political radar.
Tina- You, and other third-party supporters, seem to be voting as though this were a parliamentary system. In such a system it makes sense to vote for the candidate who most closely conforms to your views (even if he will only get a small percentage of the vote) because representation is proportional, and coalitions are formed after the election.
We do not have such a system. And we aren't going to have one anytime soon, no matter how hard you wish it were otherwise. In our "first past the post" elections, coalitions are formed before elections... inside the major parties. In a FPTP system, the most rational voting strategy is thus to support the major candidate whose positions are least unlike your own.
It boggles me how many people do not acknowledge the real structural differences between our system and a parliamentary system. They matter. They really do. Don't get me wrong, parliamentary systems have some significant advantages. If you would prefer a representational parliamentary system then by all means push for it. I might even support you.
But to ignore the structural reality of our system as it exists today is to be either willfully blind or quite ignorant of the differences between electoral systems. This isn't England and we shouldn't vote like it is.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 3 |
| 2004 | 20 |
| 2003 | 11 |
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