The fundamental flaw with direct democracy is that people who have the least knowledge on which to base decisions (and are the least competent decision-makers) are also least likely to try learn more (because they have the highest opinion of their own competence).
If the representatives could somehow be exempted from this phenomenon, so that only actual competent leaders ran for office, representative democracy would be vastly better than any alternative.
Unfortunately, of course, candidate representatives are just as susceptible to mis-judging their own competence as any of us.
Maybe there's some mix of representative and direct democracy that avoids this problem, but I'm not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, it's the system we've got, and no proposal I've seen plausibly fixes all its flaws.
However, I don't see anything hypocritical in favoring democracy, while deplore one particular act of a particular democracy. I have no problem with saying that in one particular circumstance, a politician was justified to engage in an ultimately symbolic defiance of a bad law, and I am perfectly willing to be saddened by the actions of the court in overturning said defiance, while recognizing their legal correctness.
However, given that the constitutionality of the law is being questioned, I don't agree that the court should have voided the marriages. They were right to temporarily halt further marriages until the constitutionality question is decided. However, the harm to society caused by letting the existing marriages stand until a final decision, to my mind would be less than the harm to the couples of voiding them immediately.
Meanwhile, the pedantic geek part of me, which loves exercising formal systems trying to find their weak spots, looks at "a marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman" and boggles at the possibilities. I wonder if any of the couples married in SF (or married as a "straight" couple anywhere else) included a hermaphrodite, someone with abnormal X/Y chromosomes, or a pre- or post-operative transexual. If you define "man" and "woman" chromosomally, then what about XYY and the like? If you define the terms by the external appearance of peoples' genitalia, then would a sex-change operation void a marriage? Fundamentalists, religious, linguistic, or legal, amuse and baffle me.
Some gross historical inaccuracies bother me (so do some mathematical, physical, biological... inaccuracies). Others don't. But I can't imagine saying "these particular inaccuracies bother me, and should bother everyone else, and anyone who isn't bothered by them is somehow lacking, or not paying attention."
And, calimac, am I correct in summarizing the objections you list in your livejournal as:
1. A particular character behaves in ways that you feel are extremely uncharacteristic of people of his social class of that time, and other characters are unperturbed by this.
2. It's not clear to me how strenuous your objections to the capitalization pattern of one letter are.
To me, those aren't particularly strong objections to a book. #1 might or might not put me off, depending on the details, but your description of it is not enough to convince me that the book is in fact historically inaccurate. Perhaps that character's behavior is simply different than the norm. Or perhaps if I read the book, I'd agree with you that it's so absurd that it spoils the book for me.
But I fail to understand why you think those details should turn everyone off, or why you think it isn't condescending to say "if you were paying attention, these particular details that turned me off would turn you off too."
For all I know (not being very aware of "Freedom & Necessity" until now), maybe part of the book's appeal is watching how a character with very modern sexuality interacts in an otherwise very historically accurate setting.
David M Gordon, how many industries do you think could be persuaded to sell something as a "loss leader" in hopes of an increased return a decade or more down the line? I'm not going to make up numbers and try to crunch them, but I suspect that at any reasonable interest rate, you'd have to be pretty certain of a pretty huge boost down the road to justify even a moderate loss today.
Furthermore, your argument about low reproduction rates in developed countries ignores the effect of immigration from places with higher reproductive rates. And since those immigrants missed being exposed to your "loss leader" childrens' books, the loss leader approach is even less effective at increasing the adult reading rate than it would be in the absence of immigration.
I'm strongly in favor of getting kids to read, and I'd love to see more inexpensive kids' books (and adult books, too!), I just don't see how any publisher could be expected to buy into your argument.
Oh, and I just started reading the Lord Owen article, and I'm wondering what medical ethics says about withholding a diagnosis from a patient, or lying to him about it?
And now I'm wondering what the other pronunciation could possibly be... I just don't see a lot of options, there.
I'd guess that the pronunciation of the 2nd 'e' could differ. I've always heard Mother Teresa's name pronounced Tuh-ray-suh, while I'd assumed Ms. Kerry and Ms. Nielsen Hayden both pronounced their names Tuh-reese-uh.
Obviously, I'm wrong on at least one of them, but it's clear to me that there's more than one way to pronounce T-E-R-E-S-A.
So now I'm curious, how do the ladies in question pronounce their names?
Paula, my father saw one that was in the shape of Massachusetts, and simply said "We told you so".
And another comment spam, for another .ws domain, also registered to PO Box 62916, Paphos, CY.
Two instances, identical, nothing but a link. The site they link to is some sort of sleazy paid-links search site, where *everything* is treated as a search for paid links. Even the "contact us" link leads to a search for "contact", yielding a bunch of ads for mail-order contact lenses.
As expected, their domain is registered to the same PO box in the city of Paphos, country code CY (is that Cyprus?) as the spam for a different domain that Xopher found in other threads.
Oh, and when I checked out their link, I did it by typing the URL into a new browser window, to avoid giving them referrer information, as I don't want them thinking that their spam here actually brought them any traffic.
Another one of those phony comments, this time so bland that it might be mistaken for on-topic many places.
I just had this vision of Beth popping up to ask a psuedo-relevant question while surruptitiously promoting her fine lingerie at, say, a talk about the history of Persia and its relevance to string theory.
Lenny, I think you've got your usage of "indemnify" precisely backwards. Merriam-Webster online says to "indemnify" is:
1: to secure against hurt, loss, or damage
2 : to make compensation to for incurred hurt, loss, or damage
For example, as a contract programmer, I've signed contracts where I've indemnified my client against any breaches of intellectual property law I might commit in working on their project. In other words, I've promised that if anyone raises issues about whether I stole some of the code I used on this project, I'll fight it in court, or I'll pay up, and I promise my client that they won't suffer for it.
Josh, how does "posing" as "uncooperative" make it any less bad? Yeah, Patrick's "the moment" is a bit of rhetorical overstatement; they didn't start beating him until he, what, didn't do what they told him to?
Xopher, I'd never heard that TOOT rule before; it's great! Not that I expect to be able to keep it myself, but I'll try.
Wow. So men with low sperm count or women with blocked fallopian tubes who get married are "filth", too, by that logic.
Nice, Mr. Grasso.
Funny thing, though; Andy's NYT link now leads to an article with no mention of Mr. Grasso. Instead they have this charming quote:
"Two men and two women marrying each other is a passport to hell" said Katherine Hockenbarger from Topeka, Kan., who was standing on an American flag.
Aside from the ambiguity about what "two men and two women marrying each other" means, stop degrading our flag, Ms. Hockenbarger!
Hey, can we sic the anti-flag-burning idiots on her?
Update, a few minutes later: I tried clicking "Next" again, and it got into a redirect loop. So I went back and re-loaded the first page, and it showed me the 2nd page. Clicking "Next" on the 2nd page also looped. Re-loading the first page no longer seems to work. Re-clicking on the link Patrick gives above also leads to a redirect loop.
I would have, but when I click on the "Next" link after question 10, it says:
This survey is currently closed.
Please contact the author of this survey for further assistance.
Wow, Lance, you know so much more and are so much more empathic than anyone else here. I'm so ignorant and stupid that I can't tell what point or points you're trying to make. You're apparently much more far-sighted than anyone else, but I don't know what it is you're seeing, other than that things are going to hell faster than anyone else realizes, and you seem to derive pleasure from that.
Since I'm incapable of engaging in discussion at your refined intellectual and empathic level, I'm going to admit defeat, and continue trying to improve my own life and those near me at my slow crawling pace. It's too bad that I'm incapable of understanding you; I'll just have to do the best I can without the benefit of your insight.
On the other hand, a while back you said:
... the cultural reservoirs that are vanishing with indigenous people hold what are probably the only adequate human tools for coping with catastrophic environmental disruption. They're lighter on their feet than we are.
If they're so good at coping with catastrophic environmental disruption, then why are they vanishing? Maybe Western Civilization has eliminated the catastrophic environmental disruption they need to survive?
Oops, there's my inadequate reliance on dead-white-male logic again.
Oh well, I'll just go back to trying to fix the little things I'm worried about, and you can go back to doing something about the things you're worried about. I'm not going to ask what it is you're planning to do, since I won't understand the answer.
Lance, you say "One of the more egregious temptations, when you're surrounded by half-awake dunces, is to believe that the distance between your comprehension of that complexity and theirs actually measures something like attainment". I can't tell if you realize that applies most strongly to you, or not.
As for "cannibalistic urban ferals": dude, pop out the Mad Max DVD before you wear it out, and try going outside and talking to some people. Better yet, try listening to them. You've brushed close to several valid points in your various rants, but this is just absurd. I'm convinced that our sensationalistic amoral media wouldn't have let a topic like that lie fallow if there were a scintilla of evidence for it.
Nancy, here's what I remember from reading the PDF last night. He found dozens of sites that all led back to the same cluster of businesses. He showed how the sites took a lot of their content (course and subject lists, letter from the president, etc.) from real univeristy sites. They also shared things like "student" photos.
Some sites disappeared during his investigation, only to have a different site appear using the exact same content (with a different school name).
Many sites shared a UK phone number, some shared a UK mailing address which turned out to be empty commercial spaces apparently used as a mail drop (a friend of his visited and photographed the vacant storefronts for him).
The same cluster of businesses used to be in the "international driver's license" business, until the Federal Trade Commission shut them down. They're connected to a few individuals with several aliases each, apparently operating in Israel, the UK, North Carolina, and possibly Romania.
He also found various individuals on the web claiming degrees from these mills; some also claimed legitimate degrees, he seemed to assume those claims were valid (e.g. DPharm from USF). He tried to get the dissertation of one person who had a PhD in Psychology from a mill; the mill claimed that the subject matter of the dissertation was confidential and so they wouldn't release a copy without the author's approval.
I found it curious that he was concerned about people claiming bogus degrees in education, law, and health care, but bogus degrees in engineering didn't bother him.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 64 |
| 2003 | 65 |
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