The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Anticorium:

All of this makes evident one thing: the foes of decent and universal care depend greatly on Americans not knowing anyone who has used another country's health care system.

*Note they are already trying to scare seniors with nightmares of Obamacare just writing them off to save money. As the apocryphal old woman said, keep the government out of my Medicare!

I have to admit that I would be one of the people scoffing at tehdely's theory of an organized trolling campaign. Except, you know, after seeing two hundred Guy Fawkses rickrolling the Church of Scientology, I now accept on principle any theory involving boredom, spontaneous organization, and the lulz. (And I'm not entirely sure I'm kidding about that.)

I also tend to believe that it's not that Amazon designed for "gay=objectionable" so much as "flagged as objectionable by the wise and trustworthy crowd so much smarter than any mere company, I mean, we totally read Clay Shirky=objectionable". If dairy products could produce so much drama that the dairy flag on a product deflagged it, the complaints would have taken out books about cows and we'd all be talking about #cheesefail.

...or, it comes to mind, #sporefail with the drm tag....

I really found Mr. Macdonald's response to TexDoc to be rude, hollier-than-though, snarky, and over the top

Actually, I'd say it was pretty much delivered at the level required, and was much kinder than was deserved.

Yarrow: the difference hearkens back to the original post.

Brown threw a pie in an effort to play the Holy Fool. (He seems to have since disappeared from the zeitgeist without a trace, 'cause I can't find any word of him since then.) But Singh -- who I think was unfairly treated in Quebec City, to say the least -- was in the middle of serious business. He wasn't fooling around, he wasn't making a joke, he had a track record of organized activism, and all this happened in the middle of a well-organized protest against locking down Quebec City for a free trade conference. The way he was treated is unfair, but not unrecognizably alien.

And, to be honest, I think that his skin color and any hint of "foreignness" have nothing to do with how he was treated. He was an activist who fought a bit too hard and got unfairly hammered. Singh is closer to someone like Marc Emery, who despite his pasty appearance and thoroughgoing Anglo heritage is about to be shipped out to a foreign country's prison.

JC@157: I am curious about your sentence calculation but I don't want to deviate from the thread.

Google is your friend.

In Canada, I can say with confidence, this guy would certainly be charged with two counts of assault with a weapon.

In Canada, I can say with confidence, this guy would spend nine days in jail and pay a fifty-dollar fine.

Now, calling this strategy ("send a bunch of the most rabid supporters we have over there and turn them loose to do whatever they want") astroturf feels wrong.

You need a word for a malign influence brought in to overwhelm the environment and crowd out the locals?

Kudzu.

The funny thing is, if you needed to name all of the openly conservative comedy writers who are working in the mainstream media today, your list would be as follows:

1. Jim Downey, writer, Saturday Night Live

If there's no mockery of Obama on SNL, it's because a right-wing professional writer who's responsible for the vast majority of the political humor produced by one of America's few remaining topical comedy institutions knows there's just no jokes worth making.

So from this point, heresiarch's rule is in force. Who ever has the last word loses.

[...

Well, it was worth a shot.

-Anticorium]

I'm not clear on how else I could parse Jim's comments, in particular.

I had no problem parsing what he was saying: the Republican machine that will fund the Nader campaign in 2008 (just like it funded the Nader campaign in 2004) will cut every corner it possibly can to put him on the ballot, so it is incumbent on everyone who loves fair and democratic elections to subject that Republican machine to the utmost scrutiny to make sure they're actually following the law, which past experience has shown to be a very open question indeed.

It is not even a matter of Nader being a Green, because he isn't the Green candidate yet. He is a "draft candidate" who didn't throw his hat into the GPUS ring but had it thrown for him. The primaries are still going on and there's a nonzero chance that the Green candidate this year will, not to put too fine a point on it, be someone who is both not him and who actually wanted the job in the first place.

And yet he's announced his push to be on the ballot anyway. (Maybe some of those high-priced pro bono lawyers who will put him there will be on loan from Connecticut for Lieberman.) That's the sort of thing that turns my stomach. Nader is a walking, talking Swift Boat Veterans For Tru^WDemocracy, but even after his disruptive success in 2000 and fizzling failure in 2004, there's still one organized group who actually want him in the campaign for reasons that are "vote for someone" instead of "grease McCain's ascent to power". And he cared so much about them that they had to draft him.

That's why I took Jim's argument at face value, anyway. Nader says there's no difference between the two parties and they're both corrupt, but he's happy to take money from one of them and let them do whatever dirty tricks are necessary to give him the platform he craves. If Russell gets to vote Green and vote Nader in November (which is, again, still an open question), it won't be because Nader gave even one-tenth of a goddamn about the party. But then, why should he? They haven't helped him one-tenth as much as the GOP, lately.

albatross #234: Booger.

I mean, yes.

Ah, I get it now: IHBT. HTH. HAND.

If anyone comes up with a refutation of Al From

I swear, as God is my witness, I thought my #212 was a strawman.

Why yes, by this point I do have a pile of pithy (but entirely uncharitable and in fact vaguely nasty) observations about how certain people's entire argument seems to be that the DLC is such a foul, rotten, corporatist cancer on the body politic that we have no choice but to believe every single word they utter concerning how Ralph Nader cannot possibly be blamed for anything, bt knw wht wld hppn f shrd thm.

But he knows like every politician that if you have issues that you want to raise in the US, the only way to get attention is to run a presidential campaign.

Thank the gods Nader is raising these issues. If he tried to instead do something about them, he might be stuck in a go-nowhere position like Illinois state senator, a job from which no man could ever emerge with the possibility of higher office in Washington.

They're just happy to have Democrats waste their time trying to keep Nader off the ballot when they should be focusing on defeating Republicans.

A reasonable person might wonder why it's not a waste of time for the GOP to try to put Nader on the ballot when they should be focusing on defeating Democrats. And, furthermore, what you know that they don't.

surely it's Preston Manning

No, I think Preston's overrated. Manning spent a lot of time electioneering, and got to spend a lot of time in Stornoway as a result. Harper is the guy who spent all his time doing the exact opposite of electioneering - he was working for the NCC, writing position papers on federal-provincial relations, advising other people who wanted to run for office. All the sort of scutwork that Nader thinks is beneath him.

It was only after he'd helped build a national apparatus that he decided (quite reluctantly, if the biographies I've read so far are credible) to try to lead it. Manning's a lot of things, but at core he's a loser, because he didn't spend anywhere near as much time as Harper did making it possible for a non-Liberal leader to win.

I'm convinced that down that road lies division and pure gridlock.

Fittingly enough, there actually are more options on order than "two-party system" and "pure gridlock". For example, going strictly by electability the United Kingdom is currently running an eleven-party system (boring old Canada has to settle for members of four parties serving). So the magic point of breakdown is at least twelve.

The problem with Ralph Nader is not that he is a third party. It's that he's going for the brass ring every single time, and he's abandoned any pretense at building a third-party system. I mean, whether you think his goal is "hurt the Democrats no matter how badly it screws over the country" or "genuinely help make America a better place", his energy would have been so much better spent getting Green Party candidates into races for city councils, state legislatures, and governor's offices. He would have displaced a few Democrats, elected a few Greens, and built genuine grassroots motion toward credible runs at Congress... and at the White House.

Stephen Harper he ain't.

albatross@90:

there are known (easy) attacks that exploit them

I doubt that they exist, and even if they exist I doubt they're easy. If they were, Canadian elections would be rife with fraud. To vote in Canada, you need to show up at your designated polling station with:

1. A photo ID, utility bill or bank statement with your name and address on it, matching the entry on the voter's list, or
2. A friend on the voter's list who'll vouch for your identity, or
3. The willingness to swear an oath that you are who you say you are, or
4. Any of the above, even if you're not on the voter's list for that polling station.

Now, note that #4. You don't even need to be enumerated to show up at the polls and get a ballot just as good as anyone else's, and you will never be required to show a photo ID, and you might not even need that bank statement. It's like they handed off the entire system design to Eighteen Vans Full Of Dead Chicagoans LLC. And yet, do you know how many people think that Canadian elections have been subject to the easy exploits you propose?

As close to none as makes no odds.

And I don't just mean that this is not a mainstream view. I mean that this does not even show up in the nutbarsphere. The Canadian political extremes can entertain theories from "proportional representation is a CIA plot" to "Jean Chretien had people murdered, regularly, and possibly for kicks". There's even a racist, Islamophobic segment who go into apoplexy that the four-item list I mentioned above says nothing about forcing Islamic women who wear the niqab to reveal their faces.

And yet not even the kooks think there's a problem. You can find 9/11 truthers and NAFTA superhighway freaks under any rock, but even if they think that the Canadian people are hypnotized sheeple who are voting for reptilian kitten-eaters from another planet they still believe those votes are being counted properly. Even the Islamophobes don't think that any vote fraud has actually happened -- take their claims at (ahem) face value and you're still looking at people who say that the election system is fine now and always has been, but we are facing a future full of, uh, demographic threats, and let's do something about it today just in case.

So yeah, the sort of ID requirements that would be imposed by the sort of people who talk about "vote fraud" are unnecessary. In much the same way that a unicorn tied up in your backyard would prove the existence of unicorns, Elections Canada operating in America's backyard proves that you can run a fair election on nothing more than phone bills, friendly neighbors, and a little bit of trust.

Horse. Legs. Fast. Moving. DUH.

Under the same conditions, I would think:

Horse. Species of animal I have never attempted to control, or even seen in person outside the racetrack. Stronger than me and capable of killing me with a single kick if it should decide to try. Prone to panic, considering I don't understand what's going on and am on the verge of losing it, even with a neocortex to help me try to make sense of it. Oh, and we're surrounded by little crab-things whose bite makes you burst open. Given all of these things, I will leave it alone. Let someone else get trapped under the cart after the horse explodes in the middle of a panicked gallop.

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