Sisyphus

You say "hindsight is 20/20," but a) many of us predicted pretty much what is happening now, b) the public was misled, and so had different information to go on from the start, and c) nobody forced the president to keep pretending everything was going swimmingly ("Mission Accomplished," anyone?) . ANYWAY, the nation feels misled, and they don't trust government, and Republicans in particular. The national mood is, indeed, pretty ugly. If not for Iraq, perhaps they'd still be in power. I'm not well-versed in economics, but it seems an extremely occupation can't possibly be good, nor can going deeper and deeper into debt to pay for it. I don't know how much of an effect is has, overall, but I think it's safe to say that its significant, no? I don't think long-term military capabilities have been harmed all that much. If we were to pull out of Iraq tomorrow, there would still be problems, like being understaffed due to recruitment problems, and, more seriously, there would still be the huge backlog in replacing equipment. We lack "boots on the ground" capability, which we would have if not for Iraq. We would have more forces dealing with Afghanistan properly, and could be more credibly menacing to nations like Iran. America's power in the world has suffered, as has its capability to deal with terrorism.

Hehe, are you saying you would talk to the "Fox problem solvers" or whatever they call themselves now?

Oh, I agree. It's an absurd failure. I was just trying to defend the rationale behind it.

With regards to the "bus driver" vs. "a crippled person." Just to be devil's advocate, there are a few arguments you could make. One, is that occupations are slightly different, because we usually interact with people on the basis of their jobs. As in, the guy driving the bus that you're on is the "bus driver," as far as you're concerned. But there's no reason to similarly see the guy in the wheelchair next to you as "a cripple." Second, maybe we shouldn't refer to people by what they do for a living. Marx would say that being identified as one's job is one of the most dehumanizing things you can do to a person.

Well, nobody is upset because he never portrayed a beloved character on an era-defining television show. Nobody is feigning outrage because he they don't have anything to gain from doing so. He's got no money and no political influence. He's not apologizing because he has nothing to gain from doing so. He's got tenure, and his career doesn't depend on people liking him. Didn't Strom Thurmond die in 2003?

This is not a rhetorical question. As I understand it, it first arose as intentionally merely a matter of terminology. From the wikipedia article (which I recommend), the goal is outlined as follows: 1. Certain people have their rights, opportunities, or freedoms restricted due to their categorization as members of a group with a derogatory stereotype. 2. This categorization is largely implicit and unconscious, and is facilitated by the easy availability of labeling terminology. 3. By making the labeling terminology problematic, people are made to think consciously about how they describe someone. 4. Once labeling is a conscious activity, individual merits of a person, rather than their perceived membership in a group, become more apparent. However, somewhere along the line, it came to be perceived as just "not wanting to offend anyone," or even more vague concepts. It's also identified with specifically liberal ideas, though I'm not sure that's justifiable. Certainly there are things politicians and public figures have to say, to satisfy some vague consensus that encompasses right as well as left. For example, what politician running for president has not tried to emphasize their "faith." They have to say it "gives them strength," or something. Certainly none would ever say "I don't think it's important to have faith." That would be just as much political suicide as "I don't trust black people" or something. Similarly with stuff like "supporting the troops," whatever that means... It's all kind of suspicious, frankly. In the same article: While I don't think that's completely true (it certainly originated on the Left), I think they have a point that it's use is largely used derogitorily. For example, I know hardly anyone who even remotely resembles the stereotypical PC liberal. Most self-described liberals I know will qualify their self-description with "but I don't subscribe to that PC nonsense." Not that it doesn't exist, and not that politicians don't talk in silly ways sometimes (though, as I mentioned above, it's hardly a purely liberal phenomenon), but it's neither in the mainstream nor the intellectual foundations of mainstream liberalism. Yet, to hear conservative talk show hosts describe it, half the country is obsessed with it. It's "the scourge of our times!" So, I put it to all of you. What is it? The rotten core of modern liberalism? A hopelessly misguided attempt to end racism? A basically meaningless phrase used by right to distract from what left is actually saying?

Is anyone actually defending this guy? (There certainly isn't anyone, here, defending him.) If not, then how is there a double standard? The sentiment seems to be, "What a crazy racist! And what a double standard! If a white person said that, people would call him a crazy racist!" Um, guys...?

Uh, I think it's politically correct to criticize genocide. Unless you mean that he's clearly mentally ill, and deserves our sympathy...

Isn't "deactivate" the opposite of activate?

How do you know he's a scientist? What's on the chalkboard? Perhaps we can deduce who it is, even if nobody recognizes him.

That's kind of what I figured, as well. They were trying to give him cancer, which is certainly an ingenious method of assassination, because it looks like, well, cancer. Or at least mimic some other disease. Or even radiation poisoning, if they thought they wouldn't detect the polonium in time. In any case, it looks pretty amazingly bad for the Russian government, doesn't it? It pretty much had to be some government, in order to have the resources to produce polonium, and the Russians really have the only motive.

Psshh. Your "rest of the civilized world" probably uses the metric system and abolished the death penalty, too. Buncha' weirdos.

What group will be the majority? Or are you just saying caucasians will go from majority to plurality?

Interesting. Allow me some armchair speculation... That's more or less what I would expect, but it's only one of the things I was interested in in the liberal church vs. conservative church comparison. What I was wondering, in my cynically liberal way, was about the nature of the "charity" in each case, and whether I would consider it as such. For example, in my personal experience, I've been involved in charitable endeavors at a local, quite liberal church, involving stuff like gathering clothes for the poor, running soup kitchens, caring for elderly and sick members of the community, and even buying slaves in Africa (to free them, obviously!). I've also been in some more conservative churches, who seem to be much more focused on "bringing people to Christ," spending at least as much on Bibles as on food, etc. Surely they consider that charity, but I wouldn't. I assume this is a matter of means. You can only be a philanthropist if you've got gobs of disposable income, personal contacts, and the means to arrange your other affairs so you actually have time to get personally involved. But I agree, it's still admirable. What's the distinction between working poor and "leeching poor?" Anyway, that's pretty much what I would expect. The more one lives paycheck to paycheck, the more acutely aware one is of the possibility of really being in need of help, and the more actively sympathetic one is likely to be. My own anecdotal experience agrees with that reasoning, as well.

The issues of slavery was the most hotly debated of all arguments in the Continental Congress. The majority of the "founding fathers" were opposed to it in the new nation, and did indeed mean blacks, as well, in the notion of equality among men. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Thomas Paine were all among the foremost leaders of the original American Abolitionist movement. However, the Southern delegates proved inflexible, and considered it a deal-breaking issue. Ultimately it was agreed that it was more important to have a united front and preserve the Union for the time being, and work towards the abolition of slavery later on. As for Lincoln, just look up the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

I wonder how the breakdown went. Like, how much was church-based vs. individual donations? Do conservative churches do more than liberal churches? What counts as "charity?" (i.e., does giving money to a church count?) How much of that money goes towards evangelizing? Is the implication of the title, that "conservatives care more" really valid? What's the discrepancy between purely humanitarian charity (where it's all about the receiving end) and evangelizing and fulfilling religious obligations, where it's all about the giving end and spreading ideas? Can the latter group really be said to "care?" Just some thoughts...

OR racism is funny, until you're not kidding anymore. Or it still is, sometimes, just then you're not laughing at the racism, you're laughing at the racist.

But (in theory at least, if not always in practice) it's not about giving someone success, it's about giving them the chance to succeed. My personal experiences on this are mixed. On the one hand, there were "Hispanic" rich kids from my high school with $200/an hour SAT tutors who got into the most selective universities based on affirmative action. I've seen minorities get in to schools based on affirmative action who then couldn't compete and had to drop out, since they weren't actually disadvantaged, they were just not smart enough. On the other hand, I know people from college who really did grow up in poverty, who often didn't have parents, let alone parents who went to college, whose high schools taught next to nothing and were highly dangerous to even walk down the hallway, who saw only drug dealers as "successful" role models. These guys were really smart, but there's no way in hell they'd get into a school like this without affirmative action. But because they were smart, once given the chance to succeed, they did, often spectacularly. So yes, affirmative action is most definitely broken. "Race" is not a good enough criterion, since there are yuppy black kids and poverty-stricken white kids. I suppose what I would be in favor of was a more broadly socioeconomic-based affirmative action, focused on granting opportunity to succeed. I suppose race need not even be a factor.

Of course it's disturbing. We can never watch Seinfeld in quite the same way again, and for that, I demand blood.

REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT! Hey, maybe we shouldn't be talking in terms of what is fair, but what is beneficial. For example, why did the United States put so many resources towards rebuilding Japan after WW2? Simple. We could either have a towntrodden, resentful people that would only cause endless problems for us in the generations ahead, or we could have a powerful, loyal ally. Easy choice. ANALOGOUSLY, how should we deal with a minority that started out in a far less favorable situation than the most penniless European immigrant, and was treated with gross injustice into the late 20th century? We could just start playing fair, now, and that would probably be totally ethical. (For sake of argument, let's say it is.) OR we could help them out, try to bring them up to speed to partially make up for those initial disadvantages, and thus turn a resentful, poverty and crime-stricken sub-class into full, productive members of society on equal footing with the rest of us. Now, whether things like affirmative action actually help accomplish this goal is debatable, but it might help to at least frame the problem in those terms.

I don't think so. Hollywood has always been left-leaning, and it's not nearly big enough to make any significant statistical difference.

I don't think that's legally possible. Organ donor pledges have the same status as a will, as far as I know. So it's just like the executor of an estate, say, deciding to deny everyone the inheritances spelled out in the will.

Yeah, I don't think that's a rule. However, there is the 50 move rule, wherein if there are no captured pieces or moved pawns within 50 moves, either player can claim a draw.

Indeed. Lincoln's rise to popularity was primarily because of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Trouble is, they're not cleanly distributed in different regions. Plenty of areas are heavily mixed.