Pangloss

That's interesting, I did not know that.

I agree with the first part, it's just that I think both reasons are valid for not using the rhetoric.

Fair enough. And here's an example of inciting rhetoric right here: "Economist" Paul Krugman is wasting no time blaming conservatives for this incident, in spite of the fact that he appears to have as much left-wing background as right-wing.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/assassination-attempt-in-arizona/?src=twt&twt=NytimesKrugman

This bit is amusing:

I’m going to take down comments on this one; they would need a lot of moderating, because the crazies are coming out in force, and it’s all too likely to turn into a flame war.

Gee, Krugman, throw down a match on a gas-soaked woodpile and walk away, why dontcha.

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I think it's too early to see. We'll see in the coming days if investigators determine his motivation and what contact he's had with other political groups. People may be tempted to blame it on Palin and her map, but we don't yet know if the guy even knew the map existed, or whether he followed Palin or any other political leader when planning the attack.

Sure, I guess the thing I don't understand is why it matters at all. The pundits are building score cards so that they can throw atrocities at one another as examples of why we should or should not enact health care reform! Does that actually make sense to anyone?

That's great, ydoaPs, I guess we agree then that video games and rap music should not be censored regardless of any political statements they contain. Glad to hear it. (rofl)

What do you think about the evidence that this guy is more, or at least equally, left-wing than right-wing? Inconvenient for the anti-Palin/anti-tea party crowd, isn't it?

I didn't say majority. Here's a general article you can read about games whose primary purpose is not entertainment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_games

Drowning Pool isn't rap.

No dodging, please. Are you saying that no popular music ever attempts to motivate people outside of the boundaries of entertainment?

Getting back to your point, we can include your hair-splitting qualification if you like:

The difference is that the purpose of the rhetoric is to draw people to action. It's designed to change your mind or do something you wouldn't necessarily already do. It's not a large leap from violent rhetoric to violent thoughts/feelings. As we all know, thoughts/feelings are the basis for action.

So would you support censorship of video games and rap music in cases where their stated purpose is to enact political change?

I can if you like, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that rap music is not intentionally motivational beyond the scope of entertainment. That one piece mentioned that this particular whacko's music behind one of his videos was "let the bodies hit the floor".

Of course, many of them very much are.

Those who want to paint Jared Loughner as a conservative are going to want to reconsider.

Even as Twitter users speculated on his political views — with one self-identified former classmate describing him as “left-wing” — Loughner’s favorite books, posted on the site, painted the more jumbled portrait of a troubled young man with violently anti-establishment views.

 

In addition to Hitler’s memoirs, it includes the “Communist Manifesto,” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

But the motives of Loughner — an English grammar-obsessed Army reject — remain murky and don’t fit into an easy liberal-conservative rubric. In recent weeks, he took to the Web to rail against brainwashing by government officials and “mind-control methods.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47257.html

Aside from apparent insanity, any political views appear to be more in the realm of anarchy and general dissent. This is a crackpot protester of the general type we see at G8 summits and anti-globalization rallies. Of late he may have taken to hanging out more with the local gun-toting tea party-aligned extremists, but it would be pretty foolish to label him as being aligned with any mainstream American political ideology.

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The difference is that the purpose of the rhetoric is to draw people to action. It's designed to change your mind or do something you wouldn't necessarily already do. It's not a large leap from violent rhetoric to violent thoughts/feelings. As we all know, thoughts/feelings are the basis for action.

So do you feel that video games should be censored, then?

As the link mentions, we already blame violent behavior on video games and rap lyrics. Is that ridiculous as well?

Yes it is, in my opinion.

Why is it even out of the realm of possibility that the rhetoric moved one person to action?

Oh it's not that -- I agree that flakey people might draw their motivations from elevated rhetoric, rap music, or violent video games. What I'm saying is that isolated incidents, whatever their motivations, are not indicators of trends. Nor should they be influential on public policy.

I'm not going to demand that people watch what they say because some crazy person might go and shoot someone. Crazy people will find a reason to shoot someone.

The political rhetoric is bad because it's pointlessly divisive and obstructive, not because it may occassionally lead to a mass murder by someone who would have just found their motivation elsewhere were the rhetoric not so elevated.

The elephant in the room of American politics this week will no doubt be the Giffords shooting in Arizona. As you've probably heard by now, a young man with a semi-automatic pistol with an extended ammunition magazine ran into a supermarket crowd that was gathering to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a "town hall" setting. Six people are known dead, including a nine year old girl and a Bush-appointed Federal judge, and 19 injured in an event that would have rocketed to the top of the news cycle even without the congresswoman's presence.

Some updated background here:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2011/01/09/congresswoman_critical_6_dead_in_tucson_rampage/

American politicians were universal and immediate in their condemnation of the event, and offered prayers for the victims and their families. While it's a little early yet, it does appear that the attack was politically motivated. The young man in question reportedly has some YouTube videos up showing his opposition to the congresswoman's policies, and he may have had accomplices with similar ideological motivations. Health care reform and immigration may have been amongst his complaints. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about this very soon.

Giffords won a close election against leading tea party candidate Jesse Kelly, a 29-year-old war veteran who ran on a platform of independence and economic reform, complete with Palin endorsement. But from what I understand, while the election was somewhat acrimonious, it wasn't over the line and both candidates stayed on the issues, as can be seen in this story (with video) from last August. Kelly joined in the condemnations of the attack today, offering his prayers for the victims.

Of course, the left side of the blogosphere is already suggesting that this was inevitable. I'm sure we'll hear plenty of that over the next few days as well.

I tend to agree that the level of rhetoric in this country is too strong, but I think it's ridiculous to blame violence on rhetoric. It's the same old media problem: Isolated incidents are not valid evidence.

What do you think?

No lies were told, they simply kicked people out because they could, it's a well established part of human interactions, the more powerful get the spoils. I can live with that, i see no reason to expect my people to get their lands back and I see no reason for Israel to leave and give Palestine back to the Arabs or who ever but don't try to say they had some sort of contract with God that gave them the right to take that land, they did it the old fashioned way, power and resolve.

That's clear, and it was two generations ago, amidst decades of postwar line-drawing all over the Middle East. There's a reason they don't call it the Ottoman Empire anymore.

Your comparison with the Cherokee was interesting.

The Israelis are the ones who were trying to propel 20th century claims to statehood on arguments going to back to ancient claims.

They were NOT the only ones making that argument, but more to the point, what you implied in your previous post is that they lied to authorities about being the property owner in order to steal it from its rightful owners. This is a distortion of both arguments and facts.

As to the other question about the merits of the positions of Israel and its enemies, obviously the Israeli claim to statehood in someone else's home is ridiculous.

You mean the overwhelming, international claim of Israeli statehood.

But isn't it just as ridiculous to claim that it's someone else's home? Whose home was it 15,000 years ago? All those claims are nonsense if you just go back far enough. So you might as well draw a line at some point in time and try to move forward.

There is no evidence whatsoever that humans are done with large wars and mass carnage. Nothing.

Excellent point.

But I will scrap war machinery over the evidence that we have way more than we need.

Exactly.

It's not just about World War 3, Marat. You're not wrong suggesting that cut-backs are possible. Your error, IMO, is in suggesting that a military is no longer necessary. Conflicts still happen, and like it or not your peaceful worldview relies upon remotely deployable American military power. Without the American military, Saddam would still occupy Kuwait today, and Saudi Arabia as well. North Korea would be dictating over South Korea. Iran would control the Persian Gulf. The Taliban would still be busy repressing women and blowing up Buddha statues in Afghanistan.

And deployable is expensive. It costs a lot of money to project power. That's why nobody else does it.

I'm not sure I followed that. Why should the rate be higher just because the volume is higher?

The existence of nuclear weapons didn't stop the proxy wars or direct invasions in Eastern Europe. Prague Spring? Hungary 1956? Korea?

Perhaps. It's certainly a sad state of affairs when we're arguing over which broken arm of government is most in need of wasteful overspending to make up for its brokenness.

I loved this sentence, btw:

When German students go from their tuition-free university studies to collect their $18,000 a year check from the government to pay their living expenses during their studies, and enjoy the best surgical care in the world for free, and enjoy subsidized subway and train rides everywhere in the country, they really can't feel in their personal lives the lack of any German aircraft carriers stupidly prowling the oceans in search of the type of enemy that no one has seen since the end of World War II when the atomic bomb made major wars impossible.

Nicely said!

Of course, German students had that luxury in the 1980s because American tanks and aircraft were based nearby. It's easy now to pretend that the Soviet Union had no interest in Western Europe, but there are plenty of Hungarians, Czechs, and Poles still around who remember things differently.

Well I found a great deal wrong with it.

Our healthcare system is known to be grossly inadequate (e.g., highest infant mortality rate in the developed world)

Source?

This page lists the United States at 33rd out of 197, with the actual number at only 0.63%, compared with 0.29% for first place. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

our public education system ranks about 15th in the world

That doesn't really tell us anything, since the top 15 (or 30 or more) may all be really excellent.

our welfare support for the truly needy leaves poor people living in utter misery

Source?

Uttery misery, you say? According to the Census Bureau:

- 43% of all "poor" households own an average 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath house

- Almost 75% of "poor" households own a car; 31% own 2 or more

- 97% of "poor" households have a color television; over half own 2 or more

- 78% have a VCR or DVD player; 62% have cable or satellite TV

- 89% have a microwave oven; over half have a stereo, more than a third have a dishwasher

- Only 6% of all "poor" households are overcrowded. More than 67% have more than two rooms per person.

- Average child dietary consumption of poor children is on par with children of middle and upper income parents

- 89% of poor families have "enough to eat"; only 2% report "often" not having enough

- 80% of all "poor" households have air conditioning

- The average American "poor" person has greater living space than the average person in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and many other European cities. (The average citizen there, not the average "poor" citizen.)

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/08/how-poor-are-americas-poor-examining-the-plague-of-poverty-in-america

But in terms of protecting the American public against the utterly unreal threat of a military attack

That's not the sole purpose of the American military. We also have treaty obligations to support other countries from aggression, and those treaties are widely supported by international opinion. It's true that the world is angry with us over Iraq, and understandably so, but if we were to pull back and South Korea were to fall then I'm sure we'd be blamed for that as well.

we are massively over-protected by current government spending

I agree, and I think we can curtail military spending. IMO the problem is in the structure of the government's arrangement with the military-industrial complex, and in the systemic nature of procurement practices. It's too difficult to get good projects made, with Senators looking after their home states and not thinking about what the best equipment might actually be.

Interesting story making its way around the Web this week about China's new stealth fighter, which had been thought to be further off in development. Someone spotted one sitting on a runway.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/01/05/china.us.fighter.jets/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_J-20

This is one of those mixed-up cases that, it seems to me, will likely be difficult for a jury to sort out. A man is being charged with "hacking" and faces up to five years in prison after he read his wife's email and apparently (it's not real clear) discovered she was cheating on him. She filed for divorce, which according to the link below was finalized, but she still lives with him. She also gave him her password on previous occasions.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/12/michigan-man-faces-felony-charges-5-years-in-prison-for-reading-wifes-e-mail.html

In terms of this specific case, to me this crosses the line into that gray zone of marital disputes where both sides seem to share responsibility. I actually have a personal rule about not getting involved in marital disputes between friends for exactly this same reason, and I imagine a lot of you feel the same.

But there's a larger issue here which is interesting. Should it be legal for spouses to read each other's email without the other's permission?

Most would agree it's wrong for someone to hack into someone else's mail. Why should it become legal just because they're married? On the other hand, is it really that different from sending a private investigator to see if a spouse has been cheating? Also, getting married changes the law in other ways, so maybe it should apply differently here as well?

My personal opinion is that it's illegal and should be illegal. But it does raise a bit of a question in terms of the simple mechanics of a relationship. The problem I forsee here is that one partner says it's okay for the other partner to read their email, and then, during a nasty breakup, they tell a judge that they never gave any such permission. If proof exists that they read the mail, but no proof exists of permission being given, then the first partner is screwed. Egad, do I really need to get that permission in writing?

What do you all think?

The most serious problem with the political system is that even what goes on before the public's view in effect occurs 'behind closed doors,' given that the analytical capacity of the general public is insufficient to comprehend what is really happening. Thus people who are net beneficiaries of the government wealth transfer programs which are mainly funded by progressive taxation of the wealthy cheer hysterically for the pathetically small amounts of money they get ...

We don't have wealth transfer in the United States. That's not the purpose of the progressive tax system, nor the purpose of our spending programs. Perhaps they do in your country, I don't know.

At any rate, that sounds to me like a great rationale for a flat tax system.

If nothing is going on that the general public would not accept, what's the purpose of behind doors in the first place.

Consensus-building and finding of common ground, sharing of concerns, determination of facts, communication of facts, and so on. Ever wonder how a politician arrives at his or her position? We ask them The Question at the first possible opportunity (and in fairness they contribute to that problem by running TOWARDS the cameras), but they have to form their opinion somehow, through some process.

At any rate, they don't do it in a vacuum, and they certainly don't do it on live television. They talk to people, and when they do that they ask questions that, if asked in a public forum, would make them look ignorant, biased, rude, wrong-headed, etc. This is where that old axiom comes from about legislation and sausage-making. It's disgusting, but it doesn't really matter.

But yes, the fact that THAT has to take place also opens the door for corruption and hidden agendas. But there's nothing we can do about that -- full transparency doesn't solve this problem because the process still needs to take place. So that leaves us with voting for integrity, supporting freedom of the press, and the occassional legislative tweak here and there. Best we can do.

I feel it's the electorate, in voting those people into office and the methods used.

I'd agree with that. And the method that's harmful is partisanship. And if you've only ever voted for one party, you're part of the problem.

Murkowski (Alaska SR), not only managed to void the nomination process, but campaigned/debated against all those bills passed in the Lame Duck Session, but voted for all of them.

Well that's your opinion. Apparently Alaskans apparently have a different take on it. But it's not as if she actually usurped power in some sort of illegal, or even quasi-legal manner. She ran for office. The people elected her. Way it goes.

And frankly, those votes might actually reflect what they wanted her to do. They may have wanted her, for example, to not vote in favor of DADT unless the military leadership supported it, and the panel report came back saying it would be okay.

BTW, John McCain actually took that exact position (both of them), saying he would support it if those things happened, and when they did he changed his mind, even calling it a "sad day in America" when it passed. That would have cost him my vote. But telling me you're going to support gay marriage if and only if X, Y and Z happen, and then supporting it when X, Y and Z happen, I'd be fine with that. That's how politics SHOULD work, IMO.

If legislation or the process is for all the people, why should the people NOT know the process and the deals made to achieve that legislation. We choose (elections) our leaders and representatives based on what they say (honestly or not) and then should be allowed full knowledge of any wheeling and dealing to achieve, compared to what they had said.

I agree, but just because they're making deals behind the scenes doesn't mean there is corruption. The problem is a lack of honest and intelligent leadership, and not having a plan. Banning back room deals (for example) would be treating the symptom rather than the disease, IMO. We do a lot of this, and we're always surprised when They seem to find a way around the rules. Go figure, right?

Did you ever think that national politics might just be a show to distract the common people from the real horse-trading which goes on behind the scenes, so that what we see and take seriously as 'politics' might in fact just be an illusion?

Sure. And that's often true on the small scale, but IMO, as a big picture view, the notion isn't very compatible with Occam's Razor. In short, in order to rule from behind closed doors they would have to always resist the constant onslaught of natural frustration in order to put up the planned, assigned front that was agreed upon. A more reasonable explanation is that sometimes it happens that way, but usually what we see is what we get.

By the way, back room deals aren't always a bad thing, in my opinion. For one thing, it's one of the ways a minority can check-and-balance the majority. And it's the activist's best friend. If you want social justice, prayer in public schools, wealth redistribution, marriage defined as man-and-woman, open borders, closed borders, whatever, you need back room deals, because the majority is rarely your ally.

I suspect that since the real reason why the Republican Party exists is to represent the interests of wealth in national politics, a back-room deal was reached which allowed all of the recent Democratic legislation -- which did not harm the interests of the rich -- to pass in exchange for the Democrats giving the Republicans their cherished tax cuts for billionaires.

People with money don't lose their rights as citizens the moment they get a little ahead. You may be right about the current bent of the Republican party, we'll have to wait and see. But in my opinion it's not wealth conservatives fight to maintain in general. It's opportunity.

An interesting post from Facebook's staff on Thursday shows statistics on user posts. Facebook looked at about 1 million English-language status updates, filtering them against a collection of 68 keywords and then correlating the data against two factors: User age, and number of friends.

This graphic shows the results:

Facebook's assessment:

The chart on left confirms the typical stereotypes about younger and older people. Younger people express more negative emotions (including anger) and swear more. They use more pronouns referring to oneself (“I”, “my”, etc.) and talk more about school. Older people write longer updates, use more prepositions and articles, and talk more about other people, including their family.

 

Word usage of more “popular” people also differs from people with a lower friend count. People with more friends tend to use more of the pronoun “you” and other second person pronouns. They write longer updates, and use more words referring to music and sports. More "popular" people also talk less about their families, are less emotional overall, use fewer past tense and present tense verbs and words related to time.

Also, I thought this bit was interesting:

After removing identifiable information from the updates, we had our computers calculate the percentage of words in status updates belonging to each word category (so no human ever read your updates).

Makes sense, right? You might have to take a look at some samples to check your algorithm, but you could have the computer remove the names of the samples you pull, so the data stays private.

I think it's interesting to see this kind of work being done. 600 million people collecting themselves voluntarily into an organized data set is just a dream come true for all kinds of social research. I think we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg here.

Facebook's article here:

Interesting analysis by PC Magazine here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374718,00.asp

The "lame duck" Congress passed a lot of legislation right at the end, and all the media outlets were talking about it last week. The extending of the Bush tax cuts lead directly to agreement on the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell", ratification of the latest START treaty with Russia, and funding for 9/11 first responders. (Some background here.)

I think this is a very positive sign of what we can hope to see in 2011. I believe there will likely be more hurdles, but both sides came out ahead here and important legislation was passed.

What do you all think?