🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
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Oh. See, I didn't read it as trying to do that. Just that they (Green et al) were upset about the consequences of something they (Garber et al) thought was a good idea.
Not even sure why I'm still arguing this, it's not like knowledge of the intricacies of Harvard politics would ever do anybody any good. What's your opinion of the whole Jonathan Gruber thing? Imo “voters are idiots” is something that people should be able to say, without worrying if people are going to get all offended about it, years down the line.
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Imo “voters are idiots” is something that people should be able to say, without worrying if people are going to get all offended about it, years down the line.
Perhaps, but it seems logical to me that, if a person asks voters to vote for {him|her|it|{something|someone} {he|she|it} is supporting}, having called the voters idiots might not works to said person's advantage.
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"Bush lied" is the same thing as 9-11 trooferism: the sign of a deranged mind, or, possibly, to be charitable, an ignorant one.
You might want to be careful with that if you're an AGW/ClimateChange/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days denialist. The credulists are saying exactly the same thing about you.
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I love how a single joke with a pre-joke political warning managed to trigger a political flamewar anyway!
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Isn't that two rows of sockets?
If you try to jam a connector so that it spreads across two different sockets you have bigger problems.
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And now another Bush is running for office. Don't you people learn?
Jeb Bush will never be president, so the answer is "eventually, yes."
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All because I made a remark that was intended to put the parties on an even footing regarding lies (which they are), but was taken by @FrostCat as a reference to a specific political hot potato (the Iraq WMD situation).
Jeb Bush will never be president, so the answer is "eventually, yes."
I freakin' hope not! I'd rather deal with someone as crazy as Ron or Rand Paul!
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One of our project partners just told us that they've got a problem with their production cloud service (they do cloud hosting and are quite a lot cheaper for us than Amazon). The problem? Just occasionally,
/tmpspontaneously becomes read-only.
Obviously, quite a lot of software doesn't like this. Ours included as it happens. No big surprise there. The cause is some kind of software fault in the virtual device driver or something like that. I don't know and we've not yet got the full story out of the cloud operator. I also don't know what triggers the fault to engage.
TRWTF is that they've known about this for a month and only told us when we traced down a failure reported by a user of our orchestration service to an error message that said
/tmpwas read-only on the remote system. When we asked a direct question, we got the response “Oh yes, we know about this but fixing it is a bit complicated so it might be a few months. Workaround is to reboot the VM until it comes back with the device in read-write mode.”Why didn't they tell us? We could have done mitigating steps so easily if we had only known.
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You might want to be careful with that if you're an AGW/ClimateChange/whatever-they're-calling-it-these-days denialist. The credulists are saying exactly the same thing about you.
They're insane, too. No global warming for 18+ years, as measured by satellite.
And even if the climate were changing, which is probably is, so what? Humans do better when the temps are a bit warmer. I guess if a million people in Bangladesh are living in sand-floor houses inches above the high-tide line, it's going to suck for them if the oceans rise a couple of inches. One could argue that that's an extremely poor choice of living space.
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I guess if a million people in Bangladesh are living in sand-floor houses inches above the high-tide line, it's going to suck for them if the oceans rise a couple of inches. One could argue that that's an extremely poor choice of living space.
And anyway we all hate Florida.
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If you try to jam a connector so that it spreads across two different sockets you have bigger problems.
Yeah. Jam a noodle and random random slomo connect your cables instead!
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I will just leave this here...
Ask me my opinion about the opinion of British ministers. I find the memo thoroughly unconvincing.
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"Thin", here, is functionally the same as "we should not go to war with this poor of evidence".
I recommend reading Tommy Franks' autobiography. He was CINCCENTCOM prior to and at the start of the war. There were a zillion reasons to go to war in Iraq (among others, that we were already in a low intensity shooting war).
The WMD aspect got overemphasized by everyone.
Bush and Cheney both said that Iraq had WMDs and had aided Al-Qu(however the fuck you spell it). That was demonstrably false, even at the time.
Bullshit. It was true then and it's true now. Iraq was in the business of aiding other terrorist enterprises (like against Israel).
Both Bush and Cheney said that Iraq helped with 9/11, which got everyone in to a fever pitch.
What's the cite on this? I recall hearing a lot about this claim, but I have a memory of it being false. I'm not motivated enough to go re-research it ATM, however.
What we did was by all accounts a war of aggression.
FFffuuuuuuuuck. Again, go read Tommy Franks. There were a zillion good reasons to kick the shit out of Iraq, and the aggression was primarily Iraq's.
No nation that minds their own business seems to have any issues.
Bullshit. Anyways, the big guy on the block always has people who want to knock him off his perch.
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Keep in mind that Cheney said in the 90's that going in to Baghdad would be a huge mistake, because it would destabilize the region, etc.
Times change. Stakes change. I still think it was a good idea to get rid of him. We made a lot (though as ISIS demonstrates, not enough) martyrs over there in the last 10 years.
I am no Obama lover, but even his administration has yet to reach the crescendo of corruption that Bush/Cheney had.
I cannot take this seriously.
Holy fuck, it was constant scandal and just a relenting shitstorm of vitriol.
Whaaaat? Are you talking about policy issues, like how we handled Iraq, or corruption scandals like we've had nonstop with Obama.
Before you engage in war, you remove all doubt.
You're too focused on WMD. Still.
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When was the last time Switzerland had a terrorist attack?
Looks like one was foiled in September 2014:
Switzerland: Iraqi Isis Cell Arrested for Planning Terror Attack
Three Iraqis attempted to obtain explosives and toxic gas for terror attack.
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And now another Bush is running for office. Don't you people learn?
I hope we have. I mean, if he makes it to the general, he'll be better than whatever dreck the Democrats put out, but I'll be vehemently opposed in the primaries.
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What's your opinion of the whole Jonathan Gruber thing? Imo “voters are idiots” is something that people should be able to say, without worrying if people are going to get all offended about it, years down the line.
That he called voters stupid isn't the scandal. It's that he confirmed that Obamacare was sold with a bunch of lies. Most of which didn't fool people opposed, but a lot of people who were for it bought into the lies, and are now shocked that they were lied to and maybe feel like the patsies that they are.
This also helps explain the Harvard thing. I'm not sure why you were ever interested in people changing their politics WRT the article, because that wasn't the focus at all. It was great because it's an example of reality of things they think they like coming back to bite them. If they were normal people, and not academics, I might expect them to learn something from the
experience. But theory generally trumps experience with this sort, so I can at least be comforted that they aren't insulated for their assholery.
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I am no Obama lover, but even his administration has yet to reach the crescendo of corruption that Bush/Cheney had. Holy fuck, it was constant scandal and just a relenting shitstorm of vitriol. I have truly despised them.
This is pure nonsense, unless you've redefined corruption.
Everything Obama does is corrupt. Bear in mind the media despised Bush and buried positive stories about him and wildly promoted negative ones, and they do the opposite for Obama. Fast and Furious? Nary a whisper. Dropping the investigation into voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers? Sitting on Keystone for years? Quietly refusing to issue drilling permits for years? Rewriting Obamacare on a daily basis. Extending surveillance of citizens beyond anything in the Bush years, stoking racial hatred, expanding the militarization of the police, and on and on.
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They're insane, too. No global warming for 18+ years, as measured by satellite.
That is true, but they are for the moment winning the public opinion battle. And dissenters are even said to be against science, which is particularly ironic. The point is that what "everyone knows" often turns out to not be true. At the same time, the crackpot theory of the day sometimes turns out to be correct. I would suggest leaving "anyone who disagrees is crazy" to the other side.
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When was the last time Switzerland had a terrorist attack?
The first hit I found when googling "muslim immigration in Switzerland" was this. I don't know anything about the site, but it does show a litany of complaints, including "take the cross off the national flag" and more serious things like increases in crime and jihadi recruiting. Perhaps they just haven't gotten around to terrorism yet, or perhaps the government is doing like ours and lying about incidents like the shootings at Fort Hood and the base in New York and the beltway sniper.
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There were a zillion reasons to go to war in Iraq (among others, that we were already in a low intensity shooting war).
For one thing, they were regularly violating the no-fly zones as well as refusing to allow the weapons inspections. Either of those were sufficient causes on their own for the initial invasion and removal from power of Saddam.
Bullshit. It was true then and it's true now. Iraq was in the business of aiding other terrorist enterprises (like against Israel).
It was well-known, for example, that Saddam was paying bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
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That is true, but they are for the moment winning the public opinion battle. And dissenters are even said to be against science, which is particularly ironic.
Let 'em. I have charts from organizations like NASA. They have cherry-picked tree ring data which throws out data points that don't agree with their conclusions, and models whose predictions don't match observation. Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
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That is true, but they are for the moment winning the public opinion battle.
I'm not sure I agree. They certainly get better press. But concern for global warming hasn't taken the hearts and minds of people AFAIK.
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I'm not sure I agree. They certainly get better press. But concern for global warming hasn't taken the hearts and minds of people AFAIK.
I think that's partially because it's one of those unresolvable issues that are really there to give us something to fight about. There is a disconnect between how important the issue is purported to be and the amount of meaningful action that is being taken, and it's really difficult for the average person not to notice that. "The sky is falling!" tends to stop being taken seriously if nothing is done that would have a chance of stopping it.
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And now another Bush is running for office.
I wonder what it's called when a country's leaders are always members of the same family?
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The credulists are saying exactly the same thing about you.
Well, if you [i]don't[/i] write off your political opponents as completely doolally, there's the dangerous possibility that you might have to engage in rational debate with them, and [i]nobody wants that[/i], now, do they?
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I wonder what it's called when a country's leaders are always members of the same family?
According to the media, good if it's a Clinton, or an evil dynasty if it's a Bush.
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I wonder what it's called when a country's leaders are always members of the same family?
Always, huh?
- 44 presidents so far.
- 1st related presidents were John Adams (2nd) and his son John Quincy Adams (6th).
- Next set of related presidents: William Henry Harrison (9th) and his grandson Benjamin Harrison (23rd).
- Next set of related presidents: Theodore Roosevelt (26th) and his fifth-cousin1 Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd)
- Next set of related presidents: George H. W. Bush (41st) and his son George W. Bush (43rd).
So if Jeb Bush were to become president, it would be a first in that there has never been an instance of three people from the same family serving as president, but it hardly qualifies as "always".
On the other hand, if Hilary were to be elected, it would be the first time spouses both served as president.
1 A fifth-cousin is someone with whom your
firstmost recent common ancestor is six generations back. In other words, fifth-cousins share a pair of great-great-great-great-grandparents.
Presidents | The White House
Learn more about the Presidents of the United States from WhiteHouse.gov.
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Well, if you don't write off your political opponents as completely doolally, there's the dangerous possibility that you might have to engage in rational debate with them
Not really. I haven't, but they have. Or anyways, I have an understanding of their ideas and philosophy that they have never demonstrated about mine.
Still, public debates are never going to be as detailed and rational as a private one can be. The secret is a Gramscian march through the institutions. I'm not sure we'll ever be able to counter the original march, unfortunately.
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if Hilary were to be elected, it would be the first time spouses both served as president
If Hilary had got in instead of Obama then it would have been 20+ years with two families in the white house
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Nah, you don't even have to read the title. Here you can just post your thoughts wherever you feel like. Look, I'm replying to your post in a completely unrelated thread and it's OK
We could just carry on posting across otherwise unrelated topics.
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If Hilary had got in instead of Obama then it would have been 20+ years with two families in the white house
Let's do some math:
Bush Sr. - 1 term, 4 years in office
Clinton - 2 terms, 8 years in office
Bush Jr. - 2 terms, 8 years in officeTotal: 5 terms, 20 years
Looks like we got those 20 years with 2 families in office you were talking about.
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Bush Sr. - 1 term, 4 years in officeClinton - 2 terms, 8 years in officeBush Jr. - 2 terms, 8 years in office
George W Bush is not Bush Junior, btw (and neither is his father George Senior). They don't have the same name.
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George W Bush is not Bush Junior, btw (and neither is his father George Senior). They don't have the same name.
I was doing that for the sake of simplicity. I think I know the difference:
Next set of related presidents: George H. W. Bush (41st) and his son George W. Bush (43rd).
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I was doing that for the sake of simplicity. I think I know the difference:
Simplicity is a barrier to pendantry.
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A fifth-cousin is someone with whom your first common ancestor is six generations back.
I'd say "closest" or "most recent" common ancestor. Your "first" common ancestors are, depending on your viewpoint, Adam and Eve, some unknown pair of proto-hominids, or some single-celled organism in the primordial soup. ;P
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I'd say "closest" or "most recent" common ancestor
Flag denied: insufficient dickweedery.
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Flag denied: insufficient dickweedery.
anti-anti-flagged: because you're not the boss of me!
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anti-anti-flagged: because you're not the boss of me!
Does that mean you flagged me? (I ask, in case it might motivate others to imitate you.)
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no. i flagged hardware geek.
I wonder if I can get away with flagging him and asking for the flag to count as an offset?
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I wonder if I can get away with flagging him and asking for the flag to count as an offset?
knowing @pjh he'd probably negate your offset as a flag for pedantry.
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knowing @pjh he'd probably negate your offset as a flag for pedantry.
I would still know what I meant.
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Because you're wrong. That never happened. How the FUCK is this so HARD for you to UNDERSTAND???
Anyway, about the Gruber thing, are these actual people that are feeling like patsies, or hypothetical people? My impression has always been that the percentage of people whose opinion of obamacare couldn't be summed up by the word ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ was always in the single units.
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Because you're wrong. That never happened. How the FUCK is this so HARD for you to UNDERSTAND???
What never happened now? Sorry, it's VERY hard to understand with this amount of context.
Anyway, about the Gruber thing, are these actual people that are feeling like patsies, or hypothetical people?
To be honest, I've never actually been to Harvard and seen these guys. I recall other examples of people who didn't understand the consequences of the law, but supported it anyways, and weren't at all happy with what actually happened. I mean, again, I didn't know these people personally and just read about them or saw news segments on them, so maybe they didn't really exist either.
My impression has always been that the percentage of people whose opinion of obamacare couldn't be summed up by the word ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ was always in the single units.
Possibly true. I wouldn't say that it wasn't. Of course, a lot of the "pro" sentiment was probably due at least in part to the outright lies that they believed.
