Originally Posted by Hermione Granger

Originally Posted by William Jennings Bryan

Don't let him get you down Mr. E. His black-hearted ways will be selected against in time.

Well, WJB, you'd better get cracking then. The Devil has produced four little Devils and so far you've only produced one little WJB junior. 8)

Does this tidal shift in the gene pool indicate 3T, or 4T?

Two more of my friends (one born in 80 another born in 81) just got engaged. Add them to the roster of "settlers down"

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Originally Posted by Hermione Granger

Originally Posted by William Jennings Bryan

Don't let him get you down Mr. E. His black-hearted ways will be selected against in time.

Well, WJB, you'd better get cracking then. The Devil has produced four little Devils and so far you've only produced one little WJB junior. 8)

Does this tidal shift in the gene pool indicate 3T, or 4T?

I was talkin' meme pool, not gene pool.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

From my take on the political leadership situation in this country, America is impoverished nearly beyond repair ? without a 4T Crisis, that is. Well, I say bring it on! Things have gotten so bad, politically speaking, that this November will be the first time in my adult life I will not vote for a presidential candidate.

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors. Essentially, non-voting gets counted as a vote for the continued duopoly.

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

-- but for Cod's sake, vote!

"Cod" heehee, I am going to steal this, Rick. :idea:

Originally Posted by beautifulcartoon73

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

-- but for Cod's sake, vote!

"Cod" heehee, I am going to steal this, Rick. :idea:

Don't credit me - that's Croakmore's favorite epithet. That's why I used it in that context - I normally don't take the Great Creature's name in vain.

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Originally Posted by Croakmore

From my take on the political leadership situation in this country, America is impoverished nearly beyond repair ? without a 4T Crisis, that is. Well, I say bring it on! Things have gotten so bad, politically speaking, that this November will be the first time in my adult life I will not vote for a presidential candidate.

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors. Essentially, non-voting gets counted as a vote for the continued duopoly.

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

OK, Rick, I'll give my vote to you. Tell me how to vote and why, convincingly, and I'll cast my vote for your candidate.

--Croakmore

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Originally Posted by Croakmore

From my take on the political leadership situation in this country, America is impoverished nearly beyond repair ? without a 4T Crisis, that is. Well, I say bring it on! Things have gotten so bad, politically speaking, that this November will be the first time in my adult life I will not vote for a presidential candidate.

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors. Essentially, non-voting gets counted as a vote for the continued duopoly.

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

OK, Rick, I'll give my vote to you. Tell me how to vote and why, convincingly, and I'll cast my vote for your candidate.

--Croakmore

Gentlemen, please confirm for the record that nothing of value was exchanged for a vote in this matter. beware, the vote fraud police are being mobilized.

Originally Posted by monoghan

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Originally Posted by Croakmore

From my take on the political leadership situation in this country, America is impoverished nearly beyond repair ? without a 4T Crisis, that is. Well, I say bring it on! Things have gotten so bad, politically speaking, that this November will be the first time in my adult life I will not vote for a presidential candidate.

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors. Essentially, non-voting gets counted as a vote for the continued duopoly.

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

OK, Rick, I'll give my vote to you. Tell me how to vote and why, convincingly, and I'll cast my vote for your candidate.

--Croakmore

Gentlemen, please confirm for the record that nothing of value was exchanged for a vote in this matter. beware, the vote fraud police are being mobilized.

:wink:

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors.

HAR!

They're going to do whatever the hell they want for whoever the hell they want, and rubber-stamp it however they want. Your participation or non-participation makes not a whit of difference to them, as far as policy goes. What's more, since we have a secret ballot, your voting affords you not even a degree of respect from your peers and/or neighbors. All that's affected by your voting is your own conscience. Vote (or don't vote) according to it alone.

(And besides, the places with the highest voting turnouts -- Saddam's Iraq had 99% or so; the USSR usually ran in the high 90's; etc; etc -- hardly have any legitimate claim to a "peoples' mandate")

________________________

Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining on a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master, though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her. - David Hume

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

OK, Rick, I'll give my vote to you. Tell me how to vote and why, convincingly, and I'll cast my vote for your candidate.

--Croakmore

Thanks for the offer, but you'll have to do some homework first: go to the Presidential Candidate Selector, spend a minute answering the questions, and check out the result. Then think about it for a few minutes and go through the questions again, slowly. I bet you'll find that one candidate separates a bit from the pack; and like most visitors to the site, it will probably be Cobb or Badnarik with a score around 55-60. I would be comfortable endorsing either of them.

As for myself, I will actually be canvassing door-to-door this Saturday for Kerry -- the first time in my life that I've ever done anything like that. I too am disturbed by Kerry's hawkish stance, but for me it all boils down to a single issue: energy independence.

Every single foreign and domestic policy decision should be oriented toward eliminating the need for oil imports within 5 years. Otherwise, we're going to be fighting, and losing, a war with China within 10 years.

Not coincidentally, this is the issue where the candidates show the sharpest differences. Bush himself represents virtually every possible wrong decision on this issue; Kerry is the only candidate that even remotely has the credibility to get this done. (Well, he and the guy who was elected President four years ago.)

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors.

HAR!

They're going to do whatever the hell they want for whoever the hell they want, and rubber-stamp it however they want. Your participation or non-participation makes not a whit of difference to them, as far as policy goes. What's more, since we have a secret ballot, your voting affords you not even a degree of respect from your peers and/or neighbors. All that's affected by your voting is your own conscience. Vote (or don't vote) according to it alone.

Oy, and I thought I was cynical.

Yes, voting is a personal matter, but a vote for a 3rd-party candidate is the closest we have to an official "None-Of-The-Above" vote. Do you seriously believe that the Dems and Repubs wouldn't do something different if Cobb or Badnarik suddenly won 20% of the vote, even in a single state?

Also, voter turnout suppression is the most visible aspect of the wider effort to suppress civic involvement in general, and publicly repudiating this by voting is a concrete way to begin rolling back all of the roadblocks to democratic participation.

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Yes, voting is a personal matter, but a vote for a 3rd-party candidate is the closest we have to an official "None-Of-The-Above" vote. Do you seriously believe that the Dems and Repubs wouldn't do something different if Cobb or Badnarik suddenly won 20% of the vote, even in a single state?

Other than work to:

- make it even harder for a thrid party candidate to get onto the ballot
or more likely
- bend their efforts towards co-opting the forms (though certainly not the substance) of the new opposition to attempt to subsume the uppity minority back into the fold?

No, probably not much else...

Also, voter turnout suppression is the most visible aspect of the wider effort to suppress civic involvement in general, and publicly repudiating this by voting is a concrete way to begin rolling back all of the roadblocks to democratic participation.

Allow me to rebut:

Channeling the individual's natural desire for civic involvement into the restricted form of voting from among a slate of Establishment-approved candidates is the most significant means used to-date of keeping the historically very powerful alternative means of civic involvement in check. After all, if You believe yourself to be 'in control of' the state, what inclination would you have to organize against it? Democracy is the most effective PR campaign ever waged by the ruling elite against their serfs. It beats the hell out of the "Divine Right of Kings" for plausibility.

______________________

"Power rests on nothing other than people's consent to submit, and each person who refuses to submit to tyranny reduces it by one two-hundred-and-fifty-millionth, whereas each who compromises only increases it." -- Vladimir Bulovskiy

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors.

HAR!

They're going to do whatever the hell they want for whoever the hell they want, and rubber-stamp it however they want. Your participation or non-participation makes not a whit of difference to them, as far as policy goes. What's more, since we have a secret ballot, your voting affords you not even a degree of respect from your peers and/or neighbors. All that's affected by your voting is your own conscience. Vote (or don't vote) according to it alone.

Oy, and I thought I was cynical.

Yes, voting is a personal matter, but a vote for a 3rd-party candidate is the closest we have to an official "None-Of-The-Above" vote. Do you seriously believe that the Dems and Repubs wouldn't do something different if Cobb or Badnarik suddenly won 20% of the vote, even in a single state?

Also, voter turnout suppression is the most visible aspect of the wider effort to suppress civic involvement in general, and publicly repudiating this by voting is a concrete way to begin rolling back all of the roadblocks to democratic participation.

Ross Perot certainly influenced Clinton's first term decisions, prodding him to decisions that partially layed the groundwork for the surplus that we enjoyed in the late 90s.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Yes, voting is a personal matter, but a vote for a 3rd-party candidate is the closest we have to an official "None-Of-The-Above" vote. Do you seriously believe that the Dems and Repubs wouldn't do something different if Cobb or Badnarik suddenly won 20% of the vote, even in a single state?

Other than work to:

- make it even harder for a thrid party candidate to get onto the ballot
or more likely
- bend their efforts towards co-opting the forms (though certainly not the substance) of the new opposition to attempt to subsume the uppity minority back into the fold?

No, probably not much else...

The substance of the new opposition is just as likely to get co-opted, since the 3rd-party voters are much less likely than the average voter to be swayed by mere shadows. So in this case co-opting represents progress.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Also, voter turnout suppression is the most visible aspect of the wider effort to suppress civic involvement in general, and publicly repudiating this by voting is a concrete way to begin rolling back all of the roadblocks to democratic participation.

Allow me to rebut:

Channeling the individual's natural desire for civic involvement into the restricted form of voting from among a slate of Establishment-approved candidates is the most significant means used to-date of keeping the historically very powerful alternative means of civic involvement in check.

So fine, don't vote for an "Establishment" candidate - how about Mike Bay of the National Barking Spider Resurgence?

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Originally Posted by Croakmore

From my take on the political leadership situation in this country, America is impoverished nearly beyond repair ? without a 4T Crisis, that is. Well, I say bring it on! Things have gotten so bad, politically speaking, that this November will be the first time in my adult life I will not vote for a presidential candidate.

I can understand your frustration; but if you don't vote, you get lumped in with the 40-45% of the population who (according to the pols) basically don't give a damn, and therefore get used as an excuse for the politicians to rubber-stamp whatever disastrous policies favor their rich donors. Essentially, non-voting gets counted as a vote for the continued duopoly.

I encourage you to find a candidate you can support out of the other couple dozen Presidential candidates on the ballot. SelectSmart's Presidential Candidate Selector is a good place to start; check out Vote Smart's comprehensive NPAT for detailed issue positions. So vote Cobb, or Badnarik, or Peroutka -- all of which have a chance to get at least a measurable percentage of the vote in Washington -- but for Cod's sake, vote!

Rick, I couldn't use the Candidate Selector -- it didn't ask questions I could answer. My positions didn't fit into the questions very well.

Originally Posted by William Jennings Bryan

Rick, I couldn't use the Candidate Selector -- it didn't ask questions I could answer. My positions didn't fit into the questions very well.

True, it's not perfect; I wound up answering "prefer different solutions" a lot. Still, it's just about the only place I found that more-or-less directly compares all the other candidates. (Cobb and Nader ended up as clear favorites for me.) I guess you'll have to slog through the individual issue statements at the VoteSmart NPAT.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Bush will win like stink.

Make plans for Jesus.

--Bro. Croakmore

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

The substance of the new opposition is just as likely to get co-opted, since the 3rd-party voters are much less likely than the average voter to be swayed by mere shadows. So in this case co-opting represents progress.

Historically, this has not been the case, and the nature of people and power hasn't changed enough to indicate that it might be any different these days.

So fine, don't vote for an "Establishment" candidate - how about Mike Bay of the National Barking Spider Resurgence?

And lend my support to a system I oppose? And make voting seem a more credible mode of 'civic involvement'? And help perpetuate the illusion that the desires of 'the people' matter to their rulers?
No thanks. If you play the game, you agree to abide by the outcome. I decline to give that consent. YMMV, of course.

_____________________

"Government cannot exist without the tacit consent of the populace. This consent is maintained by keeping people in ignorance of their real power. Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness, since it cannot do otherwise than reaffirm the government's supposed legitimacy." -- Fred Woodworth

Originally Posted by Justin '77

And lend my support to a system I oppose? And make voting seem a more credible mode of 'civic involvement'? And help perpetuate the illusion that the desires of 'the people' matter to their rulers?
No thanks. If you play the game, you agree to abide by the outcome. I decline to give that consent. YMMV, of course.

I'm not going to press the point any further -- mostly because I don't really disagree with you. If you are truly convinced of the injustice of the current system, and are working to do something about it, then don't vote. If that's the way you feel too, Croakmore, then so be it.

I was mainly objecting to those who use "they're all a bunch of poopyheads" as an excuse to avoid thinking about politics. Beware, if you say "a pox on both your houses", you too may wind up like Mercutio...

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

I was mainly objecting to those who use "they're all a bunch of poopyheads" as an excuse to avoid thinking about politics.

Fair enough; though I've yet to ever encounter someone who does that...

Beware, if you say "a pox on both your houses", you too may wind up like Mercutio...

There are worse ways to go. 8)

________________________

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg

Poopyheads, poxes, pretty haircuts, deck chairs on the Titanic -- if ya don't know how to spot icebergs or how to use yer communication equipment then how ya gonna make it through the night? Ya ain't, no matter how good yer haircut or how ya did or didn't serve in Vietnam.

Oh, Captain, my Captain, where art thou? I see growlers off the starboard bow.

--Croakmore

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Every single foreign and domestic policy decision should be oriented toward eliminating the need for oil imports within 5 years. Otherwise, we're going to be fighting, and losing, a war with China within 10 years.

why on earth would we be fighting a war against China at all? Yes, in case of a sharp drop in oil production as a result of the oil peak, both countries would be badly needing oil to operate their massive economies, and a war between them would only waste more oil for both. The "winner" of the war wouldn't be in control of any more oil, either. And don't think such a war could be fought in the middle east...the Chinese don't have the capability to project force that far abroad.

Welcome to T4T! 8)

Originally Posted by Harv

Originally Posted by Rick Hirst

Every single foreign and domestic policy decision should be oriented toward eliminating the need for oil imports within 5 years. Otherwise, we're going to be fighting, and losing, a war with China within 10 years.

why on earth would we be fighting a war against China at all? Yes, in case of a sharp drop in oil production as a result of the oil peak, both countries would be badly needing oil to operate their massive economies, and a war between them would only waste more oil for both. The "winner" of the war wouldn't be in control of any more oil, either. And don't think such a war could be fought in the middle east...the Chinese don't have the capability to project force that far abroad.

Short answer: it's the way of the saeculum.

Long answer: tensions have been escalating with China for some time. Oil supply is one issue; there's also outsourcing and the current account deficit, not to mention Taiwan and Tibet. We're on a collision course, and nothing I see in the current Administration's policies is moving us away from that collision.

Yes, of course it would collossally stupid to wage war with China, not the least because we are both nuclear powers. But we both have self-images that are explicitly imperialist, and that trend is only strengthening. Once the credit bubble bursts, tensions will continue to ratchet up until the unthinkable becomes thinkable. To be honest, I'm with the Frog on this one.