SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Melanie Tannenbaum has written several interesting blog posts about ambiguity intolerance and its connection to the early popular support Donald Trump is currently enjoying. Roughly speaking, people who are not comfortable without a plan of action or a path forward are said to have more ambiguity intolerance.
What may be surprising, however, is the research showing that people high in ambiguity intolerance feel so profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of uncertainty, they will often prefer a slightly negative yet certain outcome to a potentially-more-positive, uncertain one. In other words, people may find Donald Trump to be disagreeable, abrasive, or downright unlikeable. But because of his reputation for "telling it like it is" and "being honest to a fault," they also feel certain that they can believe Trump when he says he's telling the truth.
Tannenbaum points out that despite a record of Trump making contradictory comments in the past, people tend to believe his convictions on what he says because nobody would say those "non-normative" things if they really didn't believe it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RedBear on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:38AM
This seems like a good place to drop a link to Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians. http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ [umanitoba.ca]
What I loved about this book was that the author was very clear about what his statistical studies showed, and what they DID NOT show. Basically half the book is him explaining in great detail how stupid you are if you jump to conclusion X from the ABC data he presents, because ABC doesn't prove X in the slightest. It's very entertaining. He really seems to grasp just how limited statistical studies of sociological traits are, and how tricky they are to do correctly.
Nevertheless, after decades of painstaking analysis Altemeyer is able to present a very insightful picture of exactly how the mind of someone high on the "Right Wing Authoritarian" scale works. After reading and digesting most of this book, I have not been surprised in the slightest that Trump immediately jumped out ahead of the pack and remains far ahead of even his closest rival in a pack of 17 candidates. Because what the conservative mindset wants most is decisive leadership. It doesn't matter exactly where the leader is leading so much as long as he's being decisive and "not putting up with anybody's crap" and things like that. Nothing that comes out of Trump's mouth needs to actually make any sense, he just needs to be perceived as strong, honest, leadership material. His competitors hedge and hem and haw and dodge questions all day long, which just makes conservatives see them all as wishy-washy and untrustworthy. What their actual political positions happen to be is far less important to the conservative base.
As the book says, we are all somewhere on the RWA scale. But those who score near the top of the scale have terrible problems with identifying logical fallacies. If they agree with the conclusion, they believe the logic must be correct, no matter how flawed it may be. They also really dislike any kind of ambiguity. Doesn't matter what the decision is, but SOMEBODY NEEDS TO MAKE A DECISION RIGHT NOW, BY GOD! That's why even conservatives who dislike Trump as a person still approve of him as a possible leader.
If you are among the many people that are eternally amazed at the twisted logic, or complete lack thereof, among extreme right wingers, just read this book. Everything should become much clearer. If you wonder why certain people get so angry about anything that they perceive as political correctness, just read the book. If you wonder why conservatives always seem to be angry and ready to threaten violence over any particular issue at the drop of a hat, just read the book.
In fact, if you are capable of reading, read this book.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:09AM
I don't know anything about the author and I'm minutes away from sleep, but i read your post, followed the link, and thought I would add that the book is available as a free pdf download there
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 19 2015, @09:58AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:52PM
Thanks for that. I thought about mentioning it but ultimately forgot. I'll remember next time. Nothing like shouting "hey, free stuff" to get people interested. I know I probably wouldn't have read it myself if it weren't a free download.
That being said, if you have plenty of pocket change then buying a bound copy of that book to give to everyone you know would be an excellent way to invest in the survival of your country's democracy. Which country you happen to live in is irrelevant.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @09:09PM
Oh, but it is relevant. Many of the European countries of the present would read it and barely recognize the authoritarian reactions in their societies (UK being an exception). This is why extreme right/nationalist parties rarely get more than 15-20% percent of the votes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:23AM
Interesting that the climate change sides have this exactly reversed. Does Altemeyer deal with that issue at all?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:26PM
Not a bad post - although I disagree with your mindset, and your approach. Yes, I was trained to "do something, right or wrong". People in general do indeed prefer a plain spoken individual who speaks his mind. When action is required, they want a leader who can act, instead of spending weeks apologizing for the necessity of action. They especially love a leader who can admit when he was wrong, and take responsibility for screwing up. That's why Reagan was elected, IMHO.
I'm curious though. If a woman gets elected, her spouse would be the First Gentleman, I presume. If Trump gets elected, we'll have a First Toupé? This Newspeak Newgender shit confuses the hell out of me.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:13PM
Unless you're making unwarranted assumptions, you don't know what my mindset is, at least not from that post. I was just relaying the conclusions of the author, which come as close to being data-based independently-reproducible facts as social science allows. I did mention, as the author does, that we are all somewhere on the RWA scale. I have no doubt that there are many on the liberal side who would find me still far too high up the scale.
The author also notes that his decades of data showed that whenever adverse events happen to any given individual or to the society as a whole, people tend to quickly climb the RWA scale, and that there is an unfortunate tendency for people to get "stuck" the higher up the scale they went. It's really quite an enlightening book, and very meaningful for the survival of democracy.
I feel it's also important to point out that his definition of "Right Wing Authoritarian" doesn't just apply to the people we refer to as "right-wingers" in our current political climate. There are plenty on the far left who are also prone to falling under the spell of a strong authoritarian leader. This is all described much more clearly in the book, of course.
Indeed. Also easily explains why Perry's ratings held steady or went up after he had a complete brain fart on stage during the Republican debates. The conservative base enjoyed the fact that he screwed up royally, "just like any normal person". It was far less important that he had no bloody idea what he was talking about.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @11:07AM
which come as close to being data-based independently-reproducible facts as social science allows.
Which isn't much. The science may be hard, but that is no reason to lower our standards and pretend that bad and/or inconclusive science is actually good.
(Score: 2) by albert on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:46PM
Liberals took a chance on Obama last time. He's not quite a clone of George Bush. Had they chosen a liberal equivalent of Trump (less desirable-seeming but more certain) then they'd not have ended up with a near-clone of George Bush.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:35PM
What I find eternally fascinating is the implication that, if we hadn't taken a chance on Obama and instead voted Republican, we would somehow have wound up with someone who wasn't an even more authoritarian clone of GWB. How that's supposed to work is beyond me, when the entire Republican party just keeps moving further to the right. If Obama is GWB+, a Republican would have obviously been GWB++.
Every election today is a function of choosing the least-worst option.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by albert on Thursday August 20 2015, @02:53AM
Obama could've been stopped in the first primary.
McCain was no GWB clone. He lost because the republican was destined to lose. Some people, maybe including you, just can't see past the "R".
Obama could've been tossed out. By that point, you knew he was a near-clone of George Bush. If you are a chance-taking sort of person (not a Trump-liker) then tossing out Obama was the obvious choice.
You seem to equate being authoritarian, republican, "the right", and "worst option". I don't think that is so clear. I see plenty of authoritarian awfulness from the democrats. They want to take away guns, infringe on private property rights over stuff like the presence of woodpeckers (not that there is any woodpecker shortage or need), prevent you from working unless a portion of your pay goes toward a union (which conveniently funds democrats), and prevent low-value workers from being able to get hired. These days you can't really even start a new cranberry farm because you can't modify a wetland and that is where cranberries need to grow. I've known people who had to commute to multiple jobs because authoritarian policy imposed by democrats made employers unable to remain competitive while having full-time employees. Nearly the ultimate authoritarian act is to take somebody's children away, and here too it is the democrats who are most enthusiastic. Taking money away is pretty authoritarian, and it's the democrats who are more tax-prone. In comparison, the republicans are pretty mild. There is a bit of tough-on-crime posturing, and of course the stuff shared with democrats, but otherwise not much.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Thursday August 20 2015, @10:48PM
I really shouldn't, but I guess it's good mental exercise:
I try very hard to maintain myself in the center and choose whatever seems to be the least horrible option, as I said. I am registered non-partisan (or one of the other options that means the same thing, can't recall), after having been registered Republican for many years primarily because my parents were Republican. In my observation over the last 20 years or so the Republicans do nothing but toe the party line, no matter how moderate they may be in general. They have to do this in order to avoid losing access to the conservative base. But as a result the whole party just keeps swinging further and further to the right, and pandering to ridiculous outlying interests like religious fundamentalists that can't seem to comprehend exactly why the founding fathers implemented separation of church and state. I would not like to live in a theocracy, thankyouverymuch. I don't see anyone on the other side advocating the use of any known religious text to govern America.
Republicans are the ones that keep voting against equal pay for women. Republicans are the ones who keep voting against feeding poor children in schools, and against feeding people in general who are having difficulty getting access to enough food. Republicans are the ones who don't believe an American worker should be paid enough money from a full-time job to eat and pay rent and feed and clothe a couple of children. Republicans keep denying that global warming even exists, much less that we should be doing anything about it. Republicans keep wasting millions of dollars in my tax money trying fruitlessly over and over again to rescind the Affordable Care Act even though the whole thing was originally their (Romney's) idea and the American people in general are quite happy with it, including a majority of Republican voters. Republicans did everything they could to keep a few gay people from being able to marry, get insurance benefits and see their loved ones in the hospital before they die after decades of happy marriage. Republicans are wasting additional millions of dollars of my taxes implementing voter ID laws that they themselves have been caught admitting in public were just designed to keep Democratic voters from voting. Republicans are the ones trying to outlaw unions so that even if you want to unionize to negotiate better treatment or better pay, you can't.
Republicans are the ones who proudly state on national television that we should refuse to feed hungry children until their bellies are bloated like starving Ethiopian children on the brink of death from malnutrition.
I could go on and on. In short, the Republican party has been acting for a long time in a way that seems to me to be cruel, bigoted, illogical and insane in many different ways. Until they swing back toward the center and have some rational viewpoints, there is no way I can vote Republican no matter how "moderate" one candidate like McCain appears. And his chosen running mate was and is one of the most nutty, ignorant, far-right conservatives I've ever seen. My former Governor. He'd have had a much better chance without that loon ruining the party.
Every time someone objects to something about the Obama administration, I try to imagine what a Republican administration would have done in the same circumstances. I cannot imagine any more positive outcome from a Republican being in charge, and can usually imagine that it would be much worse. More spying on Americans, more war, less affordable health care, less progress on equal rights, more national debt (from waging endless war of course) and much less progress in recovering from what was nearly a modern-day Great Depression, etcetera. Pick nearly any aspect of what's been going on the last several years and you will have a difficult time convincing me that a Republican president would have magically made it all better instead of much worse.
You have your perspective and I have mine. From my perspective the current crop of Republican candidates are so ludicrously insane and hateful that the opposing party could put up an actual talking parrot and I'd be forced to vote for it just to help make sure we don't put an extreme right wing president in the Oval Office. You're failing to understand that it really doesn't matter how bad the Democratic option is, as long as the Republican option keeps being worse. Just bouncing back and forth between the two parties each election cycle accomplishes nothing. The entire country, including many Republican voters, want the Republican party to come back toward the center so they can start fielding candidates that have a snowball's chance of actually winning a general election. The only way to get them to come back to center is to make sure they keep losing elections until they break down and reform as a party. Meanwhile the Democrats are doing relatively OK as far as I'm concerned, and nobody is coming to take my guns. I'll let you know when they do.
(Score: 2) by albert on Friday August 21 2015, @02:12AM
I too am registered non-partisan. When the election isn't a close race, I often vote 3rd party. I agree it really is about the least horrible option, and that a theocracy would be pretty horrible.
It seems to me that, contrary to your stated distaste for authoritarianism, you are taking numerous authoritarian positions.
You're expecting the government to enforce some sort of standard for pay. We already have too many authoritarian rules about that. Basically it is price controls. Government intervention here should be limited to preventing fraud and possibly ensuring predictability.
You are rightly concerned about people not being able to afford basic things, but you're looking at the wrong side of the problem. Ever wonder why it is that our cost of living is so high? It's authoritarian government again. People elsewhere live on about $2 per day, but that doesn't work in the USA due to all the regulation. It's not legal to build a low-cost house or sell a low-cost meal in the USA. In this case it isn't a price control but rather a set of for-your-own-good rules. Letting people decide these things for themselves would be far less authoritarian. I'm partly guilty of this one myself; for example I like banning trans fats, which is clearly a cost-increasing authoritarian choice.
It's authoritarian to **force** a business to provide service to gay events. The classic example is massive government-imposed fines against a baker who is uncomfortable making a gay wedding cake. The baker is only chosen out of cruelty anyway; there are numerous other bakers who would love the business.
The proper response to the voter ID idea is to ensure that basic government ID is free. The fact that democrats instead simply oppose the ID requirements shows that they indeed want ineligible people to vote. BTW, you need ID to do lots of things. Any adult who could legitimately get an ID but fails to do so is an adult who can't think/plan well enough to usefully vote.
Republicans are not trying to outlaw unions, at least in the private sector. (the public sector is different; the voters are ultimately responsible for working conditions) What the republicans seek to eliminate are rotten and very authoritarian laws that enforce a private income tax against the workers, the proceeds of which will be used to support political causes that the workers often oppose. Paying union dues against my will would make my blood boil. It's pretty much official legislated corruption.
The republicans would still let you pay union dues if you wish. (good) They'd even let unions strike, which I think is pretty horrid: if you don't like the terms you should leave; we punish businesses when they abuse monopoly power and we should do likewise for unions. Monopoly abuse is a market failure; the free market has fallen off track and needs to be put back. When a union strikes, it is abusing a monopoly just as much as when Microsoft forces PC builders to buy Windows for every machine sold.
Health care is of course expensive largely because of authoritarian rules. For example, you can't just install and operate an MRI. You have to show need. To determine this, the government will ask... your competitors!!! I'm serious. No joke. You also can't turn away somebody who didn't pay you last time, even if they had the money to do so and simply didn't feel like paying. Again, I'm not kidding. These sorts of authoritarian rules jack up the prices. Recent heath care law changes don't solve these problems. They hide them and help preserve them.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:04AM
Oh yes, the old "regulation ruins everything and the free market will magically fix everything". I don't buy it, and I haven't bought it for a long time. The free market is a mythical creature that only exists in textbooks, like the perfect circle. Not in nature. Some regulations are bad. Many regulations are good, and necessary. You can't just say that all regulations are bad, or that regulation is the root cause of all social or economic problems. It's like saying that internal combustion engines would be way more efficient if they didn't have carburetors. Regulations need to be fair and balanced, not nonexistent.
Cost of living is too high because wages for the bottom 50% of the population have stagnated for nearly 35 years even as productivity kept climbing, while income for everyone above that either held steady or outpaced inflation. Started right about when the "trickle-down economics" mythos was invented, oddly enough. That's another thing I've never actually observed functioning in nature. And in every place where they've raised the minimum wage the results have been positive, completely contrary to every fearmongering Republican/conservative claim that it will cause widespread unemployment and corporate bankruptcy. The economic events of the last 35 years shows me that the free market is a farce.
I may be pulling a bit of a "No True Scotsman" fallacy here, but you seem to be speaking of authoritarianism in a very general way as if anything any government ever does besides sitting on its hands not regulating or enforcing anything is authoritarian. Meanwhile I'm speaking of Authoritarianism, those who are really high on the Right Wing Authoritarian scale (as described in Altemeyer's book) who give those in authority a free pass to break any and all laws, violate human rights, ignore constitutional rights, and establish true totalitarian regimes. Having a local democratic government appropriately enforcing our constitutional rights to equal protection under the law, to be served by a public business and not discriminated against as a member of an entire class of people, is not that sort of Authoritarianism.
We don't have to choose between total anarchy and totalitarianism. That's a false dichotomy. Things work out pretty good somewhere in the middle.
BTW, I really don't understand why it's so confusing that if you open a business that serves the public you have an obligation to serve everyone who comes in the door, whether they're black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, gay, straight, male, female or what have you. If you don't actually want to indiscriminately serve the public, don't have a business that is open to the public. It's really got squat to do with the fact that it was a gay wedding. That business owner would have gotten the same fine if she were shown to be discriminating against and refusing to serve Muslims (or Christians) or any other entire class of people.
Uh huh. Really. Chosen out of cruelty. Because all queers are just evil monsters needlessly thrusting their "lifestyle choice" on the rest of us, right? And all those uppity black people in the South during the 60s should have just gone to that equally nice diner right across the street that didn't have the "No Coloreds" sign in the window. And used the identical, fully functional drinking fountain that is always kept in good repair, just like the whites-only drinking fountain. And gone to the other doctor in the next building that will see negroes any day of the week instead of just for two hours on Wednesday mornings. And gotten on the alternate bus that lets black people sit in the front and makes whites sit in the back. Right? Yeah, that worked out real good for millions of black people in the South. Oh, wait... No, no, it really didn't. We finally ended up having to pass anti-discrimination and anti-segregation laws, and resort to, of all things, enforcing them.
Conservatives, I have noticed, frequently have this mystical idea that there is always some equally appropriate, competent and affordable local business available nearby to serve anyone who is discriminated against. I have not observed this to be a valid assumption in the real world. If you allow discrimination, it frequently results in most or all of the local businesses discriminating identically against the same class of people. I always have to wonder how people like you would react to a business discriminating against all whites, or heterosexuals, or Christians, for instance. Would the light bulb go on finally, or would you find the comparison between discriminating against heterosexuals and discriminating against homosexuals totally irrelevant because "gays don't need more rights than the rest of us" or some such illogical BS.
Cost is only part of the issue. Cost is quite onerous in some jurisdictions, which is a major problem. Other issues are the fact that the voting is held only during weekday working hours and people can only obtain government IDs during weekday working hours, at locations far away from where they live and work. Frequently low-income people, many of whom happen to be Democrats, are unable to either get time off from work to get the ID or unable to get time off to vote, or both, without risking their conservative boss firing them on the spot. Having government ID be free and having laws that require people be given appropriate time off work for voting, or holding voting on the weekend like other rational countries do would solve most of that issue. If Republicans had any actual integrity and belief in American democracy, they would do everything in their power to make sure the voter ID requirements aren't unequally targeting non-Republican voters, and would advocate weekend and multi-day voting periods. I've never observed them doing any such thing. Only the exact opposite.
But very importantly there is no actual evidence of any statistically relevant voter fraud in this country. So the whole thing always has been and always will be a huge waste of public funds deliberately designed to impact as many non-Republican voters as possible. I find that mind-numbingly unacceptable.
Uh, no, it shows no such thing. It shows that they believe, as I do, that the requirements are overly onerous and completely unnecessary. Again, there is no statistically relevant evidence of voter fraud anywhere in the US that could have ever affected even the closest election we've ever had, and certainly no statistically relevant evidence of illegal aliens or any other unqualified voters attempting to vote in national elections. This is always implied by Republicans to be some terribly widespread and important issue that would somehow affect our elections, but it is completely unsupportable, and they dodge every question where someone asks how many fraudulent voters have been found.
There is no huge Democratic conspiracy to register illegal voters. That's Republican fearmongering nonsense, and one more reason I can't vote for any Republican.
This is a very common and disturbingly elitist attitude I see from way too many conservatives. Incredibly disrespectful of your fellow citizens constitutional RIGHTS. Another reason I refuse to vote for any Republican, since this attitude seems to be shared by all Republicans. You think you have the right to declare that someone else can't possibly make the "correct" decision at the polls, so they shouldn't be allowed to vote. That arrogant attitude is unacceptable to me and one of the signs that conservatives are rank hypocrites and don't actually want to live in a democracy where people might be allowed to vote contrary to what the conservatives want.
It's soooo interesting that you don't see all these new onerous an expensive-to-implement voter ID requirements as "government regulation".
I see, Walker gets a free pass because he only outlawed unions for public workers. Even though the government is usually one of the largest employers in any given area and the public have only a very tenuous and indirect control over what government workers are paid or what benefits and general treatment they receive. Nice.
Every Republican I've ever seen has at least expressed sentiments that all unions and especially strikes should be outlawed, in both the public and private space. As you have basically just done, with your "unions are abusive monopolies" argument. I've also never seen a Republican show any interest in cracking down on actual abusive monopoly corporations. But unions? Bring out the pitchforks and torches. How dare you citizens cooperatively demand better pay or working conditions? Bunch of filthy communist scum. You should all be shot or imprisoned. Maybe both.
This is a continuation of the typical Republican/conservative nonsense idea that throwing away all regulation and relying on the mythical "free market" will just magically fix everything. "Regulations" do not explain why health care costs continue to be drastically lower in all other first world nations, for identical operations, medications and equipment, and statistically superior health outcomes across the board. They have plenty of government regulations.
Pull another one.
If you really want to live in a society where we check your bank account balance and take a deposit before helping you medically, I pity you. I hope you never get stuck in one of those hospitals that has been caught routinely sticking destitute patients in taxis and having them dumped on the street in front of a skid row homeless shelter, still wearing a hospital gown, just because they don't have enough money. Other developed nations rightfully see this sort of behavior as horrifyingly evil. But then, other nations don't run the healthcare industry on a for-profit basis, because that's considered insane and inhuman.
(Score: 2) by albert on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:21AM
Heck no. Free markets self-destruct in the absence of regulation. The ideal is to use the minimum amount of regulation required to prevent this. The obvious is stopping monopolies. We also need to stop various kinds of fraud, including simple stuff like false advertising. We also need to push the cost of externalities like pollution back onto the guilty parties.
Natural monopolies sadly require much more strict regulation or even full government control.
You're still focusing on income. Stagnation isn't all that bad unless you are into jealousy. (not that we wouldn't all like to be rich) The real problem is that the affordable things sold half a century ago are no longer legal to sell in this country.
We're competing with India, where you can buy a tuk-tuk for 125000 rupee ($1888).
Look, my grandparents have a 4-bedroom house on a quiet street in the middle of San Francisco. They paid a 4-digit price, but today that house would have a 7-digit price. Even if you could get the land for free, and you adjusted for inflation, you still couldn't get a similar house for that price today. You can blame wealthy people for bidding up the price of land, but not so much for the rest. It's building codes and zoning laws imposed to keep out the rif-raf and their shacks.
In every case that I'm aware of, the business owner was happy to serve every kind of person but not every kind of occasion. They were not discriminating against people, only purposes. They'd gladly bake a graduation cake for a gay person, and would refuse to make a gay-celebrating cake even if the buyer wasn't actually gay.
It's interesting to note that flipping this around has been tried. Gay bakers do refuse to bake things for the opposition. Why should they get a pass?
Also, do you think a KKK member should be able to demand that a black lesbian jew bake him a cake with a confederate flag or a swastika? Can you be fair about this, or is it only conservative people who should be forced to violate their deeply held beliefs?
What about NAMBLA? Can they get a cake too? Would you be willing to bake it?
I'm used to it. Whites and Asians are normally discriminated against for college admissions and scholarships. Your idea that racial discrimination has been made illegal is laughable. I wish it were true, especially for public institutions. Note that here we aren't dealing with people running universities being members of a religion that calls for discrimination against whites, so the situation is dramatically different from the cake baking.
I even got excluded from summer science stuff in high school. They listed various groups who could attend. It was a decently long list that could have been dramatically simplified by flipping it around to list who was excluded. They didn't do that of course because it would have laid bare the discrimination: no white males allowed.
Those are indeed other issues. They don't relate to ID requirements. I'd gladly choose a week of voting in place of dangerously insecure absentee and internet voting. There is a cost issue though, and I think most places rely on volunteers to help manage the voting places.
"There are undetected people voting." --> "Prove it!" --> "Seriously??? They are undetected!"
You're asking for something impossible. It's not reasonable. Making a solid effort to eliminate voter fraud is reasonable.
I expect you also draw the line somewhere. There are people with the intellectual abilities of 2-year-olds and worse.
In any case, there is no such constitutional right. Requiring payment for an ID would violate the 24th amendment. Assuming ID is free, there is no violation. Heck, states need not even let people vote! The constitution (amendments really) just prevents various kinds of discrimination. It doesn't actually say you get to vote, except for Washington D.C. residents.
I do see it as government regulation. That is a big downside, but one of the most important functions of government is fraud prevention.
Republicans don't usually seem to be quite that hostile to unions, though I nearly am. There is no avoiding the fact that it is horrifically unethical to force a company to divert a portion of every paycheck to an entity that is hostile to the company and very often hostile to the employees as well. That is a private income tax. It even comes with a huge helping of corruption, paying a kickback to the democratic party.
I'm happy that only one of the people I really know has been stuck with a union. It feels wrong to him, but he has no choice. The most notable thing the union has done is to cause a game of musical chairs with people's jobs. One facility got shut down. Everybody there with seniority got to pick jobs at other sites, kicking less senior people out of those jobs. Those people then in turn did likewise. It kept going until lots of people had changed jobs and the least-senior people got left out. Note that there is nothing here about worker performance. It's just pure seniority. Forcing a business to be run in such a stupid way is really disgusting. This does not help to make our country competitive.
If you throw away all regulation, the free market will self-destruct. We're actually missing a bit of regulation that we need, mainly related to price disclosures and preventing insurance companies from influencing the cash price. Since the free market is totally unable to operate when a person is in a genuine emergency, that probably should be fully government funded. The free market also does a rather poor job with disease that could harm other people, so I'd be happy to see that fully covered. You can shop around for your cancer treatment or accept that your time is up.
Those countries with low-cost health care allow all sorts of things that are not permitted in the USA. There isn't a strangely enforced limit on doctor education. (in the US, numbers are purposely limited in order to keep prices high) Lots of patents just get ignored. All sorts of low-cost equipment can be used and reused.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Saturday August 22 2015, @10:40AM
Your pretzel logic and paranoid delusions are really quite amazing. We have to do something about undetected (and undetectable) voter fraud that simply must exist because you say so, and it's unreasonable to want evidence? Absentee voting is "dangerously insecure"? What, is ISIS sending in absentee votes from the Middle East? Undetectably? Amazing.
You acknowledge that regulations are necessary but still go around implying that government regulation is ruining everything everywhere all the time. Fascinating.
Really, it has no relevance to cost of living that most American workers effectively got a yearly pay cut for the last three decades while the upper third got raises every year and can afford houses just fine? Truly fascinating.
Dying of cancer doesn't qualify as a "genuine emergency"? Wut? (Not that I'm really surprised.)
Mouth agape. Seriously.
I don't like Affirmative Action or corrupt unions either, but that isn't a thousandth of what I'd need to start voting Republican. If you're just going to start breaking out conspiracy theories about the number of doctors being deliberately and artificially limited (by government regulation, I suppose) to keep US health care costs sky high, there's really no point in prolonging this conversation. I'm too tired to keep up with these sorts of mental acrobatics.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by albert on Saturday August 22 2015, @06:07PM
It's well known. Here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread675073/pg1 [abovetopsecret.com]
Sure, the link is indirect. The government won't let just anybody run a school for doctors or claim to be a doctor. To do that, you must satisfy the AMA. They impose the limit. It's effectively government-imposed though because without the AMA's blessing you don't do doctor stuff.
The discovery of cancer is very serious, but it isn't like a stroke or a severed femoral artery. You can call around, make appointments, and think about how you want to deal with the matter. This is anything but an emergency. It's less of an emergency than slicing open your hand, even if it is ultimately more serious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:44PM
Thank you, excellent book!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:36AM
You are completely ignoring Leftist Authoritarians. They exist. Did you forget 20th C. history or were you being intellectually dishonest?
"If you are among the many people that are eternally amazed at the twisted logic, or complete lack thereof, among extreme right wingers, just read this book. Everything should become much clearer. "
I've read the book many times. It applies very well to both Right and Left Authoritarians. If you choose to limit your thinking to simple Left and Right political paradigms you do yourself a disservice and worse you will end up being somebody's Useful Idiot.
Do you know what this term means "Useful Idiot"?