Lurker > red sox 777

No he isn't. He won't inspire the libertarian wing OR the social conservative wing to come out in numbers.

Everyone in both of those groups is already voting against Obama anyway, even with Romney. And as a libertarian, I (and probably others) certainly won't be voting for Gingrich or Santorum against Obama.

Furthermore, despite being obviously the "most moderate" there's no CHANCE he's going to convert any actual committed lefties or Democrats to cross-over.

No, but there are a lot of moderates in the country, and they are very unhappy with the economy. This is a huge group that hasn't made up its mind, making it the most important.

And no chance Obama wins as big as he did against McCain. That blowout happened because the election was right in the midst of the economic panic, and a very unpopular war. All Obama had to do was say "Change" and call his opponent "Bush III" and his victory was guaranteed.

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Because most people are not personally afraid of being assassinated by predator drones.

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The media is favoring him, but he really is the candidate most likely to win against Obama. The media is favoring him because he's the most similar to Obama and the most friendly to big corporations.

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Mitt Romney is winning in states like South Carolina because of LFF. If Santorum or Gingrich dropped out now, he'd very likely lose on saturday. In states like New Hampshire, he's simply the most popular candidate.

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Prediction:

Mitt Romney 32%
Newt Gingrich 30%
Ron Paul 20%
Rick Santorum 15%
Herman Cain (Stephen Colbert) 3%

I may be underestimating the ability of the Republican voters to fall in line, in which case Santorum gets less and Gingrich could win.

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Bring it on? I'd be happy with a longer primary season.

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LMS votes for OOT over CT? Why now of all times?

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CT
SSBM

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Or people could get mad at Wikipedia for shutting down, and tell their Congressman to vote for SOPA.

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If he had a military background, he would have understood that fighting an offensive conventional war against the US/West was suicidal. Don't think it would have happened unless his hand was forced (like the US inciting Mexico to attack us, and retaliating by seizing half of Mexico). But the chances of his hand being forced like that would be fairly high.

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I am not ENTIRELY convinced we would have ever gotten involved in a conventional war with Russia, short of Russia invading West Germany, and even then all that means is we probably would have nuked somewhere in Russia and then Russia would have nuked Germany(if they had them by the point).

Honestly, i think the Soviets were pretty happy with their spoils from WW2 and would have turned inward if not provoked. The outward looking wing of the party were led by Trotsky and were already purged by that point.

I meant if nobody had nukes at all, not just that they weren't used. And if someone started a war in that world, it would almost definitely have been us. We had the stronger conventional army, better technology, and a vastly larger economy/production base. The Soviet leaders were well aware of that, and would not have started a war they could not win, which in the best case for them would have them succeed in defending their lands. They could play their socialist world republic propaganda videos inside Communist nations while avoiding actual military confrontation with the US.

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Looking at the list on Google's site, and there's a lot of big companies against SOPA now. If it's a matter of lobbying, SOPA may be cooked.

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Nukes probably ended up preventing World War III from happening. It's hard to imagine a non-nuclear scenario in which the US and USSR don't go to war some time after 1945.

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I'd like to think that any reasonable president would reject such a plan. Like, I don't think you'd give Obama any points for turning down an adviser's suggestion to nuke Iran

This was before the USSR developed nukes, right? For a few years, we had the potential to go for world hegemony based on use of our superweapon. I'm glad we did not.

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This isn't exact so don't quote me on it, but there was some poll taken like five years AFTER the war and some 85% of the American population still thought dropping the nuke was absolutely unquestionably the right decision.

You'd probably still get a large majority to agree with that today if you ran that poll again.

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Also, I want to note that the Mongols, almost alone among the nations of their time, did not torture. They meted out death, but not torture.

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Why wouldn't we have Nintendo and Playstation? I mean, I know video games could be gone because of butterfly effect, but it doesn't seem that the atomic bombs made Nintendo/Sony making video games any more likely at the time.

I would rank the atom bombs at the same level as the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden (both of which killed more people than the atom bombs). On a similar level would be the Mongol genocide of Khorasan (Eastern Persia). These are brutal and highly effective ways of winning wars. These tactics are a big reason that the Allies won World War II.

I don't know if they can be considered moral in the interest of saving more lives, but I think this is a reality that we need to come to terms with. Fighting wars while attempting to protect the people of the nation we are attacking produces results like Vietnam and Iraq. Before we enter into a war, we should ask ourselves how far we are willing to go to win, and if the answer is not far enough to produce a win with which we would be satisfied, we should just avoid the war. We need to abandon the pretense that we can fight wars in which we lose little and the country we attack loses little, but only the regime we are toppling loses a lot.

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Buchanan was probably willing to let the South go. Lincoln also did not do anything to stop the Civil War.

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Also, I can't imagine Obama being a top 10 president, because he'd have to be extremely different from how he's been the first term. He's been an okay president, but hasn't accomplished anything exciting or made any genuinely big changes yet. Yes, what's missing is CHANGE.

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+Implement a tarriff so large on China that it's no longer feasible to have outsourced to china as money saver for companies.
+ If they call their debts because of that, nuke them. (actually, strike that. Don't "nuke" them. Just carpet bomb. No nukes. Just standard bombs.)

This is not nearly as bad as it sounds. China needs us more than we need them. This would be an attempt to bring China to the bargaining table, and extract some major concessions out of them.

Who gets hurt the most if the US and China put massive tariffs on each other? In the US, that would be the top 1% most of all, and then the middle class who could no longer buy super cheap goods. The bottom half may not be harmed at all, as manufacturing jobs return to the US. And China is not the only source of cheap labor in the world, our companies can easily relocate their workforce to other third world countries. It may take some time, but that's all it would take, so the upper half in America would not be utterly crippled either.

China, on the other hand, needs us far more. Without trade with the US, they have no buyers for the goods. You could get horrific economic collapse pretty quickly.

Also, China cannot call their debts, because the US is not late on any payments. And is not in danger of being late on any payments. War is of course a horrible idea, but there's no reason to do that.

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Be careful. If you label SOPA as the opposite of progression, that makes it sound like the opposite of progressivism. Which makes it conservative. Which will get half the country to support it.

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Not using emoticons is alpha? Well I like that!

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Do you think it's okay for lions to have sex with multiple female lions and murder other animals? Because that's well within their morality. Lions are acting under the same biological impulses (though perhaps more basic) that humans are.

That's not the question. The question is: if a lion were magically inserted into the body of a human, would it be okay for them to have sex with multiple mates?

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I'm sure some people thought slavery was bad back then. As I said before, "what society feels is right" is just an approximation of what everyone feels, and there's always going to be some disagreement.

So what is actually right is what each individual thinks? Well, that seems much better, though I've still got some reservations (i.e. Smuffin has said that people should be free to sell themselves into slavery if they wish- should we allow this as a society?) This boils down to the single moral absolute: do what you think is good.

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But then there is no morality at all beyond falling in line with society. What the majority says is good is good. For example, gay marriage must be bad because every time it comes up for a referendum, the voters reject it.

Even this does not get you away from a moral absolute: falling in line is good. And as far as moral absolutes go, I would not choose this one!

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Obviously it's not good from our perspective. Thoughts on slavery have changed. It was right to them.

If it was right to them, why bother ending slavery? Couldn't we have just kept on thinking slavery was good?

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People who want a religion with no history of war haven't really thought it through IMO. Christianity (and many other religions) claim to be ultimate truth. How could something as important as ultimate truth not produce loads of wars through 2000 years of history? People, nations, go to war frequently, and if something hasn't been fought over, it's probably because it's simply not important. And if a religion that claims itself to be ultimate truth were not important, then it couldn't be true.

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Let's go Team Refs

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If we take the log of GDP growth (since, as you know, in Economics, the first thing we try is taking the partial derivative, and if that doesn't work, we take the log and then try taking the derivative again), that model probably fits the end of the Ice Age very well!

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Very interesting. Leverage is of course correlated with GDP growth, which is HIGHLY correlated with CO2 emissions.

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Slippery slope (as I understand it) is a perfectly legitimate argument though. If some people use the name to identify bad reasoning, that doesn't mean anything. Slippery slope is saying: A is similar to B, which is similar to C, which is similar to D. Therefore, if we know that D is bad, we should suspect that A is also bad. Obviously if A is not similar to B, or B is not similar to C, or C is not similar to D, then the argument breaks down. But that would be more like a dry slope than a slippery one.

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Leftists don't understand that because they don't see why division of power would be good. Their thinking is that there can only be one correct approach, so that approach should be applied by one government to everyone.

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For the same reason that leftists are comfortable with handing more power to the UN, probably.

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I dunno what slippery slope argument you guys were talking about, but I was talking about the typical slippery slope that is used against gay marriage, which is "first gays, then animals, then computer chairs, etc." or "first interracial, then gays, then animals, etc."

Those aren't logic.

Sure they are, in two different ways. One, you can argue that society will likely keep moving to allowing more and more things unless action is taken at some point to stop them. Liberals seem to believe this almost as a matter of basic assumptions about the world, and it's not so unrealistic. Two, you can argue as Smuffin just did: if we don't restrict marriage on the basis of sex, why should we restrict on the basis of age? Or number of people in the marriage?

You can rebut these arguments with counterarguments, in which you distinguish the cases. You can argue that gay marriage is not the same as corporate marriage because of x, y, z.

The slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy unless applied in a very simple and stupid way.

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This is what liberals define as "bigoted"

Then it's a good thing I'm not a liberal. That's one of the worst beliefs I've ever seen.

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Slippery slope is legitimate, as long as it's used right. It's highly reasonable to think that if we allow socialism now, communism will follow later. That's not saying that socialists are communists.

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Under Smuffin's plan, everyone would have the same rights. He's calling for abolition of state marriage.

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Exactly how does the department of education benefit you?

They educate people, resulting in a more productive workforce and a larger economy. More selfishly, they give me money. Of course, you can argue that if it did not exist, the private sector would do both of these things, so perhaps the DoE doesn't really benefit us after all.

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Lincoln was definitely the most controversial president ever.

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Yes - 36
No - 51

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That graph is......surprising. The president's approval rating has correlated very well with the inverse of stock prices for the past 10 years. As the stock market rose through most of Bush's presidency, his approval rating plummeted. Then came the crash, and a couple months later, Obama's election, upon which the approval rating rocketed upward. As the market came back some in the past 3 years, Obama's approval rating dropped.

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History will probably remember Obama as an okay president. Or maybe he'll be remembered as the indirect founder of the Tea Party.

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Yes - 25
No - 44

This is quite the change from when Yoblazer ran this a few years ago. These results are looking more like the traditional results for "Are you a Christian?"

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If Peyton Manning did it, it wouldn't be stat padding, would it?

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Yes - 22
No - 34

No is taking a commanding lead.

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35-7 looks like over?

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By the way, I just looked at Paul Krugman's blog, and he is now writing 3 or 4 posts per day criticizing Mitt Romney. I find it.......interesting.......that this Nobel laureate is spending so much time doing this.

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Also, I saw a recent poll with Paul at 20% in South Carolina. If he can get a few more points and pull off the upset, this could get very very interesting.

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Why not vote for the honest candidate, right? I applaud Mitt Romney for opening proclaiming that corporations are people.

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