Selling my Dodge :(
#41
05-04-2016, 08:21 PM
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I was in a very nice high school 5 years ago. Things are different, gone are the days of shop and auto classes, so think what happened to what anyone else used to learn. It's unfortunate since most of what you learn for your job is on the job, not grades or classes in school.
As for the OP: Sell it to someone who loves it!
As for the OP: Sell it to someone who loves it!
#42
05-04-2016, 09:01 PM
"None of the above" only wins if it gets more votes, too. That's the part I was talking about. You want one, you got one. It's just spelled differently.
Voting for a duopoly party, rather than just effectively voting for the candidate I like least, would be directly voting for the one I like least. I fail to see any actual difference. There may be one if I were egotistical enough to associate myself with a candidate just because he or she might win, but it doesn't take much brain to figure out that the outcome of an election isn't any reflection upon me at all so I'd have to be delusional to believe otherwise. And if it's not self-evident that this is true, as I believe it should be, I can argue that it is the correct view with reliance upon facts and data. For example:
It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is true because we all at least should have learned in high school that the stated intent of the Constitution was to thwart the democratic impulses of the electorate so it would be unable to diminish the power of the elites to set policy. There's no supposition at all in that statement -- we know what the framers did and why they did it and the arguments that were heard before they decided to do it because they wrote it all down with their own pens, and they certified as accurate and complete the minutes of the Constitutional Convention. I'm not promoting some radical view of history. What they wrote was that their intent was to isolate the government from the will of the people because, as Alexander Hamilton wrote:
Something else we learned in high school: The Declaration Of Independence is what catalyzed the revolution and motivated the British people of the colonies to violently overthrow their government, but the Declaration is not the law of the land. The Constitution, written a decade later, is. My revolutionary grandfather (whose name was Nathaniel) went to war because he believed that all are created equal and have some wonderful and inalienable rights that any legitimate form of government will promote and defend, and that any form government that is injurious to those ends rightly deserves to be altered or abolished. But then a decade later it was decided that all are not equal, and it is not the government's place to secure for its citizens life, liberty, and conditions promoting happiness.
I'm not even making up the part about my revolutionary grandfather's motive. The national archive (now online at archive.gov) contains letters that passed between my revolutionary grandfather and George Washington over a number of years, from the time of the revolution itself through the formation of the second government and Washington's election as President.
The Declaration made promises that the two governments intentionally broke. Some of us are still a little bit pissed off about that.
Which has f-all to do with a guy having sold his old truck, so I'm going to try to just let it be now. Thanks for a fun discussion, folks.
Voting for a duopoly party, rather than just effectively voting for the candidate I like least, would be directly voting for the one I like least. I fail to see any actual difference. There may be one if I were egotistical enough to associate myself with a candidate just because he or she might win, but it doesn't take much brain to figure out that the outcome of an election isn't any reflection upon me at all so I'd have to be delusional to believe otherwise. And if it's not self-evident that this is true, as I believe it should be, I can argue that it is the correct view with reliance upon facts and data. For example:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
That's from the lead-in of a study recently (in 2014) conducted by some guys who've devoted their professional careers to the study and analysis of politics and decision making, and it's backed by data. Not perfect data, since none exists, but darn good data, and it's the first time anyone ever actually did a data driven impartial analysis using scientific methods to discover what the data actually tell us about how our government actually responds to the competing interests of the classes. You can read it for yourself in the PDF here. If you're not into that kind of reading, just skip to the last couple of pages before the endnotes and read the summary.It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is true because we all at least should have learned in high school that the stated intent of the Constitution was to thwart the democratic impulses of the electorate so it would be unable to diminish the power of the elites to set policy. There's no supposition at all in that statement -- we know what the framers did and why they did it and the arguments that were heard before they decided to do it because they wrote it all down with their own pens, and they certified as accurate and complete the minutes of the Constitutional Convention. I'm not promoting some radical view of history. What they wrote was that their intent was to isolate the government from the will of the people because, as Alexander Hamilton wrote:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.
Our modern elites didn't corrupt the system. The system isn't even corrupt. It is working as intended. It effectively thwarts the democratic impulses of the people because that's precisely what it was designed to do by the elites of two and a half centuries ago.Something else we learned in high school: The Declaration Of Independence is what catalyzed the revolution and motivated the British people of the colonies to violently overthrow their government, but the Declaration is not the law of the land. The Constitution, written a decade later, is. My revolutionary grandfather (whose name was Nathaniel) went to war because he believed that all are created equal and have some wonderful and inalienable rights that any legitimate form of government will promote and defend, and that any form government that is injurious to those ends rightly deserves to be altered or abolished. But then a decade later it was decided that all are not equal, and it is not the government's place to secure for its citizens life, liberty, and conditions promoting happiness.
I'm not even making up the part about my revolutionary grandfather's motive. The national archive (now online at archive.gov) contains letters that passed between my revolutionary grandfather and George Washington over a number of years, from the time of the revolution itself through the formation of the second government and Washington's election as President.
The Declaration made promises that the two governments intentionally broke. Some of us are still a little bit pissed off about that.
Which has f-all to do with a guy having sold his old truck, so I'm going to try to just let it be now. Thanks for a fun discussion, folks.
#44
05-04-2016, 10:23 PM
Grand Champion
So there are in fact ways that we can express our dreadful democratic impulses that the establishment can do nothing about, and we really only get bent over because we tolerate it. As that great poet Thomas Jefferson once wrote, and you may even have read:
"... all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed".
All experience still shows that. Guess he knew what he was talkin' about.
#46
05-04-2016, 11:10 PM
Grand Champion
#48
05-05-2016, 04:35 PM
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