The Shrine

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/ ... index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,1 ... 90,00.html
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/14/un.reform/index.html

The first is about Hugo Chavez (Pres. of Venezuela)'s criticism of U.S.', and particularly the Bush administration's, attitude towards the U.N., which was apparently met with rousing applause.

The second is about last-minute changes, proposed by John Bolton and submitted after the deadline for proposed changes, to a draft document that addresses millenial development goals that were originally discussed during the 2000 summit, which include the removal of both global warming-prevention provisions and non-proliferation (I believe nuclear but am not sure) provisions, and increased support for antiterrorism measures. The third states that some of these changes were accepted, particularly the removal of the proliferation provisions, but I couldn't find a reference to whether or not the global warming provisions were removed as well.

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Ending the purely factual part of that post and moving on to my personal feelings, I am very, very scared tonight after reading this. I've been reading up more on peak oil scenarios, and I have to apologize to Sine for pooh-poohing them earlier, because apparently many notable scientists feel the risk is very, very real.

However, even more frightening to me is the lack of attention the Bush administration is paying to global warming, because there are a few, very possible, worst-case scenarios to that which are actually even worse than the peak oil scenarios. There are notable scientists who believe that there is a risk that, once global warming reaches a certain point, it will be completely impossible for the human race to reverse using current technology, due to alterations to some of the feedback loops that currently keep the earth's climate regulated.

One scenario involves the temperature increasing far beyond the capacity to sustain carbon-based life, I believe, having read a quote from Stephen Hawking (who admittedly is a physicist and not a climatologist, but is still considered one of today's more brilliant minds) in which he expressed his fear that the temperature of the Earth would rise to the point at which the atmosphere contains boiling sulfuric acid. Another, oddly enough, is a new Ice Age, where warming increases cloud albedo at first, and then the increased cloud albedo begins to reflect a great deal more of the Sun's energy back to space, cooling the Earth by possibly enough to severely alter the climate.

I think I am afraid tonight in a way I have not been before...not terrified in that doomsaying "we're all going to die" sense, but concerned that we may be in very serious trouble. I have known for some time that we've had the capacity to wipe ourselves out through violence, but I'd always had faith that free-market capitalism and increasing economic damage from the first signs of severe environmental damage would spark us to change our ways before we did truly serious damage in that regard. I don't know, though, that I believe that anymore, especially since the U.S. is one of the most vocal advocates of free-market capitalism, and we and our elected officials are the ones least concerned about its effects and most concerned with preserving a lifestyle based on long-term unsustainable resource use.

I certainly can still believe in optimistic predictions for the future, but I'm not complacent anymore. I can definitely see oil wars as one possibility, and can see severe climate change as another.

And, though I know we have people of differing political persuasions here, it just seems maddening to me that I believe that a great deal of this is due to a difference of five hundred votes in one state, five years ago. Instead of Al Gore, who always championed environmental causes, we have the corrupt scion of a Texas oil family, and it is almost certain that Mr. Gore's policies toward the U.N. and environmental issues would have been close to diametrically the opposite of those of Mr. Bush.

If you are a Bush supporter and you are reading this, it is very much time to wake up and admit the corruption and self-interest in this administration. I am increasingly less and less willing to listen to supporters of this administration who are not willing to respond to the continuing accusations against it, e.g., no-bid contracts for Halliburton in Iraq, or a falsified photo opportunity for Mr. Bush in New Orleans. The former of those is fact now, and while the latter is allegation only, I cannot abide any longer by someone who isn't willing to at least consider that it may actually be true. Were it investigated and reliable information to come to light disproving it, I'm not one of those who would continue to protest that it was true solely to discredit Mr. Bush and his administration, because I love both this world and its people too much to do that damage to our political system. However, there has been far too much smoke for far too long, so to speak.

Flip, and Manshoon, I'm talking to you. At this point, I am beginning to consider those who continue to support Mr. Bush and his administration as people who may be contributing to grave, grave damage to the human race. I don't know what the right response to that is, but I'm not willing anymore to let it slide under the excuse of "well, it's politics, and people have different opinions." Politics is the sensitive subject it is because it affects so many people so profoundly. I do not think it is right any longer for me to set my anger aside solely because it's somehow supposed to be more respectful to those involved.

I hope that both of you, and other supporters of Mr. Bush on this board, will respond to me regarding this, if you read it.

Look, just because I vote Republican doesn't mean I blindly support the president in whatever he does. I'm not about to say "but there really WERE WMD's in Iraq, I swear!", or "golly gee, I'm sure Mr. Bush had a good reason for opposing the 9/11 Commission". As to why millions of people are able to vote for someone like Bush, allow me to quote one of my posts from way back when:

The problem is that due to the electoral system we are not given much of a choice between [viable] candidates. The result is that you can only choose between Option A and Option B, and both have to substantially differentiate themselves from the other, which means bringing out hot-button issues to solidify their bases. Hell, Kerry has admitted to opposing abortion personally, but chances are you won't be hearing about that at all because he's the Democratic candidate and has to represent that party and its values the best he can. I wish we could skip the primaries and just have all the candidates appear on the general election ballot, because that way you'd be able to discern between candidates on various issues and vote for someone who best fits your views, rather than being forced to choose between 2 people who have to try and represent everything about their party.

I'm not planning to vote third-party anytime soon, but I would certaintly appreciate a greater choice than being told "this is your sole Republican candidate" on the ballot. The current one candidate per party system is an insult to people's intelligence.

WRT the enviromental situation, the whole thing is the "frog in the boiling water scenario" on a grand scale. Nobody's going to care because at the moment things look fine, and when things start to really get dicey and people begin taking notice, it will be too late because the shit will have too much momentum behind it. Just look at gas prices. They're still going to keep climbing, but that's not going to stop people from buying jumbo-size SUVs with barely 12 miles/gallon.

Manshoon wrote:Look, just because I vote Republican doesn't mean I blindly support the president in whatever he does.

YES IT DOES OMG

I don't have the time right now to post a full response to Manshoon, but briefly I want to point out that nowhere in my post do I say that this applies to all Republicans. The word doesn't even appear in the post. I was careful to do that, because though I'm a registered Democrat myself, I'm quite Republican in many of my economic views.

I believe a lot of the more misguided far-left Democratic social reform ideas (mostly the ones regarding putting lots of money into unproven social programs at the expense of responsible economic growth) could possibly be as damaging as the Bush administration's policies - I grew up in Los Angeles and went to public schools about twenty years after their busing programs started, and I'd put that one in the category of well-meaning but horrendously incompetent social efforts. L.A. public schools used to be good on the whole, with a few extremely bad pockets, as I understand it. Now they're bad across the board, and a lot of money that could be spent on improving schools within a community is being spent on a program that reduces the abilities of parents to visit their children's schools and stops kids from making friends within their own communities.

I have an aunt who is an aggressive liberal, and the problem with having a political discussion with her is the same as having one with anyone who bases emotions too heavily on emotion and gets angry with those who don't agree with her - she doesn't seem to want to accept certain realities. She seems to think investing a lot of my family's charitable foundation's money in radical far-left groups like communes and things will provide a return on its investment, and prior evidence and facts about those kinds of groups do not support her argument at all. As much as I love her, I don't think I'd really want to see her in certain kinds of political power, because I suspect any society she took charge of would be facing serious financial trouble very shortly after she took charge ot it.

At any rate, I suppose I took that a bit further than I needed to. My point is that I don't think the ideal of the Republican party is a danger. However, I believe forcefully that the current administration is.

I suppose I'll try to get to the other things you mentioned later, Manshoon.

Manshoon wrote:I'm not planning to vote third-party anytime soon, but I would certaintly appreciate a greater choice than being told "this is your sole Republican candidate" on the ballot. The current one candidate per party system is an insult to people's intelligence.

And it will never change because it requires Congress, a two-party dominated Congress, to change the electorial process. (You actually think that they WANT a three-party system?) Hell, we can't even get them to pay attention to the stupid electorial college system. (If the 2000 election wasn't going to get them to pay attention long enough to vote for a change in the law, nothing will.)

So, whining about the voting system isn't really going to solve anything, nor is an excuse for voting behavior. I vote for the person that will likely do the least amount of damage to the country. During the 2004 election, I would have gladly voted fucking Nixon back into office if it meant that Bush wasn't going to be president. Hell, Bush Sr. was a helluva lot more sensible than his trainwreck lying-sack-of-shit of a son. Ironic that his father learned some valuable lessons from the broken mess that Reagan left him, and now he's a hardcore Reaganite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportion ... esentation

Some good discussion material for this topic. "Duverger's Law" is a political science principle that postulates that a "first-past-the-post" voting system, like the one we use, acts to delay emerging political parties and hasten the decline of weakened ones, and quite often leads to a strong two-party system. Proportional representation is an alternate method of allocating power from votes which usually eliminates this effect. Both articles are encouraged reading (I have to finish the proportional representation one myself.)

I like Proportional Representation, but I wouldn't mind Instant Run Off either. In any case, Congress won't change anything like that without a serious revolution (of the violent kind) anyway.

The fact that this thread has 6 responses at the time of posting and the Nintendo Revolution controller discussion has more than thirty doesn't fill me with a huge amount of confidence regarding the survivability of mankind.

I post about what interests me. Politics does not interest me.

Sorry to dissapoint.

I don't actually believe you really are. Hopefully at some point that iron shield of sarcasm will fall, but I am having too fine a night to want to be the impetus for it myself.

It's not sarcasm.

This is a forum where we are free to post or not to post on topics as we see fit. Generally, the motivating factor is interest.

Thus, as this topic has relatively few responses, and the Revolution one has a lot of responses, you can deduce that we're, in general, more interested in gaming than politics.

If I really cared enough, I would frequent politically minded websites. I don't, thus I don't.

Up to you.

Mental wrote:The fact that this thread has 6 responses at the time of posting and the Nintendo Revolution controller discussion has more than thirty doesn't fill me with a huge amount of confidence regarding the survivability of mankind.

Or the fact that people (like me) come to this board to kill time reading about leisure topics (ie revolution controller), or at least wanting to add their input to such topics.

Your comment on the survivability of mandkind is a little over-dramatic :p

I certainly hope so.