Edit: Hey and Trump's speech just proved me right. Now we'll see whether the powers that be in the GOP have a smidgen of decency left in them. I wouldn't bet on it. — Echarmion

If principled means that the end justifies the means then you're just a pussy whining about details. Politics isn't about decency. This is why the left sucks monkey balls at playing the game.

As if we don't have conservatives in the Netherlands.

Yeah, I was hoping for some research.

Punctuation please. If you keep posting like these two posts you'll get banned.

I certainly am.

Isn't Biden ahead still in the official tally so far?

Anecdotal observations I suppose. It seems to mirror people's intuitions on "the end justifies the means".

:cry:

To be honest, I think typical conservatives are better at divorcing people from subjects and will happily vote for a douche if that means they get what they want. So Trump's behaviour is totally irrelevant to them as it should be. It should've been irrelevant to Democrats as well.

He's certainly doing better again than many expected.

Too much forward planning for Trump.

Most people I've met need to get layed asap. I would bet my firstborn that this applies to most of the members on the human race. — Merkwurdichliebe

I fixed that for you.

You make me embarrassed for being part of the human race. Well done.

No, that is not my position. If you need to jaywalk in order to stop a rape in progress, then by all means jaywalk. It depends on exactly what the circumstances are. — Paul Edwards

Not anymore apparently when it no longer suits you. I suggest you read our exchanges and figure out your inconsistenties.

One can hope. But too early to tell so I'm preparing to eat turd sandwiches for the next 4 years.

Is Texas a swing state this year? — Benkei

Almost, should be, but not quite there yet. — 180 Proof

Definitely a swing state now. :up:

I have to side with unenlightened on this one. I think the goal is full production, not full employment. Meaningful hobbies give meaning to.

I have no difficulty heaping the lion's share of blame upon Hussein. — Hanover

I'm not sure how you can blame Hussein for decisions the US government made. It's not as if he made you do it, right?

I think the Iraq war in the aftermath of 9/11 was understandable but fundamentally wrong. Aside from the fact that the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq was very tenuous (practically non-existent) I was against it then, recognising the lies about WMDs in light of Hans Blix' reports at the time. Even so, if all the terrorists had come from Iraq, you can still wonder whether a war against Iraq would be justified if the terrorists weren't state sponsored. And that opens up the question as to how to deal with non-state sponsored terrorists in the first place. War seems inappropriate but Eichmann type abductions to have them stand trial would be something I would support. Extra-judicial killings in foreign countries like Bin Laden are wrong even if I didn't shed a tear because there the proof was pretty conclusive. But if you accept it there then next time we do it when the proof isn't that clear. Due process is valuable.

The unfunny thing with the Iraq war was that the US intelligence apparatus decided to believe Saddam at his word because he was of course trying to convince people he did have WMDs for fear of interventions by foreign countries and particularly Iran.

I'm sure you can recognise a fallacy when you see one but the subject is rather boring.

I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Lmao. Of course I am. Will you answer the questions I posed earlier in this thread or are you just going to ignore it?

Any way, for what it's worth the Iraqi war was unjust because:

1. The US has subscribed to the UN system and therefore cannot declare a war of aggression single-handedly unless it was in defence of an immediate threat to itself or an ally, (in other words; if you agree another authority makes these decisions, you abide by that: pacta sunt servanda);
2. There was no right intention, the grounds for war were a lie, probably hiding other intentions but at no point was it to prevent the cutting of tongues or rape;
3. There was no just cause (please note that if preventing rape and torture would be a just cause then on that basis we can invade the US as well);
4. It wasn't a last resort because it was already proved no WMDs existed;
5. It fails because it was disproportional, causing more deaths in a timespan of 3 years than Saddam murdered during 24 years in power.

You can call it vigilante justice if you want. I call it a "posse". Internationally, there is no "modern civilization". There is a cesspit of dictators enslaving their populations. Yes, everyone should be Batman. The state of the world as it currently is, calls for the US and others to be Batman, and we should be thankful for it.

One day hopefully there will be wall-to-wall liberal democracies, and at that point I can agree for Batman to stand down. — Paul Edwards

You're subscribing to might is right but only if you're a certain type of country. We're back at selective justice, which is no justice at all.

I'm not sure what you're quoting, but it's true that I don't think you should rape a woman to prevent her from jaywalking, even if you knew for certain that she was going to jaywalk. — Paul Edwards

We already established you shouldn't commit a crime to prevent a crime. If starting a war is a crime, even though it prevents another crime, it is still a crime and therefore can never be just. That's a matter of definition. A purely consequentialist approach necessarily fails, as was already illustrated several posts ago because you can't tell the difference between a crime and a just action without taking into account intent (which is why proving intent in criminal law is important).

Actually this is exactly what we face internationally. The USSR could have taken over the world. A posse was formed to contain the USSR. There was no justice in the USSR, and no justice when the USSR invaded someone else. There was no justice when the communists took over Vietnam with USSR help. We live in a fundamentally unjust world. One day I hope that will change, but right now, dictators are committing human rights abuses, and even if we wanted to, we can't stop all of them at once. I'm at least trying to establish a baseline of "we want to", combined with "call Batman IF NECESSARY (which it most definitely is)". — Paul Edwards

Of course there was justification. You just happen to disagree with it but it's exactly the same hubristic bullshit you're peddling now. The USSR thought they were bettering the world by installing communist regimes through violence. You believe installing liberal democracies through violence betters the world. Welcome to the world of aggressors.

Sure he does. He's committing fallacies, dismisses things he doesn't even take the effort to understand nd you think he's "kicking ass". Good to know you can't tell the difference between a fallacy and an argument.

Alright, I'll go for a Trump win and a Senate flip just to take the least likely position. If I'll lose I'll post an argument in an ongoing philosophy of religion thread without calling all the theists idiots, either implicitly or explicitly.

Edit: plus I'll say something nice about nos4a2 and actually mean it.

Paul, I applaud your moral vision, and feel you make many great points. You're arguing your case like a skillful lawyer, which perhaps you actually are. — Hippyhead

Yeah, @Ciceronianus the White @Hanover, what do you think? Lawyer material. :snicker:

I'd rather not flirt with disaster by betting on it... I'd feel bad. How much are we betting the Democrats will control the Senate?

Arrow's theorem is a problem for every voting system so it can't be an argument for one system over the other. Some of the issues he raises are purely theoretical as well. The likelihood of a perfect distribution drops rapidly with more voters and multiple candidates with ranked choice voting.

What ranked choice voting ensures is that candidates, that a large portion of voters consider total shit bags, won't stand a chance thereby significantly raising the legitimacy of whoever gets elected.

Yes, there's a chance someone with a plurality of primary votes doesn't win the election but that's neither here nor there, because the converse in the current system is that a person with a plurality of votes wins whereas we know that more than 50% of voters doesn't want that candidate. (Even worse, we've seen Trump and Bush win without even reaching a plurality of votes). Without additional information, the cautionary principle means we should assume more than 50% of voters voted against the candidate with the plurality of votes. By distributing the secondary votes, we obtain information that is otherwise unavailable making the end result more informed as well. This illustrates as well that with ranked choice voting a vote retains value, even if your primary choice loses.

For politicians to win secondary or even tertiary votes, they will have to consider to a larger extent what the greatest number of people want instead of what enough people want. That effect is assumed to lower the level of polarisation.

The American Electoral College system for electing the president was intended in part to protect the government from populist movements; that is, it was expressly anti-democratic. The idea was that if the electorate made a stupid choice, or the election were affected by foreign influence, the Electoral College would vote right. I see on Wiki that there have been about 165 instances of faithless electors, but no election results were ever changed. In my opinion, the Electoral College failed in 2016 to do the job it was created to do. So much for one man one vote. — tim wood

That only makes sense if you don't have ranked choice voting. And even so, if a populist movement would win a majority of the votes it's fucking elitist to then say "but it's wrong". That's rather the point of democracy that at some point if enough people want something it should happen. It's up to policy makers and judges to keep whatever populist idea has gripped the country within the boundaries of the constitution and international treaties.

I would like to think that notwithstanding what I think was their failure in 2016, that if Trump had worn his swastikas on his sleeve during the 2016 campaign, the Electoral College would have the done its job and no matter how many popular votes he got, they would not have elected him president. — tim wood

I have no clue on what you base this optimism on. You've already seen it fail in 2016 and yet you still think it works? Party politics prevents electors to make ethical choices.

then you have vigilante justice. Hmmm... One wonders why no modern civilization accepts that. We're all fools! Oh, if only we were all batman and listened to Paul Edwards.

We've previously established that not all methods of preventing crime are acceptable. You even agreed but we're now back at "anything that will stop the crime is allowed, including another crime". That just opens the door of allowing me to shoot the cop, because he's committing a crime so I'm justified in doing so, which in turn allows someone else to stop me... Ad infinitum. In other words, what you just came up with is logically inconsistent and unworkable to reach any form of justice.

But what if a 3rd party knows that the criminal is going to use the money for a crime? Should the 3rd party take action to prevent the corrupt cop from stealing a criminal's money? I wouldn't. — Paul Edwards

That's just selective justice then which is no justice at all. If we start there we can have rules for poor people and rich people. Black people and white people. The law should apply to everyone equally. The corrupt cop should be apprehended because he's committing a crime.

But when a GOOD ACT is done, intent doesn't actually matter (as to whether you should try to prevent the action or not), although it would certainly be nice if there was a good intent. — Paul Edwards

And this is where a better understanding of criminal law will come in handy and the wiki pages on that are actually pretty good. You can't have a good act with bad intent. If a corrupt cop steals from a criminal who'd otherwise use it for a crime (without the cop knowing), the cop is still a thief.

If I murder you because I like murdering people and you were on your way to kill someone else (but I didn't know), I'm still a murderer even though I saved someone else.

He didn't need to to kill 300,000 Americans.

Have you ever heard of the principle of charity? Can you at least make an effort to engage what I say instead of making stuff up?It doesn't logically follow that because rape is bad every method of combatting it is proper.

How about a society that has surveillance everywhere, not just the streets but in your home too in order to combat rape? Perfectly fine because it will stop rape.

If you're in politics, you're a politician regardless of whether you play by the established rules.

I think what the US needs is a different voting system. I don't get why it's not one man, one vote, to start with. Second, if you're going to go with a winner takes all system, ranked choice voting makes a lot more sense.

Limitations on campaign funding (eg. bribes) and lobbyist activity (eg. bribes) would be a good next step. Currently, the US system has fuck all to do with democracy, where policies that 100% of people want have only 35% of being enacted, or conversely where near 99% of people don't want something, there's a 35% chance of it happening anyway. Whereas if something is wanted by 100% of the 1%, there's about 70% of it happening, where is 100% of the 1% don't want something there's a 100% of it not happening.

Edit: and no, I did not make those figures up.

But it's also reason for hope because systems can be changed.

What if Joe is basically a decent human being and the influence of how a system works (or actually doesn't) is even bigger than we think?

2) Bankrupt the regime — Hippyhead

How are you going to do that without it causing massive harm to the population?

Social media exists in all countries (except North Korea), but we don't see the same kind of polarization in the US as in places like the UK or Canada. — Mr Bee

It might be more obvious in the US but it's even happening in the Netherlands, which has a pluralistic political system. So it's not just the two party system.

When you have data such as the very obviously just liberation of Iraq conflicting with the theory, it's time to revisit the theory, rather than trying to manipulate the data to fit the theory. — Paul Edwards

I don't have such data because I don't agree with that conclusion. It surely highlights what's going wrong. You assume the Iraq war was a good thing because of whatever nebulous moral feelings you have about the matter and then proceed to justify your feelings by dressing it up in what you want to call a theory but is so far just you sharing your feelings.

The 2000 years is of totally irrelevant wars of conquest. — Paul Edwards

You don't know because you haven't studied it so you're not qualified to make that judgment. That's like me saying C++ is a terrible programming language without ever having programmed in that language. I could be accidentally right but I wouldn't know what I'm talking about.

BTW, I am a programmer by trade, and I came up with a radical new idea (S/380) which the experts couldn't even imagine, and even went so far as to say it would never work. The good thing about computers is that they respond to logic, so MVS/380 became a reality. There are rare humans who are willing to switch worldview in response to cold hard logic, and my Russian friend was one of them. Please read his blog post and tell me where he went wrong. — Paul Edwards

Good for you. Total red herring. It still doesn't stop you from committing fallacies apparently.

I didn't know this about Joe and I think it's pretty funny some of the best ads are being made by Conservatives.