Those who voted for Bush in the second term directly support ecoterrorism, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, wars of aggression for oil, socialised religion, contempt for science, etc. Those who voted for him in the first term could have known that quite a few of those items were very likely based on his past performance; if they didn't like those things then they just voted without doing their homework. You CANNOT say that anyone lending support to a party whose track record was for those things opposes them. That was well-established as the party's agenda--if you claim not to support the party's agenda but you support the party, you are a moron.

We have something called "science" and it does a decent job of letting us understand the effects of our actions. Your right to do whatever you want ends when it starts to conflict with my right to do whatever I want, and there can be peace only if we restrict our rights such that we don't infringe on the rights of others. Why should you have the right to destroy something that we all share? Why shouldn't I tell you what to do in order to protect that? Why is it unreasonable to afford all of us the same rights? Given that humans do destroy things that don't belong to them, and that that does destroy everyone's ability to live in peace, why shouldn't a government prevent that?

For example, pollution. If you dump mercury into the water, or cut down forests, or spew greenhouse gases, then you are destroying things that I need in order to live. What gives you the right to do that? Why is it reasonable for you to claim that right?

A more complex example, with a fuzzier conclusion: abstinence-only education increases teen pregnancy and STDs. There is just no question about that. Teen pregnancy increases crime, unemployment, and every kind of environmental problem. The Bush administration adamantly supported abstinence-only education, as has every Republican administration for quite a while. Now--are they ignoring a fact, or are they of the opinion that teen pregnancy, STDs, underachievers, crime, etc., are good? You tell me! Either interpretation is valid.

Um... it was deregulation in the USA that was responsible for the downfall of the world's economy. Every other first-world country is socialist to a much greater degree than we are, and they were doing just fine, thank-you-very-much. The country that is doing the best in the world is not just socialist, but pretty much communist. Where do you get the idea that socialism is bound to fail, when evidence shows that it is fully capable of succeeding brilliantly? Check the data yourself!

As for Bush's socialist agenda failing--perhaps it's Bush's way of implementing it. Apparently it's not that hard to get right, but Bush was just brilliant enough to fuck up even half-assed socialism.

Really? Your research supports that claim? If so, you're just about the only climatologist in the world with that opinion. Please link to your papers (and, of course, make sure you make clear who paid for the research). Or do you somehow think that you're more knowledgeable than the people who have the training, the data, and the supercomputers?

Yes, it's a stopgap.

But we need a stopgap. We need to reduce carbon levels yesterday, and that means not just cutting emissions to nothing, but also an emergency program of planting trees, which if done on a large enough scale, could save our asses from the fire for the next 100 years while we figured how to actually live like a civilisation that means to be around for a while.

I, for one, support military intervention in Brazil, the Amazon, Canada, and all those other places where people are cutting down trees... um, that'd be everywhere. But it looks pretty good compared to the alternative.

I agree--mostly. Gun to the head of anyone who allowed wiretaps, right from the assholes who gave the orders all the way down to the techs who implemented it. And YES to raising taxes and cutting spending--with one small caveat.

The small caveat is that Obama came to power as our economy was crumbling due to many decades of bad decisions, and the theory--crazy though it was--was that if the government encouraged lots of Americans to buy lots of American products (some of them even involving smart investment in energy-saving technology like insulation), then the economists would see GDP figures that they liked. The Bush plan, in contrast, was to enrich a bunch of his friends at the expense of the rest of the country and world, and blow up many billions of dollars' worth of expensive electronics and munitions in a foreign country in order to secure our future as The Country Whose Whole Economy Is Based On A Resource That We Don't Have (and that would destroy us if we did have it, anyway).

Obama's plan worked a little bit, anyway. GDP is up and the growth looks like it's attributable to the stimulus money (says yesterday's The Atlantic). Unemployment is not down, so his plan wasn't really a huge success (education incentives and the end of the Gag Rule will take quite a few more years to do any good). I think that as soon as we prop up failing businesses like GM we have strayed idiotically far from capitalism (and this from a confirmed socialist Canadian) but when you get right down to it, Obama had an impossible problem to solve, and he's making mistakes but at least he's trying.

Assuming we need to rebuild our economy from scratch (not completely unreasonable since it's a pyramid scheme at the moment), is Obama going about it the right way? Not really, but a little bit. Bush was the exact opposite--a total sell-out to deregulation- and hate-mongers, completely and proudly ignorant of history and science.

One area that our government needs to spend more on is regulating the industries and individuals that destroy the commons. Just as someone needs to enforce the Constitution, so also someone needs to ensure that I don't get rich by destroying common resources, like air, water, topsoil, etc. Cutting spending here will exacerbate a problem we've known about for quite a few hundreds of years, and it's rather shocking that Americans are still even more primitive here than the quality of our bread and cheese would suggest. If we prop up the economy by allowing industry to dump toxic manufacturing byproducts into the water table or the air, etc, then we all die. Yay economy? Why is this not considered a matter of National Security? Why don't we have restrictions on SUVs? Why does the EPA have so little power?

Ultimately, I suppose it's a good time to start learning Chinese.

So we're augmenting the flow: now not only will I get "Greetings Dear, I am Ivan Ilych of the First National Bank of Nigeria" but also "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You may have been pwn3d!" And no doubt, "Warning from Operation Eagle Claw: You have been pwn3d. Your identity has been stolen by a Nigerian scam syndicate. Please verify your identity by sending us your SSN and we will fix everything."

What matters isn't whether you can come up with a quantitative measure for whether there is sexism. What matters is whether women have a hard time in an environment due to their own observations.

Forget placing blame. That's only really important if you're trying to punish someone.

Rather, look for a solution. I have found that it is not really that difficult to listen to complaints and problems and to try to be sensitive to perceived issues without compromising my honour.

You can think of this as risk management. There might be sexism that you can't see. If there isn't and you don't act, then no problem. If there isn't and you do act, again, the actions required are pretty insignificant and will probably make you a better person anyway, but certainly nobody loses much. If there is and you do act, everyone wins big! If there is and you don't act, then the consequences are truly too horrible to comprehend (like: you'll have to date women who just don't appreciate love poems written in perl. Or, if you're feeling empathic today, a lot of women made miserable by feeling unwelcome when they seek a community of fellow geeks). So, given observation noise, what's the most sensible course of action?

Why is this a big deal?

Farmers dump fertiliser into the ocean. This creates blooms and subsequent dead zones. The farmers aren't punished.

The fisheries of most countries are under-regulated, leading to extinctions. The fishermen and the responsible governments aren't punished.

We all dump CO_2 into the air. This changes the pH of the ocean, acidifying it drastically and causing massive extinctions. It also changes the temperature of the earth, destroying ecosystems and having devastating effects on water flow patterns. We are not punished.

Likewise mercury, and a thousand other toxins. We dump so much Hg into the water that health researchers highly recommend limiting intake of higher-order consumers like salmon. Who is punished?

The mafia dump toxins into the ocean. WHO CARES? We have proven time and again that we don't care about the health of the oceans. We already know that governments want more excuses to punish other forms of organised crime. What's new?

Well, sure. Come up with a refutable hypothesis and test it. FOR SCIENCE!

emkyooess is right but I'm going to try to spell it out more clearly (or at least more verbosely and less Godwiny):

If you are part of an organisation, and that organisation is doing something immoral, and you follow along, then you are part of the transgression. A member of any group is a part of that group. Duh, but people who are "just doing their job" are every bit as much part of what gets done as the people pulling the strings.

To put it another way: you are responsible for your actions even if you're getting paid.

In the USA and in many other countries, women/girls are getting fatter (so are men, but that's orthogonal to the discussion). Fatter has at times past meant more beautiful (at least to painters who appreciate curves) but by today's standards fat is bad. Of course, fat is also known to be unhealthy, and I'd love to know how intellectual knowledge of health plays into attraction.

I suspect that this has a great deal to do with wealth. When most people had to work the fields, white skin and fat and some other things were signs of wealth, and were therefore attractive. Now that everyone works indoors and only the educated and rich bother with food made of animals and plants rather than with growth hormones and hydrocarbons, sports, travel, active hobbies, or at least fake it with gym memberships, the poor get fat and white and the rich get thin and tanned. I know that men are supposed to appreciate "fitness to bear children" rather than "wealth", but I suspect that men are also attracted to upper-class women...?

Another thing occurs to me: the link between social class/education level and number of children is well established--the upper classes have many fewer children for reasons other than how attractive they are. Perhaps the measure of "how many children you have" has some serious problems. Did anyone here actually read the study and find out whether they normalised for education level?