Well, if you'd actually like to understand how politics works, you can start by realizing that people aren't going to vote for him if they don't A)know who he is and B) think he can accomplish what he promises.

Surely you at least realize that the age old trick of politicians everywhere is to tell people what they want to hear.

And so you've set up a nice non-falsifiable circle of logic. Hitler didn't have to convince Germany to go to war or persecute Jews. Every instance of him doing just that - making noises about getting living space or getting rid of subhumans - is really just an instance of him telling people what they already believed and/or wanted to hear. And of course this works for every other case of someone persuading someone else of something, or cause and effect in general.

It doesn't matter as long as we're talking about people long dead, but when the topic shifts to the inevitability or preventability of war, it might be best to demand more rigorous arguments. We wouldn't want to give up and accept defeat if victory is in fact possible, after all.

Given that half of the government is trying to actively sabotage Obamacare for ideological reasons, should its problems be considered failures or successes?

But to answer your question, just wait until Republicans get the presidential seat too. They can't outright repeal Obamacare, since it has already benefited enough people to make that a political suicide, but they can cause "unfortunate fuckups" to slowly erode it away.

We might be in for stormy weather, with Republicans in the US, various extremist movements rising as people get fed p with austerity in Europe, Islam being used to recruit cannon fodder fodder for various megalomaniacs empire building projects here and there, Chinese government trying to retain dictatorship while its economy starts catching up the rest of the world and the boom consequently fading...

You under-estimate the desire of the average citizen to have his country win.

That need not manifest in the form of war. Think of sports, for example.

To Godwin this thread immediately, consider that Hitler didn't have to convince his country to go to war.....he merely went along with a desire that already existed in his countrymen. This also goes along with his irrational hatred of the Jews.

Really? So all those speeches were really just because he loved his own voice? Not to mention the rest of the Nazi propaganda.

You would never see a restaurant like Bucca Di Peppo in Europe.

You wouldn't see a restaurant serving Italian food in Europe? WTF?

Suppose you work hard on something but it doesn't work out. Should the company be able to take your house from you to cover their losses? Of course not!

But you do lose your house. You'll get fired for failure, fail to pay mortgage, and the bank takes the house.

The employees are already forced to share the risks. There is no option to just do your job and not worry about being fired. If anything, employees have more risk than companies which, after all, are too big to be allowed to fail. But your sorry ass is out in the street as soon as there's even the tiniest hint of trouble.

It might be that this state of affairs is unavoidable, the cost of an efficient economy. But that's no excuse to pretend employees aren't in just as precarious a situation as "enterpreneurs".

Everyone should be on a level playing field, but I'm not going to stop cheating first, I'll cheat until the government forces me to stop. But someone should really step up their game and force me to stop cheating.

Tragedy of the commons: no one wants antibiotic-resistant bacteria, since they're a threat to everyone, but no one can stop cheating, since that means they'll go bankrupt and still get antibiotic-resistant bacteria caused by all the other cheaters. The only known solution is a Leviathan that forces everyone to stop cheating - or at least guarantees that anyone who continues cheating will not see any benefits from it.

Windows 3.0 shared DLL code segments in memory. It's the whole point of DLLs.

So yeah, let's allow big pharma to cyberman our core nervous apparatus for something as incredibly stupid as a weight loss gimmick.

The summary is talking about people who are dying from their inability to control their appetite. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Altough real solution would be to treat sugar and fat as the dangerous, unhealthy, borderline poisonous substances they are. And at some point, we'll have to. Obesity epidemic - and all related metabological problems - are getting way out of control.

If there's a drone hovering over my land, or my 'charge' if I am hired security, it is guilty until proven innocent.

Airspace ownership is a complex issue and will only become more so as new categories of flying devices appear. Making your own rules and destroying other people's property based on them is unlikely to go well for you.

we canâ(TM)t penetrate that

Yes we can! Just need some more silicon lube.

I never quite got why plea bargains are permissible in the first place.

They're a form of punishment. Being forced to testify against yourself humiliates the accused and empowers the prosecutor. It dehumanizes the accused, by showing that no, he doesn't have any of those Constitutional rights. The prosecutor is, in effect, establishing his superiority to reality itself: pretend that what happened is what he said happened, or be severely punished.

Plea bargains are basically a sadist's wet dream. And US legal system is built on the idea that justice is institutionalized sadism. Every single aspect of it is geared towards maximum harm to those caught in it, from criminal records (meant to extend punishment to infinity) to keeping people in death row for decades to uncertain methods of execution (as opposed to a simply breathing nitrogen) to private prisons (who have very incentive to make recidivism rate as high as possible). Hence the popular notion that everyone accused must be guilty, so you can enjoy watching the system grind them to bits with good conscience.

Plea bargains are a symptom, but the disease itself is simply bloodlust.

In other words, they are the indigenous for their ancestors, for thousands of years, have settled in that place

Which is impossible for any human being to prove. Or do you have records of all or even most - or even a single one - of your ancestral lines going back to the height of the Roman Empire?

Furthermore, nations are not genetic but memetic. Being French means nothing more and nothing less than that you think of yourself as French. People born in France typically do, as do some of the people who've lived there for a while. That is true even if said people don't agree with every aspect of their nation's culture. You're simply trying to use thinly disguised racism to disqualify the opinions of people you don't agree with.

TL;DR Ein volk, ein reich, ein this bullshit again.

Stripping Western citizenship from dual nationals could be effective: you only have to see all the satellite dishes and ethnic dress in crap parts of Paris to know where peoples' real loyalty lies.

Crimes against fashion don't count as terrorism, bro. Reality TV might, but the viewers are victims, not perpetrators.

Europe will start having to do something similar with both illegal arrivals, and 2nd/3rd generation fifth-columists. Time to make ourselves the master of our own house again.

Who's us? Last time I checked, the people mandating dress codes for minorities or prohibiting listening to subversive foreign radio stations were the enemies.

Since governments tap and read everything; if they can't read it, according to them you must be hiding something.

So that's why Slashdot has had broken formatting when opening subthreads in new tabs recently!

What agency is fighting this dastardly Betaist plot?

That said, given the percentage of a lot of local police budgets currently covered by stealing stuff, it will be interesting to see whether the people who are always drifting toward the theory that freedom can be measured as a direct function of tax rate will be able to keep it together when next year's municipal budgets start being adjusted to account for this.

You know, you could simply cut the costs - tell the police to focus on thieves and murderers and leave pot smokers and prostitutes alone. Maybe stop sending SWAT teams to storm people's houses over anonymous phone calls, cease harassing black people for walking on the streets, take it easy with surplus military gear...

If anything, forcing people to actually pay for police activity might cause some much-needed reconsideration of what, exactly speaking, is necessary police activity and what is someone play-acting action movies on other people's expense.