Your video, Let's talk about Trump wagging the dog...., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

(Most of) That doesn't work, actually, all you'll get is people pandering to large corporations so they get good paying "consulting" contracts after they leave office.

Ban lobbying in every form. It's the tail wagging the dog. At least make it 100% transparent and on the public record.

The "change" is not the issue for me. Its the tail wagging the dog that I am asking about.


Why should any society capitulate for such an insignificant demographic group?

Gays make up less then 4% of population.

And for gay marriage the % is even less than 1% The question really becomes Why should 1% demographic force the 99% to change?

IF the word gay is clouding you thoughts change it ti KKK, NAMBLA, Black supremacist or any another insignificant demographic group...



To answer you question the very definition of marriage would change.

You're comparing the motive for the need to balance the budget. The analogy is with the need for balancing the budget affecting the actions of the work. In this sense, the comparison with a business is fair.

The budget decisions should lead to questions such as 'what is the most effective police work we can do within our available budget?', where as in some cases it seems to be just 'what is the most effective way to balance our budget?'.

In that case, the police work is no longer a primary consideration and the tail is wagging the dog. They may as well stop doing police work altogether and start opening hardware stores, or lemonade stands to pay their salaries and maintain their buildings.

To paraphrase Charles Goodhart: once a measurement becomes a goal, it stops being a measurement.

Can you believe they spent thousands of hours with computer experts and still didn't figure out that a document scanned to be searchable will come out with layers?

Me neither. It's either another setup, or both sides are wagging the dog.>> ^HugeJerk:

They are using the same false logic as before. When you scan an image, you don't get layers. When you scan a document as an image, you don't get layers... but when you scan a document with software that turns it into a searchable PDF, it does create layers.>> ^bobknight33:
I would gather we all have downloaded this birth certificate and looked at in in illustrator and such and have suspicion of authenticity. This is just another story that has dug deeper than you and I and have come up with more conclusive clarity that is a bogus.

He did really skirt around the happy pill issue though. I had my virtual hand up during one of his previous talks and wanted to ask that question, so I was glad when Dawkins brought it up. However Harris restructured the hypothesis to make it easier to answer; which was disappointing. On top of that; his answer largely just exposed his entire argument as not really solving what it proposes to solve.

He asks us to accept (which I do) that there is a baseline for misery; therefore there can be a measure of 'true' results to human happiness.

If this is true then there will also be a baseline of success and measurable results for a happiness pill. He avoided this and gave more specific examples of what the happiness pill would be; thereby introducing several strawman problems with it.

Dawkins even chipped in (42:10) 'well you slanted again; it wouldn't have to be like that'.

When you reduce Harris' proposition and the main problem with it; it comes down to that. Whether morality can be measured and tested in a scientific way; therefore allowing decisions to be made based upon those measurements.

The argument against actually manifested itself most strongly when he was discussing the grief pill hypothesis. He answered the question with another question: 'When would you take that pill?'; which ultimately breaks down his entire argument. If there is something fundamental that prevents his proposition from answering that question; then it shows how his proposition is unworkable beyond the 'low hanging fruit' brought up by one of the audience.

Besides, if we did implement his ideas it would require measurement based planning. As a software developer that has spent time developing to measurement based management, and as a Brit with a very measurement based government, it's my opinion that measurement based planning leads to the 'tail wagging the dog'.

With measurement based planning; the actual real world goals that you are trying to achieve will always take second place; and will even be forsaken in the interest of achieving measured results. In Harris' scenario, this would eventually translate to the use of the happiness pill; rather than making decisions about the real world in order to achieve that happiness.

So let's take the straw men out of the happiness pill hypothesis (as Dawkins intended), using a scenario from the movie The Matrix where everyone is hooked up to a machine that feeds them a virtual life that provides mental sustenance. Of course, the purposes of this was quite different to the happy pill hypothesis; but the scenario is right. In the story Agent Smith actually said (paraphrasing) "We did try to give the humans a life of bliss, but eventually they rejected it. There is something about them that requires misery.", but let us suppose that that life of bliss worked out just fine.

In that scenario, we have now perfectly succeeded in achieving Harris' goal of measurement based; scientifically engineered happiness for all. However, I think most people would agree that the scenario is abhorrent and undesirable.

Harris also answered this problem with another (quite woolly) question (paraphrasing): 'How close would we want that happiness to track reality?'. Again, if his proposition cannot answer that question, then it is largely unworkable.

If I was Harris, I would explicitly state that his proposition is exclusively in regards to making real world decisions; and not about engineering happiness at an individual level.

I agree -- Wagging the dog.

Glen Beck gave a time line of this event and it is worth seeing, It was posted here few days ago. It is a good unbiased timeline


<a rel="nofollow" href="

>> ^rebuilder:

https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/there-is-something-to-s
ee-here/
^
Completely correct there. Of all the revelations brought to light lately, we're focusing on Assange as a person and Wikileaks as an organization? Really?


Think they call that wagging the dog.

Whether or not airport security should be privatized is a fine topic for debate, but the fact of the matter is that we are not part of that debate. If corporations want to privatize American airport security, they will, whether we like it or not, and once they've gotten what they want, airport security will no longer be featured in the news, regardless of how invasive, toxic or ineffective it may be.

This is classic 'tail wagging the dog' stuff here.

Anything Lieberman does is at the direction of Israel. Look at the mess they are in after they killed the humanitarian flotilla people, and the whole episode was posted on the internet. The Israel/US relationship really is the tail wagging the dog.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^chilaxe:
I could get behind liberalism if there was a movement within it to hold accountable those fellow liberals who sabotage the cause.
Liberals have plenty of sites like 'Crooks and Liars" or Mediawatch to keep an eye on the excesses of conservatives... why can't they do the same to keep an eye on the excesses of fellow liberals?
Such a movement is certainly under way. I think Chris Dodd would have been primaried if he didn't resign (incidentally, you should rent Michael Moore's Capitalism -- he trashes Dodd pretty nicely in there and raises more than a few doubts about Democratic resolve). Charlie Rangel is a popular target too. Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, etc.
If you want a liberal taking Democrats to task with no holds barred, try Glenn Greenwald's blog. I read it occasionally, but most of the time I find him far too depressing.
I don't read Firedoglake anymore, because they've, IMO, gone off the deep end (Jane Hamsher was pushing people to work together with the tea parties to kill HCR once the public option got stripped), but if you're looking for progressives critical of Democrats, they're another good resource.
Personally, I'm a big fan of DailyKos. It's probably the biggest progressive community on the net, so often it's the battleground upon which most left vs. left fights are played out. The main content is geared towards organizing activism and electoral strategy, and commentary on the day's political events, but the Diaries are usually a grab-bag of all kinds of interesting topics, not all of which are political.
They're starting to shift from a focus on "more Democrats" to "better Democrats", but I'm not sure how many opportunities we'll have for that in 2010. Most of those that they've talked about are House races, or Arlen Specter's ongoing primary.


That's good to hear that there are left vs. left debates. However, are these mostly just folks on the far-left of the political bell curve 'pushing harder even if it means we lose'? As long as that's the dominant liberal paradigm, they don't seem to me to be reliable societal partners who can be reasoned with.

That might sound very uninvolved, but I think any intellectuals who go into politics (i.e. not Moore, Olbermann, Huffington etc.) will find that the tail wags the dog: if intellectual figures don't tell the liberal masses what they want to hear, the masses will just find figures who will. Olbermann saying "I'm not a liberal; I'm an American" seems to be a good example of that kind of permanent intellectual simplicity.

I suppose this is an inevitable macrohistorical problem... perhaps any intelligent species on any planet would face it... the necessary legacy of human evolution is that the kind of interest in cognitive complexity that's advantageous in a complex modern society wasn't sufficiently advantageous during the last 10,000 or 100,000 years to be widespread today. In other words, any collection of social norms that must appeal to 50% of the population can only achieve a limited level of intellectual accuracy.

The take-home lesson for me is: that means an individual with a greater level of intellectual accuracy can out-predict them, and thus position themselves in the right place at the right time (for whatever opportunity is targeted).

>> ^thinker247:
You're a terrible prostitute. Shouldn't this be a little more seductive for the $19.99 I just spent?
In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
That's because I make house-calls...now whip it out, donkey dick
In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You say "friend" like we've touched each other's genitals. But I've never been to the dumpster behind Popeye's Chicken, so...I resent the sentiment.
In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I needed the sabbatical because I felt I was swaying too far away from my mean-spirited closet homosexual tendencies. Don't let the tail wag the dog, my friend.
In reply to this comment by thinker247:
Your sabbatical made you bitter and mean-spirited and a closet homosexual.
In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
pssshhh I know! Have your top 5 videos even sifted yet?
In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You kill your top five videos, and all of a sudden you're a danger to the Sift.
In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
Why you handcuffed to the bedposts you kinky little devil?


Will you two fuck and get it over with already?! Sheesh!

You're a terrible prostitute. Shouldn't this be a little more seductive for the $19.99 I just spent?

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
That's because I make house-calls...now whip it out, donkey dick

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You say "friend" like we've touched each other's genitals. But I've never been to the dumpster behind Popeye's Chicken, so...I resent the sentiment.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I needed the sabbatical because I felt I was swaying too far away from my mean-spirited closet homosexual tendencies. Don't let the tail wag the dog, my friend.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
Your sabbatical made you bitter and mean-spirited and a closet homosexual.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
pssshhh I know! Have your top 5 videos even sifted yet?

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You kill your top five videos, and all of a sudden you're a danger to the Sift.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
Why you handcuffed to the bedposts you kinky little devil?

That's because I make house-calls...now whip it out, donkey dick

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You say "friend" like we've touched each other's genitals. But I've never been to the dumpster behind Popeye's Chicken, so...I resent the sentiment.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I needed the sabbatical because I felt I was swaying too far away from my mean-spirited closet homosexual tendencies. Don't let the tail wag the dog, my friend.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
Your sabbatical made you bitter and mean-spirited and a closet homosexual.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
pssshhh I know! Have your top 5 videos even sifted yet?

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You kill your top five videos, and all of a sudden you're a danger to the Sift.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
Why you handcuffed to the bedposts you kinky little devil?

You say "friend" like we've touched each other's genitals. But I've never been to the dumpster behind Popeye's Chicken, so...I resent the sentiment.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
I needed the sabbatical because I felt I was swaying too far away from my mean-spirited closet homosexual tendencies. Don't let the tail wag the dog, my friend.

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
Your sabbatical made you bitter and mean-spirited and a closet homosexual.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
pssshhh I know! Have your top 5 videos even sifted yet?

In reply to this comment by thinker247:
You kill your top five videos, and all of a sudden you're a danger to the Sift.

In reply to this comment by rottenseed:
Why you handcuffed to the bedposts you kinky little devil?