I don't know if this is normal in US politics, but I actually bothered to read the candidate statements for the US Senate in the California voter information guide. Most are in hilariously broken English, and one is even in binary. I'm guessing Mr. Binary is running for the "Standing at the Back Dressed Stupidly and Looking Stupid" Party, but a lot of the others are Democrats and Republicans.
Is this par for the course? Are there US senators who would fail a basic English proficiency test? I'm not belittling anyone who is learning a new language — I have a huge admiration for the courage and intrepidness of people who move to a country that speaks a foreign language — but these people are running for federal office.
True story: I was reading the Washington voter pamphlet maybe ten years ago, getting ready to vote, and discovered that one of my friends was running for Senate on the Libertarian ticket. So I called him up. "Dude - Bob - you're running for Senate?" "What? Oh! Yes! Yes I am!" "As a Libertarian?" "You come to the meetings a few times they make you run for something." "Senate?" "You should totally vote for me." "Why?" "'Cuz we're buds." "Do you know anything about being a senator?" "Does anybody?" "...I think the point is that some people know more than others." "But do they, though?" "Lotta times, yeah. You're running against Patty Murray!" "Okay, she probably knows more about being a senator than me. But it's not like I'm going to win." "I will totally buy you a beer but I will totally not vote for you. No hard feelings?" "No hard feelings. When should we go get that beer?"
Now look what you've made me do. They really, truly, have a visceral aversion to any kind of coercion they recognize as such. That's not just a justification for being asshole, they're consistent. They don't want to be pushed around, and they don't want you to be pushed around. They have too narrow a sense of what being constitutes being pushed around ("do this or starve" isn't actually a choice), so they fail to apply their principals to the more subtle coercions of the market along with the government, and that (at this point surely wilful) obliviousness makes them unfit to hold office, but "don't fuck with me and I won't fuck with you" is a fine moral principal that I wish was more widely held.
booooooooooo "I want to acquire stuff by my preferred means and then be left alone with my stuff" isn't a noble philosophy, especially when applied so rigidly. A consistently base opinion ought not be considered laudable for being consistent. "Don't fuck with me" is fine... so long as we can agree with what "fuck with me" means. "I won't fuck with you" is fine... so long as it's enforceable. These two caveats- group consensus and outside enforcement- constitute the pillars of social contract, which happens to be the antithesis of libertarianism, which essentially champions a return to state of nature. Which is garbage. That doesn't even touch on my objection to the kind of social values (or lack thereof) libertarianism naturally espouses. But I gotta get back to studying HIPAA right now, so I'll quit while I'm not bleeding out of all my face holes.
I've become a great fan of HIPAA since being dragged kicking and screaming into the corporate world, because "we need to devote some time to protecting our users' privacy, because not doing that would be irresponsible" does not move The Powers That Be, but "we need to devote some time to protecting our users' privacy because HIPAA" does, The Powers That Be not caring about all about doing things right if it costs them money but caring quite a bit about avoiding legal troubles. I like regulations that force The Powers That Be to let me do things closer to right. Without them I have to lie a lot... I hated it when I worked at a nonprofit, when we only had to pay attention to it when it turned out to proscribe something strictly inferior to what we planned to do.
According to elfassy, once you use this it's not longer compliant. Let's just build it out fully compliant without fax bandaids
It is truly a blunt tool for good. I've been known to rant rather a lot about the Americans with Disabilities Act and the twisted and ridiculous ways in which it is used. But the fact of the matter is, it's done an awful lot to allow disabled individuals to lead more normal, more comfortable lives. HIPAA is similar - it's a broad set of guidelines that permit people to sue over privacy which is more than the Constitution allows.
Had a boss who got to have lunch with some of the people who wrote the ADA. They copped to the fact that their legislation was deliberately vague on the presumption that caselaw would refine the regs. In plain English, "We expect a lot of people to be sued over their interpretations of our wording, and we see that as a good thing."
Laws aren't designed that way but in engineering world 2% might instead be a number that could guarantee sufficient access 95% of the time. Also according to Google 1/10 of all Americans have a severe disability so 2% is actually an underrepresented portion if you don't account for other factors
I think the worst I've ever gotten from the ADA has been needing to give screen readers something to say for visualizations and other features that are only useful if you can see, rather than just letting them ignore things that are useless to their users. I'm sure everyone using a screenreader just moves on without a second thought, but I always felt like drawing their attention to things they couldn't use was a little too much like taunting them.
It wasn't libertarian politics I praised, just the inclinations that give rise to them. I don't think "I want to acquire stuff by my preferred means and then be left alone with my stuff" is the core there, it's "I don't want to have obligations I didn't opt in to forced upon me." I find Libertarian politics frustrating, but mostly because they're the only sort of antiauthoritarian politics with any kind of momentum in America and they're the party of let the capitalists have their way with all of us, so not really antiauthoritarian at all.
I once wrote a database for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco that contained all the ICD-9 and CPT codes. Since it was a text file import into the database, I had to go through both datasets and read EVERY SINGLE ONE of them to ensure there were no spurious characters or other weirdnesses. Man... Other Contact With A Turtle, sequel... brings back memories... (and that is a GREAT name for a band!)
Hahahaha holy shit... those are real ICD-10 codes? How many times does something like that have to happen to merit its own code?
My fundamental problem with Libertarians boils down to one woman. It has been my general experience that you can discuss civil liberties with Libertarians all day. You can heartily agree and shake hands on the principle of the golden rule. But at some point you put forth some form of tragedy-of-the-commons dilemma (healthcare, public safety, infrastructure, courts, you name it) and they lick their thumbs, page through Atlas Shrugged and start pontificating about how greed is good and that people have the right to their own self-determination and basically reveal themselves not to be self-determinists but to be neo-feudalists who think they'll win because they've thought about it the longest.
Yeah, I can't find a nice thing to say about Ayn Rand. Bad philosophy in expressed in worse novels. But I think around the edges people start with dissatisfaction and latch on to the theory that seems to best express it, so "is this theory bullshit" isn't the right question to ask (they all are), the question to ask is "why have you latched on to this theory." Now, I think guys like Alan Greenspan probably latch onto it because feudalism isn't so bad if you're on top, but I don't think that's the motivation for the rank-and-file libertarian, who are for the most part not on top and know it.
It is my considered opinion that the overlap between libertarians and preppers is not coincidental. Libertarians espouse, above all else, the principle of fairness and resist, above all else, the concept of externalities. They are self-determinist to a fault and are generally resistant to bureaucracy of any kind for any purpose. The average libertarian thinks they would be far happier a hundred and fifty years ago when land was free and self-determination was the watchword but the average libertarian also resists the notion that "free land" is a consequence of a totalitarian cavalry hell-bent on genocidal conquer. The smart ones will wiggle back to "well of course we need an army to protect our civil liberties but only to protect our civil liberties" but will always change the subject when you point out that private armies are never used for good.
My problem with the Libertarians is the same issue I have with Communists. If you take human nature out of the equation, both economic philosophies are AWESOME. Humans, however, fuck everything up and need checks and balances and the push/motivation to advance the species. That and my first interactions with Libertarians were Alex Jones and Ayn Rand. There are some good ideas in there if you get past the nutjobisms.
I used to think the Communists were okay in numbers less than 100, then b_b made me read Richard Pipes. Who is exactly the kind of guy who would advise Reagan, is about as liberal as Henry Kissinger and not only concisely and completely makes the point that Marxist "Communism" has never really been tried and fails on every level, he also observes that Marxism-Leninism as practiced in the USSR and China is basically advanced kleptocracy with Marxist trappings. I think there were some serious "but on the other hand" embellishments of Communism during the Cold War and actually digging in and going chapter'n'verse on it convinced me pretty concisely that Communism doesn't work on any scale and was never intended to.
He makes a fair point about the info guide, though. Apparently candidates get charged a crazy amount of moolah to get their statements printed. I noticed the guide said candidates did have to pay to be in the guide, but it didn't say how much. That doesn't sound especially democratic. Still, I would like to see an e-voting candidate controlled by the same people who voted for Boaty McBoatface. That would be a safe pair of hands.
