Friday, November 05, 2004

The Backseat Philosopher: To My Fellow Democrats

Not all Democrats are lost in the Fever Swamps with Moore and Dean. This bloke actually shows some hope for a return to civility, not that the enraged and elite Left are gonna start listening to a sellout accomodationist like HIM.

Read every last word he's written, but for a quick taste, dig on this:

Our error is that we Democrats are far less understanding than we think we are. Our version of understanding the other side is to look at them from a psychological point of view while being completely unwilling to take their arguments seriously. "Well, he can't help himself, he's a right-wing religious zealot, so of course he's going to think like that." "Republicans who never served in war are hypocrites to send young men to die. " "Republicans are homophobes, probably because they can't deal with their secret desires." Anything but actually listening and responding to the arguments being made.

And when I say 'responding,' I don't just mean 'coming up with the best counterargument and pushing it.' Sometimes responding to an argument means finding the merit in it and possibly changing one's position. That is part of growth, right?

Here are some arguments that are being made that the Democratic party has simply not responded to, in the larger sense of the word "response":
  • Whatever the UN was, might have been, or should be, it now isn't. Genocidal tyrannies are on the Human Rights commision. Saddam Hussein funneled over 1.7 billion dollars to various decision makers and world leaders to weaken his sanctions program. One out of every three votes is about Israel. Until the UN is significantly reformed, you shouldn't take its decisions seriously.
  • If we view 1000 or even 10,000 dead soldiers as unacceptable, we will never be able to fight a real war again.
  • Proportional response with no preemption allows the other side to set the pace of the battle.
  • Just because it says something in the Bible doesn't mean there are no ancillary arguments supporting it. And just because someone uses the Bible as a source of their morality doesn't mean that any particular view of theirs is wrong. Actually, stuff that's lasted for thousands of years is more likely to be useful than stuff that was dreamed up in a French philosophy book.
I am not saying that all these arguments should win. But I do not hear enough Democrats elucidating reasoned counterarguments to these positions. "Bush insulted our allies and the UN," "Bush lied, people died," "We have become the aggressor," "Homophobia," "Religious nut." These are not responses, these are dismissals. When Democrats start actively responding, we will succeed. Until then, we will be increasingly ignored as irrelevent.

Someone want to tell Moby about this?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you say "fraud"? Can you say "recount"? I knew you could!


Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes
AP - 1 hour, 39 minutes ago

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush (news - web sites) 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites)'s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.


Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.


State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.


Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result.


The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.


The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.


In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.


In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.


Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.


The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.


Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.


Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.


When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.


"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."


A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Dirk Belligerent said...

Sure, go ahead and recount. And while we're at it, let's check those states that Kerry barely won to see if everything's kosher there, too.

Dubya's biggest mistake in 2000 was not going after the states Gore cheated in and letting it all ride on Florida.

Of course, your selective outrage at voter fraud is duly noted.

Anonymous said...

Hey now, what a surprise! There's now some evidence showing that there are inflated totals in some Florida precincts as well!

I am shocked, SHOCKED! to find out that the two biggest electoral states up for grabs have errors that favor Bush! Imagine the probability of that!

And for the record, I hope two things happen: 1) massive tallying-related fraud is uncovered that determines that Kerry should have won the elctoral votes in those states; and 2) Bush does not give up the presidency.

I don't want Kerry in the White House, I want rural America and the Christians to know that Bushco is as corrupt and scummy as the left has been saying all along. Of course, that probably doesn't matter as long as the fags can't get married!

Buy the ticket, take the fucking ride.