OK, forget my last post about what the Democrats need to do. After a few more hours both online and on TV, I can't help but think that those actions are a little too mature for too many Democrats. Let's start more simply. Speaking as a Bush voter, here's a short list of things various Democrats need to stop doing, lest they continue to marginalize themselves. Stop explaining to us why we're stupid.

By now, the election results for the US are well known: The Republicans keep the Presidency, they get more seats in the House, they get more seats in the Senate, and they will almost certainly be placing some people on the Supreme Court. Basically, while it isn't quite enough to be considered a blank check, especially as party loyalty isn't what it used to be, it is rather close; the Senate control is only a few seats short of being able to unilaterally break a filibuster.

I think what this argument typically indicates is an individual who is using the following logic, more or less consciously: My vote isn't going to be the vote that changes the outcome. Therefore, my vote is of exactly zero value. Ultimately, this is a very selfish line of reasoning, because it implicitly is claiming that only their vote should count. Well, I got news. There are about three hundred million other people in the good ole' US of A, many of them able to vote, and their votes count too.

(This is actually true of all voting systems, not just the US Government.) It seems like common sense that the purpose of voting is to determine the winner. But like much common sense, it is wrong. The purpose of voting is to satisfy the loser that they lost. Determining a winner is easy, it is the guy with the most guys and guns who is still alive. A voting-based system depends on the acquiescence of the losers, so that they don't just grab guys and guns and take over.

This is a test post. This is almost, but not quite, only a test post. I got suspend-to-disk working, for suitably small values of working, on my Linux laptop a couple of weeks ago. Since it boots up so much more quickly from a suspend, I was using it instead of a conventional power-down. Last Saturday, I took my machine down to a family re-union for a family file exchange.

So why then does the US have two meta-coalitions instead of a multiplicity of little parties? I can eliminate one popular misconception right off the bat: There are no formal provisions for two parties in the US political system. (At least, none to speak of.) The proof is simple: There are more than two parties in the US, something I daresay even most residents are only vaguely aware of. There's Reform, Green, Libertarian, and a handful of others.

Many democracies run, with varying degrees of formality, on a coalition system. Many parties via for seats in a legislative chamber, representing many distinct interests. Generally, there is something that can only be done with a strict majority, often things like passing bills or electing a Prime Minister. Since the interest groups are so fragmented, for a given bill, many of the groups may have weak or even no opinions about it; for instance, a labor party may have no strong opinions either way about a gun control bill.

This post is an introduction and will serve as an index to a series of posts I am doing on myths about the United States Govermental system. It was one post but it grew too long. It is an important series because the myths I will be addressing are very widespread, and many of them are quite damaging. Myths: The US Is A Two Party System, Not A Coalition System The US is Formally A Two-Party System The Purpose Of Voting Is To Determine A Winner My Vote Doesn't Count Interlude: Making Sense Of The 2004 Election

I was reading somebody talk about the distribution of people who "agree global warming is an issue" and how it has changed over time, and it made me wonder where I would fit in. I agree that the evidence is that the global average temperature is rising. I agree that there are certain economic issues this causes, and recall that when I use the word "economic" I automatically mean "

Over the past few decades, psychology has taken great strides towards becoming a real, hard science instead of an "observational science" like history. Cognitive psychology has helped lead the way, since it has been lucky enough to be able to measure things like response times to stimuli for a long time now, but it has proven more difficult to test theories of how minds work on the lowest level.