[Info-vax] Politicizing Nice printers for OpenVMS?

[JF Mezei]

George Cornelius wrote:

> Quit reading your own country's news reports, get your feet on the
> ground in the U.S., and see for yourself.  Skip the coasts, come to
> the Midwest, and see if your stereotypes match reality.

A nation tends to gets known by its image. And the USA has been sending
a very strange image in the last decade, one ranging from those born
again ultra religious fanatics  to the sarah palin types of ultra right
wing who don't really think about the true impact of their suggestions.
They just love their anti-this and anti-that rethoric.

The normal, intelligent centrist republicans seem to have been sidelined
because the party appears to have decided that they absolutely need
those right wing extremist votes and to get them, the party must not
appear to be too centrist.

(To bring this somewhat back on topic, LaCarly was not liked much
because she was considered a left wing republican because of her views
that the republican party should move towards centre to attract more
voters and be more inclusive.)

>From my point of view, it appears the republicans became more extreme to
the right while the democrats have stayed somewhat close to centre.


The irony here is that while the republicans claim to be the fiscally
conservative ones and accuse the democrats to be free spending hippie
socialists on drugs riding in VW vans painted with the "peace" symbol,
the record shows that national dept rises faster under republicans than
under democrats.

Yet, republicans refuse to accept this and continue to think that
cutting taxes will solve the nation's economic problems despite the fact
that cutting taxes has empirically shown to not work and make things
worse (since govts who cut taxes tend to not control spending).


> Fascinating book review in the N.Y. Times recently.  There's a fellow,
> apparently a Democrat, who has a thesis that tendencies towards being
> conservative or liberal have a lot to do with your genetic makeup.

This is a dangerous conclusion. A bit like concluding that the odds of
having a british accent are far higher if you are born in an government
hospital compared to private hospital. (govt hospitals in england vs
private hospitals in USA).

It is quite possible that there are genetic differences, but they are
perhaps not the cause of the different gotes but rather simply reflect
different genetic makeup of population in red or blue states.  Social
influences would likely be the cause of voting patterns.



> An interesting concept, and perhaps I'll be able to read it.  I want
> to believe it's even simpler than that: you vote your pocketbook,

While this may be true, I think that a sigificant portion of american
electorate are indoctrinated into a party's philosophy and will always
vote for them no matter who the leader is.  After all, americans
re-elected a known war criminal in 2004, refusing to hear stories that
showed all the lies and deceptions he used.

I had an aunt who used to be democrat. Then she became religious, got
involved in the anti abortion stuff and automatically became staunch
republican for life and refused to hear the truth about what Bush Jr
did. Bush Jr was the only only against abortion so he get her vote no
matter what else the war criminal did and how many adult americans he
sent to their deaths (and the over 125,000 iraqis he killed)

What was interesting is that she kept calling our medical system in
Canada "socialised medecine" and kept criticising it. But when her best
friend was told her cancer was not covered by her insurance and was
basically sentenced to death by some paper pusher at an insurance
company, she instantly changed her mind about our system.



> order to retain power.  Europeans would appear to have swallowed
> the propaganda as well - hook, line, and sinker.

Seeing Sarah Palin speak in public did not require any democrat's spin
to allow foreigners to make up their mind about her.

And outside of the USA, we don't really hear the democrats talk about
republicans. We hear enough directly from republicans to get an idea of
what they represent. What is hard to gauge is what percentage of
repblicans are really like that image we get.

The problem I have with americans is that their political affiliation
seems to be like sex: assigned at birth and rarely changes. If you are a
republican, you are loyal to the party, even if its leader is a known
war criminal and you'll still vote for him.

At the end of the day, elections are decided by a small minority that
sit in the middle and have not been indoctrinated by eiother party and
can choose objectively the least worse of the 2 candidates.