
On Fri, 8 Apr 2016 12:58:35 AM Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
I heard discussion on public radio, recently, of a biographical book about that family, and they had some intrigues worthy of the Italian Renaissance. And some good reasons for turning out a bit warped. I listened to that and thanked my lucky stars for having grown up among overwhelmingly sane and pleasant people.
The punishment for being a Koch is having to associate with other Koches. :-#
I'll gladly take your word for it about there no longer being a Koch sponsorship of Tea Party nutters. I really wouldn't know.
None of us would ever be certain that they aren't sponsoring them. But it seems unlikely and in any case irrelevant. The Koches wanted astroturf but got a weed infestation.
by Watergate, then by the Oil Crisis and Jimmy Carter, then by that mouth-breather Ronald Reagan. The Bill Clinton years I almost caught up
You should watch some of the videos by Ron Reagan. I think that like me you will have more respect for his father afterwards.
I'm deeply oriented towards books and traditional magazines and study of history, so I'm totally an outsider to cultures that get their worldviews from Twitter, Facebook, and reality television, and who don't really read.
Of all the things you listed, not reading twitter etc seems to be your biggest lack. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there.
I'm the product of an Ivy League college, so I'm totally an outsider to anyone so incredibly ignorant as to take Trump seriously.
I expect that more than a few Ivy League graduates vote for Trump. Being well educated doesn't necessarily prevent people from being horrible bigots. Take the Linux community's treatment of women and GLBT people as an example. If the KKK was only comprised of and supported by uneducated hicks it would have died out a long time ago.
I'm a person who defines politics as 'the public's business' and the government as 'us', so I'm totally an outsider to the infantile cult of dismissing politics as inherently evil and working solely to throw out the bastards with no Plan B, and want to shrink government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub (as evil genius and Tea Party strategist Grover Norquist says).
The reason that seasteading etc have never taken off is that even the anti-tax extremists know that a country run by people like themselves would be a horrible place to live.
Let's imagine a case where you have 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans in a CA primary. Each person who's loyal to one of those parties would vote for their candidate who seems best to them (extremist or not depending on preference). Each unaffiliated voter gets to choose between the less extreme candidates of the 2 parties. Each of the parties would probably get half the unaffiliated voters which gives the party loyalists a 2:1 advantage over independents. As most people are loyal to one of the big parties I think it will be uncommon for that to change election results.
I don't know what to tell you, but it really does seem to moderate the hopefuls' positions. And that really was the idea.
I guess it doesn't matter whether it would make a mathematical difference if people believe it makes a difference and act accordingly. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/