Buried By The Brigade At Digg 624
Even if you just arrived from Mars and have never heard of Digg, that description of the service should make it obvious how easy it is to game the system, by rounding up groups of friends to vote on stories that you want to promote, or to bury stories that you want to kill. The former type of abuse (and it is abuse, under Digg's Terms of Use; search for "organized effort") is far more common, since people usually have more incentive (commercial or otherwise) to promote their own work than to bury someone else's. And in fact, Digg has announced that the next version of the service will remove the "bury" button, replacing it with a "Report" button for reporting bona fide cases of abuse, not just to bury boring stories.
The thinking seems to be that abusive "digging" to promote a story, is less harmful than abusive "burying", and this has the ring of plausibility — that a creative effort is better than a destructive one. After all, Alternet had previously highlighted several artificial right-wing "digg brigades" mentioned in their story (Diggs And Buries, theliberalheretic, etc.), but they didn't blow the lid off of the situation until their report on the Digg Patriots bury brigade, as if to say, "Now we've found something really scandalous!" Annalee Newitz cheekily reported on how she bought votes to boost a story to the front page of Digg, but probably would have felt guilty if she'd hired a service to bury someone else's story. And when a Digg user organized an effort to bury Ron Paul stories that he thought were "spamming" the system, Ron Paul supporters protested that they were merely organizing to vote up stories they agreed with — the clear implication being that this was more honorable than organizing to vote stories down.
But this, I think, is a fallacy. If a story's ranking is artificially inflated, then the extra eyeballs for that story have to come from somewhere, and they come from users paying less attention to the other stories that the phony up-and-comer pushed out of the way. Artificially bumping a story up is just as harmful as artificially burying a story, but the harm is distributed among many innocent victims, not just one. (By the same reasoning, in fact, you could argue that burying a story does no net harm to other users of the Digg site, because the harm done to one story is cancelled out by the benefit to all the other stories that rise in prominence when the victimized story is pushed out of the way. So by strict economic logic, recruiting friends to boost your own story at the expense of everyone else's, is actually more harmful than organizing a bury brigade!)
So I don't think that Digg's replacing the "bury" button with a "report" button will fix the problem. For one thing, obviously groups could abuse the "report" button in the same way — issuing calls to action to report a story for violating the TOU. Since a flurry of bona fide abuse reports is presumably what Digg uses to identify and remove truly abusive stories like MLM spam, how are they going to tell the difference between these cases and cases of abusive "reporting"? (My suggestion: See if there is a sudden change in the percentage of users who view a story and make an abuse report. For stories that are genuine TOU violations, the percentage of users who "report" it should remain steady; for stories that are victimized by a "report brigade," you'll see a sudden spike in viewers and in the percentage of those viewers who report the story for abuse. This might have worked for detecting and stopping the bury brigades as well, although we'll never know now.)
But more fundamentally, even if this change does stop the "bury/report brigades" from killing stories at will, that only fixes the most obvious symptom of the underlying problem, which is that the system can be gamed by recruiting your friends to vote either way. It won't stop "brigades" from artificially promoting shallow stories that agree with their opinions, which does the same net harm overall.
Indeed, the most long-term harm that the DiggPatriots Yahoo Group might have done is that their cheating was so egregious that it makes other examples of cheating look benign by comparison, and might prevent people from realizing that "benign cheating" is just as harmful. As detailed in the Alternet report, the DiggPatriots group talked openly about cycling through different Digg accounts and circumventing bans on their IP addresses. The welcome message to the Yahoo Group told new users that the group was operating "under the radar." The group leader, a woman with the handle "bettverboten," talked about how to prevent Digg from monitoring their actions. And of course the vast majority of posts were calls to bury stories. But what if all of that had been inverted? If the group had operated in the open, while still focusing on recruiting conservative members? If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
I still think the only way to make Digg a true meritocracy, would be to use some version of an algorithm I outlined in an earlier article, inauspiciously titled "How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever." The gist of it is that in addition to collecting votes from friends, stories should be shown to a random subset of users on the site (perhaps in a box that occasionally appears at the top of the screen when they're logged in), who are asked to vote it up or down. The votes of a random sampling of users would be more representative of how much value the story would have to the Digg community as a whole. Even if most users who are asked to vote on a "random story" simply ignore the request, all you need is to show the story to a large enough sample that you can measure the difference in responses to a truly good story vs. one that has been promoted by digg-cheaters. You don't necessarily have to run this procedure for every story, only the ones that are about to gain some benefit from a large number of diggs (such as being pushed to the front page), and you need to decide whether the story really deserves that big boost. The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
Still, the only site that I know of, that uses a version of this "random sampling" algorithm is HotOrNot.com, which lets you recruit your friends to vote on the "hotness" of your picture on a scale of 1 to 10 (by sending them a link to that specific picture), but also shows a stream of random pictures to visitors, so that your picture can collect votes from strangers. If the votes from the users who visit your picture via the link are significantly different from the votes from users who see your picture via the random stream, then HotOrNot discounts the votes from users who view your page via the link. This prevents digg-style gaming from people who want all their friends to give them a 10. (Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
This seems like the simplest way to prevent Digg-cheating, although there may be others. Still unresolved is how to solve the general problem of "gaming" in traditional media and the blogosphere. For the foreseeable future, it's going to be the simple truth that if a major media outlet wants to run a story, it will be heard, and if no media outlet wants to run it, it won't be heard, regardless of how many viewers or readers would have voted in some hypothetical poll that, yes, they want to read that story, and yes, they liked it afterward. That's true for Internet articles as well, except to the extent that a deserving article might be rescued from obscurity by Digg, but the more that system can be gamed, the less it will reward articles that really deserve it. Digg is gameable because power users can recruit votes from their friends; the media and the blogosphere are so obviously "gameable" that we don't even call it "gameable," because "power users" — media outlets and A-list bloggers — can run whatever they want. Right now, the only way I can think of to change this situation that is even logically possible, would be for a site like Digg to adopt some version of the random-sampling algorithm, and to continue growing in power until a significant percentage of the public (not just Internet users, but everybody) relied on it for information. Then, if you had something important to say, people would hear it, but you wouldn't be able to cheat your way to the top.
The ultimate irony is that Alternet's story may never have seen the light of day, if it hadn't been the beneficiary of the same gameable, non-meritocratic inefficiencies that exist in the media-blogo-outrage-o-sphere, just as they exist on Digg. Yes, the Alternet story deserved to be heard, but you don't get the publicity you deserve, you get the publicity that you organize, and Alternet had the organizational publicity structure in place to get their voice heard. If a kid blogging from his bedroom had infiltrated the Digg Patriots group and made essentially the same discovery, would anybody ever have heard about it? (Well, maybe, because of the political hot-button factor — but even then, only after the story had been picked up by a major site like Alternet.) A truly meritocratic Digg algorithm could make it possible to get a good story out without a lot of organizational support behind it — and to ensure that an organized effort can't kill a good story either.
How is this new? (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot had this problem long before Digg even existed or was even an idea.
CmdrTaco tried several ways of dealing with it, but it still exists today. Shill accounts designed to moderate down a disliked opinion. Mod down mobs. I have seen this stuff in action on lots of people's posts.
Typically the shill actions and mob actions get undone by the general populace but you can see the effects by looking at the moderation of a hot topic post. 30+ moderations with a crapload of overrated,troll, etc.. when the post was 100% op topic are a prime example of this.
Re:What a joke. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll wait...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
If I have to choose between dig and bury... (Score:4, Interesting)
If I have to choose between gangs of diggers and gangs of buryers, I'll take the gangs of diggers.
I'd rather see what is most popular, rather than not see what is most unpopular.
But I think the suggested random voting is best.
Why bury is worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why burying is worse. Burying is act of preventing people from hearing differing opinions. While it is true that artificially inflating the importance of information also has negative effect, many different viewpoints can be overinflated, so we still end up with a variety of opinions. A comment system allows all to reflect on those opinions.
It is true that groups can game the system to inflate the ranking of stories, but look at it this way. On has a finite amount of time. It is relatively trivial to use the time to bury selective stories, but becomes more complex if one wants to do the same thing by inflation. One has to inflate a larger number of stories, and at the same time others are doing the same with stories they agree with. All sides are probably going to inflate the stories that reflect best on them, as inflating politically correct but embarrassing stories would not be beneficial.
At the end of the day, and inflation policy is more likely to result is a selection of the best stories from a variety of opinions, while a bury policy will likely cause the best stories to be buries simply because a few people disagree with the viewpoint. The question is one interested in presenting information that people can choose from, or if presenting an opinion in hopes that everyone will agree.
Re:Haha (Score:1, Interesting)
Similar things happen at other social media sites that allow for submissions and comments to be rated, even those that are considered more libertarian, liberal, or progressive.
Hacker News is a particularly bad site for this kind of stuff. Any original thought or opinion there usually comes with a barrage of downvotes.
It's a problem at Reddit, too. Point out anything remotely negative about Ruby on Rails, Perl or MongoDB in the programming sub-Reddit, and you'll get their fanboy brigades modding your comments down.
It's even an issue here at Slashdot, too. If you suggest that xkcd isn't a funny comic strip, you'll catch a whole load of shit, and your comment will be at "-1, Troll" before you know it.
How has metamoderation been working, Taco? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm genuinely curious. I haven't metamoderated in well over 7, maybe 8 years. But I'm wondering, is it working? Has it worked before?
Re:How is this new? (Score:5, Interesting)
I totally disagree. While of course this happens to some extent, and while in general Slashdot has some pretty common points-of-view (FOSS supporters, generally libertarian leaning, etc.), the level of groupthink and mob rule is many orders of magnitude less on slashdot than on digg. While part of this may be due to the audience, I think the biggest factor is the moderation system. There is no "agree" or "disagree" moderation on slashdot. There are certainly many times I've moderated stuff as interesting or insightful even if I didn't necessarily agree with the sentiment of the poster.
On digg, it's all up or down. You'll frequently see comments like "**** Republicans!" rated very highly. Whether or not you agree with Republican political views, putting four asterisks before their party name adds nothing to the discussion. You rarely, if ever, see a comment like that rated highly on slashdot, unless there's something sarcastic behind it. Of course, now you'll probably see lots of comments like that as responses rated highly :-P
Re:Digg is just a reflection of our political dial (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine going out in public and voicing your opinion, then immediately after having 30 people stand in line to punch you in the face for it.
This is essentially what is happening online and to an extent has always happened. I've been online since 1993 and remember it being the same way back then. Anonymity + opinions = abuse.
The fact that it's politics today just reflects that it was politics back with Bush. The right is getting back at the left for the vitriolic rhetoric they laid on Bush/Cheney/Palin. You could call it karma if you want I guess.
I mostly abstain from posting on the net these days. I like to read comments but I don't post often for this very reason. It's not that I care about being modded down for my opinions so much as I just no longer see the value in it. Comments on websites are often a cesspool of illiterate, bigoted, biased crap.
I guess what I am getting at is, this is nothing new. Not sure why this is suddenly in the forefront again but it does seem cyclical, every few years it comes up again and people act all butt hurt for a while, then the pendulum swings their way again and the complaints go away.
Digg is built this way (Score:2, Interesting)
It's absurd for a leftist group of people organized via the Digg "shout" system of broadcasting instructions of friends, to complain about a far smaller group of conservatives doing the same exact thing via Yahoo groups.
The proof is in the pudding. Every conservative comment on Digg is buried to hell and back. The front page of Digg is constantly full of pro-Omaba and Huffington post stories. If there really is such a massive conspiracy, why is it having no effect?
The person who "uncovered" this provides no proof for the most dramatic claim, that some people are using multiple accounts - he just speculates it is so.
Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
(Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
No, I don't think so, at least as long as your threat model is "most votes on items are unbiased, but some small number are attacked." Suppose pictures (to stay with the OP's model) are being voted on, with most pictures getting a small positive response (say, a typical picture gets a 1% positive score), and a few getting as much as 99% positive votes, with each picture getting, say, a few thousands of responses. In theory, in this situation, you know the "likeability" of any given picture to a few %. Suppose you want to test the high ranking ones for attempts to game the system. To do that you might get as few as 10 votes from people you select at random. Now, 10 votes would not be nearly enough to distinguish between (say) "50% like" and "90% like," but it would be enough to distinguish between "99% like" and "1%" like or, for that matter, "50% like" and "1 % like."
So, if you think of the overall votes as providing you with statistics, and the much smaller number of 'random' votes as providing a go/no go confidence indicator to detect gaming of the system, both are useful, and neither can replace the other. (You can use the tools of operational research to tell you, for a given confidence level, just how many random votes you need to detect gaming for any given situation.)
Re:Digg's biggest fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Digg's and Slashdot's faults are pretty much the same: they use a moderation system that doesn't allow the end-user to filter out bad moderators.
For example, on /., it would be trivial to replace meta-moderation with a system that asked:
Would you like to see moderations from this user in the future? If you say no, that person's mods are now 0s to you. We'd all have differing views of /., based on our personal preferences, and organized gangs of moderators would be totally useless. And the more you metamoderated, the better your /. experience would be. Given a higher rate of participation in metamoderation, users with high levels of 'no' could be defaulted to 'off' for all users (becoming visible only if you've explicitly said 'yes' to that moderator).
But it will never happen on any discussion site because it would yield too much of the editorial control.
Re:What a joke. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:waitasec (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. A large enough brigade to bury a story using random sampling would have to be a significant fraction of the active userbase in order to be able to reliably influence stories. On average any individual account is only going to see a fraction of the total stories and only over time will they get more. This means that in order to influence a story you need several orders of magnitude more people (50000 instead of 50) with the corresponding difficulty of organising and near impossibility of secrecy. It also prevents 'flash mob' style behaviour where the group can organise a bury vote shortly after the story appears preventing it from being seen by many other users who could possibly upvote it and ruin their efforts. If it were possible to organise 5-10% of Digg users (secretly or openly) to promote/bury particular types of stories I would have a hard time saying it was gaming the system because it now legitimately represents the outlook of a significant portion of their users rather than a fractional percentage.
The other influence it would have would be to shift the dynamic of power to people who regularly use Digg for extended periods of time since the random sample would be periodic. Like wikipedia this would shift the direction of content into the hands of power users rather than random joes. As well it would prevent use of alternate accounts and IP spoofing to inflate ratings as they would have to spend a significant amount of time on digg to rate any given story. It would also prevent people who have no interest in Digg itself but are told by a influencial member of their political group to downvote/upvote an article or do so as part of their 'service' to their political agenda.
While it is quite possible that someone would discover new ways to game the system it would raise the effort required to do so signifcantly and help avoid the appearence of political bias which could be the death of a social system like digg.
Other solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
The main problem is that a simple up/down rating conveys too little information. There are various ways to address this.
One method involves tailoring the ratings according to what the reader likes to see. This is accomplished by having the user "follow" specific raters (diggers); in other words, only the ratings done by the raters being followed matter to a given reader. Deciding what raters to follow could be done manually or automatically (or both). One automatic method is fairly data intensive, but would work as follows: for any story you choose to rate up, the system could look at who else rated the story up and make them potential followees, assuming they keep popping up this way.
Another method of addressing the root problem is to simply have lots of different kinds of ratings, and then let users assemble their own formulas for what ratings they care about. Here the difficulty is in deciding how many and what kind of ratings to use, and how to update them to keep up with the times. Perhaps there could be a fixed set and a system for proposing new types of ratings that could be moderated.
With any solution, there is the issue that users will narrow their focus down to only stories that follow their own thinking. This is what people want, to some extent. But it may also help keep people narrow-minded. Perhaps there should be a side-column in any feed that offers random stories.
Re:Haha (Score:1, Interesting)
Name one of those nationalities that contains the word "America" in the name of their home country.
Thanks for playing.
Re:How is this new? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of that can be explained by Drudgereport.com posting links to it. He's a huge anti-global warming loony (every time a state/city has a record low temperature, he posts it as "proof" that global warming is a sham). His readers are as crazy as anything out there.
Re:Slashdot is never wrong! (Score:3, Interesting)
FTFY. Slashdot is usually at least interesting w/r/t discussion. Strawman, Ad-hominem, Troll, Flamebait and other forms of Conversational Terrorism [vandruff.com] (ie, noise) are usually downrated, and many times I learn things here due to the up-rating of signal that's Informative or Insightful. I tried, I mean, really tried to spend more than 5 minutes on almost any other discussion thread... it's a worthless effort.
It's a shame that the moderation system from Slashdot (or some derivative) isn't used more widely.
Re:Haha (Score:2, Interesting)
The US has always been known as "America" for short in the English dictionary. Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, and Chile have not. No one in this day and age is confused about the term and whom it's applied to, nor should they be.
Plus, "USian" is not even a word and therefore more stupid than the alleged misappropriation of the work "American". So if you want to come up with a better word, then it needs to be an actual word.
Re:What a joke. (Score:3, Interesting)
Please give examples, with citations, of left-wing groups that are doing the same on Digg as the cited right-wing groups.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the near epileptic fit the left had over Bush didn't clue anyone in... how can you be surprised or dismayed by some from the right? After there are zealots on both sides and needless to say, their actions sell news. The news doesn't care about the majority of conservatives or liberals who act rationally, its more fun to find the loons.
The only President the US needs is one who can stand up to Congress and beat them down with the bully pulpit and get this country's finances in order. What we have now is same crap we had with Bush for 6 years, anything goes as one party in power is always ruinous for the US
At first I thought, this was an incredible statement and I fully believed in it. But there is one thing I have to point out, while the Left went nuts while Bush was in power, Bush was in command during some really messed up times in American history, and it really seemed like he hasn't handled any of it very well. The left wingers were in a fit, yes, and spawned off some... interesting groups, like 9/11 truthers. But it was Bush (though maybe not personally, but he is ultimately responsible) that brought in all sorts of reactionary politics. The left wingers attacked these things. They weren't grasping at straws when they protested the Iraq war, they weren't grasping at straws when they protested the patriot act, they weren't grasping at straws over the tax cuts.
I personally don't recall (WARNING: this memory lapse is very likely the result of bias towards the left, so please fill in the blanks if you want) the most vocal left wing pundits making random shit up to prove their point on why the Iraq war should not have happened. But the right wing rhetoric of "death panels" in Obamacare? I don't get it. The right wing rhetoric seems far more obscene, far more bizarre, far more queer. And speaking of queer, how can you have a small government and a ban on gay marriage at the same time? That is a ridiculous position to hold because a small government implies its inability to dictate morality.
That being said, I'm completely disenfranchised with politics period. I mean, Obama seemed promising when he wasn't in charge, but he has no backbone to speak of, and everyone else is playing the "my opponent is worse than me" card instead of having any independent thoughts whatsoever. No one with power has a plan and that's clear in the political discourse of the 21st century.
Oh well, there hasn't been a revolution in the western world in a while, perhaps it's time to start one...
Re:How is this new? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with meta-moderating, is that it's obscured and somewhat random. I've gone to meta and found posts with no moderation even on them. It's not consistent so people don't go in there as much as they should. You also don't get that immediate result as you do with moderating.
Personally, I think it would be better is mod points were obscure and people could all moderate but it would only alter karma if they had points to spend. All mods that do not have points would be considered meta-mods and will count as they do now.
Re:Digg's biggest fault (Score:1, Interesting)
Would that not lead to a scenario where a user would only see content that agreed with their own point of view?
It is not healthy to ignore opposing points of view..
Re:tl;dr (Score:5, Interesting)
It IS simple. And it's very traditional, too: the first true democracy, Athens, relied heavily upon random sampling to achieve popular representation. It's called sortition [wikipedia.org].
It's one thing slashdot got right, too, or at least more right than reddit and digg. Mod points are awarded randomly here, if you've been member for a while (a year, isn't it?). Since we don't get to mod all the time, we do it more conscientiously when we do. A fair evaluation by a representative sample gives far better results than what you get elsewhere, which is usually empathetic votes from people who very strongly disagree or agree with you.
(I admit, I could be a little biased here. I get much, much lower mods on reddit compared to slashdot, where it sometimes feels everything I write gets to +5!)
Rob Malda, fact is you were right in a way digg and reddit simply weren't. Their approach was appealing in the start, but didn't scale well as their readership soared. Why don't you capitalize on this more? Take the next step?
Allotted mod privileges is great, but it should also be random which comments and stories were eligible for moderation. Maybe just a tenth of the comments on each story, with these sorted on top (treewise), so that you avoid the Matthew effect [wikipedia.org], that already highly modded comments/stories get all the attention.
The firehose could really shine, if you took your old ideas (which are the same as the old ideas of the Athenians) to their logical extension.
Re:What a joke. (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, find me the part where I said I didn't think there are any leftist groups anywhere else possibly doing the same thing.
I'll wait...
Re:He's wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Two or three. Since the post can't drop below -1, you only need to bring it up to +1 or +2 to be visible at most levels of filtering. On EARLIER versions of Slashdot, you could indeed bury a post permanently by taking it to -2. You had one person mod up by 1, the rest of your clique then modded down to get the post to -1, then the person who modded up posted, eliminating the +1. This took the post to -2, which is never visible and can therefore never be modded back up (except by sysops). This bug was fixed some time back.
A related quirk was that you could also get to the dizzying heights of +6 by the same method. The total number of +6-modded posts was extremely small, but they did exist. They also caught attention merely because every poster on the site knew damn well that should be impossible.
Re:Haha (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an example of another way to silence debate. Any media organization that is not Fox or some right-wing blog is not to be taken seriously because they are liberal. Even when all they do is show verbatim clips and transcripts of the things that are being said in the right-wing media. No clever editing like Breitbart, just letting the Right say what they want to say. I've heard that same line about "such and such newspaper/network/blog/magazine is a left wing front organization" used to describe every network but Fox, every newspaper except Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, every radio station except those owned by Clear Channel of SRN, every publisher except the Eagle/Regnery group. Every university is a "left-wing front". Every union is a "left-wing front". Basically, for the Right-Wing in America, at least half of the country consists of left-wing fronts or far left lackeys. Half the nation is made up of traitors, the enemy. In 2008, according to the Right Wing, more than half the American voters were on the "far left". And why is every Democratic member of congress on the "Far Left" according to the Right? Wouldn't there have to be some people on the plain old Left? No, they're all "Far Left" but if you ask them, everyone on the Right is "Center Right".
Freedom of speech, except for liberals. Freedom of religion, except for muslims. Freedom to pursue happiness and equal protection under the law, except for homosexuals.
The current Right-Wing in the US has a very interesting set of beliefs, one that will be studied by historians for generations to come
I don't get how this is cheating... (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, if they rounded up a bunch of people who didn't care one way or the other about the story and convinced them to vote anyways - definite cheat.
If one person creates a hundred Digg ids and votes with all of them - definite cheat.
But if 100 people who genuinely like or do not like a story all log in once to say so, isn't that what the site is for?
The problem isn't multiple people voting, its the fact that everyones votes count towards the rating I see - even the votes of people who I' don't agree with. Digg tries to create a single online community, when it would more usefully facilitate the growth of multiple communities, and help people find which oneS they most belong in. Let the Tea Partiers digg as much as they like, and they will usefully tell other Tea Partiers about things they are interested in, and won't bother the rest of us one bit.
(And then, as the author of the main article above suggests, throw in the odd random story anyways, to keep people from getting _too_ balkanized.)
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's your culture -- the culture of hyper-independence -- that's exactly your problem. Everyone wants all the benefits of modern civilization, but nobody wants to give up any of their own personal wealth to fund it. Did you read that article in the New York Times yesterday, about the city and state governments who are slashing services, because their voters refuse to allow tax increases? I thought the example of Colorado Springs was most instructive: a city that has to turn off one third of their street lights, and had to auction off police helicopters (and cut police jobs) because the ratepayers voted down tax hikes? It's not like Colorado Springs is a particularly poor city or anything, the people there could probably afford the tax hike, but heaven forbid that they actually pay for the services (and the jobs to go with them) that the city provides!
Your culture is what's killing you, not your politicians. They're only doing as much as the rest of you let them get away with.
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
And to be fair, it was never about keeping their slaves, but rather to protect states' rights to decide whether or not to allow slavery.
I hear that a lot (mostly from Southerners), but I don't think non-revisionist history really backs it up.
Slight tangent: an interesting article [theatlantic.com] I read this morning that takes a crack at the idea that most Confederate soldiers weren't slaveowners.
Re:Haha (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, I listen to Rush every day
"Those who hold high places must be the ones to start to mold a new reality closer to the heart." -- Rush
Oh, you meant the OxyContin addict? Never mind.
Re:He's wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Abusive digging is somewhat self-correcting - as soon as an article reaches prominence thanks to the mass diggs, a lot more people will see it and attempt to bury it - but abusive burying fundamentally can't self-correct even if the site did allow it to be counteracted in theory.
Isn't this a bit like abusive modding on slashdot? Fewer people (even mods, unfortunately) read at -1, and once upon a time it was technically possible to get a post modded below -1 so that nobody would ever see it, even if they wanted to. These posts would not get modded back up, while posts that were spurilously modded up off the bat would eventually get modded back down.
/. after all.
At least that's the theory. In practice, spurious up-mods seem to be met by further up-mods...this is
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
But the problem is that you'll dismiss a policy out of hand BECAUSE it worked in Europe.
The only way the US is going to prevent losing a lot more ground in the world is to learn a little something from the countries where people are happy and prosperous. The "our way or the highway" approach isn't doing America a lot of good.
Re:He's wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks - I was mulling through *why* it seemed intuitively wrong to me to make those equivalent, and yeah, I think you nailed it. I'm not sure his plan isn't an improvement, but but burying a story that can't recover on it's own merit is a lot worse than hyping a story that falls apart based on it's own shortcomings.
Which is of course why we have a free press no matter how badly it sucks at time - I'd rather risk the hype of people adulating bs like the Paul Ryan budget, or even the most recent bs entertainment story, than risk an important story being buried.
Which of course highlights the fundamental cowardice of what the right-wingers were doing. To bury the opposing viewpoint in this way is to declare "Given equal time, I don't think we'll win this argument. Better make sure they don't have equal time"; Whether they don't think they'll win based on the facts, or because they think they're intellectually/morally superior to their fellow citizenry is kinda irrelevant to me - that merely helps narrow down whether it's the cowardice of the con-artist lying to others or the cowardice of the elitist lying to themselves.
Pug
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not like Colorado Springs is a particularly poor city or anything, the people there could probably afford the tax hike, but heaven forbid that they actually pay for the services (and the jobs to go with them) that the city provides!
Note: Conservative in this post refers to reduced-waste conservative, not religious 'C'onservative.
Is it not possible that they don't want the services? It's hard for a conservative to argue with someone who just wants to 'give' you something in the form of government services.
You can't argue that "This service is bad". You can't argue that something like a Fire Dept is just plain bad. It's a fire department, you know, firemen, good guys, saving houses and lives.
That's why it is harder to be a conservative. We have to argue "Yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of our Fire Department, but they cost us too much money. Here are examples as to why their budget needs to be reduced because...." eg: They could be buying new engines every year just for parades. Maybe they bought a special ladder truck that's all the rage but only marginally better than a normal truck on only 3% of the city.
But the counter-argument against the conservative is as simple as "They want to cut firemen's jobs and make your town less safe."
As a conservative, you can't win this argument even though you could be making the city more efficient. It's never easy being the 'bad guy' when it comes time to say, "We just shouldn't or can't spend our money frivolously."
Re:Haha (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Haha (Score:4, Interesting)
Byrd was more or less guaranteed his seat until his death. I'm actually from WV, and the most typical response when you ask someone's opinion of Byrd is "He was corrupt as all hell, but he'd done too much good for this state not to vote for him." Which might sound like an oxymoron, but it's really not -- he did everything in his power to improve his home state, and on any case where that wasn't a concern, well, then he wasn't so "inflexible". He played the "game" of politics and he played it well.
Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if the whole "filibuster the Civil Rights Act" thing wasn't a bid for a vote in his favor elsewhere from someone who was worried about how they'd look in their respective constituency if they tried to do it.
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
The party divisions were (and to an extent, still are) largely arbitrary.
You clearly don't live in Nevada.
Last I checked, the Nevada democratic party isn't trying to prop up a crazy who used to be a member of an ultra-radical party who's decided to hitch their wagon to a racist, xenophobic, militant, 9/11 Truther, AIDS denialist bandwagon.
Re:Haha (Score:4, Interesting)
So where do you think those racist Democrats went? Maybe they just stopped voting, maybe they joined some third party (though the numbers don't really bear this out). There's really only one party to which the racist "Dixiecrats" could have gone.
(Democratic) President Lyndon Johnson said it best, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964: "we have lost the South for a generation." The man was a Texan and he knew what he was talking about. Except maybe the part about it only lasting one generation.
If you're interested, you can also read about how the Republicans took in those southern voters, and the people who made it happen. They were not good people. Ironically, many of them probably weren't even racists at all, by the standards of the day. They simply had no concerns, and realized that this was an opportunity for power and riches. Too bad we still have to live with their ilk.
Re:Slashdot could be hugely improved (Score:3, Interesting)
It has its ups and downs. A lot of stuff would get modded up that would be misinformation and whatnot. Like it or not, the mod system on slashdot does seem to have some balancing. You have a limited number of modpoints, versus an unlimited number of digs (and buries), so using a point costs you something. Something tells me that overly abusive people that constantly do nothing but mod down receive mod points far less often (if at all). I've always tried to use my modpoints for the positive, but there are a great deal of cases where something really needs to be modded down somehow, and the slashdot community doesn't seem to be overly mean spirited. There is some fanboyism here, but that's really to be expected. We are all fans of something. Windows 7 is pretty sweet, and so is android, and I'm a huge fan of using the cheapest, best option, but I'll probably get modded somewhere for comments like that. :)
I mean seriously. This is slashdot. The "editors" here don't even bother to proof submissions half the time. Do you really expect them to actually sit down and mod comments? I heard about their wild parties from that anonymous coward user, and let me tell you, natalie portman and hot grits have nothing on the hot steaming fecal matter left from ruffies, laxative, and anal rape.
Thanks to the ability for moderators to mod down, I know where the heart and soul of slashdot lives. Its not +5 insightful, its -1 Troll. How else would I possibly find out how far you can possibly stretch your anus or about the GNAA? Who cares about Microsoft when you have two girls and a one cup? You know how many times you have to click refresh to get in one good frosty piss? That takes dedication, and I salute you trolls of slashdot for keeping this site fucking hillarious over the years and keeping me well informed of BSD's impending demise according to netcraft. Anyone remember the ASCII art and bad formatting abuse days? Ahhh....memories.