mopgoblin on 10/11/2007 at 09:36

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What? He doesn't mention Bush by name at all, and only refers to "the President" once in the body of the letter - in an attack on the Democratic members of Congress. Bush is most certainly not the focus of this letter. You didn't actually read a word of it, did you?

Kolya on 10/11/2007 at 10:57

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Having a grudge on the responsible politicians is one thing. Telling people to fuck off who meant to risk their lifes to protect your country and where subsequently thrown into a neverending shitstorm is an entirely different thing imo.

mopgoblin on 10/11/2007 at 12:39

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Democracy is rather more complicated than that, though. Using certain electoral systems can create extremely distorted results, and render some votes entirely ineffective. If I recall correctly, US elections for the House of Representatives use First Past the Post (FPP), which is a horrible system in almost every way - you get huge disproportionalities, and apparently the US version is also vulnerable to rather serious manipulation of district boundaries. The Senate elections are barely any better, as they are based on two-member districts (each corresponding to one of the states), most of which use simple plurality systems. As a result, there are very few closely contested seats, and it is almost impossible for any party to win a significant proportion of seats in either house unless that party is already well-established. The presidential elections have similar problems - any vote in a safe district is of no real effect, and the actual result need not be consistent with the popular vote. There are also plenty of problems independent of the voting system itself, e.g. regarding campaign funding. In fact, the US can barely be considered to have a valid democratic system by modern standards, and it has fallen well behind the electoral systems of many other nations. Furthermore, there is far more to the modern state than the legislature and the elected members of the executive - while unelected public servants (along with other entities that may gain access to some of the power of the state) should remain impartial and apolitical, in practice this may not always be the case.

Ultimately, even a relatively shallow examination of real-world examples tells us that representative democracy alone is not sufficient to ensure good governance. Democracy is not substantially different to any other form of government unless the people are well-informed, have a solid understanding of politics, and are willing to have a greater degree of involvement than merely casting a vote every few years. The US government and society are both structured in ways that discourage all of this, and many of the events of this decade are largely symptoms of this problem.

Trappin on 10/11/2007 at 17:00

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This guy knows how to link farm Google. It's a rare day when a search [James Circello] results in page after page after page of the same person, letter and text message.

Google allows certain points of view to slip past the anti-link farming search engine code - this is a perfect example of it.

heretic on 10/11/2007 at 17:56

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My thoughts exactly.


"I delayed my going AWOL, because when I learned both Houses of the Congress were controlled by Democrats I was confident that the war was finally over."

Ahahah... fake but funny.

Edit: Isn't this is the same organization that tried to use a "ex-green beret" as their spokesman a while back, only for him to have been exposed as a fraud who had never even served.