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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[LordSlowpoke]

When you make a soldier fight a war he's going to want all the tools in the toolbox. The reason the U.S. has been struggling in it's overseas combats since 1945 is that the U.S. public is hamstringing them every step of the way.

It sucks that the US public has prevented its army from performing acts of wholesale genocide.

It sucks that the US public has forced its army into unwinnable situations

O_o

Not like they have some of the most advanced gear in the world or anything. In a few years the standard-issue light machine gun and 1,000 rounds of its ammo are likely to weigh less than the current SAW, unloaded.

If the military was allowed to fight without restriction, those conflicts could have been won (I'd think relatively easily). Instead, they get in there and aren't allowed to do anything except stand around, because the enemy dresses like civilians and literally uses them as human shields.

when was the last time the us army was allowed to fight without restriction? i'd pull up the second and first world wars as an example of what happens when no restrictions are implemented but you could have a giant argument regarding how much they brought to the battlefield in terms of actual boots on the ground itself

can't help but get the "damn these civilians for not allowing the military to firebomb everything, we'd win wars within weeks" vibe from your post, by the way. tell me why i'm wrong in getting it

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Well yes, I suppose you can technically consider yourself to have won if you massacre everybody else.

[Leafsnail]

[Lagslayer]

What's the alternative? Just letting them go means they get a chance to do it again, or worse. It's clear the people they hide behind are incapable or unwilling to do anything about them, while at the same time, are seemingly oppressed on a daily basis by them. Sanctions require full international cooperation (which isn't happening) and hurts the innocents at least as much as the terrorists. Special ops, assassinations, and espionage only go so far by themselves. Most people see cloak and dagger stuff as dishonorable, making that a PR nightmare, anyways. Giving the civilians guns does not wash us of responsibility for blood shed, and could still ultimately end up in terrorist hands, because they control everything and disguise as civilians, themselves. This is not just some civil war that will remain neatly contained within the region.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck no matter how it's sliced, but it can't just be ignored.

[FearfulJesuit]

The Cruzlings are coming.

[Max White]

The Cruzlings are coming.

Are you prepared to go all the way with this, Cruz?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Time to review some of what Americans actually believe:

-Evolution: 60% of adults accept that humans evolved over time, while 33% believe humans have existed as we do now since the beginning of time. Acceptance of evolution is highest amongst White Mainline Protestants at 78% and lowest among White Evangelical Protestants at 27%. Amongst people who accept evolution, most groups are more-or-less divided in half on whether or not evolution was guided by a supreme being. The exception is the religiously unaffiliated, who overwhelmingly consider evolution to be a fully natural process. Politically, both Democrats and Independents did not change beyond the margin of error between 2009 and 2013, continuing to accept evolution at the mid-60%'s. Republicans, on the other hand, went down in acceptance by 11% in these past four years.

-Gun Control and Voter ID: The public remains neck-and-neck on the former, while supporting the latter at a stable majority.

-Foreign Policy Goals: The most important goal for Americans is protecting the US from terrorist attacks (83%), while the lowest is promoting democracy in other countries (18%). In general, domestic concerns are winning out over humanitarian concerns across the board. If you want a more isolationist America, then things are going your way.

-Opinion of other nations: Of Pew's selected nations, the winner is......Canada, America's BFF (81%/9%/10%). The loser is Saudi Arabia (27%/57%/16%), demonstrating that 237.5 years of independence have done little to warm Americans up to monarchy again. On the other hand, something is very, very wrong with about a third of my countrymen.

[Max White]

Interesting that white mainline Protestants are more likely to accept evolution than 'unaffiliated', although the unaffiliated were more likely to agree with the underlying process of natural selection.

Also the wider political gap there. Your republicans are getting dumber, what else is new?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

WMP are only 2% more accepting of evolution than the unaffiliated, so it's not really an important distinction.

The statistic on the Republicans is a little scary because the drop happened without an increase in the Independents or Democrats, which suggests that they believed in evolution in 2009 but don't in 2014, rather than changing affiliation.

[Dutchling]

Spoiler: "religion" (click to show/hide)

[Max White]

The other interesting little figure is that women are more likely to believe that humans didn't evolve.
I guess you are still dealing with an education gap over there then...

[Frumple]

... yeah, pretty much. Quite frankly, the stuff they taught me in high school (and, actually, the lower levels of college) re: Evolution were... frankly, basically wrong. And not in the whole "we're simplifying this so young brains can comprehend" sense. More along the lines of "We're still teaching Darwin more or less verbatim." Nevermind the decades upon decades of study since. Which is something that makes it kinda' unsurprising a lot of people get lulled by the idiot talking heads speaking against it. No shit darwin was wrong, you nincompoops. That was centuries ago. We know. We fixed the theory. It's pretty close to dead on now, and getting closer.

I'd probably say poor education on the subject and the young earth nonsense (which forces adherents to mostly discard evolutionary theory, since it doesn't particularly work on that time scale with most species) are the major reasons we've still got so many people that know so very, very little on the subject and reject evolutionary theory on what are more or less false grounds because of it.

[WealthyRadish]

People often conflate evolution with natural selection. Evolution is the idea that organisms change over time, and only that (as that study worded it).

Darwin's main contribution was proposing a mechanism for evolution, natural selection. The evidence for evolution had already been there, thanks to the emerging fossil record (and common sense things like people questioning whether vestigial structures were god's idea of a joke). Evolution itself has such a massive body of evidence behind it, and has for so long, that it's ridiculous to consider it anything short of a law that every biological study must conform with. It's only the mechanism that gets fine tuned as more complex relationships in nature are discovered and explained. To say Darwin was flat out wrong is quite a stretch, since natural selection is still the primary mechanism. He may have had some other ideas that can now be refuted, but that isn't one of them.

This is why I find it appalling in the US that we still make the halfhearted claim that evolution and creationist ideas can coexist. It should be becoming more and more obvious that whatever faith a person follows must conform to it, and not the other way around. It's like a religion denying the existence of air. I don't care if you have to pretend that the religious meaning is that there's no air in heaven or some other excuse, you still must accept that air exists.

[Karlito]

Of course, only 64% of Canadians view America favorably. Can't say I blame them.

It's good to see at least that the young believe in evolution more than older Americans, so maybe in 20 years this won't even be an issue.

[Sheb]

What's baffling me even more is that you don't need proof for evolution by natural selection. If you accept Darwin's axioms (Individuals vary, variation can be inherited, reproductive success vary among individual), evolution by natural selection logically follows.