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[scriver]

Another thing the US Government should ban is mandolins. Mandolins can cause people to lose their religion.

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot

[Trekkin]

(We have historical data showing that this kind of motivation for war leads to very bad places, and produces very pathological societal trends. The motivations behind it defy rationality, (again, because they are defined by faith as the standard). All signs point to this being a bad thing. Yet, here we are--- with somebody HONESTLY, and EARNESTLY suggesting it.)

Earnest and honest he may be, but if you actually read the .pdf he's also clearly not got his thoughts in order, in common with many people seriously suggesting that whole swathes of people are irreparably wrong and must be regarded as the enemy of all that is good and dealt with accordingly. One lady who used to ride the same bus I did would sometimes scream about how we all have the wrong kind of statues and we'll get ours, oh yes, just wait and see, but I don't blame statues.

Faith doesn't make people irrational; everyone's already at least a little irrational. Faith is one of many available excuses for irrational behavior, and by the time they're so disengaged from reality that they're a public concern, the particulars of the excuse have long since ceased to matter. Really, anything that gives a feeling that one is categorically better than everyone else and especially the folks one already doesn't like will do handily.

The guy says "numbers don't matter" and "armaments don't matter" and his proposed military is apparently cutting down trees for supplies and making blood sacrifices. I don't think we need to ascribe any motive other than derangement here.

[smjjames]

His desire to avoid bloodshed as much as possible, avoid tactics like scorched earth (then he goes ‘kill all men if they don’t yield’, which seems pretty scorched earth to me), and minimize civilian casualties is certainly notable. Historically, most religious based wars wouldn’t have given a damn about any of that.

Then again, that sort of thing with minimizing bloodshed, civilian casualties, etc, is a pretty recent thing as the human annals of war go.

[Kagus]

kill all men

But how are they going to handle all that DNA testing in a war zone?

[wierd]

kill all men

But how are they going to handle all that DNA testing in a war zone?

*snicker*

[SalmonGod]

(We have historical data showing that this kind of motivation for war leads to very bad places, and produces very pathological societal trends. The motivations behind it defy rationality, (again, because they are defined by faith as the standard). All signs point to this being a bad thing. Yet, here we are--- with somebody HONESTLY, and EARNESTLY suggesting it.)

Earnest and honest he may be, but if you actually read the .pdf he's also clearly not got his thoughts in order, in common with many people seriously suggesting that whole swathes of people are irreparably wrong and must be regarded as the enemy of all that is good and dealt with accordingly. One lady who used to ride the same bus I did would sometimes scream about how we all have the wrong kind of statues and we'll get ours, oh yes, just wait and see, but I don't blame statues.

Faith doesn't make people irrational; everyone's already at least a little irrational. Faith is one of many available excuses for irrational behavior, and by the time they're so disengaged from reality that they're a public concern, the particulars of the excuse have long since ceased to matter. Really, anything that gives a feeling that one is categorically better than everyone else and especially the folks one already doesn't like will do handily.

The guy says "numbers don't matter" and "armaments don't matter" and his proposed military is apparently cutting down trees for supplies and making blood sacrifices. I don't think we need to ascribe any motive other than derangement here.

Agreed.  It's easy to get fixated on specific cultural phenomena that attract/get hijacked by these styles of thinking, because of their prominence in our surroundings.  But take them away, and people will easily make up different ones for the same purpose.  It doesn't have to be religion.

[Reelya]

Why don't we just add the word blockchain to it?  That makes everything technology better, right?

Validating what came out of a specific voting machine is one of the good uses for a blockchain however.

Say each voting machine has a unique blockchain associated, and this is synced with the cloud. The machine would have it's internal hard-drive, but anyone who cares could run a server which collates all votes from all machines in real-time. So you could have real-time vote counting without needing any sort of official government servers.

However, the machines should also spit out and/or store paper ballots that contain all information related to that vote and the blockchain, and can be read by machines. Otherwise, a machine could lie to the users about whom the vote was cast for. There could be OCR ballot-box machines that you put your paper ballot into, which validate it against the blockchain information independently of the voting machine in question. I think the physical element of the paper ballots is necessary to prevent entirely cyber-cheating methods.

Trying to slip additional votes anywhere into this system would be very difficult. Paper ballot-stuffing wouldn't work since the paper ballots wouldn't have hash codes that line up with any machine, and adding in extra votes in a machine or changing who was voted for wouldn't work since every vote in the blockchain is hashed based on timestamp and who the vote was for. Do it right and it would be incredibly hard to tamper with.

[Loud Whispers]

His desire to avoid bloodshed as much as possible, avoid tactics like scorched earth (then he goes ‘kill all men if they don’t yield’, which seems pretty scorched earth to me), and minimize civilian casualties is certainly notable. Historically, most religious based wars wouldn’t have given a damn about any of that.

Just saying that these stratagems are not necessarily mutual - see the Mongol invasions for examples where the invaders annihilated civilians who did not yield but did not employ scorched earth tactics, while with scorched earth tactics you're usually annihilating your own civilians, not the enemy's

[Teneb]

His desire to avoid bloodshed as much as possible, avoid tactics like scorched earth (then he goes ‘kill all men if they don’t yield’, which seems pretty scorched earth to me), and minimize civilian casualties is certainly notable. Historically, most religious based wars wouldn’t have given a damn about any of that.

Just saying that these stratagems are not necessarily mutual - see the Mongol invasions for examples where the invaders annihilated civilians who did not yield but did not employ scorched earth tactics, while with scorched earth tactics you're usually annihilating your own civilians, not the enemy's

Do like the Incas and just hit people until they agree to work for you.

[misko27]

There's always voting for a blank ballot. It may feel irrelevant, but there is a huge difference, and I know that at least my state allows it.

And you can always just straight up vote for someone else. Registering matters to get your name on the ballot, but there's nothing stopping you from voting for whoever you damn well please. And hey, it works sometimes. It's why Sen. Murkowski is in office and not some generic republican. She lost her primary, but ran on a write-in campaign and actually won. Imagine that! She wone a general election on a write in campaign! That woman is unstoppable.

Also, regarding the "Biblical war" thing, is there a single half-decent idea in there that isn't blatantly ripping off Augustine of Hippo? This is a serious question mind; I have actual work to do and can't read the pdf in good conscience atm.

[Trekkin]

Also, regarding the "Biblical war" thing, is there a single half-decent idea in there that isn't blatantly ripping off Augustine of Hippo? This is a serious question mind; I have actual work to do and can't read the pdf in good conscience atm.

He's pulling bits of Acquinas more directly, but generally no. It's divided into regurgitated just war theory, standard Daddy Party authoritarian fanwank, and raving about all the killing and looting of infidels they'll get to do.

[Starver]

kill all men

But how are they going to handle all that DNA testing in a war zone?

Sample the blood-splatter?

(Though "kill all men" doesn't mean "don't kill any women*" or even "don't kill all women". I haven't read the manifesto, but you could fulfill the one simple requirement by allowing one degree or other of false-positive overspill. With no downsides, right?)


* - also children, as distinct from 'men'? Physical testing for strict age-related adulthood is perhaps more complicated than probing of chromosomes** and/or crotches, depending upon which way you want to fall on edge-condition examples. You could go by assessing gonad state (if you're already down there, you might as well!) or the presence/absence of milk-teeth, but that'd skew the cut-off down an penalise early growth-spurts, compared with most legal-majority chronological cut-offs you might consider.

** - if there was a reliable telomere-based method, for example, it would be being applied at leisure to the refugees where age is already a point being argued.

[Starver]

So you could have real-time vote counting without needing any sort of official government servers.

...potentially falling foul of the intentions behind the rules intending that an individual voter's vote remains anonymous? (Unusable as proof of a vote being that which is paid for or otherwise coerced.)

Slightly at odds with an individual having the (personal) right to ensure their own vote was cast as they intended (which the paranoid may demand, and allow them to challenge if they say they are aggrieved, but needs to still be kept unavailable to the vote-procurers themselves this side of an official audit) but I would argue also as important, lest we fall into a different kind of voting-hell and corruption of democracy.


ETA to avoid triple-posting...

There's always voting for a blank ballot. It may feel irrelevant, but there is a huge difference, and I know that at least my state allows it.

Is that like spoiling your ballot?
(But be careful how carefully you spoil it!)

[Madman198237]

His desire to avoid bloodshed as much as possible, avoid tactics like scorched earth (then he goes ‘kill all men if they don’t yield’, which seems pretty scorched earth to me), and minimize civilian casualties is certainly notable. Historically, most religious based wars wouldn’t have given a damn about any of that.

Just saying that these stratagems are not necessarily mutual - see the Mongol invasions for examples where the invaders annihilated civilians who did not yield but did not employ scorched earth tactics, while with scorched earth tactics you're usually annihilating your own civilians, not the enemy's

Scorched earth is not about destroying civilian populations, but about denying resources. In a scorched earth advance, i.e., Sherman's march to the sea, you steal everything you can and burn what you can't carry, thus denying everything to the enemy. Then, you just keep on marching, having actually garrisoned or held no land whatsoever, leaving the civilian population intact as a humanitarian problem for the owners. In a scorched earth retreat, you instead collect everything ahead of an enemy army, and again burn what you can't keep. This is often seen in retreats to fortified positions i.e. castles in the way of an enemy invasion. The enemy is thus denied critical supplies of food, which they'll almost certainly need in order to hold a siege against the castle's defenders until they surrender due to starvation.

Both are aimed at crippling an enemy's ability to wage war, by either destroying infrastructure in an advance, or denying the availability of forage or other supplies to an enemy in a retreat.

[Kagus]

Norway actually did a fair amount of scorched earth retreats during the Nazi invasion in WW2. We were occupied, but we made them regret having to put up with us!