DebateGate

 << In Syria government friendly snipers are fireing on crouds with impunity.>>

Also in Syria, armed gangs are firing on Army troops with weapons smuggled in from no one seems to know where.  Nor can anyone really determine at this point exactly which foreign interests these armed gangs are serving.  We don't really know a helluva lot about Syria, really.  Not even who the snipers are who are firing into the crowds or who they represent.

   <<If it really can't happen here , this begs the question , why can't it happen here?>>

No, of course not.  Kent State was just a bad dream, Jackson State was a made-for-TV movie.  The difference between Syria and the U.S.A. is obvious:  Americans are a bunch of gutless pussies who quit as soon as six university students were killed.  The Syrians have the balls to take a licking and keep on ticking, no matter how many students have died.  It's really too bad.  Real Revolutionary will for change does not exist in the U.S.A. any more.  Unless it can come out of the Occupy! movement.

<<We're armed, and rightfully so, but my sig sauer is no match for a military 50 caliber.  The point being a regime would be stupid to try, because of just how "messy" it would become.  Millions of deaths would be plausible under such an attempted take over by a Fascist or Communist regime>>

And yet another example of the right-wing tendency to move the circumstances under debate into Fantasyland once again.  The fact being that there is no such fascist or communist regime anywhere in the country ready or even willing to move the country into fascism or communism against the will of the people.

Consider that the special interests have already secured every goal that's important to them by the simple expedient of bribery - - the Zio-Nazis have their 100% pro-Israeli foreign policy, the War Party (military-industrial complex) has its "endless war" policy, Wall Street and the 1% have their tax breaks for the rich, no-regulation, bail-out policies and the insurance industry has privatized health care insurance with NO public option.  They love the government just as it is, although I'm sure they'd prefer legislators who are for sale at much less than current rates.

<< It will not be long before cloning tecnology brings us meat that was never part of a whole creature, I wonder why we will object to that?>>

Must be 20 years since I first heard of the concept.  The first efforts won't taste as good etc. but in principle nobody could object.  My understanding was you take cells from the muscles of the various parts of the animal corresponding to the individual cuts of meat and then grow them in vitro to form colonies much like the muscles that the butcher cuts out.  There were also problems of getting the right amount of fat cells in amongst the meat, etc. - - nothing that in theory couldn't be scientifically resolved.

<<Polygraphs are accepted by many employers , including the US government for the purpose of employee screening , at hireing and finding pilferers to fire.>>

Well, employee screening isn't meant to be accurate at all, it's just an attempt to "clear the decks" or "winnow" the crowd of applicants so that whoever's left is a lot less likely to become a problem employee if hired.  It's a rough tool, and accuracy in detecting liars is not the criterion.  If the machine identifies some real liars and also mis-identifies some honest people with false positives, for the purposes of the employer, as long as there is a good-sized pool of candidates remaining, the machine has served its purpose.  If you need ten good apples  for baking some apple pies and an apple-sorting machine takes a couple of hundred apples, detects about 150 bad apples and also throws out 20 good ones as well, you're still left with thirty apples, all good, from which to choose ten for your pies.  That's the principle of screening.

Employee hiring - - far as I can tell, same as screening.

Finding pilferers?  Far as I can tell, if an employee denies pilfering and is fired only because the machine says his denial is a lie, I'd say he's got great cause for a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.

<<Is this pertinant?>>

Not really, because we're not dealing with any random schmuck of no particular sophistication.  We're dealing with a pervert who has a lot of money and is able to purchase all the coaching and practice he needs to beat the machine and/or to buy the right man to analyze his TV appearances.  In Cain's case, I can say with total confidence, the "passing" of the test is 100% meaningless.  Which is not to say that it won't influence plenty of ignorant couch-potato schmucks who don't know any better.

     <<  I am trying to remember which of us rejected the "presumption of innocence" because it was valid only in court.>>

What I said was that the "presumption of innocence" originated in the English criminal courts at a time when over 250 distinct criminal offences carried the death penalty.  We in Canada (Nova Scotia) for example, carry the dubious distinction of having hanged a 12-year-old servant girl for the offence of stealing a silver spoon from her employer. So it was very important for a court of such fucking barbarians to at least try to limit their barbarism to such victims who were actually guilty of what they were charged with.

The presumption of innocence was carried over into modern times, on the theory that criminal convictions, with or without further penalties of incarceration, carried a stigma comparable in seriousness to the infliction of the death penalty, and therefore that the criminal courts must still bend over backwards to ensure that no innocent man or woman would be unfairly stigmatized with a criminal conviction if actually innocent.

However most decisions in our lives are not made to such rigorous standards.  If I have to decide whether or not Herman Cain is a loathesome creep, and my decision doesn't involve penalties or jail time for the Hermster, much less the sentence of death, the standards by which the decision is made have to be somewhat relaxed.  So the standards of criminal proof (guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, presumption of innocence, etc.) are not applied.

This doesn't prevent anyone from applying whatever standard of proof he chooses to any particular set of circumstances.  The problem is one of practicality and rationality - - I won't take my umbrella with me unless it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it will rain; if there are twenty of my son's favourite cookies missing from the cookie jar, even though my wife hates those cookies, I won't break my son's presumption of innocence and will insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt before blaming him for taking the cookies.  In real life, presumption of innocence is rare.  It's counter-intuitive.  The reason the concept was even invented in the first place was that most people just don't think like that, just don't use "presumption of innocence" in their own lives outside the courtroom.

The other problem is consistency - - people who insist on giving Cain the presumption of innocence in the face of all the indications that he's not innocent, yet never even thinking of presumption of innocence in alleging that Obama's a Muslim, born in Kenya, a socialist, a hater of white Americans, etc.

<<Wouldn't that depend on who wrote the laws and wrote the checks that bought the loyalty of our heavily armed law enforcement?>>

Of course it would.  However, and sticking with the real world, note that even today, when special interests obviously control both houses of the U.S. Congress, even the special interests so far have not demanded the kind of laws that would constitute a fascist or communist state.  My own and others' direst predictions notwithstanding, the state you live in in the real world is far from a typical fascist or communist state.

sirs would probably argue that this is BECAUSE the citizens have too much firepower for that to ever happen.  I would argue to the contrary that this is because of a strong tradition of Constitutional rights and government that is deeply engrained in the hearts and loyalties of the people, that transcends ideologies for the most part and despite abuses and incremental erosions, leaves most of the country with a strong sense of what they will and will not put up with in the way of governmental conduct.  Waco was a good example of how little the people's accumulated Second Amendment firepower actually means when a modern state determines that some individuals are trying to challenge its power.

So what?  I was joking too, I know it, you don't know it.

So far, no oppressive fascist or communist regime has appeared on the scene, but the death toll of armed citizens anxious to exercise their Second Amendment rights just keeps rising.  Go figure.

I guess the real issue is where do you want to live?  In the conservatives' fantasy world of oppressive fascist or communist American governments or the real world where there are no oppressive fascist or communist American governments but plenty of heavily armed law enforcement officers determined to enforce the law with deadly violence if necessary?

(Rhetorical question - - I know that conservatives try to avoid the real world like it was a plague planet.)

<<No, actually, the irrelevent part is to keep bringing up whether a lie detector test is admissibale in a court or not.>>

BINGO!  and yet again the man misses the same point.  Well you're at least consistent.  Why is it so hard to get such a simple point?  Willful blindness?  Willful ignorance?

I'll try one more time.  The courts do not accept or reject different kinds of evidence capriciously, waking up one morning and deciding, for no good reason, "Hey!!!  Today, let's ban all fingerprint evidence."  Or, "Hey!!!  Today let's ban polygraph evidence!"

Polygraph evidence only gets banned in a court when one party before the court asks the court to accept it.  The other party objects.  Each party calls witnesses, and produces evidence, on the one side trying to prove that the polygraph is a reliable detector of truth and falsehood and therefore should be accepted as evidence, and the other side trying to prove exactly the reverse.  In each case, the judge or judges of the court listen to ALL the evidence for and against the polygraph and then come to a decision on its scientific reliability.  IN AN OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF AMERICAN COURTS, FOR ALL CANADIAN COURTS, ALL EUROPEAN COURTS AND ALL AUSTRALIAN COURTS AND THE COURTS OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL, the conclusion of all those judges after hearing all that evidence is very plain:  POLYGRAPHS ARE JUNK AND POLYGRAPH SCIENCE IS JUNK SCIENCE.  Period.  End of story.  Get it now?

So the "news" that The Perv "passed a lie detector test" is basically meaningless.  VSA tests, which is what The Perv actually DID pass, are even less proven than polygraphs.  Therefore his "passing" of a junk science test is virtually meaningless.  It's like saying that his tea leaves were read by an expert who was able to determine from them that he never lies.

<< Putting aside another FACT, that U.S. courts have allowed it as admissable . . . >>

A distinct MINORITY of US Courts have accepted polygraph evidence, all but one on stipulation only, which means that even those states consider it to be of very low probative value.

<<Cain isn't on trial, nor is his accuser>>

The point, once again, is not that anyone's on trial, but that the VSA test which The Perv "passed" and one of his victims "failed" is pure junk science  and means about as much as a tea-leaf reader's opinion.