Hm... On 8 Oct 2012, at 23:19, Robert Greene <gre...@math.ucla.edu> wrote:
>> Very much off topic is what follows. >> >> Just as a point of information, I think Hitler's election >> did not depend on fraud. I think he actually did have >> a lot of popular support at one point . Why is a complex >> question, but I believe he did, though of course >> he was not above fraud if fraud was needed. > > Yes, when my children used to come home from 'ra-ra' > civics classes, I used to pose the question: "In 1945, of > Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Truman, which were elected > as leader in a democratic election?" Well, I'm not sure where and how you take the idea that I said his election was a fraud. When I wrote about flaws in election laws then the fact that there was no minimum number of votes a party needed to get representation. As a result the parliament was split up among dozens of parties, allowing one strong party, the one with the strongest faction, to form the goverment without a proper majority. Also other laws e.g. the ability to dismiss the parliament, etc. weren't written with abuses in mind. But laws should always be written that they anticipate abuse and prevent it, they shouldn't be fair weather laws that are good only as long as the government itself is good and honorable. I only mentioned him as an example of laws and government power that is seen to be good to be turned into the opposite when things go bad, and that therefore the power of the government, and particularly its access to information about the people must be severely curtailed. For the same reasons I'm against the data vacuuming on the internet I'm against income taxes: it gives the government too much information about individuals. Things like sales tax are anonymous, and they fund the government just as well, without the government having what amounts to a personality profile and dossier for each person alive within its claimed jurisdiction. However, as for Hitler: he did have a bunch of support, but in the only free election in which one could vote for him and others, he got only about 30% of the vote, and of these a lot were what in todays terminology would be "protest votes" similar to people casting a vote for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, because they were fed up with the bickering and inability of the established parties to get things done. These 30% made him the strongest faction, which is why he got to form the government, but he was far from EVER having the majority of Germans behind him. He was however to surprisingly quickly consolidate his power by all sorts of means, psychological, legitimate and illegitimate, but all effective, and thus quickly became the undisputed Führer, a dictator that had free reign, and thus elections after that point were the same farce as elections in Syria today, or Russia under Stalin. It's these elections that gave the impression that "all Germans were Nazis", but that's just as little true as that 98% of Syrians support Assad... The idea that even a majority of Germans were for Hitler is a myth that doesn't want to die that is partially old war propaganda and part bad history lessons. > The point here is not personal anecdote but that the > corruption of the search engines is attached to the commercial > world. When one gets to something outside the commercial realm > things work quite well. In the same way if you search for > complex domains > , my book with Kim and Krantz on the subject > also pops right up. Because there is NO MONEY attached! > (or only a pittance!). What has happened is not I think > political corruption(yet) but just commercial promotion. > It tends to creep in everywhere and it drowns other things-- > when there is a simultaneous occurence of the commercial and noncommercial. Agreed. The thing however is, that if there's any potentially commercial interpretation of the query, that drowns out any answer that doesn't have a commercial interest attached to it. As a result, for many things I used to hunt for on google, I now search on Wikipedia, but that narrows the breadth of the results considerably. > Shameless plug : > There is something called the "WWW Virtual Library" that aims to > give expert overviews of particular subjects on the Web. > (It actually started (by TBL) as a catalogue of the whole Web > (e.g. > <http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html>).) > Finding volunteers (and fighting off the commercialisation > attempts) is though increasingly difficult ;-(> I will have to give this a try. Sounds interesting... Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
