On Saturday I had a chance to watch the debate of the
candidates for the Democratic
presidential nomination that happened last Thursday.
Not too surprisingly, there was a lot of pandering to
isolationists who, for some reason, think that people who are
citizens of the United States are somehow more valuable than those who
aren't. Kucinich was the most extreme isolationist, and Gephardt was
isolationist as usual. What surprised me a bit was that there didn't
seem to be much of a difference between what Gephardt said about free
trade and what Dean said about free trade. And even Kerry didn't seem
very strongly for it, although he was much more supportive. Only
Lieberman stood out as a strong supporter of free trade.
Lieberman also seemed to take a more realistic stance on the war in
Iraq. Many of the candidates said we should just try to get out,
without much regard for how much of a mess that would make. Lieberman
supported sending additional troops to help bring security and stability
to Iraq, which makes sense given the current siutation. Many
of the other candidates seemed to be presenting policy based on what
they wish happened a year ago, rather than based on the situation now.
I think it's unrealistic to expect other countries to contribute
significant numbers of troops, and unrealistic for an Iraqi
military and police to form without continued assistance (and increased
security) from the US.
I was impressed (to my surprise) by Carol Moseley Braun, who's
generally, I think, viewed as a less serious candidate because she lost
reelection to her Senate seat in 1998. While, as I said above, I
disagreed with her on foreign policy and trade policy, and I'm not sure
about her economic policy (although at this stage that's often a matter
of advisors), I thought she was probably the best speaker on social
issues in the debate. And given the mess that health insurance is
becoming in this country, I hope people will be willing to listen to
advocates of a single-payer health system, although I think she did a
bad job of explaining where the money would come from. (She should have
said that it would probably cost less than what people now pay in
insurance premiums because of the huge reduction in administrative
costs.) That said, Dean's plans for phasing such a system in in steps
probably make more sense.
So who am I planning to support? I'm not sure yet, although if I had
to say which way I'm leaning, I'd say Lieberman, although I'm not sure
how strong his support is for civil liberties and the separation of church
and state.
I've switched (way back on August 6, actually) from using Mozilla
Firebird back to using Seamonkey (the traditional Mozilla application
suite). The idea of a trimmed-down browser really isn't for me, as I've been saying for years.
Features attract users. It may be difficult to provide a user interface
that makes a lot of features accessible, but it's not impossible.
Seamonkey does a bad job in some areas, and a good job in others. That
said, the main reason I was using Firebird was a feature that it had,
but Seamonkey didn't—form autocomplete.
I think Firebird is throwing out a lot of user interface (for
example, the unknown content type dialog) that's been carefully designed
to work in many situations on different platforms and replacing it with
user interface that's basically designed for Windows and doesn't make
sense on other platforms. The Mozilla application suite has sometimes
had too many cooks, but the various people who influenced it have also
ensured that it is usable in many different situations (on multiple
platforms, when interacting with many different programs, under
different configurations, by speakers of different languages, etc.).
Finally, I can't give any moral support to a browser whose font size
preference dialog is hidden behind a button within a preference panel.
Users should be asked to set their preferred font size as part of
browser configuration, and it should be easy to change thereafter. If
that were the case with other browsers, the web today wouldn't be as
much of a mess as it is. (And if we can't do something to try to make
the web a better place, then why are we developing a browser layout
engine?)
I'm not saying there aren't problems with the current application
suite. However, I think those problems would be better solved by
incremental changes (with peer review) than by redesign (without much
peer review). I think the Firebird development community is too small
and too exclusive and thus tends to change things whose original
rationale they do not know. It's the type of community that can never
create a browser that just seems to have the features you want when you
need them.
Targeted assassination is not known to be a good tool of foreign
policy. There's a reason that the US government doesn't
use it. Or at least didn't use it for a while. It tends not to
help the cause, and often backfires.
I think things in the Middle East would be a good bit less
tense right now if the goverment of Israel realized this.
My understanding (I think from some old Thomas
Friedman columns that are way too old to still be on the New York Times's website for free) is
that Hamas is a bit different from other terrorist
organizations—perhaps even quasi-governmental. Israel may
eventually need to negotiate with it, just like it eventually came to
negotiate with the PLO/Palestinian Authority. It's unlikely that Israel
accomplishes anything useful by assassinating leaders of Hamas, since
the deterrent effect on terrorism and the loss of the harm caused by the
individual leaders is probably easily outweighed by the anger caused
(and terrorism that results from it). After all, if Israel wants peace
and security, maybe it should try to set a good example?
I've slightly changed my blog format, in the hope that I can somehow
transform it into an RSS feed using XSLT (which Tantek does). In other words, I've
added information required by RSS (titles and times) in the hope that I
can transform it. I spent a bit of time poking around with XSLT. Maybe
I'll even be able to get it to do what I want. If not, I'll probably
just use perl.
I've also had a bunch of random things I wanted to say something
about, and I'm planning to say them soon...
