If you are too lazy to simply Google it I don't know what to tell you other than you are too scared to be proven wrong once again. I found at least 27 sources on less than half of the liberal sites you said you read frequently. There is no way in hell you could read any of these frequently and NOT read a number of those articles. Quit deflecting to save you liberal high ground and do your own research. It's simple and since Google is a liberal leaning search engine the stuff comes right up.
Originally Posted by CryptKicker
then just post the link for one article whose ideas i may have co-opted, intentionally or unintentionally, and we'll call it a day. is that fair?
the fact is i'm not a lib, i'm not conservative either. i'm in favor of smart policy and i'm against dumb policy. i believe the first thing to do when evaluating a problem is to forget everything you think you know about how that problem should be solved. and then go from there.
for example, there is a bet in dice called a hop bet. it's one of the worst bets on the table, with an 11.1% house advantage. only idiots even play it. no smart dice player expects to win a dime on the hop; it's worse than a slow bleed, like the field bet is, at a 5% house advantage. but i started over, forgetting everything i knew about the hop. i said, what if...
then i modeled my theory on Excel, and it checked out. then we tested it shooting dice on the hotel bed, and it checked out again. so, using nothing more than the Hop-and an even worse bet called the Big Red (it's literally the worst bet on the table)-my nephew bought in at 50k and colored up at 79.7 on a 4 day trip.
so i say again. forget everything you thought you knew, and start over, reexamining every assumption you think to be true. then you'll be able to solve little problems, and big problems too. (and like Master Yoda says, there is no try.)
and by the way, there is no center, left, or right either. there is only smart and dumb.