Friday, July 14, 2006

Will I Ever Live This Down?




You Are Most Like George W. Bush



So what if you're not exactly popular? You still rule the free world.

And while you may be quite conservative now, you knew how to party back in the day!

What Modern US President Are You Most Like?


I find this very hard to believe, but then again the questionnaire is skewed and limited. I would have guessed Van Buren, frankly, or maybe Cleveland, or Truman. They realy need to give you more options on these questions, because this just ain't right?

Thanks to Cardianal Martini, who is soon taking a probably permanent leave of absence from blogging. Pay him a visit and wish him well. He's on the blogroll.

10 comments:

fondfire said...

I would have thought that banging pregnant women, your penchant for vintage porn, and other signs of your total obsession with sex would have made you most like Clinton. But your conservative leanings must have tipped the ballance . . .

I certainly may tease you about this in the future! :-D

SecondComingOfBast said...

I think what tipped the balance was the question that asked what your favorite activites are, which I picked "reading and baseball". Basball is not accurrate, but reading is, and I had to choose them both as a set.

Believe it or not, I'm more liberal than I am conservative, I just tend to rant more about my conservative beliefs. One of those, though, is a dislike for the UN in general, and a dislike for the philosophy that America should tailor her laws to blend more with the "international community" (whatever the hell that is), so that, as well as being a strong believer in the Second Amendment-the conservative version of it-would probably make me not too much like Clinton.

Still, I am far from being like George W. Bush.

pissed off patricia said...

I'm afraid to take the test. If it showed I was most like bush I would have to be put on suicide watch. LOL

SecondComingOfBast said...

I know what you mean pop. But if you look at the questionnaire you can see how silly it really all is. Why would someone pair reading and playing baseball as one of a small list fo favorite activities? It's almost like they knew what they were doing and were intentionally trying to piss people off.

Meowkaat said...

I chose reading and baseball and I still get to be Clinton. Nyah Nyah Nyah! But I hate playing basesall...you're right, reading and baseball have nothing to do with each other. Still, I love these goofy little tests.

SecondComingOfBast said...

You should take the newer test I posted. It's a lot mroe accurrate. It has flaws as well, though. For example, a lot of my answers would be more nuanced than a simple yes or no, but by the ame token it gives you a far more accurrate reflection of where you fit in general.

fondfire said...

I dislike the U. N. as it is. However, I see potential advantages to a world-wide federal system. Yes, the concentration of world power is dangerous, but so is the concentration of nationwide power, and the potential to limit war and make the defense industry nearly irrelevant still makes me hope we can eventually evolve a world-wide federal democracy.

(Maybe I just watched too much Star Trek.)

I also have strong feelings about why there is a second ammendment (to allow for a mechanism of revolution) and that if we're going to take the first ammendment super-seriously that we should also take the second ammendment super-seriously. However, I do wonder about how/when to limit the right to bear arms. For instance, should people be allowed to purchase tanks, anti-aircraft embankments, or nuclear submarines? On the one hand, that seems absurd, but on the other hand, a hyper-literal, gun-nut reading of the second ammendment might allow for it. Rather than trying to say that the second ammendment doesn't allow for that, though, I think it might be more sensible to define the second ammendment more precisely with a new ammendment. I haven't given this a lot of thought, but it is something that has me going in circles sometimes . . . How do you define arms? What's the appropriate amount of armaments that society should allow individuals? How should society limit armaments, if at all? How do you prevent a small group of individuals dominating society with their arms? I've read up on the idea that "the armed society is a polite society." There is something to that idea, but it has its limits, too . . . (Hey, are you a Heinlein fan, too?)

Also, my feeling about the second ammendment strongly bias me toward the regulation of weapons manufacturing rather than the regulation of weapon's owners. I think it's almost absurd to try to track the distribution of produced weapons, particularly when we always know that more get produced than we can track, but as I read the second ammendment, the right to bear arms does not in any way include the right to produce monstrous amounts of them or the right to profit from them regardless of the consequences or the right to produce any number of them whatsoever. I think we have the right, as a society, to limit weapons manufacture in a huge way. (The reasons it isn't done has much more to do with subsidizing the defense industry, regardless of who dies as a result . . . That's the kind of shit that upsets me.) Anyway, this is part of the larger problem of corporate profit above human need . . . I think most of the rhetoric around the second ammendment is skewed, inflamatory, irrational, and often delusional. Liberals want to believe that the founding fathers were concerned only about personal protection (whereas I think they were creating a "revolutionary mechanism" with the 2nd ammendment) and conservatives want to believe that the right to weaponize yourself is dangerously absolute. Again, I think the concern is more about the creation, marketing, and proliferation of weapons and less about individual acquisition of them. So, for me, this becomes another "abuse of corporate 'personhood'" issue . . .

SecondComingOfBast said...

Any international organization should never go beyond trying to be a facilitator for peace and the resolution of disputes, and for disaster relief and humanitarian aid. Anything that seeks to go beyond that has the potential for mischief and should be avoided.

Regulation of gun manufacturers would be a de facto regulation of private citizens,so I can't support that either. The only line I would draw is on the subject of weapons whose very natures make them a danger to a neighborhood, such as high explosives like dynamite, grenades, tnt, and other types of bombs and explosives. Guns can be abused, and abusers should be severely punished. Not only is this the only regulatiion that is appropriate or necessary, it is the only kind that will work.

But guns aren't going to malfunction to the point they explode and blow up a whole neighborhood, or block, or entire city, so they aren't by their natures dangerous due to their presence in a particular setting.

I'm going to post more about this later. In fact, I'm going to put a lot of thought into it, so it will probably be a longer post than usual, but it will touch on these issues you've raised, and others as well. I just don't know for sure when it will be, I'm a believer in the impact of timing. But it shouldn't be too long.

fondfire said...

Be sure to think about international arms trade, too.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. In part, we definitely seem to see the second ammendment a little differently. I see it as applying only to individuals and never to commercial enterprise, for one thing.

autogato said...

Bush.
HA!