I pretty much agree with Xranadu, but I'm going to make a further point. It's not what you're saying that's the problem. In fact, 80% of readers here would probably agree with you that Obama won't change much. And that's precisely the point. The problem is that you came in here with some high-and-mighty comment that pretended to know what everyone else was thinking, when it's obvious that you have not been reading the site or the letters section. If you had, you would have seen the countless Glenn Greenwald columns stressing all of the same points that you bring up, and nearly everyone agreeing with him. However, rather than making some nihilistic pronouncements he makes TWO points: one being that the system is corrupt and constant grassroots pressure must be applied to politicians from both parties, and the second being that NEVERTHELESS, an Obama presidency is preferable to a McCain one, and the national election is not a place to symbolically vent your impotent rage by throwing away your vote.

So yes, you can go on thinking that you're more enlightened while everyone else here is some mindless Obama worshiper, but there's absolutely no basis for it. I personally would have preferred Kucinich, but oh well.

You can see that from her base of support. Is any sane person actually going to claim that working class people are somehow LESS sexist than the 'elitists' who voted for Obama? Please. Taking the same tired center-right corporate-pandering politics and slapping an 'F' next to it instead of an 'M' doesn't make the candidate a feminist.

The sections you mentioned about Aristotelian 'science' and the dominance of religion for an entire era are proof of this. So I think the predictable lamentation about Wikipedia towards the end of the article is misguided because, unless you have your head buried in an Edmund Burke tract, it should be pretty obvious that democracy does not equal "mob rule". In theory, Wikipedia works the same way that a constitutional democracy does: a guiding set of "objective" principles (individual liberty, freedom of speech; citation, reliable sources) are decided on beforehand, and the task of the people is to decide on the best means to achieve them.

Leaving aside the predictable snark of uninformed morons from a dying generation ("but ANYONE can write ANYTHING there!"), the success of Wikipedia demonstrates the "wisdom of the crowd". Wikipedia doesn't designate users as experts in the way that Citizendium does, but it's self-correcting in the sense that people will not try to write about topics that they do not know about, and no matter how many times a troll tries to insert some fringe opinion, it will be deleted unless it can be properly sourced. Furthermore, the editors who have the power to enforce these guidelines obtain this power by virtue of having participated and contributed more, and thus have a personal interest in maintaining the objective credibility of the project.

The bottom line is that no matter what individual biases the particular members of a given crowd have, most of them will nevertheless agree on the benefit of having a body of knowledge governed by consistent methods that the majority of the group can acknowledge as objective (whether they are actually objective or not is another matter). We don't democratically decide what medical treatments work best; rather, we democratically decide to entrust such decisions to experts using means that are agreed to be valid. In the sense that people recognize the importance of basic principles and previously established knowledge by credible experts, you could say that Wikipedia is a far more successful model of democracy than American politics, where we choose presidents based on whether we'd like to have a beer with them.

The CREW page that the Salon article links to does indeed just show the same list, but it also links to the full report, which is in turn a list where each name has a link that leads to a specific description of the wrongdoing. In case you missed it, it is here:

http://www.citizensforethics.org/node/34046

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Internet.

I realized a long time ago that the way we are normally told to think of the US economy amounts to a situation where the entire nation is being held hostage by the corporate top tier. If we raise taxes, minimum wage, or environmental/safety standards they'll go offshore and we'll lose jobs. If we don't bail them out unconditionally, they'll refuse to participate and destroy the whole economy. No matter what, their right to earn as large a profit and pay their executives as much as they want is a completely unquestionable constant that everything else must be negotiated around. How else can this be described?

Please tell me this is not the official Broadsheet position.

Sarah, is this the point where you finally realize just how old you're getting? Kinda like those people who say "the Google?" As much as I wish I didn't have them etched in my head from involuntary overexposure in high school, it's Blink 182.

In response to the poster in favor of uniforms: by all means, that would be nice. In the USSR we had to wear uniforms, and the school environment was strictly one of learning. You have to realize, however, that school plays a much bigger extracurricular and socializing role here, given the lack of community activity and overworked and generally distracted parents. If everyone had to wear uniforms, I'd have no problem with the ban. But as long as the morons are allowed to show off their Abercrombie rags and blown-out hairdos, he should by all means be allowed to wear some eyeliner. It's no more stupid than any of those other things.