The Java API is badly in need of editting.

I just bumped into Collection.equals(Object) method, which contains this gem:

Thus, a custom equals method for a collection class that implements neither the List nor Set interface must return false when this collection is compared to any list or set. (By the same logic, it is not possible to write a class that correctly implements both the Set and List interfaces.)

So a list that guaranties uniqueness would have to be a Set or a List, but absolutely cannot be both. At least, not without violating the API.

The intuitive API to me is to have the Collection interface require that the Collection.equals(Object) method to return true iff the argument is a collection whose Iterator returns the same elements in the same order as this.iterator(). This would mean that collections with different add/remove behavior could be equals to eachother, but that’s already true — a synchronized ArrayList is equals to a unsynchronized ArrayList is equals to a typed List is equals to a LinkedList by definition, as long as they return the same elements in the same order.

The real fun is that the note in the Collections class is actually wrong. If you look at Set.equals(Object), it requires that the parameter is equals to this iff they are both sets, and if the parameter has the same size as this and if all the elements of this are contained in the parameter. If you look at List.equals(Object), this is equals to the parameter iff they are both lists, and if they return the same elements in the same order. I see nothing in these definitions that says you can’t satisfy both of them at the same time.

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Doing a little google searching, it turns out that Lennin never actually used the phrase “useful idiots”. But it gain currency in the 1960’s and 1970’s among conservatives to describe those people who carried the propoganda water for the Soviet Union- and then, by extension, all of the left. The idea was certainly out there, however, and, due to their own uses of the phrase, the proto-radical right was certainly aware of the concept. And it had it’s uses. The right useful idiots would lend intellectual credency and the veneer of ethical or moral responsibility to a movement that, at core, had neither.

E.J. Dionne, like me, is reaching the conclusion that the Republicans screwing up helps the Republicans. Republican screw ups, Republican mismanagement of goverment, leads to the conclusion that goverment itself is the problem (not Republicans), and that we need to elect more Republicans to shrink the size of the ineffective Federal Goverment. Dionne’s article is a reaction to Bush bashing “the federal goverment” for not responding appropriately to Katrina, and asking why we still have 11,000 trailers sitting in a field when people are homeless. That’s a damned good question, Mr. President- why don’t you answer it? The money quote from Dionne’s article:

This episode is important because it is representative of a corrosive style of politics. Bush and many of his fellow Republicans have done a good business over the years running against the ills of Big Government. They are so much in the habit of trashing government that even when they are in charge of things — remember, Republicans have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for all but 18 months since 2001 — they pretend they are not.

And when their own government fails, they turn around and use their incompetence to argue that government can never work anyway, so you might as well keep electing conservatives to have less government. It’s an ideological Catch-22. Even their failures prove they are right.

This should be a classic sign that it’s a con- heads we win, tails you lose. And clinging t0 the beleif that the radical right wouldn’t be that dishonorable is also naive. Two examples ripped from the headlines serve to belie the Republican’s honor. First up, the Administration is claiming that they are above the law:

There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President “agrees” to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress — again — that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President’s powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide.

I find it doubly humorous that they are using the Constitution to defend breaking the law- except the law they are breaking is the Constitution itself (specifically the fourth admendment). Especially since the administration is now arguing that their right to warrantless searches now includes physical searches. On the Democratic side of the ledger we have social security numbers (where the problem is that the law preventing their abuse isn’t enforced) and single payer health care (where the problem is the potiential future violations). On the Republican side of the ledger we have warrantless physical searches, unlimited spying, unlimited detainment, torture, and the sale of your tax records for profit. And yet, somehow, these two sides are equally bad.

The other issue is the defense- not only of the President, but also of sometime-Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech. OK, the hiring itself was highly suspect, and that’s an issue I’ll go into at a later point. What’s interesting is the initial reaction of the right wing to the disclosure that Domenech was a serial plagiarist:

Most Bush supporters have no behavioral standards of any kind and will defend any behavior at all — no matter how venal or corrupt — as long as it’s engaged in by a fellow Bush supporter. Allegiance to the Bush movement outweighs every other attribute, and renders acceptable, even justifiable, even the most dishonest and reprehensible conduct.

The vileness of what currently calls itself the “conservative movement” has no limit. Any time of the last five years I could have just as easily come up with two examples ripped from the headlines. Heck, just about any time in the last thirty years I could have come up with examples- it’s not like Nixon (Watergate) or Reagan and Bush Sr. (Iran-Contra) were that much more respectfull of the Constitution. In this way, they’re not unlike the Hilter or Stalin regimes. They’re already hauling people away in the middle of the night to be tortured to death- while they have yet to hit the body count of either Hitler or Stalin, they are on the scoreboard. And they’ve been heading that way for a long while. The very act of trying to defend a Hitler or a Stalin, or any of their ideas, is innately very dangerous. Because neither Hitler nor Stalin started out as Hitler and Stalin- they worked their way there, step by step, after having accepted as true false premises. This isn’t quite guilt by association, but the question of why you can defend part of their regime without defending all of it- and why the ideas you promote do not, inevitably, promote evil- are legitimate questions you need to answer. That you are not making the same logical mistakes they did.

This is why you don’t defend the enemy’s propoganda, ever. Doing so- even with the best of intentions, simply makes you a useful idiot.

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The IRS, the GOP Congress, and the Bush administration plan to sell your tax returns to, well, whomever wants to buy them. This is what they call a “safeguard”, and “not a significant regulatory action”. There’s a simple, beautiful understanding to any words used by the modern GOP… just take the dictionary definition of the words they use, and they mean the opposite.

This is the sort of thing that makes my blood boil… well, in general, but specifically whenever anyone even IMPLIES a connection between the Republican Party and the libertarian side of conservative values. I mean, in America, it’s considered rude to talk about salaries in public! Historically, private tax returns have been treated as nearly sacred, especially by the IRS.

And what’s in this deal for consumers? How is this in any way good for American citizens? I can easily see how it’s good for a handful of corporations. And identity thieves. And blackmailers. And scandal-monging journalists. But everyone else? This will just suck.

But if you vote Democrat, we’ll have welfare and sex ed and the terrorists will win.

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This started out as a response to bhurt-aw’s post, but it’s enough of a tangent that it deserves its own entry. So here goes.

In Peggy Noonan’s article, she is distressed by Bush’s non-conservative stance. Conservatism, by its very nature, is reluctant to grow the government or increase spending. Bush doesn’t seem be reluctant at all to grow the government or increase spending — Hell, he’s increased it even faster than Clinton (check the last link). So he’s certainly not a conservative.

Now, both Brian and the link make the following argument:

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar–and that they were in on the con.

1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there’s more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a “compassionate conservative” to convince voters you don’t want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: “Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all.”

At least in my case, I didn’t ever know about this “con”. In fact, nobody did — Peggy Noonan and the whole Manhattan Institute weren’t in some kind of con, they were subscribers to a genuine belief that I happen to share. Bush signed onto compassionate conservative as the campaign geared up and signed off shortly after his initial faith based initiatives had been implemented: in short, the change came because he was handed the new horse of “national security”. But, since compassionate conservatism is being attacked as a con, I feel the need to explain exactly what it is.

First, let’s take a look at what Peggy Noonan has to say about it in that article:

I understood Mr. Bush to be saying, when he first came on the national scene, that he was the kind of conservative who cared very personally about the poor and struggling, who would take actions aimed at helping them, and that those actions would include promoting policies aimed at keeping the economy healthy and capable of pumping out jobs. I also understood Mr. Bush to be saying–and he often said it–that he meant to allow and encourage faith-based programs that helped young men who were getting in trouble with, or at risk of getting in trouble with, the law. It was clear by at least the 1990s that local programs run and staffed by the religious and their organizations had a higher rate of success than did programs that excluded religion. Under Mr. Bush, the feds would no longer funnel money exclusively into nonsectarian programs. The inner-city pastor would now be able to get a portion.

Compassionate conservatism is the political application of the belief that people deserve to be empowered — that people do best when they are given dignity and opportunity, and that people are personally hindered by systems (like welfare) that encourage them to be passive recipient of a huge system. An idea like workfare, which encourages people to be a contribution to the economy instead of external to it, is a keen compassionate conservative idea. Entrepreneurial drives and an opposition to McJobs are fundamental to the compassionate conservative idea, because it is important that people have the opportunity to acheive a position that their drive and capability can reach. Compassionate conservatism differs from liberalism in that it favors pro-active, non-governmental support structures (like churches, ethnic and neighborhood community centers, etc.) instead of governmental support structures. But a compassionate conservative does have the same general focus as liberals traditionally do, which is why liberals can’t really understand it — they assume that since conservatives haven’t traditionally suggested solutions to their problems, their solutions are the only reasonable ones. This is just a flat-out conceit born out of the academic basis of liberalism, and it’s one of the things that annoys me the most about liberals.

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First off, let me state that there hasn’t been a concerted effort here to pummel on Republicans. I only intended to post on this subject when something interesting happened- it’s just that the last couple of weeks have been bad weeks if you’re still trying to be a moderate Republican.

First off, in today’s edition, Peggy Noonan realizes she was conned.

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised…. Everyone murmured about… how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

Actually, a more interesting question is why wasn’t this question raised until 2005? Bush’s drunken sailor spending binge didn’t magically start in 2005, it’d had a four year run at that point- and raising the question in 2004 might have allowed people to do something about the problem.

The reason the question wasn’t raised was that the fiscal conservatives, the Eisenhower conservatives, thought they were in on the con. This is an important physcological factor in getting conned- thinking you’re in on the con. Consider, for example, your typical Nigerian scam. They’re asking you to do something illegal (launder money) up front. The basic story is that they’re stealing this money and need help laundering it (they carefully don’t say this specifically, but it’s what it amounts to). This works because it creates a mental “safe zone”- you can’t be being conned if you’re participating in the con. It’s the poor suckers who are getting their money stolen and laundered through you who are the real victims here, not you.

Of course, the real victim isn’t some (probably mythical) millionaire who’s getting his money stolen, it’s the supposed launderer. Likewise, could the real target of the “Compassionate Conservative” con be Republicans? Especially non-extremist Republicans?

To that end, I also want to point out today’s news that McCain is hiring Bush-2004 top adviser Terry Nelson. This is the same Terry Nelson who is deeply involved in the Delay-Abramoff money scandal. Machievelli said you could judge a leader by his advisers- well, this choice of adviser says boatloads about McCain. McCain has decided that in order to win the nomination, he has to a) pander to the radicals, and b) con the rest of the party. In effect, what Bush did in 2000. So he’s hiring Bush league (sorry, but I love that term) advisers to help him do exactly that.

The only question that remains is wether the Republicans are willing to send their life savings to Nigeria again.

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