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US To Deploy Ballistic Missile Interceptors In Response To North Korean Threats
New submitter dcmcilrath sends this quote from the NY Times:
"The Pentagon will spend $1 billion to deploy additional ballistic missile interceptors along the Pacific Coast to counter the growing reach of North Korea's weapons, a decision accelerated by Pyongyang's recent belligerence and indications that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, is resisting China's efforts to restrain him. ... The missiles have a mixed record in testing, hitting dummy targets just 50 percent of the time, but officials said Friday’s announcement was intended not merely to present a credible deterrence to the North’s limited intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal. They said it is also meant to show South Korea and Japan that the United States is willing to commit resources to deterring the North and, at the same time, warn Beijing that it must restrain its ally or face an expanding American military focus on Asia."
that it's the "home of the brave", wouldnt want to over react to mr tinpot and give him any cred, you need to read the sign again "do not feed the trolls"
I believe this problem would largely go away if the media just stopped covering North Korea's every temper tantrum. An exception would be The Onion and maybe Colbert, but even that might be enough to reinforce their "Terrible Twos" sort of behavior. I do give some credit to the administration for ceasing to play the stupid game that has been going on since the early 90s:
1. Provocation
2. Talk
3. Cough up food aid or the like
4. Promise to be nice
5. Lather, rinse, repeat
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
that starts with the premise that north korea will only do things that are rational and make sense, and never anything stupid, is a losing argument
citation: the behavior so far of north korea
it's rather weird that anyone is depending upon rationality, common sense and intelligence, in attempting to understand the behavior of north korea
of course they can't win. but they can do a lot of damage on their way out, and this is the problem. to not understand this is to not understand that control is not absolute, and behavior is not perfectly rational. in any country, nevermind the likes of basket case north korea
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not a threat, but an opportunity to spend a billion dollars on missiles.
...warn Beijing that it must restrain its ally or face an expanding American military focus on Asia.
I wonder if they'll be borrowing money from China in order to support that expansion :)
China. They're big allies of North Korea, and I don't think they'd take kindly to America having significant military presence right there.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
That's how the executive branch works. Undo whatever minor things the last administration did to make them look bad. Then, and only then, decide if what they were doing was a good idea. If it is, then re-brand and redeploy in the current administration's name at the nearest convenience.
Go, NK. Stand up to those capitalist lackeys.
Millions of people regularly resorting to eating grass to ward off starvation is socialism at its finest?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Its the brainwashed "minority" and leader that is the problem."
If you had watched recent videos of people visiting North Korea, you would know that the brainwashed are not the "minority" there. For generations now they have been constantly inundated with propaganda about how the United States is the epitome of evil, and apparently the majority actually believe it.
No, but I find it's best not to respond to the strawmen that the McCarthyists like to hold up. They usually find some other grand flaw in socialism when you bother to point out that it's been working well for decades in Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, China, and most of South America, and that many of the countries under that umbrella enjoy a better average standard of living and healthier economy than the US, too.
Nordic Europeans countries, Australia, and Canada have successful "socialist" programs due mostly to the fact that they have small populations and have robust resource extraction industries. Take away their oil/coal/natural gas and they would suffer just like Japan, China, and many South American countries, which counter to your claim, have either stagnant economies (Japan, S. America) or have abandoned socialism altogether (China). If you didn't know, China got rid of public health care way back in the 90's. Everything is private (well, except for government workers).
Since they don't really work, we could save $999M by paying some Hollywood set designers deploy something that just looks like a ballistic missile defense system. They could hire some extras to protest the installations for greater authenticity.
Having government-regulated economies is different than having government-regulated political systems. Right-wingers tend to mix these two up in their heads, but in fact they are orthogonal traits.
Singapore has a more or less capitalist economy, but has heavy gov't control over political decisions (no democracy), which demonstrates that economic control and political control are different things both in theory and in practice.
Table-ized A.I.
The Democrats have been saying for the past 30 years would not work?
"The report to this bill specifically notes the possible threat from the North Korean Taepo Dong II missile, which the report claims may have the range to hit Alaska. Since this weapon is in development, we do not in fact know that this missile will be capable of that range. But with North Korea in such dire straits economically and the growing possibility of its opening, with reunification with the south increasingly likely, should we spend billions on a missile defense system that probably won't work to counter a threat that may never exist?" - John Kerry
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1995/s950804f.htm
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Not unlike propaganda in the US made the majority of americans think Sadam Hussein was behind 9/11...
To write such a thing is an insult to oppressed North Koreans. You can watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera and YouTube. You can listen to Rush & NPR, read blogs, The New York Times and The Onion You can go to a rally or fly to London and visit on Speaker' Corner in Hyde Park. You can call your friend on the phone and say "Man, the government sucks, doesn't it?"
North Koreans can do NONE of those things. NONE.
many of the countries under that umbrella enjoy a better average standard of living and healthier economy than the US, too.
Sure, pick on the US when it's down. It wasn't so long ago that the US enjoyed a sub-6% unemployment rate while Europe looked on in envy with 25% of their youth out of work. And for every Germany or Norway in Europe you have an Italy or Spain (Greece is too easy). For every Brazil in South America, you have a Venezuela. Socialism can quickly send your country over a cliff when the voters run up the debt and the financiers decide to make borrowing more expensive. Even the US has gone down this road - can you imagine the carnage if our Treasury yield suddenly were in the 7% range? We'd be in a austerity spiral like half of Europe.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It is time to stop appeasing the North Koreans and take action. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed many $100s of billions to our debt, the result of wars of attrition. Our current response to North Korea continues this pattern and actually validates the North Korean threat. This has got to stop.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, NK is capable of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people today. Seoul has a population of 10 million and is within firing range of plain old ordnance from NK. They don't need nukes, they've already got one of our biggest allies as a hostage.
None of your unilateralist fantasies are going to work given the current situation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
North Korea is Juche which is a perverted form of Communism which in turn is a perverted form of socialism. You could argue that North Korea is a socialist society in the same sense that fascist Spain was a conservative society.
Socialism is the school of thought that's based on the idea that unfettered capitalism will infiltrate and ruin every aspect of society and act over time to concentrate wealth into ever fewer, ever more incompetent hands. This basic belief is shared by everyone from the centrist middle of the road Social democrat all the way over to the hard line Stalinist-Maoist, but the conclusions that people within socialism come to are very different. One reason why most socialists don't call themselves socialists today is because the Soviet Union and its vassal and client states and their horrible crimes against their own populations made it necessary to drop that term.
Socialism can go very, very wrong, obviously, but it's difficult to dismiss the basic premise that capitalism does destructive things.
It's a stretch to call what they have in Europe, Australian, Canada, Japan or even China socialism. Those are capitalist economies with varying amounts of socialist elements. The same is true of the USA. North Korea is a whole different thing and the system they have there is very broken.
I prefer to use a wheel rather than a line for the political spectrum, because at the extreme "ends" (fascism/communism) it basically looks the same.
Well, that sounds a bit like 'the political compass' where you have a left-right axis and a authoritarian-libertarian axis. You have left-wing authoritarians and right-wing authoritarians.
I tend to think about people's political beliefs and attitudes in terms of two personality types: hawks and doves (or a spectrum between hawks and doves), of three ideologies: Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism, and of countless political movements that people (ideally) join in order to try to get things done.
It's easy to bring up the images of the stereotypical hawkish conservative who's involved in furthering religion and the right to bear arms, and of the equally stereotypical dovish liberal-socialist who's a feminist and an environmentalist, but I think most people are a lot more complicated than that and probably a lot more complicated than my amateur model accounts for. I know that research in countries with multi party systems has consistently shown that voters can switch from any party to any other party from one election to another, so it's pretty complicated.
Wrong. Sweden, Finland and Denmark doesn't have any of the natural resources you mentioned. In fact, they have very limited natural resources but their awful socialist school systems produce well-educated employees for their high tech industries. The right mixture of socialism and capitalism is a quite well working formula.