Retroactive immunity is not fascism though. Here's a page you may find illuminating http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html. Aside from that, I agree with everything Olbermann says, although of course he insists on saying it in a way that will never convince any but the already faithful. But I guess I'm not looking to him to save the nation.
In any case, it should be intuitively obvious that corporatism is not Fascism. WWII sucked for business in all Axis countries. The minority that could convert to producing materiel of course benefited for a short time, but after their factories started getting hit by Lancasters it went entirely downhill from there. Fascism is about a particular merger between the citizenry and the state's agenda. And whereas it did keep free market competition as a system of production, fascism really had little of corporatism at it's core.
I'm not advocating for Bush in any way, I hate the guy, but what we're seeing here is simple crime and corruption. It's not Fascism.
When Bush starts asking for (and forming) citizen groups to contribute to terrorist monitoring and detection, that's the time to start shitting your pants. And leaving the country. Seriously on that last one.
Was the actual word he used, and it does not mean what you think it means. It does not mean the modern legal structure you that we refer to as a "corporation." It means much more like "guilds." Here's an informative page discussing the issue http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html.
Fascism at it's core really has nothing to do with corporatism. Fascism is about absorbing everyone into the agenda of the all powerful state. Rights and restrictions evaporate as the distinction between public and private realms, between the state and the people, disappears. And despite the fact that Nazi Germany maintained a heavily free market oriented approach to production, and that the State operated in close coordination with business, corporatism is not fascist.
When Bush and Cheney give no bid contracts to Halliburton, it's corruption. Criminal corruption. It's not the second coming of the Third Reich.
One aspect of our border security, however, is unprecedented in recent history. As an entirely law abiding citizen, you could in theory say or do the wrong thing, and if it related to terrorism, be made to disappear. You could be sent to Guantanamo, which remains a legal black hole, and without being charged with anything or given the opportunity to speak with a lawyer (or anybody else), be removed from the U.S. and sent to a prison where you are almost entirely at the mercy of the Executive branch.
You're right to point out that the U.S. is still, when taken in it's entirety, about as far away from a police state as any nation on the planet. But the other commenter is right to point out (although he overstates his case) that in several specific areas of our nation buds of totalitarianism are growing. The disappearance of law abiding citizens for uncertain reasons seems to still exist almost entirely in the realm of the hypothetical, but the fact that the possibility exists at all is something to be extremely concerned about.
The startings of fascism, or any other type of totalitarian government, are not the sort of thing one wants to wait any length of time to stamp out. The existence of a place like Guantanamo is extremely dangerous, and it's a place that needs to be destroyed as quickly as possible.
It's hard to beat "already installed when I got it" when it comes to ease of installation. Until more PC vendors offer pre-installed linux, you're competing to win a fight that your average consumer doesn't care about, because your average consumer doesn't install his own OS. Maybe it's easier to put a new engine in a Ford than a Toyota. That doesn't convince me to buy a Ford, because I'm never going to replace or install a new engine.
Probably could have skipped the car analogy... but I guess it's too late now.
When we have so many sources of clean and renewable energy? Those in the developing world, and many more in developed nations aren't interested in "making due with less" when there isn't any reason to do so. Ethanol from corn isn't a solution to our energy problems, but that doesn't imply that neither nuclear nor solar are. I for one, look forward to consuming ever greater amounts of energy, more cheaply and cleanly than ever, as time goes on and technology improves.
The planet can clearly support (through the help of our friend Albert Einstein) FAR more energy than we're using right now. Ignoring that blindingly obvious fact is lazy and defeatist. And ignorant of history. When has the "just make do forever" crowd ever won out? Why would you want them to?
Wanting to get more than what you worked for is pretty much the definition of selfishness. Don't come after the people that don't want to give things to you just because you want them. They aren't being selfish by wanting to keep the fruit of their labor, you are being jealous by wanting to take it from them for free.
A median is an average. The studios were probably doing a mean (which is what most people think of when they think of an average). And to be honest, there's probably even more distortion than you think. I'm sure the WGA is including a whole pile of unpaid interns on the bottom, and the studios aren't counting those. A lot of ugly distortion all around.
Actually ordering something is important for another reason. Whereas you can hide from me, you can't hide from American Express. If they won't give you their address over the phone (or not a real one - they're aware they're breaking the law), buying something from them with a CC is a surefire way to find out where their money is kept, which ensures that you can get money from them after a successful suit.
I know that's why I signed up. Seriously though, have you ever been to a church? That's not what's going on. Religion is about people convincing themselves that an all-powerful and all-knowing being believes and wants exactly the same things (coincidentally) as they do. That's why people that hate gays believe god hates gays too, people that hate women believe god intended them to be a second class, people that hate people with other beliefs believe god wants them to kill infidels, and people that hate sex believe god wants them to always suffer any negative consequences that arise from fucking. So people that like to control others try to make the case that god wants those others to be controlled, but you're missing the bigger picture.
Disclosure: I am not actually religious, despite the implications of my opening.
I wasn't justifying anything. Did you read my post? Or did you hallucinate a different post in it's place? All I pointed out was that Saddam is no longer in power, and that Iraq is not the same state it was 5 years ago. I didn't say attacking Iraq was the right idea. I didn't justify the cost of the war in blood and treasure. I didn't claim that we weren't responsible for the changes. All I said was that there have been changes, and bitching and moaning about the fact that there weren't jihadis in Iraq 5 years ago doesn't change the fact that they are there now. I also didn't imply we had to "stay the course" or anything of the sort. But you can't ignore the facts on the ground because other aspects of the war upset you, and forming policy based on facts that haven't been true for over 5 years is pretty low quality thinking. About in line with what Bush would do, whom I presume you dislike. I dislike him too in fact (see why it's bad to assume?).
Anyhow, talk about your cognitive dissonance. Yikes.
If you think someone coming at you with a suicide vest is comparable to someone coming after a portion of your education with lawyers and votes, you've lost all connection with reality. For me, I consider my right not have violence directed at me a lot more sacred than my right to learn about evolution. I'm happy to have both, but if I had to choose, it's not much of a decision.
And by the way, it's not like fundamentalist Islam is fine with evolution and abortions. Fundamentalist Islam's complaints are generally fundamentalist Christianity's complaints, plus a bunch of other stuff. AND they pursue those goals in a far more violent manner. Different ends, different means. What they do have in common is a distaste for certain types of liberty, but if your thinking ends there, you are being intellectually lazy and ignorant.
Christianity has modernized. One hopes Islam will eventually do the same, and that people in Iran will one day be lucky enough to have their greatest complaint about their overly religious brethren be their attempts through lobbying and (Gasp!) voting to force them to teach Creationism along side evolution.
Except Christian fundamentalists have far more money at their disposal than their Islamic counterparts. Consider that fundamentalist Evangelicals constitute several percent of the American population, and the enormous amount of wealth the U.S citizenry has access to. The reason Christian fundamentalists behave differently than Islamic fundamentalists is not because the Christians can't afford the guns and explosives they need. It's because they have different goals, and that there are different methods that are acceptable to use to pursue those goals.
The violence directed towards perceived enemies of Christianity (including abortion clinics) pales in comparison to the violence directed towards perceived enemies of Islam.
Christians have far greater resources at their disposal than at any time in history, yet they are as a group far more polite and tolerant of others than Muslims. It's not an issue of funding or organization, it's an issue of Middle Eastern culture's failure to modernize.
Notice plenty of countries with Islamic populations (like Indonesia) don't have these problems.
And no one's confused (except maybe you). Yes, Saddam ran a secular state that was very low on Islamic based terror. But he hasn't run that state for nearly 5 years now. And sadly, Iraq is now pretty well infested with jihadis. It wasn't then, it is now. Get used to it.
You didn't notice any characters in your story that weren't American? There's plenty of blame to go around, and no need to try to turn the issue of Iranian repression into a black and white all the U.S. or all the Iranian's fault issue.
We started a revolution, and installed the shah - that was short sighted and our fault. THEY started a revolution and installed an Islamic supreme council. You can't argue that that wasn't in the Iranian's court without resorting to borderline racism. We may have helped destroy the liberal society that would have resisted Khamanei's installment, but they were the society that installed him.
Is a good idea because it allows individual states to experiment with different laws and policies and residents to vote with their feet. If one state decides to give subsidies to industries that voters aren't interested in subsidizing, or open a bunch of museums no one is interested in visiting, then residents can respond by leaving the state. States can learn from each other's mistakes without having to make those same mistakes themselves. When you only have federal laws, that mechanism is destroyed. If the U.S. gov't decides to enact stupid policy, you're trapped unless you want to leave the country, which is much more difficult than leaving your state.
There are benefits of harmonizing laws between states, increased efficiency among them, but harmonizing ALL laws is a mistake, because it doesn't allow individual states to act as experiments, and if the federal government screws up you are trapped.
And also, to the extent that some policies are only good or bad based on people's personal preference, differing state laws give you more choice on how you want to live while still remaining in the U.S.
It means that they're selling the wrong group of products. If 95% of your customers are throwing away a large portion of what they paid for, and the other 5% are taking more than they paid for, that's a hint that you need to sell a smaller product more cheaply to the 95% and a larger more expensive product to the 5%.
Of course, because this is the real world, what TW is going to try to do is leverage their monopoly to gouge everybody, but there is a central issue here which is that selling only by bandwidth no longer works as well given current internet usage behaviors. Large and frequent file downloads are here to stay. So a market for total data transfer opens up, and ISPs start to charge people for what they're really using, which is bandwidth and total transfer/time period.
Halliburton received no-bid contracts - hardly a libertarian ideal. Blackwater does not have a worse track record than the U.S. Military. Sure sending those 4 guys into Fallujah blind and under protected was a big fuck-up, but the Military does stuff that like that too. Look at nearly 4 years of a strategy of essentially sending patrols out to get hit by IEDs and shot at. Blackwater did plenty of things well, and that isn't to be ignored simply because the only time they made the news was when they made mistakes. And Libertarianism isn't Anarchy - it stipulates enforced contracts and individual protections and property rights and other niceties sorely missing in Iraq. All in all, the Iraq experiment was highly un-Libertarian.
Libertarianism's mistake is that it overestimates the quality of the Average Citizen. Like with Communism, you get a bunch of liberal (in the classical sense of the word) educated guys together who assume that everyone is like the people they hang around with (liberal educated people) and form impractical beliefs based on that false assumption. Your average consumer is fundamentally pretty unreasonable, and Libertarianism can't function without a considered, far sighted citizenry.
But in any case, Iraq was not a test of Libertarian theory, and has little to say about any of that.
You're aware price is a measure of value? If the government comes in and messes with the price of copper, fewer people get what they value. This isn't a humanitarian issue (like with water, which has no substitutes), so resources should be left to be used efficiently.
And please go take an economics course so you understand why the free market IS a humanitarian system. Hint: willing buyer, willing seller, and no central government to decide what something is worth to you. It will be worth whatever it costs to make or acquire it. It's not romantic, but it works.
Incentives can be recurring. Consider U.S. farm subsidies... It is absolutely within the power for a gov't to offer Goog a permanent tax break (or something else) to try to attract them. That would be recurring. National gov't concessions are not necessarily the pittances you make them out to be.
Unfortunately, companies get bought out when they behave unprofitably. So Merck sells (say) the only pill they make for $10, Pfizer says to themselves that's bullshit, buys Merck, and starts selling it at $100. You are very right to point out that our current patent system handcuffs the invisible hand by granting these hugely overprotective monopolies, but the pharma companies aren't really in a position to do anything about that, except make out like bandits. Patent law reform is the only solution because pharma companies are not in a position to play hero, even if they wanted to be.
And I actually started my point with an "unfortunately" only because I didn't want people thinking I was just being a shill for pharma. The ability of firms to buy out other firms when they have poor leadership is actually a huge boon to society (reduces the entrenchment of incompetent executives), but it of course also prevents altruistic behavior in public companies. 2 steps forward, one step back.
Someone needs to bring back Reagan's Trust but Verify. For all the Reagan humping among republicans today, it amazes me that they can suggest with a straight face that a simple check to make sure something horrible isn't occurring behind the scenes is somehow the wrong idea. It's like no one's even heard of the difference between a democracy and a _constitutional_ democracy, and why that was the great American innovation. It's not democracy that prevents tyranny, it's the constitution. Please don't fuck with it.
>>In comparison the US Gov started a war in Iraq (based on _deceit_ ) and got how many killed? And cost the USA how much?
Argh this is something I hate when people do. The fact that the Iraq war was started on the basis of dishonest evidence has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING RELEVANT TO YOUR ARGUMENT/caps. Don't bring it up, because your argument is not "fuck Bush," it's that it's foolish to trade away liberty for no additional security towards something that isn't particularly dangerous in the first place. When you start just throwing crap on at the end about how much the Bush Administration sucks, it starts to look like you don't entirely know what your point really is or what you're really talking about. As someone who argues with Bush fans all the time, let me tell you, this is a crippling mistake. It's called diluting your argument - don't do it.
Use spammers tactics against them. They've spent a huge amount of time trying to defeat intelligent filters by finding language that computers can't understand, but humans can. Might as well put that research to good use.
Another thing to tack on to reasons to support international politeness is that it allows elected political leaders in other countries to do things that benefit you. You don't run into situations like we have in Iraq, where many developed nations can't help us even if they wanted to, because the people in charge of sending money or troops would get voted out of office. Notice, for instance, the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, because we were polite with the rest of the world when invading (and making the case to do so), greater than half of it's nation building costs are payed by the EU. That's a pretty stark contrast to Iraq. So their ability to send supporting money and troops is another reason to play nice with other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Retroactive immunity is not fascism though. Here's a page you may find illuminating http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html. Aside from that, I agree with everything Olbermann says, although of course he insists on saying it in a way that will never convince any but the already faithful. But I guess I'm not looking to him to save the nation.
In any case, it should be intuitively obvious that corporatism is not Fascism. WWII sucked for business in all Axis countries. The minority that could convert to producing materiel of course benefited for a short time, but after their factories started getting hit by Lancasters it went entirely downhill from there. Fascism is about a particular merger between the citizenry and the state's agenda. And whereas it did keep free market competition as a system of production, fascism really had little of corporatism at it's core.
I'm not advocating for Bush in any way, I hate the guy, but what we're seeing here is simple crime and corruption. It's not Fascism.
When Bush starts asking for (and forming) citizen groups to contribute to terrorist monitoring and detection, that's the time to start shitting your pants. And leaving the country. Seriously on that last one.
Was the actual word he used, and it does not mean what you think it means. It does not mean the modern legal structure you that we refer to as a "corporation." It means much more like "guilds." Here's an informative page discussing the issue http://www.publiceye.org/fascist/corporatism.html.
Fascism at it's core really has nothing to do with corporatism. Fascism is about absorbing everyone into the agenda of the all powerful state. Rights and restrictions evaporate as the distinction between public and private realms, between the state and the people, disappears. And despite the fact that Nazi Germany maintained a heavily free market oriented approach to production, and that the State operated in close coordination with business, corporatism is not fascist.
When Bush and Cheney give no bid contracts to Halliburton, it's corruption. Criminal corruption. It's not the second coming of the Third Reich.
One aspect of our border security, however, is unprecedented in recent history. As an entirely law abiding citizen, you could in theory say or do the wrong thing, and if it related to terrorism, be made to disappear. You could be sent to Guantanamo, which remains a legal black hole, and without being charged with anything or given the opportunity to speak with a lawyer (or anybody else), be removed from the U.S. and sent to a prison where you are almost entirely at the mercy of the Executive branch.
You're right to point out that the U.S. is still, when taken in it's entirety, about as far away from a police state as any nation on the planet. But the other commenter is right to point out (although he overstates his case) that in several specific areas of our nation buds of totalitarianism are growing. The disappearance of law abiding citizens for uncertain reasons seems to still exist almost entirely in the realm of the hypothetical, but the fact that the possibility exists at all is something to be extremely concerned about.
The startings of fascism, or any other type of totalitarian government, are not the sort of thing one wants to wait any length of time to stamp out. The existence of a place like Guantanamo is extremely dangerous, and it's a place that needs to be destroyed as quickly as possible.
It's hard to beat "already installed when I got it" when it comes to ease of installation. Until more PC vendors offer pre-installed linux, you're competing to win a fight that your average consumer doesn't care about, because your average consumer doesn't install his own OS. Maybe it's easier to put a new engine in a Ford than a Toyota. That doesn't convince me to buy a Ford, because I'm never going to replace or install a new engine.
Probably could have skipped the car analogy... but I guess it's too late now.
When we have so many sources of clean and renewable energy? Those in the developing world, and many more in developed nations aren't interested in "making due with less" when there isn't any reason to do so. Ethanol from corn isn't a solution to our energy problems, but that doesn't imply that neither nuclear nor solar are. I for one, look forward to consuming ever greater amounts of energy, more cheaply and cleanly than ever, as time goes on and technology improves.
The planet can clearly support (through the help of our friend Albert Einstein) FAR more energy than we're using right now. Ignoring that blindingly obvious fact is lazy and defeatist. And ignorant of history. When has the "just make do forever" crowd ever won out? Why would you want them to?
Wanting to get more than what you worked for is pretty much the definition of selfishness. Don't come after the people that don't want to give things to you just because you want them. They aren't being selfish by wanting to keep the fruit of their labor, you are being jealous by wanting to take it from them for free.
A median is an average. The studios were probably doing a mean (which is what most people think of when they think of an average). And to be honest, there's probably even more distortion than you think. I'm sure the WGA is including a whole pile of unpaid interns on the bottom, and the studios aren't counting those. A lot of ugly distortion all around.
Actually ordering something is important for another reason. Whereas you can hide from me, you can't hide from American Express. If they won't give you their address over the phone (or not a real one - they're aware they're breaking the law), buying something from them with a CC is a surefire way to find out where their money is kept, which ensures that you can get money from them after a successful suit.
I know that's why I signed up. Seriously though, have you ever been to a church? That's not what's going on. Religion is about people convincing themselves that an all-powerful and all-knowing being believes and wants exactly the same things (coincidentally) as they do. That's why people that hate gays believe god hates gays too, people that hate women believe god intended them to be a second class, people that hate people with other beliefs believe god wants them to kill infidels, and people that hate sex believe god wants them to always suffer any negative consequences that arise from fucking. So people that like to control others try to make the case that god wants those others to be controlled, but you're missing the bigger picture.
Disclosure: I am not actually religious, despite the implications of my opening.
I wasn't justifying anything. Did you read my post? Or did you hallucinate a different post in it's place? All I pointed out was that Saddam is no longer in power, and that Iraq is not the same state it was 5 years ago. I didn't say attacking Iraq was the right idea. I didn't justify the cost of the war in blood and treasure. I didn't claim that we weren't responsible for the changes. All I said was that there have been changes, and bitching and moaning about the fact that there weren't jihadis in Iraq 5 years ago doesn't change the fact that they are there now. I also didn't imply we had to "stay the course" or anything of the sort. But you can't ignore the facts on the ground because other aspects of the war upset you, and forming policy based on facts that haven't been true for over 5 years is pretty low quality thinking. About in line with what Bush would do, whom I presume you dislike. I dislike him too in fact (see why it's bad to assume?).
Anyhow, talk about your cognitive dissonance. Yikes.
If you think someone coming at you with a suicide vest is comparable to someone coming after a portion of your education with lawyers and votes, you've lost all connection with reality. For me, I consider my right not have violence directed at me a lot more sacred than my right to learn about evolution. I'm happy to have both, but if I had to choose, it's not much of a decision.
And by the way, it's not like fundamentalist Islam is fine with evolution and abortions. Fundamentalist Islam's complaints are generally fundamentalist Christianity's complaints, plus a bunch of other stuff. AND they pursue those goals in a far more violent manner. Different ends, different means. What they do have in common is a distaste for certain types of liberty, but if your thinking ends there, you are being intellectually lazy and ignorant.
Christianity has modernized. One hopes Islam will eventually do the same, and that people in Iran will one day be lucky enough to have their greatest complaint about their overly religious brethren be their attempts through lobbying and (Gasp!) voting to force them to teach Creationism along side evolution.
Except Christian fundamentalists have far more money at their disposal than their Islamic counterparts. Consider that fundamentalist Evangelicals constitute several percent of the American population, and the enormous amount of wealth the U.S citizenry has access to. The reason Christian fundamentalists behave differently than Islamic fundamentalists is not because the Christians can't afford the guns and explosives they need. It's because they have different goals, and that there are different methods that are acceptable to use to pursue those goals. The violence directed towards perceived enemies of Christianity (including abortion clinics) pales in comparison to the violence directed towards perceived enemies of Islam. Christians have far greater resources at their disposal than at any time in history, yet they are as a group far more polite and tolerant of others than Muslims. It's not an issue of funding or organization, it's an issue of Middle Eastern culture's failure to modernize. Notice plenty of countries with Islamic populations (like Indonesia) don't have these problems.
And no one's confused (except maybe you). Yes, Saddam ran a secular state that was very low on Islamic based terror. But he hasn't run that state for nearly 5 years now. And sadly, Iraq is now pretty well infested with jihadis. It wasn't then, it is now. Get used to it.
You didn't notice any characters in your story that weren't American? There's plenty of blame to go around, and no need to try to turn the issue of Iranian repression into a black and white all the U.S. or all the Iranian's fault issue.
We started a revolution, and installed the shah - that was short sighted and our fault. THEY started a revolution and installed an Islamic supreme council. You can't argue that that wasn't in the Iranian's court without resorting to borderline racism. We may have helped destroy the liberal society that would have resisted Khamanei's installment, but they were the society that installed him.
Is a good idea because it allows individual states to experiment with different laws and policies and residents to vote with their feet. If one state decides to give subsidies to industries that voters aren't interested in subsidizing, or open a bunch of museums no one is interested in visiting, then residents can respond by leaving the state. States can learn from each other's mistakes without having to make those same mistakes themselves. When you only have federal laws, that mechanism is destroyed. If the U.S. gov't decides to enact stupid policy, you're trapped unless you want to leave the country, which is much more difficult than leaving your state.
There are benefits of harmonizing laws between states, increased efficiency among them, but harmonizing ALL laws is a mistake, because it doesn't allow individual states to act as experiments, and if the federal government screws up you are trapped.
And also, to the extent that some policies are only good or bad based on people's personal preference, differing state laws give you more choice on how you want to live while still remaining in the U.S.
It means that they're selling the wrong group of products. If 95% of your customers are throwing away a large portion of what they paid for, and the other 5% are taking more than they paid for, that's a hint that you need to sell a smaller product more cheaply to the 95% and a larger more expensive product to the 5%.
Of course, because this is the real world, what TW is going to try to do is leverage their monopoly to gouge everybody, but there is a central issue here which is that selling only by bandwidth no longer works as well given current internet usage behaviors. Large and frequent file downloads are here to stay. So a market for total data transfer opens up, and ISPs start to charge people for what they're really using, which is bandwidth and total transfer/time period.
Halliburton received no-bid contracts - hardly a libertarian ideal. Blackwater does not have a worse track record than the U.S. Military. Sure sending those 4 guys into Fallujah blind and under protected was a big fuck-up, but the Military does stuff that like that too. Look at nearly 4 years of a strategy of essentially sending patrols out to get hit by IEDs and shot at. Blackwater did plenty of things well, and that isn't to be ignored simply because the only time they made the news was when they made mistakes. And Libertarianism isn't Anarchy - it stipulates enforced contracts and individual protections and property rights and other niceties sorely missing in Iraq. All in all, the Iraq experiment was highly un-Libertarian.
Libertarianism's mistake is that it overestimates the quality of the Average Citizen. Like with Communism, you get a bunch of liberal (in the classical sense of the word) educated guys together who assume that everyone is like the people they hang around with (liberal educated people) and form impractical beliefs based on that false assumption. Your average consumer is fundamentally pretty unreasonable, and Libertarianism can't function without a considered, far sighted citizenry.
But in any case, Iraq was not a test of Libertarian theory, and has little to say about any of that.
Point people to Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy. It matters what you are building.
You're aware price is a measure of value? If the government comes in and messes with the price of copper, fewer people get what they value. This isn't a humanitarian issue (like with water, which has no substitutes), so resources should be left to be used efficiently.
And please go take an economics course so you understand why the free market IS a humanitarian system. Hint: willing buyer, willing seller, and no central government to decide what something is worth to you. It will be worth whatever it costs to make or acquire it. It's not romantic, but it works.
Incentives can be recurring. Consider U.S. farm subsidies... It is absolutely within the power for a gov't to offer Goog a permanent tax break (or something else) to try to attract them. That would be recurring. National gov't concessions are not necessarily the pittances you make them out to be.
Unfortunately, companies get bought out when they behave unprofitably. So Merck sells (say) the only pill they make for $10, Pfizer says to themselves that's bullshit, buys Merck, and starts selling it at $100. You are very right to point out that our current patent system handcuffs the invisible hand by granting these hugely overprotective monopolies, but the pharma companies aren't really in a position to do anything about that, except make out like bandits. Patent law reform is the only solution because pharma companies are not in a position to play hero, even if they wanted to be.
And I actually started my point with an "unfortunately" only because I didn't want people thinking I was just being a shill for pharma. The ability of firms to buy out other firms when they have poor leadership is actually a huge boon to society (reduces the entrenchment of incompetent executives), but it of course also prevents altruistic behavior in public companies. 2 steps forward, one step back.
Someone needs to bring back Reagan's Trust but Verify. For all the Reagan humping among republicans today, it amazes me that they can suggest with a straight face that a simple check to make sure something horrible isn't occurring behind the scenes is somehow the wrong idea. It's like no one's even heard of the difference between a democracy and a _constitutional_ democracy, and why that was the great American innovation. It's not democracy that prevents tyranny, it's the constitution. Please don't fuck with it.
>>In comparison the US Gov started a war in Iraq (based on _deceit_ ) and got how many killed? And cost the USA how much?
/caps. Don't bring it up, because your argument is not "fuck Bush," it's that it's foolish to trade away liberty for no additional security towards something that isn't particularly dangerous in the first place. When you start just throwing crap on at the end about how much the Bush Administration sucks, it starts to look like you don't entirely know what your point really is or what you're really talking about. As someone who argues with Bush fans all the time, let me tell you, this is a crippling mistake. It's called diluting your argument - don't do it.
Argh this is something I hate when people do. The fact that the Iraq war was started on the basis of dishonest evidence has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING RELEVANT TO YOUR ARGUMENT
Use spammers tactics against them. They've spent a huge amount of time trying to defeat intelligent filters by finding language that computers can't understand, but humans can. Might as well put that research to good use.
Another thing to tack on to reasons to support international politeness is that it allows elected political leaders in other countries to do things that benefit you. You don't run into situations like we have in Iraq, where many developed nations can't help us even if they wanted to, because the people in charge of sending money or troops would get voted out of office. Notice, for instance, the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, because we were polite with the rest of the world when invading (and making the case to do so), greater than half of it's nation building costs are payed by the EU. That's a pretty stark contrast to Iraq. So their ability to send supporting money and troops is another reason to play nice with other countries.