The most powerful government in the world hasn't ended poverty or crime or, in fact, what I was actually talking about, provided health care.
However, it's fairly obvious that, at least, it's simply not trying with reducing poverty and providing healthcare, because other countries seem to manage those just fine. (And, of course, lower poverty and you pretty mcuh automatically lower crime.)
But I'm not going to get in a discussion with you, as you're clearly an idiot who needs to get shot, taking to a hospital, and required to sign an indentured servitude agreement for the next decade before you get treated, which would be nice and legal in your universe.
Or you could work hard, live a fiscally responsible lifestyle, live below your means - instead of living on credit card debt like so many people - and save money for a rainy day.
I was going to be polite, but as the other posts addressed your stupidity in polite terms as well I ever could, I have decided to be rude. There are three options here:
1) You're a fucking moron who has absolutely no idea how much medical costs are. In which case, here's hoping you need some obscure procedure to live that your insurance doesn't cover so you can stare at your $3000 after-taxes paycheck, your $5000 bank balance, your $20,000 retirement account, and do the math in your head for a $100,000 hospital bill.
2) You're a deluded idiot that thinks that people somehow have control over their medical expenses, who thinks they or a loved one could never get cancer or some other long-term disease that will not only wipe out their finances, but cause them to lost their insurrance when they can no longer keep their job. In which case, here's hoping you get cancer, and recover, and then have to live with half a million dollars worth of medical bills and no job.
3) You are the 1% of the rich I was talking about, and are additionally worthless scum. In which case, here's hoping you get hit by a truck. And get dragged under it a hundred feet.
Um...no he wasn't. Hagbard Celine was, arguably, an anarcho-capitalists, but there were other characters in the books, and plenty of them had different viewpoints. In fact, that was specifically commented on at the start of the very first book, by the left-wing character who started the story by being broken out of prison.
Yeah! Luckily, only well-known writer need help in paying their medical bills. There can't possibly be anyone out there in the same situtation who can't appeal to slashdot because he spent his live paving roads that hundreds of thousands of people use every day.
Okay, here goes: RAW writes books that do, indeed, sell. I own four of them. The Illumninatus! trilogy is the second book on the bibliography of the Hacker's Jargon file. His Schrödinger's Cat trilogy has been called the first quantum sci-fi novel.
His books referenced Buckminister Fuller, Timothy Leary, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, and Alfred Korzybski, either as geiuses or complete lunatics depending on different character's moods. He's one of the most psychologically aware sci-fi writers, often describing people's 'programming' and 'reality tunnels'.
Frankly, if you don't know who RAW is, I have to question what the hell you're doing posting on slashdot.
So, considering he was a successful writer, or at least as successful as they come, and they won't sell you private insurance if you have post-polio, what exactly should he have done to pay his medical bills?
Are you certain that society is a better place as a result of implementing medical transfer payments?
Of course it is.
The defination of a society is a group of people who band together for the common good.
What if they have carefully laid up their own futures, and have no wish to receive any transfer payments at all?
The only way to have enough money to never worry about medical bills is to be born rich, or win the lottery. Period. You're talking about less than 1% of the population.
Yes, I know that. The problem is that If I'm on a site that has a partial icon, whether or not it is, say, google analytics turned on and the site turned off, or the site turned on and doubleclick turned off.
I love NoScript. I just wish it had a way to say 'No, I never ever ever want to allow doubleclick.net to use Javascript, stop telling me that I have Javascript 'partially allowed' on those sites.'.
Yeah, I know I can get rid of the bar, but knowing when a site might be broken because Javascript is disabled is important. If I got rid of the bar, I'd miss that fact some of the time, and the rest of the time I'd notice and keep doing what I currently do every other day: Thinking 'Why do I have Javascript disabled on this site I trust?' and click on the list, and go 'Oh, I don't, I have it enabled on this site, I just have it disabled on their doubleclick ads.'.
I.e., they need three states, not two. The 'untrusted', 'trusted', and...um...'distrusted'.
Oh well. Occassionally wondering why a trusted site is 'partially allowed' is better than letting anyone randomly run Javascript.
What the hell is wrong with the Republican leadership?!
I don't get it. What do you mean? Yeah, it seems rather sad, but honestly, their suffering was not in vain. It enabled the Great and Noble Republican Party to have one more vote. Surely, keep one vote in the House away from the Party of Evil, aka, the Democrats, is worth a few children's lives? You have to agree we must keep the evil Democrats out of the government at all costs.
And I think these kids got off pretty lightly! I mean, if Foley hadn't voted how the Administration had wanted, they could have be taken and had their testicles crushed one at a time until he agreed to get back in line.
But, I'm feeling kind today, so I don't even think we need to punish them much. Just send one or two of them, and their parents, to secret prisons. That should shut them up. We can let them back out when we don't need to operate the House anymore.
the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
Liar. Social services are, indeed, the largest portion of the budget.
But once you disregard social security (And you have to disregard it, because it is taking in more than it is spending, so if you could magically get rid of it you'd lose money, unless you're planning on requiring people to pay into a non-existant program.), defense is about half a trillion, and social services are about a trillion.
Now, half a trillion is, of course, less than a trillion, so defense is smaller, but it's hardly 'a drop in the bucket', as you put it.
Of course, part of that trillion is because the Republican's heroic little 'Medicare reform' sucks money out of both the government and the people's pockets and deposits into 'insurers'.
You do realize that Clinton averaged a budget that was about 1.8 trillion, right? And Bush's have climbed to 2.8? Military spending has climbed from.3 billion to.5 billion, so there's where.2 went, but that means Bush has increased spending by.8 trillion in ways completely unconnected with the military. Yes, Bush has increased spending by slightly more than a third, and only 20% of that increase was for the military.
But go ahead blaming the evil Democrats for spending all the money. I guess they're the reason the debt went up.4 trillion a year under Bush Sr.,.2 trillion a year under Clinton, and.5 trillion a year under Bush Jr.
P.S. Reducing the budget to half a trillion dollars would require reductions in military spending, as military spending is (slightly) above that amount, and obviously the rest of the government needs money also.
I've had logical discussions with liberals. No, we aren't the same thing. For reference, compare female suffrage, a primary progressive thing, to black civil rights, a more liberal thing. Notice one happened faster, and one happened with less violence. They focus on 'rights', we focus on fixing problems.
I've had logical discussions with libertarians. Used to be one of them. Us progressives need libertarians to point out when we've broken something, like, oh, our Prohibition, our insane absurd failure to protect women. Sometimes you can solve a problem by removing laws, not adding ones, and we often forget that. (Their positions about drug and prostitution laws are correct in their appraisal of our other failures, although we're not taking the blame for them anymore as other people are holding on to them far longer than we alone would have.)
I've had logical discussions with conservatives. We agree on many points, like we're both anti-gun control, although for different reasons. (They think they have a right to guns, I think guns stop crime.) We both think schools are utterly broken, and sometimes we have interesting ideas how to fix them. We also think laws to help influence people towards moral behavior are good ideas in moderation, although lately some of their concepts of 'immoral behavior' have become completely unhinged from reality.(1)
So, as mainly a member of one of the two groups on 'the left', I can interact with the two groups on 'the right' civilly. Many times our ideas intersect, or they can point out things I haven't thought of.
However, I've haven't had a logical discussion with a supporter of this administration in quite some time. Neo-cons, ironically enough, are progressives, they're just progressives who got kicked out of 'the left' back in the 70s for being, to be blunt, fucking batshit insane, with their idea we can invade other countries and 'fix' them. Although that's often called a 'liberal' idea, it really is 'progressive', and about five million times stupider than Prohibition, and about fifty million times stupider than anything a modern progressive wants.
1) Gay people, for example. Hey, if gay people want to get married...HELL YEAH! Do you know how many children out there need to be adopted?
Why, exactly, would Clinton lie? What possible gain would he have there? If people want to attribute something to malice instead of incompetance, they're going to have to explain, exactly, what the malice was. Clinton doesn't like aspirin or something?(1)
No, that was incompetance, and, incidentally, it's the exact same incompetance that happens in any war, like the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy, or the bombing last year of Aaytha, Iraq. Sometimes bad intelligence about targets happens, and innocent people die and innocent buildings get destroyed.
Meanwhile, we know the Bush Administration delibrately manipulated the American people into a war with repeated and persistent instances of lying by stating things they knew weren't true, or had already been disproven. In addition to, whenever there were two opposing opinions, choosing the one that would support their views instead of the one the intelligence community believed, which isn't strictly speaking 'lying', but it isn't a way to gather intelligence.
And we know why he did that, because we know he wanted a war with Iraq as soon as he got into office.
That's simply not comparable to mistakenly bombing a building, which, incidentally, the military has done a lot more under Bush, although that's simply because they've bombed a lot more things.
And, yeah, while the 'it was really an aspirin factory' meme has gotten out there, we're almost certain it was operated for al-Qaeda, funnelling money and medicine to them, and we don't actually know it wasn't producing precurser chemicals for WMDs. By Bush standards, that would be enough to raze it to the ground, imprison all workers without a trial, and torture the people operating it, so I have no idea what people are bitching about.
1) The gag here, at the time, people said it was 'wag the dog'...pretending to be in a war to distract from a scandal. But, hehe, can't actually use that one at the same time as 'Monica distracted Clinton from al Qaeda'. Saying he was fighting terrorism to 'distract' from a sex scandal doesn't actually work politically.(2)
2) And the last thing Republicans want to do now is mention the words 'sex scandal'.
Actually, prohibition was for moral reasons, but not the moral reasons people think. It was to stop an actual problem.
Men would spend all their money on alcohol, and abuse their wives under alcohol's influence. Prohibition was to stop wife battering, and irresponsible men who would literally walk into a bar with their paycheck on Friday night and out of the bar Sunday night without it.
At that time, it seemed a reasonable way to solve the problem. And, in fact, it possibly helped that a little, although that's obviously hard to tell with the skyrocketing crime rate in areas that actually enforced it.(1) It would be rather hard to see 10% less violence toward women with 150% more violent towards everyone!
Just wanted to clear up that common misconception. All too many people think it was some sort of moral judgement on drinking, but, while the rhetoric of the time liked to call it 'demon rum', in actuality a lot of the people involved in the movement would have, for example, been happy restricting prohibition to married men if that had been at all plausible.(2)
Yeah, there were some people who were in it for different reasons, crazy moralists who thought, for no explicably reason, that alcohol use was a sin, period. But it was mainly the dying gasp of the progressive movement, and progressives tend to actually solve problems, and they saw that alcohol was causing problems, and either didn't think of, or did think of, but realized it couldn't happen, the other way to solve the problem. Which was the way we eventually adopted about 30 years later, with no-fault divorces, child support, and women actually having rights WRT their husband's behavior towards them.
Sadly, the same misguided movement produced the laws against prostitution that are still hurting women, by the effect of keeping prostitutes from accessing the laws created later on to protect women. And, to get back to the parent post, some of the original support of outlawing drugs.
I say that as someone who considers himself a progressive, FYI. But I'm willing to admit that, while progressives have been almost uniformly correct about the existence of social ills they try to solve (As opposed to conservatives, who often try to solve social ills that don't actually exist or do exist but are not actually problems.), sometimes they solve them incorrectly, in ways that are more damaging than the originial ill! We need to be willing to say 'No, that obviously didn't work, let's stop that and try something else'.
1) Some areas didn't enforce it, like California, but you obviously wouldn't be able to see an effect there.
2) The temperance movement actually had a very large overlap with the suffrage movement. For a lot of women, outlawing alcohol was a backup plan to letting them vote. (Presumably, once they could vote, they would vote for changes in the law to protect women.) The history of Utah is a fun read there, as they were way out in the front for both those issues.
Yeah, D&D is the greatest example. With rock and roll, people can, in fact, seriously argue that did cause a lot of problems, namely, the 60s. It didn't, it was the other way around, but people can stand there and pretend otherwise, even those who were actually around then and participated.
Same with lots of other stuff that got protested, like cop-killing rap (Remember that?) and comic books. They didn't cause problems, they existed at the same times as problems, as outlets, and people looking for scapegoats blamed them. And while they might have read comic books, they read 'good' comic books, and they can convinced thinking comic books have changed. And they never liked rap.
But you point at the big D&D flap and they have no response, because D&D isn't even slightly associated with any bad behavior. D&D didn't do anything, except probably caused some kids to flunk of out college, and I think society at large realizes it's probably better to flunk out of college because you stay up all night playing D&D and skip your classes than because you stay up all night partying and skip your classes, which college students have been doing since time immortal.
And RPG players are everywhere. Computer groups, theatre groups, college kids. There are groups of guys who, instead of catching the game, play a game instead, and you'd never know it. And with the continual release of D&D-based computer games, it can't help but suck in new players. I think, with any random person under, say, 30, you have at least 50% chance of hitting somoene who's participated in a RPG at least once, and another 25% of the people didn't, but know 'normal' people who did regularly and aren't going to think of it as weird.
So the response to 'Grand Theft Auto might make kids violent!' is 'Oh, you mean like D&D?'
And they think 'Hey, wait, I've played D&D, and it didn't make me violent, no matter what those idiots said back then. Maybe the people I've been listening to are the same idiots.'
Incidentally, when you think about it, GTA is actually somewhat like D&D, except that people are encouraged to play evil characters instead of good ones. They've very open-ended, just walking around and doing missions, except the missions in D&D are usually for good, and the missions in GTA are usually for evil, or at least chaos.
Just how fucking stupid are you? Google 'kerry traitor' and 'pelosi traitor' and you'll see lots of people calling them traitors. The fourth hit for 'pelosi traitor' actually calls her 'a commie traitor'.
China doesn't really have to 'cope' with it...because they already did. They don't have any external debts or anything.
Imagine that I have a a job, and I don't have to pay any bills, and I loan you a fifty to pay your bills each month. I've already handled not having the money. You never repaying me might be annoying, but I'm hardly going to be unable to pay my bills, as I don't have any bills. You can't cleverly refuse to pay me back and harm me any more than the original loan, and I've had the original loan just fine for quite some time.
I.e., China doesn't, at any point, 'need' the money back. I'm sure it wants it, but it has not made budget plans assuming it will have that money. In fact, it's made budget plans assuming it will loan more to the US.
And,yeah, if the US refuses to honor it's loan with China, it's screwed, because not only would China not loan it any more money (duh) but no one else would, including, confusingly, itself.
Why the hell do people think I'm talking about them walking up and demanding money? That would just be insanely stupid behavior.
They'd be taking their promissary notes and trading them for stocks, real goods, and property, either to US citizens, or even people outside the country who already own US assets. Not only would dumping that many assets on the market depress it, but then they'd could use that real property in combative ways, like closing plants and housing and stuff.
The only way to 'void' that would be to nationalize property.
Look, it's like a millionaire in a town full of poor people. Walking into the bank and demanding a million dollars in cash, which the bank won't have, would be slightly funny, but not cause any problems. Buying the two grocery stores and close them down? Buying the plant that 90% of the town works at and bulldozing it? The town's fucked.
The US is so tightly balanced that we can't afford to have a a few industries stop working for three days, like shipping. Some of these industries are mostly publically traded companies. You do the math as to what damage a malicious entity with several trillion dollars could do, even if by selling they take a loss and end up with only, say, three trillion.
Um, I think you have that exactly backwards. There might be a US-China allience, but only on paper. In reality, it will be the US operating as China's puppet.
There's absolutely no reason that China has to do anything the US says. The only thing the US can do is threaten to dishonor its debt, which will essentially kill the US as no one will trust it ever again. Hell, the US can't really make the theat, much less actually do it. And that doesn't really hurt China, because, unlike the US, China actually has an economy that produces things, and they'll just keep selling them.
As for who would buy the debt...um...America? Duh. They waltz in with their trillion dollars and start buying everything in sight. By the time anyone realizes what's wrong, they own half the country.
Of course, what I actually expect them to do is save it for the bidding war over the last oil. Think about it. In twenty years, as oil is at 130 a barrel, they can pay 140 instead, using our money, and outbid us.
1) China is funding all of that. Yes, all of it. They could stop funding it at any moment. This is what happens when you have a war without raising taxes.
2) Compare the spending of Hezbollah. Compare the spending of Israel. Check the result of their last war. If you weren't paying attention, it was a tie, and it was only a tie because Israel refused to actually set foot in Lebanon, because otherwise Israeli soldiers would have been blow to shit. The spending on a military does not translate to the effectiveness of a military.
3) Can't have a military without soldiers, and the US is running out. Seriously.
And Turkey, after they invade Iraq because Iraq doesn't do anything about their Kurdish terrorists.
And Canada, when it figures we don't have a military anymore, might start strolling in and taking things that look cool, like the Statue of Liberty and North Dakota.
Remember folks. Being in favor of leaving Iraq before every American soldier is dead is cutting-and-running.
Slashdot Mirror
The most powerful government in the world hasn't ended poverty or crime or, in fact, what I was actually talking about, provided health care.
However, it's fairly obvious that, at least, it's simply not trying with reducing poverty and providing healthcare, because other countries seem to manage those just fine. (And, of course, lower poverty and you pretty mcuh automatically lower crime.)
But I'm not going to get in a discussion with you, as you're clearly an idiot who needs to get shot, taking to a hospital, and required to sign an indentured servitude agreement for the next decade before you get treated, which would be nice and legal in your universe.
Or you could work hard, live a fiscally responsible lifestyle, live below your means - instead of living on credit card debt like so many people - and save money for a rainy day.
I was going to be polite, but as the other posts addressed your stupidity in polite terms as well I ever could, I have decided to be rude. There are three options here:
1) You're a fucking moron who has absolutely no idea how much medical costs are. In which case, here's hoping you need some obscure procedure to live that your insurance doesn't cover so you can stare at your $3000 after-taxes paycheck, your $5000 bank balance, your $20,000 retirement account, and do the math in your head for a $100,000 hospital bill.
2) You're a deluded idiot that thinks that people somehow have control over their medical expenses, who thinks they or a loved one could never get cancer or some other long-term disease that will not only wipe out their finances, but cause them to lost their insurrance when they can no longer keep their job. In which case, here's hoping you get cancer, and recover, and then have to live with half a million dollars worth of medical bills and no job.
3) You are the 1% of the rich I was talking about, and are additionally worthless scum. In which case, here's hoping you get hit by a truck. And get dragged under it a hundred feet.
Why would we have one of those things? That's just emboldening the sick!
Um...no he wasn't. Hagbard Celine was, arguably, an anarcho-capitalists, but there were other characters in the books, and plenty of them had different viewpoints. In fact, that was specifically commented on at the start of the very first book, by the left-wing character who started the story by being broken out of prison.
Yeah! Luckily, only well-known writer need help in paying their medical bills. There can't possibly be anyone out there in the same situtation who can't appeal to slashdot because he spent his live paving roads that hundreds of thousands of people use every day.
You don't even know who RAW is, aren't you?
Okay, here goes: RAW writes books that do, indeed, sell. I own four of them. The Illumninatus! trilogy is the second book on the bibliography of the Hacker's Jargon file. His Schrödinger's Cat trilogy has been called the first quantum sci-fi novel.
His books referenced Buckminister Fuller, Timothy Leary, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, and Alfred Korzybski, either as geiuses or complete lunatics depending on different character's moods. He's one of the most psychologically aware sci-fi writers, often describing people's 'programming' and 'reality tunnels'.
Frankly, if you don't know who RAW is, I have to question what the hell you're doing posting on slashdot.
So, considering he was a successful writer, or at least as successful as they come, and they won't sell you private insurance if you have post-polio, what exactly should he have done to pay his medical bills?
Are you certain that society is a better place as a result of implementing medical transfer payments?
Of course it is.
The defination of a society is a group of people who band together for the common good.
What if they have carefully laid up their own futures, and have no wish to receive any transfer payments at all?
The only way to have enough money to never worry about medical bills is to be born rich, or win the lottery. Period. You're talking about less than 1% of the population.
Yes, I know that. The problem is that If I'm on a site that has a partial icon, whether or not it is, say, google analytics turned on and the site turned off, or the site turned on and doubleclick turned off.
I love NoScript. I just wish it had a way to say 'No, I never ever ever want to allow doubleclick.net to use Javascript, stop telling me that I have Javascript 'partially allowed' on those sites.'.
Yeah, I know I can get rid of the bar, but knowing when a site might be broken because Javascript is disabled is important. If I got rid of the bar, I'd miss that fact some of the time, and the rest of the time I'd notice and keep doing what I currently do every other day: Thinking 'Why do I have Javascript disabled on this site I trust?' and click on the list, and go 'Oh, I don't, I have it enabled on this site, I just have it disabled on their doubleclick ads.'.
I.e., they need three states, not two. The 'untrusted', 'trusted', and...um...'distrusted'.
Oh well. Occassionally wondering why a trusted site is 'partially allowed' is better than letting anyone randomly run Javascript.
What the hell is wrong with the Republican leadership?!
I don't get it. What do you mean? Yeah, it seems rather sad, but honestly, their suffering was not in vain. It enabled the Great and Noble Republican Party to have one more vote. Surely, keep one vote in the House away from the Party of Evil, aka, the Democrats, is worth a few children's lives? You have to agree we must keep the evil Democrats out of the government at all costs.
And I think these kids got off pretty lightly! I mean, if Foley hadn't voted how the Administration had wanted, they could have be taken and had their testicles crushed one at a time until he agreed to get back in line.
But, I'm feeling kind today, so I don't even think we need to punish them much. Just send one or two of them, and their parents, to secret prisons. That should shut them up. We can let them back out when we don't need to operate the House anymore.
the military is a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend on socialism
Liar. Social services are, indeed, the largest portion of the budget.
But once you disregard social security (And you have to disregard it, because it is taking in more than it is spending, so if you could magically get rid of it you'd lose money, unless you're planning on requiring people to pay into a non-existant program.), defense is about half a trillion, and social services are about a trillion.
Now, half a trillion is, of course, less than a trillion, so defense is smaller, but it's hardly 'a drop in the bucket', as you put it.
Of course, part of that trillion is because the Republican's heroic little 'Medicare reform' sucks money out of both the government and the people's pockets and deposits into 'insurers'.
You do realize that Clinton averaged a budget that was about 1.8 trillion, right? And Bush's have climbed to 2.8? Military spending has climbed from .3 billion to .5 billion, so there's where .2 went, but that means Bush has increased spending by .8 trillion in ways completely unconnected with the military. Yes, Bush has increased spending by slightly more than a third, and only 20% of that increase was for the military.
But go ahead blaming the evil Democrats for spending all the money. I guess they're the reason the debt went up .4 trillion a year under Bush Sr., .2 trillion a year under Clinton, and .5 trillion a year under Bush Jr.
P.S. Reducing the budget to half a trillion dollars would require reductions in military spending, as military spending is (slightly) above that amount, and obviously the rest of the government needs money also.
No shit.
I'm a progressive.
I've had logical discussions with liberals. No, we aren't the same thing. For reference, compare female suffrage, a primary progressive thing, to black civil rights, a more liberal thing. Notice one happened faster, and one happened with less violence. They focus on 'rights', we focus on fixing problems.
I've had logical discussions with libertarians. Used to be one of them. Us progressives need libertarians to point out when we've broken something, like, oh, our Prohibition, our insane absurd failure to protect women. Sometimes you can solve a problem by removing laws, not adding ones, and we often forget that. (Their positions about drug and prostitution laws are correct in their appraisal of our other failures, although we're not taking the blame for them anymore as other people are holding on to them far longer than we alone would have.)
I've had logical discussions with conservatives. We agree on many points, like we're both anti-gun control, although for different reasons. (They think they have a right to guns, I think guns stop crime.) We both think schools are utterly broken, and sometimes we have interesting ideas how to fix them. We also think laws to help influence people towards moral behavior are good ideas in moderation, although lately some of their concepts of 'immoral behavior' have become completely unhinged from reality.(1)
So, as mainly a member of one of the two groups on 'the left', I can interact with the two groups on 'the right' civilly. Many times our ideas intersect, or they can point out things I haven't thought of.
However, I've haven't had a logical discussion with a supporter of this administration in quite some time. Neo-cons, ironically enough, are progressives, they're just progressives who got kicked out of 'the left' back in the 70s for being, to be blunt, fucking batshit insane, with their idea we can invade other countries and 'fix' them. Although that's often called a 'liberal' idea, it really is 'progressive', and about five million times stupider than Prohibition, and about fifty million times stupider than anything a modern progressive wants.
1) Gay people, for example. Hey, if gay people want to get married...HELL YEAH! Do you know how many children out there need to be adopted?
NPR isn't really to the 'left' of Fox News, it's to the 'reality' of Fox News. Or, to rephrase, Fox News is more unrealityish than NPR.
What's wrong with lowering taxes? It is the only way I know to prevent bought "representatives" from taking even more freedoms away from citizens.
Good Lord. Are you somehow posting from 1998?
They just spend money they don't have when they lower taxes.
Exactly. There you go.
Why, exactly, would Clinton lie? What possible gain would he have there? If people want to attribute something to malice instead of incompetance, they're going to have to explain, exactly, what the malice was. Clinton doesn't like aspirin or something?(1)
No, that was incompetance, and, incidentally, it's the exact same incompetance that happens in any war, like the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy, or the bombing last year of Aaytha, Iraq. Sometimes bad intelligence about targets happens, and innocent people die and innocent buildings get destroyed.
Meanwhile, we know the Bush Administration delibrately manipulated the American people into a war with repeated and persistent instances of lying by stating things they knew weren't true, or had already been disproven. In addition to, whenever there were two opposing opinions, choosing the one that would support their views instead of the one the intelligence community believed, which isn't strictly speaking 'lying', but it isn't a way to gather intelligence.
And we know why he did that, because we know he wanted a war with Iraq as soon as he got into office.
That's simply not comparable to mistakenly bombing a building, which, incidentally, the military has done a lot more under Bush, although that's simply because they've bombed a lot more things.
And, yeah, while the 'it was really an aspirin factory' meme has gotten out there, we're almost certain it was operated for al-Qaeda, funnelling money and medicine to them, and we don't actually know it wasn't producing precurser chemicals for WMDs. By Bush standards, that would be enough to raze it to the ground, imprison all workers without a trial, and torture the people operating it, so I have no idea what people are bitching about.
1) The gag here, at the time, people said it was 'wag the dog'...pretending to be in a war to distract from a scandal. But, hehe, can't actually use that one at the same time as 'Monica distracted Clinton from al Qaeda'. Saying he was fighting terrorism to 'distract' from a sex scandal doesn't actually work politically.(2)
2) And the last thing Republicans want to do now is mention the words 'sex scandal'.
Actually, prohibition was for moral reasons, but not the moral reasons people think. It was to stop an actual problem.
Men would spend all their money on alcohol, and abuse their wives under alcohol's influence. Prohibition was to stop wife battering, and irresponsible men who would literally walk into a bar with their paycheck on Friday night and out of the bar Sunday night without it.
At that time, it seemed a reasonable way to solve the problem. And, in fact, it possibly helped that a little, although that's obviously hard to tell with the skyrocketing crime rate in areas that actually enforced it.(1) It would be rather hard to see 10% less violence toward women with 150% more violent towards everyone!
Just wanted to clear up that common misconception. All too many people think it was some sort of moral judgement on drinking, but, while the rhetoric of the time liked to call it 'demon rum', in actuality a lot of the people involved in the movement would have, for example, been happy restricting prohibition to married men if that had been at all plausible.(2)
Yeah, there were some people who were in it for different reasons, crazy moralists who thought, for no explicably reason, that alcohol use was a sin, period. But it was mainly the dying gasp of the progressive movement, and progressives tend to actually solve problems, and they saw that alcohol was causing problems, and either didn't think of, or did think of, but realized it couldn't happen, the other way to solve the problem. Which was the way we eventually adopted about 30 years later, with no-fault divorces, child support, and women actually having rights WRT their husband's behavior towards them.
Sadly, the same misguided movement produced the laws against prostitution that are still hurting women, by the effect of keeping prostitutes from accessing the laws created later on to protect women. And, to get back to the parent post, some of the original support of outlawing drugs.
I say that as someone who considers himself a progressive, FYI. But I'm willing to admit that, while progressives have been almost uniformly correct about the existence of social ills they try to solve (As opposed to conservatives, who often try to solve social ills that don't actually exist or do exist but are not actually problems.), sometimes they solve them incorrectly, in ways that are more damaging than the originial ill! We need to be willing to say 'No, that obviously didn't work, let's stop that and try something else'.
1) Some areas didn't enforce it, like California, but you obviously wouldn't be able to see an effect there.
2) The temperance movement actually had a very large overlap with the suffrage movement. For a lot of women, outlawing alcohol was a backup plan to letting them vote. (Presumably, once they could vote, they would vote for changes in the law to protect women.) The history of Utah is a fun read there, as they were way out in the front for both those issues.
Yeah, D&D is the greatest example. With rock and roll, people can, in fact, seriously argue that did cause a lot of problems, namely, the 60s. It didn't, it was the other way around, but people can stand there and pretend otherwise, even those who were actually around then and participated.
Same with lots of other stuff that got protested, like cop-killing rap (Remember that?) and comic books. They didn't cause problems, they existed at the same times as problems, as outlets, and people looking for scapegoats blamed them. And while they might have read comic books, they read 'good' comic books, and they can convinced thinking comic books have changed. And they never liked rap.
But you point at the big D&D flap and they have no response, because D&D isn't even slightly associated with any bad behavior. D&D didn't do anything, except probably caused some kids to flunk of out college, and I think society at large realizes it's probably better to flunk out of college because you stay up all night playing D&D and skip your classes than because you stay up all night partying and skip your classes, which college students have been doing since time immortal.
And RPG players are everywhere. Computer groups, theatre groups, college kids. There are groups of guys who, instead of catching the game, play a game instead, and you'd never know it. And with the continual release of D&D-based computer games, it can't help but suck in new players. I think, with any random person under, say, 30, you have at least 50% chance of hitting somoene who's participated in a RPG at least once, and another 25% of the people didn't, but know 'normal' people who did regularly and aren't going to think of it as weird.
So the response to 'Grand Theft Auto might make kids violent!' is 'Oh, you mean like D&D?'
And they think 'Hey, wait, I've played D&D, and it didn't make me violent, no matter what those idiots said back then. Maybe the people I've been listening to are the same idiots.'
Incidentally, when you think about it, GTA is actually somewhat like D&D, except that people are encouraged to play evil characters instead of good ones. They've very open-ended, just walking around and doing missions, except the missions in D&D are usually for good, and the missions in GTA are usually for evil, or at least chaos.
Just because they seem to be 12 doesn't actually make them twelve, it just makes them idiots.
Just how fucking stupid are you? Google 'kerry traitor' and 'pelosi traitor' and you'll see lots of people calling them traitors. The fourth hit for 'pelosi traitor' actually calls her 'a commie traitor'.
A militia is just a group of people with guns willing to work together, dumbass.
And 'well-regulated' means the same thing as 'well-maintained'.
China doesn't really have to 'cope' with it...because they already did. They don't have any external debts or anything.
Imagine that I have a a job, and I don't have to pay any bills, and I loan you a fifty to pay your bills each month. I've already handled not having the money. You never repaying me might be annoying, but I'm hardly going to be unable to pay my bills, as I don't have any bills. You can't cleverly refuse to pay me back and harm me any more than the original loan, and I've had the original loan just fine for quite some time.
I.e., China doesn't, at any point, 'need' the money back. I'm sure it wants it, but it has not made budget plans assuming it will have that money. In fact, it's made budget plans assuming it will loan more to the US.
And,yeah, if the US refuses to honor it's loan with China, it's screwed, because not only would China not loan it any more money (duh) but no one else would, including, confusingly, itself.
Why the hell do people think I'm talking about them walking up and demanding money? That would just be insanely stupid behavior.
They'd be taking their promissary notes and trading them for stocks, real goods, and property, either to US citizens, or even people outside the country who already own US assets. Not only would dumping that many assets on the market depress it, but then they'd could use that real property in combative ways, like closing plants and housing and stuff.
The only way to 'void' that would be to nationalize property.
Look, it's like a millionaire in a town full of poor people. Walking into the bank and demanding a million dollars in cash, which the bank won't have, would be slightly funny, but not cause any problems. Buying the two grocery stores and close them down? Buying the plant that 90% of the town works at and bulldozing it? The town's fucked.
The US is so tightly balanced that we can't afford to have a a few industries stop working for three days, like shipping. Some of these industries are mostly publically traded companies. You do the math as to what damage a malicious entity with several trillion dollars could do, even if by selling they take a loss and end up with only, say, three trillion.
Um, I think you have that exactly backwards. There might be a US-China allience, but only on paper. In reality, it will be the US operating as China's puppet.
There's absolutely no reason that China has to do anything the US says. The only thing the US can do is threaten to dishonor its debt, which will essentially kill the US as no one will trust it ever again. Hell, the US can't really make the theat, much less actually do it. And that doesn't really hurt China, because, unlike the US, China actually has an economy that produces things, and they'll just keep selling them.
As for who would buy the debt...um...America? Duh. They waltz in with their trillion dollars and start buying everything in sight. By the time anyone realizes what's wrong, they own half the country.
Of course, what I actually expect them to do is save it for the bidding war over the last oil. Think about it. In twenty years, as oil is at 130 a barrel, they can pay 140 instead, using our money, and outbid us.
Several points:
1) China is funding all of that. Yes, all of it. They could stop funding it at any moment. This is what happens when you have a war without raising taxes.
2) Compare the spending of Hezbollah. Compare the spending of Israel. Check the result of their last war. If you weren't paying attention, it was a tie, and it was only a tie because Israel refused to actually set foot in Lebanon, because otherwise Israeli soldiers would have been blow to shit. The spending on a military does not translate to the effectiveness of a military.
3) Can't have a military without soldiers, and the US is running out. Seriously.
And Turkey, after they invade Iraq because Iraq doesn't do anything about their Kurdish terrorists.
And Canada, when it figures we don't have a military anymore, might start strolling in and taking things that look cool, like the Statue of Liberty and North Dakota.
Remember folks. Being in favor of leaving Iraq before every American soldier is dead is cutting-and-running.