So you think because it has "affordable" in the name, that it actually is affordable. Don't you know of the tradition of that bills in congress are given names that are exactly opposite of the bill's effects?
Tea Party is in favor of reforming SS, Medicare etc. It is typical of the deceptive way liberals operate to take the placard held by some idiot to represent an entire movement. Do you also take everything every junkie wrote on a cardboard during the occupy protests as representative of the liberal policies?
What do you mean by demographics? The Us population is getting older, which is traditionally more Republican demographics. Oh, you mean the huge influx of Latinos. Right, I understand now. Only, in their own countries Latinos tend to elect fairly conservative governments so once the Democrat deception regarding the immigration issue stops working, things might change.
Exactly, I don't know why this is so hard to understand. This is how it traditionally works in banana republics:
Step 1. Promise free stuff (spending on the poor etc) Step 2. Gain power, influence and wealth by winning an election. Step 3. Pay for the above spending by borrowing Step 4. Once the debt gets too large, pay it by printing money
The resulting inflation that mostly harms the poor from the step 1 is a side effect, left to the next government to deal with with austerity measures (guess who suffers the most again).
Try posting a strongly pro-IP post in one of many IP related articles (there are usually 3-4 on the front page at any one time) and see how quickly it becomes -1 Troll. As for the politics, usually pro-conservative posts get modded down but I'm not sure if that's because liberals are the majority here or because they are more inclined to mod down rather than reply.
Unfortunately it will always depend on the honesty of the moderators. Spreading the power among many moderators is no solution either as the assumption that a group of people is less biased than a single person is wrong and dangerous. People don't arrive at opinions by carefully and rationally weighing all the evidence (not enough time in the world) etc. but by picking them up from other people. 99% of our 'opinions' are memes and we are just carriers. A well picked individual with some effort can overcome their biases (for example as journalists are supposed to be trained to do) but to expect the majority in a large group to do that is crazy.
And yet it still doesn't work very well. Take a look at any story involving, say, US politics or copyright issues and you will find that any post that strongly disagrees with the groupthink of the majority gets modded as Troll or Flamebait even when it is clearly not.
The second implies that all monopolies are created by the government, and that all government services are monopolies. Which is obviously horseshit.
Almost all government services are monopolies. In fact it would be hardly fair for the government (with unlimited taxpayer funding) to compete in providing a service with a private business. Almost all monopolies are created by the government. It is very hard to find examples of true monopolies that arose in a fairly free market that lasted for any length of time, and even harder to find any that were able to abuse their position before competitors jumped in. As for the government created monopolies, the examples are endless.
The goal was to stop (or discourage) Assad's regime from using chemical weapon attacks in the future
I don't buy that at all. I think Obama tried to pick sides in Syria and help topple the Assad regime. Chemical weapons were just an excuse, possibly fabricated. This may have been right policy or wrong, but in any case he has been forced into a humiliating retreat by Putin's clever exploitation of Obama's indecisiveness and reluctance to take unpopular actions. This is actually a diplomatic humiliation of the USA by Putin and the world is taking notes. We may get our way in the end, that comes with being the only superpower, but its not going to be due to skilful diplomacy by the administration.
"the use of deadly weapons anywhere in the world is an affront to human dignity"
So the use of deadly weapons to by, say, Poland to fight against invasion by Nazi Germany was an "affront to human dignity"? Everything depends on the context. Submitting to evil without even fighting back is also an affront to human dignity.
The difference is that chemical weapons are by nature indiscriminate. With a bullet you aim at a particular person, with gas who dies depends literally on which way the wind blows.
That's what wars are really fought for, to shut up annoying people. Same with Hitler, remember those long boring speeches. Man I'm glad we did something about it.
Spending money on a bullshit "green" scams does not benefit mankind either. Green energy with Democrats in power is like defense with Republicans in power, a buzzword to facilitate transfer of taxpayer money to private hands.
Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).
Whats you strategy? 1) Kill them while they're young 2) If they somehow survive, give them more welfare 3) Increase taxes on productive people to finance the ever-increasing welfare state 4) Greece, here we come
1. Dropping out of high school 2. Having children before the age of 21 or outside marriage 3. Using drugs or committing other crimes and spending time in jail 4. Failure to get a job (even unskilled minimum wage) and stick with it and work hard
If you do not do any of those four things (and it is not too much to ask) you have only 2% chance of living in poverty in the USA.
Funny thing about Las Vegas is that it is both the worst and one of the best places to see the stars. The strip is extremely bright but relatively small and rather than being surrounded by suburban sprawl and smaller towns and villages like most other cities, Vegas is surrounded by empty desert. Drive out into the desert just far enough for the Vegas glow to disappear from the horizon and you're in business.
I remember the outrage when Ann Coulter said that the way to deal with the Middle East problems is to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity". It is hilarious to me that this now seems to be the official government policy and under Obama no less. We are certainly invading their countries one by one, we are killing their leaders, and while we are not exactly converting them to Christianity, we are converting them to western values that have their roots in Christianity and are alien to Islam.
Any victory for Assad would be temporary, and the war would start all over again few years down the line. These countries will have to transition to democracy, the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back again. The transition will be horribly messy, like in Egypt, but there is no other option except delaying it further which really just creates more misery.
All these countries have had colonial rulers replaced with Socialist dictators (Saddam, Assad, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak) which kept the will of the people suppressed by force and now the will of the people is being unleashed. Granted, it is most unfortunate that the will of the people in those places seem to involve electing oppressive Islamic rulers, but I guess we have to deal with problems one at the time. They still have to learn not just democracy but basic human rights, and we have to start somewhere.
This is the same Huffington Post that hypocritcally moderates every thread to shape the discussion in favor of their own personal political agenda?
Yes and it is easy to test as well. Post a few posts criticizing Obama (using polite language) in appropriate articles and then post exactly the same posts but replacing Obama with any Republican. Every single post about a Republican will get through but most of those mentioning about Obama will never get posted. Not to mention the childish inanity of the majority of posts there and it validates what Breitbart said about Huffpo: that he is glad he set it up for Arianna because it shows liberals for what they are, a bunch of naive, hateful and ignorant spoiled children.
Torture, bribery of foreign officials, child sex trafficking.
You and I may not like it but torture was in fact not illegal. As to bribery and providing boy prostitutes to afghan warlords, give me a break. You want CIA operatives in Afghanistan charged with fucking bribery? First of all that's the only way to get things done over there, and secondly, is bribery of foreign officials even a crime?
Exactly. Reading comments from pro-Manning people, you would think there is a huge list of horrendous crimes that he made public, but that is simply not the case. To me, the stuff he made public actually kinda proved that we are the good guys after all. Even the few incidents that are iffy (that apache video) are fucking videotaped, archived, investigated etc and eventually they tend to become public knowledge. What other country has ever done any of that? Russians in Afghanistan routinely carpet bombed towns and villages as a collective punishment and killed over a million of Afghan civilians and even Russians will still bitch about the US being bad guys for some reason. You want us to be perfect? Fine, I want that to, but at least I realize that perfection in war is not possible and I try to have some perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think because it has "affordable" in the name, that it actually is affordable. Don't you know of the tradition of that bills in congress are given names that are exactly opposite of the bill's effects?
Tea Party is in favor of reforming SS, Medicare etc. It is typical of the deceptive way liberals operate to take the placard held by some idiot to represent an entire movement. Do you also take everything every junkie wrote on a cardboard during the occupy protests as representative of the liberal policies?
What do you mean by demographics? The Us population is getting older, which is traditionally more Republican demographics. Oh, you mean the huge influx of Latinos. Right, I understand now. Only, in their own countries Latinos tend to elect fairly conservative governments so once the Democrat deception regarding the immigration issue stops working, things might change.
Exactly, I don't know why this is so hard to understand. This is how it traditionally works in banana republics:
Step 1. Promise free stuff (spending on the poor etc)
Step 2. Gain power, influence and wealth by winning an election.
Step 3. Pay for the above spending by borrowing
Step 4. Once the debt gets too large, pay it by printing money
The resulting inflation that mostly harms the poor from the step 1 is a side effect, left to the next government to deal with with austerity measures (guess who suffers the most again).
Try posting a strongly pro-IP post in one of many IP related articles (there are usually 3-4 on the front page at any one time) and see how quickly it becomes -1 Troll. As for the politics, usually pro-conservative posts get modded down but I'm not sure if that's because liberals are the majority here or because they are more inclined to mod down rather than reply.
Unfortunately it will always depend on the honesty of the moderators. Spreading the power among many moderators is no solution either as the assumption that a group of people is less biased than a single person is wrong and dangerous. People don't arrive at opinions by carefully and rationally weighing all the evidence (not enough time in the world) etc. but by picking them up from other people. 99% of our 'opinions' are memes and we are just carriers. A well picked individual with some effort can overcome their biases (for example as journalists are supposed to be trained to do) but to expect the majority in a large group to do that is crazy.
It's obvious that comments are what make some websites attractive. This is one of them.
Not a bad comment, but come on, hardly enough to make this website attractive.
A cosmonaut!?
And yet it still doesn't work very well. Take a look at any story involving, say, US politics or copyright issues and you will find that any post that strongly disagrees with the groupthink of the majority gets modded as Troll or Flamebait even when it is clearly not.
The second implies that all monopolies are created by the government, and that all government services are monopolies. Which is obviously horseshit.
Almost all government services are monopolies. In fact it would be hardly fair for the government (with unlimited taxpayer funding) to compete in providing a service with a private business. Almost all monopolies are created by the government. It is very hard to find examples of true monopolies that arose in a fairly free market that lasted for any length of time, and even harder to find any that were able to abuse their position before competitors jumped in. As for the government created monopolies, the examples are endless.
The goal was to stop (or discourage) Assad's regime from using chemical weapon attacks in the future
I don't buy that at all. I think Obama tried to pick sides in Syria and help topple the Assad regime. Chemical weapons were just an excuse, possibly fabricated. This may have been right policy or wrong, but in any case he has been forced into a humiliating retreat by Putin's clever exploitation of Obama's indecisiveness and reluctance to take unpopular actions. This is actually a diplomatic humiliation of the USA by Putin and the world is taking notes. We may get our way in the end, that comes with being the only superpower, but its not going to be due to skilful diplomacy by the administration.
"the use of deadly weapons anywhere in the world is an affront to human dignity"
So the use of deadly weapons to by, say, Poland to fight against invasion by Nazi Germany was an "affront to human dignity"? Everything depends on the context. Submitting to evil without even fighting back is also an affront to human dignity.
The difference is that chemical weapons are by nature indiscriminate. With a bullet you aim at a particular person, with gas who dies depends literally on which way the wind blows.
That's what wars are really fought for, to shut up annoying people. Same with Hitler, remember those long boring speeches. Man I'm glad we did something about it.
Spending money on a bullshit "green" scams does not benefit mankind either. Green energy with Democrats in power is like defense with Republicans in power, a buzzword to facilitate transfer of taxpayer money to private hands.
Depends what you mean by "choice". Of course nobody will choose poor if given a magical choice between being rich and being poor. But give them a choice of getting a minimum wage paying job, working long hours, giving up booze, drugs and cigarettes, living responsibly and saving small amounts of money on the side while looking for a course at a community college to improve their skills, studying at night while working during the day, then getting a better paying job and working hard at it. While you are right about mental issues being a major cause of homelessness, there are other issues involved and those include choices that they have made daily throughout their life, such as choosing an easy short term option (getting high) or hard (waking up early and going to a shitty job day after day).
Whats you strategy? 1) Kill them while they're young 2) If they somehow survive, give them more welfare 3) Increase taxes on productive people to finance the ever-increasing welfare state 4) Greece, here we come
Causes of poverty:
1. Dropping out of high school
2. Having children before the age of 21 or outside marriage
3. Using drugs or committing other crimes and spending time in jail
4. Failure to get a job (even unskilled minimum wage) and stick with it and work hard
If you do not do any of those four things (and it is not too much to ask) you have only 2% chance of living in poverty in the USA.
Funny thing about Las Vegas is that it is both the worst and one of the best places to see the stars. The strip is extremely bright but relatively small and rather than being surrounded by suburban sprawl and smaller towns and villages like most other cities, Vegas is surrounded by empty desert. Drive out into the desert just far enough for the Vegas glow to disappear from the horizon and you're in business.
As anybody who's been to Vegas can confirm, lots of lights = lots of culture. So, yes, you are right.
I remember the outrage when Ann Coulter said that the way to deal with the Middle East problems is to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity". It is hilarious to me that this now seems to be the official government policy and under Obama no less. We are certainly invading their countries one by one, we are killing their leaders, and while we are not exactly converting them to Christianity, we are converting them to western values that have their roots in Christianity and are alien to Islam.
As I see it, it would be better if FSA wins.
Any victory for Assad would be temporary, and the war would start all over again few years down the line. These countries will have to transition to democracy, the genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back again. The transition will be horribly messy, like in Egypt, but there is no other option except delaying it further which really just creates more misery.
All these countries have had colonial rulers replaced with Socialist dictators (Saddam, Assad, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak) which kept the will of the people suppressed by force and now the will of the people is being unleashed. Granted, it is most unfortunate that the will of the people in those places seem to involve electing oppressive Islamic rulers, but I guess we have to deal with problems one at the time. They still have to learn not just democracy but basic human rights, and we have to start somewhere.
This is the same Huffington Post that hypocritcally moderates every thread to shape the discussion in favor of their own personal political agenda?
Yes and it is easy to test as well. Post a few posts criticizing Obama (using polite language) in appropriate articles and then post exactly the same posts but replacing Obama with any Republican. Every single post about a Republican will get through but most of those mentioning about Obama will never get posted. Not to mention the childish inanity of the majority of posts there and it validates what Breitbart said about Huffpo: that he is glad he set it up for Arianna because it shows liberals for what they are, a bunch of naive, hateful and ignorant spoiled children.
Torture, bribery of foreign officials, child sex trafficking.
You and I may not like it but torture was in fact not illegal. As to bribery and providing boy prostitutes to afghan warlords, give me a break. You want CIA operatives in Afghanistan charged with fucking bribery? First of all that's the only way to get things done over there, and secondly, is bribery of foreign officials even a crime?
Exactly. Reading comments from pro-Manning people, you would think there is a huge list of horrendous crimes that he made public, but that is simply not the case. To me, the stuff he made public actually kinda proved that we are the good guys after all. Even the few incidents that are iffy (that apache video) are fucking videotaped, archived, investigated etc and eventually they tend to become public knowledge. What other country has ever done any of that? Russians in Afghanistan routinely carpet bombed towns and villages as a collective punishment and killed over a million of Afghan civilians and even Russians will still bitch about the US being bad guys for some reason. You want us to be perfect? Fine, I want that to, but at least I realize that perfection in war is not possible and I try to have some perspective.