I appreciate where you're coming from, but can this also be applied to actions? If I sit on a hill with a sniper rifle, shoot at your head, and then miss, have I done anything wrong? Let's say the bullet whizzes past your head and lands in the ocean. Nobody is harmed. You never even notice that it happened. Should I go to jail for attempted murder, or is the "no harm, no foul" rule still in effect?
I'm not talking about *lying* per se. I agree that there was some intelligence to support his assertions (although he did blatantly change things like "There is evidence that X is happening" to "We are 100% certain of X"). What I'm talking about is the obvious fact that the war was a foregone conclusion before rumbling about WMD even started. Anybody watching the rhetoric leading up to it should have seen that. I remember being shocked at hearing the phrase "Committed to regime change" while the jury was still well out on WMD. Add to that the fact that one WMD weren't found, it was all about "helping the Iraqi people" and always had been.
Probably the most dishonest part of all of it was not spinning intelligence (I won't go so far as to say "lying" because I'm fairly sure that Bush still believed he was right), but how hard they worked to subtly tie Iraq to 9/11 when it had nothing to do with it. Any question to Bush or Cheney during a press conference was always answered with "We will never forget the events of 9/11." It was just like "Remember the Alamo!" over and over again. For some reason, hardly anybody in the media asked the follow up question, "Since we know that Iraq was not at all responsible for 9/11, what's the connection?" Well into the war, and well after we knew for certain that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, about 3/4 of the country still believed that Iraq was responsible for it. In the days of carefully shaped political messages, detailed polling results, and communications consultants, I find it very hard to believe that the Bush administration was unaware of this widespread misconception. As I see it, rather than correcting it, they made it worse and played on it to get support for their war on false pretenses.
Now, I can understand that Iraq is a strategically important part of the world. Our energy security relies on that region, and I would be upset at any President for ignoring it to the detriment of our national security. However, cynically playing on whatever rationale you can make play with the American people rather than just coming out and saying, "We want to install a democratic government in the middle east in order to promote democracy and stability there so we have to worry less about our energy security" is clearly dishonest. I think that Bush believed in WMD, and he believed (rightly) that the Iraqi people were oppressed. But those were very clearly just nice-to-haves and not the real rationale for the war.
Honestly, I wonder if all the people who harp on morality and integrity ever think about morality beyond sexual morality. Caring for the poor and infirm, promoting peace, and generally doing things that make the lives of millions of people markedly better end up taking a back seat to the private lives of people who, like us, often have flawed personal relationships. Given an opportunity to bring about world peace and end hunger and disease at the expense of widespread sexual "immorality," I strongly suspect that a lot of people would opt for disease, famine, and war. It's a sad statement.
People who are "too indifferent, fucked-up or poor to provide an education to their childrent" should not be parents in the first place. I am not advocating that the government decides who can and cant have kids (this isn't China), but I am saying that people should take personal responsibility. If they are poor, they shouldnt get pregnent. If they are not willing or able to put in the effort to raise their kids, then they should either not get pregnent or give them away for adoption.
That's a delightful idea. Why didn't we think of that earlier? People who would be crappy parents and not see to their children's education should simply not be parents. Now we just have to deal with the ones who have already become parents.
It isn't the government's responsibility to raise one's kids.
No, but it becomes the government's responsibility to protect you and me from those kids when they grow up to be dangerous felons. It certainly becomes the government's responsibility to house them in prisons, and I'm pretty sure that's not too cheap either.
"Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered
Wherever such a thing mattered? You're going to have to flesh this one out a bit. Does that mean wherever such a thing mattered enough for parents to pay for an education for their children?
So your definition of integrity is trading somebody who commits a serious marital infidelity for somebody who cynically starts a war under false pretenses?
I think that in this case, the answer to that is because it would be against the law to do otherwise. I'm pretty certain that the foundation will have it built into the charter, and I'm also pretty sure that the charter will offer no way of changing that provision without an executive order from Bill himself.
If this is your test for obviousness, then NOTHING is patentable, because everything is just "a solution waiting for technological progress to make it feasible." Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your position in this matter), our patent system doesn't just look at "ideas," it looks at the idea plus a "reduction to practice" -- in other words, the guy that says "I wish I could take my email with me" doesn't get a patent, but the guy that actually figures out HOW to do it does. We give patents based onthe invention of the "technological progress" that makes the solutions feasible.
If everybody has the same obvious idea and you're the first one to figure out how to implement it, you should get a patent. On the implementation. Example: Everybody wants a portable device that can receive email. No portable network hardware is available. Portable network hardware becomes available from a third party and you're the first slob to crank out an email device with the network hardware in it. Should you get a patent on how you hooked together the parts? Maybe, if it's sufficiently clever. Should you be able to patent the general idea that everybody has been chomping at the bit to implement? I certainly don't think so.
You mean such sensible arguments like "Bush looks like a chimp"? And all the ones about how great Saddam was? Sorry, there were no sensible arguments from the far left wing.
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of, "There's insufficient evidence that Iraq is a significant threat," or "It will cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives," or "It's possible to turn a relatively stable if messed up state (no shortage of those in the world) and turn it into a civil war embroiled failed state," or "It will provide fodder for terrorist recruiters and a training ground for recruits." I suppose the monkey one is kind of funny, but it's probably best kept in the category of "stupid arguments that the media will allow in place of sensible ones."
Reporting protests isn't exactly the way to get the rational opposing view across. There were plenty of sensible arguments above and beyond "No blood for oil!" and "He's not my president!" which is about all you get when your only opposition voice is people ranting at protests. The problem is who ends up being given the mic when opposing views are solicited. The sample liberal in frame four is what I was thinking of in this case.
Similar technique my ass. The Iraqi figure was arrived at by door to door surveys, in an unusually small number of areas, many of which "just happened" to be the sites of recent conflict. Such as, for instance, fallujah.
Those areas are what we would call "population centers" when designing a statistical study. Cluster sampling is a common method, and I have yet to see a convincing argument as to why it simply doesn't apply in this case. I definitely haven't seen somebody actually talk about the specifics of the methodology in the paper in question. Lots of vague hand waving, but that doesn't really get you very far in experimental design.
One of the major failings of the media was its inability or unwillingness to point out that it was well understood that Iraq was not a sponsor of 9/11. Remember, we knew this well before the war, and the vast majority of Americans believed otherwise well after the war began. I attribute that in no small part to the media credulously playing the "We will never forget the lessons of 9/11" and "Fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" sound bites without pointing out that those phrases were totally irrelevant to Iraq. Of course, calling people on it would have been Liberal Bias, so hardly anybody spoke up. It's a classic example of compulsive centrist disorder.
The problem with many of those that don't like this program is that they see Terrorism in much the same way that the Clinton administration did. As a law-enforcement problem. That type of limited vision is how we ended up with 9/11 in the first place. By not treating terrorism as what it is, a MILITARY action against the US and other countries by an organized but decentralized force, and assuming that subpoenas, police and lawyers will be effective in stopping a global jihad, we place ourselves directly in the line of fire for another terror attack.
Terrorism IS generally a law-enforcement problem. Your adversaries are private citizens, not necessarily supported by any government entity. They often reside within your borders, and the things that they do are illegal. They can be wiretapped with warrants, arrested by police, tried, and put in jail. There is nothing about their activities that make them magical or otherwise in need of tools other than those used against organized crime.
If they're being sponsored by a government (e.g. Afghanistan), then you have yourself a war. When you can specify an enemy (not an idea like "terrorism") and objectives to neutralize the enemy, then you can have a war. You can't start an open ended war against a vague notion like "drugs" or "terror," demand a bunch of new powers, fight nobody in particular for years on end, and hope to be successful at doing anything other than expanding your authority. That's all this has always been about.
Seriously. Think about what you just said. The wiretapping that the Bush administration is doing is legal if a warrant is issued. All the Bush administration wants to do is remove the accountability. Can you explain to me how we might have averted 9/11 if the government hadn't had to get a warrant for wiretapping?
Ahhh. I see. They give you the $100 for some sub-$100 purchase and you give them their $100 back modded as a $1 as part of the change. Now $99 of value has disappeared from their wallet, and if you can dupe them into purchasing something worth $1 from you (or getting change for a $1), you can snag the $99 of disappeared value for yourself. From your original post, I was reading:
1) Mod a $100 to turn it into a $1 2) Give the fake $1 to a blind person for something presumably worth $1 (you're now out $99) 3) Buy the fake $1 back for $1 (cash or something else) and get your original hundred back with some extra holes in it.
There's also a difference between (1) Being well off and being indifferent to the suffering of others and (2) Being well of *because* of the suffering of others and being indifferent to that fact. Neither one is particularly great, but one of them is a lot worse.
Otherwise known as freedom of speech. So what I'm hearing from you is, "You should be allowed to say whatever you want, as long as I agree with it."
There may be some people here thinking that way, but I think that the majority position is, "You should be allowed to say whatever you want, but if it's nutty and obviously factually wrong I reserve the right to point and laugh at you."
I would very much like to agree with you on that, but as it stands, the poorly educated and disinterested people you refer to make up a huge percentage of voters and they vote for school board members in the districts where I would send my kids to school. Now, I find it a little creepy that people who can't get their heads around the basics of biology can be elected to positions of authority over nuclear arsenals, but I can live with it as it's not necessarily a direct qualification. I would rather not elect people who believe that the planet is flat and was created last Thursday selecting science books for our next generation of engineers and scientists.
The bottom line here is that the standard of living in the USA has exceeded the standard of living in other countries for some time now, and our ability to justify that increased standard of living has decreased over time. We're at a point where a correction has to be made, and the result of that correction will be large segments of the rest of the world (mainly India and China) "catching up" for a while. Unless Americans somehow figure out how to do something better than the rest of the world again, there necessarily has to be a period of comparative stagnation while other nations begin to eat their fair share of the pie. You correctly point out that it's the economically efficient way for things to be, and that protectionism simply distorts the markets in an attempt to delay the inevitable in the long run. There are other things to consider, however.
Thought experiment: You have a high wage and I have a low wage. Does it make life harder for your wages to stagnate for a few years while I catch up to you, or for us to simply immediately move to the mean of your wage and my wage? We have to remember that there are a lot of ways for that equilibration to happen. There can be a "soft landing" or a "hard landing" or anything in between. It's quite a painful thing to allow workers' wages to float in an internationally competitive market when they have to contend with sticky prices at home. If you drop from $80K to $12K in a year, the fact that you can buy TurboTax for a few dollars less is not going to help when you're dealing with other costs that don't move quite so quickly. Housing prices, for example, simply aren't going to adjust quickly enough to account for the shifts in real income that worldwide wage parity would cause. Even if they did, the number of people whose wealth is largely held in their homes and who may have borrowed against those homes is staggering. Remember, people still have to eat and provide shelter while the secondary effects of increased efficiency are making their way through the economy.
The idea of an economically efficient wonderland where all prices float and there are no barriers to trade only works when there are no sticky prices and everything actually *can* float. Any time a good is incorrectly valued and has to return to its appropriate value, there are going to be secondary effects. If that good happens to be wages for a sizable segment of the population, there's a definite upper limit to how quickly that "snap" can happen without some serious short term (and I'm talking *years* not days) fallout for the rest of the economy. There are clearly some policy decisions to be made that will affect how quickly the net flow of wealth happens, how quickly the playing field levels, and how soon the rising tide can once again begin lifting all ships.
You mean other than 300 years of experience with the free market? Other than the combined research of every economist since Adam Smith? Other than that, how about simple logic: if the US not trading freely with China makes the US better off, why wouldn't California not trading with, say, Massachusetts make California better off? Indeed, if trade didn't make you personally better off, you wouldn't go to work or shop, you would just stay home and make your own clothes.
Many labor laws are very clearly limitations on free trade between workers and employers. Were we "better off" before them, or simply more economically efficient? If your goal is simply the efficient allocation of resources, free trade in a competitive market is unbeatable. It doesn't necessarily follow that the most efficient allocation of resources is the key to making everybody better off, though.
I'm confused - was there an increase in genetic information as a result of this experiment? More generally, has there EVER been an increase in genetic information?
I would be *blown away* if the people who ask these questions could ever provide a meaningful definition of "genetic information" for the people who answer them to work with.
I do have an understanding of the current value system for dollars. And I fully understand that the current system is designed to have one dollar worth one cent after 20 or so years.
Well, actually, it was designed to keep control over price stability and mild but consistent inflation is more of a consequence. A lot of people seem unclear on the reasons for fiat money and a central bank's control of the money supply, so I thought I'd just stick that in, even though I'm not entirely clear on your position on the topic. The GP just seemed like another nutty conspiracy theory rant.
The people who are outraged by the idea that their money isn't "real" seem to think that it's some sort of major conspiracy against the working man when it's just a simple trade off: You can have stable and predictable (or at least, controllable) inflation with fiat money or unstable and potentially dangerous price swings with commodity money. We're just trying to avoid the inevitable fall out that happens whenever the supply of whatever trinket we decide to use as money doesn't grow at the same rate as the rest of the economy.
Definitely. Any nuanced position that requires more than one logical step is fodder for negative advertising. It's harder to explain away a misrepresentation than it is to misrepresent a person in the first place. I remember Wes Clark saying that something was a "Necessary but insufficient condition for war" and thinking, "You're a dead man. That type of reasoning simply will not play in modern politics." Only people who can stay "on message" with a consistent, easy to understand (even if it's obviously logically flawed) message can get the support they need. The minute you modify your message to be more logically or factually correct, it becomes too complex to withstand quote mining and straw men. It's a sad fact of life.
So let me get this straight, it's not okay to say that atheists, as a group, are immoral, but it is okay to say that religious people, as a group, are less intelligent.
Well, you could look into the statistics on prison inmates and whether they identify themselves as theists or atheists, but I think you'd be equally disappointed in the results.
then you have borrowed a state of morality from the Christians that you appear to at least disagree with and in all likelihood despise given the tone of your most.
Nobody else came up with the idea of "Don't kill your neighbor and take his stuff" independently of Christianity? Life must have been miserable everywhere on the planet until very recently. I had no idea. I'll grant you the invention of things like "No graven images of God," but I have a sneaking suspicion that some other cultures may have stumbled upon the idea in your example somewhere along the way.
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I appreciate where you're coming from, but can this also be applied to actions? If I sit on a hill with a sniper rifle, shoot at your head, and then miss, have I done anything wrong? Let's say the bullet whizzes past your head and lands in the ocean. Nobody is harmed. You never even notice that it happened. Should I go to jail for attempted murder, or is the "no harm, no foul" rule still in effect?
I'm not talking about *lying* per se. I agree that there was some intelligence to support his assertions (although he did blatantly change things like "There is evidence that X is happening" to "We are 100% certain of X"). What I'm talking about is the obvious fact that the war was a foregone conclusion before rumbling about WMD even started. Anybody watching the rhetoric leading up to it should have seen that. I remember being shocked at hearing the phrase "Committed to regime change" while the jury was still well out on WMD. Add to that the fact that one WMD weren't found, it was all about "helping the Iraqi people" and always had been.
Probably the most dishonest part of all of it was not spinning intelligence (I won't go so far as to say "lying" because I'm fairly sure that Bush still believed he was right), but how hard they worked to subtly tie Iraq to 9/11 when it had nothing to do with it. Any question to Bush or Cheney during a press conference was always answered with "We will never forget the events of 9/11." It was just like "Remember the Alamo!" over and over again. For some reason, hardly anybody in the media asked the follow up question, "Since we know that Iraq was not at all responsible for 9/11, what's the connection?" Well into the war, and well after we knew for certain that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, about 3/4 of the country still believed that Iraq was responsible for it. In the days of carefully shaped political messages, detailed polling results, and communications consultants, I find it very hard to believe that the Bush administration was unaware of this widespread misconception. As I see it, rather than correcting it, they made it worse and played on it to get support for their war on false pretenses.
Now, I can understand that Iraq is a strategically important part of the world. Our energy security relies on that region, and I would be upset at any President for ignoring it to the detriment of our national security. However, cynically playing on whatever rationale you can make play with the American people rather than just coming out and saying, "We want to install a democratic government in the middle east in order to promote democracy and stability there so we have to worry less about our energy security" is clearly dishonest. I think that Bush believed in WMD, and he believed (rightly) that the Iraqi people were oppressed. But those were very clearly just nice-to-haves and not the real rationale for the war.
Honestly, I wonder if all the people who harp on morality and integrity ever think about morality beyond sexual morality. Caring for the poor and infirm, promoting peace, and generally doing things that make the lives of millions of people markedly better end up taking a back seat to the private lives of people who, like us, often have flawed personal relationships. Given an opportunity to bring about world peace and end hunger and disease at the expense of widespread sexual "immorality," I strongly suspect that a lot of people would opt for disease, famine, and war. It's a sad statement.
So your definition of integrity is trading somebody who commits a serious marital infidelity for somebody who cynically starts a war under false pretenses?
I think that in this case, the answer to that is because it would be against the law to do otherwise. I'm pretty certain that the foundation will have it built into the charter, and I'm also pretty sure that the charter will offer no way of changing that provision without an executive order from Bill himself.
Reporting protests isn't exactly the way to get the rational opposing view across. There were plenty of sensible arguments above and beyond "No blood for oil!" and "He's not my president!" which is about all you get when your only opposition voice is people ranting at protests. The problem is who ends up being given the mic when opposing views are solicited. The sample liberal in frame four is what I was thinking of in this case.
One of the major failings of the media was its inability or unwillingness to point out that it was well understood that Iraq was not a sponsor of 9/11. Remember, we knew this well before the war, and the vast majority of Americans believed otherwise well after the war began. I attribute that in no small part to the media credulously playing the "We will never forget the lessons of 9/11" and "Fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" sound bites without pointing out that those phrases were totally irrelevant to Iraq. Of course, calling people on it would have been Liberal Bias, so hardly anybody spoke up. It's a classic example of compulsive centrist disorder.
If they're being sponsored by a government (e.g. Afghanistan), then you have yourself a war. When you can specify an enemy (not an idea like "terrorism") and objectives to neutralize the enemy, then you can have a war. You can't start an open ended war against a vague notion like "drugs" or "terror," demand a bunch of new powers, fight nobody in particular for years on end, and hope to be successful at doing anything other than expanding your authority. That's all this has always been about.
Seriously. Think about what you just said. The wiretapping that the Bush administration is doing is legal if a warrant is issued. All the Bush administration wants to do is remove the accountability. Can you explain to me how we might have averted 9/11 if the government hadn't had to get a warrant for wiretapping?
Ahhh. I see. They give you the $100 for some sub-$100 purchase and you give them their $100 back modded as a $1 as part of the change. Now $99 of value has disappeared from their wallet, and if you can dupe them into purchasing something worth $1 from you (or getting change for a $1), you can snag the $99 of disappeared value for yourself. From your original post, I was reading:
1) Mod a $100 to turn it into a $1
2) Give the fake $1 to a blind person for something presumably worth $1 (you're now out $99)
3) Buy the fake $1 back for $1 (cash or something else) and get your original hundred back with some extra holes in it.
There's also a difference between (1) Being well off and being indifferent to the suffering of others and (2) Being well of *because* of the suffering of others and being indifferent to that fact. Neither one is particularly great, but one of them is a lot worse.
I would very much like to agree with you on that, but as it stands, the poorly educated and disinterested people you refer to make up a huge percentage of voters and they vote for school board members in the districts where I would send my kids to school. Now, I find it a little creepy that people who can't get their heads around the basics of biology can be elected to positions of authority over nuclear arsenals, but I can live with it as it's not necessarily a direct qualification. I would rather not elect people who believe that the planet is flat and was created last Thursday selecting science books for our next generation of engineers and scientists.
The bottom line here is that the standard of living in the USA has exceeded the standard of living in other countries for some time now, and our ability to justify that increased standard of living has decreased over time. We're at a point where a correction has to be made, and the result of that correction will be large segments of the rest of the world (mainly India and China) "catching up" for a while. Unless Americans somehow figure out how to do something better than the rest of the world again, there necessarily has to be a period of comparative stagnation while other nations begin to eat their fair share of the pie. You correctly point out that it's the economically efficient way for things to be, and that protectionism simply distorts the markets in an attempt to delay the inevitable in the long run. There are other things to consider, however.
Thought experiment: You have a high wage and I have a low wage. Does it make life harder for your wages to stagnate for a few years while I catch up to you, or for us to simply immediately move to the mean of your wage and my wage? We have to remember that there are a lot of ways for that equilibration to happen. There can be a "soft landing" or a "hard landing" or anything in between. It's quite a painful thing to allow workers' wages to float in an internationally competitive market when they have to contend with sticky prices at home. If you drop from $80K to $12K in a year, the fact that you can buy TurboTax for a few dollars less is not going to help when you're dealing with other costs that don't move quite so quickly. Housing prices, for example, simply aren't going to adjust quickly enough to account for the shifts in real income that worldwide wage parity would cause. Even if they did, the number of people whose wealth is largely held in their homes and who may have borrowed against those homes is staggering. Remember, people still have to eat and provide shelter while the secondary effects of increased efficiency are making their way through the economy.
The idea of an economically efficient wonderland where all prices float and there are no barriers to trade only works when there are no sticky prices and everything actually *can* float. Any time a good is incorrectly valued and has to return to its appropriate value, there are going to be secondary effects. If that good happens to be wages for a sizable segment of the population, there's a definite upper limit to how quickly that "snap" can happen without some serious short term (and I'm talking *years* not days) fallout for the rest of the economy. There are clearly some policy decisions to be made that will affect how quickly the net flow of wealth happens, how quickly the playing field levels, and how soon the rising tide can once again begin lifting all ships.
The people who are outraged by the idea that their money isn't "real" seem to think that it's some sort of major conspiracy against the working man when it's just a simple trade off: You can have stable and predictable (or at least, controllable) inflation with fiat money or unstable and potentially dangerous price swings with commodity money. We're just trying to avoid the inevitable fall out that happens whenever the supply of whatever trinket we decide to use as money doesn't grow at the same rate as the rest of the economy.
Definitely. Any nuanced position that requires more than one logical step is fodder for negative advertising. It's harder to explain away a misrepresentation than it is to misrepresent a person in the first place. I remember Wes Clark saying that something was a "Necessary but insufficient condition for war" and thinking, "You're a dead man. That type of reasoning simply will not play in modern politics." Only people who can stay "on message" with a consistent, easy to understand (even if it's obviously logically flawed) message can get the support they need. The minute you modify your message to be more logically or factually correct, it becomes too complex to withstand quote mining and straw men. It's a sad fact of life.