1 : imperial government, authority, or system 2 : the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence
If you don't think forcing another country to obey our laws by violating their national sovereignty through political and military influence isn't imperialism, you're fucking stupid.
Oh goody! Let me guess, we get to define who the criminals are, right? Let's see, we need to exclude:
1) wars of aggression (Vietnam, Lebanon, Phillippines, Iraq, etc) 2) trade wars (Iraq, Cuba, pretty much all of central and south america) 3) covert coup d'etat (Iran, Iraq, pretty much all of central and south america) 4) aiding and abetting known terrorists (the CIA in Iraq, Iran, and pretty much all of central and south america)
And remember, if you so much as allow a single credit card to be stolen from an IP address from within your country, we reserve the right to use any of the above methods to exact justice.
Iraqis and Afghanis have been at war for a long time. Vietnam had been battling the Chinese for centuries. The militia groups have some fancy weapons, but they are too dependent on fuel and other vulnerable resources, and have never been shot at in most cases.
In modern urban warfare, large armies have a disadvantage, especially when they are abroad. The rural areas likely occupied by militias would be mowed over with little fuss. It isn't like Vietnam where you're lost in a jungle without air support, getting ambushed from a vast network of tunnels that the locals have dug over decades.
Militias could fight with low energy guerrilla style surprise attacks, but every time more than three of them marched together, they'd get tagged and wasted pretty quickly. Cut power to the surrounding neighborhood, and they'll get turned in. In most cases, regional SWAT and FBI would have more than enough to take them out. Don't confuse weekend warriors with little aphorisms on their pickup trucks for the mujaheddin.
Turkey has a secular military, not a secular government. And they certainly don't value free access to information since they also recently banned the pro-Kurdish party. We have been helping Turkey kill Kurds for years in exchange for political and military support in the middle east. Just across the border we support Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Another spot of American foreign policy dripping with irony.
The decision appeared to be a setback for the government’s efforts to bring Kurds into the political system. Last month, the government presented a landmark plan calling for the free use of the Kurdish language in the media and in political campaigns, restoring Kurdish names to towns that had been given Turkish ones, and a new committee to fight discrimination.
The Kurdish party, known as the DTP, applauded those efforts but has refused to join the government and other lawmakers in calling for the Kurdish rebels to lay down their arms, a position many analysts believe led to the court’s ruling on Friday.
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground.
Everyone lives or dies by their credit reports. Good credit gets you everything from cheaper insurance rates to security clearances. For some people, it's great. For those who start out in the hole or have been affected by illness or the loss of a spouse or have been defrauded by an insurance company, it's not so great.
You may not know it, but you have no right to compel any credit bureau to produce documentation proving the debt. That's a far more important issue than pretending that the government isn't already illegally wiretapping you or tracking you by your social security number. So, instead of voting for someone or running for office or helping out with a campaign in order to end the true losses of privacy and justice, people are kept busy fighting something as meaningless as a standardized ID.
I have to laugh, because I don't give a flying leap about my credit report.
What are you, a teenager? You need good credit to buy a house, a car, to apply for a job, to get loans for higher education, and even for security clearances.
Not all of us are that stupid to get ourselves buried in debt, and those that did have no one to blame but themselves... certainly not the "gummint."
Who convinced you that you weren't part of the government?
It's the same reason militia groups train in the woods. They like to pretend that they could defend themselves against the United States Armed Forces. It's simply a distraction against the things that really protect freedom, like voting, community organizations, or being an active citizen in the Athenian sense.
The standing army is used for foreign coup d'etats instead of civil wars on home soil. They learned a long time ago that giving you the "choice" of entertainment, fast food joints, cars, and clothes is far more effective distraction from participatory democracy than direct government violence.
In the fantasized bleak future, the government wins because they have a national ID card. In reality, you are already owned by your debt. You either plead fealty to the system in exchange for access to material goods, and live and die by your credit report, or you suffer the consequences.
You made the assumption that the US government would allow such a move. We have several client states that would revolt if we provided democratizing influences like free access to information. These states include: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey...
The US Government would now allow such a move against China either, since they are our most lucrative trading partner, and damn close to becoming more than that. Money matters to us a hell of a lot more than freedom.
Yeah, until you realize you have to listen to the rustling of fat, phlegm, and asthmatic breathing while you're doing it. And then the unfortunate incident when you hear, "Son! What on earth are you doing to that controller with your pants down?"
I've never heard of that. Did you mean Windows Phone 7 Series Mobile R2 SP3 Home Ultimate Starter Business Premium Platinum Live Arcade Elite Upgrade Office Enterprise Complete Upgrade Edition?
Not quite. My point is that if you can read the following:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
and you can find justification for the CIA, despite the fact that it later states
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
then certainly under welfare - being health, happiness, and prosperity - you can find support for public health care.
Our nation is already bankrupt, this bill now solidifies it.
CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that enacting both pieces of legislation—H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal—would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010–2019 period as result of changes in direct spending and revenues. That figure comprises $124 billion in net reductions deriving from the health care and revenue provisions and $19 billion in net reductions deriving from the education provisions. CBO has not completed an estimate of the potential impact of the legislation on discretionary spending, which would be subject to future appropriation action.
You'd also be hard pressed to find him supporting secret police that are unaccountable to the Congress, or any dime spent that wasn't publicly accounted for, or support for any standing armies. He also didn't support centralized banking and passed laws to try and destroy what he called the "pseudo aristocracy."
I'll gladly trade health care reform for a total dismantling of the military industrial complex and the Federal Reserve. Any takers?
If you believe that medical insurance has been deregulated, then you're an idiot
The kind of idiot that compares vets to doctors? Or health programs for humans that resuscitate at all costs, versus another where spending more than $500 usually means you put the animal down?
Let me help you out. You seem to be in want of the curiosity to discover data, but if you subscribe to the Austrian School of I Don't Believe In Economics, it's entirely expected.
Hawaii has near universal, government mandated health care. They've had it for forty years, and according to the New York Times:
But perhaps the most intriguing lesson from Hawaii has to do with costs. This is a state where regular milk sells for $8 a gallon, gasoline costs $3.60 a gallon and the median price of a home in 2008 was $624,000 — the second-highest in the nation. Despite this, Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are nearly tied with North Dakota for the lowest in the country, and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the nation’s lowest.
Hawaii residents live longer than people in the rest of the country, recent surveys have shown, and the state’s health care system may be one reason. In one example, Hawaii has the nation’s highest incidence of breast cancer but the lowest death rate from the disease.
The answer, I believe, is incentive. If budgets are the limiting factor, the incentive is to keep patients healthy. If there is no limiting factor, then the incentive is to raise prices until the lower income clients are filtered out, and dumped on to public services at very high costs. Insurance companies have a single goal of externalizing high cost patients, which are the poor, the chronically ill, and those who have lost their jobs. In a nutshell, the patients who need health care the most.
If the bill forces them to keep everyone on their rolls, it will drive costs down. No one competes for high cost clients. But, through the haze and ignorance of your dogmatic belief in the fairytale "market," I doubt this thought would ever cross your mind.
That's not even close to the "main" way they maximize profits.
Citation? Seems like, according to multiple studies including this one, deregulation and concentration of monopoly powers have lead to skyrocketing profits. Profits up 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while US wages are only up 30%. Premiums have risen 120%.
If we want affordable medical care, the examples of how to do that are right in front of us: veterinary care and LASIK show exactly what happens when providers have to compete.
Yes, a single eye procedure and vet care can completely model the economics of total human health services.
When are you signing up for Cat Cross Doggie Shield? Because I think it's about time we put you down.
It's not my fault that if I injure myself others feel compelled to help me. If I think I can go it alone, who does it hurt?
When you're unconscious after a car wreck, there's no way to know if you want to live or die. So, as a society that values life - at least American life - you are resuscitated at all costs.
I don't want free health care. Now, I have to pay for it. That doesn't seem like a good situation to me.
Let me give you a piece of advice I got while protesting the Iraq war, which is about to roll over the trillion dollar price tag:
Or the CIA. Or the air force. Or the public education system. Or funding nuclear power plants. Or the FDA, FCC, CDC, OSHA, EPA, FBI, NSA, and believe me, I could go on.
The founding fathers believed only landowning white men should have rights. The world is quite a different place. We have germ theory, evolutionary theory, cars, planes, electricity, running water, and a toilet that is more than a hole in the ground. And women and non-whites and non-landowners can vote.
The real genius of the Constitution is that they gave us the power to change it. So, right after you get all of the above in the Constitution, you're welcome to start bitching. Otherwise, it's just empty rhetorical fluff that stops rational discussion.
One thing many of the founding fathers had was an affinity for a "natural" aristocracy, in other words, smart people; and a hatred of the aristocracy of birthright, in other words, wealthy people. In fact, some of them believed in awarding good education through competition and paying for it with public funds, passed laws ending entails and primogeniture, and here's a couple quotes that will really blow your mind:
"Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784.
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785.
Oh no! One of our founders was a socialist marxist pinko commie fascist! Run for your lives, I mean, money!
We don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics reflecting what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well known liberal bias.
jcr makes sweeping generalizations to appeal to libertarians, and then retreats without clarifying any points or providing evidence to support his position.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but every nation with a record like this which has also covertly overthrown dozens of governments and also has a history of ignoring international law and suppressing international opinion absolutely qualifies as an imperial power. Forcing sovereign nations to capitulate to giving up sovereignty through financial pressure falls well within the bounds of imperial behavior.
Embracing ignorance, or in less polite terms, being fucking stupid, cannot change reality.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imperialism
Main Entry: imperialism
Function: noun
Date: 1800
1 : imperial government, authority, or system
2 : the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas; broadly : the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence
If you don't think forcing another country to obey our laws by violating their national sovereignty through political and military influence isn't imperialism, you're fucking stupid.
Oh goody! Let me guess, we get to define who the criminals are, right? Let's see, we need to exclude:
1) wars of aggression (Vietnam, Lebanon, Phillippines, Iraq, etc)
2) trade wars (Iraq, Cuba, pretty much all of central and south america)
3) covert coup d'etat (Iran, Iraq, pretty much all of central and south america)
4) aiding and abetting known terrorists (the CIA in Iraq, Iran, and pretty much all of central and south america)
And remember, if you so much as allow a single credit card to be stolen from an IP address from within your country, we reserve the right to use any of the above methods to exact justice.
Iraqis and Afghanis have been at war for a long time. Vietnam had been battling the Chinese for centuries. The militia groups have some fancy weapons, but they are too dependent on fuel and other vulnerable resources, and have never been shot at in most cases.
In modern urban warfare, large armies have a disadvantage, especially when they are abroad. The rural areas likely occupied by militias would be mowed over with little fuss. It isn't like Vietnam where you're lost in a jungle without air support, getting ambushed from a vast network of tunnels that the locals have dug over decades.
Militias could fight with low energy guerrilla style surprise attacks, but every time more than three of them marched together, they'd get tagged and wasted pretty quickly. Cut power to the surrounding neighborhood, and they'll get turned in. In most cases, regional SWAT and FBI would have more than enough to take them out. Don't confuse weekend warriors with little aphorisms on their pickup trucks for the mujaheddin.
Turkey has a secular military, not a secular government. And they certainly don't value free access to information since they also recently banned the pro-Kurdish party. We have been helping Turkey kill Kurds for years in exchange for political and military support in the middle east. Just across the border we support Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Another spot of American foreign policy dripping with irony.
The decision appeared to be a setback for the government’s efforts to bring Kurds into the political system. Last month, the government presented a landmark plan calling for the free use of the Kurdish language in the media and in political campaigns, restoring Kurdish names to towns that had been given Turkish ones, and a new committee to fight discrimination.
The Kurdish party, known as the DTP, applauded those efforts but has refused to join the government and other lawmakers in calling for the Kurdish rebels to lay down their arms, a position many analysts believe led to the court’s ruling on Friday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/europe/12istanbul.html
Indeed.
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/liberals_are_useless_20091206/
Everyone lives or dies by their credit reports. Good credit gets you everything from cheaper insurance rates to security clearances. For some people, it's great. For those who start out in the hole or have been affected by illness or the loss of a spouse or have been defrauded by an insurance company, it's not so great.
You may not know it, but you have no right to compel any credit bureau to produce documentation proving the debt. That's a far more important issue than pretending that the government isn't already illegally wiretapping you or tracking you by your social security number. So, instead of voting for someone or running for office or helping out with a campaign in order to end the true losses of privacy and justice, people are kept busy fighting something as meaningless as a standardized ID.
I have to laugh, because I don't give a flying leap about my credit report.
What are you, a teenager? You need good credit to buy a house, a car, to apply for a job, to get loans for higher education, and even for security clearances.
Not all of us are that stupid to get ourselves buried in debt, and those that did have no one to blame but themselves... certainly not the "gummint."
Who convinced you that you weren't part of the government?
It's the same reason militia groups train in the woods. They like to pretend that they could defend themselves against the United States Armed Forces. It's simply a distraction against the things that really protect freedom, like voting, community organizations, or being an active citizen in the Athenian sense.
The standing army is used for foreign coup d'etats instead of civil wars on home soil. They learned a long time ago that giving you the "choice" of entertainment, fast food joints, cars, and clothes is far more effective distraction from participatory democracy than direct government violence.
In the fantasized bleak future, the government wins because they have a national ID card. In reality, you are already owned by your debt. You either plead fealty to the system in exchange for access to material goods, and live and die by your credit report, or you suffer the consequences.
You made the assumption that the US government would allow such a move. We have several client states that would revolt if we provided democratizing influences like free access to information. These states include: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey...
The US Government would now allow such a move against China either, since they are our most lucrative trading partner, and damn close to becoming more than that. Money matters to us a hell of a lot more than freedom.
Yeah, until you realize you have to listen to the rustling of fat, phlegm, and asthmatic breathing while you're doing it. And then the unfortunate incident when you hear, "Son! What on earth are you doing to that controller with your pants down?"
I've never heard of that. Did you mean Windows Phone 7 Series Mobile R2 SP3 Home Ultimate Starter Business Premium Platinum Live Arcade Elite Upgrade Office Enterprise Complete Upgrade Edition?
What is the sound of no thoughts happening?
Not quite. My point is that if you can read the following:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
and you can find justification for the CIA, despite the fact that it later states
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
then certainly under welfare - being health, happiness, and prosperity - you can find support for public health care.
Our nation is already bankrupt, this bill now solidifies it.
CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that enacting both pieces of legislation—H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal—would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010–2019 period as result of changes in direct spending and revenues. That figure comprises $124 billion in net reductions deriving from the health care and revenue provisions and $19 billion in net reductions deriving from the education provisions. CBO has not completed an estimate of the potential impact of the legislation on discretionary spending, which would be subject to future appropriation action.
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/
Too afraid to say shit? How'd you make it outside the grade school firewall?
Hi-oh! Zing! Pow!
You'd also be hard pressed to find him supporting secret police that are unaccountable to the Congress, or any dime spent that wasn't publicly accounted for, or support for any standing armies. He also didn't support centralized banking and passed laws to try and destroy what he called the "pseudo aristocracy."
I'll gladly trade health care reform for a total dismantling of the military industrial complex and the Federal Reserve. Any takers?
If you believe that medical insurance has been deregulated, then you're an idiot
The kind of idiot that compares vets to doctors? Or health programs for humans that resuscitate at all costs, versus another where spending more than $500 usually means you put the animal down?
Let me help you out. You seem to be in want of the curiosity to discover data, but if you subscribe to the Austrian School of I Don't Believe In Economics, it's entirely expected.
Hawaii has near universal, government mandated health care. They've had it for forty years, and according to the New York Times:
But perhaps the most intriguing lesson from Hawaii has to do with costs. This is a state where regular milk sells for $8 a gallon, gasoline costs $3.60 a gallon and the median price of a home in 2008 was $624,000 — the second-highest in the nation. Despite this, Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are nearly tied with North Dakota for the lowest in the country, and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the nation’s lowest.
Hawaii residents live longer than people in the rest of the country, recent surveys have shown, and the state’s health care system may be one reason. In one example, Hawaii has the nation’s highest incidence of breast cancer but the lowest death rate from the disease.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/health/policy/17hawaii.html
The answer, I believe, is incentive. If budgets are the limiting factor, the incentive is to keep patients healthy. If there is no limiting factor, then the incentive is to raise prices until the lower income clients are filtered out, and dumped on to public services at very high costs. Insurance companies have a single goal of externalizing high cost patients, which are the poor, the chronically ill, and those who have lost their jobs. In a nutshell, the patients who need health care the most.
If the bill forces them to keep everyone on their rolls, it will drive costs down. No one competes for high cost clients. But, through the haze and ignorance of your dogmatic belief in the fairytale "market," I doubt this thought would ever cross your mind.
Yahoo news reporting the new bill will save billions of dollars.
That's according to the preliminary findings of the Congressional Budget Office. Which was an okay source when it was reporting that the old bill would be more expensive.
Again, Fox can't seem to bear the weight of the truth.
That's not even close to the "main" way they maximize profits.
Citation? Seems like, according to multiple studies including this one, deregulation and concentration of monopoly powers have lead to skyrocketing profits. Profits up 428 percent from 2000 to 2007, while US wages are only up 30%. Premiums have risen 120%.
If we want affordable medical care, the examples of how to do that are right in front of us: veterinary care and LASIK show exactly what happens when providers have to compete.
Yes, a single eye procedure and vet care can completely model the economics of total human health services.
When are you signing up for Cat Cross Doggie Shield? Because I think it's about time we put you down.
It's not my fault that if I injure myself others feel compelled to help me. If I think I can go it alone, who does it hurt?
When you're unconscious after a car wreck, there's no way to know if you want to live or die. So, as a society that values life - at least American life - you are resuscitated at all costs.
I don't want free health care. Now, I have to pay for it. That doesn't seem like a good situation to me.
Let me give you a piece of advice I got while protesting the Iraq war, which is about to roll over the trillion dollar price tag:
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT! FREEDOM AIN'T FREE!
Or the CIA. Or the air force. Or the public education system. Or funding nuclear power plants. Or the FDA, FCC, CDC, OSHA, EPA, FBI, NSA, and believe me, I could go on.
The founding fathers believed only landowning white men should have rights. The world is quite a different place. We have germ theory, evolutionary theory, cars, planes, electricity, running water, and a toilet that is more than a hole in the ground. And women and non-whites and non-landowners can vote.
The real genius of the Constitution is that they gave us the power to change it. So, right after you get all of the above in the Constitution, you're welcome to start bitching. Otherwise, it's just empty rhetorical fluff that stops rational discussion.
One thing many of the founding fathers had was an affinity for a "natural" aristocracy, in other words, smart people; and a hatred of the aristocracy of birthright, in other words, wealthy people. In fact, some of them believed in awarding good education through competition and paying for it with public funds, passed laws ending entails and primogeniture, and here's a couple quotes that will really blow your mind:
"Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784.
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." -Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785.
Oh no! One of our founders was a socialist marxist pinko commie fascist! Run for your lives, I mean, money!
Selfishness is patriotism. Ignorance is morality. Jesus was a millionaire.
Welcome to the new Republican party!
We don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics reflecting what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well known liberal bias.
jcr makes sweeping generalizations to appeal to libertarians, and then retreats without clarifying any points or providing evidence to support his position.
-cop