Well lets see. One the one hand we have your opinion. On the other we have the historical record of the regimes who invented, promoted and championed fascism. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, lots of luv from Lenin and Stalin in their day. Even some luv from FDR, who saw much to be emulated in it.
> Fascism is simply private business that is controlled by the government.
You couldn't be more wrong. Go read some history and get back to me. I'd really suggest the book I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_. It's very well footnoted so even if you can't bring yourself to accept his conclusions just on the strength of his arguments, you will have plenty of primary sources lined up for you to go looking for... and then have to face up to learning something you always thought to be Truth just ain't so, Fascism was a philosophy of the leftist mind, fully at home in the company of Progressives, Socialists, modern (not classical) Liberals and even Communists who all saw things to like in fascist thought. Some simply thought it a useful phase on the jourrney to the perfect socialist utopia, but all admired, if nothing else, its effectiveness at sweeping away classical liberalism which they all loathed.
And another one that will probably rock your reality. The Nazis were not just Fascists, they were Socialists, like their name implies. They just weren't International Socialists like the Russians. Look up the Nazi Party platform (the previous three words into Google will work) and tell me they weren't Socialists. Yes, from their first published platform it was obvious they were racists and Nationalists, but it also reveals why they named themselves National Socialists.
> So, by your logic, since Republicans are endorsed by several KKK grand dragons, they must all be racists?
Oh really? I live in Lousiana. We had the ill fortune, due to a trick of the whacky primary system we had at the time, to end up with David Duke vs Edwin (charged but not convicted then, now serving time in Federal Prison) Edwards. The Republican party, both in the state and the national party, repudicated Duke and even put out bumper stickers saying "This time, vote for the Crook". In other words, the Party Lincoln built had and has no place for dipshit Klansmen[1]. If you would recall some history, the Solid South was solidly Democratic during the civil rights era. All those govt goons with firehoses, those guys were lifelong Democrats. It was only when that stuff finally died out that the Republicans have finally rose to ascendence in the South. But your team has been writing the news and the official histories, probably since before you were born, so you might not even realize how ignorant you come off with that tired old Republican == Racist crap.
On the other hand I didn't see the Obama campaign returning the contributions from Soros, etc. or repudiating his dozens of other more personal and long term Communist Party associations.
[1] And just remember, most Klansmen these days tend to be Nazis. Which is just more evidence they are still playing on your team, not mine. Hilter, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, you fascists do have such 'colorful' heros.
Sorry, I forgot and didn't get around to replying to the rest of your post.....
> I think you consider the unions a bugaboo.
Yup. But only under certain conditions. The rise of organized labor was a reaction to real problems, too bad it happened right in time to be almost totally captured by International Communism with organized crime picking up the scraps.
My major objection comes when the government gets involved and grants the union a monopoly on labor once a site votes in the union. Can't see how that isn't an uncompensated taking. Reducing management's decision to pay up or close the worksite seems unfair. Yes workers have the right to all walk out of a job they think is treating them unfairly. But management should have the right to let em go if they think the expense of recruiting and training a whole new labor force is less expensive than the union's demands. Yes management might be wrong in that calculation. But the union could also have been wrong in evaluating the worth of it's labor. Both sides should have the right to be wrong because it is the most basic liberty all others depend upon.
And yes, while I think the UAW with their insane work rules, gold plated pensions and such were major contributing factors management stupidity should not be ignored. Which is why they should have been allowed to go bankrupt and let the assets be bought up by people who would hopefully put those assets to more productive uses. Thus both labor, management and the shareholders would have lost and the important economic signal that would have sent would have been a good thing.
> The smaller cars that were produced by Honda and Toyota faced labor costs very close to that of American car companies.
That is simply wrong. Show me one auto bearing a foreign name badge built in a union state at union wages? Yes those folks working in the southern US make pretty good wages but it often less than half of the total compensation the unionized plants pay. Remember that the final blow to Detroit was the accumulated pensions owned to the unions on the automakers balance sheets.
> Obama isn't a fool. He knows what the consequences will be.
There is much merit in what you say but I still hold out to one hope. Overreach. Because Obama is fool and almost zero experience he might not listen to wiser heads in his Party (and I'm not talking about the Democrats). Remember that with Specter's coming out Democrats own Washington. Yes the Joker's eventual arrival (if that ain't the Universe having a bit of fun with us what is!) their rule will be total, but with Snowe and/or Collins available to 'be bipartisan' when needed they already have effective control. And come the next elections if the economy is still in the crapper Obama just might be Carter 2.0. Assuming the Republicans can find A) find a leader and B) nominate him/her instead of passing them over for another McCain/Dole/loser.
I think we both agree that barring Obama having an epiphany and suddenly becoming a centrist free market guy the economy ain't getting better. So it is only a question of how bad it gets and will there be enough MSM types still working at places still in business to blow a smokescreen for his sorry ass to hide behind.
> Because communism is dead, and has been for a long, long time. I am scared of fascism, which > is far different from Communism, and I think you need to learn what the difference is.
Not at all, it it you who needs to learn the true nature of Fascism. Go read Jonah Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_ for a start. Fasism, back when it was real movements and not just a word meaning "things/people Democrats don't like." was always an allied movement of Progressive/Liberal/Socialist/etc politics. Fascism was an explicit rejection of classical liberalism and conventional religion in favor of a totalitarian all powerful State (and of course Maximum Leader) that was to be worshiped as a God. And Communism is far from dead, we have one in the White House and at least dozens serving in Congress.
Here are a few of my rules:
1. If you have ever hugged Fidel (and not repented your wickedness) you are a Communist. Just that one test gets you more than a dozen current sitting members of Congress.
2. William Ayers is a Communist. If the available evidence (friend of Chavez, his writings, etc) somehow doesn't convince, there is always his own statement that yes he is a (but only a small c, like that absolves him of anything) communist.
3. Anyone who can earn the endorsement of multiple known Communists (Ayers, Wright, Soros, etc) is almost certainly a Communist. It's just how they roll. And beginning one's political career with a fundraiser thrown in the home of a admitted violent revolutionary Communist is designed to send a signal to other fellow travellers. Add in the other factors and it would be foolish to extend Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.
> With all the loopholes, our effective tax rate is around 10% of GDP.
You are quite mad, you do know that don't you. The government (all levels) in 2008 accounted for about 5 1/2 Trillion out a total gross domestic product (that included that government spending as output) of 14 trillion and change. And those figures were BEFORE the recession lowered GDP and Porkulus and the socialism to come increased the government. Before Obama is done we will be lucky to only have half of GDP feeding the government monster.
>..you can find dozens of them on the wiki page for 'laffer curve.'
Yup, quite mad. Anyone who uses Wikipedia for any remotely political topic is mad by definition. Even though that page isn't too horrible, as Wikipedia pages go... i.e it was only moderatetly biased against (as opposed to frothing hatred) the topic of the entry, the general notion of trusting Wikipedia on any political matter where one doesn't ALREADY know enough to know if the page has been hijacked by the freak show is just daft.
Yes. Better question is why aren't you? Or did you think the failure of the Soviet Union settled everything? It should have, but Communism is a religion and no number of failures will convince the true believers that their religion is false. Nope, the SOviets failed because they didn't 'do it right.' whatever the hell that means. But at any rate, Communism is still alive (although mutating wildly) in China. Communism is still alive and well in our own hemisphere. And most importantly, Communism is still alive and well here in the USA. And just like Vietnam and Iraq's most important battles were fought in Washington DC's halls of power, the NY media and the academy, the Cold War rages on in the same places and the decisive battle has yet to happen.
> When the controllers of the means of production fail to keep the means of production working properly, > smart people look to take over the means of production.
Interesting notion. The UAW was the biggest contributor to the failure of the US auto industry. By raising labor costs to the point only huge luxury cars could earn a profit. So now the POTUS has reached into the market and seized two automakers and awarded them to the unions who created the problem but contributed heavily to his campaign. When a union gets majority ownership (and not by buying it, but by seizing it by virtue of political power) of their workplace what other term you you prefer we use to describe it other than "the workers seizing the means of production." Which has been the Communist rallying cry since the perverted notion began.
But we do have a system to deal with the controllers of the means of production failing. It used to be called bankruptcy court. But the UAW would lose bigtime so it wasn't considered a (politically) viable option.
> Want to be a Cayman corporation? Then move your ass to the Cayman Islands, along with your entire family.
You might yourself suprised by the results if you yell that loudly enough. If I were the CEO of generic mega corp I might just ask myself why not? The Caymen Islands are nice and if they get crowded just go in with a few fellow CEOs, buy out some small country and rename it Galt's Gulch.
They are rich, remember? Flying back to NY every month or so to catch the Opera or whatnot isn't a problem. Just buy a 747 and offer cheap rides for the midlevel staffers you relocated and life would be good and mostly tax free. What you guys forget is the price to remain here in the US must be kept below the price of moving or people will just vote with their feet. Lose a quarter of the filthy rich and our top heavy 'soak the rich' taxation model falls apart.
> It hasn't seemed to work too well for the last several rounds of tax cuts.
Oh? Go look at the revenue figures, they disagree. Every time tax rates get cut revenue rises. Every time, The problem is that spending has gone up faster, thus deficits.
> Certainly there is a point where lowering taxes reduces total revenue.
Yes, that is the basic logic of the Laffer Curve. However our taxes are so punishingly high we could cut them a lot before getting near the good side of the curve. The logic of the Laffer Curve is so compelling that it is remarkable that we haven't made a serious effort to get on the good side of it. I mean it should be self evident that there exists a point on the tax curve on the flip side of the Curve where the government would bring in the exact same revenue yet the economy would be much larger than now, and where if new revenue were needed a tax increase would actually bring in additional revenue as expected.
However Mr. Obama gave away the game back in the debates didn't he. He, being the King of the Idiots and one of the few dumb enough to speak the truth on the matter, actually said he favors raising the capital gains tax in the full knowledge that it will decrease revenue but increase some nebulous commie notion of 'fairness.' Of course the media have taken pains to put that mistake down the memory hole.
No, thank them. Obama, being a fool, is about to learn why those loopholes exist. We put them in to keep some of the multinationals headquartered here in the US in practice by allowing them to headquarter on paper somewhere else and we all agreed to ignore the oddities that followed from that. Forced to actually choose many will opt to close up the skyscraper here and open one up in a more business friendly climate. Then profits from US operations will flow OUT instead of overseas profits flowing IN. I'm failing to see how the US wins.
This trend is going to be accelerated by the overthrow of the rule of law implied in the auto bailouts, etc. When the workers are running around seizing the means of production smart people start looking to get out while they can.
> The minute you try to "democratize" is, politicians and PR types will try to game the system...
Too late, the politicians and PR types are already gaming the system.
Do I think stories in newspapers should be blindly moderated like slashdot comments? Oh hell no. But getting some outside feedback into the editorial loop certainly can't hurt a system to obviously broken. So yes, if the editors see a very negative reaction to a story they should take a look at WHY teh readers are saying ixnay on it, take a look into their complaint and see if they have a point. There should be a human editor in the loop though, if nothing else to stop the Colbert troll army, the 4chan troll army, etc.
Which of course brings me back to something I have said many times on many forums including this one. This is all moot because for the most part human editors NO LONGER EXIST. We all have this mental picture of the grizzled old editor ruthlessly marking up the poor reporter's copy and throwing it back to him for a rewrite. But they went out during the rounds of endless belt tightening in the MSM over the past decades. Look at the NYT, CNN, any major news website. Don't look at their blogs, look only at the real news copy. Bet you find a groaner spelling or grammer error within ten minutes even if you read at a below average speed. And if you read an article in a area where you know poo from shinola you will find a factual error in almost every story these days. And everyone interviewed will say at least one of their quotes got mangled between their mouth and the final copy. So much for the fresh faced right out college interns doing fact checking and following up on double checking the quotes. All that is gone. The average newspaper or TV network journalism is about as accurate as the better blogs. And increasingly the blogs are doing a better job because the blogs will mercilessly fact check each other.
If somebody could get a real old fashioned news organization back in the game I can't help but believe there is enough pent up demand for real journalism that it would find a revenue stream somehow. Ya know, journalism: where you report who did what, where and why they did it. Reported in depth, with extensive quotes and background and every quote and fact checked with a high enough accuracy rate to quickly gain a reputation as the fracking Voice of God. Then leave the opinions and analysis to the talking heads on cable news shows and blogs.
> It makes it trivial to find someone whose opinion supports your position...
Exactly. Anybody with a functioning brain could figure this one out but like so many myths of the left it goes unchallenged. And when challenged the challenger is either thrown down the memory hole (if small, as in watch this post go -1) or shouted down violently in the hope they learn to never question authority[1] again. Or just shouted down to drown them out. And even if the rebuttal is total and absolute the politically correct version of history simply continues.
Glass Steagall was intended to prevent the sort of diversified banking, brokerage and insurance financial monsters that proved best able to survive this fiasco. Lehman Brothers, the pure brokerage play, is dead. Bear Sterns and Merril Lynch, again pure brokerages, are absorbed and gone. AIG, a pure play insurance outfit is now a zombie government semi-entity.
But we must blame someone, anyone, other than the real villians of this story. Freddie, Fanny, Congress (mostly Democrats but also fair share of Republicans who were more than willing to go along including at one notable point Pres. Bush himself) and to a small but notable extent Obama's legal work for ACORN. By 'encouraging' (quotas) lenders to make loans they KNEW would almost certainly go bad forced[2] them to do yet more terrible things to try to paper over the problem and spread the losses out, only delaying the diaster, making it bigger and infecting so much more of the economy of the entire world.
All we hear is how this was 'a failure of regulation' and thus the solution is yet more regulation. Nope. It was a failure of policy. The regulators had more than enough authority and did nothing because the banks were doing exactly what the government wanted them to be doing. A failure caused by government being too involved in 'private' finance. I put private in scare quotes because for the most part it already didn't exist and won't at all once Obama gets done. Almost no home mortagage has really been private in decades, almost all either actually go through Freddie/Fannie or at least are 'conforming' paper, meaning they meet the requirements set by Freddie/Fannie. Only the very rich got to use the actual private sector banking system to buy a home. Almost every home built in the last few decades has been built to FHA specs and recomendations, if by nothing else but osmossis. Congress set actual percentage quotas on how many loans would go to which politically preferred groups, including (in dense weasel words of course) how many had to be loans almost certain to go bad.
[1] Remember Citizen, "Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism." But only when attacking a Republican administration. Attacking the Most Holy One is treason at best and probably even worse: Racism. Racism, the crime with no defense, no firm guideline to know when one has committed it and the only punishment is banishment from all polite society.
[2] Not forced much. After all most of the people making the decisons were quite happy to squander the shareholder funds in theor trust to be seen as 'enlightened' by primitive socialist savages. Savages in the sense that they can see all the wonders of civilization, envy, and fear it, but couldn't create much of anything if their lives depended on it. After all, far too many banking/fund managers/etc executives are young college educated socialists themselves.
> Don't support corporate radio any longer - listen to X1FM, raw and uncut internet radio. Go to x1fmradio.com for more in
Don't know if you are being paid to spam for them or you are just an idiot. Hard to tell sometimes.
1. It's as over compressed as the worst "Hundred Thousand Watt Blowtorch" FM station. Yuck!
2. Don't support corporate radio... by going to a corporate radio site. Oh hell yea. Guess you never bothered to click on their about us link where they explain about their years of hard work becoming one of the "leading radio corporations in the Industry" their eight year association with Clear Channel Radio (aren't they the ones the kostards really HATE?) and their plans to "develop our accumulated radio knowledge in today's new digital broadband world."
It's fun watching hipsters blather on about "Alternative" music, films, etc being spoon fed to them by the exact same corporations and marketing geniuses. Even funnier is that as soon as one of these 'alternative' things goes mainstream you idiots declare it a 'sellout' and move on to the next shiny corporate droppings not realizing this is exactly what the corporation wants. When they find one of their low grade offerings somehow has mass appeal the last thing they want is the hipsters to keep glomming on it and scaring the mass market away.
> I would recommend actually reading about history...
I'm aware they had a brief moment where they ALMOST but not quite made it, but it passed before they could defang the worst parts of Islam and sunk back into barbarism. History would have been quite different had things went just a little differently, they could have recivilized dark/middle ages Europe, made the great voyages of discovery, discovered the scientific method, etc. but it didn't work out that way. Interesting possibilities for alternative history novels but here on our timeline they didn't make it.
>..both Turkey and Iran are good and tolerant people..
Ok, you picked the same two I'd have taken if pressed to argue the other side. But both are very weak cases. In Turkey almost everything has gone right from our POV, they had a strong/popular leader who deeply implanted a tradition of a secular representive government yet no serious person would put their odds of tossing all that in the next decade for Sharia at less than one in three, most would probably give it even odds. Iran is even weaker. For all this blather (mostly from people who haven't been there anymore than thee or me) that the people of Iran are tolerant pro western folk they sure have a wierd way of showing it. If the majority really were like that they should have found a way to get a government that reflects their views, or at least forced the mad mullahs to moderate a wee bit. Sounds like 'good Germans' to me.
> So I doubt any country, even the US would fullfil your requirements.
Why? We haven't ever came close to a religious state. At the Federal level, in the early days several States were. And When was the last time we stoned a homosexual? If the nefarious Religious Right is really running things (well at least until our Saviour returned to redeem us on Jan 20) you should be able to point to a few cases where the evil government strung em up a few queers.
> What we can say is that Wilson had irrifutable proof that some of the evidence being used by > the administration to justify the war was false. At the time he was trying to go public with > it, the Bush administration went out of its way to discredit him and make his, and his wife's > life hell.
That is the standard version the media tell, the only problem is it is utterly and provably false in almost every detail.
Problem 1: Joe Wilson was NOT tasked to Nigeria by Cheney as he likes to imply. We now know as undisputed fact that he was suggested by his wife to some midlevel CIA folks. What isn't quite as clear but fairly well documented is that his mission was part of a skunkworks project in the CIA by old ex Clinton hangers on to undermine the Iraq effort for reasons many, murky and likely to never be completely understood.
But combined with other CIA actions at the time a good argument can be assembled that their actions were an attempt at regime change in their own country. Reasonable people can dispute whether the CIA should/actually can undermine foreign governments but I would hope we can agree that secret programs to bring down their own government is intolerable. If we didn't live in bizarro world an blue ribbon commission would have been established to get to the botttom of it and sack anyone remotely responsible or knowledgeable yet silent on any such scheme.
Problem 2: Joe Wilson's report did NOT harm the administration position re: Saddam and WMD, instead it strengthened them. Wilson reported that Niger refused to sell Yellowcake to Saddam's agents. Wilson and the media used that to shout that "Saddam did not buy any Uranium, Bush Lied Kids Died!" But of course some of paid attention is school and learned to read. That infamous British intelligence report said the same thing, that Saddam had TRIED to buy uranium." Now why does one TRY to buy uranium? Anyone? Bueller?
Problem 3: Bush and his evil minions went after Wilson personally, even outing his wife the super secret agent.
> What's the difference between Cuba locking people up and Guantanamo?
Idiot.
Lets start with the big one. Castro locks up meek little librarians for the crime of criticising him. The people in Gitmo are people we took on the battlefield bearing arms against us plus a few we took in raids. We processed out the ones who weren't considered high risk, that is if we could find a country willing to take them. We in fact were too generous in turning people loose since we have caught several former inmates again trying to kill our forces. Despite Obama's lofty words now that he is POTUS he is finding it just as hard to figure out what the hell to do with the inmates.
> > Furthermore they aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions so we would have been perfectly within the laws of war to have simply executed them.
> Sounds like tinpot dictator logic to me. It's always possible to construct a convenient legal fiction to justify your actions.
Not at all. The Geneva Conventions are a treaty, only applicable (by design) to soldiers fighting under the flag of a co-signatory nation state. It is the incentive of gaining it's protection for one's own forces that motivates... shall we say less moraly developed... nations to sign on and undertake the expense of providing the required facilities to enemy POWs. Or do you think Hitler signed on (and in the main honored them) because he was such a great humanitarian? No, he saw two advantages, one was the advantage gained by his soldiers knowing that if captured they would be treated well and second was having the allied forces knowing he was honoring the Conventions meant they would be willing to surrender when in a hopeless situation instead of fighting like cornered rats, these outweighed the expense of operating his POW camps. This was proven out in the Pacific theater where it quickly became clear to both sides that no quarter (we would take prisioners if offered but the Japanese would usually fight to the finish) was to be expected. It made a real difference. Remember that the GC was intended to regulate traditional war between conscript armies fighting traditional battles. The ideas it encodes don't apply well to non-state actors hiding amongst civilian populations.
Providing GC coverage for people who clearly are not covered and not themselves obeying it's restrictions removes all incentive for nations to remain in the Geneva Conventions. In other words people like you who have reimagined the Geneva Conventions are going to cause a lot MORE pain and suffering in the future.
> I'm not sure why you think that their birth rates mean that their society is going to die.
History doesn't exactly repeat itself but it does rhyme and you have no choice but to dance to the beat. Lower the birth rate below replacement and problems will come your way. But you are right that all other things being equal survival is still possible in such a scenario. Hell, if it were a slow enough decline it might even be a positive thing. But there is a rate below which no civilization has recovered. Most of Europe is below that line and it is worse that it first appears. Most European cities have slums filled with Muslim immigrants who do the menial jobs illegal Mexicans do here in the USA. The national birth rates include those much more fecund populations. The actual birth rate amongst Europeans is thus even lower than the official numbers.
Were the new immigrants assimilating this would change the racial makeup of those countries a bit but other than that make little overall differnce. Even here in the US our immigrant population isn't exactly assimilating very well these days but they aren't totally alien either, being mostly Catholics who share most of the Western tradition with us. But in Europe the Muslims aren't assimilating at all, their culture is utterly incompatible with Europe and their population is rapidly rising as the overall population declines. It isn't going to take long for those two trend lines to meet and then pass each other. The increasing demand from the immingrants to have their host country assimulate to THEIR culture is already loud and politically powerful. Considering the apathy toward preserving European culture amongst the natives things are going to get interesting long before the actual population lines cross. Like I said, give it twenty or thirty years and there won't be a single European civilization left on the continent.
> You do know that just because it is lowering now, doesn't mean it will continue to, right?
Baring some major societal upheaval it isn't likely to trend upwards anytime soon. Another few years and there simply won't be enough time even if you could convince modern secular humanist feminists to become brood mares, and few of the economies could withstand removing such a large percentage of the labor pool for that anyway.
But we have a less agressive version of the disease here. Only here it is the blue states which aren't breeding. San Francisco closes a couple of schools at the end of each year. If we could just wrest control of our schools back and had enough time we red state folk could win the battle by simply outbreeding the social democrats. But we don't have either the time or the political power. Time is running out on us as well, just not because of population. The baton handoff between Great Britain and the US was probably the only time a major world power fell without being devoured by awaiting barbarians. The election of Obama pretty much sealed our fate to become a second rate power and I doubt we will have Britain's incredible fortune. But then again we do have those protective oceans and we will have to fall far and fast to worry about agression from Canada or Mexico in my lifetime.
But don't take my word for any of this, go look up the numbers and plot em on a spreadsheet. It will scare you a lot more that way, if I just linked to a graph you will look at it a minute and then move on, allowing yourself to quickly forget something so disturbing so you can get on with living your peaceful life awaiting the bounty Obama is going to shower upon you any day now. But if you look it up for yourself and do your own figures you will have to face the cold math. And the math says Europe is already lost. We should enbark upon a program to save that which can be saved before it all gets torn down but we won't because nobody will admit there is a problem until it is too late to do anything except accept a few refugees.
That is perfectly fine, playing an online game is just playing a game the same as baseball.
> NASCAR wins by having more money to pump into car mods and engineers.
But only up to a point. NASCAR goes to great length to level the playing field. Any serious team should be able to muster the resources to 'play in the big leagues', otherwise they should have stayed on a less prestigious racing circuit. So all of the teams have roughly the same resources (or at least sufficient to compete) at their disposal and winning is more a matter of getting the right people on your team.
> NBA/NFL/NHL all make more money and have better teams if they pump money into someone that another team can't afford.
Actually, that was the motivation for the salary caps and revenue sharing rules enforced in all of the big money sports. Of course the big teams in large markets always find ways but again it is within limits. If some billionaire could take a minor market franchise to a national championship in a couple of years it would totally destroy the game and viewers would start going away until the league got some control back.
> A company has a decent plan to try and level the playing field and get farmers out of games > and you just call them "pathetic losers."
Yes, anyone who has to cheat at a fricking game is a pathetic loser. If that judgement hits a little too close to home then deal with it and ask yourself why it hurts to be called a loser by someone you have never met.
My objection is that the companies see the farmers as the problem instead of as the symptom. Yes selling items will quickly run off the farmers if the company sells the items/gold for less than the cost to farm them. That is Econ 101. But the problem is the people buying the items and that problem only gets worse when the social sanctions are removed from the bad behaviour. It's just defining deviancy down.
> Look around you, this kind of stuff happens all over the "real" world.
Yes, the real world is a crappy place overrun with pathetic losers wanting things they haven't earned. We call them Democrats. If I am playing a game I want to forget about this place and it's problems and go explore a less depressing world. You know, one where Heroes do mighty deeds and survive based on their skill, wits, raw courage and just a wee bit of fortune. Adding "and when that fails entering their credit card number" just detracts from the poetry somehow.
Looked at their tax rates lately? More importantly have you looked at their birth rate? Europe is dead, twenty or thirty years from now there won't be enough of them left to hold back the barbarian hordes they are growing in their slums. It's math and it's ugly. If they faced up to the problem NOW and started giving massive subsidies to encourage breeding they might could save themselves but it isn't a sure thing. If they also deported every non-citizen in those slums the odds might come up to even. And with every day of inaction the odds get just a little longer. Not that it matters since the typical European has lost the will to even try to defend himself or his civilization. And that's just defending on the field of ideas, actual physical action is something only the street gangs know about. In Paris it is a good night if the roving bands of barbarians only burn a dozen cars, it only becomes a story when the number goes up to the hundreds.
But even now most of Europe is low economic growth and slowing, increasing political cleansing and loss of liberty and with the current downturn their welfare states are coming apart at the seams. As Lady Thatcher is claimed to have said, "Eventually you run out of other people's money to spend." And sooner than most people think we too will run out of other people's money to loot. Probably when China decides to stop buying our debt instruments.
> I'm pretty sure that gold farmers would cease to exist if the gaming company themselves sells gold for real $$$ at a lower rate.
I think that is the point. If you have to grind for weeks to get a Sword of Awesomeness you will insist on selling it for a decent chunk of change. But you won't be able to compete with the company store. Thus farming isn't a viable business model anymore.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes. But that treats symptoms not the real problem. The problem is losers wanting pretend items they couldn't possibly earn in a frickin' game so badly they will pay serious real coin to get them. It would be like bribing your DM to let your third level character find a +5 sword. Who would continue to play in a gaming group if such a disgusting thing were to occur?
I can see why losers would want to buy things they couldn't earn. I can see why the companies running the games would want to take the losers money instead of spending resources fighting gold farming. What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows buying their way to the top. And a game filled only with pathetic losers isn't likely to stay fun for even the losers for long.
> I have not said a word in defense of the Democrats or Obama. They are as complicit as the Republicans, IMO.
Ok, fair enough, I certainly haven't liked what my team has been doing a lot of the time either. Defeat the socialist threat and the only force holding the Republican coalition together goes away, which is something I would welcome.
> Islamic threat!?!? We are not at war with the Muslim religion, we are > at war with extremists who use religion as a tool.
Not quite. Have a look at their holy book sometime. It makes some of the nasty bits in the Old Testament look quite civilized. The difference is that our religions went through the Enlightenment and now even the shrinking percentage of our people who take their religion seriously ignore most of the less tolerant bits. They on the other hand haven't had their "Enlightenment" yet and they actually believe their religion. Some of the higher class ones who get educated in the West and some who now live in the west adopt some more tolerant views, i.e the sort of Muslims people like thee and me might meet. After all, if they LIKED living under strict Sharia they would probably still be living in their homeland. But even living and/or being educated in the West doesn't mean they won't be a religious zealot. UBL had a first rate Western education, the very best Saudi oil money could buy.
But if you want to argue most Muslims are actually people we can live with you have to start with one test. Please name me a 'tolerant' or 'moderate' majority Muslim population before attempting to convince me that 'moderate Muslim' isn't just code for either "I'm not ready to be a marytr yet myself but I certainly don't object (or not very much) when others answer the call to jihad. Death to America!" or "Just wait until we get 51% and of the votes infidel! Then you will know Islamic Justice as we end your perverted ways. Allah Akbar!"
I know most people won't allow themselves to face the true enormity of the problem, Shrub certainly never appears to have admitted it even to himself. However our task is nothing less than to somehow reform Islam into something compatible with modern secular Civilization. Or to destroy it before it gains the means to destroy us. Time is fast running out while we refuse to even admit the scale of the task before us. I'm very afraid we will end up panicked into Ann Coulter's "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
> Here's a thought, how about not getting into unncesary foreign wars?!?!
The President, with the concurrence of a majority of Congress plus a majority of the American people believed opening a new front in Iraq (barring Saddam suddenly deciding to comply with the UN Resolutions that were the Casus Beli) was a prudent course of action. War doesn't allow for takebacksies, once you are in you are IN.
Even US citizens like José Padilla have been denieghed the right to Habeous Corpus.
Eh? I was pretty sure the Supremes heard his case.
> > Name one dissident who has been silenced. > Joseph C. Wilson would be the obvious choice, since his story actually did make it public.
Strange meaning of silenced you have. There were months you couldn't turn on a Sunday talking heads show without that asshat showing up. And if he wasn't there whoever WAS there was talking ABOUT Wilson. Combine with a book deal, multiple glowing photo essays in all of the leading print publications, etc. Oh, since you probably still don't know this, neither Rove nor Cheney outted his desk jockey wife. I wish we never had to endure his idiocy but alas. Oh, and for the record, his reports leant credibility to the theory Saddam was TRYING to buy yellowcake accoring to several people in the government. Idiot Joe couldn't connect the dots but there are still a few sane spooks left.
> I have never compared Bush to Hitler.
You might not but is an entirely too common (and pathetic) meme on the left.
And here we see the 'reality' the 'Reality Based' crowd lives in.
>..believes in the erosion of civil liberties, consolidation of executive power, > silencing those who dissent, torture,revoking habeous corpus, forced religion, > racial profiling and exclusion, warmongering, etc...
So let me break down your pitiful rant and take it on a charge at a time.
Erosion of civil liberties? You mean the Patriot Act that Obama DIDN'T renounce once he was the one in the hot seat and would be responsible if something went FOOM!, is that what you are on about? The Patriot Act that DIDN'T actually do most of the things the crazies say it does?
Consolidation of executive power always happens during wartime. As someone who leans Libertarian I find it distasteful but can't see a way around the problem. The only solution is to push hard for a return to normal as soon as the Islamic threat is beat back. Of course this is the first war where the party out of power tried to convince itself we weren't actually at war so they could feel justified in continuing the usual politics of national destruction.
"Silencing those who dissent"? Are you insane or do you just believe if you repeat a lie enough it will become the Truth? Name one dissident who has been silenced. We suffered through eight long years of nothing but loud rancourous dissent that crossed the line to treason more than once. How many AMERICAN CITIZENS did BushHitler put in to gulags? You idiots like to preen and think you are brave patriots speaking truth (or at least truthiness) to power but you are wrong. Try it in a real dictatorship and you can earn some actual Karma. You know, places your type loves to proclaim your love of but never get around to relocating to. Say Cuba for one example, they have thousands locked up but I'm sure they could make room for you.
"torture,revoking habeous corpus"
I won't concede that waterboarding is torture, but even if it is we did it to three, yes three, very high value targets. This isn't like we were torturing POWs in WWII who were mostly just conscripts, these were high ranking officers. Furthermore they aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions so we would have been perfectly within the laws of war to have simply executed them. And I really don't think you even know what a phrase like habeous corpus even means if you think we have been violating it.
"forced religion" Oh really. Example please? Or are you just regurgitating dailykos propaganda?
"racial profiling and exclusion" If only. Or are you suggesting it makes sense to consider a little old black lady travelling with her children as equally a risk as three twenty something middle eastern men two of which are named after their morally challenged prophet? No we shouldn't get too carried away with the racial profiling, but as a practical matter. For example the recent revelations about KSM's plan for an attack on LA was planned to use Asian (but Muslim) probably to avert suspiscion.
"warmongering" You guys have pretty much turned that phrase into a null, much like overuse has made 'bigot' and 'fascist' pretty empty. Especially since you idiots don't even know 'fascist' means you. Go read Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_, it might just get ya to start questioning some of your assumptions about a great many things.
> Me? I don't think they've either looked at their stand closely enough to realize > what it sounds like to the other side, or would care if they did.
You are being far too kind to people who don't deserve it. It's pretty simple. A clear win in Iraq would have meant Republican control for a generation, a loss would have meant the opposite. The current basic tie was enough to put Obama in the White House. To a Democratic Socialist there isn't anything more important than gaining power and keeping it. The country can go to Hell as long as they Rule the descent, after all there isn't any place where Socialists have gained total control which didn't quickly turn into a Hell on Earth. The smarter ones understand that point and reason that THEY will be OK as the ones with the power so it's all good as a poor bitter people are easier to rule.
So just to be clear, I am calling people like Reid, Pelosi and Murtha traitors. They knowingly leant aid and comfort to sworn enemies during a time of actual war for the purpose of enhancing the power of themselves and their faction. Most of the Moveon.org crowd can be let off the treason hook be reason of just being Useful Idiots following wicked leaders. Obama is probably just as guilty but I'm not certain he possesses the capacity to understand the consequences of his actions since I doubt a narcissist like him can fully actualize another person as a person and not as just another mirror for His Glory to reflect off of.
> Here's a hint: you may want to stop looking at politics as something with 'sides' and realize we are all in this together.
Actually, no we aren't. If anything we are even more divided on the basic notions that should decide the basic course of political affairs than we were in the 1860s.
On one side you have the social democrats (Democratic Party) who want, being charitable, European Welfare Socialism and Big Sister. On teh other side are those who still think the Founding Fathers were on to something. And there isn't much room for compromise between worldviews so divergent. The Democrats have long understood and I think important elements of the Conservative movement (not the Republicans as of yet) now realize that we are fast approaching a 'there can be only one' point in history, where one side must finally confront and defeat the other.
Two futures lie ahead of us, one of an emasculated politically cleansed America where the State (i.e. national government) reigns supreme over pretty much everything, assigns everyone their place and everyone knows resistence to be futile as we spiral down to Third World status and keep going towards failed state. The other is a miracle where the Democrats, as they neared the moment of triumph overreach and are thrown down by an outraged population and we live happily ever after in a land of liberty with low taxes and regulation... for a time until a new generation must learn the same lessons again, that Freedom ain't Free and that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
> Since Microsoft would have to keep supplying patches to XP, there will be no reason > to even think about installing Windows 7.
It gets even better. If they ship an XP compatibility layer in 7 it tells everyone that XP apps will be a supported option for the lifetime of Windows 7. And if XP is kept alive in this way, ya you are probably right that patches for XP itself will probably be continued for quite some time, especially since they are going to be selling newly licensed copies at least as late as this Xmas.
However it is the follow on effects of a promise that XP will be a viable platform to run applications in for at least the next 5-7 years. It makes XP the safe choice of API to write new code to. An XP compatible application will run on XP, Windows 7 and via CodeWeavers increasingly effective efforts (as the XP target has remainied basically stable for years) it means an XP application can run at native speed on Mac and Linux. And it doesn't take that much effort to write XP apps that will run on 7 anyway without needing the emulation layer so 7 compatible XP code is going to be a more universal binary than Java ever achieved in the real world.
If Microsoft isn't careful with this XP on 7 plan they could Warp themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
> Fascism does not mean what you think it means.
Well lets see. One the one hand we have your opinion. On the other we have the historical record of the regimes who invented, promoted and championed fascism. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, lots of luv from Lenin and Stalin in their day. Even some luv from FDR, who saw much to be emulated in it.
> Fascism is simply private business that is controlled by the government.
You couldn't be more wrong. Go read some history and get back to me. I'd really suggest the book I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_. It's very well footnoted so even if you can't bring yourself to accept his conclusions just on the strength of his arguments, you will have plenty of primary sources lined up for you to go looking for... and then have to face up to learning something you always thought to be Truth just ain't so, Fascism was a philosophy of the leftist mind, fully at home in the company of Progressives, Socialists, modern (not classical) Liberals and even Communists who all saw things to like in fascist thought. Some simply thought it a useful phase on the jourrney to the perfect socialist utopia, but all admired, if nothing else, its effectiveness at sweeping away classical liberalism which they all loathed.
And another one that will probably rock your reality. The Nazis were not just Fascists, they were Socialists, like their name implies. They just weren't International Socialists like the Russians. Look up the Nazi Party platform (the previous three words into Google will work) and tell me they weren't Socialists. Yes, from their first published platform it was obvious they were racists and Nationalists, but it also reveals why they named themselves National Socialists.
> So, by your logic, since Republicans are endorsed by several KKK grand dragons, they must all be racists?
Oh really? I live in Lousiana. We had the ill fortune, due to a trick of the whacky primary system we had at the time, to end up with David Duke vs Edwin (charged but not convicted then, now serving time in Federal Prison) Edwards. The Republican party, both in the state and the national party, repudicated Duke and even put out bumper stickers saying "This time, vote for the Crook". In other words, the Party Lincoln built had and has no place for dipshit Klansmen[1]. If you would recall some history, the Solid South was solidly Democratic during the civil rights era. All those govt goons with firehoses, those guys were lifelong Democrats. It was only when that stuff finally died out that the Republicans have finally rose to ascendence in the South. But your team has been writing the news and the official histories, probably since before you were born, so you might not even realize how ignorant you come off with that tired old Republican == Racist crap.
On the other hand I didn't see the Obama campaign returning the contributions from Soros, etc. or repudiating his dozens of other more personal and long term Communist Party associations.
[1] And just remember, most Klansmen these days tend to be Nazis. Which is just more evidence they are still playing on your team, not mine. Hilter, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, you fascists do have such 'colorful' heros.
Sorry, I forgot and didn't get around to replying to the rest of your post.....
> I think you consider the unions a bugaboo.
Yup. But only under certain conditions. The rise of organized labor was a reaction to real problems, too bad it happened right in time to be almost totally captured by International Communism with organized crime picking up the scraps.
My major objection comes when the government gets involved and grants the union a monopoly on labor once a site votes in the union. Can't see how that isn't an uncompensated taking. Reducing management's decision to pay up or close the worksite seems unfair. Yes workers have the right to all walk out of a job they think is treating them unfairly. But management should have the right to let em go if they think the expense of recruiting and training a whole new labor force is less expensive than the union's demands. Yes management might be wrong in that calculation. But the union could also have been wrong in evaluating the worth of it's labor. Both sides should have the right to be wrong because it is the most basic liberty all others depend upon.
And yes, while I think the UAW with their insane work rules, gold plated pensions and such were major contributing factors management stupidity should not be ignored. Which is why they should have been allowed to go bankrupt and let the assets be bought up by people who would hopefully put those assets to more productive uses. Thus both labor, management and the shareholders would have lost and the important economic signal that would have sent would have been a good thing.
> The smaller cars that were produced by Honda and Toyota faced labor costs very close to that of American car companies.
That is simply wrong. Show me one auto bearing a foreign name badge built in a union state at union wages? Yes those folks working in the southern US make pretty good wages but it often less than half of the total compensation the unionized plants pay. Remember that the final blow to Detroit was the accumulated pensions owned to the unions on the automakers balance sheets.
> Obama isn't a fool. He knows what the consequences will be.
There is much merit in what you say but I still hold out to one hope. Overreach. Because Obama is fool and almost zero experience he might not listen to wiser heads in his Party (and I'm not talking about the Democrats). Remember that with Specter's coming out Democrats own Washington. Yes the Joker's eventual arrival (if that ain't the Universe having a bit of fun with us what is!) their rule will be total, but with Snowe and/or Collins available to 'be bipartisan' when needed they already have effective control. And come the next elections if the economy is still in the crapper Obama just might be Carter 2.0. Assuming the Republicans can find A) find a leader and B) nominate him/her instead of passing them over for another McCain/Dole/loser.
I think we both agree that barring Obama having an epiphany and suddenly becoming a centrist free market guy the economy ain't getting better. So it is only a question of how bad it gets and will there be enough MSM types still working at places still in business to blow a smokescreen for his sorry ass to hide behind.
> Because communism is dead, and has been for a long, long time. I am scared of fascism, which
> is far different from Communism, and I think you need to learn what the difference is.
Not at all, it it you who needs to learn the true nature of Fascism. Go read Jonah Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_ for a start. Fasism, back when it was real movements and not just a word meaning "things/people Democrats don't like." was always an allied movement of Progressive/Liberal/Socialist/etc politics. Fascism was an explicit rejection of classical liberalism and conventional religion in favor of a totalitarian all powerful State (and of course Maximum Leader) that was to be worshiped as a God. And Communism is far from dead, we have one in the White House and at least dozens serving in Congress.
Here are a few of my rules:
1. If you have ever hugged Fidel (and not repented your wickedness) you are a Communist. Just that one test gets you more than a dozen current sitting members of Congress.
2. William Ayers is a Communist. If the available evidence (friend of Chavez, his writings, etc) somehow doesn't convince, there is always his own statement that yes he is a (but only a small c, like that absolves him of anything) communist.
3. Anyone who can earn the endorsement of multiple known Communists (Ayers, Wright, Soros, etc) is almost certainly a Communist. It's just how they roll. And beginning one's political career with a fundraiser thrown in the home of a admitted violent revolutionary Communist is designed to send a signal to other fellow travellers. Add in the other factors and it would be foolish to extend Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.
> With all the loopholes, our effective tax rate is around 10% of GDP.
You are quite mad, you do know that don't you. The government (all levels) in 2008 accounted for about 5 1/2 Trillion out a total gross domestic product (that included that government spending as output) of 14 trillion and change. And those figures were BEFORE the recession lowered GDP and Porkulus and the socialism to come increased the government. Before Obama is done we will be lucky to only have half of GDP feeding the government monster.
> ..you can find dozens of them on the wiki page for 'laffer curve.'
Yup, quite mad. Anyone who uses Wikipedia for any remotely political topic is mad by definition. Even though that page isn't too horrible, as Wikipedia pages go... i.e it was only moderatetly biased against (as opposed to frothing hatred) the topic of the entry, the general notion of trusting Wikipedia on any political matter where one doesn't ALREADY know enough to know if the page has been hijacked by the freak show is just daft.
> Still running scared of the Red Menace, I see.
Yes. Better question is why aren't you? Or did you think the failure of the Soviet Union settled everything? It should have, but Communism is a religion and no number of failures will convince the true believers that their religion is false. Nope, the SOviets failed because they didn't 'do it right.' whatever the hell that means. But at any rate, Communism is still alive (although mutating wildly) in China. Communism is still alive and well in our own hemisphere. And most importantly, Communism is still alive and well here in the USA. And just like Vietnam and Iraq's most important battles were fought in Washington DC's halls of power, the NY media and the academy, the Cold War rages on in the same places and the decisive battle has yet to happen.
> When the controllers of the means of production fail to keep the means of production working properly,
> smart people look to take over the means of production.
Interesting notion. The UAW was the biggest contributor to the failure of the US auto industry. By raising labor costs to the point only huge luxury cars could earn a profit. So now the POTUS has reached into the market and seized two automakers and awarded them to the unions who created the problem but contributed heavily to his campaign. When a union gets majority ownership (and not by buying it, but by seizing it by virtue of political power) of their workplace what other term you you prefer we use to describe it other than "the workers seizing the means of production." Which has been the Communist rallying cry since the perverted notion began.
But we do have a system to deal with the controllers of the means of production failing. It used to be called bankruptcy court. But the UAW would lose bigtime so it wasn't considered a (politically) viable option.
> Want to be a Cayman corporation? Then move your ass to the Cayman Islands, along with your entire family.
You might yourself suprised by the results if you yell that loudly enough. If I were the CEO of generic mega corp I might just ask myself why not? The Caymen Islands are nice and if they get crowded just go in with a few fellow CEOs, buy out some small country and rename it Galt's Gulch.
They are rich, remember? Flying back to NY every month or so to catch the Opera or whatnot isn't a problem. Just buy a 747 and offer cheap rides for the midlevel staffers you relocated and life would be good and mostly tax free. What you guys forget is the price to remain here in the US must be kept below the price of moving or people will just vote with their feet. Lose a quarter of the filthy rich and our top heavy 'soak the rich' taxation model falls apart.
> It hasn't seemed to work too well for the last several rounds of tax cuts.
Oh? Go look at the revenue figures, they disagree. Every time tax rates get cut revenue rises. Every time, The problem is that spending has gone up faster, thus deficits.
> Certainly there is a point where lowering taxes reduces total revenue.
Yes, that is the basic logic of the Laffer Curve. However our taxes are so punishingly high we could cut them a lot before getting near the good side of the curve. The logic of the Laffer Curve is so compelling that it is remarkable that we haven't made a serious effort to get on the good side of it. I mean it should be self evident that there exists a point on the tax curve on the flip side of the Curve where the government would bring in the exact same revenue yet the economy would be much larger than now, and where if new revenue were needed a tax increase would actually bring in additional revenue as expected.
However Mr. Obama gave away the game back in the debates didn't he. He, being the King of the Idiots and one of the few dumb enough to speak the truth on the matter, actually said he favors raising the capital gains tax in the full knowledge that it will decrease revenue but increase some nebulous commie notion of 'fairness.' Of course the media have taken pains to put that mistake down the memory hole.
> Blame congress for leaving the loop holes.
No, thank them. Obama, being a fool, is about to learn why those loopholes exist. We put them in to keep some of the multinationals headquartered here in the US in practice by allowing them to headquarter on paper somewhere else and we all agreed to ignore the oddities that followed from that. Forced to actually choose many will opt to close up the skyscraper here and open one up in a more business friendly climate. Then profits from US operations will flow OUT instead of overseas profits flowing IN. I'm failing to see how the US wins.
This trend is going to be accelerated by the overthrow of the rule of law implied in the auto bailouts, etc. When the workers are running around seizing the means of production smart people start looking to get out while they can.
> The minute you try to "democratize" is, politicians and PR types will try to game the system...
Too late, the politicians and PR types are already gaming the system.
Do I think stories in newspapers should be blindly moderated like slashdot comments? Oh hell no. But getting some outside feedback into the editorial loop certainly can't hurt a system to obviously broken. So yes, if the editors see a very negative reaction to a story they should take a look at WHY teh readers are saying ixnay on it, take a look into their complaint and see if they have a point. There should be a human editor in the loop though, if nothing else to stop the Colbert troll army, the 4chan troll army, etc.
Which of course brings me back to something I have said many times on many forums including this one. This is all moot because for the most part human editors NO LONGER EXIST. We all have this mental picture of the grizzled old editor ruthlessly marking up the poor reporter's copy and throwing it back to him for a rewrite. But they went out during the rounds of endless belt tightening in the MSM over the past decades. Look at the NYT, CNN, any major news website. Don't look at their blogs, look only at the real news copy. Bet you find a groaner spelling or grammer error within ten minutes even if you read at a below average speed. And if you read an article in a area where you know poo from shinola you will find a factual error in almost every story these days. And everyone interviewed will say at least one of their quotes got mangled between their mouth and the final copy. So much for the fresh faced right out college interns doing fact checking and following up on double checking the quotes. All that is gone. The average newspaper or TV network journalism is about as accurate as the better blogs. And increasingly the blogs are doing a better job because the blogs will mercilessly fact check each other.
If somebody could get a real old fashioned news organization back in the game I can't help but believe there is enough pent up demand for real journalism that it would find a revenue stream somehow. Ya know, journalism: where you report who did what, where and why they did it. Reported in depth, with extensive quotes and background and every quote and fact checked with a high enough accuracy rate to quickly gain a reputation as the fracking Voice of God. Then leave the opinions and analysis to the talking heads on cable news shows and blogs.
> It makes it trivial to find someone whose opinion supports your position...
Exactly. Anybody with a functioning brain could figure this one out but like so many myths of the left it goes unchallenged. And when challenged the challenger is either thrown down the memory hole (if small, as in watch this post go -1) or shouted down violently in the hope they learn to never question authority[1] again. Or just shouted down to drown them out. And even if the rebuttal is total and absolute the politically correct version of history simply continues.
Glass Steagall was intended to prevent the sort of diversified banking, brokerage and insurance financial monsters that proved best able to survive this fiasco. Lehman Brothers, the pure brokerage play, is dead. Bear Sterns and Merril Lynch, again pure brokerages, are absorbed and gone. AIG, a pure play insurance outfit is now a zombie government semi-entity.
But we must blame someone, anyone, other than the real villians of this story. Freddie, Fanny, Congress (mostly Democrats but also fair share of Republicans who were more than willing to go along including at one notable point Pres. Bush himself) and to a small but notable extent Obama's legal work for ACORN. By 'encouraging' (quotas) lenders to make loans they KNEW would almost certainly go bad forced[2] them to do yet more terrible things to try to paper over the problem and spread the losses out, only delaying the diaster, making it bigger and infecting so much more of the economy of the entire world.
All we hear is how this was 'a failure of regulation' and thus the solution is yet more regulation. Nope. It was a failure of policy. The regulators had more than enough authority and did nothing because the banks were doing exactly what the government wanted them to be doing. A failure caused by government being too involved in 'private' finance. I put private in scare quotes because for the most part it already didn't exist and won't at all once Obama gets done. Almost no home mortagage has really been private in decades, almost all either actually go through Freddie/Fannie or at least are 'conforming' paper, meaning they meet the requirements set by Freddie/Fannie. Only the very rich got to use the actual private sector banking system to buy a home. Almost every home built in the last few decades has been built to FHA specs and recomendations, if by nothing else but osmossis. Congress set actual percentage quotas on how many loans would go to which politically preferred groups, including (in dense weasel words of course) how many had to be loans almost certain to go bad.
[1] Remember Citizen, "Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism." But only when attacking a Republican administration. Attacking the Most Holy One is treason at best and probably even worse: Racism. Racism, the crime with no defense, no firm guideline to know when one has committed it and the only punishment is banishment from all polite society.
[2] Not forced much. After all most of the people making the decisons were quite happy to squander the shareholder funds in theor trust to be seen as 'enlightened' by primitive socialist savages. Savages in the sense that they can see all the wonders of civilization, envy, and fear it, but couldn't create much of anything if their lives depended on it. After all, far too many banking/fund managers/etc executives are young college educated socialists themselves.
> Don't support corporate radio any longer - listen to X1FM, raw and uncut internet radio. Go to x1fmradio.com for more in
Don't know if you are being paid to spam for them or you are just an idiot. Hard to tell sometimes.
1. It's as over compressed as the worst "Hundred Thousand Watt Blowtorch" FM station. Yuck!
2. Don't support corporate radio... by going to a corporate radio site. Oh hell yea. Guess you never bothered to click on their about us link where they explain about their years of hard work becoming one of the "leading radio corporations in the Industry" their eight year association with Clear Channel Radio (aren't they the ones the kostards really HATE?) and their plans to "develop our accumulated radio knowledge in today's new digital broadband world."
It's fun watching hipsters blather on about "Alternative" music, films, etc being spoon fed to them by the exact same corporations and marketing geniuses. Even funnier is that as soon as one of these 'alternative' things goes mainstream you idiots declare it a 'sellout' and move on to the next shiny corporate droppings not realizing this is exactly what the corporation wants. When they find one of their low grade offerings somehow has mass appeal the last thing they want is the hipsters to keep glomming on it and scaring the mass market away.
> I would recommend actually reading about history...
I'm aware they had a brief moment where they ALMOST but not quite made it, but it passed before they could defang the worst parts of Islam and sunk back into barbarism. History would have been quite different had things went just a little differently, they could have recivilized dark/middle ages Europe, made the great voyages of discovery, discovered the scientific method, etc. but it didn't work out that way. Interesting possibilities for alternative history novels but here on our timeline they didn't make it.
> ..both Turkey and Iran are good and tolerant people..
Ok, you picked the same two I'd have taken if pressed to argue the other side. But both are very weak cases. In Turkey almost everything has gone right from our POV, they had a strong/popular leader who deeply implanted a tradition of a secular representive government yet no serious person would put their odds of tossing all that in the next decade for Sharia at less than one in three, most would probably give it even odds. Iran is even weaker. For all this blather (mostly from people who haven't been there anymore than thee or me) that the people of Iran are tolerant pro western folk they sure have a wierd way of showing it. If the majority really were like that they should have found a way to get a government that reflects their views, or at least forced the mad mullahs to moderate a wee bit. Sounds like 'good Germans' to me.
> So I doubt any country, even the US would fullfil your requirements.
Why? We haven't ever came close to a religious state. At the Federal level, in the early days several States were.
And When was the last time we stoned a homosexual? If the nefarious Religious Right is really running things (well at least until our Saviour returned to redeem us on Jan 20) you should be able to point to a few cases where the evil government strung em up a few queers.
> What we can say is that Wilson had irrifutable proof that some of the evidence being used by
> the administration to justify the war was false. At the time he was trying to go public with
> it, the Bush administration went out of its way to discredit him and make his, and his wife's
> life hell.
That is the standard version the media tell, the only problem is it is utterly and provably false in almost every detail.
Problem 1: Joe Wilson was NOT tasked to Nigeria by Cheney as he likes to imply. We now know as undisputed fact that he was suggested by his wife to some midlevel CIA folks. What isn't quite as clear but fairly well documented is that his mission was part of a skunkworks project in the CIA by old ex Clinton hangers on to undermine the Iraq effort for reasons many, murky and likely to never be completely understood.
But combined with other CIA actions at the time a good argument can be assembled that their actions were an attempt at regime change in their own country. Reasonable people can dispute whether the CIA should/actually can undermine foreign governments but I would hope we can agree that secret programs to bring down their own government is intolerable. If we didn't live in bizarro world an blue ribbon commission would have been established to get to the botttom of it and sack anyone remotely responsible or knowledgeable yet silent on any such scheme.
Problem 2: Joe Wilson's report did NOT harm the administration position re: Saddam and WMD, instead it strengthened them. Wilson reported that Niger refused to sell Yellowcake to Saddam's agents. Wilson and the media used that to shout that "Saddam did not buy any Uranium, Bush Lied Kids Died!" But of course some of paid attention is school and learned to read. That infamous British intelligence report said the same thing, that Saddam had TRIED to buy uranium." Now why does one TRY to buy uranium? Anyone? Bueller?
Problem 3: Bush and his evil minions went after Wilson personally, even outing his wife the super secret agent.
> What's the difference between Cuba locking people up and Guantanamo?
Idiot.
Lets start with the big one. Castro locks up meek little librarians for the crime of criticising him. The people in Gitmo are people we took on the battlefield bearing arms against us plus a few we took in raids. We processed out the ones who weren't considered high risk, that is if we could find a country willing to take them. We in fact were too generous in turning people loose since we have caught several former inmates again trying to kill our forces. Despite Obama's lofty words now that he is POTUS he is finding it just as hard to figure out what the hell to do with the inmates.
> > Furthermore they aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions so we would have been perfectly within the laws of war to have simply executed them.
> Sounds like tinpot dictator logic to me. It's always possible to construct a convenient legal fiction to justify your actions.
Not at all. The Geneva Conventions are a treaty, only applicable (by design) to soldiers fighting under the flag of a co-signatory nation state. It is the incentive of gaining it's protection for one's own forces that motivates... shall we say less moraly developed... nations to sign on and undertake the expense of providing the required facilities to enemy POWs. Or do you think Hitler signed on (and in the main honored them) because he was such a great humanitarian? No, he saw two advantages, one was the advantage gained by his soldiers knowing that if captured they would be treated well and second was having the allied forces knowing he was honoring the Conventions meant they would be willing to surrender when in a hopeless situation instead of fighting like cornered rats, these outweighed the expense of operating his POW camps. This was proven out in the Pacific theater where it quickly became clear to both sides that no quarter (we would take prisioners if offered but the Japanese would usually fight to the finish) was to be expected. It made a real difference. Remember that the GC was intended to regulate traditional war between conscript armies fighting traditional battles. The ideas it encodes don't apply well to non-state actors hiding amongst civilian populations.
Providing GC coverage for people who clearly are not covered and not themselves obeying it's restrictions removes all incentive for nations to remain in the Geneva Conventions. In other words people like you who have reimagined the Geneva Conventions are going to cause a lot MORE pain and suffering in the future.
> I'm not sure why you think that their birth rates mean that their society is going to die.
History doesn't exactly repeat itself but it does rhyme and you have no choice but to dance to the beat. Lower the birth rate below replacement and problems will come your way. But you are right that all other things being equal survival is still possible in such a scenario. Hell, if it were a slow enough decline it might even be a positive thing. But there is a rate below which no civilization has recovered. Most of Europe is below that line and it is worse that it first appears. Most European cities have slums filled with Muslim immigrants who do the menial jobs illegal Mexicans do here in the USA. The national birth rates include those much more fecund populations. The actual birth rate amongst Europeans is thus even lower than the official numbers.
Were the new immigrants assimilating this would change the racial makeup of those countries a bit but other than that make little overall differnce. Even here in the US our immigrant population isn't exactly assimilating very well these days but they aren't totally alien either, being mostly Catholics who share most of the Western tradition with us. But in Europe the Muslims aren't assimilating at all, their culture is utterly incompatible with Europe and their population is rapidly rising as the overall population declines. It isn't going to take long for those two trend lines to meet and then pass each other. The increasing demand from the immingrants to have their host country assimulate to THEIR culture is already loud and politically powerful. Considering the apathy toward preserving European culture amongst the natives things are going to get interesting long before the actual population lines cross. Like I said, give it twenty or thirty years and there won't be a single European civilization left on the continent.
> You do know that just because it is lowering now, doesn't mean it will continue to, right?
Baring some major societal upheaval it isn't likely to trend upwards anytime soon. Another few years and there simply won't be enough time even if you could convince modern secular humanist feminists to become brood mares, and few of the economies could withstand removing such a large percentage of the labor pool for that anyway.
But we have a less agressive version of the disease here. Only here it is the blue states which aren't breeding. San Francisco closes a couple of schools at the end of each year. If we could just wrest control of our schools back and had enough time we red state folk could win the battle by simply outbreeding the social democrats. But we don't have either the time or the political power. Time is running out on us as well, just not because of population. The baton handoff between Great Britain and the US was probably the only time a major world power fell without being devoured by awaiting barbarians. The election of Obama pretty much sealed our fate to become a second rate power and I doubt we will have Britain's incredible fortune. But then again we do have those protective oceans and we will have to fall far and fast to worry about agression from Canada or Mexico in my lifetime.
But don't take my word for any of this, go look up the numbers and plot em on a spreadsheet. It will scare you a lot more that way, if I just linked to a graph you will look at it a minute and then move on, allowing yourself to quickly forget something so disturbing so you can get on with living your peaceful life awaiting the bounty Obama is going to shower upon you any day now. But if you look it up for yourself and do your own figures you will have to face the cold math. And the math says Europe is already lost. We should enbark upon a program to save that which can be saved before it all gets torn down but we won't because nobody will admit there is a problem until it is too late to do anything except accept a few refugees.
> Funny... I will just compare this to sports
That is perfectly fine, playing an online game is just playing a game the same as baseball.
> NASCAR wins by having more money to pump into car mods and engineers.
But only up to a point. NASCAR goes to great length to level the playing field. Any serious team should be able to muster the resources to 'play in the big leagues', otherwise they should have stayed on a less prestigious racing circuit. So all of the teams have roughly the same resources (or at least sufficient to compete) at their disposal and winning is more a matter of getting the right people on your team.
> NBA/NFL/NHL all make more money and have better teams if they pump money into someone that another team can't afford.
Actually, that was the motivation for the salary caps and revenue sharing rules enforced in all of the big money sports. Of course the big teams in large markets always find ways but again it is within limits. If some billionaire could take a minor market franchise to a national championship in a couple of years it would totally destroy the game and viewers would start going away until the league got some control back.
> A company has a decent plan to try and level the playing field and get farmers out of games
> and you just call them "pathetic losers."
Yes, anyone who has to cheat at a fricking game is a pathetic loser. If that judgement hits a little too close to home then deal with it and ask yourself why it hurts to be called a loser by someone you have never met.
My objection is that the companies see the farmers as the problem instead of as the symptom. Yes selling items will quickly run off the farmers if the company sells the items/gold for less than the cost to farm them. That is Econ 101. But the problem is the people buying the items and that problem only gets worse when the social sanctions are removed from the bad behaviour. It's just defining deviancy down.
> Look around you, this kind of stuff happens all over the "real" world.
Yes, the real world is a crappy place overrun with pathetic losers wanting things they haven't earned. We call them Democrats. If I am playing a game I want to forget about this place and it's problems and go explore a less depressing world. You know, one where Heroes do mighty deeds and survive based on their skill, wits, raw courage and just a wee bit of fortune. Adding "and when that fails entering their credit card number" just detracts from the poetry somehow.
> Europe is hardly hell on earth
Looked at their tax rates lately? More importantly have you looked at their birth rate? Europe is dead, twenty or thirty years from now there won't be enough of them left to hold back the barbarian hordes they are growing in their slums. It's math and it's ugly. If they faced up to the problem NOW and started giving massive subsidies to encourage breeding they might could save themselves but it isn't a sure thing. If they also deported every non-citizen in those slums the odds might come up to even. And with every day of inaction the odds get just a little longer. Not that it matters since the typical European has lost the will to even try to defend himself or his civilization. And that's just defending on the field of ideas, actual physical action is something only the street gangs know about. In Paris it is a good night if the roving bands of barbarians only burn a dozen cars, it only becomes a story when the number goes up to the hundreds.
But even now most of Europe is low economic growth and slowing, increasing political cleansing and loss of liberty and with the current downturn their welfare states are coming apart at the seams. As Lady Thatcher is claimed to have said, "Eventually you run out of other people's money to spend." And sooner than most people think we too will run out of other people's money to loot. Probably when China decides to stop buying our debt instruments.
> I'm pretty sure that gold farmers would cease to exist if the gaming company themselves sells gold for real $$$ at a lower rate.
I think that is the point. If you have to grind for weeks to get a Sword of Awesomeness you will insist on selling it for a decent chunk of change. But you won't be able to compete with the company store. Thus farming isn't a viable business model anymore.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes. But that treats symptoms not the real problem. The problem is losers wanting pretend items they couldn't possibly earn in a frickin' game so badly they will pay serious real coin to get them. It would be like bribing your DM to let your third level character find a +5 sword. Who would continue to play in a gaming group if such a disgusting thing were to occur?
I can see why losers would want to buy things they couldn't earn. I can see why the companies running the games would want to take the losers money instead of spending resources fighting gold farming. What I fail to understand is why anyone worth a damn would keep playing a game that openly allows buying their way to the top. And a game filled only with pathetic losers isn't likely to stay fun for even the losers for long.
> I have not said a word in defense of the Democrats or Obama. They are as complicit as the Republicans, IMO.
Ok, fair enough, I certainly haven't liked what my team has been doing a lot of the time either. Defeat the socialist threat and the only force holding the Republican coalition together goes away, which is something I would welcome.
> Islamic threat!?!? We are not at war with the Muslim religion, we are
> at war with extremists who use religion as a tool.
Not quite. Have a look at their holy book sometime. It makes some of the nasty bits in the Old Testament look quite civilized. The difference is that our religions went through the Enlightenment and now even the shrinking percentage of our people who take their religion seriously ignore most of the less tolerant bits. They on the other hand haven't had their "Enlightenment" yet and they actually believe their religion. Some of the higher class ones who get educated in the West and some who now live in the west adopt some more tolerant views, i.e the sort of Muslims people like thee and me might meet. After all, if they LIKED living under strict Sharia they would probably still be living in their homeland. But even living and/or being educated in the West doesn't mean they won't be a religious zealot. UBL had a first rate Western education, the very best Saudi oil money could buy.
But if you want to argue most Muslims are actually people we can live with you have to start with one test. Please name me a 'tolerant' or 'moderate' majority Muslim population before attempting to convince me that 'moderate Muslim' isn't just code for either "I'm not ready to be a marytr yet myself but I certainly don't object (or not very much) when others answer the call to jihad. Death to America!" or "Just wait until we get 51% and of the votes infidel! Then you will know Islamic Justice as we end your perverted ways. Allah Akbar!"
I know most people won't allow themselves to face the true enormity of the problem, Shrub certainly never appears to have admitted it even to himself. However our task is nothing less than to somehow reform Islam into something compatible with modern secular Civilization. Or to destroy it before it gains the means to destroy us. Time is fast running out while we refuse to even admit the scale of the task before us. I'm very afraid we will end up panicked into Ann Coulter's "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
> Here's a thought, how about not getting into unncesary foreign wars?!?!
The President, with the concurrence of a majority of Congress plus a majority of the American people believed opening a new front in Iraq (barring Saddam suddenly deciding to comply with the UN Resolutions that were the Casus Beli) was a prudent course of action. War doesn't allow for takebacksies, once you are in you are IN.
Even US citizens like José Padilla have been denieghed the right to Habeous Corpus.
Eh? I was pretty sure the Supremes heard his case.
> > Name one dissident who has been silenced.
> Joseph C. Wilson would be the obvious choice, since his story actually did make it public.
Strange meaning of silenced you have. There were months you couldn't turn on a Sunday talking heads show without that asshat showing up. And if he wasn't there whoever WAS there was talking ABOUT Wilson. Combine with a book deal, multiple glowing photo essays in all of the leading print publications, etc. Oh, since you probably still don't know this, neither Rove nor Cheney outted his desk jockey wife. I wish we never had to endure his idiocy but alas. Oh, and for the record, his reports leant credibility to the theory Saddam was TRYING to buy yellowcake accoring to several people in the government. Idiot Joe couldn't connect the dots but there are still a few sane spooks left.
> I have never compared Bush to Hitler.
You might not but is an entirely too common (and pathetic) meme on the left.
> So i
And here we see the 'reality' the 'Reality Based' crowd lives in.
> ..believes in the erosion of civil liberties, consolidation of executive power,
> silencing those who dissent, torture,revoking habeous corpus, forced religion,
> racial profiling and exclusion, warmongering, etc...
So let me break down your pitiful rant and take it on a charge at a time.
Erosion of civil liberties? You mean the Patriot Act that Obama DIDN'T renounce once he was the one in the hot seat and would be responsible if something went FOOM!, is that what you are on about? The Patriot Act that DIDN'T actually do most of the things the crazies say it does?
Consolidation of executive power always happens during wartime. As someone who leans Libertarian I find it distasteful but can't see a way around the problem. The only solution is to push hard for a return to normal as soon as the Islamic threat is beat back. Of course this is the first war where the party out of power tried to convince itself we weren't actually at war so they could feel justified in continuing the usual politics of national destruction.
"Silencing those who dissent"? Are you insane or do you just believe if you repeat a lie enough it will become the Truth? Name one dissident who has been silenced. We suffered through eight long years of nothing but loud rancourous dissent that crossed the line to treason more than once. How many AMERICAN CITIZENS did BushHitler put in to gulags? You idiots like to preen and think you are brave patriots speaking truth (or at least truthiness) to power but you are wrong. Try it in a real dictatorship and you can earn some actual Karma. You know, places your type loves to proclaim your love of but never get around to relocating to. Say Cuba for one example, they have thousands locked up but I'm sure they could make room for you.
"torture,revoking habeous corpus"
I won't concede that waterboarding is torture, but even if it is we did it to three, yes three, very high value targets. This isn't like we were torturing POWs in WWII who were mostly just conscripts, these were high ranking officers. Furthermore they aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions so we would have been perfectly within the laws of war to have simply executed them. And I really don't think you even know what a phrase like habeous corpus even means if you think we have been violating it.
"forced religion" Oh really. Example please? Or are you just regurgitating dailykos propaganda?
"racial profiling and exclusion" If only. Or are you suggesting it makes sense to consider a little old black lady travelling with her children as equally a risk as three twenty something middle eastern men two of which are named after their morally challenged prophet? No we shouldn't get too carried away with the racial profiling, but as a practical matter. For example the recent revelations about KSM's plan for an attack on LA was planned to use Asian (but Muslim) probably to avert suspiscion.
"warmongering" You guys have pretty much turned that phrase into a null, much like overuse has made 'bigot' and 'fascist' pretty empty. Especially since you idiots don't even know 'fascist' means you. Go read Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_, it might just get ya to start questioning some of your assumptions about a great many things.
> Me? I don't think they've either looked at their stand closely enough to realize
> what it sounds like to the other side, or would care if they did.
You are being far too kind to people who don't deserve it. It's pretty simple. A clear win in Iraq would have meant Republican control for a generation, a loss would have meant the opposite. The current basic tie was enough to put Obama in the White House. To a Democratic Socialist there isn't anything more important than gaining power and keeping it. The country can go to Hell as long as they Rule the descent, after all there isn't any place where Socialists have gained total control which didn't quickly turn into a Hell on Earth. The smarter ones understand that point and reason that THEY will be OK as the ones with the power so it's all good as a poor bitter people are easier to rule.
So just to be clear, I am calling people like Reid, Pelosi and Murtha traitors. They knowingly leant aid and comfort to sworn enemies during a time of actual war for the purpose of enhancing the power of themselves and their faction. Most of the Moveon.org crowd can be let off the treason hook be reason of just being Useful Idiots following wicked leaders. Obama is probably just as guilty but I'm not certain he possesses the capacity to understand the consequences of his actions since I doubt a narcissist like him can fully actualize another person as a person and not as just another mirror for His Glory to reflect off of.
> Here's a hint: you may want to stop looking at politics as something with 'sides' and realize we are all in this together.
Actually, no we aren't. If anything we are even more divided on the basic notions that should decide the basic course of political affairs than we were in the 1860s.
On one side you have the social democrats (Democratic Party) who want, being charitable, European Welfare Socialism and Big Sister. On teh other side are those who still think the Founding Fathers were on to something. And there isn't much room for compromise between worldviews so divergent. The Democrats have long understood and I think important elements of the Conservative movement (not the Republicans as of yet) now realize that we are fast approaching a 'there can be only one' point in history, where one side must finally confront and defeat the other.
Two futures lie ahead of us, one of an emasculated politically cleansed America where the State (i.e. national government) reigns supreme over pretty much everything, assigns everyone their place and everyone knows resistence to be futile as we spiral down to Third World status and keep going towards failed state. The other is a miracle where the Democrats, as they neared the moment of triumph overreach and are thrown down by an outraged population and we live happily ever after in a land of liberty with low taxes and regulation... for a time until a new generation must learn the same lessons again, that Freedom ain't Free and that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
> Since Microsoft would have to keep supplying patches to XP, there will be no reason
> to even think about installing Windows 7.
It gets even better. If they ship an XP compatibility layer in 7 it tells everyone that XP apps will be a supported option for the lifetime of Windows 7. And if XP is kept alive in this way, ya you are probably right that patches for XP itself will probably be continued for quite some time, especially since they are going to be selling newly licensed copies at least as late as this Xmas.
However it is the follow on effects of a promise that XP will be a viable platform to run applications in for at least the next 5-7 years. It makes XP the safe choice of API to write new code to. An XP compatible application will run on XP, Windows 7 and via CodeWeavers increasingly effective efforts (as the XP target has remainied basically stable for years) it means an XP application can run at native speed on Mac and Linux. And it doesn't take that much effort to write XP apps that will run on 7 anyway without needing the emulation layer so 7 compatible XP code is going to be a more universal binary than Java ever achieved in the real world.
If Microsoft isn't careful with this XP on 7 plan they could Warp themselves.