You're the one who keeps banging his head against the brick wall, not me.
I am quite confident that international war crimes tribunals will find Negroponte guilty. They will laugh at any argument that all the death squads were coincidental.
There was no proof that Joe Capone was a gangster chieftain (he was convicted on tax evasion, believe it or not).
And yes, there is no proof that John Negroponte was behind the death squads in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Iraq. But isn't it amazing that the killing fields appear wherever he shows up? If you think that is still a coincidence, fine. I think he's evil.
Remember, the death squads always follow Negroponte's appearance on the scene. Always! That is more than enough coincidence for a strong suspicion. Police routinely arrest people on far less. Negroponte should have been tried long ago by a war crimes tribunal.
Proof is a different matter, but I am willing to bet that Negroponte will be found guilty by an impartial international court. The evil coincidences are just too strong to ignore.
By it's very definition, it can be called a coincidence until there is more than simple causal connections.
Tell that to the military then. As they say, "three times is enemy action". When death squads appear wherever Negroponte shows up, without exception, a reasonable conclusion -- not ironclad proof mind you, just a reasonable conclusion -- is that one is a consequence of the other.
And then linking two people together simply by an accident of birth takes it just beyond conspiracy theory in my opinion.
Yeah, you're probably one of those who believe George W. Bush earned his presidency by merit, not because he was the son of George H. W. Bush.
Wherever Negroponte went, there were death squads. You can call it coincidence if you want. But remember the following military maxim: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the OLPC project, has a brother named John Negroponte. Yes, that Negroponte: the current Deputy Secretary of State. So it's probably not surprising that the OLPC project is now under Microsoft's thumb: the huge octopus in Redmond has a lot of tentacles inside the Bush administration; this political influence was probably how Microsoft escaped being seriously punished after losing the anti-trust case.
By the way, John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras in 1981-85, and to Iraq in 2004-5. We started hearing about death squads in both countries not long after his appointment. Death squads started appearing in El Salvador and Guatemala at about the same time as Negroponte's stint in Honduras. There is no proof that he was the instigator of the death squads, but I would not be surprised to learn that he was the evil force behind them, not surprised at all.
So Nicholas Negroponte has some heavy political connections, not all of which are entirely savory.
This looks like another trivial patent. Whatever happened to the old "non-obvious" test for patentability?
Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management.
At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there.
Thats not the way it happened. It is just the story that Chavez tells the world, apparently you bought it.
Yeah, the whole world must have dreamt up George Bush's instant recognition of the new Pedro Carmona government. The world must have continued to see fantasies; there weren't really any massive popular pro-Chavez demonstrations throughout Venezuela in the days after the coup. And Chavez did not really return, forcing Bush to recognize him again. All of that did not really happen. Our eyes were lying to us, right?
Yet you don't see scientists going around saying maybee to gravity do you?
You're guilty of binary thinking. A theory doesn't have to be wholly true in order to be useful, as long as it's not wholly false. You rarely have clear choices between perfect black and perfect white; there is always some grey.
Scientists do go around saying "maybe" about gravity. The "maybe" is implied, and is rarely made explicit in scientific discourse, because everything in science is only provisionally accepted. You can overturn even the theory of gravity if your evidence is solid enough. But that counter-evidence had better be ironclad, because Newton's law of gravitation as modified by Einstein is very strongly supported by huge amounts of evidence; the theory is considered something like 99.999% likely to be true. The "maybe" is never totally gone, but it is probably less than 0.0001% in the case of gravity.
where I am people are not going to leave even if gas prices go up to $10/liter.
You're saying that people won't leave your area even when gas prices reach $38 per gallon, and your fill-ups start costing $3000 per month? (I'm assuming four refills of a 20-gallon tank.)
there is NO way that the present $4+ is $1.50 plus $2.50 risk premium because of Iraq.
Actually, the invasion of Iraq is probably one of the main causes of the current (prematurely) high price of gas. The reason is that Iraq's oil production is still far below what it was pre-invasion. If Iraq's oil producers had not been damaged, they would have comfortably absorbed the new demand from China and India, and the price of gas would have stayed reasonable. So you can thank Bush's "all guns and no brains" policies for the current pain at the gas pumps.
blah blah blah, I couldn't care less about point of anyone who wants me to give up my private car and take a bus or any other shared public transit.
No problem. Feel free to stay right where you are.
However, as the cost of commuting goes higher and higher, the rest of us will move back to the city. Eventually, all the roads in your area will start decaying due to lack of maintenance, because those of us in the central city -- who by then will be by far the bulk of the population of the metro area -- will refuse to subsidize your lifestyle. You will be stuck out there, all by yourself, unable to travel anywhere because most of the roads are useless. Enjoy your freedom.
Don't underestimate the economic power of a fascist country, and China is one.
China is far more complicated than you can imagine. It is both fascist and non-fascist. Do you know that elections have been running there for more than a decade now, at the village level? In other words, the majority of the population in China is already democratic.
A successful company is a gestalt of different people with different skills doing what they do best.
True, but in a high-technology company, the technical people need to be on top. The CEO does not absolutely have to be a true engineer but he needs to understand the technology thoroughly. As evidence, notice that Intel and Microsoft both follow this recipe. And IBM nearly died when its CEO was a Air Force fighter jock (John Akers) and recovered when an engineer took charge (Lou Gerstner).
In all fairness, libertarianism has never been tried (anarchy has, but that's different because it lacks the rule of law)
"Rule of law"? How do you propose to enact the "rule" part in a libertarian society? Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between proclaiming some laws and enforcing them. If you have some enforcement mechanism, it can turn on you, and we are right back to where we started the conversation.
All libertarians want is the freedom to do as they please to the extent that it does not cause direct harm to others. Is that really so much to ask?
That may actually be too much to ask -- if want all that freedom and you want it to last. Basically, what I'm saying is that you are dreaming if you think you will have that much freedom and the thugs will not abuse it.
Believe it or not, libertarianism shares many features with communism (which by the way is not socialism). For example, both libertarianism and communism give the people nearly total freedom. And both are dreamily impractical.
This conversation has been interesting, but we must end it now. Overwhelming evidence and good hard sense cannot beat religion -- whether that religion is called libertarianism or communism.
The problem is people such as yourself who are unwilling to trust other people and hold a very negative opinion of them. Believing that people will mostly keep their heads down and pay a protection fee is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I have practically all of history on my side. People have paid protection fees (taxes) to their local thugs and kept their heads down; that's how monarchies came to be.
Faith by itself is not enough when you are creating a civilization; you have to be realistic. You have to worry about what might go wrong and build in safeguards. The communists like Bakunin were just as idealistic as you are, but they failed to guard against people like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Result: total disaster.
What you've got to understand is that there is no system of government that will give you the protection you seek.
No system is perfect, but some are better than others. Because of its tendency to crumble into feudalism or fascism, libertarianism is not one of the better systems.
(Though, to be fair, we can probably pretty much count on it now.)
Maybe not.
Most of the people we incarcerated in Guantanamo might not have been our enemies, but after 6 years of being tortured they sure hate us now. That may have been what pluther meant.
I don't know how this is relevant to a discussion of libertarianism, since [the Third World] governments are primarily kleptocracies.
Precisely. A libertarian society would concentrate wealth at the top. These fortunate few would inevitably be kleptocratic. Because wealth is power, they would be driven by fear of each other to acquire as much wealth as possible, stealing it if necessary. Private charity from the rich -- the only people who might contribute enough to matter -- dies quickly.
Constant vigilance and the willingness to sacrifice our comforts and potentially our lives is the only way we can live in a free society.
That is what would be required to sustain a libertarian society. This is why libertarianism cannot last, because very few people are willing to risk their lives.
But if you were just fighting some organized mob, you have some hope of overpowering it (after all, the mob needs you more than you need it).
What if the mob were smart enough to keep a light presence until it grew too large to fight? As I wrote in my other response, if the mob charged only a small protection fee, how many people would bother to fight it initially? If 5 million people paid $200 a year, the mob would have an annual income of $1 billion. With that kind of revenue, they would grow exponentially. They would quickly became too strong for any rag-tag militia to fight.
In the end, if just comes down to faith. Faith that you can depend on your fellow man to help you when you are in need.
I admire your faith, but I know that people are mostly selfish and cowardly. Faith is not enough. Any successful civilization must have muscle -- and then you are faced with the difficult problem of keeping that muscle under control.
People need to come together to counter these threats. Criminal gangs are always dependent on the people they victimize. The power is in the hands of the people who actually do the work.
That is theoretically true. In practice, however, if the choice is between paying a small "protection fee" to the local gangsters and being kneecapped, how do you think most people would choose?
We could easily form voluntary militias that would be more powerful than any criminal organization.
I dispute the "more powerful part". A few would join the kind of voluntary militia you envision, but people of that sort are rare. In a sustained conflict the militia will lose because the overwhelming majority of people (like 99%) would pay their small protection fees and keep their heads down, thereby funding the gang and making it stronger. This would be even more true if the gangsters controlled the media.
(Please don't bring up the American Revolution. The rebels were able to win only because Britain had to fight three simultaneous warsagainst France, Spain, and the American rebels. Consequently, British Army strength in America was never more than 12,000. The Brits, distracted by other wars, could only lose in America.)
There is not reason a libertarian country couldn't have exactly the same safeguards. It all depends how these security organizations would be set up and managed.
If they are organized, they have power. How can you prevent them from turning on you? You can't just wave a magic wand and make it so. Do you see how difficult the problem is? The Romans couldn't solve it; neither could the framers of the Constitution.
How can the ends justify the means? Why form a state-sponsored armed mob to deny us our freedoms and our property, when there are so many willing free agents chomping at the bit to do the same.
That is the crux of the problem. You need an "armed mob" for protection -- but how do you prevent that mob from turning against you? Worse, how do you prevent that mob from merging with other mobs and becoming ever more powerful? How do you stop the monster from becoming strong enough to take over the country? History has many, many examples of violent takeover.
As the Romans liked to say, the fundamental problem of society is quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians?
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I am quite confident that international war crimes tribunals will find Negroponte guilty. They will laugh at any argument that all the death squads were coincidental.
Feel free to keep banging your head against the same brick wall. You probably think it's only coincidence that your head is hurting.
And yes, there is no proof that John Negroponte was behind the death squads in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Iraq. But isn't it amazing that the killing fields appear wherever he shows up? If you think that is still a coincidence, fine. I think he's evil.
Proof is a different matter, but I am willing to bet that Negroponte will be found guilty by an impartial international court. The evil coincidences are just too strong to ignore.
Tell that to the military then. As they say, "three times is enemy action". When death squads appear wherever Negroponte shows up, without exception, a reasonable conclusion -- not ironclad proof mind you, just a reasonable conclusion -- is that one is a consequence of the other.
And then linking two people together simply by an accident of birth takes it just beyond conspiracy theory in my opinion.
Yeah, you're probably one of those who believe George W. Bush earned his presidency by merit, not because he was the son of George H. W. Bush.
Wherever Negroponte went, there were death squads. You can call it coincidence if you want. But remember the following military maxim: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.
By the way, John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras in 1981-85, and to Iraq in 2004-5. We started hearing about death squads in both countries not long after his appointment. Death squads started appearing in El Salvador and Guatemala at about the same time as Negroponte's stint in Honduras. There is no proof that he was the instigator of the death squads, but I would not be surprised to learn that he was the evil force behind them, not surprised at all.
So Nicholas Negroponte has some heavy political connections, not all of which are entirely savory.
Here is one way to fix the problem: let the Patent Office be heavily penalized for every patent overturned by the courts. If the Office goes bankrupt as a result of its own negligence, too bad, let it die. Congress can always start a new Office with completely different management.
At the moment, the Patent Office is too unaccountable; there is little penalty for doing shoddy work. The threat of bankruptcy might concentrate a few minds over there.
Yeah, the whole world must have dreamt up George Bush's instant recognition of the new Pedro Carmona government. The world must have continued to see fantasies; there weren't really any massive popular pro-Chavez demonstrations throughout Venezuela in the days after the coup. And Chavez did not really return, forcing Bush to recognize him again. All of that did not really happen. Our eyes were lying to us, right?
In the movie "Godfather II", gangsters were carving up a cake decorated with a map of Cuba. This was just before the overthrow of Batista.
Fixed it for you.
You're guilty of binary thinking. A theory doesn't have to be wholly true in order to be useful, as long as it's not wholly false. You rarely have clear choices between perfect black and perfect white; there is always some grey.
Scientists do go around saying "maybe" about gravity. The "maybe" is implied, and is rarely made explicit in scientific discourse, because everything in science is only provisionally accepted. You can overturn even the theory of gravity if your evidence is solid enough. But that counter-evidence had better be ironclad, because Newton's law of gravitation as modified by Einstein is very strongly supported by huge amounts of evidence; the theory is considered something like 99.999% likely to be true. The "maybe" is never totally gone, but it is probably less than 0.0001% in the case of gravity.
You're saying that people won't leave your area even when gas prices reach $38 per gallon, and your fill-ups start costing $3000 per month? (I'm assuming four refills of a 20-gallon tank.)
You're dreaming. The migration back to the city is already starting at $1 per liter.
In any case, I would gladly buy off all that unused land if noone would need those homes anymore.
You'll also pay $millions per year yourself to keep the roads maintained? You're dreaming.
Actually, the invasion of Iraq is probably one of the main causes of the current (prematurely) high price of gas. The reason is that Iraq's oil production is still far below what it was pre-invasion. If Iraq's oil producers had not been damaged, they would have comfortably absorbed the new demand from China and India, and the price of gas would have stayed reasonable. So you can thank Bush's "all guns and no brains" policies for the current pain at the gas pumps.
No problem. Feel free to stay right where you are.
However, as the cost of commuting goes higher and higher, the rest of us will move back to the city. Eventually, all the roads in your area will start decaying due to lack of maintenance, because those of us in the central city -- who by then will be by far the bulk of the population of the metro area -- will refuse to subsidize your lifestyle. You will be stuck out there, all by yourself, unable to travel anywhere because most of the roads are useless. Enjoy your freedom.
China is far more complicated than you can imagine. It is both fascist and non-fascist. Do you know that elections have been running there for more than a decade now, at the village level? In other words, the majority of the population in China is already democratic.
True, but in a high-technology company, the technical people need to be on top. The CEO does not absolutely have to be a true engineer but he needs to understand the technology thoroughly. As evidence, notice that Intel and Microsoft both follow this recipe. And IBM nearly died when its CEO was a Air Force fighter jock (John Akers) and recovered when an engineer took charge (Lou Gerstner).
He's right!
"Rule of law"? How do you propose to enact the "rule" part in a libertarian society? Unfortunately, there is a huge difference between proclaiming some laws and enforcing them. If you have some enforcement mechanism, it can turn on you, and we are right back to where we started the conversation.
All libertarians want is the freedom to do as they please to the extent that it does not cause direct harm to others. Is that really so much to ask?
That may actually be too much to ask -- if want all that freedom and you want it to last. Basically, what I'm saying is that you are dreaming if you think you will have that much freedom and the thugs will not abuse it.
Believe it or not, libertarianism shares many features with communism (which by the way is not socialism). For example, both libertarianism and communism give the people nearly total freedom. And both are dreamily impractical.
This conversation has been interesting, but we must end it now. Overwhelming evidence and good hard sense cannot beat religion -- whether that religion is called libertarianism or communism.
It's possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I have practically all of history on my side. People have paid protection fees (taxes) to their local thugs and kept their heads down; that's how monarchies came to be.
Faith by itself is not enough when you are creating a civilization; you have to be realistic. You have to worry about what might go wrong and build in safeguards. The communists like Bakunin were just as idealistic as you are, but they failed to guard against people like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Result: total disaster.
What you've got to understand is that there is no system of government that will give you the protection you seek.
No system is perfect, but some are better than others. Because of its tendency to crumble into feudalism or fascism, libertarianism is not one of the better systems.
Precisely. A libertarian society would concentrate wealth at the top. These fortunate few would inevitably be kleptocratic. Because wealth is power, they would be driven by fear of each other to acquire as much wealth as possible, stealing it if necessary. Private charity from the rich -- the only people who might contribute enough to matter -- dies quickly.
That is what would be required to sustain a libertarian society. This is why libertarianism cannot last, because very few people are willing to risk their lives.
But if you were just fighting some organized mob, you have some hope of overpowering it (after all, the mob needs you more than you need it).
What if the mob were smart enough to keep a light presence until it grew too large to fight? As I wrote in my other response, if the mob charged only a small protection fee, how many people would bother to fight it initially? If 5 million people paid $200 a year, the mob would have an annual income of $1 billion. With that kind of revenue, they would grow exponentially. They would quickly became too strong for any rag-tag militia to fight.
In the end, if just comes down to faith. Faith that you can depend on your fellow man to help you when you are in need.
I admire your faith, but I know that people are mostly selfish and cowardly. Faith is not enough. Any successful civilization must have muscle -- and then you are faced with the difficult problem of keeping that muscle under control.
That is theoretically true. In practice, however, if the choice is between paying a small "protection fee" to the local gangsters and being kneecapped, how do you think most people would choose?
We could easily form voluntary militias that would be more powerful than any criminal organization.
I dispute the "more powerful part". A few would join the kind of voluntary militia you envision, but people of that sort are rare. In a sustained conflict the militia will lose because the overwhelming majority of people (like 99%) would pay their small protection fees and keep their heads down, thereby funding the gang and making it stronger. This would be even more true if the gangsters controlled the media.
(Please don't bring up the American Revolution. The rebels were able to win only because Britain had to fight three simultaneous warsagainst France, Spain, and the American rebels. Consequently, British Army strength in America was never more than 12,000. The Brits, distracted by other wars, could only lose in America.)
There is not reason a libertarian country couldn't have exactly the same safeguards. It all depends how these security organizations would be set up and managed.
If they are organized, they have power. How can you prevent them from turning on you? You can't just wave a magic wand and make it so. Do you see how difficult the problem is? The Romans couldn't solve it; neither could the framers of the Constitution.
How can the ends justify the means? Why form a state-sponsored armed mob to deny us our freedoms and our property, when there are so many willing free agents chomping at the bit to do the same.
That is the crux of the problem. You need an "armed mob" for protection -- but how do you prevent that mob from turning against you? Worse, how do you prevent that mob from merging with other mobs and becoming ever more powerful? How do you stop the monster from becoming strong enough to take over the country? History has many, many examples of violent takeover.
As the Romans liked to say, the fundamental problem of society is quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians?