Nobody is just assuming that; the people are making that decision on their own by leaving their previous way of life and moving to a new one (more like ours). Nobody is forcing these jobs on people. This isn't the African slave trade, in which people were captured and forced to work in jobs they didn't choose.
And that statistic about 4% population / 25% resources is ridiculous. The reason we "use" so much of the resources is because we make the most stuff, and that includes both tangible stuff and abstract stuff, like designs, technology, etc.
So what's your point? If the "sweatshop" up and leaves, does that make things better? Or do people only starve in places that have sweatshops? What did people do before sweatshops? Did they just all starve? No, they had subsistance farming. They can go back to that if they want, but it's probably not a very popular choice, because the hours are at least as long, the work is harder, and who knows when a famine will render all of that futile anyway.
You're right, I'm glad I have more choices than that. But then again, I wish I had as many choices as Bill Gates does, or even as many choices as some of my friends with higher-paying jobs do. Unfortunately, the world isn't necessarily fair. I can better myself, and get higher-paying jobs hopefully, but I have about as much chance of reaching Bill Gates' level as an Indonesian sneaker worker has of reaching mine. Unfortunately, we can't just legislate such drastic opportunities into existence.
The problem isn't that the schools are underfunded (though that is usually a problem), the problem is that the family is underfunded. Children often have to work rather than go to school so that their family can eat.
I didn't say that one has to decide between those two, and implying that takes my comment out of context. I was replying to a discussion about the relative rate of progress in America vs. the third world, and taking the position that it has been much more rapid in the third world in the past couple decades than it was during the Industrial Revolution.
Wow, there is just so much wrong with that I don't know where to start. Two points, basically:
One, overly strict working conditions, even when enforced by the military, does not constitute coersion to work. Coersion implies that the workers were forcibly made to work there, which is clearly not the case; they chose to work there.
Two, if you think the third world hates us because too many of us carry guns, you are so far out in space it may be impossible to bring you back in. In America - a lot of hicks keep shotguns in their pickups. In the third world - marauding gangs of bandits drive around robbing people with assault weapons. If you think they're worried about our gun problems, I don't even know what to tell you.
If you think the Nike "sweatshops" are in any way comparable to what passed for factories in America (and Western Europe) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you have another thing coming. While the greatest transgression that Nike has allegedly committed is not giving bathroom breaks, factories here regularly for all intents and purposes purchased orphan children and used them in the most dangerous situations because they had no one to complain on their behalf. Crushed by a coal machine vs. having to hold it too long: you decide.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
I disagree. The colonists who fought Great Britain almost unanimously became the United States, and their leaders were transformed wholesale. Now, to say that the because the French funded a bunch of colonists, they supported the Confederacy -- I think that would be a fair comparison.
And it's really not a nitpick. Letting an error like "the US supported the Taliban" go gives implicit agreement to the suggestion that the US supported this regime until it was convenient not to. That is entirely not the case.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
I wasn't making a moral judgement on who is right and who is wrong. The fact is that at one time he was fighting with our allies, and later he started fighting against us. There's no duplicity here; when he started attacking Americans abroad and then at home, he became an enemy.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
I've read a lot of Chomsky, and that's not what he's been saying.
You're right, that's not what he's saying. Another thing he's not saying is any sort of solution to any problem ever. I did not mean to imply that I was paraphrasing Chomsky, instead, I tried to give my viewpoint on what he is adding to the debate. In my opinion, that addition is just a litany of abuses the US has committed with neither the balance of the US's good deeds or any sort of solution to the problems whatsoever.
The first step is to ask the right questions. If you don't, you can't possibly hope to make an informed decision. The first question that must be asked is "Why were the crimes of Sept. 11th committed?" Only then can we hope to stop the violence.
That, IMHO, is not the way to go about it at all. While understanding the reasoning behind the organizations that committed these crimes is certainly crucial, making it our main focus risks turning the debate into a question of "What can we do to make them happy again?" Unfortunately, there is nothing that we can do to accomplish that. The main problem most Islamic terrorists have with the US is its support of Israel, and we simply cannot just drop Israel. Our support of Israel is the only thing that has ever brought the Israelis and Palestinians to the peace table, and withdrawing that support risks catastrophe far beyond assassinations of Palestinian officials and bombings of Israeli pizza shops. If we withdraw our support from Israel, do you think the Israelis will just give up, get in some boats, and try to find a country elsewhere? Hardly. The Israelis will defend themselves to the utmost - and that would likely include the use of nuclear weapons. So please do not make the mistake of thinking that just walking away from the region will make everything ok.
Bombing an already starving population ruled by an oppressive regime right before winter sets in is going to result in the deaths of millions of civilians by winter's end. Is that helping or doing harm?
Allowing a decades-long civil war -- one in which more civilians are killed per day than in the entire US bombing campaign combined: is that helping or doing harm? The fact of the matter is that the US has been in the past, is in the present, and will continue to be in the future the largest single supplier of humanitarian aid to the Afghani people. I don't remember hearing that in any of Chomsky's speeches.
Keep reading. ZNet [zmag.org]. IndyMedia [indymedia.org]. Listen to the rhetoric Bush is spouting. Take a Bush speech and replace "God" with "Allah" and "U.S." with "Islam" and you can't tell him apart from bin Laden.
Well, I haven't read ZNet, so I can't comment on that until I check it out, but IndyMedia is without a doubt one of the most irresponsible "journalistic" sites on the web. Let's not forget the incident in which they claimed that footage of Palestinians celebrating on Sept. 11th was shot in 1991, despite the fact that it contains 1995 model vehicles. As for the speeches of Bush and Bin Laden, to say they're interchangeable is beyond gross oversimplification. Even if you think that Bush is truly a terrorist in democratic garb, and that he means to rule the entire earth, his speeches are about punishing criminals and aiding the Afghan people. Bin Laden makes no such claims to generosity - he only wants to help if it involves killing Americans or Jews.
You'll notice there are a couple things to which I didn't respond; I'll try to do so later tonight if I have time. I just wanted to at least put this stuff into the debate before I left work.
Enhydra makes a database called InstantDB which is small, embedable, and Java. It's cheap, but not free. It used to be Free, and if you look around, you can find copies of the Free version around still (I'm not sure if they're maintained anymore). In reality, though, I'm not sure why you wouldn't go with hsql, which is just as good, just as embedable, and Freer. Is there something wrong with hsql that is making you look elsewhere?
Thank you for a fantastic summary of why so many naive leftists' proposals for the Middle East are wrong. The only thing that ever got Israel to the table with the Palestinians was American support - absent that, the Middle East will disappear in a puff of (possibly nuclear) smoke.
Re:Timothy McVeigh was a fundamentalist...
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
Why wasn't a war declared on the sort of organisations that McVeigh belonged to, and the sort of anti-goverment far right views that are regularly expressed on right wing talk shows ?
Actually, it was, under the Clinton adminstration, and the number of radical anti-government groups in the US severely declined.
After all what would you call someone who bombed a Red Cross depot ?
Not this again. That Red Cross building had been abandoned months ago and was being used by Taliban forces. The Red Cross itself issued a statement confirming that fact.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
Actually, that "humanitarian aid" had nothing to do with starving people. It had to do with the war on drugs. We gave a repressive regime 43 million dollars to do with what they will, because they said they would get rid of poppies, the main crop of the average Afghani.
As a poster noted below, the $43 million was given in aid (including food and medicine) through the UN and through non-governmental organizations. The US government did not write a $43 million check paid to the order of "The Taliban, Afghanistan."
As far as your three choices none of them are good. I'm not smart enough to figure out what the cure all solution is. I'm more concerned with our motives.
That's a very Chomskian viewpoint - "I don't know what to do, but what the US is doing is wrong." The problem is that by rejecting all three of those options, you reject every option. Those three options basically boil down to the three stances we could take: Friendly (send aid), Neutral (ignore), or Hostile (attack). What else could we possibly do? I am not advocating, by the way, installing a US puppet. I am advocating that the US militarily remove the Taliban from power and provide security forces while a coalition government can be formed (either by the UN or another similar organization).
Besides all that, why are we targeting Afghanistan? There are lots of other places where people are starving.
Yes, but only one of those places hosts a group that murdered 5000 US civilians.
Re:Its not just the US, its lots of others too..
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
Option 4) Work _with_ the other countries in the region, have Pakistan involved in determining the make up and format for elections (I know miltary dictator setting up a democracy), have Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria et al involved in this process.
I'm afraid that won't work. Pakistan, besides already being a military dictatorship as you previously stated, were until the threat of US military force, the Taliban's biggest backers. They (and by "they" I refer to the Pakistani government) are not interested in the peace and well-being of Afghans, they are interested only in keeping Afghanistan out of sight and out of mind. Supporting the Taliban regime was for them a way to have a government in Afghanistan they could control, and they didn't really care what they did to their people. There is nothing now to suggest that they care enough about Afghanistan to want to set up elections in that country (and provide the necessary security to keep it stable), especially when they haven't even managed to set up elections of their own.
In regards to your previous point, I think the US is being very cautious about the Northern Alliance, and does not plan to just turn over power at the end of the conflict. While I obviously don't speak for the State Department, I think their plan is to help the Northern Alliance ground troops, and then include them in a coalition government, but not necessarily have them just set up a new (and most likely unsavory) regime.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
One day, Osama is a "freedom fighter", the next day he's a terrorist.
Well, yeah. One day he's repelling a Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the next he's bombing US embassies, attacking US ships, and murdering 5000 US civilians. People don't necessarily stay the same. I don't see why our view of them should.
Re:GLOBALIZATION IS ABOUT HAVE EXPLOITING HAVE-NOT
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2, Funny
Dear, sweet Lord. Never in my most imaginative, feverish nightmares would I have dreamt that someone would actually accuse Jon Katz of being a pro-corporate shill.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
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· Score: 2
Then we need to leave all these countries all alone.
Wrong. In one of his few moments of coherence, the poster above noted that the US's immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan following the war with the USSR is one of the reasons Afghanistan has been fighting a civil war for over a decade. Your solution -- go in, get what we want, and then leave the country a bombed-out mess -- is exactly the opposite end of the spectrum from a well thought out, effective foreign policy.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2
I can't believe you would actually reply with that. That gift was in the form of humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan who are STARVING TO DEATH. I'm sure you would be the first to cry bloody murder that the US government would allow a famine to continue while it had so much extra money on its hands, but when they do, it sure makes a convenient argument against them later.
Basically, in your scenario, the US could do absolutely no right. There are, to my knowledge, three broad options the US could pursue in regards to Afghanistan:
Ignore it. Of course, this raises the cry that the US ignores people in suffering (and it would be true). Guess we can't do that.
Topple the ruling regime. This is, on the other hand, just a means to oil in the Caspian Sea, right? It has nothing to do with any sort of self-defense or humanitarian need, we just need more oil. So that's out.
Allow the Taliban to remain in power, but just send humanitarian assistance. Well, we tried that, but as you noted, that is propping up a barbaric regime. So that's no good.
So then, please enlighten me as to which of these three options is acceptable to you, or give me a fourth which I have not considered. As far as I can tell, you've ruled out every possible course of action.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's hard to take your argument seriously when it contains such glaring historical mistakes. The US did not support the Taliban against the USSR because the Taliban did not even exist at the time. Certainly some of the Afghani rebels eventually joined the Taliban, but to say we supported the Taliban is like saying that because we supported Poland during the Second World War we supported the Warsaw Pact.
Good thing I'm planning on seeing both of those movies anyway.
CmdrTaco then continued by saying,
"Then I plan to complain on slashdot that Disney, AOL-TW, and Fox -- coincidentally the companies who will be making money off Monsters, Inc., Harry Potter, and Star Wars Episode II respectively -- are using their vast monetary resources to purchase laws in the United States Congress. The irony of blasting these movie studios repeatedly on my website and then in the same breath praising and promoting their movies is apparently totally lost on me."
Well, not really. Chances are, an office environment already has a dedicated print server. If the printer isn't supported by Linux (which very few aren't anymore), that print server can always stay Windows with no problems for the rest of the network.
First of all, I think they're donating to Mozilla because it's built on Moz technology (XUL, etc.). But since it will presumably be GPL (like the rest of Mozilla), there's no reason Gnome or KDE can't use it. What does it matter if it was donated "to" them? It's GPL, Gnome/KDE are GPL, if it's good, put it in there!
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is just assuming that; the people are making that decision on their own by leaving their previous way of life and moving to a new one (more like ours). Nobody is forcing these jobs on people. This isn't the African slave trade, in which people were captured and forced to work in jobs they didn't choose.
And that statistic about 4% population / 25% resources is ridiculous. The reason we "use" so much of the resources is because we make the most stuff, and that includes both tangible stuff and abstract stuff, like designs, technology, etc.
So what's your point? If the "sweatshop" up and leaves, does that make things better? Or do people only starve in places that have sweatshops? What did people do before sweatshops? Did they just all starve? No, they had subsistance farming. They can go back to that if they want, but it's probably not a very popular choice, because the hours are at least as long, the work is harder, and who knows when a famine will render all of that futile anyway.
You're right, I'm glad I have more choices than that. But then again, I wish I had as many choices as Bill Gates does, or even as many choices as some of my friends with higher-paying jobs do. Unfortunately, the world isn't necessarily fair. I can better myself, and get higher-paying jobs hopefully, but I have about as much chance of reaching Bill Gates' level as an Indonesian sneaker worker has of reaching mine. Unfortunately, we can't just legislate such drastic opportunities into existence.
The problem isn't that the schools are underfunded (though that is usually a problem), the problem is that the family is underfunded. Children often have to work rather than go to school so that their family can eat.
I didn't say that one has to decide between those two, and implying that takes my comment out of context. I was replying to a discussion about the relative rate of progress in America vs. the third world, and taking the position that it has been much more rapid in the third world in the past couple decades than it was during the Industrial Revolution.
Wow, there is just so much wrong with that I don't know where to start. Two points, basically:
One, overly strict working conditions, even when enforced by the military, does not constitute coersion to work. Coersion implies that the workers were forcibly made to work there, which is clearly not the case; they chose to work there.
Two, if you think the third world hates us because too many of us carry guns, you are so far out in space it may be impossible to bring you back in. In America - a lot of hicks keep shotguns in their pickups. In the third world - marauding gangs of bandits drive around robbing people with assault weapons. If you think they're worried about our gun problems, I don't even know what to tell you.
When Nike's private army starts abducting workers from their homes at gunpoint, your analogy will be accurate.
If you think the Nike "sweatshops" are in any way comparable to what passed for factories in America (and Western Europe) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you have another thing coming. While the greatest transgression that Nike has allegedly committed is not giving bathroom breaks, factories here regularly for all intents and purposes purchased orphan children and used them in the most dangerous situations because they had no one to complain on their behalf. Crushed by a coal machine vs. having to hold it too long: you decide.
I disagree. The colonists who fought Great Britain almost unanimously became the United States, and their leaders were transformed wholesale. Now, to say that the because the French funded a bunch of colonists, they supported the Confederacy -- I think that would be a fair comparison.
And it's really not a nitpick. Letting an error like "the US supported the Taliban" go gives implicit agreement to the suggestion that the US supported this regime until it was convenient not to. That is entirely not the case.
I wasn't making a moral judgement on who is right and who is wrong. The fact is that at one time he was fighting with our allies, and later he started fighting against us. There's no duplicity here; when he started attacking Americans abroad and then at home, he became an enemy.
You're right, that's not what he's saying. Another thing he's not saying is any sort of solution to any problem ever. I did not mean to imply that I was paraphrasing Chomsky, instead, I tried to give my viewpoint on what he is adding to the debate. In my opinion, that addition is just a litany of abuses the US has committed with neither the balance of the US's good deeds or any sort of solution to the problems whatsoever.
That, IMHO, is not the way to go about it at all. While understanding the reasoning behind the organizations that committed these crimes is certainly crucial, making it our main focus risks turning the debate into a question of "What can we do to make them happy again?" Unfortunately, there is nothing that we can do to accomplish that. The main problem most Islamic terrorists have with the US is its support of Israel, and we simply cannot just drop Israel. Our support of Israel is the only thing that has ever brought the Israelis and Palestinians to the peace table, and withdrawing that support risks catastrophe far beyond assassinations of Palestinian officials and bombings of Israeli pizza shops. If we withdraw our support from Israel, do you think the Israelis will just give up, get in some boats, and try to find a country elsewhere? Hardly. The Israelis will defend themselves to the utmost - and that would likely include the use of nuclear weapons. So please do not make the mistake of thinking that just walking away from the region will make everything ok.
Allowing a decades-long civil war -- one in which more civilians are killed per day than in the entire US bombing campaign combined: is that helping or doing harm? The fact of the matter is that the US has been in the past, is in the present, and will continue to be in the future the largest single supplier of humanitarian aid to the Afghani people. I don't remember hearing that in any of Chomsky's speeches.
Well, I haven't read ZNet, so I can't comment on that until I check it out, but IndyMedia is without a doubt one of the most irresponsible "journalistic" sites on the web. Let's not forget the incident in which they claimed that footage of Palestinians celebrating on Sept. 11th was shot in 1991, despite the fact that it contains 1995 model vehicles. As for the speeches of Bush and Bin Laden, to say they're interchangeable is beyond gross oversimplification. Even if you think that Bush is truly a terrorist in democratic garb, and that he means to rule the entire earth, his speeches are about punishing criminals and aiding the Afghan people. Bin Laden makes no such claims to generosity - he only wants to help if it involves killing Americans or Jews.
You'll notice there are a couple things to which I didn't respond; I'll try to do so later tonight if I have time. I just wanted to at least put this stuff into the debate before I left work.
Enhydra makes a database called
InstantDB which is small, embedable, and Java. It's cheap, but not free. It used to be Free, and if you look around, you can find copies of the Free version around still (I'm not sure if they're maintained anymore). In reality, though, I'm not sure why you wouldn't go with hsql, which is just as good, just as embedable, and Freer. Is there something wrong with hsql that is making you look elsewhere?
Dude, you just blasted a school for sucking at football and you're from Texas?! Hello pot, I'd like you to meet kettle...
;-)
Thank you for a fantastic summary of why so many naive leftists' proposals for the Middle East are wrong. The only thing that ever got Israel to the table with the Palestinians was American support - absent that, the Middle East will disappear in a puff of (possibly nuclear) smoke.
Actually, it was, under the Clinton adminstration, and the number of radical anti-government groups in the US severely declined.
Not this again. That Red Cross building had been abandoned months ago and was being used by Taliban forces. The Red Cross itself issued a statement confirming that fact.
As a poster noted below, the $43 million was given in aid (including food and medicine) through the UN and through non-governmental organizations. The US government did not write a $43 million check paid to the order of "The Taliban, Afghanistan."
That's a very Chomskian viewpoint - "I don't know what to do, but what the US is doing is wrong." The problem is that by rejecting all three of those options, you reject every option. Those three options basically boil down to the three stances we could take: Friendly (send aid), Neutral (ignore), or Hostile (attack). What else could we possibly do? I am not advocating, by the way, installing a US puppet. I am advocating that the US militarily remove the Taliban from power and provide security forces while a coalition government can be formed (either by the UN or another similar organization).
Yes, but only one of those places hosts a group that murdered 5000 US civilians.
I'm afraid that won't work. Pakistan, besides already being a military dictatorship as you previously stated, were until the threat of US military force, the Taliban's biggest backers. They (and by "they" I refer to the Pakistani government) are not interested in the peace and well-being of Afghans, they are interested only in keeping Afghanistan out of sight and out of mind. Supporting the Taliban regime was for them a way to have a government in Afghanistan they could control, and they didn't really care what they did to their people. There is nothing now to suggest that they care enough about Afghanistan to want to set up elections in that country (and provide the necessary security to keep it stable), especially when they haven't even managed to set up elections of their own.
In regards to your previous point, I think the US is being very cautious about the Northern Alliance, and does not plan to just turn over power at the end of the conflict. While I obviously don't speak for the State Department, I think their plan is to help the Northern Alliance ground troops, and then include them in a coalition government, but not necessarily have them just set up a new (and most likely unsavory) regime.
Well, yeah. One day he's repelling a Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the next he's bombing US embassies, attacking US ships, and murdering 5000 US civilians. People don't necessarily stay the same. I don't see why our view of them should.
Dear, sweet Lord. Never in my most imaginative, feverish nightmares would I have dreamt that someone would actually accuse Jon Katz of being a pro-corporate shill.
Wrong. In one of his few moments of coherence, the poster above noted that the US's immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan following the war with the USSR is one of the reasons Afghanistan has been fighting a civil war for over a decade. Your solution -- go in, get what we want, and then leave the country a bombed-out mess -- is exactly the opposite end of the spectrum from a well thought out, effective foreign policy.
I can't believe you would actually reply with that. That gift was in the form of humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan who are STARVING TO DEATH. I'm sure you would be the first to cry bloody murder that the US government would allow a famine to continue while it had so much extra money on its hands, but when they do, it sure makes a convenient argument against them later.
Basically, in your scenario, the US could do absolutely no right. There are, to my knowledge, three broad options the US could pursue in regards to Afghanistan:
So then, please enlighten me as to which of these three options is acceptable to you, or give me a fourth which I have not considered. As far as I can tell, you've ruled out every possible course of action.
It's hard to take your argument seriously when it contains such glaring historical mistakes. The US did not support the Taliban against the USSR because the Taliban did not even exist at the time. Certainly some of the Afghani rebels eventually joined the Taliban, but to say we supported the Taliban is like saying that because we supported Poland during the Second World War we supported the Warsaw Pact.
Yeah. If the Phantom Menace were open-sourced we'd have to dump everything and start again, Mozilla-style.
CmdrTaco then continued by saying,
Well, not really. Chances are, an office environment already has a dedicated print server. If the printer isn't supported by Linux (which very few aren't anymore), that print server can always stay Windows with no problems for the rest of the network.
First of all, I think they're donating to Mozilla because it's built on Moz technology (XUL, etc.). But since it will presumably be GPL (like the rest of Mozilla), there's no reason Gnome or KDE can't use it. What does it matter if it was donated "to" them? It's GPL, Gnome/KDE are GPL, if it's good, put it in there!