Nonsense. Arkhan's point and the aptness of the example were both precise. The notions of "fair use" and "copyright violation" are unreasonably vague and indeterminate. Even your assumption that Slashdot=person has taken years of US appellate work to settle, and many people still think this needs further work.
I've been reading the comments and metamoderating on this thread. Fully 50% of the stuff here is wholly ignorant, and another 45% is doctrinaire horse manure being peddled by one of the two major party candidates or LOLbertarians. All I can say is: This is a serious discussion?! We're in a lot worse shape than I thought.
Yep. It's a "balance of powers" issue. As you put it, "any government tinkering with the free markets requires some thoughtful regulation to counter balance it." Government regulators given a free hand over any market will stomp the living crap out of it (the Soviet Union being the paradigm case). Private entrepreneurs given a free hand will poison the public and rob them blind. Got to be some middle ground, or everybody loses sooner or later.
My point is: Our success at this business+government stuff may be "spotty", as you say. But we don't have much choice. No way business and government can operate independently (as most Lolbertarians I've met seem to think).
I agree with your conclusion, but your reading of both the articles you cite in your last two posts seems to me excessively partisan.
In debunking the Glass-Steagall deregulation as the sole cause of the crisis, the factcheck.org post didn't just dismiss Phil Gramm's alleged contribution to this collapse. It also quoted Bob Kuttner pointing to "several bouts of deregulation going back to the 70s" as the real cause of this crisis. The other, third-hand Bloomberg quote (Greenspan --> WSJ --> Bloomberg) didn't actually say "Fannie and Freddie are" the "flawed model". The quote as presented was that the crisis as a whole represented an opportunity to challenge a flawed model, without specifying what the model was. The article as a whole then goes on to summarize Greenspan as saying that speculative frenzies in deregulated quasi-governmental authorities were one principal cause. The "flawed model", to Greenspan, is "privatizing profits" by maintaining Fannie/Freddie a shareholder organization and "socializing losses" by attempting to keep shareholders whole at public expense. That's very clear from the full context: as the Bloomberg reporter notes, Greenspan advocates nationalizing Fannie and Freddie and wiping out the shareholders.
Why not simply accept the fact that Greenspan is telling us that deregulation was the cause of this? He may be wrong about that, but we actually need to listen to him, since it's clearly a hard-won knowledge. This is the man who has been a deregulation advocate for his entire, lengthy career. And he's saying he was wrong. It's not a political thing; as factcheck noted, both parties voted to deregulate over the last 30 years. It just didn't work the way he hoped it would, and he said so.
Finally: We need to learn something from this, because quasi-governmental authorities like Fannie and Freddie just aren't going away. We've been using them since before the Depression to do capital formation for really huge undertakings, from a stable mortgage market (Fannie & Freddie) to turning an entire landscape into a titanic economic engine (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). That isn't going to -- and shouldn't -- stop. There's no other good way to make projects like that happen. As investments, they're too huge, risky and marginally profitable to interest private capital, and too rewarding to private interests to be 100% taxpayer-funded. But if we're going to mix public and private interests that way, somebody has to be watching out for the public interest at least as strongly as private interests. And that means regulation.
I'd say somebody in the Lake Country Republican party has:
1. Gender confusion
2. A need to have voter registration fraud vs. voter fraud explained to her/him/it.
3. The expectation of a really interesting experience on the day Princess the Goldfish shows up and requests a ballot.
Don't you think this Republican meme has passed its sell-by date?
Ah, such hurt feelings. There, there. You got to call me "dolt" and "idiot" and I just called you "genius". Doesn't that feel better?
Actually, genius, no, I don't win. Apparently I have to continue sharing my nation with lots of people -- alleged academics, even -- who are either liars or so powerfully biased they're willing to toss logic out the window to serve a partisan end. That's pretty much a loss all around.
Of course, I should expect that. In America, even supposed "conservative intellectuals" George Will get paid to utter biased crap like this: George Will Explains the Colin Powell Endorsement. But hey, I'm partisan! Don't believe anything I say.
Ah, thanks, now it's all clear! Your concern is solely for the perceived value -- the reputation -- of the institutions (the Nobel Committee, the MPAS Academy, the people who gave a Grammy to the Dixie Chicks, etc.) granting these forms of recognition to workers in various fields. And naturally, any time such an institution recognizes a known anti-Bush partisan for his or her work, those institutions risk impairment of their reputations because:
A) After all, everyone knows there is a massive partisan conspiracy on the part of Bush critics to attack this wildly popular president every and any way they can. These people are fanatical and will stop at nothing to destroy him. (Al Gore, in particular, has never stopped talking for a second about how the 2000 election was stolen, which is why nobody takes him seriously on stuff like global warming. And of course, the IAEA...they were completely wrong about there being no WMD in Iraq, and just having them around is such an insult to Bush.)
B) Some pack of well-intentioned, impartial conservatives might attribute the fact that the award was made at all to this well-known, massive, partisan anti-Bush conspiracy, acting behind the scenes at the institution to ensure that the award was made. And of course, there is no defence against such a suspicion of, as you put it, "apparent alleged political motivations behind the awarding" (nice string of modifiers there, BTW!).
So your concern is that these institutions stop giving awards to known anti-Bush partisans. And if they should find that impossible, then they need to at least not acknowledge the fact that the awardee is an anti-Bush partisan. Those receiving the awards, and anyone who thinks they deserved the award, should these unmentionable topics too. Because it's, you know, embarrassing. Of course, it's not really you that's embarrassed. It's those institutions and those receiving the awards. They're embarrassed. If you're embarrassed at all, it's because you're embarrassed for them.
So does that about sum it up? If so, I have one last question: Does the phrase "concern troll" mean anything to you?
I haven't exaggerated a bloody thing. Your quotes are your quotes, and they clearly imply that Krugman's political opinions discredit him, if not his work:
Playing up his anti-Bush sentiment only serves to diminish the value of this award.
In what universe? How does acknowledging Krugman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? How does pointing to Friedman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? If both men won their awards fair and square, based on peer judgement of the worth of each man's work as a useful finding or theoretical instrument, how would the value of an award recognizing the value of that work be diminished by pointing to the man's political opinions? If your point is that nothing outside the work itself has any effect on the value of that work, then the value of awards recognizing that work can neither be enhanced nor diminished by information about things like their political opinions. It would be incoherent to do so; like saying Robert Reich was a terrible Treasury official because he is physically almost a dwarf, or that Don Rumsfeld was a great Secretary of Defense because his jokes were funny and he stood at his desk all day.
IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee.
Krugman hasn't been stupid enough to claim he got the award for political reasons, and neither have I. It would be especially stupid to do so given that Friedman, whose political opinions couldn't be more different from Krugman's, has won the same award.
As it happens, however, Krugman is on record (in "Conscience of a Liberal") that his political opinions are outgrowths of his understanding of economics. Friedman has said essentially the same thing in some work of his I've forgotten. Both men clearly think their work and their politics are connected. Why is it therefore out of bounds to accept them at their word and criticize or praise these men -- not their awards, or the work itself -- based on what they claim are the political implications of their work?
But he doesn't need to, because in his prior life as an full-time economist he did work that was genuinely worthy of recognition.
Another idiotic remark. Krugman hasn't stopped working. What, Krugman stopped being a "full-time" economist when he started teaching at Princeton? How about after he started writing for Slate? Was it the Times columns? What, precisely, constitutes a "full-time economist" in your world?
I've spoken with several conservative economists who admire that work, even as they wondered "what happened to him?"
Your statement here is argumentative to say the least. So the fact that conservative economists respect Krugman's research work in spite of Krugman's politics somehow legitimizes that work? That if he were releasing more of this work and doing fewer Times columns, he would be even more "worthy"? I thought you were arguing that politics has nothing to do with the worth of the work? Friedman's work is also admired by some liberal economists. The Friedmanites I've read couldn't care less. These idiots and their work don't constitute a canon, and they are arbiters of nothing. The additional "while wondering 'What happened to him?'" is particularly egregious. Why even bring that up, if you're not trying to argue that Krugman's political opinions are indeed somehow "fringe" and discredit him?
You know, I don't think I've deliberately misread you. I appreciate that you think Krugman deserved his award, and I certainly agree. But you lard the pig with all this additional stuff about politics and I don't think that was accidental.
If you want to dismiss me as an dolt, be my guest. The feeling is certainly mutual. Your original statement is illogical, incoherent, and if not obviously tendentious in the ways I've
Yes, and learning how to *employ* words in the interest of clarity *even more important*! Something about which you seem never to have been instructed!
You're the same sort of hopeless idiot who thinks nobody attacked Friedman Nobel on the same basis.
I didn't pick ANY of them. YOU picked every last one. I merely responded.
Bullshit. Your response was to cherry-pick among the ones I listed.
Pick ANY statement I've made here...It's all verified easily.
Shall we start with your alleged location "near" San Francisco and your base-contractor employment and your acquaintance with many Iraq vets? All perfectly verifiable, right?
So much so that you (ironically) see *me* (PBS-watching, heavily Dem. voting, etc.) as far right-wing...Your head just might explode if you ever met a Fox News and AM talk-radio addict.
No sale. I run into faux Dem trolls like you all day long. Along with plenty of Bill O'Lielly "moderates" and the usual Limbrains. You're running very true to type. The accusation of "baseless personal attacks" when your utter lack of facts or sense is pointed to and laughed it is a classic response pattern.
This fools no one. Your non-partisanship is mostly up your ass, like your "corrections" to my facts. You've selected a tiny portion of the crimes Bush has committed against this country and excused every last one of them with a pack of unverifiable and unsuppported assertions. You're as partisan on the right as I am on the left.
"Iraq is working out nicely now"? Suggest you try that particular idiot remark out on some Iraq veterans, or the Iraqis themselves.
"An open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place"? Please do me a favor and stand in Union Square and explain that idiotic theory to San Franciscans after the next major earthquake. They'll have some fun hanging you from the nearest lampost and beating your corpse to a pulp.
"You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all." Who, precisely, are you kidding with that bullshit? There's nothing here but a defence of the last 8 years and the Bush Regime.
And this crap is +5? I'm sorry, but if you're sincere about this, you clearly think politics doesn't actually have any meaningful impact on real events. And if that's so, you're really too stupid to waste any more time on. Bye.
Oh piffle. What else are you trying to do with your opening remark but imply that Krugman's anti-Bush stance is somehow fringe and laughable? Here's your opening remark:
Playing up his anti-Bush sentiment only serves to diminish the value of this award. IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee.
On the contrary: His anti-Bush sentiment demonstrates that he's been paying attention.
The hard core left-wing crowd that mindlessly bash everything from the right is just as bad, and, at least appear to be, far more numerous. There are good ideas and bad ideas on both sides. But picking the good from the bad requires the kind of intelligent discussion of policy issues we haven't seen here in some time. Of course if you're buying into the political party nonsense, it's easy to think that everyone on the other side of an issue are drooling morons, while your side is always right...
Ah. I suppose we can now expect the Left in the US to be treated with some respect, then? Forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for it.
All you have to do to realize that the Right is far more numerous than the Left on Slashdot is to look at the comments and moderation on this very thread. Right at the top is a +5 "Insightful" comment deriding Krugman as some kind of fringe crackpot because he is very critical of the Bush Regime. This is an attitude he shares with fully 80% of the US public, by the way. But no matter. If you do happen to be aware of the fact that most of America hates this President, there are still plenty of other comments to amuse yourself with, including some that actually pretend that Krugman's professional work is completely wrong, and others that pretend Krugman wasn't *actually* awarded a nobel at all. All modded fairly high, so they're easy to find.
As for there being good ideas on the Right side: I'm sorry, but the Right have had absolutely everything their own way in the United States for most of this decade (including a mostly supine Democratic congress since 2006). So we really don't need to waste a lot of time discussing the verity of the Right's policy "ideas". We can judge them empirically. And the experimental results are these: The country is losing two wars, we are hated even by our allies, our enemies (like Russia) demonstrate their contempt for us in ways we do not dare answer, the size of the national debt has tripled, millions of people are losing their homes, a mid-sized American city was wiped out by a natural disaster and left to rot, unemployment is at its highest in five years, the economy as a whole is in free fall, and the Executive violates essential constitutional rights regularly and with impunity. And I'm sure all of that has the same explanation unrepentant Stalinists offer for the fall of the Soviet Union: "But you never really tried our [conservative/communist/pick your ideology] ideas at all!"
You know, I'd like to treat your comment with more respect, since it is at least possible that you're sincere in your belief that there is some sort of equivalence of intellectual or moral tone between the US Right and Left wings. But after 8 years of Bush, the multiple disasters his misrule has brought on us as a people, and the sneering and libels the Right have applied to the Left throughout, having to listen to further levels of denial and intellectual dishonesty like this really make it very difficult to do anything but laugh.
You know, I haven't visited Slashdot in a couple of weeks, and it seems like the comment stupidity level here (not to mention in the moderation) is getting extremely high. Just a few more Bush Regime diehards, and Slashdot comments will achieve the "Catchment Basin for Subnormals" level observable at YouTube.
"Brilliant economist, that Krugman. But being anti-Bush means he's a Flat Earth Black Helicopter nutjob."
In addition to +5 insightful, that's pretty hilarious. In case you hadn't noticed, genius, being Anti-Bush is now the majority opinion in the USA (not to mention most of the world), and has been for some time.
Oh I see, so it's still the *government's* fault that this private company completely screwed up really basic requirements for handling sensitive information. Like freaking encrypting it, for chrissakes. No, *government* picked the wrong company, because *government* is so completely stupid and corrupt. QED.
Point #1 is a perfectly legitimate contract parameter; if they *didn't* go for the lowest price, all of the Free-Market Faithful like you would go ballistic. Point #2 is ignorant nonsense: Most of the people letting contracts and overseeing them in government agencies, not excepting TSA, are career civl servants who are neither politicians nor political appointees, and have no "campaign" to benefit from contractor contributions. Your point #3 is perfectly correct for corrupt civil servants. Now prove to me that there are more corrupt government officials letting contracts than corrupt corporate officers with the same power.
Slashdot Mirror
Pwned :-)
Nonsense. Arkhan's point and the aptness of the example were both precise. The notions of "fair use" and "copyright violation" are unreasonably vague and indeterminate. Even your assumption that Slashdot=person has taken years of US appellate work to settle, and many people still think this needs further work.
Precisely correct. Thank you, Arkhan.
Oh for pity's sake. Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and as right-wing as it gets. If he's calling himself a Democrat now, he's also a liar.
I've been reading the comments and metamoderating on this thread. Fully 50% of the stuff here is wholly ignorant, and another 45% is doctrinaire horse manure being peddled by one of the two major party candidates or LOLbertarians. All I can say is: This is a serious discussion?! We're in a lot worse shape than I thought.
Yep. It's a "balance of powers" issue. As you put it, "any government tinkering with the free markets requires some thoughtful regulation to counter balance it." Government regulators given a free hand over any market will stomp the living crap out of it (the Soviet Union being the paradigm case). Private entrepreneurs given a free hand will poison the public and rob them blind. Got to be some middle ground, or everybody loses sooner or later. My point is: Our success at this business+government stuff may be "spotty", as you say. But we don't have much choice. No way business and government can operate independently (as most Lolbertarians I've met seem to think).
I agree with your conclusion, but your reading of both the articles you cite in your last two posts seems to me excessively partisan.
In debunking the Glass-Steagall deregulation as the sole cause of the crisis, the factcheck.org post didn't just dismiss Phil Gramm's alleged contribution to this collapse. It also quoted Bob Kuttner pointing to "several bouts of deregulation going back to the 70s" as the real cause of this crisis. The other, third-hand Bloomberg quote (Greenspan --> WSJ --> Bloomberg) didn't actually say "Fannie and Freddie are" the "flawed model". The quote as presented was that the crisis as a whole represented an opportunity to challenge a flawed model, without specifying what the model was. The article as a whole then goes on to summarize Greenspan as saying that speculative frenzies in deregulated quasi-governmental authorities were one principal cause. The "flawed model", to Greenspan, is "privatizing profits" by maintaining Fannie/Freddie a shareholder organization and "socializing losses" by attempting to keep shareholders whole at public expense. That's very clear from the full context: as the Bloomberg reporter notes, Greenspan advocates nationalizing Fannie and Freddie and wiping out the shareholders.
Why not simply accept the fact that Greenspan is telling us that deregulation was the cause of this? He may be wrong about that, but we actually need to listen to him, since it's clearly a hard-won knowledge. This is the man who has been a deregulation advocate for his entire, lengthy career. And he's saying he was wrong. It's not a political thing; as factcheck noted, both parties voted to deregulate over the last 30 years. It just didn't work the way he hoped it would, and he said so.
Finally: We need to learn something from this, because quasi-governmental authorities like Fannie and Freddie just aren't going away. We've been using them since before the Depression to do capital formation for really huge undertakings, from a stable mortgage market (Fannie & Freddie) to turning an entire landscape into a titanic economic engine (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). That isn't going to -- and shouldn't -- stop. There's no other good way to make projects like that happen. As investments, they're too huge, risky and marginally profitable to interest private capital, and too rewarding to private interests to be 100% taxpayer-funded. But if we're going to mix public and private interests that way, somebody has to be watching out for the public interest at least as strongly as private interests. And that means regulation.
Oh for god's sake: Even Greenspan and Cox have admitted that Fannie and Freddie weren't the root cause of this mess.
Consensus reality!? Dude, that's like..wait, what?
I'd say somebody in the Lake Country Republican party has: 1. Gender confusion 2. A need to have voter registration fraud vs. voter fraud explained to her/him/it. 3. The expectation of a really interesting experience on the day Princess the Goldfish shows up and requests a ballot. Don't you think this Republican meme has passed its sell-by date?
Actually, genius, no, I don't win. Apparently I have to continue sharing my nation with lots of people -- alleged academics, even -- who are either liars or so powerfully biased they're willing to toss logic out the window to serve a partisan end. That's pretty much a loss all around.
Of course, I should expect that. In America, even supposed "conservative intellectuals" George Will get paid to utter biased crap like this: George Will Explains the Colin Powell Endorsement. But hey, I'm partisan! Don't believe anything I say.
A) After all, everyone knows there is a massive partisan conspiracy on the part of Bush critics to attack this wildly popular president every and any way they can. These people are fanatical and will stop at nothing to destroy him. (Al Gore, in particular, has never stopped talking for a second about how the 2000 election was stolen, which is why nobody takes him seriously on stuff like global warming. And of course, the IAEA...they were completely wrong about there being no WMD in Iraq, and just having them around is such an insult to Bush.)
B) Some pack of well-intentioned, impartial conservatives might attribute the fact that the award was made at all to this well-known, massive, partisan anti-Bush conspiracy, acting behind the scenes at the institution to ensure that the award was made. And of course, there is no defence against such a suspicion of, as you put it, "apparent alleged political motivations behind the awarding" (nice string of modifiers there, BTW!).
So your concern is that these institutions stop giving awards to known anti-Bush partisans. And if they should find that impossible, then they need to at least not acknowledge the fact that the awardee is an anti-Bush partisan. Those receiving the awards, and anyone who thinks they deserved the award, should these unmentionable topics too. Because it's, you know, embarrassing. Of course, it's not really you that's embarrassed. It's those institutions and those receiving the awards. They're embarrassed. If you're embarrassed at all, it's because you're embarrassed for them.
So does that about sum it up? If so, I have one last question: Does the phrase "concern troll" mean anything to you?
In what universe? How does acknowledging Krugman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? How does pointing to Friedman's political opinions diminish the value of his award? If both men won their awards fair and square, based on peer judgement of the worth of each man's work as a useful finding or theoretical instrument, how would the value of an award recognizing the value of that work be diminished by pointing to the man's political opinions? If your point is that nothing outside the work itself has any effect on the value of that work, then the value of awards recognizing that work can neither be enhanced nor diminished by information about things like their political opinions. It would be incoherent to do so; like saying Robert Reich was a terrible Treasury official because he is physically almost a dwarf, or that Don Rumsfeld was a great Secretary of Defense because his jokes were funny and he stood at his desk all day.
Krugman hasn't been stupid enough to claim he got the award for political reasons, and neither have I. It would be especially stupid to do so given that Friedman, whose political opinions couldn't be more different from Krugman's, has won the same award.
As it happens, however, Krugman is on record (in "Conscience of a Liberal") that his political opinions are outgrowths of his understanding of economics. Friedman has said essentially the same thing in some work of his I've forgotten. Both men clearly think their work and their politics are connected. Why is it therefore out of bounds to accept them at their word and criticize or praise these men -- not their awards, or the work itself -- based on what they claim are the political implications of their work?
Another idiotic remark. Krugman hasn't stopped working. What, Krugman stopped being a "full-time" economist when he started teaching at Princeton? How about after he started writing for Slate? Was it the Times columns? What, precisely, constitutes a "full-time economist" in your world?
Your statement here is argumentative to say the least. So the fact that conservative economists respect Krugman's research work in spite of Krugman's politics somehow legitimizes that work? That if he were releasing more of this work and doing fewer Times columns, he would be even more "worthy"? I thought you were arguing that politics has nothing to do with the worth of the work? Friedman's work is also admired by some liberal economists. The Friedmanites I've read couldn't care less. These idiots and their work don't constitute a canon, and they are arbiters of nothing. The additional "while wondering 'What happened to him?'" is particularly egregious. Why even bring that up, if you're not trying to argue that Krugman's political opinions are indeed somehow "fringe" and discredit him?
You know, I don't think I've deliberately misread you. I appreciate that you think Krugman deserved his award, and I certainly agree. But you lard the pig with all this additional stuff about politics and I don't think that was accidental.
If you want to dismiss me as an dolt, be my guest. The feeling is certainly mutual. Your original statement is illogical, incoherent, and if not obviously tendentious in the ways I've
Yes, and learning how to *employ* words in the interest of clarity *even more important*! Something about which you seem never to have been instructed! You're the same sort of hopeless idiot who thinks nobody attacked Friedman Nobel on the same basis.
Bullshit. Your response was to cherry-pick among the ones I listed.
Shall we start with your alleged location "near" San Francisco and your base-contractor employment and your acquaintance with many Iraq vets? All perfectly verifiable, right?
No sale. I run into faux Dem trolls like you all day long. Along with plenty of Bill O'Lielly "moderates" and the usual Limbrains. You're running very true to type. The accusation of "baseless personal attacks" when your utter lack of facts or sense is pointed to and laughed it is a classic response pattern.
Talking to you is a little like talking to Bryon York, another right-wing jackass who knows exactly zero about the subject under discussion.
This fools no one. Your non-partisanship is mostly up your ass, like your "corrections" to my facts. You've selected a tiny portion of the crimes Bush has committed against this country and excused every last one of them with a pack of unverifiable and unsuppported assertions. You're as partisan on the right as I am on the left.
"Iraq is working out nicely now"? Suggest you try that particular idiot remark out on some Iraq veterans, or the Iraqis themselves. "An open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place"? Please do me a favor and stand in Union Square and explain that idiotic theory to San Franciscans after the next major earthquake. They'll have some fun hanging you from the nearest lampost and beating your corpse to a pulp. "You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all." Who, precisely, are you kidding with that bullshit? There's nothing here but a defence of the last 8 years and the Bush Regime. And this crap is +5? I'm sorry, but if you're sincere about this, you clearly think politics doesn't actually have any meaningful impact on real events. And if that's so, you're really too stupid to waste any more time on. Bye.
You implied precisely that, "idiot". Words still have meaning.
On the contrary: His anti-Bush sentiment demonstrates that he's been paying attention.
Ah. I suppose we can now expect the Left in the US to be treated with some respect, then? Forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for it.
All you have to do to realize that the Right is far more numerous than the Left on Slashdot is to look at the comments and moderation on this very thread. Right at the top is a +5 "Insightful" comment deriding Krugman as some kind of fringe crackpot because he is very critical of the Bush Regime. This is an attitude he shares with fully 80% of the US public, by the way. But no matter. If you do happen to be aware of the fact that most of America hates this President, there are still plenty of other comments to amuse yourself with, including some that actually pretend that Krugman's professional work is completely wrong, and others that pretend Krugman wasn't *actually* awarded a nobel at all. All modded fairly high, so they're easy to find.
As for there being good ideas on the Right side: I'm sorry, but the Right have had absolutely everything their own way in the United States for most of this decade (including a mostly supine Democratic congress since 2006). So we really don't need to waste a lot of time discussing the verity of the Right's policy "ideas". We can judge them empirically. And the experimental results are these: The country is losing two wars, we are hated even by our allies, our enemies (like Russia) demonstrate their contempt for us in ways we do not dare answer, the size of the national debt has tripled, millions of people are losing their homes, a mid-sized American city was wiped out by a natural disaster and left to rot, unemployment is at its highest in five years, the economy as a whole is in free fall, and the Executive violates essential constitutional rights regularly and with impunity. And I'm sure all of that has the same explanation unrepentant Stalinists offer for the fall of the Soviet Union: "But you never really tried our [conservative/communist/pick your ideology] ideas at all!"
You know, I'd like to treat your comment with more respect, since it is at least possible that you're sincere in your belief that there is some sort of equivalence of intellectual or moral tone between the US Right and Left wings. But after 8 years of Bush, the multiple disasters his misrule has brought on us as a people, and the sneering and libels the Right have applied to the Left throughout, having to listen to further levels of denial and intellectual dishonesty like this really make it very difficult to do anything but laugh.
You know, I haven't visited Slashdot in a couple of weeks, and it seems like the comment stupidity level here (not to mention in the moderation) is getting extremely high. Just a few more Bush Regime diehards, and Slashdot comments will achieve the "Catchment Basin for Subnormals" level observable at YouTube.
In addition to +5 insightful, that's pretty hilarious. In case you hadn't noticed, genius, being Anti-Bush is now the majority opinion in the USA (not to mention most of the world), and has been for some time.
Thank you for such a reasonable, rational, humane response.
Oh I see, so it's still the *government's* fault that this private company completely screwed up really basic requirements for handling sensitive information. Like freaking encrypting it, for chrissakes. No, *government* picked the wrong company, because *government* is so completely stupid and corrupt. QED. Point #1 is a perfectly legitimate contract parameter; if they *didn't* go for the lowest price, all of the Free-Market Faithful like you would go ballistic. Point #2 is ignorant nonsense: Most of the people letting contracts and overseeing them in government agencies, not excepting TSA, are career civl servants who are neither politicians nor political appointees, and have no "campaign" to benefit from contractor contributions. Your point #3 is perfectly correct for corrupt civil servants. Now prove to me that there are more corrupt government officials letting contracts than corrupt corporate officers with the same power.