No, this is not true. They can tell their member nations to change their laws as pertaining to free trade. If the nation doesn't want to change the laws, they can always leave the WTO. Please research the WTO before furthering propaganda.
First of all, the National Park Police will tell you otherwise wrt it being the largest protest in US history. They count people at protests/deomonstrations in DC that take place on federal land. You don't get to be largest unless you are counting people in hundreds of thousands. Second, sovreignity is not an issue. Member nations of the WTO are members by choice. If the WTO is encroaching on a member nation's sovreignity, the member nation can leave the WTO. They stay members because it is beneficial to the workers and consumers in the nation for the nation to stay a member of the WTO. Finally, calling that a civil protest is an insult to those who have participated in civil protests. Civil protests do not require the local police to break out the SWAT teams and tear gas. Civil protests do not involve looting or general destruction of property. I think Starbucks is bringing about the downfall of Just Plain Coffee, but I feel sorry for them for having stores looted by what you are refering to as civil protestors. Frankly, I hold the protestors responsible for the damage done by vandals who are unassociated with the protest. By taking actions that require such a large police presence, the protestors stripped the citizens of Seattle of their right to police protection that their local taxes pay for. Call me a capitalist pig, a heartless bastard, or whatever you prefer. I think that a lot of people are passing harsh judgements of the WTO without a complete comprehension of what it is that the WTO does, and what the limits of it's power are.
itachi, card carrying member of the oppresive bourgeoisie conspiracy against the glorious worker
Regardless of whether or not you feel that injesting animal hormones is safe can you honestly say that it this is fair? Is it really the responsibility of the WTO to decide that it knows what is best for the health of the European people?
Well, yes, the WTO should be allowed to tell the EU to halt the import ban. If the EU wants to require that all imported US beef is labelled as such and include a warning about the possible health risks, thats a whole seperate issue. But the point of the WTO is free trade, which is beneficial to everyone involved. The WTO helps consumers in any member nation by driving prices lower for any traded goods. An import ban causes prices to rise, since there is a lower quantity of the good available for trade. With greater quantity available, prices fall, and consumers win. If hormone-treated beef is labelled as such, you will find a segment of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for the non-treated beef. So the cattle ranchers in the EU and the US win also - they all get to sell their beef. The WTO has done nothing to the detriment of citizens of the EU with that decision. In fact, everyone involved in the trade of beef between the EU and the US, plus consumers in the EU, is better off directly because of the WTO decision.
While you're mentioning greenpeace, etc., let me suggest a few places to go for a more economically aware perspective of the situation.
optout@axicom.com gets you off of their marketing lists. They still have you on their other lists, which include credit info, etc, but are much more restricted. Still looking into getting off of those lists... Also, for US based/.ers, you can also opt out of direct marketing, tho I don't know the contact info for that. The national opt-out list in the US is run by the Direct Marketers Assoc. or somesuch.
For the truly private, a few thoughts: -pay cash or check, only -don't ever fill out any sort of survey. -when registering with utility co., insurance,etc where you have to provide some degree of info, specify that you want your info to remain private -write your govt. reps, let them know how you feel
A cabbie from Chicago, no less. They just tacked an artificial rhinocerous onto the front of the tank, and it could just force its way through the Norman hedgerows, which is pretty impressive. I mean, a 6 foot tallpile of dirt with big hedges/trees/shrubs (old green stuff with lots of deep roots) doesn't just fall over...
I second that, though. Fab-oo hack, esp since it was so needed. They hadn't figured that the norman hedgerows would be any different from the little ones that English fox hunters jump over, so they had nothing with which to break them down. Other methods were developed for dealign with the hedgerows, like big piles of TNT, but nothing so elegant as the Rhinos.
Perhaps I'm not explaining the mechanism very well, but it's not really a choice on the part of the monopoly. Intentional or not, they do end up with a higher price than a fair market porducer selling the same good to the same consumers. Now whether or not consumers should be re-imbursed for the damage done to them by a monoploy is a seperate issue. Personally, I think that they should. A monopoly does really bad things to the market and to development of the good. However, since monopolies aren't an everyday situation, maybe this should be dealt with as part of the final ruling. My point is just that the entire market has been hurt by this, particularly including consumers. They are right in claiming they've been hurt, but dealing with that is a seperate issue.
I forgot one important point which is relevant here. The suit is about the fair price, not the option to purchase. Being unfairly overcharged because there was no other way to use a joe average home PC. Sorry.
Look at the price range for consumer pc OSes between the first PCs and the beginning of the MS monopoly. Average, then adjust for inflation. We should be left with the average consumer OS price in a non-monoploy environment. Then, figure the top and bottom end prices also. Each person in the suit can define how happy they were with windows on a 1-10 scale, 10 being overjoyed, and 1 being suicidal due to windows. Fit the prices to the 1-10 scale, and MS pays each person the difference.
The argument brought by this suit isn't that consumers were forced to buy windows. The argument is that the price of windows was artificially high due to the fact that MS had monoploy power. The suit simply claims that the consumers who did buy the good from a monoploy are entitled to be reimbursed now that the monopoly has been declared to be such.
So far I've seen a lot of comments where people are yelling at each other as to whether or not MS being a monoploy hurt consumers, and if so, which consumers. So, here's the basic free market lowdown on monopolies (Which should apply to most readers, whether you like it or not)
In a normal market, you have supply and demand. Pretty basic. Price on the vertical axis, supply on the horizontal. S & D look like an x. As price rises, producers are willing to make more. As price falls, consumers want more. For instance, say 5 people would want a pc if it costs 1 million USD. 10 people want one if it costs 750,000 USD. etc on down to a whole lot of people if it costs roughly 2,000 USD. Same deal for supply - producers will make x pc's at price n. 2x pcs at price 2n. These two curves intersect at some point. Assuming that nobody interferes with the market, the intersection of the supply and demand curves will show you the price per unit of the good and the total production of the good. Now, if you can't differentiate between the various versions of the good (butter is butter is butter, no brand names), then the only difference is price. So one company charges more, and their version doesn't sell because it's more expensive. When brand names and quality get added in, it gets more complicated, but the same basic notions are there. It's an issue of paying for the consumer preferences. Take beer. Nobody could mistake Guiness for Bud, no matter what. Now, Guiness has a higher price per volume, but since consumer preferences for beer vs. pisswater come into play, Guiness can be sold at a higher price because some consumers are willing to pay more for actual beer rather than buying cheaper pisswater. However, bud and miller are priced pretty similarly, because the two goods are very very similar, and price can very easily be a differentiating factor.
I'll assume everyone is following so far. So now we have our consumer market for operatin systems. Way back when, in those long ago days of the Carter years and early Reagan years, you could buy several commercial operating systems for your computer. And they were priced in a way not too different from the beer pricing I described above. Sure, server OSes might cost more, but the consumer of server OSes feels okay because they are getting a serious OS, as opposed to something like ms-dos, which fits consumer needs but certainly wont be driving your big, bad, company mainframe. Then, time goes by. For whatever reasons, the number of OSes starts to fall. Soon, we only have the MS OS family.
Before, we had two products that were competing, and the differences between the two, as far as the market cared, were price and consumer preferences. The existance of competition kept the prices close. If consumers were indifferent to which OS they used, price was the only differentiation. Now, with just Windows left on the market, there's nothing holding prices down. So prices go up. Which means that, for any physical good, quantity produced drops. After all, putting that extra money into production just raises our costs. And, as a monopoly producer, we want to minimize costs while maximizing price. This is profit maximization. If we make software, this means skimping on the product testing while notching the price up as much as the consumers will stand. Now, our monoploy is going to set it's price based on the lowest possible production costs. Now, the lowest possible production level is going to be expensive - you build a single prototype car, you have to pretty much handbuild it from scratch. Build a limited run - you have dicounts for buying/building a part in bulk, etc. But costs scale back up as you start to use up limited resources - if you try to buy every sparkplug ever made, it's starts to get pricey. Software mucks with this, since once it's compiled, duplicating it is nearly free, so it's not entirely clear to me what the monopoly effect would have on a software company. However, there are some costs. The CD/floppy that it ships on, the manual, the box, the plastic wrap and paper with the EULA on it. So each shipped copy costs somewhere between a dollar and 10, depending on the quantities shipped. Well, it's a monopoly, so they'll make as many copies as they need to to get the lowest possible price. And they set the selling price based on that. So the consumer ends up paying more for the good than the market indicates the good is worth. Which, pardon the pun, isn't good.
If the above doesn't make sense, I probably left something out. I don't think I did, but it's been a while...
So, the conclusion, the whole point. MS is a monoploy, for whatever reasons, and abused it. Given the fact that a monopolies goods are priced higher than they otherwise would be, MS has hurt anyone who has bought a computer since MS became a monopoly. Higher prices hurt consumers - less money left to spend on other goods. And not just computer consumers, either. Because artificially high price of windows kept consumers from having that money to spend on alternate goods. Whatever the difference between the market price for an OS and the price that was charged for monoploy Windows is money that should have gone into other markets - computer games, waterskis, water buffalo, whatever. So any market that you didn't spend money in because of the inflated price of Windows was hurt by MS. Now, IANAL, nor am I an expert witness in the area of economics, but I do know economics, and I have studied economics as applied to law, and I feel relatively confident that this conclusion isn't too far out in left feild. I wouldn't try to file a class action suit on behalf of the waterski industry, but I will say without a doubt that MS has done a serious injury to free market consumers and should not be allowed to just walk away.
Major brand name pc without windows but with a big, corporate warranty. Sure, today you can go to VA. How many consumers know of VA? Does VA have the years of household recognition that a name like compaq has? True, I'd much rather own a VA box than a compaq anything (expect a ds10 _would_ be nice....), but we have to look at the joe average population.
A co-worker of mine has a second job at the Philadelphia UPS hub. (we work for an academic institution, so we tend to collect side jobs). She says that breakage is a regular thing. Re-packing into other boxes, or slapping some tape on the side and claiming that it arrived that way is standard operating procedure. Which is a bummer, because that means one fewer reliable shipper. But after talking to her, I'm never shipping anything irreplacable via UPS.
No, that isn't always good. In my own experience, that wouldn't have worked. I didn't want to see the problem, I didn't want it to be there. If I had been dragged to a psychiatrist (which, at one very different point in my life, I was), it would have been counter-productive. The denial got stronger when other people told me I was fscked. What got me better was my dearest friend (who had been there) suggesting that if three was something wrong, here was the way to take care of it. And then life got livable again.
I vote pretty left, but John McCain doesn't look that bad. And there's Bradley, and like a bazillion republicans plus some crackpots from other parties...
But this ironic thing is that they are both deadheads, and he's not as boring as we think. There are reported incidents of tray surfing on Air Force two during the climb to flight altitude...
Quake is a current example. My point is that, as humans, we lay at war. A lot. Chess. I agree about most sports. I'm just saying we should recognize it for what it is.
I'm not sure if we're understanding each other, let me clarify my position. People(as a species) are violent. People(as a species) play at war. People have real wars. It's messy. It is, in some cases, unavoidable and necesssary for people to fight wars. Cases of human right, for example, like the European Theater in WWII. So I think we should be willing to admit to ourselves that we are what we are, that we like playing at war, and as a species, we're not getting any more or less violent, and accept it.
Well, if you look at any FPS, you get of notice that there might be a hint of violence in the premise of the game. Yes, it's just a game, it doesn't make you violent, it wont send you ona shooting spree, but it is playing at war. I don't think there's anything wrong with that - like I said, I enjoy a good gibbing session. I just think we need to be unashamed about it and say "I'm playing at war". The same goes for war: when we reach the point where diplomacy fails, we need to say "no more games, we're really killing". People have always fought, it's just how that changes. I don't think that that will ever change, no matter how much we'd like it to. It's the same as anything else humans do that isn't so nice - lying, stealing, being wise-asses, adultery (well, it's nice, but it's not nice) and so forth. Really what I've been thinking about throughout this whole thread is why we try to convince ourselves that we aren't a violent species. I'd say that we're downright gruesome, and for the last century or three, we've at least tried to appear nice about it.
There's a difference between propaganda and outright lies. Propaganda usually is a little more creative . What the pentagon is concerned about is violating the Geneva Convention - for example, lies that do that would be marking every soldier as a medic, even though they're carrying (concealed, presumably) weapons. The rules of war say it's Not Okay to lie. Demoralize, kill, bomb, wound, scare, mock - all that is okay. If you think about it, it really does make sense. If side A tells everyone on side B that side B's boss wants them to surrender, then they kill them while they're surrendering, that's just not very moral. If they all fight it out, and some of them die, well, that's not as wrong. At least they were honest about it. I suppose I'm sounding a little screwed up. I think this stuff is a little screwed up, though.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is not true. They can tell their member nations to change their laws as pertaining to free trade. If the nation doesn't want to change the laws, they can always leave the WTO. Please research the WTO before furthering propaganda.
itachi
First of all, the National Park Police will tell you otherwise wrt it being the largest protest in US history. They count people at protests/deomonstrations in DC that take place on federal land. You don't get to be largest unless you are counting people in hundreds of thousands. Second, sovreignity is not an issue. Member nations of the WTO are members by choice. If the WTO is encroaching on a member nation's sovreignity, the member nation can leave the WTO. They stay members because it is beneficial to the workers and consumers in the nation for the nation to stay a member of the WTO. Finally, calling that a civil protest is an insult to those who have participated in civil protests. Civil protests do not require the local police to break out the SWAT teams and tear gas. Civil protests do not involve looting or general destruction of property. I think Starbucks is bringing about the downfall of Just Plain Coffee, but I feel sorry for them for having stores looted by what you are refering to as civil protestors. Frankly, I hold the protestors responsible for the damage done by vandals who are unassociated with the protest. By taking actions that require such a large police presence, the protestors stripped the citizens of Seattle of their right to police protection that their local taxes pay for. Call me a capitalist pig, a heartless bastard, or whatever you prefer. I think that a lot of people are passing harsh judgements of the WTO without a complete comprehension of what it is that the WTO does, and what the limits of it's power are.
itachi, card carrying member of the oppresive bourgeoisie conspiracy against the glorious worker
Regardless of whether or not you feel that injesting animal hormones is safe can you honestly say that it this is fair? Is it really the responsibility of the WTO to decide that it knows what is best for the health of the European people?
Well, yes, the WTO should be allowed to tell the EU to halt the import ban. If the EU wants to require that all imported US beef is labelled as such and include a warning about the possible health risks, thats a whole seperate issue. But the point of the WTO is free trade, which is beneficial to everyone involved. The WTO helps consumers in any member nation by driving prices lower for any traded goods. An import ban causes prices to rise, since there is a lower quantity of the good available for trade. With greater quantity available, prices fall, and consumers win. If hormone-treated beef is labelled as such, you will find a segment of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for the non-treated beef. So the cattle ranchers in the EU and the US win also - they all get to sell their beef. The WTO has done nothing to the detriment of citizens of the EU with that decision. In fact, everyone involved in the trade of beef between the EU and the US, plus consumers in the EU, is better off directly because of the WTO decision.
While you're mentioning greenpeace, etc., let me suggest a few places to go for a more economically aware perspective of the situation.
The Cato Institute
The Economist
and
The Adam Smith Institue
itachi
opt out, dude
itachi
optout@axicom.com gets you off of their marketing lists. They still have you on their other lists, which include credit info, etc, but are much more restricted. Still looking into getting off of those lists... /.ers, you can also opt out of direct marketing, tho I don't know the contact info for that. The national opt-out list in the US is run by the Direct Marketers Assoc. or somesuch.
Also, for US based
For the truly private, a few thoughts:
-pay cash or check, only
-don't ever fill out any sort of survey.
-when registering with utility co., insurance,etc where you have to provide some degree of info, specify that you want your info to remain private
-write your govt. reps, let them know how you feel
itachi
A cabbie from Chicago, no less. They just tacked an artificial rhinocerous onto the front of the tank, and it could just force its way through the Norman hedgerows, which is pretty impressive. I mean, a 6 foot tallpile of dirt with big hedges/trees/shrubs (old green stuff with lots of deep roots) doesn't just fall over...
I second that, though. Fab-oo hack, esp since it was so needed. They hadn't figured that the norman hedgerows would be any different from the little ones that English fox hunters jump over, so they had nothing with which to break them down. Other methods were developed for dealign with the hedgerows, like big piles of TNT, but nothing so elegant as the Rhinos.
Perhaps I'm not explaining the mechanism very well, but it's not really a choice on the part of the monopoly. Intentional or not, they do end up with a higher price than a fair market porducer selling the same good to the same consumers. Now whether or not consumers should be re-imbursed for the damage done to them by a monoploy is a seperate issue. Personally, I think that they should. A monopoly does really bad things to the market and to development of the good. However, since monopolies aren't an everyday situation, maybe this should be dealt with as part of the final ruling. My point is just that the entire market has been hurt by this, particularly including consumers. They are right in claiming they've been hurt, but dealing with that is a seperate issue.
wtf. sounds like poetry. deep down inside you're a fag.
Dude, that's not cool. Bigotry sucks. Open your mind, life goes easier that way.
I forgot one important point which is relevant here. The suit is about the fair price, not the option to purchase. Being unfairly overcharged because there was no other way to use a joe average home PC. Sorry.
Look at the price range for consumer pc OSes between the first PCs and the beginning of the MS monopoly. Average, then adjust for inflation. We should be left with the average consumer OS price in a non-monoploy environment. Then, figure the top and bottom end prices also. Each person in the suit can define how happy they were with windows on a 1-10 scale, 10 being overjoyed, and 1 being suicidal due to windows. Fit the prices to the 1-10 scale, and MS pays each person the difference.
The argument brought by this suit isn't that consumers were forced to buy windows. The argument is that the price of windows was artificially high due to the fact that MS had monoploy power. The suit simply claims that the consumers who did buy the good from a monoploy are entitled to be reimbursed now that the monopoly has been declared to be such.
So far I've seen a lot of comments where people are yelling at each other as to whether or not MS being a monoploy hurt consumers, and if so, which consumers. So, here's the basic free market lowdown on monopolies (Which should apply to most readers, whether you like it or not)
In a normal market, you have supply and demand. Pretty basic. Price on the vertical axis, supply on the horizontal. S & D look like an x. As price rises, producers are willing to make more. As price falls, consumers want more. For instance, say 5 people would want a pc if it costs 1 million USD. 10 people want one if it costs 750,000 USD. etc on down to a whole lot of people if it costs roughly 2,000 USD. Same deal for supply - producers will make x pc's at price n. 2x pcs at price 2n. These two curves intersect at some point. Assuming that nobody interferes with the market, the intersection of the supply and demand curves will show you the price per unit of the good and the total production of the good. Now, if you can't differentiate between the various versions of the good (butter is butter is butter, no brand names), then the only difference is price. So one company charges more, and their version doesn't sell because it's more expensive. When brand names and quality get added in, it gets more complicated, but the same basic notions are there. It's an issue of paying for the consumer preferences. Take beer. Nobody could mistake Guiness for Bud, no matter what. Now, Guiness has a higher price per volume, but since consumer preferences for beer vs. pisswater come into play, Guiness can be sold at a higher price because some consumers are willing to pay more for actual beer rather than buying cheaper pisswater. However, bud and miller are priced pretty similarly, because the two goods are very very similar, and price can very easily be a differentiating factor.
I'll assume everyone is following so far. So now we have our consumer market for operatin systems. Way back when, in those long ago days of the Carter years and early Reagan years, you could buy several commercial operating systems for your computer. And they were priced in a way not too different from the beer pricing I described above. Sure, server OSes might cost more, but the consumer of server OSes feels okay because they are getting a serious OS, as opposed to something like ms-dos, which fits consumer needs but certainly wont be driving your big, bad, company mainframe. Then, time goes by. For whatever reasons, the number of OSes starts to fall. Soon, we only have the MS OS family.
Before, we had two products that were competing, and the differences between the two, as far as the market cared, were price and consumer preferences. The existance of competition kept the prices close. If consumers were indifferent to which OS they used, price was the only differentiation. Now, with just Windows left on the market, there's nothing holding prices down. So prices go up. Which means that, for any physical good, quantity produced drops. After all, putting that extra money into production just raises our costs. And, as a monopoly producer, we want to minimize costs while maximizing price. This is profit maximization. If we make software, this means skimping on the product testing while notching the price up as much as the consumers will stand. Now, our monoploy is going to set it's price based on the lowest possible production costs. Now, the lowest possible production level is going to be expensive - you build a single prototype car, you have to pretty much handbuild it from scratch. Build a limited run - you have dicounts for buying/building a part in bulk, etc. But costs scale back up as you start to use up limited resources - if you try to buy every sparkplug ever made, it's starts to get pricey. Software mucks with this, since once it's compiled, duplicating it is nearly free, so it's not entirely clear to me what the monopoly effect would have on a software company. However, there are some costs. The CD/floppy that it ships on, the manual, the box, the plastic wrap and paper with the EULA on it. So each shipped copy costs somewhere between a dollar and 10, depending on the quantities shipped. Well, it's a monopoly, so they'll make as many copies as they need to to get the lowest possible price. And they set the selling price based on that. So the consumer ends up paying more for the good than the market indicates the good is worth. Which, pardon the pun, isn't good.
If the above doesn't make sense, I probably left something out. I don't think I did, but it's been a while...
So, the conclusion, the whole point.
MS is a monoploy, for whatever reasons, and abused it. Given the fact that a monopolies goods are priced higher than they otherwise would be, MS has hurt anyone who has bought a computer since MS became a monopoly. Higher prices hurt consumers - less money left to spend on other goods. And not just computer consumers, either. Because artificially high price of windows kept consumers from having that money to spend on alternate goods. Whatever the difference between the market price for an OS and the price that was charged for monoploy Windows is money that should have gone into other markets - computer games, waterskis, water buffalo, whatever. So any market that you didn't spend money in because of the inflated price of Windows was hurt by MS. Now, IANAL, nor am I an expert witness in the area of economics, but I do know economics, and I have studied economics as applied to law, and I feel relatively confident that this conclusion isn't too far out in left feild. I wouldn't try to file a class action suit on behalf of the waterski industry, but I will say without a doubt that MS has done a serious injury to free market consumers and should not be allowed to just walk away.
Major brand name pc without windows but with a big, corporate warranty. Sure, today you can go to VA. How many consumers know of VA? Does VA have the years of household recognition that a name like compaq has? True, I'd much rather own a VA box than a compaq anything (expect a ds10 _would_ be nice....), but we have to look at the joe average population.
That and laptops.
A co-worker of mine has a second job at the Philadelphia UPS hub. (we work for an academic institution, so we tend to collect side jobs). She says that breakage is a regular thing. Re-packing into other boxes, or slapping some tape on the side and claiming that it arrived that way is standard operating procedure. Which is a bummer, because that means one fewer reliable shipper. But after talking to her, I'm never shipping anything irreplacable via UPS.
No, that isn't always good. In my own experience, that wouldn't have worked. I didn't want to see the problem, I didn't want it to be there. If I had been dragged to a psychiatrist (which, at one very different point in my life, I was), it would have been counter-productive. The denial got stronger when other people told me I was fscked. What got me better was my dearest friend (who had been there) suggesting that if three was something wrong, here was the way to take care of it. And then life got livable again.
Hey, don't mock us fufu liberal arts econ majors. Some of us go the dual major route - CS and BS.
:)
I vote pretty left, but John McCain doesn't look that bad. And there's Bradley, and like a bazillion republicans plus some crackpots from other parties...
But this ironic thing is that they are both deadheads, and he's not as boring as we think. There are reported incidents of tray surfing on Air Force two during the climb to flight altitude...
True. I suppose I shouldn't have done that. But it was the exact same article from redherring.
-1, redundant?2 19&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/11/121
Quake is a current example. My point is that, as humans, we lay at war. A lot. Chess. I agree about most sports. I'm just saying we should recognize it for what it is.
I'm not sure if we're understanding each other, let me clarify my position. People(as a species) are violent. People(as a species) play at war. People have real wars. It's messy. It is, in some cases, unavoidable and necesssary for people to fight wars. Cases of human right, for example, like the European Theater in WWII. So I think we should be willing to admit to ourselves that we are what we are, that we like playing at war, and as a species, we're not getting any more or less violent, and accept it.
itachi
A turnip shaped like a thingy?
Well, if you look at any FPS, you get of notice that there might be a hint of violence in the premise of the game. Yes, it's just a game, it doesn't make you violent, it wont send you ona shooting spree, but it is playing at war. I don't think there's anything wrong with that - like I said, I enjoy a good gibbing session. I just think we need to be unashamed about it and say "I'm playing at war". The same goes for war: when we reach the point where diplomacy fails, we need to say "no more games, we're really killing". People have always fought, it's just how that changes. I don't think that that will ever change, no matter how much we'd like it to. It's the same as anything else humans do that isn't so nice - lying, stealing, being wise-asses, adultery (well, it's nice, but it's not nice) and so forth. Really what I've been thinking about throughout this whole thread is why we try to convince ourselves that we aren't a violent species. I'd say that we're downright gruesome, and for the last century or three, we've at least tried to appear nice about it.
itachi
There's a difference between propaganda and outright lies. Propaganda usually is a little more creative . What the pentagon is concerned about is violating the Geneva Convention - for example, lies that do that would be marking every soldier as a medic, even though they're carrying (concealed, presumably) weapons. The rules of war say it's Not Okay to lie. Demoralize, kill, bomb, wound, scare, mock - all that is okay. If you think about it, it really does make sense. If side A tells everyone on side B that side B's boss wants them to surrender, then they kill them while they're surrendering, that's just not very moral. If they all fight it out, and some of them die, well, that's not as wrong. At least they were honest about it. I suppose I'm sounding a little screwed up. I think this stuff is a little screwed up, though.
itachi