A fair market price could happen if the employee knew what all employers were willing to pay for his service and the employers knew what all employee were willing to work for. The result would be a fair market price.
"Fair Market Price" is the price for a commodity/service that compares favorably to the price available from other industry sources. You expand this definition so that the employee must know what ALL employers are willing to pay. This of course is impossible, so you define the employee as being in an "exploited" position. Convenient!
Of course we don't live in a true capitalist economy where prices are dictated completely by the market. First, there is a minimum wage and other government intervention.
I think those things do more harm than good.
Not to mention most employers will immediately drop a prospective employee who answers "How much are you willing to work for?" with the question "How much are you willing to pay?" Thereby exacerbating the information imbalance.
This "information imbalance" you speak of is merely another form of the "oppressive bourgoisie / exploited proletariot" dogma.
I was working a job I hated at 30K/year. Then I was offered a job at 65K/year. I told my boss that I was going to leave, and he begged me to stay. I told him that I was offered a competing deal and they were doubling my salary. He told me that they could do anything except pay me more. Tell me: who was the strong one and who was the weak one in that position? Situations like that happen all the time when the skillset is in high demand. Hence, the skillset fetches high price in the market.
Because one of the downfalls of capitalism is that it treats people - chiefly employees - like commodities to be bought, sold, and found bargains on, instead of humans with hopes, cares, concerns, families, etc.
An employer doesn't treat people as commodities, but rather their skills. An individual's hopes, cares, concerns, and families are the responsibility of the individual, not of their employer.
Keep in mind that the individual who offered to work for $7/hr was willing to work for that rate. He/she was not forced or lied to in order to work for that rate. You may say, "But you were originally willing to spend $10/hr!". That would only be true if that's what I thought the going rate for the particular skillset was. Suppose you wanted to buy a DVD player and planned to spend $40 for it. Then you see an ad that was selling it for $30. Would you go for the lower price, or would go buy the one that had the price that you were "originally willing" to spend? Remember: retailers have hopes, cares, concerns, and families, too! Are you going to deprive them of those things just because someone else has a sweeter distribution deal?
Wal*Mart, anyone? Call bullshit on me? I've seen it over and over again,
It's not bullshit at all. I've seen it over and over, too. The difference between you and me in this regard is that you choose to bash capitalism when people don't get whatever their "needs" are in a "capitalistic system". (I put that in quotes because I don't regard capitalism as a "system", but rather that thing that exists only when individuals are allowed to exist as free and moral traders.) Remember this: no one is preventing you from helping someone in need. The "conservative" Southern USA gives the most money to charity, year after year, whereas the "liberal" Northeastern USA is the most stingy when it comes to charity.
I'm not saying that there's necessarily a better system out there...everything seems to suck.
Life is hard! I've had two failed businesses in the past year, lost my life savings, and my partner declared bankruptcy. But I'm not going to sit around and whine "everything sucks!" I'm going to get off my ass and keep trying and have a happy life in spite of it all. As a result of my refusal to give up, I have three more businessess in the works with the theory that if I throw enough shit against the wall, something's going to stick, and I'm going to engineer my way out of this pit I find myself in.
And despite how you and I may have differences in values, I wish the same tenacity in the pursuit of happiness for you in your life. Too many people preach doom, guilt, and hate, and it all deserves to go straight into the garbage. May you find a pursuit that you enjoy, make money doing it, develop rich and enjoyable interests, help those whom you love (and whom you think merit help), and live a long and happy life. Happiness is your birthright.
If kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery was overlooked or legal, you bet they would be.
Let me make my objection more clear. I am about to start a company, and I used to own a restaurant (which was a company). Are you claiming that if I could get away with kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery for profit, then I would do it?
They- like all companies- are a FOR-PROFIT venture, and will do whatever they think is the thing that will garner them the most profit. Period.
This is a most rephrehensible comment to make. You claim that since a company wants to make a profit, they will, therefore, by definition, do ANYTHING that might make them money. For instance, if kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia is profitable, then ANY for-profit company would have no compunction at all in doing so. This is a wrong-headed, insulting, and stupid idea. Perhaps you believe it because you believe axiomatically that the profit motive is evil.
Welcome to Capitalism, enjoy your stay.
You and I have very different understandings of capitalism. To me, capitalism is when people trade value-for-value as free individuals. It is immoral to make money through force or fraud, and those who do it should be punished. Capitalism is merely that which exists by default when individual property rights are protected by the state, free people are allowed to trade, and force and fraud are punished. It is the celebration of individual excellence. It allows companies like Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks to exist which, despite their leftist lip-service, are actually shining monuments to the success of capitalism over older, inferior competitors.
To you, capitalism is probably the source of all the world's misery. I think that's an article of your faith as opposed to observations of reality.
What "risk-free" violent games have you been playing? I get killed all the time in Quake, GTA, etc.
After which you respawn, correct? If you wanted a game with *real* risk (not this pussy "no permadeath!" fake risk that you champion), then after you "get killed" in Quake, rusty metal spikes would shoot out of your PC into your eyes, heart, and genitals.
As long as they portray it as bad parenting and idiotic kids acting out bits from a video game.
The stupid often die in stupid ways, and there's little we can do about that. But what about the "bad parenting" you mention? Would good parents prevent their kinds from playing GTA (because it might influence their kids to predatory violence)?
Some people watch The Daily Show and think that this is not only the most realistic "news" on TV, but that by thinking so makes them better than everyone else.
The first example is ascribing unrealistic levels of influence to playing a video game. The second is simply a matter of TV misinforming viewers. Huge difference.
You seem to indicate that the former only influences while the latter only (mis)informs. I think that both cases both inform and influence.
In the first case (the violent video game), the game informs the game player that predatory violence is fun, acceptable, cool, and risk-free. It influences the game player to participate in said predatory violence.
In the second case (the television show) the show informs the viewer that forensic science is blisteringly fast, nominally expensive, fun, computationally trivial, and capable of technological feats that do not exist. It influences the viewer to place trust in forensic science in ways where it is not deserved.
Humans have lived most of their lives living off of the land and their labor. You may have heard of a little thing called farming.
"Saving the family farm" is another one of the popular themes from the left nowadays. What condescending, leftist, urbanites (who have no idea what an actual farm is like) fail to realize is that almost everyone who has grown up on a farm (which is a life filled with endless toil) have done everything to get away from it and toward a life of convenience and leisure (the life that most urbanite leftists ignorantly enjoy). It is that not humans that have lived most of their lives as farmers (which you seem to allege), but rather humanity which has spent most of its existence living in lives of toil and misery. The technology that I can "progress" and you call "unsustainable" has given us humans better lives with more leisure time. My guess is that you wouldn't last 5 minutes doing farm work. The left has rarely championed work anyways! Go look at http://www.whywork.org/ to see what some other leftists think about the issue of work. Do you think those leftists want to spend one millisecond of time doing work on a farm?
I know this goes against your globalist/economic paradise line of thinking . . . but this has nothing to do with politics. You are the one who is injecting politics in here.
This notion of a "globalist/economic paradise line of thinking" is the way you slander me, but does not represent what I think at all. Nor am I the one "injecting politics"; rather, I am responding to what was from the onset a political issue. The "sustainable" movement is intrinsically linked with the environmental movement which has *always* been a political issue. To claim that your argument is beyond politics is deceitful of you. It is a failed attempt to paint your subjective point of view as "fact" rather than a value-based viewpoint.
The Chinese are simply trying to make an investment in something that will hopefully reap a gain in effecincy by promoting self-sufficency of these people.
And yet my valid criticism was not of the Chinese, but rather of the sanctimonious leftists who claim to be "for the poor" while simultaneously championing products that are "good for everyone" yet too expensive for the poor. You have failed to respond to this hypocrisy. Instead, you have chosen to attack me personally which speaks volumes about your character (not ot mention your argument). Granted, there are other aspects of the "sustainable" movmement which do NOT fall under this hypocrital umbrella, and I do not necessarily object to those.
The only class warfare rhetoric, ironically, is yours.
You make this claim shortly after you uttered the "gobalist" rhetoric and attempted to smear me with it. You look like you're not putting a lot of thought into your argument. Furthermore, what, specifically, did I state that you would consider class warfare rhetoric? I notice you cite no examples.
Curious. So the "rich liberals" want sustainable, but that's "expensive."
You're using your sarcasm quotes far too liberally (pun un-intended). There are plenty of rich liberals (I know that's an ugly truth) who want things that are "sustainable", and those things are virtually guanrateed to be more expensive than the stuff on the regular market.
Then the "rich conservatives" want cheap, throw-away shit?
What kind of broken, black-and-white thinking is this? Rich people, liberal or conservative, live rich lifestyles. They want big houses with pretty views and nice wine and fancy clothes and everything that you or I would like to enjoy if we had their kind of money. Rich liberals do NOT live among the poor rabble that they often champion. They, like rich conseravtives, live in Aspen or Austin or Long Island. They do NOT live in the 9th ward of New Orleans, not in a million years, despite how much they "care" about the people who live there.
quite possibly with the end result that rich conservatives in China can afford themselves arcologies to move into when the oil dries up and their air gets even worse than at present
You don't quite grasp it yet. The rich conservatives *and* the rich liberals are doing the same thing. They are shoring up so that their families and friends will be safe. This is not a "liberal v. conservative" issue, it's a "rich v. poor" issue, and there are *plenty* of filthy, stinking rich liberals with their millions of dollars in off-shore tax havens. I think the rich liberals suck worse becuase if they really "cared" as much about the poor as they claim to, then they would spend some of their own money to make a difference. Why aren't rich liberals criticized for their yachts and jewelry and egregious tax evasion?
By the way, NONE of this "sustainable" shit will make a damn bit of difference when the oil runs out. Oil is the lifeblood of the American way of life. If we don't find a way to replace it, then life will one day get a whole lot shitter for everyone in the country except for the extremely, extremly rich (in which demographic there are both liberals and conservatives).
So, yes, it is more expensive. Or it seems that way, at least.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
We can either bury our heads in the sand and cry "It's more expensive," or we can make a wise investment in conserving resources today for the "poor people" of tomorrow.
Perhaps you can make that choice because your rich enough for "sustanable options" to be in your budget. How many poor people do you see driving hybrid cars? Hybrid cars are expensive.
I'm not burying my head in the sand at all (that actually a job for leftists regarding Shari'a and the new Caliphate). I'm stating an economic fact. Poor people have fewer options they can afford. "Sustainable" options are too expensive for them. Only the rich can choose to be "sustainable". I know you feel this is a moral issue, so you're going to be all "But we *have* to do *SOMETHING*!!!" about it, but that doesn't change the fact that poor people can't afford it.
Are you saying that basically every self-sustaining community is for rich people?
Of course not! I cannot cover every facet of everything in a single post, can I? I was trying to make a single point: "sustainable" often means "expensive", which contradicts the "pro-poor-people" message that the champions of "sustainable" simultaneously spout.
I saw that episode of Morgan Spurlock's deceitful TV propganda "30 days" in which the two NYC folks visit the "sustanable community". They lived like a primitive tribe (with solar panels)... except that their lifestyle was basically a parasite on the ass of the culture they eschew. For example: they would go take the waste grease from fast food restaurants to power their "eco friendly" cars. Did anyone not realize that such a scheme depended on "Big Food" to function? Later, these same people went dumpster diving. Wow, what an awesome sustainable lifestyle! I wanted to gag.
but it's hardly a "posh playground" as you so foolishly put it.
Perhaps because I wasn't describing the Radical Faeries. There are many, many leftists who spout off all sorts of stupid rhetoric about "the poor" who are also filthy, fucking, stinking rich (Ted Kenendy, John Kerry, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore, the list goes on and on). Why won't you put blame where it is due? Why can't you realize that hypocrisy exists on the "right" *and* on the the "left"?
The hypocrisy of "sustainable"
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
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· Score: -1, Troll
Things that are "sustainable" (and "organic" in the foodie subculture) are often championed by people who claim to know better than everyone else. They spout off like enlightened, forward-thinking people upon whom the rest of the common rabble relies for knowledge and sophistication.
In other words, they're leftists. But we're all used to leftist sanctimony, right? Here's the part that really gets under my skin.
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive. In other words, poor people can't afford it. While rich, sophisticated leftists wallow in their organic fucking arugula, the poor rabble that they claim to "care about" will still be eating fast food and frozen pizzas. (Or millet, seeing as these people will be living in China.) "Sustainable" won't help those people one iota because they can't afford to pay for it. The rest of the subhumans will still be ignorantly destroying the Earth as before. When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Even reading the article makes it seem like these "sustainable" cities are going to be nothing more than posh playgrounds for the cosmopolitan readers of "The Nation". When the denizens of these not-quite-quaint climate-controlled and shielded-from-the-shit bio-domes are toasting each other with glasses of "certified 100% organic" chardonnay, will they also be asking themselves, "I wonder what the poor are doing?" Despite their tired class-warfare rhetoric, I would have to say, "hell, no."
Poverty and lack of education, while certainly not justifications for crime, are often part of the cause.
I think you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. The reason you mention poverty at all is because you are trying to justify (or, in your parlance, "understand") the crime, but pretend like you're not by saying the exact opposite. If there is no justification for the crime, then there is no need at all to talk about poverty. The reason I think it's a justification is because your argument naturally leads into, "If we solve poverty, then we'll solve the crime, as poverty is the root cause of the crime."
See also, "Hitler will calm down if we let him have the Sudetenland."
The poverty justification is flawed anyway. Suppose there are two individuals. One of them chooses a life of going out, hooking up, and using drugs. The other has a much less glamorous life of studying, earning degrees in higher education, and fetching a high-paying job. The first individual ends up in poverty while the other has a nice lifestyle. The first individual, seeing the other's wealth, decides to mug him. A cosmopolitan leftist with a "nuanced understanding" decides to blame the crime on "poverty" -- meaning, if only the first individual wasn't poor, then he wouldn't have committed the crime.
We'll solve that "root problem" by using the force of government to steal money from the second individual and give it to the first. The first individual rewards us with his vote.
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
You make it sound as if the mujahideen were chosen as "bad guys" out of racism, cowboy stupidity, or even chosen arbitrarily. This is part of the militant ingorance that leftists display toward the mujahideen and what they want to do to everyone in the dar al-harm (that's the land you and I live in). In their minds, you have three options: death, conversion to Islam, or subjugation (including jizya, the "infidel tax", which you must pay in shame). The mujahideen are more than willing to detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City (imagine what that would do to the *global* economy) for the cause of harming the Kufr (that's you and me). No, not because of "poverty". Because of their religion in which black-and-white thinking in terms of "us" and "them" is so stark and so absolutist that it makes George Bush look like a finely-nuanced cosmopolitan reporter for the New York Times.
I reply to shills because it helps to sharpen my sword.
Vaginal sex does transmit AIDS (although anal sex does so more efficiently).
Since you can't detect the virus you have no way of showing this. All you can detect is antibodies which you have no way of showing are linked to HIV (because you can't detect the virus). Oh, what about PCR and viral load? It multiplies fragments which are alleged to be part of HIV, but since you can't detect the virus, you have no way of knowing if those fragments came from HIV or not.
The virus doesn't care about class or race at all.
But it apparently cares about sexual orientation (since gay men get different opportunistic diseases than straights do) and physical location (since African "AIDS" is nothing like North American "AIDS"). Interesting that we have a disease which happens to match the patterns of geopolitcs and culture.
Furthermore, the "virus" might not care about class or race, but the "HIV tests" certainly do. The test results of every "HIV test" are NOT read, but rather interpreted according to an individual's "risk group". A "negative" result for you might very well be a "positive" result for someone in a different race or class. Say, for instance, black drug user.
We are not immune, it's already started to spread among us, and I'd like to get vaccinated before it becomes a pandemic thankyouverymuch.
I'd first worry about whether or not there actually is a virus before worrying about being vaccinated for it. Since Gallo used exactly the same discredited method for HIV that he did for a previous non-existant virus that he claimed to have "discovered" but later recanted, I don't know what you have to go on. Fear and paranoia, perhaps? "Pandemic" certainly is a scary word!
And the risk of AIDS reduces sexual opportunities for everyone, which IMHO makes it even worse than any disease which merely kills people at random.
"AIDS" kills far fewer people than many other, indentifyable, detectable diseases. But there are far too many scientists and drug manufacturers on the AIDS gravy train and far too many AIDS zealots to let that salient fact interfere with our hysteria and misanthopy.
AIDS is not a disease. AIDS is a religion, and the god of this religion is Death.
I think public scrutiny over HIV/AIDS is long overdue. Much of the USA, where most of the millions in "AIDS research" is spent, is white, middle-class, heterosexual, and drug-free. Many of these people don't have to worry about HIV/AIDS because it doesn't affect them. AIDS has become dogma, and to question it is about a million times more offensive to people than questioning the divinity of Jesus Christ.
If you can peg my political stance from that last paragraph, I'll be impressed.;)
This is a good post, and it's the appropriate foil for mine. Doctors are learned, experienced humans who make a craft of helping and healing people, and they are right to be frustrated by ignorant hicks who can't follow directions or want to be difficult.
Doctors are also fallible humans who are not immune from human phenomena such as elitism, vengefulness, and self-indulgent power trips.
We all need, for our own sakes, healthy, *healthy* skepticism. Doctors are not perfect, nor are they gods. Sometimes, they are evil. It is incumbent upon all us doctors and lay people to remove the evil people from civil, polite, kind society.
Well, as far as I know, people aren't forced in to treatment unless they become a danger to themselves or others.
And what, exactly, decides when I become a "danger" to myself or to others? Since I have expressed some degree of skepticism in the medical industry, does that mean I am at least a little bit "dangerous"? Some people would answer "Yes!" to that. Should I be forced into treatment?
The decision of whether or not an individual is a "danger" is one made by fallible humans, and it has been abused before. Please check out the link that I posted in the original post if you would like to read about just such a story. Black kids with "AIDS" aren't exactly Natalee Holloway, so they're not as fetching on salacious television spots. I invite you to read the evidence and reason about what you find.
False. I call myself a Eudaimonist, and I think that Scientology is a dangerous and destructive cult. I have read quite a bit about Fair Game, OT levels, body thetans, and all sorts of other $cientology garbage.
2) There is a high chance you are a Republican
False. I vote Libertarian, and, as a gay adoptive parent, I am keenly aware of the threat that many Republicans pose toward my family.
3) There is a high chance that both (1) and (2) are true.
Since (1) and (2) are both false, so is (3).
You scored 0%, which is an F.
Regardless, your string of strawmen and self-destructive cynicism does not an argument make.
What a quaint way of writing that sentence! It sure makes you look witty and cool. At the same time, an M.D. who perscribes Risperdal to a non-psychotic person has the potential to do grave harm to her patient, and I can confirm such a theory by direct, personal experience. It turns out that this very same doctor was forced out doing practice in her former city because of malpractice. Was I warned of this? By any other psychologist? Of course not. But to be bitter about such a thing, in your view, is "self-destructive". Yet you gloss over the harm done by shitty doctors who prescribe dangerous psychotropic drugs to thier victims when they're at their weakest -- and I was the victim! You are as abusive as you are stupid. No wonder I had marked you as a foe!
Currently one of the greatest challenges a psychologist faces in these disorders is getting the patient to see that they really do have one and it is impacting them negatively.
Yes, convincing a patient that they need to pay you all that money must be rather difficult. Yet the Noble Health Practicioner(TM) plunges forward!
I can't help but be terribly cynical and bitter after many wasted hours in the offices of ineffective psychologists (not to mention those shitty drug-dealing quacks -- psychiatrists!). Admitting you have a problem is only the first step. Finding a psychologist who is worth a damn is quite a bit more difficult, and no one, especially not a hungry-for-your-money psychologist, will help you find the one that works for you. You have to do it on your own, when you are at your weakest. It sucks, but that's life.
For those of you not in the know, Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder.
I read TFA.
The problem I see with this kind of testing is the cases where the diagnosed individual refuses treatment. The stigma against being labeled as "crazy" is still crushingly huge, and this is a signifigant reason why many people who suffer from emotional disorders refuse to seek treatment. They see it as a sign of weakness, of "not being able to handle things themselves."
So I forsee and fear individuals getting stuck with a (mandatory) needle then being told, "You are anxious", and "You must submit to treatment". The world knows no shortage of elitist M.D.s who hate the notion of a patient not obeying their very learned whim. Why not use the police to force these people into treatment? Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.
FWIW, people who engage in carding don't see it as harming someone else, but rather something else.
Some do, some don't. The ones that referred to victims as "suckers" with a wicked sneer are certainly aware that a someone is being harmed.
Granted, people whose CC nums have been used incur a time loss in reporting the fraud* and having the charges removed,
It sounds like you're arguing, "since no money was lost, then the individual who owns the card really isn't harmed". This is an individual who probably has 1,000 better things to do than to have to sit in customer service hell, fill out forms, and worry about identity theft for the sake of some punk kid who wants some free stuff and isn't ashamed to hurt someone else for the sake of getting it.
but the direct financial loss usually lands on the faceless credit card company.
This is the most annoying line of irrational thinking that comes from anticapitalists. They think that corporations are ethereal beings that have no connection to humanity. In truth, all corporations are comprised of individuals (some more moral than others) who all have individual lives. You can't harm a "faceless" corporation without harming individuals.
Personally, I consider fraud unethical, but I can see how some, particularly young'uns, might have a kind of bastardized Robin Hood view of it.
Robin Hood is frequently a hero of the Left, and young'uns are frequently Leftist. I think it's because they're often annoyed that they don't have "cool sh*t" and feel envious of people who do. I think it's also because they haven't been working in the real world for very long and are still accustomed to having their parents give them things (instead of earning them). Robin Hood doesn't have to be bastardized -- he's already a bastard because he's a thief.
When I worked for an online company providing VoIP service, we became aware of "carding", or swapping / generating credit card numbers for the sake of obtaining merchandise for "free".
I visited some on-line forums and was rather shocked by what I read. First of all, it seemed like none of the people who participated in this activity thought that it was wrong. In fact, many of them justified the action by referring to the victims as "suckers" (meaning, it's acceptable to screw people who are "stupid" enough to fall for it).
The language and "HOWTOs" on the forum were very reminiscent of the old warez sites that I used to frequent. This was just another form of being "comptuer cool", it seemed.
So if users who use P2P (which are largely users who would trade warez) often overlap with people who are into "carding" (which always harms someone else), then why wouldn't they also be into cheating and stealing in more conventional ways? It doesn't stand to reason that a person would have a moral problem lifting something from a brick-and-mortar store yet have no compunction with generating someone's credit card number (and CVV2 number!) and then charging $2,000 of computer gear to it.
It is incumbent upon us to differentiate the type of "theft" where no property is taken to theft (where property IS taken). And, yes, I'm talking about property, not "intellectual property" which is nothing more than ideas propped up by laws.
Your post has got to be the best example of European Leftist sanctimony I've seen on slashdot, right up to the liberal use of personal attacks and ugly language. Allow me to rebut your point of view:
You claim that the Muslim world "had a democracy". (I'll ignore for now that your use of the word "democracy" is rhetoric.) This is incorrect. The Muslim world, before its breakup, was the Caliphate, which was a Theocracy, ruled by Islamic law called Shari'a.
You claim that the prophet Muhammad practiced Democratic principles. In reality, he waged ethnic cleansing of the Jews (I know that hating Jews is in vogue in the Left nowadays), religious persecution, religious war, and coerced marriage with young girls.
You claim that the lack of a "democracy" in the Muslim world is due to "imperial influence". Not only is this false since I've already established that the Caliphate was a theocracy, but you ignore the fact that Muslims exerted a little imperialism of their own. Perhaps you remember that Spain used to be ruled by Muslims, and that the Muslim armies (who were conquering land by force in the name of religion) extended into France before they were defeated.
You ignore the fact that the countries which deny women the right to vote are Muslim-ruled countries, since woman's suffrage is contrary to Shari'a.
You ignore the fact that Shari'a also prescribes the death penalty for homosexuals. (As a gay man, I regard that as important.)
You ignore the fact that adoption rights do not exist under Shari'a. (As an adoptive parent, I regard that as important.)
You ignore the fact that offensive jihad had been pracised many, many times by muslim armies in the past (remember Spain?).
You ignore the fact that the belief that Islam will dominate the world is a mainstream view among muslims -- not an extreme view, a mainstream view.
You ignore the fact that many muslim countries voted against the UN declaration of human rights (not all of which I support, but you probably regard as important), arguing that Islam (Shari'a) was the only solution for all humanity.
You ignore the fact that muslims see the world in two and only two camps: dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) and dar al-Harb (the world of war), and you, in their point of view, are in the dar al-Harb and, therefore, at war with all Muslims.
I understand that you hate America and hate George Bush. I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I like his policies, nor do I support him. You have to let go of that hatred and recognize that all of us who value individual rights and freedoms, not to mention women's rights and gay rights, have a huge problem facing us regarding Islam. Please take your head out of the sand and learn about what Islam really *is* instead of what you merely want it to be.
Slashdot Mirror
A fair market price could happen if the employee knew what all employers were willing to pay for his service and the employers knew what all employee were willing to work for. The result would be a fair market price.
"Fair Market Price" is the price for a commodity/service that compares favorably to the price available from other industry sources. You expand this definition so that the employee must know what ALL employers are willing to pay. This of course is impossible, so you define the employee as being in an "exploited" position. Convenient!
Of course we don't live in a true capitalist economy where prices are dictated completely by the market. First, there is a minimum wage and other government intervention.
I think those things do more harm than good.
Not to mention most employers will immediately drop a prospective employee who answers "How much are you willing to work for?" with the question "How much are you willing to pay?" Thereby exacerbating the information imbalance.
This "information imbalance" you speak of is merely another form of the "oppressive bourgoisie / exploited proletariot" dogma.
I was working a job I hated at 30K/year. Then I was offered a job at 65K/year. I told my boss that I was going to leave, and he begged me to stay. I told him that I was offered a competing deal and they were doubling my salary. He told me that they could do anything except pay me more. Tell me: who was the strong one and who was the weak one in that position? Situations like that happen all the time when the skillset is in high demand. Hence, the skillset fetches high price in the market.
Because one of the downfalls of capitalism is that it treats people - chiefly employees - like commodities to be bought, sold, and found bargains on, instead of humans with hopes, cares, concerns, families, etc.
An employer doesn't treat people as commodities, but rather their skills. An individual's hopes, cares, concerns, and families are the responsibility of the individual, not of their employer.
Keep in mind that the individual who offered to work for $7/hr was willing to work for that rate. He/she was not forced or lied to in order to work for that rate. You may say, "But you were originally willing to spend $10/hr!". That would only be true if that's what I thought the going rate for the particular skillset was. Suppose you wanted to buy a DVD player and planned to spend $40 for it. Then you see an ad that was selling it for $30. Would you go for the lower price, or would go buy the one that had the price that you were "originally willing" to spend? Remember: retailers have hopes, cares, concerns, and families, too! Are you going to deprive them of those things just because someone else has a sweeter distribution deal?
Wal*Mart, anyone? Call bullshit on me? I've seen it over and over again,
It's not bullshit at all. I've seen it over and over, too. The difference between you and me in this regard is that you choose to bash capitalism when people don't get whatever their "needs" are in a "capitalistic system". (I put that in quotes because I don't regard capitalism as a "system", but rather that thing that exists only when individuals are allowed to exist as free and moral traders.) Remember this: no one is preventing you from helping someone in need. The "conservative" Southern USA gives the most money to charity, year after year, whereas the "liberal" Northeastern USA is the most stingy when it comes to charity.
I'm not saying that there's necessarily a better system out there...everything seems to suck.
Life is hard! I've had two failed businesses in the past year, lost my life savings, and my partner declared bankruptcy. But I'm not going to sit around and whine "everything sucks!" I'm going to get off my ass and keep trying and have a happy life in spite of it all. As a result of my refusal to give up, I have three more businessess in the works with the theory that if I throw enough shit against the wall, something's going to stick, and I'm going to engineer my way out of this pit I find myself in.
And despite how you and I may have differences in values, I wish the same tenacity in the pursuit of happiness for you in your life. Too many people preach doom, guilt, and hate, and it all deserves to go straight into the garbage. May you find a pursuit that you enjoy, make money doing it, develop rich and enjoyable interests, help those whom you love (and whom you think merit help), and live a long and happy life. Happiness is your birthright.
If kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery was overlooked or legal, you bet they would be.
Let me make my objection more clear. I am about to start a company, and I used to own a restaurant (which was a company). Are you claiming that if I could get away with kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery for profit, then I would do it?
They- like all companies- are a FOR-PROFIT venture, and will do whatever they think is the thing that will garner them the most profit. Period.
This is a most rephrehensible comment to make. You claim that since a company wants to make a profit, they will, therefore, by definition, do ANYTHING that might make them money. For instance, if kidnapping children and selling them into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia is profitable, then ANY for-profit company would have no compunction at all in doing so. This is a wrong-headed, insulting, and stupid idea. Perhaps you believe it because you believe axiomatically that the profit motive is evil.
Welcome to Capitalism, enjoy your stay.
You and I have very different understandings of capitalism. To me, capitalism is when people trade value-for-value as free individuals. It is immoral to make money through force or fraud, and those who do it should be punished. Capitalism is merely that which exists by default when individual property rights are protected by the state, free people are allowed to trade, and force and fraud are punished. It is the celebration of individual excellence. It allows companies like Ben & Jerry's and Starbucks to exist which, despite their leftist lip-service, are actually shining monuments to the success of capitalism over older, inferior competitors.
To you, capitalism is probably the source of all the world's misery. I think that's an article of your faith as opposed to observations of reality.
What "risk-free" violent games have you been playing? I get killed all the time in Quake, GTA, etc.
After which you respawn, correct? If you wanted a game with *real* risk (not this pussy "no permadeath!" fake risk that you champion), then after you "get killed" in Quake, rusty metal spikes would shoot out of your PC into your eyes, heart, and genitals.
As long as they portray it as bad parenting and idiotic kids acting out bits from a video game.
The stupid often die in stupid ways, and there's little we can do about that. But what about the "bad parenting" you mention? Would good parents prevent their kinds from playing GTA (because it might influence their kids to predatory violence)?
It gets worse yet!
Some people watch The Daily Show and think that this is not only the most realistic "news" on TV, but that by thinking so makes them better than everyone else.
The first example is ascribing unrealistic levels of influence to playing a video game. The second is simply a matter of TV misinforming viewers. Huge difference.
You seem to indicate that the former only influences while the latter only (mis)informs. I think that both cases both inform and influence.
In the first case (the violent video game), the game informs the game player that predatory violence is fun, acceptable, cool, and risk-free. It influences the game player to participate in said predatory violence.
In the second case (the television show) the show informs the viewer that forensic science is blisteringly fast, nominally expensive, fun, computationally trivial, and capable of technological feats that do not exist. It influences the viewer to place trust in forensic science in ways where it is not deserved.
Humans have lived most of their lives living off of the land and their labor. You may have heard of a little thing called farming.
"Saving the family farm" is another one of the popular themes from the left nowadays. What condescending, leftist, urbanites (who have no idea what an actual farm is like) fail to realize is that almost everyone who has grown up on a farm (which is a life filled with endless toil) have done everything to get away from it and toward a life of convenience and leisure (the life that most urbanite leftists ignorantly enjoy). It is that not humans that have lived most of their lives as farmers (which you seem to allege), but rather humanity which has spent most of its existence living in lives of toil and misery. The technology that I can "progress" and you call "unsustainable" has given us humans better lives with more leisure time. My guess is that you wouldn't last 5 minutes doing farm work. The left has rarely championed work anyways! Go look at http://www.whywork.org/ to see what some other leftists think about the issue of work. Do you think those leftists want to spend one millisecond of time doing work on a farm?
I know this goes against your globalist/economic paradise line of thinking . . . but this has nothing to do with politics. You are the one who is injecting politics in here.
This notion of a "globalist/economic paradise line of thinking" is the way you slander me, but does not represent what I think at all. Nor am I the one "injecting politics"; rather, I am responding to what was from the onset a political issue. The "sustainable" movement is intrinsically linked with the environmental movement which has *always* been a political issue. To claim that your argument is beyond politics is deceitful of you. It is a failed attempt to paint your subjective point of view as "fact" rather than a value-based viewpoint.
The Chinese are simply trying to make an investment in something that will hopefully reap a gain in effecincy by promoting self-sufficency of these people.
And yet my valid criticism was not of the Chinese, but rather of the sanctimonious leftists who claim to be "for the poor" while simultaneously championing products that are "good for everyone" yet too expensive for the poor. You have failed to respond to this hypocrisy. Instead, you have chosen to attack me personally which speaks volumes about your character (not ot mention your argument). Granted, there are other aspects of the "sustainable" movmement which do NOT fall under this hypocrital umbrella, and I do not necessarily object to those.
The only class warfare rhetoric, ironically, is yours.
You make this claim shortly after you uttered the "gobalist" rhetoric and attempted to smear me with it. You look like you're not putting a lot of thought into your argument. Furthermore, what, specifically, did I state that you would consider class warfare rhetoric? I notice you cite no examples.
Curious. So the "rich liberals" want sustainable, but that's "expensive."
You're using your sarcasm quotes far too liberally (pun un-intended). There are plenty of rich liberals (I know that's an ugly truth) who want things that are "sustainable", and those things are virtually guanrateed to be more expensive than the stuff on the regular market.
Then the "rich conservatives" want cheap, throw-away shit?
What kind of broken, black-and-white thinking is this? Rich people, liberal or conservative, live rich lifestyles. They want big houses with pretty views and nice wine and fancy clothes and everything that you or I would like to enjoy if we had their kind of money. Rich liberals do NOT live among the poor rabble that they often champion. They, like rich conseravtives, live in Aspen or Austin or Long Island. They do NOT live in the 9th ward of New Orleans, not in a million years, despite how much they "care" about the people who live there.
quite possibly with the end result that rich conservatives in China can afford themselves arcologies to move into when the oil dries up and their air gets even worse than at present
You don't quite grasp it yet. The rich conservatives *and* the rich liberals are doing the same thing. They are shoring up so that their families and friends will be safe. This is not a "liberal v. conservative" issue, it's a "rich v. poor" issue, and there are *plenty* of filthy, stinking rich liberals with their millions of dollars in off-shore tax havens. I think the rich liberals suck worse becuase if they really "cared" as much about the poor as they claim to, then they would spend some of their own money to make a difference. Why aren't rich liberals criticized for their yachts and jewelry and egregious tax evasion?
By the way, NONE of this "sustainable" shit will make a damn bit of difference when the oil runs out. Oil is the lifeblood of the American way of life. If we don't find a way to replace it, then life will one day get a whole lot shitter for everyone in the country except for the extremely, extremly rich (in which demographic there are both liberals and conservatives).
So, yes, it is more expensive. Or it seems that way, at least.
Which is it? You can't have it both ways.
We can either bury our heads in the sand and cry "It's more expensive," or we can make a wise investment in conserving resources today for the "poor people" of tomorrow.
Perhaps you can make that choice because your rich enough for "sustanable options" to be in your budget. How many poor people do you see driving hybrid cars? Hybrid cars are expensive.
I'm not burying my head in the sand at all (that actually a job for leftists regarding Shari'a and the new Caliphate). I'm stating an economic fact. Poor people have fewer options they can afford. "Sustainable" options are too expensive for them. Only the rich can choose to be "sustainable". I know you feel this is a moral issue, so you're going to be all "But we *have* to do *SOMETHING*!!!" about it, but that doesn't change the fact that poor people can't afford it.
Are you saying that basically every self-sustaining community is for rich people?
... except that their lifestyle was basically a parasite on the ass of the culture they eschew. For example: they would go take the waste grease from fast food restaurants to power their "eco friendly" cars. Did anyone not realize that such a scheme depended on "Big Food" to function? Later, these same people went dumpster diving. Wow, what an awesome sustainable lifestyle! I wanted to gag.
Of course not! I cannot cover every facet of everything in a single post, can I? I was trying to make a single point: "sustainable" often means "expensive", which contradicts the "pro-poor-people" message that the champions of "sustainable" simultaneously spout.
I saw that episode of Morgan Spurlock's deceitful TV propganda "30 days" in which the two NYC folks visit the "sustanable community". They lived like a primitive tribe (with solar panels)
but it's hardly a "posh playground" as you so foolishly put it.
Perhaps because I wasn't describing the Radical Faeries. There are many, many leftists who spout off all sorts of stupid rhetoric about "the poor" who are also filthy, fucking, stinking rich (Ted Kenendy, John Kerry, George Soros, Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore, the list goes on and on). Why won't you put blame where it is due? Why can't you realize that hypocrisy exists on the "right" *and* on the the "left"?
Things that are "sustainable" (and "organic" in the foodie subculture) are often championed by people who claim to know better than everyone else. They spout off like enlightened, forward-thinking people upon whom the rest of the common rabble relies for knowledge and sophistication.
In other words, they're leftists. But we're all used to leftist sanctimony, right? Here's the part that really gets under my skin.
Anything "sustainable" (or "organic") is guaranteed to be expensive. In other words, poor people can't afford it. While rich, sophisticated leftists wallow in their organic fucking arugula, the poor rabble that they claim to "care about" will still be eating fast food and frozen pizzas. (Or millet, seeing as these people will be living in China.) "Sustainable" won't help those people one iota because they can't afford to pay for it. The rest of the subhumans will still be ignorantly destroying the Earth as before. When you see "sustainable", you can think of this tagline: "Sustainable. By rich liberals, for rich liberals."
Even reading the article makes it seem like these "sustainable" cities are going to be nothing more than posh playgrounds for the cosmopolitan readers of "The Nation". When the denizens of these not-quite-quaint climate-controlled and shielded-from-the-shit bio-domes are toasting each other with glasses of "certified 100% organic" chardonnay, will they also be asking themselves, "I wonder what the poor are doing?" Despite their tired class-warfare rhetoric, I would have to say, "hell, no."
The *ultimate* unregulated monopoly is the government. They can charge whatever they want, and they can provide crappy service and get away with it.
Does that sound too uncool? Let me frame it in a different way that sounds more "hackish":
Who watches the watchmen?
Poverty and lack of education, while certainly not justifications for crime, are often part of the cause.
I think you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. The reason you mention poverty at all is because you are trying to justify (or, in your parlance, "understand") the crime, but pretend like you're not by saying the exact opposite. If there is no justification for the crime, then there is no need at all to talk about poverty. The reason I think it's a justification is because your argument naturally leads into, "If we solve poverty, then we'll solve the crime, as poverty is the root cause of the crime."
See also, "Hitler will calm down if we let him have the Sudetenland."
The poverty justification is flawed anyway. Suppose there are two individuals. One of them chooses a life of going out, hooking up, and using drugs. The other has a much less glamorous life of studying, earning degrees in higher education, and fetching a high-paying job. The first individual ends up in poverty while the other has a nice lifestyle. The first individual, seeing the other's wealth, decides to mug him. A cosmopolitan leftist with a "nuanced understanding" decides to blame the crime on "poverty" -- meaning, if only the first individual wasn't poor, then he wouldn't have committed the crime.
We'll solve that "root problem" by using the force of government to steal money from the second individual and give it to the first. The first individual rewards us with his vote.
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
You make it sound as if the mujahideen were chosen as "bad guys" out of racism, cowboy stupidity, or even chosen arbitrarily. This is part of the militant ingorance that leftists display toward the mujahideen and what they want to do to everyone in the dar al-harm (that's the land you and I live in). In their minds, you have three options: death, conversion to Islam, or subjugation (including jizya, the "infidel tax", which you must pay in shame). The mujahideen are more than willing to detonate a nuclear weapon in New York City (imagine what that would do to the *global* economy) for the cause of harming the Kufr (that's you and me). No, not because of "poverty". Because of their religion in which black-and-white thinking in terms of "us" and "them" is so stark and so absolutist that it makes George Bush look like a finely-nuanced cosmopolitan reporter for the New York Times.
I reply to shills because it helps to sharpen my sword.
Vaginal sex does transmit AIDS (although anal sex does so more efficiently).
Since you can't detect the virus you have no way of showing this. All you can detect is antibodies which you have no way of showing are linked to HIV (because you can't detect the virus). Oh, what about PCR and viral load? It multiplies fragments which are alleged to be part of HIV, but since you can't detect the virus, you have no way of knowing if those fragments came from HIV or not.
The virus doesn't care about class or race at all.
But it apparently cares about sexual orientation (since gay men get different opportunistic diseases than straights do) and physical location (since African "AIDS" is nothing like North American "AIDS"). Interesting that we have a disease which happens to match the patterns of geopolitcs and culture.
Furthermore, the "virus" might not care about class or race, but the "HIV tests" certainly do. The test results of every "HIV test" are NOT read, but rather interpreted according to an individual's "risk group". A "negative" result for you might very well be a "positive" result for someone in a different race or class. Say, for instance, black drug user.
We are not immune, it's already started to spread among us, and I'd like to get vaccinated before it becomes a pandemic thankyouverymuch.
I'd first worry about whether or not there actually is a virus before worrying about being vaccinated for it. Since Gallo used exactly the same discredited method for HIV that he did for a previous non-existant virus that he claimed to have "discovered" but later recanted, I don't know what you have to go on. Fear and paranoia, perhaps? "Pandemic" certainly is a scary word!
And the risk of AIDS reduces sexual opportunities for everyone, which IMHO makes it even worse than any disease which merely kills people at random.
"AIDS" kills far fewer people than many other, indentifyable, detectable diseases. But there are far too many scientists and drug manufacturers on the AIDS gravy train and far too many AIDS zealots to let that salient fact interfere with our hysteria and misanthopy.
AIDS is not a disease. AIDS is a religion, and the god of this religion is Death.
Thank you, it feels good to be appreciated.
;)
I think public scrutiny over HIV/AIDS is long overdue. Much of the USA, where most of the millions in "AIDS research" is spent, is white, middle-class, heterosexual, and drug-free. Many of these people don't have to worry about HIV/AIDS because it doesn't affect them. AIDS has become dogma, and to question it is about a million times more offensive to people than questioning the divinity of Jesus Christ.
If you can peg my political stance from that last paragraph, I'll be impressed.
This is a good post, and it's the appropriate foil for mine. Doctors are learned, experienced humans who make a craft of helping and healing people, and they are right to be frustrated by ignorant hicks who can't follow directions or want to be difficult.
Doctors are also fallible humans who are not immune from human phenomena such as elitism, vengefulness, and self-indulgent power trips.
We all need, for our own sakes, healthy, *healthy* skepticism. Doctors are not perfect, nor are they gods. Sometimes, they are evil. It is incumbent upon all us doctors and lay people to remove the evil people from civil, polite, kind society.
Well, as far as I know, people aren't forced in to treatment unless they become a danger to themselves or others.
And what, exactly, decides when I become a "danger" to myself or to others? Since I have expressed some degree of skepticism in the medical industry, does that mean I am at least a little bit "dangerous"? Some people would answer "Yes!" to that. Should I be forced into treatment?
The decision of whether or not an individual is a "danger" is one made by fallible humans, and it has been abused before. Please check out the link that I posted in the original post if you would like to read about just such a story. Black kids with "AIDS" aren't exactly Natalee Holloway, so they're not as fetching on salacious television spots. I invite you to read the evidence and reason about what you find.
From your message I can guess a few things:
We'll see how well you scored:
1) There is a high chance you are a Scientologist
False. I call myself a Eudaimonist, and I think that Scientology is a dangerous and destructive cult. I have read quite a bit about Fair Game, OT levels, body thetans, and all sorts of other $cientology garbage.
2) There is a high chance you are a Republican
False. I vote Libertarian, and, as a gay adoptive parent, I am keenly aware of the threat that many Republicans pose toward my family.
3) There is a high chance that both (1) and (2) are true.
Since (1) and (2) are both false, so is (3).
You scored 0%, which is an F.
Regardless, your string of strawmen and self-destructive cynicism does not an argument make.
What a quaint way of writing that sentence! It sure makes you look witty and cool. At the same time, an M.D. who perscribes Risperdal to a non-psychotic person has the potential to do grave harm to her patient, and I can confirm such a theory by direct, personal experience. It turns out that this very same doctor was forced out doing practice in her former city because of malpractice. Was I warned of this? By any other psychologist? Of course not. But to be bitter about such a thing, in your view, is "self-destructive". Yet you gloss over the harm done by shitty doctors who prescribe dangerous psychotropic drugs to thier victims when they're at their weakest -- and I was the victim! You are as abusive as you are stupid. No wonder I had marked you as a foe!
Currently one of the greatest challenges a psychologist faces in these disorders is getting the patient to see that they really do have one and it is impacting them negatively.
Yes, convincing a patient that they need to pay you all that money must be rather difficult. Yet the Noble Health Practicioner(TM) plunges forward!
I can't help but be terribly cynical and bitter after many wasted hours in the offices of ineffective psychologists (not to mention those shitty drug-dealing quacks -- psychiatrists!). Admitting you have a problem is only the first step. Finding a psychologist who is worth a damn is quite a bit more difficult, and no one, especially not a hungry-for-your-money psychologist, will help you find the one that works for you. You have to do it on your own, when you are at your weakest. It sucks, but that's life.
For those of you not in the know, Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder.
I read TFA.
The problem I see with this kind of testing is the cases where the diagnosed individual refuses treatment. The stigma against being labeled as "crazy" is still crushingly huge, and this is a signifigant reason why many people who suffer from emotional disorders refuse to seek treatment. They see it as a sign of weakness, of "not being able to handle things themselves."
So I forsee and fear individuals getting stuck with a (mandatory) needle then being told, "You are anxious", and "You must submit to treatment". The world knows no shortage of elitist M.D.s who hate the notion of a patient not obeying their very learned whim. Why not use the police to force these people into treatment? Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.
Or maybe I'm just anxious...
FWIW, people who engage in carding don't see it as harming someone else, but rather something else.
Some do, some don't. The ones that referred to victims as "suckers" with a wicked sneer are certainly aware that a someone is being harmed.
Granted, people whose CC nums have been used incur a time loss in reporting the fraud* and having the charges removed,
It sounds like you're arguing, "since no money was lost, then the individual who owns the card really isn't harmed". This is an individual who probably has 1,000 better things to do than to have to sit in customer service hell, fill out forms, and worry about identity theft for the sake of some punk kid who wants some free stuff and isn't ashamed to hurt someone else for the sake of getting it.
but the direct financial loss usually lands on the faceless credit card company.
This is the most annoying line of irrational thinking that comes from anticapitalists. They think that corporations are ethereal beings that have no connection to humanity. In truth, all corporations are comprised of individuals (some more moral than others) who all have individual lives. You can't harm a "faceless" corporation without harming individuals.
Personally, I consider fraud unethical, but I can see how some, particularly young'uns, might have a kind of bastardized Robin Hood view of it.
Robin Hood is frequently a hero of the Left, and young'uns are frequently Leftist. I think it's because they're often annoyed that they don't have "cool sh*t" and feel envious of people who do. I think it's also because they haven't been working in the real world for very long and are still accustomed to having their parents give them things (instead of earning them). Robin Hood doesn't have to be bastardized -- he's already a bastard because he's a thief.
When I worked for an online company providing VoIP service, we became aware of "carding", or swapping / generating credit card numbers for the sake of obtaining merchandise for "free".
I visited some on-line forums and was rather shocked by what I read. First of all, it seemed like none of the people who participated in this activity thought that it was wrong. In fact, many of them justified the action by referring to the victims as "suckers" (meaning, it's acceptable to screw people who are "stupid" enough to fall for it).
The language and "HOWTOs" on the forum were very reminiscent of the old warez sites that I used to frequent. This was just another form of being "comptuer cool", it seemed.
So if users who use P2P (which are largely users who would trade warez) often overlap with people who are into "carding" (which always harms someone else), then why wouldn't they also be into cheating and stealing in more conventional ways? It doesn't stand to reason that a person would have a moral problem lifting something from a brick-and-mortar store yet have no compunction with generating someone's credit card number (and CVV2 number!) and then charging $2,000 of computer gear to it.
It is incumbent upon us to differentiate the type of "theft" where no property is taken to theft (where property IS taken). And, yes, I'm talking about property, not "intellectual property" which is nothing more than ideas propped up by laws.
Your post has got to be the best example of European Leftist sanctimony I've seen on slashdot, right up to the liberal use of personal attacks and ugly language. Allow me to rebut your point of view:
You claim that the Muslim world "had a democracy". (I'll ignore for now that your use of the word "democracy" is rhetoric.) This is incorrect. The Muslim world, before its breakup, was the Caliphate, which was a Theocracy, ruled by Islamic law called Shari'a.
You claim that the prophet Muhammad practiced Democratic principles. In reality, he waged ethnic cleansing of the Jews (I know that hating Jews is in vogue in the Left nowadays), religious persecution, religious war, and coerced marriage with young girls.
You claim that the lack of a "democracy" in the Muslim world is due to "imperial influence". Not only is this false since I've already established that the Caliphate was a theocracy, but you ignore the fact that Muslims exerted a little imperialism of their own. Perhaps you remember that Spain used to be ruled by Muslims, and that the Muslim armies (who were conquering land by force in the name of religion) extended into France before they were defeated.
You ignore the fact that the countries which deny women the right to vote are Muslim-ruled countries, since woman's suffrage is contrary to Shari'a.
You ignore the fact that Shari'a also prescribes the death penalty for homosexuals. (As a gay man, I regard that as important.)
You ignore the fact that adoption rights do not exist under Shari'a. (As an adoptive parent, I regard that as important.)
You ignore the fact that offensive jihad had been pracised many, many times by muslim armies in the past (remember Spain?).
You ignore the fact that the belief that Islam will dominate the world is a mainstream view among muslims -- not an extreme view, a mainstream view.
You ignore the fact that many muslim countries voted against the UN declaration of human rights (not all of which I support, but you probably regard as important), arguing that Islam (Shari'a) was the only solution for all humanity.
You ignore the fact that muslims see the world in two and only two camps: dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) and dar al-Harb (the world of war), and you, in their point of view, are in the dar al-Harb and, therefore, at war with all Muslims.
I understand that you hate America and hate George Bush. I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I like his policies, nor do I support him. You have to let go of that hatred and recognize that all of us who value individual rights and freedoms, not to mention women's rights and gay rights, have a huge problem facing us regarding Islam. Please take your head out of the sand and learn about what Islam really *is* instead of what you merely want it to be.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/