So pay attention to stuff like the government pre-collecting much or most of your income right out of your pay, before you see it, giving it enormous wealth at its disposal.
Except that the neo-cons have already figured the way around that - borrow. So tax cuts won't mean lesss government spending until you take away the ability for the government to borrow money; they'll just shift the debt to future generations. (Many of these people beleive the Rapture is comin' soon anyway and will wipe out any merely mortal debt...)
And under conservative "leadership", if spending is cut, it's not cut for the military, for covert ops, for prison building, for "law enforcement", or for other ways of repressing people. It's cut for things like levee maintenance. Whoops!
(Oh, and who's in a tax bracket where most of their paycheck comes out in taxes? Americans pay some of the lowest taxes amoung industrialized nations.)
You know, it's a curious thing. If I say "San Francisco has a much better mass transit system than Baltimore (which isn't saying much), we could learn from them", nobody says "If you like it so much, you should move there!".
If I say "Boston did a great job in cleaning up their harbor, Baltimore could learn from them", nobody says "you should move there, let us know how it goes."
If I say "New Hampshire's law requiring voting machines to mark and read paper ballots is a good idea, Maryland could learn from them", nobody says "you should move there, then."
I can suggest that my city and state learn from others, and no one suggests I don't love the place I live. No, it's only if I suggest that the United States could learn something from another country that some far-right ultra-nationalist, who loves America with the sort of irrational fervor that a three-year-old child loves his Mommy, gets his testicles twisted and tells me I should leave.
That's one definition. Here is another. `Of or relating to source code that is available to the public'.
And the American Heritage dictionary is supposed to be authoritative about software development and licensing?
Look up "trusted" in a dictionary and you won't find mention of the Orange Book or Common Criteria, but you'd better understand their definitions if you're going to talk about "trust" in a computer system.
Yes, natural language is ambiguous; one of the ways ambiguity is resolved is via context. "Work" means one thing when I'm talking about my paycheck, another if I'm talking about physics. If I said I get paid for my work on such-and-such-project and you asked how much force I exerted over what distance, you'd either be joking or you'd be dangerously confused.
"Open source", in the context of software development and licensing, is ambiguous only as a convenience for those who wish to create confusion and either sabotage, or ride the coat-tails of, the Open Source movement.
But since you bring it up: once again you're talking about a central hub of "piracy" and not breaking down to the level where you were pursuing the man on the street.
"Central hub"? No. The "threat" was that "the man on the street" was going to tape albums, not that record rental shops were cranking out pirate copies.
I clearly remember 8-tracks in the 70s.
Uh, yes. As I said, they (or at least their heyday) were earlier than "the days of Walkmans and boom boxes."
either there is a univerally applicable moral law to which all accountable, or there is not.
"Accountable" in what sense? Are you basing your ethics on fear of punishment and hope of reward? That's a pretty poor motivation.
But, if morals are nothing more than a set of conventions or rules produced by humans, then they are not universal.
A reasonable ethical system is a set of ideas produced by humans based on observation of actions and their results, not arbitrarily. For example, it is a fairly universal law of human behavior that people who treat others badly don't get invited to the good parties. It's also a good rule of thumb that people like to go to the good parties. Ergo, when considering the fundamental ethical question of "how shall I live my life", one of the points in the answer is "Don't treat others badly".
If you want to call this observation of how things are "transcendental", fine. But it's got nothing to do with deities.
Each individual is free to invent any type of moral system that seem right to them -- there is no higher authority to judge them differently.
Of course people are free to invent any type of system that seem right (or that even seems wrong) to them. People do it all the time. Unfortunately, usually their inventions are based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning, and lead to suffering for themselves and others.
Indeed, people are also free to invent any type of gods they want, and do it all the time - also usually based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning.
The adjective "non-supernatural" is also misleading.
No, it's an entirely accurate way to describe ethical systems which do not rely on assumptions about the supernatural.
If they don't want to serve you pages, then they don't have to.
Well, yes. But then why have a website?
If you want to truly be part of the World Wide Web, then your pages need to be served to the World. It's right there in the name.
If you're going to whine about people not looking at your ads and try to block ad-blockers, set up a walled garden where people have to pay a nickel to see your stuff, fine. But then few people are going to see your site and link to it; you'll be isolated from the Web.
Are these liberties we have given up "essential," and is the protection the new laws provide "temporary"?
Yes, Fourth Amendment rights are essential; and the "protection" of the government's power grabs isn't temporary, it's non-existant. Wanna spy on suspected bad guys? Get a fucking warrant. End runs around that check provide no "protection" to anybody.
In war time, we give up liberties. We ration food and gas. We censor the news. We read soldier's mail. We even interned the Japanese.
In war time (which, since we don't have a Congressional declaration, this ain't), authoritarians will take liberties if the people let them. That doesn't make it right or legal.
Do you really think that the RIAA considered going around in a car in the 70s and 80s and stopping kids with portable 8-track players, Walkmans and boom boxes and demanding that they produce proof of ownership of the music?
In the 1980s, back when LPs and cassette tapes were all the rage, there were record rental stores. The RIAA managed to smash this by getting Congress to pass the "Record Rental Amendment" in 1984.
So, yes, the RIAA was concerned with copying back in the days of Walkmans and boom boxes. (8 tracks were a little earlier, Junior.)
as a percentage of GDP. And maybe that's why, after cutting 10 divisions during the Clinton years, we don't have enough troops to win a prolonged war.
Percentage of GDP is irrelevant. How does a bigger GDP imply we need a bigger military?
And we had enough troops to easily win the wars against the Taliban's Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq. We don't have enough troops to turn either nation into a instant peaceful democracy, any more than we have enough gasoline to put out the latest forest fires - you can never have enough of a tool that does the opposite of your goal. Every day we occupy Iraq, we might as well be printing recruitment posters for Al Qaeda.
In the early 1960s the Department of Defense constituted 45 percent of federal spending, whereas this year it will constitute an estimated 17 percent, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
Except that that's wrong. When you add in war spending (not accounted for in the budget), veteran's health and retirement benefits, and interest on debt accrued for defense spending, annual military spending makes about about a trillion dollars.
Funny how all of you lefties want to cut the things the Constitution actually requires the government to do, not the preposterous entitlements that are not mentioned in the Constitution, and are bankrupting America.
Funny how all of you righties want to lump several very different things under the rubric of "entitlements: support to the elderly and disabled in the form of Social Security and Medicare; the veteran's and military benefits that should be rightly understood as part of defense spending; other federal retirement spending; and support to poor people. We can only meaningfully deal with reform when these are understood individually.
The article says "only free software compiler" which could mean either a compiler that is free software (as in FOSS), or a software compiler that is free.
It is the existence of a transcendent personal God who acts as a law-giver who can hold humanity accountable that makes morals both meaningful and universal. Without such a concept, morals become relative to the individual who decides what rules are right and wrong for themselves, and what meaning the rules will have for them.
First, religious morals are hardly meaningful and universal. For example, the "moral" concept that certain consensual sexual acts are "evil" is neither.
Religious morals are exactly relative to the individual who's preaching, who then tries to back up his own opinions by attirbuting them to deities.
Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.
Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.
If users want to be stupid and pretend that sleep is off, then they pay the consequences.
No, if Apple designs a shoddy and defective product that does not clearly distinguish between "sleep" and "off", then they need to pay the consequences - recall the thing, fix it, and pay any and all charges incurred by users.
I would hope that if you buy an iPhone you're knowledgeable enough to look up the airplane mode.
Great, so if an iPhone owner doesn't read some fine print in the back of the manual to understand which of several different "off" modes is really "off", the phone is a threat to the safety of the plane. Great design.
I believe intuitively that you are correct. However, if it is truly the nature of things, then we should be able to quantify and explain how it is naturally derived.
Don't confuse the objective physiology and biochemistry of the brain with the sujective quality of experience. If the question is "does being nice make me happy?", the best way to find out is to carefully examine your own experience. No amount of obective external observation can answer a subjective internal question, any more than subjective internal observation can answer an obective external question.
But, the question of "what is the evolutionary biology that makes human beings, by and large, feel good when they're being nice?", is also an interesting one. There may be some information in the field of positive psychology. From the neurological point of view, I would guess that mirror neurons have a role to play.
How about reading and replying to sources on actual ideology of muslims that I have cited...
The Schiffauer text you link doesn't even say anything relevant! He's talking about internal politics of one branch of Islam in Germany, and ends with the hopeful conculsion that "Islamic philosophers could use the strength of Islam to elaborate a philosophy of the network society, incorporating a wise treatment of boundaries and a rethinking of the social nature of the individual."
Spengler's piece on Sistani might be useful is seen as the opinions of one strain of Islam in one culture, but veers into bigotry when it suggests that Sistani's ideas are universal throughout Islam. Really, would you take a piece about a conservative Catholic bishop in Africa as informative about your Quaker neighbors?
It's sad that you're so bound and determined to find justification for your hate you can't read straight.
Look, no one is arguing that there do not exist Muslims (and Christians, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and Pagans, and atheists...) who have wacko ideology.
But to pretend that such is that ideology of all Muslims (Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, atheists) is exactly the defintion of prejudice. You're unwilling to look at Muslims as individual human beings, to understand that across the world they represent a wide swath. The dancing Sufis are not the same as the Nation of Islam, who are not the same as middle-class American Muslims whose grandparents immigrated to the states, who are not the same as the Palestinian Muslim who endure the occupation, who are not the same as the Saudi princes.
I disagree. Big business was alive and well during the Gilded Age, when the US Federal government was tiny...
You miss the point. I'm talking about something much more fundamental. No government issued corporate charters, no Big Business. No government issued land deeds for speculators, no Big Business. Eliminate government issued copyrights and patents as we know them, no Big Business. And on this point it makes no difference that some of these are done by the federal government and some by states.
I'm not hostile to your points about Federalism, it's a question I go back and forth on. Certainly the contemporary Federal government is leaps and bounds beyond its Constitutional mandate, we're in agreement there. But the point I want to raise is the dependance of Big Business on state action.
Libertarian capitalists are fond of talking about "smaller government", but capitalism can't exist without a whole lot of government action on behalf of the owning class. Which is why the original - and the only true - libertarians were and are liberatarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists.
The basic principle of debate is that you debate what the person actually says, not what you invent.
Except that I wasn't debating "theAtomicFireball". I was making a general comment about a certain current in political thought, one that was under discussion in the thread and one that I have encountered many, many, many times.
Does that sound to you like a country willing to respect sovereignty and self-determination of other nations?
I'm not quite sure what your point is. I'm not lauding the Soviet Union. only pointing out that a significant factor in the way that it developed may well have been attacks on it by the Allies.
The fact that the USSR didn't respect the sovereignty and self-determination of other nations, is hardly an excuse for the USA to behave the same way.
You can not expect the world to turn into a favorable direction for you if you sit down and do nothing.
True. But that doesn't mean that violence and colonialism are the only ways of "doing something".
How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?
How about you put down your hate, fear, and bigotry, and learn what the ideology of actual Muslims is?
You use fallacy of composition: just because some, formally Muslim, probably not very devout
Who the hell are you to tell these people that they're not very devout?
It's those who are murdering in the name of Islam who are not devout, breaking the laws of the religion they claim to follow - the rules of jihad do not allow for the killing of innocents.
Plus, they are peaceful only because they are in minority. For now.
Oh, horseshit. The people I mention are peaceful bcause they're nice people.
Christianity is doctrinally about love, Islam is doctrinally about submission:
Uh, right. No Christian would ever pray "thy will be done."
In short, there can be no peace with Islam, as two ideologies underpinning the reflective lifestyles - Islam, the traditional and developed world, the modernist lifestyle, which more or less can be reconciled with Christianity - are in fundamental and irreconcileable disagreement.
In their mainstreams, neither Christianity nor Islam is really compatible with democracy, which is why you have so many "born-again" Christians who want kingly authority for the President. You can't pray to "The Lord", the "King of Kings", etcetera, and hold democracy close to your heart.
It's no wonder that the wacko fringe Christians and the wacko fringe Muslims hate each other so dearly - they're entirely too much alike.
No, most people who talk about smaller government really do want a smaller Federal government.
"Smaller government" and "smaller Federal government" are two very different things. Simply shuffling powers around matters little. I don't disagree that the Fed has gotten too big, but all too many "state's rights" advocates either naively believe that the states are more friendly to liberty than the federal government, or actively want the states to be able to oppress the minority groups they don't like.
Funny how people forget things like the US military being first on the scene after the Tsunami hit...
And wouldn't it have been better if well-trained and well-equipped disaster relief specialists from a Department of Peace were doing that, instead of a bunch of people whose primary training is warfare?
or world kept mostly free of piracy from the US navy
Which is why smaller government is an inherent good...it reduces the ability of big business to line their pockets with your tax money while being backed up by the monopoly of force that is the government.
My point is that the very existence of "big business" is only made possible by government action, and that those are the parts of government that need to be shrunk first. Shrinking the parts that provide some oversight of "big business" is foolhardy - like lightening your car by installing light-duty brakes instead of replacing the engine with a smaller one.
Merely saying "shrink the government!" is not enough, you need to describe what parts. There's a big difference between a plan that starts with shrinking the Army, the Federal Reserve, and the DEA, and once that starts with shrinking FEMA, the Small Business Administration, and the NIH.
Perhaps those later wars would be more popular - in US and abroad - if people remembered that prior to WWII americans didn't want any part of world politics or being a global policeman.
...provided one forgets about WWI, the Spanish-American War, Philippine-American war, the Monroe Doctrine, et cetera. And the amazingly little-known U.S. and allied invasion of communist Russia, one of my favorite little-known but vitally important historical events. (Kind of relevant to the Cold War, eh? Not so paranoid for the Russians to fear an American
attack if we'd already done it once.)
Oh, and just how did we come to have a naval base in Hawaii in the first place? Or our presence in Guam? The Philippines? The Pacific conflict was a straight-up fight between expansionist colonial powers. Yes, the U.S. was somewhat less vicious, though American atrocities were not unknown.
The idea of the U.S. quietly minding it's own business when suddenly attacked by those sneaky Japanese and then reluctantly rising to save the world, is great nationalist mythology. But it's lousy history. Sure, we'd toned down the foreign meddling for a few years - because we ran out of money.
And Muslims clearly believe in imposing their Sharia law on the rest of the world by force. Well, not everyone who calls himself a muslim, but the more "devote" one is, the more he is likely to advocate violence.
That's odd. I don't think my Muslim veternarian, or his kids who used to take my karate class, want to impose Sharia law on me. Nor did the Muslim karate teacher who visited my dojo and stayed at my house for a few days a few years back. I don't think the woman in the chador who bagged my groceries yesterday (yes, that was odd) bore me any ill will. Nor did the nice folks from South Africa with whom I sat at dinner at an event last summer (we were all at the vegetarian table). But I think they all counted themselves as devout.
So how's about you ease off the prejudice, friend?
Now we are attacked again - this time by muslims rather than soviets
You seem to be confused. The Soviets never attacked us, and the Muslims who did were part of a criminal ring, not agents of a state. 9/11 was a crime, not an act of war. Treating it as war was the first mistake.
I'm in favor of much smaller government than we have now.
Unfortuantely, those who make the most noise about "smaller government" usually mean taking the regulators and governors off the engine of the state, not shrinking the engine.
Smaller government? Start by reducing the amount we spend on military dominance of the planet for the benefit of American business. We could halve our "defense" spending and still outspend any potential adversary about five to one. That leaves plenty to defend our nation - while being less of a temptation to foreign adventures and wars of choice.
Then let's go about reducing government powers to issue corporate charters, land and resource deeds, copyright and patents, and to run a federal reserve system that lets banks suck in wealth and that bails out speculator markets. (Yes, some of these are federal, some are state; as a practical matter, though, it matters little which level of government employs the guy with the gun who backs up government's demands.) Shrink the engine that creates economic injustice, and there's less need for the (relatively small) regulators of social welfare programs.
Atlas Shrugged is about what happens when genius goes on strike.
And in the real world, the answer is: not much.
For example, all the medical researchers in the nation striking would not have the impact of rank-and-file doctors walking out. And all doctors in the nation going on strike would not have the impact on public heath of all the garbage collectors and plumbers refusing to work. (The majority of the increased life expectancy we enjoy today is due to effective sanitation.)
Day-to-day, the more "genius" someone's work requires, the less direct his or her impact. We don't need genius to maintain the world, we need the "working stiffs" to show up.
I'm not saying we don't need genius; but to elevate intellectual work over more physical labor is just as much of an error as Maoist or Marxist anti-intellectualism.
Would WW2 have been lost (apart from a few million more casualties in the invasion of Japan)...
Japan was already suing for peace by the time the bombs were dropped. The idea that millions would die in an invasion if we hadn't nuked is just wrong. The decision to drop the first nuclear bomb on Japan rather than Germany was made in 1943; the decision to follow through on it was based more on intimidating the Soviets and justifying the cost of the Manhattan Project than on any need to incinerate tens of thousands of human beings.
So, no, WWII would not have been lost if the physicists had gone on strike. But had the labor unions gone on strike, it would have been a different issue - which is why the federal government fscked up the union system during the war.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the neo-cons have already figured the way around that - borrow. So tax cuts won't mean lesss government spending until you take away the ability for the government to borrow money; they'll just shift the debt to future generations. (Many of these people beleive the Rapture is comin' soon anyway and will wipe out any merely mortal debt...)
And under conservative "leadership", if spending is cut, it's not cut for the military, for covert ops, for prison building, for "law enforcement", or for other ways of repressing people. It's cut for things like levee maintenance. Whoops!
(Oh, and who's in a tax bracket where most of their paycheck comes out in taxes? Americans pay some of the lowest taxes amoung industrialized nations.)
You know, it's a curious thing. If I say "San Francisco has a much better mass transit system than Baltimore (which isn't saying much), we could learn from them", nobody says "If you like it so much, you should move there!".
If I say "Boston did a great job in cleaning up their harbor, Baltimore could learn from them", nobody says "you should move there, let us know how it goes."
If I say "New Hampshire's law requiring voting machines to mark and read paper ballots is a good idea, Maryland could learn from them", nobody says "you should move there, then."
I can suggest that my city and state learn from others, and no one suggests I don't love the place I live. No, it's only if I suggest that the United States could learn something from another country that some far-right ultra-nationalist, who loves America with the sort of irrational fervor that a three-year-old child loves his Mommy, gets his testicles twisted and tells me I should leave.
Sure, a Mac is a nice and pretty guilded cage, compared to the rotting dank rat-infested prison of MS Windows.
But it's still a cage. You're just dependent on the mercy of a different set of corporate masters.
And the American Heritage dictionary is supposed to be authoritative about software development and licensing?
Look up "trusted" in a dictionary and you won't find mention of the Orange Book or Common Criteria, but you'd better understand their definitions if you're going to talk about "trust" in a computer system.
Yes, natural language is ambiguous; one of the ways ambiguity is resolved is via context. "Work" means one thing when I'm talking about my paycheck, another if I'm talking about physics. If I said I get paid for my work on such-and-such-project and you asked how much force I exerted over what distance, you'd either be joking or you'd be dangerously confused.
"Open source", in the context of software development and licensing, is ambiguous only as a convenience for those who wish to create confusion and either sabotage, or ride the coat-tails of, the Open Source movement.
"Open source" is a term of art with a very specific meaning.
Anyone in the software field, or any related field, who thinks that "open source simply means the source is available" is dangerously ignorant.
"Central hub"? No. The "threat" was that "the man on the street" was going to tape albums, not that record rental shops were cranking out pirate copies.
Uh, yes. As I said, they (or at least their heyday) were earlier than "the days of Walkmans and boom boxes."
"Accountable" in what sense? Are you basing your ethics on fear of punishment and hope of reward? That's a pretty poor motivation.
A reasonable ethical system is a set of ideas produced by humans based on observation of actions and their results, not arbitrarily. For example, it is a fairly universal law of human behavior that people who treat others badly don't get invited to the good parties. It's also a good rule of thumb that people like to go to the good parties. Ergo, when considering the fundamental ethical question of "how shall I live my life", one of the points in the answer is "Don't treat others badly".
If you want to call this observation of how things are "transcendental", fine. But it's got nothing to do with deities.
Of course people are free to invent any type of system that seem right (or that even seems wrong) to them. People do it all the time. Unfortunately, usually their inventions are based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning, and lead to suffering for themselves and others.
Indeed, people are also free to invent any type of gods they want, and do it all the time - also usually based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning.
No, it's an entirely accurate way to describe ethical systems which do not rely on assumptions about the supernatural.
Well, yes. But then why have a website?
If you want to truly be part of the World Wide Web, then your pages need to be served to the World. It's right there in the name.
If you're going to whine about people not looking at your ads and try to block ad-blockers, set up a walled garden where people have to pay a nickel to see your stuff, fine. But then few people are going to see your site and link to it; you'll be isolated from the Web.
Yes, Fourth Amendment rights are essential; and the "protection" of the government's power grabs isn't temporary, it's non-existant. Wanna spy on suspected bad guys? Get a fucking warrant. End runs around that check provide no "protection" to anybody.
In war time (which, since we don't have a Congressional declaration, this ain't), authoritarians will take liberties if the people let them. That doesn't make it right or legal.
You don't get to give up my liberties for me.
In the 1980s, back when LPs and cassette tapes were all the rage, there were record rental stores. The RIAA managed to smash this by getting Congress to pass the "Record Rental Amendment" in 1984.
So, yes, the RIAA was concerned with copying back in the days of Walkmans and boom boxes. (8 tracks were a little earlier, Junior.)
Percentage of GDP is irrelevant. How does a bigger GDP imply we need a bigger military?
And we had enough troops to easily win the wars against the Taliban's Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq. We don't have enough troops to turn either nation into a instant peaceful democracy, any more than we have enough gasoline to put out the latest forest fires - you can never have enough of a tool that does the opposite of your goal. Every day we occupy Iraq, we might as well be printing recruitment posters for Al Qaeda.
Except that that's wrong. When you add in war spending (not accounted for in the budget), veteran's health and retirement benefits, and interest on debt accrued for defense spending, annual military spending makes about about a trillion dollars.
Funny how all of you righties want to lump several very different things under the rubric of "entitlements: support to the elderly and disabled in the form of Social Security and Medicare; the veteran's and military benefits that should be rightly understood as part of defense spending; other federal retirement spending; and support to poor people. We can only meaningfully deal with reform when these are understood individually.
No. "Free software" has been a term of art for over two decades, meaning software that is distributed under terms respecting the four freedoms. Any person educated in the field of software knows that the term "free software" does not refer to price.
"FOSS" is a recent term that attempts to conflate the Free Software movement with the Open Source Software movement.
It's this childish attempt to redefine well-understood terms that makes you look like a corporate shill.
First, religious morals are hardly meaningful and universal. For example, the "moral" concept that certain consensual sexual acts are "evil" is neither.
Religious morals are exactly relative to the individual who's preaching, who then tries to back up his own opinions by attirbuting them to deities.
Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.
Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.
No, if Apple designs a shoddy and defective product that does not clearly distinguish between "sleep" and "off", then they need to pay the consequences - recall the thing, fix it, and pay any and all charges incurred by users.
Great, so if an iPhone owner doesn't read some fine print in the back of the manual to understand which of several different "off" modes is really "off", the phone is a threat to the safety of the plane. Great design.
Don't confuse the objective physiology and biochemistry of the brain with the sujective quality of experience. If the question is "does being nice make me happy?", the best way to find out is to carefully examine your own experience. No amount of obective external observation can answer a subjective internal question, any more than subjective internal observation can answer an obective external question.
But, the question of "what is the evolutionary biology that makes human beings, by and large, feel good when they're being nice?", is also an interesting one. There may be some information in the field of positive psychology. From the neurological point of view, I would guess that mirror neurons have a role to play.
The Schiffauer text you link doesn't even say anything relevant! He's talking about internal politics of one branch of Islam in Germany, and ends with the hopeful conculsion that "Islamic philosophers could use the strength of Islam to elaborate a philosophy of the network society, incorporating a wise treatment of boundaries and a rethinking of the social nature of the individual."
Spengler's piece on Sistani might be useful is seen as the opinions of one strain of Islam in one culture, but veers into bigotry when it suggests that Sistani's ideas are universal throughout Islam. Really, would you take a piece about a conservative Catholic bishop in Africa as informative about your Quaker neighbors?
It's sad that you're so bound and determined to find justification for your hate you can't read straight.
Look, no one is arguing that there do not exist Muslims (and Christians, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and Pagans, and atheists...) who have wacko ideology.
But to pretend that such is that ideology of all Muslims (Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, atheists) is exactly the defintion of prejudice. You're unwilling to look at Muslims as individual human beings, to understand that across the world they represent a wide swath. The dancing Sufis are not the same as the Nation of Islam, who are not the same as middle-class American Muslims whose grandparents immigrated to the states, who are not the same as the Palestinian Muslim who endure the occupation, who are not the same as the Saudi princes.
You miss the point. I'm talking about something much more fundamental. No government issued corporate charters, no Big Business. No government issued land deeds for speculators, no Big Business. Eliminate government issued copyrights and patents as we know them, no Big Business. And on this point it makes no difference that some of these are done by the federal government and some by states.
I'm not hostile to your points about Federalism, it's a question I go back and forth on. Certainly the contemporary Federal government is leaps and bounds beyond its Constitutional mandate, we're in agreement there. But the point I want to raise is the dependance of Big Business on state action.
Libertarian capitalists are fond of talking about "smaller government", but capitalism can't exist without a whole lot of government action on behalf of the owning class. Which is why the original - and the only true - libertarians were and are liberatarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists.
Except that I wasn't debating "theAtomicFireball". I was making a general comment about a certain current in political thought, one that was under discussion in the thread and one that I have encountered many, many, many times.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. I'm not lauding the Soviet Union. only pointing out that a significant factor in the way that it developed may well have been attacks on it by the Allies.
The fact that the USSR didn't respect the sovereignty and self-determination of other nations, is hardly an excuse for the USA to behave the same way.
True. But that doesn't mean that violence and colonialism are the only ways of "doing something".
How about you put down your hate, fear, and bigotry, and learn what the ideology of actual Muslims is?
Who the hell are you to tell these people that they're not very devout?
It's those who are murdering in the name of Islam who are not devout, breaking the laws of the religion they claim to follow - the rules of jihad do not allow for the killing of innocents.
Oh, horseshit. The people I mention are peaceful bcause they're nice people.
Uh, right. No Christian would ever pray "thy will be done."
In their mainstreams, neither Christianity nor Islam is really compatible with democracy, which is why you have so many "born-again" Christians who want kingly authority for the President. You can't pray to "The Lord", the "King of Kings", etcetera, and hold democracy close to your heart.
It's no wonder that the wacko fringe Christians and the wacko fringe Muslims hate each other so dearly - they're entirely too much alike.
"Smaller government" and "smaller Federal government" are two very different things. Simply shuffling powers around matters little. I don't disagree that the Fed has gotten too big, but all too many "state's rights" advocates either naively believe that the states are more friendly to liberty than the federal government, or actively want the states to be able to oppress the minority groups they don't like.
And wouldn't it have been better if well-trained and well-equipped disaster relief specialists from a Department of Peace were doing that, instead of a bunch of people whose primary training is warfare?
Piracy still accounts for hundreds of incidents each year, with $13 to $16 billion in annual losses.
My point is that the very existence of "big business" is only made possible by government action, and that those are the parts of government that need to be shrunk first. Shrinking the parts that provide some oversight of "big business" is foolhardy - like lightening your car by installing light-duty brakes instead of replacing the engine with a smaller one.
Merely saying "shrink the government!" is not enough, you need to describe what parts. There's a big difference between a plan that starts with shrinking the Army, the Federal Reserve, and the DEA, and once that starts with shrinking FEMA, the Small Business Administration, and the NIH.
...provided one forgets about WWI, the Spanish-American War, Philippine-American war, the Monroe Doctrine, et cetera. And the amazingly little-known U.S. and allied invasion of communist Russia, one of my favorite little-known but vitally important historical events. (Kind of relevant to the Cold War, eh? Not so paranoid for the Russians to fear an American attack if we'd already done it once.)
Oh, and just how did we come to have a naval base in Hawaii in the first place? Or our presence in Guam? The Philippines? The Pacific conflict was a straight-up fight between expansionist colonial powers. Yes, the U.S. was somewhat less vicious, though American atrocities were not unknown.
The idea of the U.S. quietly minding it's own business when suddenly attacked by those sneaky Japanese and then reluctantly rising to save the world, is great nationalist mythology. But it's lousy history. Sure, we'd toned down the foreign meddling for a few years - because we ran out of money.
That's odd. I don't think my Muslim veternarian, or his kids who used to take my karate class, want to impose Sharia law on me. Nor did the Muslim karate teacher who visited my dojo and stayed at my house for a few days a few years back. I don't think the woman in the chador who bagged my groceries yesterday (yes, that was odd) bore me any ill will. Nor did the nice folks from South Africa with whom I sat at dinner at an event last summer (we were all at the vegetarian table). But I think they all counted themselves as devout.
So how's about you ease off the prejudice, friend?
You seem to be confused. The Soviets never attacked us, and the Muslims who did were part of a criminal ring, not agents of a state. 9/11 was a crime, not an act of war. Treating it as war was the first mistake.
Unfortuantely, those who make the most noise about "smaller government" usually mean taking the regulators and governors off the engine of the state, not shrinking the engine.
Smaller government? Start by reducing the amount we spend on military dominance of the planet for the benefit of American business. We could halve our "defense" spending and still outspend any potential adversary about five to one. That leaves plenty to defend our nation - while being less of a temptation to foreign adventures and wars of choice.
Then let's go about reducing government powers to issue corporate charters, land and resource deeds, copyright and patents, and to run a federal reserve system that lets banks suck in wealth and that bails out speculator markets. (Yes, some of these are federal, some are state; as a practical matter, though, it matters little which level of government employs the guy with the gun who backs up government's demands.) Shrink the engine that creates economic injustice, and there's less need for the (relatively small) regulators of social welfare programs.
And in the real world, the answer is: not much.
For example, all the medical researchers in the nation striking would not have the impact of rank-and-file doctors walking out. And all doctors in the nation going on strike would not have the impact on public heath of all the garbage collectors and plumbers refusing to work. (The majority of the increased life expectancy we enjoy today is due to effective sanitation.)
Day-to-day, the more "genius" someone's work requires, the less direct his or her impact. We don't need genius to maintain the world, we need the "working stiffs" to show up.
I'm not saying we don't need genius; but to elevate intellectual work over more physical labor is just as much of an error as Maoist or Marxist anti-intellectualism.
Japan was already suing for peace by the time the bombs were dropped. The idea that millions would die in an invasion if we hadn't nuked is just wrong. The decision to drop the first nuclear bomb on Japan rather than Germany was made in 1943; the decision to follow through on it was based more on intimidating the Soviets and justifying the cost of the Manhattan Project than on any need to incinerate tens of thousands of human beings.
So, no, WWII would not have been lost if the physicists had gone on strike. But had the labor unions gone on strike, it would have been a different issue - which is why the federal government fscked up the union system during the war.