It seems that someone has been drinking those, "cesspool waters of American capitalism" again. Of course what better beverage to have with your "double bread with meat"?
Kim Jong-Il heard about Farmville and thought that sounded fun
Mr Kim, or as he prefers to be called "the dear leader", doesn't need Facebook to play games with farming or people's lives. He has control over millions of real people, all of whom can be forced to participate in whatever macabre social experiment he chooses to conduct, except that here in the real world there are no saves, no continues and you get only 1 life. The continued existence of the North Korean Worker's Party and the monstrous state that it has produced is one of the greatest ongoing travesties of social justice in our time. It is hard to imagine any other place on earth where the ordinary citizen is worse off than in North Korea. At least in Somalia and Sudan the people have some inkling of what the outside world is like and whether or not they are being lied to. The people of North Korea, on the other hand, have been so thoroughly brainwashed and controlled that the outside world essentially does not exist for them or at least not in any way that is meaningful. Even Cuba is practically a paradise by way of comparison to North Korea. Mr Kim and his father are disgraces to the entire human race, in the same league as Hitler and Stalin before them, and history will forever damn their names, just as surely as Hitler and Stalin are damned, when Korea is eventually re-united under a freely elected and democratic government of by and for the people of Korea. In the meantime the rest of the free world should do whatever it can to hasten that day.
Peter Gibbons: You're gonna lay off Samir and Michael?
Bob Slydell: Oh yeah, we're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal.
Bob Porter: Standard operating procedure.
Peter Gibbons: Do they know this yet?
Bob Slydell: No. No, of course not. We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
They will probably have to separate Blago from the general prison population for his own safety. A nice white guy like him wouldn't last long in most American prisons or at least not without the sort of bargain being referenced by the parent above.
How about a lifted ambulance with a beefy off-road suspension, like the kind they use in off-road truck racing, with a front skid plate? That way the ambulance could take the bumps at full speed...hehe.
All the things you mentioned have been tried in some capacity and yet we have failed to make meaningful progress. The problem will solve itself sometime during the next century as populations adjust to the diminished support capacity of a much warmer, less biodiverse and resource depleted planet. This process will probably involve mass migrations, resource wars, pandemics and other assorted nastiness until a new equilibrium is reached. No doubt some will call me a pessimist, but I prefer the term realist instead.
Military spending accounts for more of our budget than any other program.
That is true, when considered as a single item. However, is it really fair to lump all defense related spending under a "defense" category while simultaneously drawing distinctions between "medicare & medicaid" and "social security"? Why not combine "medicare & medicaid" and "social security" into an "entitlements" category as 39% of the budget? You will notice that the "defense" budget includes many other items besides just direct military spending (i.e. guns and bombs), which is what most people think of when they think of defense spending. For example, the "defense" budget includes veterans affairs, veterans pensions, part of NASA's budget, interest on debts incurred in past wars, FBI counter-terrorism, Department of Energy defense related expenditures, etc. My point is that whether or not "defense" makes up the biggest single budget item depends upon how you slice the pie and it is no surprise that different groups like to slice it differently to make ideologically motivated points. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
dead-weight loss is a positive thing if it discourages consumption of limited natural resources, and if you agree that taxes are a necessity, why not discourage wasteful behaviour instead of discouraging business.
The deliberate waste of valuable resources, which could be put to other more productive uses, strikes people who see it as being incredibly foolish and insensitive. Remember the "cash-4-clunkers" program where people from around the world watched in horror on the video sharing sites as Americans took perfectly serviceable vehicles and ruined them? Read some of the comments on those videos about "wasteful and stupid Americans". No, the proper way to handle the limited use of natural resources is for everything, including the rights to clean air and water on real property, to be privately owned by someone. The private owner is a much better steward of his own property than any third party (i.e. the government). There would still be some large scale externalities that would require government regulation to address, but like taxes they could also be minimized. In summary, the solution to waste in the economy is not high taxes which encourage even more waste. Indeed, this is reminiscent of those, like Paul Krugman, on the left who suggest that the way to get our over-indebted economy moving is to borrow and spend even more (i.e. the stimulus didn't work because it wasn't big enough...the classic escalation of commitment to an essentially failed policy). Note to those on the left: A failed policy doesn't become successful simply through increased efforts and unlimited subsequent tries; the next time won't actually be different.
The left may be accused of tax and spend, but the right is definitely about spending *and* tax cuts.
True enough, but two wrongs don't make a right. You will notice how the Republicans, for example, have not been very successful at assimilating the Tea Party. There are substantial numbers of citizens disgusted by both high taxes AND high spending. The libertarians here amongst us have consistently argued for less of both but for different reasons, both the right and the left don't much care for us.
and if resource use is inflexible as you claim, a resource tax is really just that.
I made no such claim. However, it is well known that taxes, however small, always distort the marketplace and produce some dead weight loss. The principle is well known from basic economics. Now, some minimal amount of revenue is required to fund the necessary functions of government and the government mostly derives its revenues from taxes so taxes are not entirely dispensable. However, it would be desirable for taxes to be limited to the amount minimally required to fund those necessary functions. You can argue about what level of functionality is necessary, but most people would agree that it should be substantially less than what the government currently wastes each year. It is also possible to discuss the relative efficiencies of various taxes in generating that revenue, but that is separate discussion from the issue of minimally necessary government revenue.
How do you suppose that the Tea Parties have gained so much ground at the expense of the Republicans here in the United States? There are a lot of people out there who are tired of both high spending AND high taxes. The Republicans have tried to absorb the Tea Parties, but they have largely failed to do so. Bush the younger completely destroyed, through very high spending (mostly on the wars), the fiscal credibility that took decades to build beginning with Reagan and later with the '94 contract with America. It is true that the conservatives lost their way and the Tea Party has fed off this discontentment.
You are right, that was the one. However, the point regarding wealthy and well connected NIMBYs in suburban enclaves along the proposed routes remains valid.
The NIMBYs are not peculiar to California. Indeed, the aforementioned tactics and their assorted variations work just as well in many other states. There are reasons why the waste water treatment plants, garbage incinerators and oil refineries are rarely located next to wealthy enclaves with property values to protect.
Wait, we do that for airplanes. Nevermind. Go about your business.
Even the worst airlines are rarely as bad as Amtrak. For example, here in California a trip from San Diego up to San Louis Obispo, a distance of 320 miles, can be driven in about 5.5 hours, but it often takes 10 - 12 hours or longer to make that same journey by Amtrak up the coast. The Amtrak rarely runs on time (delays of hours or more are routine) and takes a meandering unhurried trip along the coast, pulling over and stopping frequently to allow freight trains loaded with sugar beats to pass it by. The only people who take Amtrak are those who don't really care how long it takes as long as the cost is rock bottom.
The GP was trying to point out that comparing trains to airplanes on the basis of "security hassles" at the airport is unfair because similarly restrictive security measures will invariably be applied to trains as well in time. In effect, pointing out "security hassles" as a drawback of any given mass transit system, particularly long distance and high speed transit, is probably being unfair. It would benefit the discussion if everyone would simply accept that security measures will be involved in any mass transit systems of these types and simply leave it at that.
True, but as the 2004 Madrid Train Bombings showed, the evil-doers are all too willing to strike when and where they can and you can bet your bottom dollar that the first time there are dead children being pulled out of the wreckage and carried away in body bags, the security measures and associated inconvenience will rival anything presently experienced in our nation's airports. The other posters are right about that.
You can't turn America into Europe by simply taxing fuel at the same rate.
There are many on the left who, out of a desire to see "good" things done quickly, reflexively support higher taxes and increased government spending, regardless of the prevailing economic circumstances. In response to their claims of concern for the plight of the common man, Milton Friedman once said, "I admire the softness of their hearts, but unfortunately it very often extends to their heads as well."
Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
There are other issues besides subsidies. For example, here in California wealth NIMBYs in southern Marin County (near San Francisco) have successfully lobbied to have the proposed high speed rail line either routed around or tunneled under their wealthy suburban communities, at great additional expense, so as not to disrupt their perfect neighborhoods or negatively impact their property values. They have also lobbied to have the "high speed train" substantially reduce speed on many parts of the route, essentially defeating the purpose. Here in the United States, unlike in Europe and Japan, it much easier to be a NIMBY and essentially kill a project with lawsuits, environmental impact studies and other political chicaneries as long as you have money to burn. The price of your train rapidly escalates as decades of legal wrangling, planning commission hearings, and environmental impact studies make the final cost of your rail line completely uncompetitive.
but there's obviously room for a lot of unfairness.
More it seems than most people are willing to say. The wealthy, the powerful, the famous and the politically well connected or their clients always seem to find themselves treated differently, some would say more deferentially, than the common man. It has been this way for as long as there has been courts and recorded history. The best that we ordinary people can do is withhold our votes for those who promise to ever tougher laws because it is invariably the ordinary man who invariably suffers most when these new rules are applied with ruthless zeal by prosecutors seeking to advance political careers regardless of the human cost. Indeed, the present situation here in the United States is enough to convert even the most optimistic citizen into an ardent student of Machiavelli.
As also mentioned on this thread, TDD goes hand-in-hand with concepts like Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection and Design by Contract. The goal is to develop loosely coupled yet cohesive software framework which enforces generic constraints through contracts, generally implemented as interfaces, and upon which calling code can rely for correctness. The above mentioned techniques, among others, allow us to abstract and generalize as much of the software stack as possible, reducing specific program instances to little more than their minimal differential implementations; with clear separation of concerns, scalability and testability. A framework or library which supports these goals is sometimes said to be "injectable" in that it can receive injections of concrete types at runtime which satisfy the abstract contracts (defined by the interfaces) and can itself be injected into other code. The point is that the code into which the concrete type is injected neither knows nor cares which actual type is injected at runtime. The only thing that matters is the contract (i.e. the interface is implemented). The unit tests help ensure the correctness of various concrete contract implementations prior to use.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that one. Inversion of Control is among the more useful concepts to come out of the software development community in recent years and it goes hand-in-hand with TDD and with modular programming and loose coupling with respect to software development in general. Personally, I use and like the Structure Map IoC framework (I especially like the assembly scanning and convention definition features), but Castle Windsor is also popular and even the Microsoft entry (late as usual) into this field, Unity, is fairly decent and getting better. The only caution I would give about using IoC is to take time to properly understand it before using it (it tends to be a bit of a mind-bender or an inversion, if you'll pardon the pun, the first time through) and learn to recognize where the boundaries are in your libraries and where IoC can help you achieve the goals of modularity and loose coupling.
it would be easier to evacuate those civilians that want to leave than change the mind set of the majority.
Maybe we should? After all, this isn't Germany or South Korea. Meanwhile, the world is running out of resources, namely oil (of which Afghanistan has none), global temperatures are rising and we have other pressing problems here at home. The fight against global terrorism is a generational struggle, like the cold war before it, so we must not allow ourselves to become distracted by infrequent terrorist attacks. The terrorists are attempting to goad us into spending billions to prevent what are, IMHO, acceptable casualties in the grand scheme of things. I am not saying that we should do nothing about global terrorism, but perhaps it is time to put this problem back into its proper perspective and acknowledge that full scale invasions and occupations are not cost effective means to deal with this problem (at least not in Afghanistan, Iraq has oil so it's a somewhat different matter). General Petraeus is a fine commander and an excellent soldier, but he is being asked to complete a task that countless generals throughout history, including Alexander the Great, have been unable to finish. The phrase, "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink" is apropo in this case. Afghanistan will cease being a shit hole when its people decide that they are ready to stop living like primitive tribals and join the community of nations. Until that day, I believe that we are wasting our time there with an occupation. We should continue the intelligence war and the drone campaigns against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other terrorists, killing them when and where we are able to.
However, we should also be fighting the battle of ideas against militant Islam; taking the fight to them in the public sphere. We should be lining up Muslims on our side to pick apart militant fatwas and say, "you're wrong and this is why". This is yet another area where the foreign policy of President Obama has really been a failure. The speeches that he has given overseas reveal a dangerous naïveté about the real world and realpolitik. On top of that, we need another Henry Kissinger style Secretary of State, but are instead stuck with Hillary Clinton. This sort of bumbling diplomacy forces us to fight more often or else fold our hand (which projects weakness). Reagan, for example, rarely had to use guns when the credible threat that he would use them (and effectively) was very often enough to deter our adversaries. Peace through strength. Obama needs to project strength in foreign policy, but instead he projects weakness by apologizing for the United States and humbling himself while abroad...pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that someone has been drinking those, "cesspool waters of American capitalism" again. Of course what better beverage to have with your "double bread with meat"?
Kim Jong-Il heard about Farmville and thought that sounded fun
Mr Kim, or as he prefers to be called "the dear leader", doesn't need Facebook to play games with farming or people's lives. He has control over millions of real people, all of whom can be forced to participate in whatever macabre social experiment he chooses to conduct, except that here in the real world there are no saves, no continues and you get only 1 life. The continued existence of the North Korean Worker's Party and the monstrous state that it has produced is one of the greatest ongoing travesties of social justice in our time. It is hard to imagine any other place on earth where the ordinary citizen is worse off than in North Korea. At least in Somalia and Sudan the people have some inkling of what the outside world is like and whether or not they are being lied to. The people of North Korea, on the other hand, have been so thoroughly brainwashed and controlled that the outside world essentially does not exist for them or at least not in any way that is meaningful. Even Cuba is practically a paradise by way of comparison to North Korea. Mr Kim and his father are disgraces to the entire human race, in the same league as Hitler and Stalin before them, and history will forever damn their names, just as surely as Hitler and Stalin are damned, when Korea is eventually re-united under a freely elected and democratic government of by and for the people of Korea. In the meantime the rest of the free world should do whatever it can to hasten that day.
Peter Gibbons: You're gonna lay off Samir and Michael?
Bob Slydell: Oh yeah, we're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal.
Bob Porter: Standard operating procedure.
Peter Gibbons: Do they know this yet?
Bob Slydell: No. No, of course not. We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.
They will probably have to separate Blago from the general prison population for his own safety. A nice white guy like him wouldn't last long in most American prisons or at least not without the sort of bargain being referenced by the parent above.
How about a lifted ambulance with a beefy off-road suspension, like the kind they use in off-road truck racing, with a front skid plate? That way the ambulance could take the bumps at full speed...hehe.
El bano esta in el sanitario...El queso is viejo y putrado.
All the things you mentioned have been tried in some capacity and yet we have failed to make meaningful progress. The problem will solve itself sometime during the next century as populations adjust to the diminished support capacity of a much warmer, less biodiverse and resource depleted planet. This process will probably involve mass migrations, resource wars, pandemics and other assorted nastiness until a new equilibrium is reached. No doubt some will call me a pessimist, but I prefer the term realist instead.
I fear for our democracy if this silliness continues much longer.
Don't worry, it's too late for our that now; The descent into Idiocracy has already begun.
But thinking that opt-in bicycle sharing schemes are a great example of the thin end of that wedge is just, you know... fucking bonkers
Oh come now, surely everyone knows that only smelly communist hippies share bicycles? If we let this go, what will they ask for next?
Military spending accounts for more of our budget than any other program.
That is true, when considered as a single item. However, is it really fair to lump all defense related spending under a "defense" category while simultaneously drawing distinctions between "medicare & medicaid" and "social security"? Why not combine "medicare & medicaid" and "social security" into an "entitlements" category as 39% of the budget? You will notice that the "defense" budget includes many other items besides just direct military spending (i.e. guns and bombs), which is what most people think of when they think of defense spending. For example, the "defense" budget includes veterans affairs, veterans pensions, part of NASA's budget, interest on debts incurred in past wars, FBI counter-terrorism, Department of Energy defense related expenditures, etc. My point is that whether or not "defense" makes up the biggest single budget item depends upon how you slice the pie and it is no surprise that different groups like to slice it differently to make ideologically motivated points. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
dead-weight loss is a positive thing if it discourages consumption of limited natural resources, and if you agree that taxes are a necessity, why not discourage wasteful behaviour instead of discouraging business.
The deliberate waste of valuable resources, which could be put to other more productive uses, strikes people who see it as being incredibly foolish and insensitive. Remember the "cash-4-clunkers" program where people from around the world watched in horror on the video sharing sites as Americans took perfectly serviceable vehicles and ruined them? Read some of the comments on those videos about "wasteful and stupid Americans". No, the proper way to handle the limited use of natural resources is for everything, including the rights to clean air and water on real property, to be privately owned by someone. The private owner is a much better steward of his own property than any third party (i.e. the government). There would still be some large scale externalities that would require government regulation to address, but like taxes they could also be minimized. In summary, the solution to waste in the economy is not high taxes which encourage even more waste. Indeed, this is reminiscent of those, like Paul Krugman, on the left who suggest that the way to get our over-indebted economy moving is to borrow and spend even more (i.e. the stimulus didn't work because it wasn't big enough...the classic escalation of commitment to an essentially failed policy). Note to those on the left: A failed policy doesn't become successful simply through increased efforts and unlimited subsequent tries; the next time won't actually be different.
The left may be accused of tax and spend, but the right is definitely about spending *and* tax cuts.
True enough, but two wrongs don't make a right. You will notice how the Republicans, for example, have not been very successful at assimilating the Tea Party. There are substantial numbers of citizens disgusted by both high taxes AND high spending. The libertarians here amongst us have consistently argued for less of both but for different reasons, both the right and the left don't much care for us.
and if resource use is inflexible as you claim, a resource tax is really just that.
I made no such claim. However, it is well known that taxes, however small, always distort the marketplace and produce some dead weight loss. The principle is well known from basic economics. Now, some minimal amount of revenue is required to fund the necessary functions of government and the government mostly derives its revenues from taxes so taxes are not entirely dispensable. However, it would be desirable for taxes to be limited to the amount minimally required to fund those necessary functions. You can argue about what level of functionality is necessary, but most people would agree that it should be substantially less than what the government currently wastes each year. It is also possible to discuss the relative efficiencies of various taxes in generating that revenue, but that is separate discussion from the issue of minimally necessary government revenue.
How do you suppose that the Tea Parties have gained so much ground at the expense of the Republicans here in the United States? There are a lot of people out there who are tired of both high spending AND high taxes. The Republicans have tried to absorb the Tea Parties, but they have largely failed to do so. Bush the younger completely destroyed, through very high spending (mostly on the wars), the fiscal credibility that took decades to build beginning with Reagan and later with the '94 contract with America. It is true that the conservatives lost their way and the Tea Party has fed off this discontentment.
You are right, that was the one. However, the point regarding wealthy and well connected NIMBYs in suburban enclaves along the proposed routes remains valid.
The NIMBYs are not peculiar to California. Indeed, the aforementioned tactics and their assorted variations work just as well in many other states. There are reasons why the waste water treatment plants, garbage incinerators and oil refineries are rarely located next to wealthy enclaves with property values to protect.
Wait, we do that for airplanes. Nevermind. Go about your business.
Even the worst airlines are rarely as bad as Amtrak. For example, here in California a trip from San Diego up to San Louis Obispo, a distance of 320 miles, can be driven in about 5.5 hours, but it often takes 10 - 12 hours or longer to make that same journey by Amtrak up the coast. The Amtrak rarely runs on time (delays of hours or more are routine) and takes a meandering unhurried trip along the coast, pulling over and stopping frequently to allow freight trains loaded with sugar beats to pass it by. The only people who take Amtrak are those who don't really care how long it takes as long as the cost is rock bottom.
The GP was trying to point out that comparing trains to airplanes on the basis of "security hassles" at the airport is unfair because similarly restrictive security measures will invariably be applied to trains as well in time. In effect, pointing out "security hassles" as a drawback of any given mass transit system, particularly long distance and high speed transit, is probably being unfair. It would benefit the discussion if everyone would simply accept that security measures will be involved in any mass transit systems of these types and simply leave it at that.
True, but as the 2004 Madrid Train Bombings showed, the evil-doers are all too willing to strike when and where they can and you can bet your bottom dollar that the first time there are dead children being pulled out of the wreckage and carried away in body bags, the security measures and associated inconvenience will rival anything presently experienced in our nation's airports. The other posters are right about that.
You can't turn America into Europe by simply taxing fuel at the same rate.
There are many on the left who, out of a desire to see "good" things done quickly, reflexively support higher taxes and increased government spending, regardless of the prevailing economic circumstances. In response to their claims of concern for the plight of the common man, Milton Friedman once said, "I admire the softness of their hearts, but unfortunately it very often extends to their heads as well."
Trains win in every densely populated region, hands down.
There are other issues besides subsidies. For example, here in California wealth NIMBYs in southern Marin County (near San Francisco) have successfully lobbied to have the proposed high speed rail line either routed around or tunneled under their wealthy suburban communities, at great additional expense, so as not to disrupt their perfect neighborhoods or negatively impact their property values. They have also lobbied to have the "high speed train" substantially reduce speed on many parts of the route, essentially defeating the purpose. Here in the United States, unlike in Europe and Japan, it much easier to be a NIMBY and essentially kill a project with lawsuits, environmental impact studies and other political chicaneries as long as you have money to burn. The price of your train rapidly escalates as decades of legal wrangling, planning commission hearings, and environmental impact studies make the final cost of your rail line completely uncompetitive.
but there's obviously room for a lot of unfairness.
More it seems than most people are willing to say. The wealthy, the powerful, the famous and the politically well connected or their clients always seem to find themselves treated differently, some would say more deferentially, than the common man. It has been this way for as long as there has been courts and recorded history. The best that we ordinary people can do is withhold our votes for those who promise to ever tougher laws because it is invariably the ordinary man who invariably suffers most when these new rules are applied with ruthless zeal by prosecutors seeking to advance political careers regardless of the human cost. Indeed, the present situation here in the United States is enough to convert even the most optimistic citizen into an ardent student of Machiavelli.
As also mentioned on this thread, TDD goes hand-in-hand with concepts like Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection and Design by Contract. The goal is to develop loosely coupled yet cohesive software framework which enforces generic constraints through contracts, generally implemented as interfaces, and upon which calling code can rely for correctness. The above mentioned techniques, among others, allow us to abstract and generalize as much of the software stack as possible, reducing specific program instances to little more than their minimal differential implementations; with clear separation of concerns, scalability and testability. A framework or library which supports these goals is sometimes said to be "injectable" in that it can receive injections of concrete types at runtime which satisfy the abstract contracts (defined by the interfaces) and can itself be injected into other code. The point is that the code into which the concrete type is injected neither knows nor cares which actual type is injected at runtime. The only thing that matters is the contract (i.e. the interface is implemented). The unit tests help ensure the correctness of various concrete contract implementations prior to use.
and do some reading on "inversion of control"
Yeah, I forgot to mention that one. Inversion of Control is among the more useful concepts to come out of the software development community in recent years and it goes hand-in-hand with TDD and with modular programming and loose coupling with respect to software development in general. Personally, I use and like the Structure Map IoC framework (I especially like the assembly scanning and convention definition features), but Castle Windsor is also popular and even the Microsoft entry (late as usual) into this field, Unity, is fairly decent and getting better. The only caution I would give about using IoC is to take time to properly understand it before using it (it tends to be a bit of a mind-bender or an inversion, if you'll pardon the pun, the first time through) and learn to recognize where the boundaries are in your libraries and where IoC can help you achieve the goals of modularity and loose coupling.
it would be easier to evacuate those civilians that want to leave than change the mind set of the majority.
Maybe we should? After all, this isn't Germany or South Korea. Meanwhile, the world is running out of resources, namely oil (of which Afghanistan has none), global temperatures are rising and we have other pressing problems here at home. The fight against global terrorism is a generational struggle, like the cold war before it, so we must not allow ourselves to become distracted by infrequent terrorist attacks. The terrorists are attempting to goad us into spending billions to prevent what are, IMHO, acceptable casualties in the grand scheme of things. I am not saying that we should do nothing about global terrorism, but perhaps it is time to put this problem back into its proper perspective and acknowledge that full scale invasions and occupations are not cost effective means to deal with this problem (at least not in Afghanistan, Iraq has oil so it's a somewhat different matter). General Petraeus is a fine commander and an excellent soldier, but he is being asked to complete a task that countless generals throughout history, including Alexander the Great, have been unable to finish. The phrase, "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink" is apropo in this case. Afghanistan will cease being a shit hole when its people decide that they are ready to stop living like primitive tribals and join the community of nations. Until that day, I believe that we are wasting our time there with an occupation. We should continue the intelligence war and the drone campaigns against the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other terrorists, killing them when and where we are able to.
However, we should also be fighting the battle of ideas against militant Islam; taking the fight to them in the public sphere. We should be lining up Muslims on our side to pick apart militant fatwas and say, "you're wrong and this is why". This is yet another area where the foreign policy of President Obama has really been a failure. The speeches that he has given overseas reveal a dangerous naïveté about the real world and realpolitik. On top of that, we need another Henry Kissinger style Secretary of State, but are instead stuck with Hillary Clinton. This sort of bumbling diplomacy forces us to fight more often or else fold our hand (which projects weakness). Reagan, for example, rarely had to use guns when the credible threat that he would use them (and effectively) was very often enough to deter our adversaries. Peace through strength. Obama needs to project strength in foreign policy, but instead he projects weakness by apologizing for the United States and humbling himself while abroad...pathetic.