On the contrary, very few targets in Serbia which were not dual-use were
targeted, and great care was taken to hit buildings at their point of zero
or least occupancy. Where this was not considered sufficient to avoid
civilian casualties, explicit warnings were given to the Serbs to make
sure that the buildings would be evacuated.
Sure, there are at least two known cases where the Serbian leadership under
Milosevic intentionally concealed these warnings, to cause civilian deaths
for propaganda purposes, but if we had wanted to cause civilian deaths, I
assure you, a lot more Serbs would be dead. As is, very few died.
As for Japan, I find it rather telling that you feel the need to go back almost
sixty years to find an example of what you claim is commonplace, but at any
rate, it is clear that the number of civilians killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
is a small fraction of the number of Japanese civilians who would have died in
the island-by-island attack on the Japanese home islands which would have been
necessary without these bombings. In other words, these bombings saved
millions of civilian lives, plus hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese
soldiers.
Which brings us to Nicaragua, where faced with a totalitarian dictatorship which was
not only terrorizing its own population, but was staging guerilla attacks on neighboring
countries in which hundreds died, we backed a local rebellion which fought for and
won the right to free elections. The people overwhelmingly voted the rebels into power
in an election which even Jimmy Carter and the UN had to admit was free and fair, and
the dictator Ortega retired to an apartment Managua, where he now writes romance novels
for a living. Sure sounds like a win to all concerned for me -- what's your complaint
here?
Care to provide any reference supporting this claim? For that matter, can you explain why, if we are in fact targeting civilians, we're doing such a poor job of hitting them (about 1,100 civilians dead in Afghanistan, for example -- see the section on civilian casualties at then end of
this article for details)?
they admit as much in their planning documents
Again, care to provide any reference backing this claim up? Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
You speak of risk, but I certainly don't see the US or any other nation going around demanding repayment for these loans. We have, for all intents in purposes, eaten the loss on these, and the only time they become an issue is in our obvious reluctance to throw good money after bad by extending more loans to these nations, based only on their having switched dictators.
The fact is, giving up on these loans and saying that we would consider these nations to have a blank slate would be an act of charity, no more, and no less. And as such, as with any act of charity, we should consider it, and we should consider its costs.
It is certainly not something that we `owe' to anyone.
As for economics in general, your understanding is incorrect both in general (there is, in fact, much more real monetary value flowing around today than in the past, for the simple reason that due to economic growth there is more real value backing these transactions), and in the particulars (even healthcare is remarkably elastic -- as people live longer and come to expect a higher standard of living, their healthcare needs expand).
The charges against Sharon are at worst that he failed to prevent a lebanese militia which had allied itself with Israel from committing a massacre he had no way of knowing was going to happen. That militia, by the way, has since allied itself with Syria against Israel, and is still going strong, but no one has a problem with that, apparently, go figure.
But you're right. Being totalitarian dictatorships, none of the Arab nations ever voted anyone into office (though plenty of them are ruled by actual mass murderers), so I guess they dodge the issue neatly, eh?
Um, no, the reason we support Israel is that it's one of only two nations in it's section of the world which are free, democratic, and open.
Other than Israel and Turkey, you could walk from the west coast of Africa to the Indian border and not pass through a single democracy, a single free-market economy, or a single open society.
But its all those guys you think we should be appeasing, by turning our back on a nation with values similar to ours? No thanks...
No one is being hauled away in the middle of the night, no one has been held without contact to council (even al-Muhajir has had a lawyer at every step of the way, including now), and no one is being held incommunicado.
In fact, I welcome you to point to a single example of a right you've lost since September 11.
So let me get this straight -- we go out of our way to avoid hitting civilians, while fighting a war we didn't ask for, including putting our own men on the ground in harm's way to more accurately designate targets. Meanwhile, our enemies go out of their way to kill as many civilians as possible, because they believe that killing civilians is the morally right thing to do. And you don't see any difference?
Care to provide any backing for the numbers you claim? At all?
All serious estimates of civilan deaths in Afghanistan suggest a number around 1,100 -- see the section on civilian casualties at the end of
this article for details.
The fact is, we've put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure that we hit only the terrorist network which did this to us, and did not hit civilians, including putting our own men on the ground in harm's way to designate targets, and providing so much food aid that more food was getting into Afghanistan during the air campaign than had gotten in at any time in the previous ten years.
Can you point me to any nation in the world's history that has fought a war so humanely?
for somone to be rich someone else has to be poor. western countries keep 3rd
world countries in poverty through foriegn debt.
While this is a common claim by the left, any serious economist would point out that economics is not, in fact, a zero sum game. A free economy tends to grow on its own, as new technologies and processes emerge -- it does not grow by taking resources from elsewhere. If this were not true, how do you explain that the world economy taken as a whole is constantly growing. Are we taking resources from other planets, too?
No, third world nations are poor because they pursue backwards and oppressive economic policies which prevent growth. It's that simple. (And if you don't believe that, note that third world countries such as India or Korea which adopted free-market economies are doing quite well, thank you).
The rest of your post simply descends into incoherence. Perhaps if you rephrase it more clearly, it will become obvious to you how silly it is...
So what's your suggestion? That we should be making policy decisions based on what we think will make a madman like Osama bin Laden like us?
Really?
I mean, what? He thinks women should be flogged if they step out of doors unescorted, and we believe in equal rights for women, so we compromise and only flog our women on tuesdays and thursdays?
Appeasement doesn't work. It never has, and it never will. It's also morally despicable.
The study shows a five-fold increase in the number of incarcerated black men over the past 20 years.
The problem with simply throwing around numbers like this is that these facts do not exist in a vacuum. In order to make any useful judgement from the above numbers, we would need to ask some or all of the following questions:
How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated relate to changes in the population in the age groups most associated with crime?
How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated among blacks relate to changes among other races?
How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated among blacks relate to changes in the crime rate among blacks?
These questions can be summed up as follows: how do these changes relate to the crime rate overall? Do they reflect more crimes being committed, a greater percentage of criminals being caught, or disparate sentencing? To simply throw out the number as if it necessarily demonstrates the last of these three is, at best, disingenuous.
While there is certainly room for disagreement with the court's decision in the Nuremberg Files case, to suggest that this is some sort of policy shift away from free speech is nonsensical -- far less direct threats have been banned in past court judgements, and in this area as elsewhere, the general trend is toward free speech, not away from it.
As mentioned by an AC elsewhere in this thread, one need only look at the recent ruling on child pornography to confirm this.
To repeat the AC's question: ``whose rights are they taking away?''
So far, you've asked us to take a lot of things on assertion, but haven't provided any examples. Perhaps if you provided an example, your case would be more credible (learning to spell and having your `home page' link not point to an empty directory wouldn't hurt either).
there are more black men in prison than in college
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there are more black men in the age range usually seen in prison (say 17-65) then in the age range normally seen in college (say 18-22) too...
Put differently, and returning to the top of this thread, it seems to me that complaining that you don't control what is done with something you decide to sell after you sell it is like complaining that democracy doesn't give you equal voting rights because your candidate didn't win...
I think an analogy will show why this doesn't make sense to me:
Suppose you have a loaf of bread. You decide to sell it. You can ask any price you want for it -- you control the sale of the loaf of bread.
Now suppose I buy that loaf of bread, use it to makes sandwiches (along with some cheese I bought from someone else), and sell these sandwiches at a nifty profit.
This in no way interferes with your ability to ask any price you want for the bread. It in no way interferes with your control over your bread.
And thus, I completely fail to see why you think that an employer buying my labor, combining it with another's labor, and selling the result at a profit tells us anything over whether I control my labor. I still set the price at which I sell my labor. I still have complete control over my labor, and may cease to sell it at any time.
Furthermore, to return to our analogy, I see no reason to prevent the sandwich-maker from making a profit on the sandwiches. Far from being a `utopia' (except in the true sense, of existing nowhere), such a system would remove the incentive he has to offer sandwiches for sale, leaving the consumer with less choice -- and leaving the bread-maker no better off.
I would certainly not take corporate profits as evidence that you are not
disposing of the fruits of your own labor as long as we are talking about
a free-market system, where you chose what job to accept, and can leave
if you do not feel you are being paid enough.
In capitalism, your labor and abilities are a commodity which you alone
control -- its up to you to go out and sell them and get a fair price,
but you always have the option to turn down an offer you don't like.
This stands in marked contrast to totalitarian systems such as socialism
where your labor is considered a property of the state, which assigns it
as it sees fit, and sets the price you may receive for it.
Sure, it can devolve, and stop being capitalism -- but capitalism is the only
system which doesn't take as its premise someone else deciding how the fruits
of your labor will be spent.
Just as democracy is the system where you decide what
to do instead of being told by some dictator, capitalism is the
system where you decide what you want to spend the fruits of your
labor on, rather than taking what is alotted to you by some
bureaucracy.
To fault capitalism because you don't like how someone else chooses to
spend their money is akin to faulting democracy because you don't like
who got elected.
By the way, one of us characterizes anyone who has the nerve (why the sheer unmitigated gall!) to disagree with
him as `evil' a `fascist' and a `shit' and a `scumbag' (or plays stupid word games with their names). Do you really want to suggest that it's some other political
affiliation which engages in dehumanizing their enemies and thus encourages violence against them? Really?
The fact is, such language, along with a bizarre hyperbole (a tiff with a cop is `torture', cops being a little
on edge when protesters who threw molotovs at them come back to two is `destruction of the right to protest', and
so forth) are the entirety of your position. You certainly haven't presented any coherent arguments for any of
your claims.
And that, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, is pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, there are at least two known cases where the Serbian leadership under Milosevic intentionally concealed these warnings, to cause civilian deaths for propaganda purposes, but if we had wanted to cause civilian deaths, I assure you, a lot more Serbs would be dead. As is, very few died.
As for Japan, I find it rather telling that you feel the need to go back almost sixty years to find an example of what you claim is commonplace, but at any rate, it is clear that the number of civilians killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a small fraction of the number of Japanese civilians who would have died in the island-by-island attack on the Japanese home islands which would have been necessary without these bombings. In other words, these bombings saved millions of civilian lives, plus hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers.
Which brings us to Nicaragua, where faced with a totalitarian dictatorship which was not only terrorizing its own population, but was staging guerilla attacks on neighboring countries in which hundreds died, we backed a local rebellion which fought for and won the right to free elections. The people overwhelmingly voted the rebels into power in an election which even Jimmy Carter and the UN had to admit was free and fair, and the dictator Ortega retired to an apartment Managua, where he now writes romance novels for a living. Sure sounds like a win to all concerned for me -- what's your complaint here?
The US purposefully targets civilians,
Care to provide any reference supporting this claim? For that matter, can you explain why, if we are in fact targeting civilians, we're doing such a poor job of hitting them (about 1,100 civilians dead in Afghanistan, for example -- see the section on civilian casualties at then end of this article for details)?
they admit as much in their planning documents
Again, care to provide any reference backing this claim up? Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
The fact is, giving up on these loans and saying that we would consider these nations to have a blank slate would be an act of charity, no more, and no less. And as such, as with any act of charity, we should consider it, and we should consider its costs.
It is certainly not something that we `owe' to anyone.
As for economics in general, your understanding is incorrect both in general (there is, in fact, much more real monetary value flowing around today than in the past, for the simple reason that due to economic growth there is more real value backing these transactions), and in the particulars (even healthcare is remarkably elastic -- as people live longer and come to expect a higher standard of living, their healthcare needs expand).
But you're right. Being totalitarian dictatorships, none of the Arab nations ever voted anyone into office (though plenty of them are ruled by actual mass murderers), so I guess they dodge the issue neatly, eh?
Other than Israel and Turkey, you could walk from the west coast of Africa to the Indian border and not pass through a single democracy, a single free-market economy, or a single open society.
But its all those guys you think we should be appeasing, by turning our back on a nation with values similar to ours? No thanks...
No one is being hauled away in the middle of the night, no one has been held without contact to council (even al-Muhajir has had a lawyer at every step of the way, including now), and no one is being held incommunicado.
In fact, I welcome you to point to a single example of a right you've lost since September 11.
If you can't, you're just blowing hot air.
Really?
Thank you. You've just demonstrated the bankrupcy of your position better than anyone else here could have.
All serious estimates of civilan deaths in Afghanistan suggest a number around 1,100 -- see the section on civilian casualties at the end of this article for details.
The fact is, we've put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure that we hit only the terrorist network which did this to us, and did not hit civilians, including putting our own men on the ground in harm's way to designate targets, and providing so much food aid that more food was getting into Afghanistan during the air campaign than had gotten in at any time in the previous ten years.
Can you point me to any nation in the world's history that has fought a war so humanely?
for somone to be rich someone else has to be poor. western countries keep 3rd world countries in poverty through foriegn debt.
While this is a common claim by the left, any serious economist would point out that economics is not, in fact, a zero sum game. A free economy tends to grow on its own, as new technologies and processes emerge -- it does not grow by taking resources from elsewhere. If this were not true, how do you explain that the world economy taken as a whole is constantly growing. Are we taking resources from other planets, too?
No, third world nations are poor because they pursue backwards and oppressive economic policies which prevent growth. It's that simple. (And if you don't believe that, note that third world countries such as India or Korea which adopted free-market economies are doing quite well, thank you).
The rest of your post simply descends into incoherence. Perhaps if you rephrase it more clearly, it will become obvious to you how silly it is...
Um, no, no it isn't. Thanks for playing.
I mean, what? He thinks women should be flogged if they step out of doors unescorted, and we believe in equal rights for women, so we compromise and only flog our women on tuesdays and thursdays?
Appeasement doesn't work. It never has, and it never will. It's also morally despicable.
The study shows a five-fold increase in the number of incarcerated black men over the past 20 years.
The problem with simply throwing around numbers like this is that these facts do not exist in a vacuum. In order to make any useful judgement from the above numbers, we would need to ask some or all of the following questions:
- How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated relate to changes in the population in the age groups most associated with crime?
- How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated among blacks relate to changes among other races?
- How do these changes in absolute numbers incarcerated among blacks relate to changes in the crime rate among blacks?
These questions can be summed up as follows: how do these changes relate to the crime rate overall? Do they reflect more crimes being committed, a greater percentage of criminals being caught, or disparate sentencing? To simply throw out the number as if it necessarily demonstrates the last of these three is, at best, disingenuous.As mentioned by an AC elsewhere in this thread, one need only look at the recent ruling on child pornography to confirm this.
So far, you've asked us to take a lot of things on assertion, but haven't provided any examples. Perhaps if you provided an example, your case would be more credible (learning to spell and having your `home page' link not point to an empty directory wouldn't hurt either).
Okay, then it should be easy for you to provide an example, instead of shooting your mouth off. Why don't you?
No, of course not, you're just blowing hot air.
No, of course not, you're just blowing hot air.
there are more black men in prison than in college
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there are more black men in the age range usually seen in prison (say 17-65) then in the age range normally seen in college (say 18-22) too...
Put differently, and returning to the top of this thread, it seems to me that complaining that you don't control what is done with something you decide to sell after you sell it is like complaining that democracy doesn't give you equal voting rights because your candidate didn't win...
Suppose you have a loaf of bread. You decide to sell it. You can ask any price you want for it -- you control the sale of the loaf of bread.
Now suppose I buy that loaf of bread, use it to makes sandwiches (along with some cheese I bought from someone else), and sell these sandwiches at a nifty profit.
This in no way interferes with your ability to ask any price you want for the bread. It in no way interferes with your control over your bread.
And thus, I completely fail to see why you think that an employer buying my labor, combining it with another's labor, and selling the result at a profit tells us anything over whether I control my labor. I still set the price at which I sell my labor. I still have complete control over my labor, and may cease to sell it at any time.
Furthermore, to return to our analogy, I see no reason to prevent the sandwich-maker from making a profit on the sandwiches. Far from being a `utopia' (except in the true sense, of existing nowhere), such a system would remove the incentive he has to offer sandwiches for sale, leaving the consumer with less choice -- and leaving the bread-maker no better off.
In capitalism, your labor and abilities are a commodity which you alone control -- its up to you to go out and sell them and get a fair price, but you always have the option to turn down an offer you don't like.
This stands in marked contrast to totalitarian systems such as socialism where your labor is considered a property of the state, which assigns it as it sees fit, and sets the price you may receive for it.
Sure, it can devolve, and stop being capitalism -- but capitalism is the only system which doesn't take as its premise someone else deciding how the fruits of your labor will be spent.
Just as democracy is the system where you decide what to do instead of being told by some dictator, capitalism is the system where you decide what you want to spend the fruits of your labor on, rather than taking what is alotted to you by some bureaucracy.
To fault capitalism because you don't like how someone else chooses to spend their money is akin to faulting democracy because you don't like who got elected.
Sounds like a good match to me. :-)
By the way, one of us characterizes anyone who has the nerve (why the sheer unmitigated gall!) to disagree with him as `evil' a `fascist' and a `shit' and a `scumbag' (or plays stupid word games with their names). Do you really want to suggest that it's some other political affiliation which engages in dehumanizing their enemies and thus encourages violence against them? Really?
The fact is, such language, along with a bizarre hyperbole (a tiff with a cop is `torture', cops being a little on edge when protesters who threw molotovs at them come back to two is `destruction of the right to protest', and so forth) are the entirety of your position. You certainly haven't presented any coherent arguments for any of your claims.
And that, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, is pathetic.