It's how a conservative politician gets to leak news that the war is doing well and the liberals are all corrupt.
Lest that sound like picking on the conservatives only, let's make it clean that CNN and the New York Times use anonymous sources all the time as well for things that really should not be anonymously sourced. But I can't help but think that's what a WSJ whistleblower site is really about, as a repository for political figures to say things that they wouldn't want to say to your face.
First of all, those 18% of taxes are coming from different places. Check this graph from Reuters. Over the past few decades, we've been taking in much less tax revenues from business taxes (corporate, excise) and taking in much more from payroll taxes (social security, Medicare). That goes along with the fact that we cut business taxes and raised payroll taxes during the 80's. So if the Laffer curve exists, it apparently doesn't apply to half the taxes that we collect.
Second, we can talk about wealth disparity. The income tax is a tax that primarily affects high incomes, while low incomes can often deduct out of income tax completely while still paying FICA taxes. You would imagine that during a period like the 00's in which the gains in GDP were mainly being absorbed by high income earners that you would then see a rapid expansion in income tax revenues, but as the chart above showe, income taxes went up during the dot-com boom but barely returned to a historical average near the peak of the next boom. That would indicate that we're going to need another overinflated bubble to get income tax receipts back to the historical average after yet another recent drop.
There's also the fallacy that more tax cuts will continue to drive GDP and employment, while the current trend is that liquidity amongst corporations is substantial enough to create more investment but that hiring is being held back by a lack of demand. While tax cuts may be a driver of employment, it's unlikely as big of a driver as demand, which has sharply dropped as the costs of consumer goods and services has risen. If the deficit is a concern, then income tax increases would likely have a lesser impact on the economy than in cutting services that contribute to the working and middle classes that drive demand.
Whenever I'm about to go shopping for an expensive product wih many different choices available, in a field that I do not consistently read consumer reports about so as to be immediately informed about the choices and quality, one of the first things I am going to do is to ask the people I know online for help in choosing something, because one of them is bound to know much more about the subject than I do. I don't see what's so lazy about a guy soliciting for help about purchasing a product - hell, I call that the smart way to go.
Actually, if you're looking for an accurate portrayal of medicine, watch Scrubs. And I'm not kidding about that - there's a show that was intentionally based on a lot of real-life experiences of medical interns and nurses and such, even if the show was exaggerated for comic effect.
Oh, come on. If we derived modern computers from the aliens' systems, then certainly the aliens had their own problems. I can just imagine those two aliens in the mothership sitting there, staring at the virus notification on the screen, going, "I TOLD you to download the latest service pack! Fscking McAlienfee!"
If your brother owns a truck, then I can assure you that he is always being asked to help haul things. That is the curse of being The Guy I Know With A Truck.
I want to say this as someone who generally enjoys Apple products but does find them a bit overpriced, so please withhold fanboy accusations in one direction or another.
An executive at our company recently gave a speech to our team about how impressed he was with Apple's sales theories. He says that he sees Apple as successful because they don't just make products that fit into a certain line - they make new products.
As in... what's an iPhone? If you had to describe an iPhone to someone, what would you say? You would say maybe, "It's a smartphone that functions using a touch screen instead of a keypad and has access to a very large number of small applications and games." Go into an Apple Store, though, and ask a rep what an iPhone is, and he'll say, "Well, it's the iPhone. Here, try it out." Then he'll give you one and let you play with it for awhile.
When you watch a commercial for the iPhone, you never hear things like, "blazing fast 1.5 Ghz speed," or "some of the largest capacity on the market." You also never hear the word "smartphone." When you watch an iPhone commercial, you see people browsing the internet or playing games or chatting on IM. By the way, you might recall how the original iPod commercials never said the words "mp3 player" - they just featured silhouettes of people dancing. And when has Apple ever referred to an iPad as a "tablet computer?"
Whenever Apple markets a product, they don't describe it to you. They tell you its name, they show you what it does, and they try to get you to think of it as a brand new device that has no relationship to anything else on the market. Getting back to our executive at our company, he talked about developing our product suite with a new name that hadn't been used before, and talked about how he'd set up their booth at the last major trade show to have tons of demonstrations, where people could just interact with the product rather than reading a ten-page fact sheet about all of the new and interesting things that product can do. We had a ton of interested customers at that booth this year.
You can't help but compare that stuff to Microsoft, who is always playing catch-up. "Here's OUR mp3 player! Here's OUR user-friendly OS! Here's OUR smartphones!" Microsoft markets its products as the MS iteration of products that always exist, giving them that special MS touch that makes those products better. Apple markets its products as... Apple products. I don't care whether you love or hate Apple or something in between - you have to respect that strategy.
I've been occasionally hearing this argument lately. "Yeah, we know these guys are doing bad things, but what if you find out that your guys are doing bad things, too? That would prove that you're even more evil, now wouldn't it!" It sounds like an attempt to conflate a hypothetical situation with what's actually going on. You know, things that there are no evidence for yet do not deserve equal weight with things that are actually evident.
This is in no way to say that I think the Obama administration is completely blameless and angelic in all things. If we were to discover that this firm was working on some of the same hacking and propaganda techniques on behalf of the government, then I'd damned well like to know about that as well. If the Obama administration was using these tactics on American citizens, I hope the investigation uncovers it somehow. And if you, parent poster, murdered a bunch of people ten years ago, I would hope that you are sent to jail for it. You know, if you did that. But in the meantime, we've got documents pointing to fraud being done by this firm on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, so why don't we start with that?
"The BBC has a clear agenda of promoting a multicultural society while being run by the oxford elite and including very little of the multicultural society and villifying anyone who dares question this."
If this is true, then that would be an example of someone complaining about something that they have no direct knowledge about. That's not a conspiracy theorist. The definition of a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who comes up with theories about conspiracies. For example, the crazy idea that Google is secretly a tool of the liberal government - an idea not backed by any direct evidence of Google's involvement, but simply by drawing lines between names on a whiteboard. Does anyone in Europe advance conspiracy theories in the way that Beck does, from a well-paid platform?
Most libertarians that I know of say that they want to decrease government regulations on businesses, because they consider these to be a distortion of the free market. When asked what will happen to a business that damages the environment or discriminates against people, etc., most libertarians respond that these businesses will simply go out of business because no one will do business with them, there will be boycotts, and the like. It's a theory that implies that governments should not be strong enough to restrict businesses ("government small enough to drown in a bathtub") but should be weak enough that they can be taken down by a coordinated consumer effort. It's a theory that businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals. And if such a thing were possible, then Rockefeller would have gone out of business.
It's not about a "blood for oil" trade. It's that the architects of the war grossly underestimated the costs of the invasion, and part of the pitch for the occupation was that the cost of war would be minimal considering that the money recouped from Iraq's domestic production would help to repay for the invasion. This link has a few good quotes:
"The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment -- as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." -Donald Rumsfeld, 2003
I'm divided on this controversy, because I also know a couple of teachers. They post on Facebook, or they show up in IRC chat, and the number one thing that seem to like to talk about is how there's this one kid that they just absolutely want to strangle some days. Or lesser injustices like kids not doing their homework and such. Considering the stress of the environment and the lack of discipline in some kids, I think it's fair that teachers should want to vent now and then.
What bothers me more about the OP is that the teacher didn't blog behind a pseudonym or behind a locked Facebook post. I'm not sure that putting your actual name on a blog and making it moderately clear which kids you're dissing is a mature thing to do in any case.
Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school.
That's part of the problem - schools are often funded by local property taxes and the like. Which is to say, the richer areas have richer schools as more taxes get paid into them. You might want to ask why we have such a disparity in teacher salaries from school to school that have little to do with quality of performance.
Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.
The story goes, as I've heard, that one day a work consultant came to my company and offered to analyze their work practices to see if they could discover any positive or negative patterns. One thing they noted in their survey of the staff was that the more productive employees, the ones who had stayed on with the company for a decade, were the ones that had been referred to the company by a current employee. Since then, the company has offered a generous referral bonus for signing up friends.
Of course if you only listen to Rachel Maddow, then you were probably unaware.
If you think that Rachel Maddow doesn't hit Obama for this stuff all the time, then you're just as blindly partisan as you claim other people to be. Characters like Keith Olbermann, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Maher have been giving Obama shit since be got elected - from hiring much of Clinton's economic team with their heavy ties to the financial industry, to his backdoor meetings with healthcare providers promising not to bargain for lower bulk rates if they would support the reform bill.
See, the funny part about all of this is that people like Glenn Beck think that Obama is a socialist, an evil plant of the far-left set out to destroy all American values, but then they turn right around and accusing him of being in the pocket of big business without the least bit of irony. The guy is a centrist, and he's clearly positioning himself to work with the Republican Congress to try and get some compromises and get some things accomplished over the next two-year period - much to the chagrin of his Rachel-Maddow-watching supporters.
Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Case in point, and apropos to the original post, it was the government that required cell phone carriers to allow customers to take their phone numbers with them when they switched to a different carrier. This removed a barrier to competition, as the hassle of telling everyone your new number was often enough to dissuade people from switching companies, and may have even caused cell carriers to offer better deals in order to pick up more customers that were ready to switch.
Out of curiosity, did that make the game "profitable?" I mean, three times zero is still zero. Does the game now bring in enough revenue to justify its continued existence?
[F]ight your way through a mystifyingly complex government bureaucracy for a full day of discipline problems and budget cuts, all for the same pay as the meathead who barely graduated college? Gee, where do I sign up? A couple changes that I think would go a long way towards addressing some of this:
I think you contradict yourself a bit there. Instead of new incentives and a screwy pay structure and testing that kinda sorta shows who the better teachers are, why not just, y'know, raise the average teaching salary to match that of other professions with similar training requirements? That would bring more talented people to the profession, since many of those talented people leave to seek careers where they can be rewarded for their talents, and growing the talent pool would then give schools more range in firing underperforming teachers since they would have more ready replacements.
I mean, "incentives" is basically a way that we say we want it to look like we're giving people higher salaries than what they're currently getting without actually having to pay higher salaries. When a person signs up for a job, they ask what it pays every two weeks - they don't ask what bonus they earn for being voted employee of the month. And a lot of students do the same thing when they select their college majors. Right now, you might earn a good salary as a teacher if you're well recognized and you can teach in the right school district and you can cut a certain amount of politics and you're willing to eventually move up to an admin position (and not to mention in the current climate of cutting education budgets to make up for shortfalls in state budgets, if you can even get a job to begin with), whereas there are plenty of careers to train for where you can just earn a good salary. Your incentives might push current teachers to do a little better, but they won't attract more talented people to the profession.
The people seem to be responding by kicking his ass. Democracy!
Short clarification - the people have NOT yet responded by kicking his ass. TFA is an editorial by a guy who says this all of that stuff will happen. The only thing that appears to have happened so far is that Mugabe and his administration have thrown a fit.
it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.
To further that argument, remember that when we uncovered abuse of tortures at Gitmo, we were told that there were terrorists who would now know what kind of interrogation techniques we use and would train their operatives to resist those techniques. We were told that we needed to keep our interrogation processes secret in the name of national security. And to some extent, there's some truth in that - if terrorists want to be arrested and made into martyrs, it helps to know how your captors will deal with you.
I don't know how I feel about this particular incident. I think there's a lot in the latest batch of WL releases that the public deserve to know, while a lot of it is just backroom chatter and face-saving things said behind doors that could've just been let there alone. But I absolutely hate this argument that we can't uncover the truth about things because TEH BAD PEOPLE will use that information against us.
Number one, the bad people will always find something that they can use to fuel their propaganda. You're not going to stop the bad people by keeping these things secret. Number two, if you give people a freedom, then some people will use it for bad purposes. You give people the right to bear arms, then some people are going to get shot. Some people will say that if you ban guns, then only the criminals will have guns, and I sympathize with that argument. I would say that if we don't have information getting out to people about how their governments are functioning, then only the government itself will know how it is functioning.
I want to quote a paragraph from TFA here: Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.
What that paragraph says to me is - Mugabe is still in control, and if Wikileaks hadn't exposed this bit of dirt on one of his rivals, then it still would have happened for the first bit of negative information he could uncover. On top of that, the author of the post isn't talking about a loss of support for the prime minister that's already happened - he's predicting everything that's going to happen in the future, so there's no direct guarantee that the whole coalition government is about to collapse. It's terrible that Zimbabwe could be back in trouble again - not new trouble, just the trouble that was already there and was simmering quietly - but I still find blaming Wikileaks for this trouble to be the equivalent of blaming a pebble for the avalanche.
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It's how a conservative politician gets to leak news that the war is doing well and the liberals are all corrupt.
Lest that sound like picking on the conservatives only, let's make it clean that CNN and the New York Times use anonymous sources all the time as well for things that really should not be anonymously sourced. But I can't help but think that's what a WSJ whistleblower site is really about, as a repository for political figures to say things that they wouldn't want to say to your face.
First of all, those 18% of taxes are coming from different places. Check this graph from Reuters. Over the past few decades, we've been taking in much less tax revenues from business taxes (corporate, excise) and taking in much more from payroll taxes (social security, Medicare). That goes along with the fact that we cut business taxes and raised payroll taxes during the 80's. So if the Laffer curve exists, it apparently doesn't apply to half the taxes that we collect.
Second, we can talk about wealth disparity. The income tax is a tax that primarily affects high incomes, while low incomes can often deduct out of income tax completely while still paying FICA taxes. You would imagine that during a period like the 00's in which the gains in GDP were mainly being absorbed by high income earners that you would then see a rapid expansion in income tax revenues, but as the chart above showe, income taxes went up during the dot-com boom but barely returned to a historical average near the peak of the next boom. That would indicate that we're going to need another overinflated bubble to get income tax receipts back to the historical average after yet another recent drop.
There's also the fallacy that more tax cuts will continue to drive GDP and employment, while the current trend is that liquidity amongst corporations is substantial enough to create more investment but that hiring is being held back by a lack of demand. While tax cuts may be a driver of employment, it's unlikely as big of a driver as demand, which has sharply dropped as the costs of consumer goods and services has risen. If the deficit is a concern, then income tax increases would likely have a lesser impact on the economy than in cutting services that contribute to the working and middle classes that drive demand.
Whenever I'm about to go shopping for an expensive product wih many different choices available, in a field that I do not consistently read consumer reports about so as to be immediately informed about the choices and quality, one of the first things I am going to do is to ask the people I know online for help in choosing something, because one of them is bound to know much more about the subject than I do. I don't see what's so lazy about a guy soliciting for help about purchasing a product - hell, I call that the smart way to go.
Actually, if you're looking for an accurate portrayal of medicine, watch Scrubs. And I'm not kidding about that - there's a show that was intentionally based on a lot of real-life experiences of medical interns and nurses and such, even if the show was exaggerated for comic effect.
Oh, come on. If we derived modern computers from the aliens' systems, then certainly the aliens had their own problems. I can just imagine those two aliens in the mothership sitting there, staring at the virus notification on the screen, going, "I TOLD you to download the latest service pack! Fscking McAlienfee!"
If your brother owns a truck, then I can assure you that he is always being asked to help haul things. That is the curse of being The Guy I Know With A Truck.
I want to say this as someone who generally enjoys Apple products but does find them a bit overpriced, so please withhold fanboy accusations in one direction or another.
An executive at our company recently gave a speech to our team about how impressed he was with Apple's sales theories. He says that he sees Apple as successful because they don't just make products that fit into a certain line - they make new products.
As in... what's an iPhone? If you had to describe an iPhone to someone, what would you say? You would say maybe, "It's a smartphone that functions using a touch screen instead of a keypad and has access to a very large number of small applications and games." Go into an Apple Store, though, and ask a rep what an iPhone is, and he'll say, "Well, it's the iPhone. Here, try it out." Then he'll give you one and let you play with it for awhile.
When you watch a commercial for the iPhone, you never hear things like, "blazing fast 1.5 Ghz speed," or "some of the largest capacity on the market." You also never hear the word "smartphone." When you watch an iPhone commercial, you see people browsing the internet or playing games or chatting on IM. By the way, you might recall how the original iPod commercials never said the words "mp3 player" - they just featured silhouettes of people dancing. And when has Apple ever referred to an iPad as a "tablet computer?"
Whenever Apple markets a product, they don't describe it to you. They tell you its name, they show you what it does, and they try to get you to think of it as a brand new device that has no relationship to anything else on the market. Getting back to our executive at our company, he talked about developing our product suite with a new name that hadn't been used before, and talked about how he'd set up their booth at the last major trade show to have tons of demonstrations, where people could just interact with the product rather than reading a ten-page fact sheet about all of the new and interesting things that product can do. We had a ton of interested customers at that booth this year.
You can't help but compare that stuff to Microsoft, who is always playing catch-up. "Here's OUR mp3 player! Here's OUR user-friendly OS! Here's OUR smartphones!" Microsoft markets its products as the MS iteration of products that always exist, giving them that special MS touch that makes those products better. Apple markets its products as... Apple products. I don't care whether you love or hate Apple or something in between - you have to respect that strategy.
I've been occasionally hearing this argument lately. "Yeah, we know these guys are doing bad things, but what if you find out that your guys are doing bad things, too? That would prove that you're even more evil, now wouldn't it!" It sounds like an attempt to conflate a hypothetical situation with what's actually going on. You know, things that there are no evidence for yet do not deserve equal weight with things that are actually evident.
This is in no way to say that I think the Obama administration is completely blameless and angelic in all things. If we were to discover that this firm was working on some of the same hacking and propaganda techniques on behalf of the government, then I'd damned well like to know about that as well. If the Obama administration was using these tactics on American citizens, I hope the investigation uncovers it somehow. And if you, parent poster, murdered a bunch of people ten years ago, I would hope that you are sent to jail for it. You know, if you did that. But in the meantime, we've got documents pointing to fraud being done by this firm on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, so why don't we start with that?
"The BBC has a clear agenda of promoting a multicultural society while being run by the oxford elite and including very little of the multicultural society and villifying anyone who dares question this."
If this is true, then that would be an example of someone complaining about something that they have no direct knowledge about. That's not a conspiracy theorist. The definition of a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who comes up with theories about conspiracies. For example, the crazy idea that Google is secretly a tool of the liberal government - an idea not backed by any direct evidence of Google's involvement, but simply by drawing lines between names on a whiteboard. Does anyone in Europe advance conspiracy theories in the way that Beck does, from a well-paid platform?
Most libertarians that I know of say that they want to decrease government regulations on businesses, because they consider these to be a distortion of the free market. When asked what will happen to a business that damages the environment or discriminates against people, etc., most libertarians respond that these businesses will simply go out of business because no one will do business with them, there will be boycotts, and the like. It's a theory that implies that governments should not be strong enough to restrict businesses ("government small enough to drown in a bathtub") but should be weak enough that they can be taken down by a coordinated consumer effort. It's a theory that businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals. And if such a thing were possible, then Rockefeller would have gone out of business.
Do other countries have conspiracy theorists with such depth and wide-reaching audiences that have radio or television programs?
Ah, so it was moderately pseudonym'ed. I abscond.
It's not about a "blood for oil" trade. It's that the architects of the war grossly underestimated the costs of the invasion, and part of the pitch for the occupation was that the cost of war would be minimal considering that the money recouped from Iraq's domestic production would help to repay for the invasion. This link has a few good quotes:
"The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment -- as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." -Donald Rumsfeld, 2003
I'm divided on this controversy, because I also know a couple of teachers. They post on Facebook, or they show up in IRC chat, and the number one thing that seem to like to talk about is how there's this one kid that they just absolutely want to strangle some days. Or lesser injustices like kids not doing their homework and such. Considering the stress of the environment and the lack of discipline in some kids, I think it's fair that teachers should want to vent now and then.
What bothers me more about the OP is that the teacher didn't blog behind a pseudonym or behind a locked Facebook post. I'm not sure that putting your actual name on a blog and making it moderately clear which kids you're dissing is a mature thing to do in any case.
A short reminder for those who forget - half of all teachers in America quit within 5 years.
Was this an affluent school? Absolutely. The entire reason my family moved into this neighborhood, which is frankly on the expensive side for us, was so that my brother and I could go to that high school.
That's part of the problem - schools are often funded by local property taxes and the like. Which is to say, the richer areas have richer schools as more taxes get paid into them. You might want to ask why we have such a disparity in teacher salaries from school to school that have little to do with quality of performance.
Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.
The story goes, as I've heard, that one day a work consultant came to my company and offered to analyze their work practices to see if they could discover any positive or negative patterns. One thing they noted in their survey of the staff was that the more productive employees, the ones who had stayed on with the company for a decade, were the ones that had been referred to the company by a current employee. Since then, the company has offered a generous referral bonus for signing up friends.
Of course if you only listen to Rachel Maddow, then you were probably unaware.
If you think that Rachel Maddow doesn't hit Obama for this stuff all the time, then you're just as blindly partisan as you claim other people to be. Characters like Keith Olbermann, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Maher have been giving Obama shit since be got elected - from hiring much of Clinton's economic team with their heavy ties to the financial industry, to his backdoor meetings with healthcare providers promising not to bargain for lower bulk rates if they would support the reform bill.
See, the funny part about all of this is that people like Glenn Beck think that Obama is a socialist, an evil plant of the far-left set out to destroy all American values, but then they turn right around and accusing him of being in the pocket of big business without the least bit of irony. The guy is a centrist, and he's clearly positioning himself to work with the Republican Congress to try and get some compromises and get some things accomplished over the next two-year period - much to the chagrin of his Rachel-Maddow-watching supporters.
Maxwell Smart was more of a bumbler. Much of the time he did do something right or mildly clever to win the day by the episode's end.
This is what I was going to say. Get Smart was goofy, it was a farce, but the lead character was genuinely competent.
And Gilligan's Island? The Professor built radios from coconuts! Dude had The Spark!
+1 Foglio reference.
Granted it doesn't happen enough, partly because well designed regulations are actually really hard to pull off, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Case in point, and apropos to the original post, it was the government that required cell phone carriers to allow customers to take their phone numbers with them when they switched to a different carrier. This removed a barrier to competition, as the hassle of telling everyone your new number was often enough to dissuade people from switching companies, and may have even caused cell carriers to offer better deals in order to pick up more customers that were ready to switch.
Out of curiosity, did that make the game "profitable?" I mean, three times zero is still zero. Does the game now bring in enough revenue to justify its continued existence?
[F]ight your way through a mystifyingly complex government bureaucracy for a full day of discipline problems and budget cuts, all for the same pay as the meathead who barely graduated college? Gee, where do I sign up? A couple changes that I think would go a long way towards addressing some of this:
I think you contradict yourself a bit there. Instead of new incentives and a screwy pay structure and testing that kinda sorta shows who the better teachers are, why not just, y'know, raise the average teaching salary to match that of other professions with similar training requirements? That would bring more talented people to the profession, since many of those talented people leave to seek careers where they can be rewarded for their talents, and growing the talent pool would then give schools more range in firing underperforming teachers since they would have more ready replacements.
I mean, "incentives" is basically a way that we say we want it to look like we're giving people higher salaries than what they're currently getting without actually having to pay higher salaries. When a person signs up for a job, they ask what it pays every two weeks - they don't ask what bonus they earn for being voted employee of the month. And a lot of students do the same thing when they select their college majors. Right now, you might earn a good salary as a teacher if you're well recognized and you can teach in the right school district and you can cut a certain amount of politics and you're willing to eventually move up to an admin position (and not to mention in the current climate of cutting education budgets to make up for shortfalls in state budgets, if you can even get a job to begin with), whereas there are plenty of careers to train for where you can just earn a good salary. Your incentives might push current teachers to do a little better, but they won't attract more talented people to the profession.
The people seem to be responding by kicking his ass. Democracy!
Short clarification - the people have NOT yet responded by kicking his ass. TFA is an editorial by a guy who says this all of that stuff will happen. The only thing that appears to have happened so far is that Mugabe and his administration have thrown a fit.
Are you really going to adhere to your ideals when real lives are at stake?
If you don't stick to your values when tested, they're not values. They're hobbies. --Jon Stewart
it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.
To further that argument, remember that when we uncovered abuse of tortures at Gitmo, we were told that there were terrorists who would now know what kind of interrogation techniques we use and would train their operatives to resist those techniques. We were told that we needed to keep our interrogation processes secret in the name of national security. And to some extent, there's some truth in that - if terrorists want to be arrested and made into martyrs, it helps to know how your captors will deal with you.
I don't know how I feel about this particular incident. I think there's a lot in the latest batch of WL releases that the public deserve to know, while a lot of it is just backroom chatter and face-saving things said behind doors that could've just been let there alone. But I absolutely hate this argument that we can't uncover the truth about things because TEH BAD PEOPLE will use that information against us.
Number one, the bad people will always find something that they can use to fuel their propaganda. You're not going to stop the bad people by keeping these things secret. Number two, if you give people a freedom, then some people will use it for bad purposes. You give people the right to bear arms, then some people are going to get shot. Some people will say that if you ban guns, then only the criminals will have guns, and I sympathize with that argument. I would say that if we don't have information getting out to people about how their governments are functioning, then only the government itself will know how it is functioning.
I want to quote a paragraph from TFA here: Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.
What that paragraph says to me is - Mugabe is still in control, and if Wikileaks hadn't exposed this bit of dirt on one of his rivals, then it still would have happened for the first bit of negative information he could uncover. On top of that, the author of the post isn't talking about a loss of support for the prime minister that's already happened - he's predicting everything that's going to happen in the future, so there's no direct guarantee that the whole coalition government is about to collapse. It's terrible that Zimbabwe could be back in trouble again - not new trouble, just the trouble that was already there and was simmering quietly - but I still find blaming Wikileaks for this trouble to be the equivalent of blaming a pebble for the avalanche.