I think you mean there are no really viable ones, due in large part to common sense. Or call it "lack of traction" if you want to be more polite, or call it "ineffective leadership" if you don't. To me that last one is a direct appear to common sense to not support someone who is ineffective at their job.
Is that so? Or maybe there's another explanation for why massively popular socialist policies like a public option on health care go nowhere, but massively unpopular conservative policies like bank bailouts, warrantless wiretapping, and (currently) social security cuts fly through without a hitch?
Does the Rational Actor Fairy have a reason why this would be better than the status quo, where people are already held accountable for negligent driving that results in an accident? Either through civil courts, criminal courts, or rising insurance costs. On the flip side, you'd lose the reinforcement effect of law enforcement, the way a second time drunk driver is slapped with heavy fines, even if he's never hit anybody...
Or, alternatively, if Rational Actor Fairy has a spell that makes people think of the consequences of their actions first and "I'll be okay I'll get away with it this time" later. As opposed to every person who's ever committed a civil or criminal infraction.
However I am also a Libertarian, and I agree that the government should not be getting into these nitpicky arguments, and should be left to the people and free market to decide.
So what does the Free Market Fairy do to discourage a guy from texting while driving his car through your t-bone at 50 miles an hour?
Sounds like you are simply spewing "stupid Uberbah Bullshit"
Sounds like you're butthurt that your winger fuckwittery was just destroyed.
Please give me the list of lawyers that lost everything they had and are now destitute due to a failed class action lawsuit.
Please tell me who pays for the cost of dozens of staffers, expert witnesses, and court costs if the class action lawyers lose the case. Please tell me how much of share of the pie you would want for a job where you assume all of the risk, where everyone else makes money from your efforts with zero time, effort, of money invested of their own.
Don't like it, hire your own damn lawyer and take your own damn risk.
No the point is a cash grab for the lawyers, the people in the class action lawsuit dontget anything, but the lawyers get another million to 10 million to buy yet another yacht or villa in colorado.
Stupid winger bullshit. The people in the class action suit take zero risk, which means if the suit is successful they literally get money for nothing. Whereas if the case is lost, the lawyers are on the hook for the entire cost of the case - which can be enormous if there are a few hundred thousand documents to parse and dozens of staffers to pay salaries for.
Don't like it, take your own damn risk and hire your own damn lawyer.
But of course no one is going to do that if the amount they've been stiffed is less than the cost of even filing in small claims court. The only solutions are class action lawsuits, or government agencies cracking the whip. But of course, the sort of useful idiots (for the corporations) that hate class action lawsuits also hate government oversight.
Oh you mean the politicians who are likely using said loopholes?
Not the politicians. The paymasters of the politicians. That's why both parties were in a rush to bail out the bankers, and have left the poor and working classes to fend for themselves.
Or more accurately, what does the GP have against JSTOR's low-ranking IT admin who found the access log when requested? Or the teenage daughter of the manager at JSTOR who passed on the request for that log? Or the MIT janitor who was supposed to lock that storage closet? Those are the people whose names are going to be named, and whose lives will be ruined when Anonymous lets loose their unbridled vigilante mayhem.
More accurately, do you have anything to support this tautology that Anonymous would go after the bystanders in this affair, rather than the ringleaders who decided to "make an example" by blowing up a trespassing case into a 35 year prison sentence?
We have not ever once actually experienced a true free market model in existence.
Of course you have. Somalia today, the Gilded Age right here in the U.S. of A. Also, your free market god is rather cruel and vicious to anyone who isn't a robber baron, which is why people got pissed off and demanded the sort of laws and unions that you despise today. Because saying you're a true believer in Randian Economics is just a longer way of saying you're a sociopath.
All prices are always set to maximize revenue. If companies could raise prices without alienating customers, they would go right ahead and do so, taxes or no taxes.
Sounds like the time in Vegas where I won jackpots on three separate slot machines in one day, and was begging Tony and Guido to believe it was just a craaaazy coincidence and to not break my kneecaps....
Newsflash: that kind of demagogic straw man was asinine 12 years ago, much less today.
The official figure of casualties for the invasion and aftermath is around 66 thousand (according to wikipedia). There are hundreds of thousands more killed by Sunni and Shia militias (not the Americans).
Newsflash: there wouldn't have been a sectarian civil war if the country wasn't first destabilized by the U.S. invasion, and then handled by a half-assed occupation when at least 500,000 troops were needed to establish and keep the peace.
Now, let's see
A list of per-Kuaitte actions that has nothing to do with how many people would have died if Saddam was left in power? And you do know that Iraq had U.S. backing in it's war on Iran, right?
Then we have the continuous daily tortures and killings by his secret police.
And now we have the daily tortures and killings by our puppet government in Iraq and by sectarian factions. Much like with Afghanistan, the atrocities you use as a justification for U.S. military hegemony have not only continued to happen, but are frequently done by our "allies".
At least a million have died between the invasion and the civil war. Millions more have been made refugees. Thousands are being effected by the shit we dropped there, including severe birth defects from depleted uranium. The country was bombed back into the stone age. Civil rights for women have been set back centuries. And don't forget the half-million kids we killed with sanctions in the 90's. But, you're ignoring the mountain to focus on the molehill. Still.
The invasion of Iraq was one of the greatest war crimes in the history of the human race. You're trying to defend the indefensible.
I feel like this severely understates the relationship between the Taliban and Al Queda
Is that you way of saying "I'm just going to ignore the fact that Bush refused to ignore an extradition offer from the Taliban?"
I don't know why I am entertaining your fantasies and engaging in your argument, but when I see ignorance as blind as yours I must respond.
Yup, looks like it. To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, the great thing about facts is that they are true whether or not wingnuts believe in them.
The offer happened. It's documented. Deal with it.
The state of Florida was not complicit on many governmental levels in ensuring those hijackers were trained to fly planes.
Neither was the Taliban.
Even the FBI, a group that does not directly connect Bin Ladin to 9/11, connects the hijackers to Al Queda, which Bin Ladin founded and maintained a position of seniority in.
Same as when banks started having to report transactions of a few thousand dollars to the feds, because it could be "money laundering". If it's not the mob, it's terrahrists or pedos.
I'd just like to point out that the opposite is true too... not having Flash is also great until you need to run it, at which point it sucks because it means you can't access whatever content you wanted to access.
Right, just like how the iPhone is not only missing an SD card slot, but an 8-trac player.
Were you 5 at the time or something? There were massive anti-war demonstrations, but because they were peceived as being anti-American, and we were all supposed to be grieving over 9/11 as though it was the beginning of Armageddon rather than an unusually bloody terrorist attack, Western governments broadly ignored them.
Maybe he's running on media math, where 500 teabaggers turning up for a protest in 2009 was more newsworthy than 500,000 anti-war protestors in 2003?
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I am pretty sure Afghanistan was very connected to 9/11
No more so than Florida, where the hijackers went to flight school.
Were the Taliban not harboring many Al Queda operations and people connected to the attack?
The Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laddin if we offered evidence that he was guilty of what we were accusing him of doing. So, Iraq wasn't Bush's first bogus war of choice.
That's right mod - if you disagree with it, cowardly claim it's flamebait.
Because there's no -1, Wingnut Bullshit mod.
The NYT editorial page was quite on fire with anti-war sentiment
On what fucking planet? The NYT treated anonymous, unverified administration claims as fact. Over and over again. So did the WaPo. Their journalistic malpractice is legendary, so on what planet were you on at the time?
Contrary to what you may think, there was WMDs. Gas was used to kill hundreds of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq. When we went in, it was not on rockets ready to be shot...it was in under ground bunkers and storage facilities.
Zombie wingnut revisionist history. Chemical weapons degrade over time. If that mustard gas warhead that would have wiped out a village in 1983 would leave you with a bad skin rash in 2003, it's no longer a weapon of mass destruction.
Bullshit. Your are making excuses for a dictator and his equally evil sons.
You bullshit. The suffering that would have happened if Saddam had been left in power is a mountain next to the dead, tortured, wounded, and homeless as a result of Bush's invasion and occupation.
Slashdot Mirror
I find your lack of self-awareness disturbing.
Is that so? Or maybe there's another explanation for why massively popular socialist policies like a public option on health care go nowhere, but massively unpopular conservative policies like bank bailouts, warrantless wiretapping, and (currently) social security cuts fly through without a hitch?
Does the Rational Actor Fairy have a reason why this would be better than the status quo, where people are already held accountable for negligent driving that results in an accident? Either through civil courts, criminal courts, or rising insurance costs. On the flip side, you'd lose the reinforcement effect of law enforcement, the way a second time drunk driver is slapped with heavy fines, even if he's never hit anybody...
Or, alternatively, if Rational Actor Fairy has a spell that makes people think of the consequences of their actions first and "I'll be okay I'll get away with it this time" later. As opposed to every person who's ever committed a civil or criminal infraction.
No, that's not a given. Anarchists can be for rules and organizations - just not hierarchies. Libertarians, on the other hand, really are that crazy.
So what does the Free Market Fairy do to discourage a guy from texting while driving his car through your t-bone at 50 miles an hour?
Sounds like you're butthurt that your winger fuckwittery was just destroyed.
Please tell me who pays for the cost of dozens of staffers, expert witnesses, and court costs if the class action lawyers lose the case. Please tell me how much of share of the pie you would want for a job where you assume all of the risk, where everyone else makes money from your efforts with zero time, effort, of money invested of their own.
Don't like it, hire your own damn lawyer and take your own damn risk.
Stupid winger bullshit. The people in the class action suit take zero risk, which means if the suit is successful they literally get money for nothing. Whereas if the case is lost, the lawyers are on the hook for the entire cost of the case - which can be enormous if there are a few hundred thousand documents to parse and dozens of staffers to pay salaries for.
Don't like it, take your own damn risk and hire your own damn lawyer.
But of course no one is going to do that if the amount they've been stiffed is less than the cost of even filing in small claims court. The only solutions are class action lawsuits, or government agencies cracking the whip. But of course, the sort of useful idiots (for the corporations) that hate class action lawsuits also hate government oversight.
Not the politicians. The paymasters of the politicians. That's why both parties were in a rush to bail out the bankers, and have left the poor and working classes to fend for themselves.
More accurately, do you have anything to support this tautology that Anonymous would go after the bystanders in this affair, rather than the ringleaders who decided to "make an example" by blowing up a trespassing case into a 35 year prison sentence?
You're using that term, "victims", but it doesn't mean whatever it it is you think it means.
Of course you have. Somalia today, the Gilded Age right here in the U.S. of A. Also, your free market god is rather cruel and vicious to anyone who isn't a robber baron, which is why people got pissed off and demanded the sort of laws and unions that you despise today. Because saying you're a true believer in Randian Economics is just a longer way of saying you're a sociopath.
Shorter version:
All prices are always set to maximize revenue. If companies could raise prices without alienating customers, they would go right ahead and do so, taxes or no taxes.
In the same week?
Sounds like the time in Vegas where I won jackpots on three separate slot machines in one day, and was begging Tony and Guido to believe it was just a craaaazy coincidence and to not break my kneecaps....
Newsflash: that kind of demagogic straw man was asinine 12 years ago, much less today.
Newsflash: there wouldn't have been a sectarian civil war if the country wasn't first destabilized by the U.S. invasion, and then handled by a half-assed occupation when at least 500,000 troops were needed to establish and keep the peace.
A list of per-Kuaitte actions that has nothing to do with how many people would have died if Saddam was left in power? And you do know that Iraq had U.S. backing in it's war on Iran, right?
And now we have the daily tortures and killings by our puppet government in Iraq and by sectarian factions. Much like with Afghanistan, the atrocities you use as a justification for U.S. military hegemony have not only continued to happen, but are frequently done by our "allies".
At least a million have died between the invasion and the civil war. Millions more have been made refugees. Thousands are being effected by the shit we dropped there, including severe birth defects from depleted uranium. The country was bombed back into the stone age. Civil rights for women have been set back centuries. And don't forget the half-million kids we killed with sanctions in the 90's. But, you're ignoring the mountain to focus on the molehill. Still.
The invasion of Iraq was one of the greatest war crimes in the history of the human race. You're trying to defend the indefensible.
Is that you way of saying "I'm just going to ignore the fact that Bush refused to ignore an extradition offer from the Taliban?"
Yup, looks like it. To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson, the great thing about facts is that they are true whether or not wingnuts believe in them.
The offer happened. It's documented. Deal with it.
Neither was the Taliban.
Non sequitur.
Same as when banks started having to report transactions of a few thousand dollars to the feds, because it could be "money laundering". If it's not the mob, it's terrahrists or pedos.
Same shit from both parties, different day.
And how long ago was that? You still bitching about single button mice as well? How about cooperative multitasking?
Right, just like how the iPhone is not only missing an SD card slot, but an 8-trac player.
Maybe he's running on media math, where 500 teabaggers turning up for a protest in 2009 was more newsworthy than 500,000 anti-war protestors in 2003?
No more so than Florida, where the hijackers went to flight school.
The Taliban offered to hand over Bin Laddin if we offered evidence that he was guilty of what we were accusing him of doing. So, Iraq wasn't Bush's first bogus war of choice.
Because there's no -1, Wingnut Bullshit mod.
On what fucking planet? The NYT treated anonymous, unverified administration claims as fact. Over and over again. So did the WaPo. Their journalistic malpractice is legendary, so on what planet were you on at the time?
Zombie wingnut revisionist history. Chemical weapons degrade over time. If that mustard gas warhead that would have wiped out a village in 1983 would leave you with a bad skin rash in 2003, it's no longer a weapon of mass destruction.
You bullshit. The suffering that would have happened if Saddam had been left in power is a mountain next to the dead, tortured, wounded, and homeless as a result of Bush's invasion and occupation.
By offering to hand over Bin Laddin if given evidence that the accusations against him were true?
Iraq wasn't the only bogus war of choice started by Bush.
Incredibly wrong. The support you speak of only happened after the war was already underway.