I'm not talking about handing out coupons for iPods to anyone who is poor. I'm talking about providing them with the things that they couldn't afford no matter how well they budget, like health insurance that doesn't disappear as soon as you get sick, legel representation when they need it, and that kind of thing. And moreoever, supporting those who simply can't work -- do you honestly believe that they don't exist? This isn't about some weird idea of a "poverty-line", but real assessments of who can and can't afford food and a home, who can and can't afford treatment for deadly but treatable diseases, who can and can't afford an education, and so on.
I define my "foes", as you call them, as anyone who thinks that the disabled should be left to die if they don't know anyone rich and generous enough to support them. Knowing some seriously disabled people myself and having seen the inside of psych hospitals while visiting relatives employed at them, I can say with absolute moral authority that anyone who wants to abandon these people for the sake of slightly faster rate of economic growth is monstrous. Having such a profound lack of empathy marks neocons and libertarians as barely Human.
Check out how much of your tax money actually goes to welfare programs, and how much goes to farm subsidies to support people who want to keep living on barren patches of dirt that no longer support life, subsidies for corporations that haven't been profitable in decades but happen to have a CEO who is friends with a politician, how much goes towards buying useless missile defence systems like the PATRIOT or shitty naval helicopters that crash more often than they land. It costs practically nothing to help the needy -- what exactly makes you think it's such a terrible idea?
And you're free to hand your own money to your military, to the companies that win your government's no-bid contracts, and to Iraq. And yet you love to force your fellow citizens to help support those doomed crusades. Why is charity so undeserving of federal organisation, but not slaughter and cronyism?
And how well did Vietnam, Korea, Central America, and South Africa work out? They're some of the worst shitholes in the world, thanks to western meddling. West Germany is the only success in the lot.
I guess when you overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with butchering despots, murder civilians with weapons as hideously and needlessly cruel as napalm, and bomb countries that you aren't even at war with, people somehow see that as a bad thing... what ever could they be thinking?
Actually, none of the states you mentioned were fascist either. Hitler ruled under the Nazi ideology, while Stalin and Mao under Communism (or Stalinism/Maoism, for those who like to seperate that from what Marx called communism).
Fascism is what Mussolini practiced. I suggest you look it up -- you'll find the parallels between fascism and neoconservativism quite striking. I'd think that someone who is supposedly a libertarian would be more concerned about modern American politics -- everything about the Bush administration is diametrically opposed to libertarian ideals, unless your idea of libertarianism is just leaving the disabled and infirm to freeze to death in the back-alleys of ghettos while still wasting trillions of dollars on the largest government in American history.
I'd like a tiny fraction of that money handed to people who CAN'T earn money for themselves. I know neocons don't believe in the existence of disability or old-age, but I assure that they do exist, and are quite effective at making people unemployable.
And regarding US economic growth, apparently you've failed to notice that the US economy is in the process of collapsing under the pressure of a massive deficit and widespread corporate corruption and incompetence. But if you really haven't noticed that most new investment is taking place in privately owned companies in China and India, then I doubt you're capable of even questioning your religious conviction in the infallability greed to solve the world's problems.
Right, and America doesn't murder millions? Remember slavery? How many Africans were killed, exactly? Infanticide? A lot of people would call aborton exactly that, so you're not off the hook there either. Not to mention dumpster babies, which America has had more than a few of. Many forced sterilisations back around the beginning of the twentieth century, and lots of Americans who think that we should bring back that kind of eugenics. It's not extensive as Chinese infanticide, but it's only a matter of degree. Executing convicts? At least China doesn't execute children and the mentally incompetent. Oh wait, America finally bannd executing the mentally incompetent, although children are still fair game. Censorship? Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the Republican's latest attempt to stop the media from revealing their crimes. And the constant threats against Iran...
Don't dupe yourself -- America is a fascist state, and has been for some time now. It probably started around Clinton's time, although Dubya has worked hard to try and outdo him.
That's assuming that you believe that investing in publically owned corporations benefits the economy, rather than simply transferring money to other millionaire CEOs as they lay off their employees and stifle innovation.
That's precisely why idealogues are so stupid and dangerous. While Canada and Sweden beautifully combine the superb tool that is capitalism with the aims of socialism, Neocons try to elevate capitalism into some deranged ideal.
But yes, capitalism-the-ideal does grind the poor into the dust. If you believe in private ownership, it generally follows that you don't believe in redistributing wealth when a minority of people have so much wealth that the trickle-down effect no longer functions -- after all, no one spends 100 million dollars in one year. Even people making a quarter of million dollars spend only a small proportion of it. The rest gets hoarded. And that causes the economy to grind to a halt and the poor to suffer. Creating wealth is worthless when all of the new wealth just goes straight into the hoards of the rich.
Not to mention the fact that capitalists invariably oppose any form of organized behaviour on the part of workers that might give them enough power to successfully bargain for better wages/work conditions/rights/whatever with their employers. Anyone who would deprive people of the right to organize and peacably assemble is monstrous, and that's what capitalists want to do.
Spoken like a true idealogue. Next I suppose you'll tell us that all liberals are just jealous of the rich? That environmentalism is just a scam to destroy the American economy? Save it for the Spin-Zone, and all the other Bill "Blubbering Vagina" O'Reilly.
Socialism is about trying to elevate the lives of everyone, rather than letting the rich grind the poor into dust. If keeping the sick, the disabled, and the elderly alive means slightly decreasing the affluence of a few millionaires, I'd call that a bargain.
Besides, look at Canada or Sweden -- supposedly socialist countries. Where is the "collectivism"? There's a great deal of debate and diversity in both of those countries. It's fascist states the US that force everyone to follow the same path of greed, hatred, and destruction.
Most nations that conduct aerial bombardment work VERY diligently to strike bunkers and factories rather than residential and commercial areas. Every bomb that hits a residence is a bomb that is wasted -- unless you're engaged in terror-bombing of course, which is undeniably a terrorist activity (although probably an ineffective one, if the Battle of Britain is any indicator). After all, that's part of the purpose of modern "smart bombs" -- they hit the factories and bunkers that you want to target, rather than the residences and commercial buildings that you don't. It's both a strategic and a moral victory if you succeed.
Protesters and revolutionaries in other countries have often thought the same thing, and have inevitably been dismayed to discover just how wrong they were. Frequently, the weapons used to slaughter the aforementioned protesters and revolutionaries were provided by the United States, to prevent the possibility of US-friendly dictators being replaced by democratic populist governments. Don't fool yourself -- the second amendment is meaningless. Even if 100 million Americans rose up, they wouldn't have the might to match the US military. Remember, America doesn't have an abundant supply of leftover Soviet weaponry the way Iraq and Afghanistan do. No RPGs, no high explosives, none of the other tools necessary to mount a reasonable insurgency in the face of tanks, gunships, APCs, or even good old-fashioned Marines in body armor.
There's really no chance for sanity to return to the US Government until Americans have the sense to elect a liberal or conservative party -- in the Canadian and European sense, not the sickeningly malformed American sense. Right now, all the US has are two flavours of fascism, and that's just not a sustainable way to head into the future. It leads inevitably to war, economic collapse, and barbarism.
There's a bit of a distinction that should be made. If the civilians you speak of avoid killing their fellow civilians at all costs, then they're just a resistance army. Think Tito or those Greeks who made life really shitty for the Nazis. We call what goes on in Iraq "terrorism" because they slaughter a hundred times as many Iraqui civilians as they do American troops, they kidnap and murder foreign civilians, and other reprehensible (even by the standards of war) behaviour.
By way of analogy, consider the US war of independence. For the most part (at least at the outset), Americans were a resistance army (later they were uniformed and all that, and so were just a plain old military). There were instances of terrorism, in which over-zealous revolutionaries murdered empire loyalists. But those are separate kinds of things. Interestingly, Canada's only hereditary title is "United Empire Loyalist", which means that one of your ancestors fled from the US to Canada during the war of independence. It's generally considered unwise to put that title on your business cards when visiting the States though....:P
I don't know why people even bother arguing with the Fox News zealots. They're incapable of basic reasoning. Just move somewhere that's a safe distance above sea level, and wait for Texans to start dying of heatstroke, Californians to start dying of Malaria, and Floridans to drown in catastrophic floods. The south will take the brunt of it anyway, so sooner or later the idiocy will be wiped out. Reason might prevail just in time to salvage northern US. Everyone smart and/or wealthy lives up north anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude#Latitude_and _wealth
More affairs start in the office than anywhere else... in real life anyway. Maybe in the make-believe world that conservatives occupy, forests are the only place that affairs can begin. But a one day hunting trip with other people present is hardly a set up for a torrid steamy affair. Only a psychotically jealous nut would have a problem with that.
I'll bet you don't let your wife have male friends, or at least insist on being present whenever she associates with them. Sad...
Does the I for I-VT Jeffords stand for independent? I didn't think Americans were even capable of breaking out of the two-party trap. Which state was it that had the guts to elect an independent senator?
Thinking of that, why isn't there a single republican in that list? You would think that a party that is supposedly about small government and staying out of people's affairs would have at least a few members opposed to the PATRIOT act. Doesn't the republican party contain ANY classical consevatives anymore? Is it really all neo-conservatives (AKA Fascists, in the Mussolini sense of the word)?
Then your wife is deeply insecure, and your marriage is a sad joke. How do you work? Don't you have female coworkers? Female friends? Does your wife demand that you be chaperoned whenever you leave the house?
I'll never understand why people let their psychotically jealous partners run their lives.
The sad thing is that you, me, and the entire Republican party seem to understand this, but the Democratic party just can't seem to get a grip on it. Whatever your political beliefs are, isn't some healthy political competition a good thing? Someone has to help those clowns get their act together before America degenerates into a one-party-system despotism.
Dear god! Men and women socialising in a non-marital context! The world is collapsing! Someone alert the Taliban... I mean the Republicans. What kind of degenerate has Cheney turned into?!? We all know that socialising with a woman leads DIRECTLY to sex. That awful man...
Meanwhile, in reality, I'd say that Cheney going hunting in a mixed gender group shows that he's not quite the insanely conservative progress-hater that he often comes off as when he speaks in his official capacities.
It's hard to overestimate the value of clever ideas. That's why, in addition to the usual mathematicians and cipher experts, Bletchley Park included a number of puzzle fans, crossword afficianados, and other game experts. When it comes to clever ideas about Human behaviour, those kinds of people are indispensable. The people running Bletchley Park were clearly quite clever themselves, assembling such a group. Clever ideas (and, by the same logic, stupid ideas like starting a war with an industrial superpower even though your existing enemies are proving to be more than you can handle) can change the world in profound ways.
This is really something that deserves some more discussion. Slashdot is full of people with knowledge of at least basic engineering, mechanics, etc. There are lots of people with money that are looking for ways to help the developing world. Someone here with some organizational skills should try and get them together, start a little foundation, and start flying people to Africa to start up local workshops that double as training centres for the next generation of local workshop experts.
I'd volunteer, but I have neither money, organizational skills, nor workshop skills of any kind...
Population increases are only temporary. The birthrate will always decline once the standard of living improves. Population explosions are usually confined to the places and times where health and affluence increase quite suddenly -- such Canada and the US at the end of World War 2, Europe during the industrial revolution, India right now. After a few decades, people adapt and the birth rate plummets until it reaches a level appropriate to the low mortality rates and long life-spans that affluence brings with it.
Good governance is a side-effect of affluence, not the other way round. It was when the European middle-class began to develop that democracy began to sprout in Europe. Once you have a group of people with some free time on their hands, they can start hassling their government, getting involved in politics, giving money to the right people to fund the right initiatives, etcetera.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Hey, you can't underestimate the value of good roads. The Romans knew it, and anyone who has used the miracle that is the American highway system (or the abortion that is the Canadian highway system) knows it too.
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I define my "foes", as you call them, as anyone who thinks that the disabled should be left to die if they don't know anyone rich and generous enough to support them. Knowing some seriously disabled people myself and having seen the inside of psych hospitals while visiting relatives employed at them, I can say with absolute moral authority that anyone who wants to abandon these people for the sake of slightly faster rate of economic growth is monstrous. Having such a profound lack of empathy marks neocons and libertarians as barely Human.
Check out how much of your tax money actually goes to welfare programs, and how much goes to farm subsidies to support people who want to keep living on barren patches of dirt that no longer support life, subsidies for corporations that haven't been profitable in decades but happen to have a CEO who is friends with a politician, how much goes towards buying useless missile defence systems like the PATRIOT or shitty naval helicopters that crash more often than they land. It costs practically nothing to help the needy -- what exactly makes you think it's such a terrible idea?
And you're free to hand your own money to your military, to the companies that win your government's no-bid contracts, and to Iraq. And yet you love to force your fellow citizens to help support those doomed crusades. Why is charity so undeserving of federal organisation, but not slaughter and cronyism?
I guess when you overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with butchering despots, murder civilians with weapons as hideously and needlessly cruel as napalm, and bomb countries that you aren't even at war with, people somehow see that as a bad thing... what ever could they be thinking?
Fascism is what Mussolini practiced. I suggest you look it up -- you'll find the parallels between fascism and neoconservativism quite striking. I'd think that someone who is supposedly a libertarian would be more concerned about modern American politics -- everything about the Bush administration is diametrically opposed to libertarian ideals, unless your idea of libertarianism is just leaving the disabled and infirm to freeze to death in the back-alleys of ghettos while still wasting trillions of dollars on the largest government in American history.
And regarding US economic growth, apparently you've failed to notice that the US economy is in the process of collapsing under the pressure of a massive deficit and widespread corporate corruption and incompetence. But if you really haven't noticed that most new investment is taking place in privately owned companies in China and India, then I doubt you're capable of even questioning your religious conviction in the infallability greed to solve the world's problems.
Don't dupe yourself -- America is a fascist state, and has been for some time now. It probably started around Clinton's time, although Dubya has worked hard to try and outdo him.
That's assuming that you believe that investing in publically owned corporations benefits the economy, rather than simply transferring money to other millionaire CEOs as they lay off their employees and stifle innovation.
But yes, capitalism-the-ideal does grind the poor into the dust. If you believe in private ownership, it generally follows that you don't believe in redistributing wealth when a minority of people have so much wealth that the trickle-down effect no longer functions -- after all, no one spends 100 million dollars in one year. Even people making a quarter of million dollars spend only a small proportion of it. The rest gets hoarded. And that causes the economy to grind to a halt and the poor to suffer. Creating wealth is worthless when all of the new wealth just goes straight into the hoards of the rich.
Not to mention the fact that capitalists invariably oppose any form of organized behaviour on the part of workers that might give them enough power to successfully bargain for better wages/work conditions/rights/whatever with their employers. Anyone who would deprive people of the right to organize and peacably assemble is monstrous, and that's what capitalists want to do.
Socialism is about trying to elevate the lives of everyone, rather than letting the rich grind the poor into dust. If keeping the sick, the disabled, and the elderly alive means slightly decreasing the affluence of a few millionaires, I'd call that a bargain.
Besides, look at Canada or Sweden -- supposedly socialist countries. Where is the "collectivism"? There's a great deal of debate and diversity in both of those countries. It's fascist states the US that force everyone to follow the same path of greed, hatred, and destruction.
Most nations that conduct aerial bombardment work VERY diligently to strike bunkers and factories rather than residential and commercial areas. Every bomb that hits a residence is a bomb that is wasted -- unless you're engaged in terror-bombing of course, which is undeniably a terrorist activity (although probably an ineffective one, if the Battle of Britain is any indicator). After all, that's part of the purpose of modern "smart bombs" -- they hit the factories and bunkers that you want to target, rather than the residences and commercial buildings that you don't. It's both a strategic and a moral victory if you succeed.
Protesters and revolutionaries in other countries have often thought the same thing, and have inevitably been dismayed to discover just how wrong they were. Frequently, the weapons used to slaughter the aforementioned protesters and revolutionaries were provided by the United States, to prevent the possibility of US-friendly dictators being replaced by democratic populist governments. Don't fool yourself -- the second amendment is meaningless. Even if 100 million Americans rose up, they wouldn't have the might to match the US military. Remember, America doesn't have an abundant supply of leftover Soviet weaponry the way Iraq and Afghanistan do. No RPGs, no high explosives, none of the other tools necessary to mount a reasonable insurgency in the face of tanks, gunships, APCs, or even good old-fashioned Marines in body armor.
There's really no chance for sanity to return to the US Government until Americans have the sense to elect a liberal or conservative party -- in the Canadian and European sense, not the sickeningly malformed American sense. Right now, all the US has are two flavours of fascism, and that's just not a sustainable way to head into the future. It leads inevitably to war, economic collapse, and barbarism.
By way of analogy, consider the US war of independence. For the most part (at least at the outset), Americans were a resistance army (later they were uniformed and all that, and so were just a plain old military). There were instances of terrorism, in which over-zealous revolutionaries murdered empire loyalists. But those are separate kinds of things. Interestingly, Canada's only hereditary title is "United Empire Loyalist", which means that one of your ancestors fled from the US to Canada during the war of independence. It's generally considered unwise to put that title on your business cards when visiting the States though.... :P
Seriously though, of course you're correct. When information is Free, we all benefit.
I'll bet you don't let your wife have male friends, or at least insist on being present whenever she associates with them. Sad...
Thinking of that, why isn't there a single republican in that list? You would think that a party that is supposedly about small government and staying out of people's affairs would have at least a few members opposed to the PATRIOT act. Doesn't the republican party contain ANY classical consevatives anymore? Is it really all neo-conservatives (AKA Fascists, in the Mussolini sense of the word)?
I'll never understand why people let their psychotically jealous partners run their lives.
The sad thing is that you, me, and the entire Republican party seem to understand this, but the Democratic party just can't seem to get a grip on it. Whatever your political beliefs are, isn't some healthy political competition a good thing? Someone has to help those clowns get their act together before America degenerates into a one-party-system despotism.
Meanwhile, in reality, I'd say that Cheney going hunting in a mixed gender group shows that he's not quite the insanely conservative progress-hater that he often comes off as when he speaks in his official capacities.
It's hard to overestimate the value of clever ideas. That's why, in addition to the usual mathematicians and cipher experts, Bletchley Park included a number of puzzle fans, crossword afficianados, and other game experts. When it comes to clever ideas about Human behaviour, those kinds of people are indispensable. The people running Bletchley Park were clearly quite clever themselves, assembling such a group. Clever ideas (and, by the same logic, stupid ideas like starting a war with an industrial superpower even though your existing enemies are proving to be more than you can handle) can change the world in profound ways.
I'd volunteer, but I have neither money, organizational skills, nor workshop skills of any kind...
Population increases are only temporary. The birthrate will always decline once the standard of living improves. Population explosions are usually confined to the places and times where health and affluence increase quite suddenly -- such Canada and the US at the end of World War 2, Europe during the industrial revolution, India right now. After a few decades, people adapt and the birth rate plummets until it reaches a level appropriate to the low mortality rates and long life-spans that affluence brings with it.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Hey, you can't underestimate the value of good roads. The Romans knew it, and anyone who has used the miracle that is the American highway system (or the abortion that is the Canadian highway system) knows it too.