"Fox news isn't doing anything different from NBC, CBS and ABC."
Exploding trucks and Rather's "fake documents" just somehow don't match up against 8 years of continuoys Fox propaganda leading the way in suckering the U.S. in to Iraq, and doing everything in their power to elect one of the worst Presidents in our history...twice. If you want I'll make a list of all the bone headed things Bush and Cheney have done, with the help of Fox and Rupert Murdoch, which have nearly destroyed the U.S. and may well succeed in actually destroying it.
For example Bush started the drive in 2001 to put everyone in their own home, even people who simply couldn't afford them, which lead directly to the mortgage crisis which is on the verge of destroying the U.S. economy if the not the global economy.
I'm willing to give Rather a pass on the "fake documents" thing. All indications are the documents were accurate fakes. George Bush did in fact massively cheat on his National Guard service. He and his stooges just managed to destroy all the incriminating documents. As Texas governor he was in charge of the Texas National Guard so it was easy for him to erase his checkered National Guard history. It created extreme frustration in some people that George Bush got a free pass for his dereliction of his Guard duty while Kerry was barbecued for his service and he actually served in combat in Vietnam. People were furious because George's checkered paper trail had been erased so some people used forgery in an attempt to restore it based on the facts as nearly as they have been pieced together. As I recall a particular issue was Bush was probably using cocaine during his Guard years when random drug testing was introduced by the Guard and Bush just went AWOL apparently to make sure he didn't get tested. He apparently didn't show up during all of his last year in the Guard in 1972-1973 and got an honorable discharge in 1973 in spite of failing to show up.
I think it would be cool if all the right wing nut jobs who watch Fox did join MySpace to help Rupert out. It would probably make MySpace nearly toxic as a social networking site since the people who watch Fox are anti-cool.
The issue is that as soon as they took the program out from under the supervision of the FISA court it became nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who they were spying on or how sweeping and abusive the program became. It doesn't really matter if they were only listening to calls of foreign nationals, once they bypassed the courts they could spy on anyone they felt like and probably did. They violated the Constitution by spying on people without a warrant, period. When you let your government spy on you without court supervision, its really easy for your government to collect dirt on opponents to discredit and blackmail them, to snuff out dissent, to win elections, and then your representative Democracy is pretty much gone. We've been there before. Nixon and Hoover very nearly destroyed our Republic in the 60's and 70's which is why FISA was created.
By circumventing FISA the Bush administration was turning the clock back to a time when our government was abusively spying on people for no good reason. Since abuse was happening before FISA was created chances are its occurring now that FISA has been gutted. Chances are its even worse this time around since digital communications and computers make it possible to eavesdrop on a much larger scale than you could in 1968. Back then agents actually had to listen to and read everything. Now computers can sift through everything and kick out every email or phone call which has a keyword of interest.
I'm not sure I'm really that concerned about granting immunity to the telecoms. When the NSA and the President told them to do it, it took extraordinary balls to say no. Qwest did and their CEO ended up in prison partially because of his refusal to play ball with them. Qwest lost a big classified government contract because of their refusal to participate, their stock tanked and their CEO was charged for misleading shareholders because he couldn't talk about all this classified blackmail.
I'd be glad to let the telecoms go, as long as the people in the government who told them to do it go to jail, the people at the not, not the people in the middle or at the bottom. Throwing the telecoms in jails is about like throwing the privates in Abu Graib in jail. Its become clear the torture they were doing at Abu Graib and Gitmo was ordered by the highest levels of the Bush administration, especially Cheney and Addington. They should be going to jail, not the flunkies who did what their government ordered them to do in the panic post 9/11.
"many of those special forces folks come back and become your local police"
I think most of special forces people are going to work for companies like Blackwater now, because they can make six figure salaries being mercenaries which is a fairly new thing. I imagine its more regular military going in to local policing. Most local police force salaries kind of suck by comparison to mercenary. Being a mercenary used to be illegal but now its a very respectably multinational growth industry and a career. If you don't mind living in places like Iraq and a little danger I think Blackwater kind of rocks, you are accountable to almost no one for you actions and can make a lot of money. You can in fact shoot people at random and usually get away with it. If you are in a police force in the U.S. you will get untold hassle from internal affairs if you shoot someone.
"Also, doesn't anyone else find it ironic that those folks are supposed to be fighting for freedom and the American way?"
Very little of what America has been fighting for lately has anything to to with freedom in the general sense, though they are fighting for "the American way". I think your might have some misconceptions of what the "American way" is. The "American way" is making money, as much as possible, as easily as possible, so they are fighting only for the freedom to make money. When you have a lot of money you get a lot of freedom, if you are poor you don't get much. Since World War II America has mostly been fighting a no holds barred war to make the world safe for Capitalism and multinational corporations. Freedom for ordinary people has almost never been a driving factor, since the U.S. has routinely supported ruthless, repressive, dictators as long as they were pro American and pro respecting the freedoms of the wealthy and big business. It has also been fighting, ruthlessly, to control critical resources like oil and banana plantations for multinationals. There is an element of trying to propagate American culture around the globe too.
This is why America is pro Vietnam and pro China now, because they opened their doors to Western capital, and are adopting western cultures(i.e. cars and TV's), and no long nationalize assets of multinationals. This is why America is extremely anti Cuba and Venezuela, because Cuba and Venezuela have at one point or another nationalized assets of American multinationals, Venezuela in particular recently nationalized oil fields owned by Exxon Mobile.
A lot of communist and socialist dictators suck and I wouldn't want to live under them, Cuba, China, Venezuela included. The socialist governments in northern Europe don't seem so bad though me personally I don't like being taxed in to the ground to pay for social programs run by giant bureaucracies. But wait I get taxed in to the ground in America too for social programs and to line the pockets of giant contractors so I'm not sure what America really stands for. Unfortunately the world seems to have divided in to a bunch of socialist nanny states and a bunch of Fascist leaning nations including the U.S., U.K., Russia and China. It seems there really aren't many nice places to live, outside of maybe some islands in the Caribbean where you can just live and take care of your own business without an oppressive, overgrown government constantly meddling in your life.
Probably wont get any mod points here for saying it but I can understand why it was a split decision. It is true that prisoners of war in previous wars didn't have Habeus Corpus and were in fact imprisoned for the duration so giving combatants in a war access to the courts is kind of a scary precedent, so the minority does have a point.
The current war is nothing like any wars we've had since at least the Civil War. World War II combatants mostly wore uniforms, were imprisoned for the duration if captured, and had no access to the courts. Spies were the only ones that are a close parallel to the Gitmo detainees, or maybe guerrillas in the Civil War who didn't wear uniforms or play by the rules of war. I'm little hazy on how much habeus corpus spies were given in World War II or the Civil War. As best I recall prisoner of war camps during the Civil War, for uniformed combatants, made Gitmo look like a country club by comparison, all of those prisoners were red blooded Americans, and their treatment was horrible.
We have such a big problem today because we are in undiscovered country, and courts don't do well when there aren't good precedents.
We are facing a war that will probably go on indefinitely is the first problem. There is no point where one side is likely to win and the prisoners will be released, so being a prisoner of this war is probably a life sentence. If the executive is granted exceptional powers because we are at war, and the war will never end, then we have given the executive unchecked power forever. It seems the majority was extremely concerned about Bush and Cheney seizing this kind of exceptional power.
That combatants don't wear uniforms is another big problem. Its not cut and dried when you capture someone that they are or aren't a combatant. In Vietnam many combatants didn't wear uniforms but they also weren't targeting the American homeland while Al Qaeda is. Its really hard to build a criminal case against Al Qaeda and captives in these new war zones. Its not like you are going to send an FBI team in to Afghanistan or Pakistan, in to an Al Qaeda training camp for example, to collect evidence and build a case that proves guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.
That said I think it would probably be better to not have held anyone against whom there wasn't a really strong case, just because the arbitrary detention of some innocent people in Gitmo and other secret prisons has been a propaganda disaster for the U.S. Sure some real terrorists would be released but the price of that would have been small compared to the devastation thats been done to the rule of law and America's global reputation, When America opted for torture that completely destroyed America's standing in the world.
You can understand how badly 9/11 bent the heads of the people in the Bush administration because it was the most devastating attack against the American homeland in modern history, it happened on their watch, it was in many respects their fault, and they wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. So they opted for some extreme measures to try to prevent more attacks. If the people in the Bush administration were great statesmen I think they might have opted for the high road instead, but unfortunately they were a bunch of mostly incompetent ideologues, they were in over their heads, and they did a bunch of incredibly stupid things as a result. They might have skated in normal times, but they were placed under extraordinary pressure and they self destructed because they weren't sound statemen in the first place. Sadly there probably an element in them that was in fact trying to expand executive power and using 9/11 as an execuse. Cheney and Rumsfeld first came to the White House at the end of Nixon and Watergate and endured a period during which executive power was decimated because of Vietnam and Watergate. As a result they were disposed to overcorrect in the opposite direction in creating an all powerful war time executive that had a taint of dictatorship. Che
I'm pretty sure Iraqis were fairly well educated under Saddam, maybe not to Nazi Germany levels, but pretty good by Middle Eastern standards. Iraq had a quite good education and health care system especially prior to the first gulf war and the boycott. Women also had a lot more rights, and better education access, than they do now with Shia fundamentalists dominating much of the country. People forget Saddam was a secular Socialist dictator, you know a lot like Hitler.
Iraq's intelligentsia was put under pressure by years of boycott and then decimated by the American occupation. If they were Bathists they were pushed in to permanent unemployment by debathification, which was one of Bremmer's most fundamental screw ups. The Shia's pushed for it because they were nursing a huge grudge against the Bathists, but the Bathists were the ones who knew how to make the country work. The U.S. should have never allowed debathification, at least at the level it happened, because it created a huge pool of disgruntled Sunnis which fueled the insurgency.
Then death squads and criminal gangs further decimated the intelligensia when the U.S. failed to establish security after the war. Kidnappings for ransom specifically targeted all the well educated professionals. Ethnic cleansing further hammered them. I'm pretty sure most of the well educated who could manage it fled the country. Its not exactly a surprise nothing works in Iraq now. Everyone who knew how to make things work were either debathified or driven out of the country by the violence.
The problem is that there are a number of factors which lead to the "best ideas" not winning. The ideas most likely to win when religion injects itself in to government, especially representative democracy, is the one with the most warm bodies behind it and the most economic and political power. You can have a complete monstrosity of a religion winning as long as it breeds faster, proselytizes better, and is more adept at acquiring political power.
This is a largely unspoken motivator behind religions which prohibit birth control and a key factor in whey they are so vehemently opposed to abortion. They are trying to win the religion game by breeding faster and having the most warm bodies. Take it to its absurd maximum and you have the FLDS and polygamy. It is unfortunately a bad strategy to pursue on a planet that is bursting at the seams due to overpopulation.
Much of the current political tension and polarization in the U.S. stems from around 1980 and the Reagan era when fundamentalist Christians transitioned form being somewhat politically apathetic, and certainly not politically organized, to a very powerful and well organized political block seeking to force their religious views on the nation as a whole at the ballot box. It simply hasn't worked and they last seven years have proved that.
I'm probably not doing a great job of explaining it but all I want is a society where everyone IS completely and utterly free to practice their religion as long as in so doing they aren't inflicting harm on others or forcing their religious views on others, and especially those who want to use secular, civic institutions to do so. You can have the rule of law without injecting god in to it.
LOL, did you think you could just say this and then follow it with the least objective post possible on the subject, and think people would believe your were being objective just because you said you were.....
"In fact, the Bible that you would say needs to be forever locked out of public view"
I never said any such thing. All books and knowledge should be as public as possible, so anyone who has the desire to read it can, and decide for themselves if it is wisdom or poppycock, but it needs to be their choice not something people like you are shoving down their throat against their will. Of course you need to set it next to the Koran, Book of Mormon, and Book of the Dead. The things you shouldn't be doing with it is forcing children in schools to read it, unless its in a course in religion they opted in to. You shouldn't be hanging the ten commandments in court rooms so that people who aren't Christian get the impression that they are going to be punished for not being Christian, or going to be punished based on the tenets of a religion they don't subscribe to. If you are going to hang religious dogma up there then you better be OK with hanging the sharia, and any other religious doctrine you can think of next to it.
"If you really believe it, how could you not tell people about it?"
What makes you think that anyone else wants to hear you rant about your personal religious views. You kind of summed up why there is a lot of animosity towards proselytizers, especially when they hold government office, because you have developed the delusion that they KNOW the truth, and everyone else doesn't, and its your job to beat everyone else in to submission. Why stop at just telling people your truth, when you can take it to the level of the Spanish Inquisition and torture people until they come around.
You are glossing over the fact your "truth" is predicated entirely on faith and it is impossible for you or anyone else to know if what you are talking about is the truth or a complete and under fabrication designed to:
A. Assuage your fear of death by telling you that you will go to heaven and everything will be wonderful when you die just as long as you do what your church tells you to do. Fear of death is one of our most deep seated fears so it follows religion would use that fear to get you to sign up.
B. Assuage your guilt about "sin" so your church gives you a get out of your guilt free card, and all the things you feel guilty about will be forgiven if you just do what your church tells you to do and fill their collection plate every Sunday.
Most religions are exceptionally powerful psychological hammers designed to exploit human insecurities so they can completely control you. It is a fine art honed over thousands of years, and it works extremely well, which is why there are so many religious fanatics in the world, whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu.
Can't stop a majority religion from electing candidates of their faith. You can however stop those candidates, once they become public servants from using their office to spend tax dollars to subsidize religious causes, or from discriminating against people based on their religious views. And you sure can try to prevent them, through the courts, from passing laws that inflict their religious views on people who don't agree with it.
You can't stop me from wishing politicians would keep their religion, whatever it is, as a part of their personal life and stop flaunting it in public like so much gaudy jewelry. That does nothing but cheapen it, just like American flag lapel pins cheapens their patriotism.
You seriously underestimate the impact 10 very public executions a year will have to compel a populace to conform to the religious views of those in power. You don't have to kill everyone who doesn't conform, you just need to make it clear that those who don't run a definite risk of torture and execution. The inquisition was in particular used to ethnically cleanse Spain of Jews, something it did very well.
You would think Protestant Christians would have enough historical perspective to remember how Rome persecuted Christians and how Catholic monarchs persecuted Protestants to realize it is a fundamentally good thing to have governments which are precluded by law from expressing their religious views as part of their governance.
"What you want is to prohibit people from believing or expressing anything other than that which you think."
No it means I'm not going to force my religious view or absence there of on anyone else, and I don't want them to force it on me, especially using their position in government to do it. What part do you not get that I don't want someone elected to public office shoving their individual religious choice down my throat using their office to do it. I don't care that they have a religious choice and in their private life they exercise it to the hilt, but when they punch in for work they should leave their religion at home.
I didn't say politicians can't draw upon their religious beliefs to shape their opinions and outlook. I suggested they should refrain from making public policy overtly and primarily based on their religious views, and they should especially refrain from flaunting their particular religious views in speeches and the like once they take office. It smacks of insincerity and manipulation to hide "use" God when you are pushing public policy on your constituents.
We can agree to outlaw murder, rape and theft without crutching off religion. If you are inflicting harm on a fellow human being it follows what you are doing should be outlawed, no God required. Abortion is a tougher call, but there is an issue where people should agree to disagree and it should, within reason, be left to individuals to make their choice. If you disapprove of abortion then fine don't do it, but leave other people with different values to make their own decisions. If you disapprove of gay marriage fine, but you should leave people who don't share your views alone if they want a legal basis for a union with the person they choose to spend their life with.
"It's not like they affect how he administrates his state. That's a tenant of the religion and there are plenty of Christians in office. Would you outlaw that religion?
No, but it is extremely desirable for politicians holding public office to compartmentalize their religious views and try to keep them private, especially when said views are offensive to many of their constituents. Believe it or not many people dislike it when the person running their state or nation tells them they are going to go to hell for their personal religious views. It is a statement which is a strong indicator of bias, and that the person saying it believes you are an inferior to him because of your personal religious views. Doesn't really matter when its one private citizen holding this view about another. It matters a lot when its the chief law enforcement officer of a state or nation saying it, because that person makes life and death decisions which influence large numbers of people, someone who has a LOT of power over your life. Try being an officer in the U.S. military these days because the deck is stacked against you if you aren't devoutly religious(preferably born again Christian).
Religious people just don't get it, but separation of church and state, is just as much in their interest as it is of atheists and minority religions. The founding fathers implemented it because many of the people in America fled to America to escape state sponsored religious persecution in Europe. They knew first hand how horrible it was to live in a country where the government favored one religion and persecuted, often brutally, all the others. The Spanish inquisition sucked and it is a logical outcome of letting religious bias permeate government. The only fair and equitable way to avoid state sponsored religious bias is to keep religion out of government all together. The founding fathers did the right thing in separation of church and state, and religious people need to "get" that.
If people were really religious for the right reasons they would have no problem keeping their religion private. They would realize religion should be something between an individual, their god(s) and maybe the members of their their church. As soon as you start inflicting your religion on others, against their will, you cross a dreadful line where your religion has become a weapon, and not a path for self enlightenment.
Just curious, how many self proclaimed atheists or agnostics hold high elected office in this country? Very, very few, because they are for all practical purposes precluded from getting elected in this country, they are practically outlawed from holding high public office now. If you want to get elected to any serious political office in this country its a simple fact you are going find Jesus or at least Jehovah, one way or another, even if deep in your heart you don't believe in it. That creates a seed of hypocrisy and dishonesty to self in a lot of politicians that flowers in to a lot of corrupt elected officials.
It could be your are seeing backlash from the fact the Republicans have been shoving their Christianity down everyones for a number of years now. Not saying its necessarily right to apply "turn about is fair play", but you can understand why a lot of people have settled in to deep, deep hatred of right wing Republicans who wear their Christianity on their sleeves, and American flags on their lapel, like Perry and Bush. It does seem more than a little odd a gaming convention would choose a lighting rod like that as a keynote, especially since game developers and players probably don't trend toward conservative Republican, nor do they go to a game convention to listen to politician blather especially one as far to one side of the spectrum as Perry. I would say it would be just as odd and inappropriate to have Obama or the Clinton's keynote a convention like this. If you can find a politician who publicly acknowledges being an avid gamer now that might be a great keynoter. I don't think you will find one of any prominence though since gaming has been so demonized I doubt any successful politician would ever admit having played one, let alone being an avid gamer.
The Republicans have, until recently, been extremely adept at exploiting bigotry to get elected, bigotry against gays, against right to lifers, against opponents of the stupid war in Iraq, against atheists and agnostics, against most religions outside of Christianity and Judaism, against Democrats, against pretty much everyone except white, fundamentalist, pro war Christian Republicans. Bigotry against gays alone pretty much one the 2002 and 2004 elections for the Republicans.
The Bush administration has been applying all kinds of unconstitutional litmus tests for people serving in the executive branch over the last seven years, and quite blatantly excluding Democrats, gays, and right to lifers for non political jobs, in the Justice department in particular. They nearly destroyed the Justice department by passing over highly qualified applicants from top law schools, using litmus tests, in favor of under qualified, born again Christians from terrible law schools run by Christian universities. Just google Patrick Henry College and you will discover its become a fast track for placing fundamentalist Christians in top positions in the executive branch which kind of smacks of bigotry and discrimination against people of other religions or no religion at all. Just read Patrick Henry's mission statement:
"The Mission of Patrick Henry College is to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding. Educating students according to a classical liberal arts curriculum, and training them with apprenticeship methodology, the College provides academically excellent baccalaureate level higher education with a biblical world view."
If they were just a fringe college it might not matter but the fact is this College has in fact been fast tracking their students in to top positions in the U.S. government. If the Republican's hadn't so completely botched the last seven years, their long term plan was to turn the U.S. government in to a blatantly religious institution, in violation of the separation of church and state, where these people would be using your tax dollars to inflict their religious views on you.
Re:Klein's a Leftist with an agenda, not a journal
on
China's All-Seeing Eye
·
· Score: 1
"In my experience, most Americans I've met that actually spent some time living and working in a country other than the US"
I'm American but I've lived in Canada for years. I have to agree the luster does quickly wear off the U.S. as soon as you see it from outside, and especially get away from the saturation coverage of the American media, schools and government telling everyone in America how wonderful America is. It simply isn't that great a country any more if ever it was. It sure has never really promoted freedom around the world like the propaganda says it did. It was mostly just a huge beneficiary of being one of the the last great untapped frontiers and it benefited mightily from being protected from the ravages of two world wars by two big oceans. Now that all of those edges are exhausted its becoming more and more apparent that the America system and the American people are pretty much morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt. It hasn't helped that recent American governments were completely incompetent and drove America off a cliff.
The U.S. fosters repressive regimes just because they are anti communist, anti worker, anti socialism and pro big business and Capitalism.
Some of the big historical reasons for U.S. sponsored coups are control of natural resources in countries when the population realizes they are being exploited by foreign multinationals. In the case of Iran the U.S. and Britain ran Operation Ajax to overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq because he was nationalizing Iran's oil fields because Britain and the U.S. were taking Iran's wealth and giving Iran chump change for it. Certainly the oil companies deserved compensation for their substantial investments to find and develop those oil fields but the deals given the host countries were often bad and still are today. As I recall in the oil fields being developed off the west coast of Africa, the oil companies are still cutting deals that lined the pockets of the corrupt people running the host countries but are largely screwing the people of those countries out of much needed wealth. That Iranian coup installed the Shah of Iran, who was despised by his people en masse and lead to an Islamic revolution we are still dealing with today. The U.S. very much wants to topple Chavez in Venezuela for the same reason today because he nationalized oil fields controlled by the likes of Exxon Mobile.
The term "Banana Republic" refers to the tendency of the U.S. to send Marines in to Central and South America to protect the interest of United Fruit company(now Dole) which acquired ownership of vast plantations in those countries, manipulated the governments of said countries, and did its best to profit at the expense of the indigenous people in places like Honduras.
"Simple fact: poor people can't buy shit."
You do have a point here. There is certainly a big motivation in the mutinationals to get the Chinese and Indians rich enough to buy cars, TV's and all the other things they want to sell, and for which markets have peaked in the west. They want them to get just rich enough to afford these things, but not so rich that they turn in to "expensive" labor though. They are doing quite a good job of it appears since these markets are growing in China and India. Unfortunately its kind of a bad at a point in which there isn't enough oil to run all those cars, and where China in particular is going to burn massive amounts of coal to run all those appliances and global warming is going to snow ball.
It should be pointed out that Capitalists have divided loyalties. They do want affluent consumers to buy their goods. But they also want dirt cheap poor people to work in their factories for nothing. Globalization has been working perfectly for this because Capitalsts can just move the factories to where all the dirt poor people are and sell to where the affluent are. Unfortunately the affluent U.S. the economy is cratering since it doesn't produce anything of value any more. In China the cheap labor is starting to inflate so its not as desirable a place as it was to off shore.
Capitalism is all about a delicate balance of stratifying society. It doesn't want everyone to be rich because that results in expensive labor which is pure poison to capitalism. Unregulated it has always created a very wealthy elite because once you have a lot of money its very easy to make a lot more. If you don't have any money its very hard to ever get any. You live from paycheck to paycheck spending everything you make and you fill the role of cheap labor.
It will be interesting to see how many more iterations of moving the factories to the dirt poor countries can be done before there are no dirt poor third world countries to move to. Its possible by then the U.S. will be the dirt poor third world country and they can start offshoring work from China and India to the U.S.
If the robber barons of the late 19th century U.S. are any guide I seriously don't Capitalism goal is to enrich everyone. Their goal is to squeeze
"For example the land is owned by the state and cannot be owned and traded by the people making use of it: the owners have no incentive to increase or protect its value, so instead they milk it off as fast as they can for immediate gains in influence, renting it out as cheap dumping ground for industries that employ the citizens."
I recall reading recently that there is a substantial grass roots movement in rural China for land reform and privatization of farm land so farmers can start benefiting from Capitalism like the rest of the country. It seems China's massive rural population has started to notice that sum "lucky" people are getting massively rich off of Capitalism especially in the free economic zone in the south eastern coast. I imagine they've also noticed many of the nouveau riche in China are communist party boss who've abandoned Communist ideology so they can line their own pockets, often to the tune of billions of dollars.
It remains to be seen if the movement goes any where or if it is crushed like a bug by the Communist party, but at least some within China are waking up to the hypocrisy. You also have to wonder how you can equitably privatize farm land sixty years in to Communism.
"Nationally, the US would be far better off with every invention being public domain, and US companies being able to get the jump on the Chinese copyists."
Excepting that with out any return on investment no one has any incentive to invent anything, or if they do they have no incentive to make the often substantial investment necessary to commercialize one. IP laws are pretty dubious in things like software but they were a pretty important factor in driving innovation in physical inventions in the last couple centuries in America.
I think in the case of China its just a case of extreme stupidity on the part of the West to do any business at all there as long as they are blatantly ripping off everyone's IP, which they most definitely are, by cloning and copying just about everything in site.
Re:Klein's a Leftist with an agenda, not a journal
on
China's All-Seeing Eye
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A key point about canecubo's list is that many of these regimes were at least condoned by the U.S. while many were puppet regimes out right installed by the U.S. just because they were anti communist, anti union and pro big business. Nazi Germany was openly embraced by the elites in the U.S. right up to 1939 and sometimes after. George W. Bush's grandfather, for example, was the American banker for the Thiessen family who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power.
If the United States is the guiding light to Capitalism and Freedom around the world, how come the U.S. is so closely aligned with so many repressive regimes. The answer is because capitalism has no real correlation to freedom. Capitalism is just as much at home in repressive right wing states as it is in liberal democracies. There is no real correlation between economic system and governmental model.
Capitalism does in fact flourish in right wing states, often very oppressive ones. Unbridled Capitalism has a nasty tendency towards wealth concentration in the hands of an elite few and the people with all the money almost inevitably seek to control all the levers of political power because it protects, supports and nourishes their economic interests. This is a cocktail which often leads to right wing dictatorial governments which are no friends to freedom. In particular they often are extremely fond of breaking up labor unions, because labor unions are good for workers but bad for profitability. They are also fond of rigging elections or getting rid of them all together because ruling elites are small and easily outvoted if you let all the poor unwashed masses have an actual say in their government. In the U.S. this has been accomplished by a two party system where both parties are controlled by the ruling elites and which never offer an actual choice to ordinary people.
The U.S. being a free society can mostly be attributed to the immense wisdom of our founding fathers who did create a remarkable framework for a free society. Unfortunately, its been slowly unraveling ever since. I think if the founding fathers saw the horror that is the Federal government, the state of civil liberties, and our two party system today, they would no doubt launch a second revolution to topple it and restore the government outlined in the Constitution which has been almost completely obliterated by our two political parties and the corporations and ruling elites which own them.
Capitalism is about profit, pure and simple. Freedom doesn't really have anything at all to do with profitability and often gets in its way. Capitalism and Freedom can coexist, in fact Capitalism is a helpful ingredient for freedom since it is extremely beneficial to control your own wealth rather than letting a bureaucratic state do it for you. Unfortunately Capitalism can and does flourish in repressive right wing states, always has and probably always will.
I'd have to agree the submission is a little breathless, but it is interesting to and important to think about the consequences of a pervasive police state in the digital age. East Germany's police state was extremely labor intensive. You pretty much had to have people to eavesdrop on phone calls, lots and lots of magnetic tape, and lots and lots of people spying on their neighbors.
In the digital age its increasingly possible to actually listen to everything and let computers sort out the keywords and red flag people for closer scrutiny. As everything has moved in to a databases it is much easier to correlate data from multiple databases and look at, for example, all your bank records, your taxes filings, what you buy, your travel plans, the books and movies you read and watch, and get an extremely good picture of any individuals thoughts. Eliot Spitzer is a recent case study of someone who was destroyed by the increasingly pervasive spying on banking activities.
The down side of the Internet is it has created a mechanism to allow the police state to digitally monitor what people are saying, thinking, doing and wanting to do, far more than ever before.
Not sure I would get so excited about China doing this, they are after all a totalitarian state and being doing these things quite blatantly for 60 plus years, they are just going to be a lot better at it in the digital age, and its fairly new that Western companies get to help in their oppression.
I think we should be somewhat more concerned about the fact the governments of U.S. and Great Britain are doing many of these same things, just somewhat more subtly and almost no one seems to notice or care. They are countries that are supposed to have things like civil liberties, like freedom of speech and habeas corpus, but the free societies we so fond of bragging about are being dismantled before our eyes using Islamic terrorism as the excuse. You could blame it all Bush and Blair but I'm pretty sure the espionage state will continue to expand unabated, no matter which party is in power, because:
A. The fear of a new terrorist attach can be used to justify every excess.
B. People in power almost inevitably want more power and more control of their domain, not less. Its a somewhat rare individual who achieves great power and then doesn't use it, abuse it and expand it. It rare indeed to find people that actually relinquish power they already have. Almost the only time it happens is when gross excesses of someone abusing their power lead to scandal, for example Watergate, Vietnam and the abuses of the CIA in the 1960's. Executive power was reigned in, in the 1970's by things like the Church Committee though the Republicans hated everything that happened in the 70's to reign in abuse of power and managed to undo all the check and balances in the last 7 years and push America even further in to a police state than was the case under Nixon and Hoover.
"that modern China represents a form of authoritarian capitalism whose efficiency is quite remarkable"
I think its open to debate if China is remarkable for its "efficiency". It mostly just has lots of cheap labor, no labor unions and very weak pollution and safety regulation which means its a cheap place to do things like manufacturing. There are quite a few things working against its economic efficiency.
A. The party officials that run the place are extremely corrupt. Corruption is good for business only if it swings your way. If it swings against you, or for your competition it is quite bad for business, and the unpredictability of corruption is especially bad for business.
B. The legal frameworks in the country are extremely poor. This is a plus if you ware a bootlegger ripping off your competition's product, its not so good if your IP and products are the ones being ripped off.
C. Not sure exactly why but China did apparently pass new labor laws around the first of the year and they undid some of the slave labor aspects of being a worker in China. Workers did actually get some rights under the new laws and it appears they are going to cause a significant spike in the cost of labor, along with the simple fact labor isn't as abundant in China as it once was. This along with a number of other factors is causing wage inflation and making China less and less attractive to Capitalism. The factors that made China boom can also work against it and lead to a bust and for the boom to move elsewhere.
D. China's one child policy is starting to cause a severe shortage of young workers since it began in 1979. Their population is going to start become senior citizen heavy like Japan and the U.S. which has a lot of negative economic consequences. Most older workers can't stand the dormitories and 6-7 day work weeks in China's factories so as the young labor pool drops its going to hammer their sweat shop manufacturing industries.
E. Censorship might have its positives in that it helps eliminate dissent but it also means you can do some incredibly stupid stuff and get away with it because you can suppress knowledge of your stupidity. A free press and a free Internet can server a useful purpose in that it can eventually expose corruption, incompetence and stupidity and led to corrective action if the press and freedom of speech works. For example in the U.S. the free press went dysfunctional after 9/11 and untold stupidity was perpetrated by the Bush administration like the war in Iraq, torture and domestic spying. The press still isn't very healthy but America has started to throw the Republican's out of power for their incompetence, though the Democrats are much of an improvement. In China is if the ruling party turns bad, there are no alternatives except for changing one set of Communist party leaders for another in an internal power struggle.
F. The spiking cost of oil is suddenly starting to work against globalization. Not sure how accurate it is but someone on CNBC said the cost to ship a container from China to the U.S. has quadrupled recently from $2K to $8K and if oil prices continue to spike its going to be less and less attractive to ship goods half way around the world. Its already working against heavy goods with a low labor component like steel. The more expensive fuel gets the less likely you are going to offshore manufacturing for the U.S. and Europe to China. Mexico may become increasingly attractive again for the U.S. labor pool.
The basic problem is science, math and engineering are hard work to learn and to do, and you can't get rich doing it for the most part. You are looking at a lot of really, really hard work and a really poor return on investment. The only way you are going to get rich is if you manage to invent something with practical application you can patent or sell. The chance of producing a marketable product from a field like particle physics is extremely low, so you have to do it as a labor of love with the realization you are going to barely make ends meet all your life. Of course if you don't do basic research then the applied science and technology built on top of it will wither too and you just stop inventing anything worthwhile.
The fundamental problem we have is the U.S. is a capitalism obsessed country. It is mostly about get rich quick schemes, whether it be the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, the China/outsourcing bubble or the commodities bubble. Especially since the dot com bubble the whole country is obsessed with money for nothing and chicks for free schemes. Thats mostly why our economy is cratering because we produce increasingly little of substance or of actual value, and are mostly using scams like sub-prime mortgages to make a quick buck, with an inevitable collapse soon after. We are just one giant pyramid scheme where the con artists and the cheaters get rich, and the hard working people, like scientists and engineers who work hard have nothing to show for it. Something most people fail to notice is that most of the well educated engineers and scientist are coming out of relatively socialist countries like China and India. I think there is a fair chance that capitalist countries just aren't good at producing or supporting scientists and engineers because there are a lot better fields where you make a lot more money for a lot less work, mainly business, law or the bubble profession like mortgage broker or dot com entrepreneur. More regimented societies like China, Nazi Germany, or the U.S.S.R. are better at turning out scientists and engineers because those are esteemed professions, sought by the state, and the best people aren't lured away by higher paying professions. It remains to be seen if China and Russia start failing at turning out scientist and engineers too now that they've embraced Capitalism and its easier to make quick money in business and law instead.
To play devil's advocate here though, you kind of have to wonder how many breakthroughs are coming out of particle physics lately. Its turning in to a somewhat mature field and there aren't as many breakthroughs as there were in the 20th century when it was new. There is some risk it may, like a lot of mature fields, turn in to a lot of investment with fewer and fewer breakthroughs to justify the payoff, and a bunch of ivory tower types who aren't producing the results people who spend money want to see. The toys required to make the new breakthroughs are also getting a lot more expensive, hard to fund and governments are weighing the return on the investment harder.
The only problem is the Bush administration has been blatantly violating the Hatch act for most of the last seven years so if they are going to punish this guy....
Karl Rove was going from agency to agency to see how they could use government agencies and contracts to help get Republicans reelected. This included having big meetings at the agencies on government time to discuss how to win elections for Republicans. I think they did finally force the head of the GSA to resign because she was one of the more blatant abusers of the Hatch act. But it took a long time and she had already done all the damage she could do on this front.
The whole U.S. Attorney scandal was damn close to violating the Hatch act. The U.S. attorney in New Mexico was most likely fired because he wasn't being aggressive enough in pursuing a kind of thin corruption case against a Democrat that the Republican senator from New Mexico thought would help Republicans in the election.
I only wish they would have been so diligent in enforcing this law for the last seven years.
"The first is weight - mobility systems cost a great of it, and every gram alloted to them is a gram that can't be spent on science."
Well I sure hope the science instruments pay off. I'm a little skeptical about spending a half billion dollars to sit at once spot, analyze a limited amount of dirt and ice there, with a high probability of finding not much of interest. At least there is a good weather station on board. Viking, other than providing the first pictures from Mars was kind of a dud compared to the rovers. When you intentionally drop a payload in a safe but really boring terrain like the one where Phoenix is, mobility to find interesting places really does count for a lot.
If you were to ask me I am of the opinion that way to much money is being spent by NASA on the search for life. It is an interesting question but it should be a secondary goal, not the primary one. The primary goal should be laying the foundation for exploiting space resource for the benefit of an increasingly stretched planet earth, and colonizing Mars someday so we have a new biosphere apart from this one. Learning what resources Mars has to offer to further that end seems more interesting than a somewhat long shot obsession with extraterrestrial life.
"Never before has a beep made the US collectively shit its pants before Sputnik"
It might have upset the general population. I think Eisenhower, the Air Force and CIA were dancing a jig over Sputnik.
A. In particular it established precedent for satellites overflying the U.S. and U.S.S.R., a precedent Eisenhower very much wanted the U.S.S.R. to set first. The U.S. was already planning for spy satellites to replace all the hassles of U-2 flights, and Sputnik gave the U.S. diplomatic and international law cover to do it since Sputnik overflew the U.S. first. Eisenhower may well of intentionally blocked a first U.S. satellite so the U.S.S.R would set the precedent, and the U.S. has gained huge advantage from spy satellites ever since.
B. It gave the military a blank check to spend on the arms race. Spending still going on today, to the great detriment of the U.S. economy. Eisenhower was famous for warning about the defense industrial complex because it acquired enormous quantities of money and power after Sputnik.
The Russian were early leaders in rocketry because their nuclear warheads were huge, heavy, primitive and inferior in design to U.S. warheads. They had to develop much bigger rockets sooner for their nuclear deterrent which gave them a substantial lead in launching the first satellite and in early manned launches.
"Did you know, for example, that the people in our "volunteer military" aren't allowed to leave if they change their minds?"
That's a deeply flawed concern. People who join the military are signing a contract. Its quite clear what the terms are going in. If you have any reservations about them....don't sign it.
The thing you should be upset about is stop loss. Because there the U.S. government is breaking the contract and forcing people to stay after the terms of their contract are up. That is wrong and you would think people would stop volunteering for the military since they should be aware it could turn in to indefinite servitude because of stop loss. It is mostly a back door draft, entice people in with educational benefits and the like and then don't let them leave.
It would be a whole lot more honest if the Bush administration just reinstituted the draft. They don't because they know that would create a fire storm of antiwar sentiment. Dissent against the Iraq war is so muted because it is a war being fought by "volunteers". If affluent young white people were being drafted the Bush administration would have been thrown out in 2004. Instead the volunteer army, at least at the enlisted level is mostly made up of the poor desperate for the education benefits and cash, and even non U.S. citizens who have been promised citizenship in return for military service.
"You think this broadcast flag, or any of this type of DRM, is actually going to prevent cappers from recording shows, stripping commercials, and posting online?"
Uh, no, they are also attempting to prevent people with DVR's and TV on PC's from skipping commercials which destroys the business model NBC is producing content under too. Not saying its an effective strategy, but if you want to watch NBC's show off the airwaves for free either YOU and everyone else watches the commercials or eventually they go out of business and stop producing any content. Or you switch to a pay per view business model which would also probably end up DRM laden. I'm not saying the ad sponsored model is a particularly viable one any more but it is the model being used here. Pay per view might work for some people but isn't particularly a good one for people without much disposable income and if people are faced with big bills for their TV they may just watch less. Pick your poison. If you think you are going to get compelling, free, content with no commercials you are delusional, if so switch to YouTube and ad block Google's ads.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fox news isn't doing anything different from NBC, CBS and ABC."
Exploding trucks and Rather's "fake documents" just somehow don't match up against 8 years of continuoys Fox propaganda leading the way in suckering the U.S. in to Iraq, and doing everything in their power to elect one of the worst Presidents in our history...twice. If you want I'll make a list of all the bone headed things Bush and Cheney have done, with the help of Fox and Rupert Murdoch, which have nearly destroyed the U.S. and may well succeed in actually destroying it.
For example Bush started the drive in 2001 to put everyone in their own home, even people who simply couldn't afford them, which lead directly to the mortgage crisis which is on the verge of destroying the U.S. economy if the not the global economy.
I'm willing to give Rather a pass on the "fake documents" thing. All indications are the documents were accurate fakes. George Bush did in fact massively cheat on his National Guard service. He and his stooges just managed to destroy all the incriminating documents. As Texas governor he was in charge of the Texas National Guard so it was easy for him to erase his checkered National Guard history. It created extreme frustration in some people that George Bush got a free pass for his dereliction of his Guard duty while Kerry was barbecued for his service and he actually served in combat in Vietnam. People were furious because George's checkered paper trail had been erased so some people used forgery in an attempt to restore it based on the facts as nearly as they have been pieced together. As I recall a particular issue was Bush was probably using cocaine during his Guard years when random drug testing was introduced by the Guard and Bush just went AWOL apparently to make sure he didn't get tested. He apparently didn't show up during all of his last year in the Guard in 1972-1973 and got an honorable discharge in 1973 in spite of failing to show up.
I think it would be cool if all the right wing nut jobs who watch Fox did join MySpace to help Rupert out. It would probably make MySpace nearly toxic as a social networking site since the people who watch Fox are anti-cool.
The issue is that as soon as they took the program out from under the supervision of the FISA court it became nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who they were spying on or how sweeping and abusive the program became. It doesn't really matter if they were only listening to calls of foreign nationals, once they bypassed the courts they could spy on anyone they felt like and probably did. They violated the Constitution by spying on people without a warrant, period. When you let your government spy on you without court supervision, its really easy for your government to collect dirt on opponents to discredit and blackmail them, to snuff out dissent, to win elections, and then your representative Democracy is pretty much gone. We've been there before. Nixon and Hoover very nearly destroyed our Republic in the 60's and 70's which is why FISA was created.
By circumventing FISA the Bush administration was turning the clock back to a time when our government was abusively spying on people for no good reason. Since abuse was happening before FISA was created chances are its occurring now that FISA has been gutted. Chances are its even worse this time around since digital communications and computers make it possible to eavesdrop on a much larger scale than you could in 1968. Back then agents actually had to listen to and read everything. Now computers can sift through everything and kick out every email or phone call which has a keyword of interest.
I'm not sure I'm really that concerned about granting immunity to the telecoms. When the NSA and the President told them to do it, it took extraordinary balls to say no. Qwest did and their CEO ended up in prison partially because of his refusal to play ball with them. Qwest lost a big classified government contract because of their refusal to participate, their stock tanked and their CEO was charged for misleading shareholders because he couldn't talk about all this classified blackmail.
I'd be glad to let the telecoms go, as long as the people in the government who told them to do it go to jail, the people at the not, not the people in the middle or at the bottom. Throwing the telecoms in jails is about like throwing the privates in Abu Graib in jail. Its become clear the torture they were doing at Abu Graib and Gitmo was ordered by the highest levels of the Bush administration, especially Cheney and Addington. They should be going to jail, not the flunkies who did what their government ordered them to do in the panic post 9/11.
"many of those special forces folks come back and become your local police"
I think most of special forces people are going to work for companies like Blackwater now, because they can make six figure salaries being mercenaries which is a fairly new thing. I imagine its more regular military going in to local policing. Most local police force salaries kind of suck by comparison to mercenary. Being a mercenary used to be illegal but now its a very respectably multinational growth industry and a career. If you don't mind living in places like Iraq and a little danger I think Blackwater kind of rocks, you are accountable to almost no one for you actions and can make a lot of money. You can in fact shoot people at random and usually get away with it. If you are in a police force in the U.S. you will get untold hassle from internal affairs if you shoot someone.
"Also, doesn't anyone else find it ironic that those folks are supposed to be fighting for freedom and the American way?"
Very little of what America has been fighting for lately has anything to to with freedom in the general sense, though they are fighting for "the American way". I think your might have some misconceptions of what the "American way" is. The "American way" is making money, as much as possible, as easily as possible, so they are fighting only for the freedom to make money. When you have a lot of money you get a lot of freedom, if you are poor you don't get much. Since World War II America has mostly been fighting a no holds barred war to make the world safe for Capitalism and multinational corporations. Freedom for ordinary people has almost never been a driving factor, since the U.S. has routinely supported ruthless, repressive, dictators as long as they were pro American and pro respecting the freedoms of the wealthy and big business. It has also been fighting, ruthlessly, to control critical resources like oil and banana plantations for multinationals. There is an element of trying to propagate American culture around the globe too.
This is why America is pro Vietnam and pro China now, because they opened their doors to Western capital, and are adopting western cultures(i.e. cars and TV's), and no long nationalize assets of multinationals. This is why America is extremely anti Cuba and Venezuela, because Cuba and Venezuela have at one point or another nationalized assets of American multinationals, Venezuela in particular recently nationalized oil fields owned by Exxon Mobile.
A lot of communist and socialist dictators suck and I wouldn't want to live under them, Cuba, China, Venezuela included. The socialist governments in northern Europe don't seem so bad though me personally I don't like being taxed in to the ground to pay for social programs run by giant bureaucracies. But wait I get taxed in to the ground in America too for social programs and to line the pockets of giant contractors so I'm not sure what America really stands for. Unfortunately the world seems to have divided in to a bunch of socialist nanny states and a bunch of Fascist leaning nations including the U.S., U.K., Russia and China. It seems there really aren't many nice places to live, outside of maybe some islands in the Caribbean where you can just live and take care of your own business without an oppressive, overgrown government constantly meddling in your life.
Probably wont get any mod points here for saying it but I can understand why it was a split decision. It is true that prisoners of war in previous wars didn't have Habeus Corpus and were in fact imprisoned for the duration so giving combatants in a war access to the courts is kind of a scary precedent, so the minority does have a point.
The current war is nothing like any wars we've had since at least the Civil War. World War II combatants mostly wore uniforms, were imprisoned for the duration if captured, and had no access to the courts. Spies were the only ones that are a close parallel to the Gitmo detainees, or maybe guerrillas in the Civil War who didn't wear uniforms or play by the rules of war. I'm little hazy on how much habeus corpus spies were given in World War II or the Civil War. As best I recall prisoner of war camps during the Civil War, for uniformed combatants, made Gitmo look like a country club by comparison, all of those prisoners were red blooded Americans, and their treatment was horrible.
We have such a big problem today because we are in undiscovered country, and courts don't do well when there aren't good precedents.
We are facing a war that will probably go on indefinitely is the first problem. There is no point where one side is likely to win and the prisoners will be released, so being a prisoner of this war is probably a life sentence. If the executive is granted exceptional powers because we are at war, and the war will never end, then we have given the executive unchecked power forever. It seems the majority was extremely concerned about Bush and Cheney seizing this kind of exceptional power.
That combatants don't wear uniforms is another big problem. Its not cut and dried when you capture someone that they are or aren't a combatant. In Vietnam many combatants didn't wear uniforms but they also weren't targeting the American homeland while Al Qaeda is. Its really hard to build a criminal case against Al Qaeda and captives in these new war zones. Its not like you are going to send an FBI team in to Afghanistan or Pakistan, in to an Al Qaeda training camp for example, to collect evidence and build a case that proves guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.
That said I think it would probably be better to not have held anyone against whom there wasn't a really strong case, just because the arbitrary detention of some innocent people in Gitmo and other secret prisons has been a propaganda disaster for the U.S. Sure some real terrorists would be released but the price of that would have been small compared to the devastation thats been done to the rule of law and America's global reputation, When America opted for torture that completely destroyed America's standing in the world.
You can understand how badly 9/11 bent the heads of the people in the Bush administration because it was the most devastating attack against the American homeland in modern history, it happened on their watch, it was in many respects their fault, and they wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. So they opted for some extreme measures to try to prevent more attacks. If the people in the Bush administration were great statesmen I think they might have opted for the high road instead, but unfortunately they were a bunch of mostly incompetent ideologues, they were in over their heads, and they did a bunch of incredibly stupid things as a result. They might have skated in normal times, but they were placed under extraordinary pressure and they self destructed because they weren't sound statemen in the first place. Sadly there probably an element in them that was in fact trying to expand executive power and using 9/11 as an execuse. Cheney and Rumsfeld first came to the White House at the end of Nixon and Watergate and endured a period during which executive power was decimated because of Vietnam and Watergate. As a result they were disposed to overcorrect in the opposite direction in creating an all powerful war time executive that had a taint of dictatorship. Che
I'm pretty sure Iraqis were fairly well educated under Saddam, maybe not to Nazi Germany levels, but pretty good by Middle Eastern standards. Iraq had a quite good education and health care system especially prior to the first gulf war and the boycott. Women also had a lot more rights, and better education access, than they do now with Shia fundamentalists dominating much of the country. People forget Saddam was a secular Socialist dictator, you know a lot like Hitler.
Iraq's intelligentsia was put under pressure by years of boycott and then decimated by the American occupation. If they were Bathists they were pushed in to permanent unemployment by debathification, which was one of Bremmer's most fundamental screw ups. The Shia's pushed for it because they were nursing a huge grudge against the Bathists, but the Bathists were the ones who knew how to make the country work. The U.S. should have never allowed debathification, at least at the level it happened, because it created a huge pool of disgruntled Sunnis which fueled the insurgency.
Then death squads and criminal gangs further decimated the intelligensia when the U.S. failed to establish security after the war. Kidnappings for ransom specifically targeted all the well educated professionals. Ethnic cleansing further hammered them. I'm pretty sure most of the well educated who could manage it fled the country. Its not exactly a surprise nothing works in Iraq now. Everyone who knew how to make things work were either debathified or driven out of the country by the violence.
"And may the best ideas win."
The problem is that there are a number of factors which lead to the "best ideas" not winning. The ideas most likely to win when religion injects itself in to government, especially representative democracy, is the one with the most warm bodies behind it and the most economic and political power. You can have a complete monstrosity of a religion winning as long as it breeds faster, proselytizes better, and is more adept at acquiring political power.
This is a largely unspoken motivator behind religions which prohibit birth control and a key factor in whey they are so vehemently opposed to abortion. They are trying to win the religion game by breeding faster and having the most warm bodies. Take it to its absurd maximum and you have the FLDS and polygamy. It is unfortunately a bad strategy to pursue on a planet that is bursting at the seams due to overpopulation.
Much of the current political tension and polarization in the U.S. stems from around 1980 and the Reagan era when fundamentalist Christians transitioned form being somewhat politically apathetic, and certainly not politically organized, to a very powerful and well organized political block seeking to force their religious views on the nation as a whole at the ballot box. It simply hasn't worked and they last seven years have proved that.
I'm probably not doing a great job of explaining it but all I want is a society where everyone IS completely and utterly free to practice their religion as long as in so doing they aren't inflicting harm on others or forcing their religious views on others, and especially those who want to use secular, civic institutions to do so. You can have the rule of law without injecting god in to it.
"OK ... lets look at this objectively."
LOL, did you think you could just say this and then follow it with the least objective post possible on the subject, and think people would believe your were being objective just because you said you were.....
"In fact, the Bible that you would say needs to be forever locked out of public view"
I never said any such thing. All books and knowledge should be as public as possible, so anyone who has the desire to read it can, and decide for themselves if it is wisdom or poppycock, but it needs to be their choice not something people like you are shoving down their throat against their will. Of course you need to set it next to the Koran, Book of Mormon, and Book of the Dead. The things you shouldn't be doing with it is forcing children in schools to read it, unless its in a course in religion they opted in to. You shouldn't be hanging the ten commandments in court rooms so that people who aren't Christian get the impression that they are going to be punished for not being Christian, or going to be punished based on the tenets of a religion they don't subscribe to. If you are going to hang religious dogma up there then you better be OK with hanging the sharia, and any other religious doctrine you can think of next to it.
"If you really believe it, how could you not tell people about it?"
What makes you think that anyone else wants to hear you rant about your personal religious views. You kind of summed up why there is a lot of animosity towards proselytizers, especially when they hold government office, because you have developed the delusion that they KNOW the truth, and everyone else doesn't, and its your job to beat everyone else in to submission. Why stop at just telling people your truth, when you can take it to the level of the Spanish Inquisition and torture people until they come around.
You are glossing over the fact your "truth" is predicated entirely on faith and it is impossible for you or anyone else to know if what you are talking about is the truth or a complete and under fabrication designed to:
A. Assuage your fear of death by telling you that you will go to heaven and everything will be wonderful when you die just as long as you do what your church tells you to do. Fear of death is one of our most deep seated fears so it follows religion would use that fear to get you to sign up.
B. Assuage your guilt about "sin" so your church gives you a get out of your guilt free card, and all the things you feel guilty about will be forgiven if you just do what your church tells you to do and fill their collection plate every Sunday.
Most religions are exceptionally powerful psychological hammers designed to exploit human insecurities so they can completely control you. It is a fine art honed over thousands of years, and it works extremely well, which is why there are so many religious fanatics in the world, whether they be Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu.
Can't stop a majority religion from electing candidates of their faith. You can however stop those candidates, once they become public servants from using their office to spend tax dollars to subsidize religious causes, or from discriminating against people based on their religious views. And you sure can try to prevent them, through the courts, from passing laws that inflict their religious views on people who don't agree with it.
You can't stop me from wishing politicians would keep their religion, whatever it is, as a part of their personal life and stop flaunting it in public like so much gaudy jewelry. That does nothing but cheapen it, just like American flag lapel pins cheapens their patriotism.
You seriously underestimate the impact 10 very public executions a year will have to compel a populace to conform to the religious views of those in power. You don't have to kill everyone who doesn't conform, you just need to make it clear that those who don't run a definite risk of torture and execution. The inquisition was in particular used to ethnically cleanse Spain of Jews, something it did very well.
You would think Protestant Christians would have enough historical perspective to remember how Rome persecuted Christians and how Catholic monarchs persecuted Protestants to realize it is a fundamentally good thing to have governments which are precluded by law from expressing their religious views as part of their governance.
"What you want is to prohibit people from believing or expressing anything other than that which you think."
No it means I'm not going to force my religious view or absence there of on anyone else, and I don't want them to force it on me, especially using their position in government to do it. What part do you not get that I don't want someone elected to public office shoving their individual religious choice down my throat using their office to do it. I don't care that they have a religious choice and in their private life they exercise it to the hilt, but when they punch in for work they should leave their religion at home.
I didn't say politicians can't draw upon their religious beliefs to shape their opinions and outlook. I suggested they should refrain from making public policy overtly and primarily based on their religious views, and they should especially refrain from flaunting their particular religious views in speeches and the like once they take office. It smacks of insincerity and manipulation to hide "use" God when you are pushing public policy on your constituents.
We can agree to outlaw murder, rape and theft without crutching off religion. If you are inflicting harm on a fellow human being it follows what you are doing should be outlawed, no God required. Abortion is a tougher call, but there is an issue where people should agree to disagree and it should, within reason, be left to individuals to make their choice. If you disapprove of abortion then fine don't do it, but leave other people with different values to make their own decisions. If you disapprove of gay marriage fine, but you should leave people who don't share your views alone if they want a legal basis for a union with the person they choose to spend their life with.
"It's not like they affect how he administrates his state. That's a tenant of the religion and there are plenty of Christians in office. Would you outlaw that religion?
No, but it is extremely desirable for politicians holding public office to compartmentalize their religious views and try to keep them private, especially when said views are offensive to many of their constituents. Believe it or not many people dislike it when the person running their state or nation tells them they are going to go to hell for their personal religious views. It is a statement which is a strong indicator of bias, and that the person saying it believes you are an inferior to him because of your personal religious views. Doesn't really matter when its one private citizen holding this view about another. It matters a lot when its the chief law enforcement officer of a state or nation saying it, because that person makes life and death decisions which influence large numbers of people, someone who has a LOT of power over your life. Try being an officer in the U.S. military these days because the deck is stacked against you if you aren't devoutly religious(preferably born again Christian).
Religious people just don't get it, but separation of church and state, is just as much in their interest as it is of atheists and minority religions. The founding fathers implemented it because many of the people in America fled to America to escape state sponsored religious persecution in Europe. They knew first hand how horrible it was to live in a country where the government favored one religion and persecuted, often brutally, all the others. The Spanish inquisition sucked and it is a logical outcome of letting religious bias permeate government. The only fair and equitable way to avoid state sponsored religious bias is to keep religion out of government all together. The founding fathers did the right thing in separation of church and state, and religious people need to "get" that.
If people were really religious for the right reasons they would have no problem keeping their religion private. They would realize religion should be something between an individual, their god(s) and maybe the members of their their church. As soon as you start inflicting your religion on others, against their will, you cross a dreadful line where your religion has become a weapon, and not a path for self enlightenment.
Just curious, how many self proclaimed atheists or agnostics hold high elected office in this country? Very, very few, because they are for all practical purposes precluded from getting elected in this country, they are practically outlawed from holding high public office now. If you want to get elected to any serious political office in this country its a simple fact you are going find Jesus or at least Jehovah, one way or another, even if deep in your heart you don't believe in it. That creates a seed of hypocrisy and dishonesty to self in a lot of politicians that flowers in to a lot of corrupt elected officials.
It could be your are seeing backlash from the fact the Republicans have been shoving their Christianity down everyones for a number of years now. Not saying its necessarily right to apply "turn about is fair play", but you can understand why a lot of people have settled in to deep, deep hatred of right wing Republicans who wear their Christianity on their sleeves, and American flags on their lapel, like Perry and Bush. It does seem more than a little odd a gaming convention would choose a lighting rod like that as a keynote, especially since game developers and players probably don't trend toward conservative Republican, nor do they go to a game convention to listen to politician blather especially one as far to one side of the spectrum as Perry. I would say it would be just as odd and inappropriate to have Obama or the Clinton's keynote a convention like this. If you can find a politician who publicly acknowledges being an avid gamer now that might be a great keynoter. I don't think you will find one of any prominence though since gaming has been so demonized I doubt any successful politician would ever admit having played one, let alone being an avid gamer.
The Republicans have, until recently, been extremely adept at exploiting bigotry to get elected, bigotry against gays, against right to lifers, against opponents of the stupid war in Iraq, against atheists and agnostics, against most religions outside of Christianity and Judaism, against Democrats, against pretty much everyone except white, fundamentalist, pro war Christian Republicans. Bigotry against gays alone pretty much one the 2002 and 2004 elections for the Republicans.
The Bush administration has been applying all kinds of unconstitutional litmus tests for people serving in the executive branch over the last seven years, and quite blatantly excluding Democrats, gays, and right to lifers for non political jobs, in the Justice department in particular. They nearly destroyed the Justice department by passing over highly qualified applicants from top law schools, using litmus tests, in favor of under qualified, born again Christians from terrible law schools run by Christian universities. Just google Patrick Henry College and you will discover its become a fast track for placing fundamentalist Christians in top positions in the executive branch which kind of smacks of bigotry and discrimination against people of other religions or no religion at all. Just read Patrick Henry's mission statement:
"The Mission of Patrick Henry College is to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding. Educating students according to a classical liberal arts curriculum, and training them with apprenticeship methodology, the College provides academically excellent baccalaureate level higher education with a biblical world view."
If they were just a fringe college it might not matter but the fact is this College has in fact been fast tracking their students in to top positions in the U.S. government. If the Republican's hadn't so completely botched the last seven years, their long term plan was to turn the U.S. government in to a blatantly religious institution, in violation of the separation of church and state, where these people would be using your tax dollars to inflict their religious views on you.
"In my experience, most Americans I've met that actually spent some time living and working in a country other than the US"
I'm American but I've lived in Canada for years. I have to agree the luster does quickly wear off the U.S. as soon as you see it from outside, and especially get away from the saturation coverage of the American media, schools and government telling everyone in America how wonderful America is. It simply isn't that great a country any more if ever it was. It sure has never really promoted freedom around the world like the propaganda says it did. It was mostly just a huge beneficiary of being one of the the last great untapped frontiers and it benefited mightily from being protected from the ravages of two world wars by two big oceans. Now that all of those edges are exhausted its becoming more and more apparent that the America system and the American people are pretty much morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt. It hasn't helped that recent American governments were completely incompetent and drove America off a cliff.
"Why does the US foster oppressive regimes?"
The U.S. fosters repressive regimes just because they are anti communist, anti worker, anti socialism and pro big business and Capitalism.
Some of the big historical reasons for U.S. sponsored coups are control of natural resources in countries when the population realizes they are being exploited by foreign multinationals. In the case of Iran the U.S. and Britain ran Operation Ajax to overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq because he was nationalizing Iran's oil fields because Britain and the U.S. were taking Iran's wealth and giving Iran chump change for it. Certainly the oil companies deserved compensation for their substantial investments to find and develop those oil fields but the deals given the host countries were often bad and still are today. As I recall in the oil fields being developed off the west coast of Africa, the oil companies are still cutting deals that lined the pockets of the corrupt people running the host countries but are largely screwing the people of those countries out of much needed wealth. That Iranian coup installed the Shah of Iran, who was despised by his people en masse and lead to an Islamic revolution we are still dealing with today. The U.S. very much wants to topple Chavez in Venezuela for the same reason today because he nationalized oil fields controlled by the likes of Exxon Mobile.
The term "Banana Republic" refers to the tendency of the U.S. to send Marines in to Central and South America to protect the interest of United Fruit company(now Dole) which acquired ownership of vast plantations in those countries, manipulated the governments of said countries, and did its best to profit at the expense of the indigenous people in places like Honduras.
"Simple fact: poor people can't buy shit."
You do have a point here. There is certainly a big motivation in the mutinationals to get the Chinese and Indians rich enough to buy cars, TV's and all the other things they want to sell, and for which markets have peaked in the west. They want them to get just rich enough to afford these things, but not so rich that they turn in to "expensive" labor though. They are doing quite a good job of it appears since these markets are growing in China and India. Unfortunately its kind of a bad at a point in which there isn't enough oil to run all those cars, and where China in particular is going to burn massive amounts of coal to run all those appliances and global warming is going to snow ball.
It should be pointed out that Capitalists have divided loyalties. They do want affluent consumers to buy their goods. But they also want dirt cheap poor people to work in their factories for nothing. Globalization has been working perfectly for this because Capitalsts can just move the factories to where all the dirt poor people are and sell to where the affluent are. Unfortunately the affluent U.S. the economy is cratering since it doesn't produce anything of value any more. In China the cheap labor is starting to inflate so its not as desirable a place as it was to off shore.
Capitalism is all about a delicate balance of stratifying society. It doesn't want everyone to be rich because that results in expensive labor which is pure poison to capitalism. Unregulated it has always created a very wealthy elite because once you have a lot of money its very easy to make a lot more. If you don't have any money its very hard to ever get any. You live from paycheck to paycheck spending everything you make and you fill the role of cheap labor.
It will be interesting to see how many more iterations of moving the factories to the dirt poor countries can be done before there are no dirt poor third world countries to move to. Its possible by then the U.S. will be the dirt poor third world country and they can start offshoring work from China and India to the U.S.
If the robber barons of the late 19th century U.S. are any guide I seriously don't Capitalism goal is to enrich everyone. Their goal is to squeeze
"For example the land is owned by the state and cannot be owned and traded by the people making use of it: the owners have no incentive to increase or protect its value, so instead they milk it off as fast as they can for immediate gains in influence, renting it out as cheap dumping ground for industries that employ the citizens."
I recall reading recently that there is a substantial grass roots movement in rural China for land reform and privatization of farm land so farmers can start benefiting from Capitalism like the rest of the country. It seems China's massive rural population has started to notice that sum "lucky" people are getting massively rich off of Capitalism especially in the free economic zone in the south eastern coast. I imagine they've also noticed many of the nouveau riche in China are communist party boss who've abandoned Communist ideology so they can line their own pockets, often to the tune of billions of dollars.
It remains to be seen if the movement goes any where or if it is crushed like a bug by the Communist party, but at least some within China are waking up to the hypocrisy. You also have to wonder how you can equitably privatize farm land sixty years in to Communism.
"Nationally, the US would be far better off with every invention being public domain, and US companies being able to get the jump on the Chinese copyists."
Excepting that with out any return on investment no one has any incentive to invent anything, or if they do they have no incentive to make the often substantial investment necessary to commercialize one. IP laws are pretty dubious in things like software but they were a pretty important factor in driving innovation in physical inventions in the last couple centuries in America.
I think in the case of China its just a case of extreme stupidity on the part of the West to do any business at all there as long as they are blatantly ripping off everyone's IP, which they most definitely are, by cloning and copying just about everything in site.
A key point about canecubo's list is that many of these regimes were at least condoned by the U.S. while many were puppet regimes out right installed by the U.S. just because they were anti communist, anti union and pro big business. Nazi Germany was openly embraced by the elites in the U.S. right up to 1939 and sometimes after. George W. Bush's grandfather, for example, was the American banker for the Thiessen family who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power.
If the United States is the guiding light to Capitalism and Freedom around the world, how come the U.S. is so closely aligned with so many repressive regimes. The answer is because capitalism has no real correlation to freedom. Capitalism is just as much at home in repressive right wing states as it is in liberal democracies. There is no real correlation between economic system and governmental model.
Capitalism does in fact flourish in right wing states, often very oppressive ones. Unbridled Capitalism has a nasty tendency towards wealth concentration in the hands of an elite few and the people with all the money almost inevitably seek to control all the levers of political power because it protects, supports and nourishes their economic interests. This is a cocktail which often leads to right wing dictatorial governments which are no friends to freedom. In particular they often are extremely fond of breaking up labor unions, because labor unions are good for workers but bad for profitability. They are also fond of rigging elections or getting rid of them all together because ruling elites are small and easily outvoted if you let all the poor unwashed masses have an actual say in their government. In the U.S. this has been accomplished by a two party system where both parties are controlled by the ruling elites and which never offer an actual choice to ordinary people.
The U.S. being a free society can mostly be attributed to the immense wisdom of our founding fathers who did create a remarkable framework for a free society. Unfortunately, its been slowly unraveling ever since. I think if the founding fathers saw the horror that is the Federal government, the state of civil liberties, and our two party system today, they would no doubt launch a second revolution to topple it and restore the government outlined in the Constitution which has been almost completely obliterated by our two political parties and the corporations and ruling elites which own them.
Capitalism is about profit, pure and simple. Freedom doesn't really have anything at all to do with profitability and often gets in its way. Capitalism and Freedom can coexist, in fact Capitalism is a helpful ingredient for freedom since it is extremely beneficial to control your own wealth rather than letting a bureaucratic state do it for you. Unfortunately Capitalism can and does flourish in repressive right wing states, always has and probably always will.
I'd have to agree the submission is a little breathless, but it is interesting to and important to think about the consequences of a pervasive police state in the digital age. East Germany's police state was extremely labor intensive. You pretty much had to have people to eavesdrop on phone calls, lots and lots of magnetic tape, and lots and lots of people spying on their neighbors.
In the digital age its increasingly possible to actually listen to everything and let computers sort out the keywords and red flag people for closer scrutiny. As everything has moved in to a databases it is much easier to correlate data from multiple databases and look at, for example, all your bank records, your taxes filings, what you buy, your travel plans, the books and movies you read and watch, and get an extremely good picture of any individuals thoughts. Eliot Spitzer is a recent case study of someone who was destroyed by the increasingly pervasive spying on banking activities.
The down side of the Internet is it has created a mechanism to allow the police state to digitally monitor what people are saying, thinking, doing and wanting to do, far more than ever before.
Not sure I would get so excited about China doing this, they are after all a totalitarian state and being doing these things quite blatantly for 60 plus years, they are just going to be a lot better at it in the digital age, and its fairly new that Western companies get to help in their oppression.
I think we should be somewhat more concerned about the fact the governments of U.S. and Great Britain are doing many of these same things, just somewhat more subtly and almost no one seems to notice or care. They are countries that are supposed to have things like civil liberties, like freedom of speech and habeas corpus, but the free societies we so fond of bragging about are being dismantled before our eyes using Islamic terrorism as the excuse. You could blame it all Bush and Blair but I'm pretty sure the espionage state will continue to expand unabated, no matter which party is in power, because:
A. The fear of a new terrorist attach can be used to justify every excess.
B. People in power almost inevitably want more power and more control of their domain, not less. Its a somewhat rare individual who achieves great power and then doesn't use it, abuse it and expand it. It rare indeed to find people that actually relinquish power they already have. Almost the only time it happens is when gross excesses of someone abusing their power lead to scandal, for example Watergate, Vietnam and the abuses of the CIA in the 1960's. Executive power was reigned in, in the 1970's by things like the Church Committee though the Republicans hated everything that happened in the 70's to reign in abuse of power and managed to undo all the check and balances in the last 7 years and push America even further in to a police state than was the case under Nixon and Hoover.
"that modern China represents a form of authoritarian capitalism whose efficiency is quite remarkable"
I think its open to debate if China is remarkable for its "efficiency". It mostly just has lots of cheap labor, no labor unions and very weak pollution and safety regulation which means its a cheap place to do things like manufacturing. There are quite a few things working against its economic efficiency.
A. The party officials that run the place are extremely corrupt. Corruption is good for business only if it swings your way. If it swings against you, or for your competition it is quite bad for business, and the unpredictability of corruption is especially bad for business.
B. The legal frameworks in the country are extremely poor. This is a plus if you ware a bootlegger ripping off your competition's product, its not so good if your IP and products are the ones being ripped off.
C. Not sure exactly why but China did apparently pass new labor laws around the first of the year and they undid some of the slave labor aspects of being a worker in China. Workers did actually get some rights under the new laws and it appears they are going to cause a significant spike in the cost of labor, along with the simple fact labor isn't as abundant in China as it once was. This along with a number of other factors is causing wage inflation and making China less and less attractive to Capitalism. The factors that made China boom can also work against it and lead to a bust and for the boom to move elsewhere.
D. China's one child policy is starting to cause a severe shortage of young workers since it began in 1979. Their population is going to start become senior citizen heavy like Japan and the U.S. which has a lot of negative economic consequences. Most older workers can't stand the dormitories and 6-7 day work weeks in China's factories so as the young labor pool drops its going to hammer their sweat shop manufacturing industries.
E. Censorship might have its positives in that it helps eliminate dissent but it also means you can do some incredibly stupid stuff and get away with it because you can suppress knowledge of your stupidity. A free press and a free Internet can server a useful purpose in that it can eventually expose corruption, incompetence and stupidity and led to corrective action if the press and freedom of speech works. For example in the U.S. the free press went dysfunctional after 9/11 and untold stupidity was perpetrated by the Bush administration like the war in Iraq, torture and domestic spying. The press still isn't very healthy but America has started to throw the Republican's out of power for their incompetence, though the Democrats are much of an improvement. In China is if the ruling party turns bad, there are no alternatives except for changing one set of Communist party leaders for another in an internal power struggle.
F. The spiking cost of oil is suddenly starting to work against globalization. Not sure how accurate it is but someone on CNBC said the cost to ship a container from China to the U.S. has quadrupled recently from $2K to $8K and if oil prices continue to spike its going to be less and less attractive to ship goods half way around the world. Its already working against heavy goods with a low labor component like steel. The more expensive fuel gets the less likely you are going to offshore manufacturing for the U.S. and Europe to China. Mexico may become increasingly attractive again for the U.S. labor pool.
The basic problem is science, math and engineering are hard work to learn and to do, and you can't get rich doing it for the most part. You are looking at a lot of really, really hard work and a really poor return on investment. The only way you are going to get rich is if you manage to invent something with practical application you can patent or sell. The chance of producing a marketable product from a field like particle physics is extremely low, so you have to do it as a labor of love with the realization you are going to barely make ends meet all your life. Of course if you don't do basic research then the applied science and technology built on top of it will wither too and you just stop inventing anything worthwhile.
The fundamental problem we have is the U.S. is a capitalism obsessed country. It is mostly about get rich quick schemes, whether it be the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, the China/outsourcing bubble or the commodities bubble. Especially since the dot com bubble the whole country is obsessed with money for nothing and chicks for free schemes. Thats mostly why our economy is cratering because we produce increasingly little of substance or of actual value, and are mostly using scams like sub-prime mortgages to make a quick buck, with an inevitable collapse soon after. We are just one giant pyramid scheme where the con artists and the cheaters get rich, and the hard working people, like scientists and engineers who work hard have nothing to show for it. Something most people fail to notice is that most of the well educated engineers and scientist are coming out of relatively socialist countries like China and India. I think there is a fair chance that capitalist countries just aren't good at producing or supporting scientists and engineers because there are a lot better fields where you make a lot more money for a lot less work, mainly business, law or the bubble profession like mortgage broker or dot com entrepreneur. More regimented societies like China, Nazi Germany, or the U.S.S.R. are better at turning out scientists and engineers because those are esteemed professions, sought by the state, and the best people aren't lured away by higher paying professions. It remains to be seen if China and Russia start failing at turning out scientist and engineers too now that they've embraced Capitalism and its easier to make quick money in business and law instead.
To play devil's advocate here though, you kind of have to wonder how many breakthroughs are coming out of particle physics lately. Its turning in to a somewhat mature field and there aren't as many breakthroughs as there were in the 20th century when it was new. There is some risk it may, like a lot of mature fields, turn in to a lot of investment with fewer and fewer breakthroughs to justify the payoff, and a bunch of ivory tower types who aren't producing the results people who spend money want to see. The toys required to make the new breakthroughs are also getting a lot more expensive, hard to fund and governments are weighing the return on the investment harder.
The only problem is the Bush administration has been blatantly violating the Hatch act for most of the last seven years so if they are going to punish this guy....
Karl Rove was going from agency to agency to see how they could use government agencies and contracts to help get Republicans reelected. This included having big meetings at the agencies on government time to discuss how to win elections for Republicans. I think they did finally force the head of the GSA to resign because she was one of the more blatant abusers of the Hatch act. But it took a long time and she had already done all the damage she could do on this front.
The whole U.S. Attorney scandal was damn close to violating the Hatch act. The U.S. attorney in New Mexico was most likely fired because he wasn't being aggressive enough in pursuing a kind of thin corruption case against a Democrat that the Republican senator from New Mexico thought would help Republicans in the election.
I only wish they would have been so diligent in enforcing this law for the last seven years.
"The first is weight - mobility systems cost a great of it, and every gram alloted to them is a gram that can't be spent on science."
Well I sure hope the science instruments pay off. I'm a little skeptical about spending a half billion dollars to sit at once spot, analyze a limited amount of dirt and ice there, with a high probability of finding not much of interest. At least there is a good weather station on board. Viking, other than providing the first pictures from Mars was kind of a dud compared to the rovers. When you intentionally drop a payload in a safe but really boring terrain like the one where Phoenix is, mobility to find interesting places really does count for a lot.
If you were to ask me I am of the opinion that way to much money is being spent by NASA on the search for life. It is an interesting question but it should be a secondary goal, not the primary one. The primary goal should be laying the foundation for exploiting space resource for the benefit of an increasingly stretched planet earth, and colonizing Mars someday so we have a new biosphere apart from this one. Learning what resources Mars has to offer to further that end seems more interesting than a somewhat long shot obsession with extraterrestrial life.
"Never before has a beep made the US collectively shit its pants before Sputnik"
It might have upset the general population. I think Eisenhower, the Air Force and CIA were dancing a jig over Sputnik.
A. In particular it established precedent for satellites overflying the U.S. and U.S.S.R., a precedent Eisenhower very much wanted the U.S.S.R. to set first. The U.S. was already planning for spy satellites to replace all the hassles of U-2 flights, and Sputnik gave the U.S. diplomatic and international law cover to do it since Sputnik overflew the U.S. first. Eisenhower may well of intentionally blocked a first U.S. satellite so the U.S.S.R would set the precedent, and the U.S. has gained huge advantage from spy satellites ever since.
B. It gave the military a blank check to spend on the arms race. Spending still going on today, to the great detriment of the U.S. economy. Eisenhower was famous for warning about the defense industrial complex because it acquired enormous quantities of money and power after Sputnik.
The Russian were early leaders in rocketry because their nuclear warheads were huge, heavy, primitive and inferior in design to U.S. warheads. They had to develop much bigger rockets sooner for their nuclear deterrent which gave them a substantial lead in launching the first satellite and in early manned launches.
"Did you know, for example, that the people in our "volunteer military" aren't allowed to leave if they change their minds?"
That's a deeply flawed concern. People who join the military are signing a contract. Its quite clear what the terms are going in. If you have any reservations about them....don't sign it.
The thing you should be upset about is stop loss. Because there the U.S. government is breaking the contract and forcing people to stay after the terms of their contract are up. That is wrong and you would think people would stop volunteering for the military since they should be aware it could turn in to indefinite servitude because of stop loss. It is mostly a back door draft, entice people in with educational benefits and the like and then don't let them leave.
It would be a whole lot more honest if the Bush administration just reinstituted the draft. They don't because they know that would create a fire storm of antiwar sentiment. Dissent against the Iraq war is so muted because it is a war being fought by "volunteers". If affluent young white people were being drafted the Bush administration would have been thrown out in 2004. Instead the volunteer army, at least at the enlisted level is mostly made up of the poor desperate for the education benefits and cash, and even non U.S. citizens who have been promised citizenship in return for military service.
"You think this broadcast flag, or any of this type of DRM, is actually going to prevent cappers from recording shows, stripping commercials, and posting online?"
Uh, no, they are also attempting to prevent people with DVR's and TV on PC's from skipping commercials which destroys the business model NBC is producing content under too. Not saying its an effective strategy, but if you want to watch NBC's show off the airwaves for free either YOU and everyone else watches the commercials or eventually they go out of business and stop producing any content. Or you switch to a pay per view business model which would also probably end up DRM laden. I'm not saying the ad sponsored model is a particularly viable one any more but it is the model being used here. Pay per view might work for some people but isn't particularly a good one for people without much disposable income and if people are faced with big bills for their TV they may just watch less. Pick your poison. If you think you are going to get compelling, free, content with no commercials you are delusional, if so switch to YouTube and ad block Google's ads.