The Tunguska event could be mis-interpreted as a nuclear strike if it were to happen today over a populated area.
I thought nuclear strikes were highly radioactive. That and other clues would be easy to gather very quickly. What do you mean "very quickly"? By "very quickly", do you mean "Mr. President, we believe this to be a Russian first strike, and you must decide in the next 5 minutes if we are going to retaliate" quick?
If you define capitalism = "private control of a market", and socialism = "state control of a market", then socialism = greater disparity in wealth.
Socialism creates an illusion of equality, because the people who exercise power over the means of production claim to do so "on behalf of the people".
However, whoever controls something for all intents and purposes owns something. State property = the private property of the ruling class. All the ritual and posturing aside, there is no such thing as public property. It is a perfect example of people trying to redefine the problem away - simply define the property of the wealthy ruling class as "public property", and then suddenly "inequality" goes away. Amazing!
It is dubious that European socialist programs help the poor. Europeans simply externalized the effects of 18th and 19th century imperialism, and the U.S. internalized it. It is easy to claim your socialist programs help the poor, when the poverty that Europe created with slavery and imperialism in the 18th and 19th century exists in Africa, Asia, and South America, where as the poverty the U.S. created during the 18th and 19th century exists in the United States.
Europe simply used nationalism to redefine its poverty to be a foreign problem (The British Empire, for example, didn't eliminate poverty in India, it just defined India as no longer "British", and voula - Euro-Socialism eliminates extreme poverty!). The people enslaved by the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries became U.S. citizens. Just because Europe has chosen to politically segregate itself from the people it devastated, doesn't mean that a Frenchman isn't as responsible for the poverty in Haiti as an American is for the poverty in New Orleans!
You can call someone in poverty a Haitian, but they are still a person suffering because of your economic system. You can call a capitalist a "Government Minister of Finance", but they are still a rich privileged white person who runs shit and tells other people what to do. The only difference is that a MoF has way more influence over the means of production than a typical capitalist.
My pessimism about America is that it has become TOO European and abandoned the liberal values is was supposed to represent.
Actually, their are widely varying opinions amongst industrialized nations. Much of Europe, for example, places societal rights higher than individual rights, not recognizing, the "right" of people to profit based upon heredity. This is reflected in taxation designed to cancel out wealth condensation and/or high inheritance taxes that attempt to return property and wealth to society as a whole for redistribution, when the current owner passes away. This is a sliding scale, with these measures being taken in different measure in different nations, but little of that has to do with the ethical/moral conventions or economic theory.
This is often the propaganda associated with European style socialism. My firsthand experience tells me that class-roles are much more rigid and established in Europe than in the United States.
An explanation of European socialism that makes more sense to me is that landed European upper-class, who were traditionally one and the same as the state, saw a way to take advantage of popular dissatisfaction with the burgeoning industrial capitalist class. They found they could easily manipulate the working underclass into supporting a state-elite ruling class with a little bit of populist rhetoric.
The landed lord became the socialist legislator, filling mostly the same social/economic role as a feudal lord.
European socialism does offer the promise of more comfortable poverty for the underclass, but it is a machine for re-enforcing class and hierarchy by making an underclass existence more tolerable.
Without intervention, extreme capitalism collapses under its own weight when the poor rebel and forcibly redistribute the wealth, with a lot of pain, suffering, injustice, and instability at the same time. Philosophers and moralist scoff at the idea that because you have deed to some land for historical reasons, you have any more right to it than others. You likely only have that deed because you were lucky enough to be born to a family with more wealth than others.
"Capitalism" is a term invented by Karl Marx, and doesn't objectively describe any real-life ideology or economic construct. In reality, all system of economic production could be called capitalism, in that the means of production are in the hands of a small minority. Your thinking is flawed because you assume that capital owned by a state elite class is somehow less "capitalistic" than capital owned by an industrialist/entrepreneur.
State intervention is not an alternative to extreme capitalism. State intervention is a form of extreme capitalism. However, state-education and nationalistic brainwashing has convinced people that the state-elite are somehow not a capitalist class, when it is the very epitome of it. The only real alternative to extreme capitalism (the extreme centralization of capital in the hands of a few), is extreme decentralization, what some people call a "Free Market" (although a true free-market is an abstract unrealizable concept) - Basically, when no individual economic player is powerful enough to have a significant effect on the economy.
Comparing societies in this light, the US has recently been moving more and more towards extreme capitalism and wealth condensation, where the wealthy are not taxed heavily enough to compensate society for the earning advantages their inherited wealth affords them. It has not yet come to a head as it did in the great depression and new deal, but it is certainly headed that way. If you're looking for an example of a more balanced and stable economy/society, look to the European countries with the high standards of living.
Western Europe and the United States have about the same amount of capitalism. On the Index of Economic Freedom (which is published by a pro-business organization), the U.S. clearly falls somewhere in the middle. The stereotype of "capitalist" U.S. and "socialist" Europe is a stereotype.
The United States is moving more and more towards capitalist extrem
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.
So what about your grandmother? If the thug from down the block with the big guns and tough friends decides he wants her house, what's she supposed to do? It doesn't matter whether she's 'more committed' or not, she still ends up homeless or dead. Is that the way you want life to be?
And before you say 'oh, I'd help out my grandma', what about her widowed, disabled neighbour who has no family? Who is going to help her out in your brave new world?
The last time I checked, property rights were enforced by the state. Grandma has delegated some of her self-defense to a group of professionals who (in theory at least, if not reality), are supposed to protect her and her property.
However, if the state is the only thing protecting your property rights, you are pretty much screwed. Police can be corrupt, government itself can be greedy. If the majority of people are armed and willing to defend their property, then that keeps the police and politicians honest.
But anyone who is totally at the mercy of the state (widowed, disabled neighbor with no family), or at the total mercy of anyone really, then yeah, they are screwed. If only a few people are helpless, and most people are able to defend themselves, then the disabled widows might benefit from a society where taking other people's property is generally discouraged. But in a society where people are intentionally kept helpless, there is very little hope for the disabled widow.
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.
Generally, the person who feels it is their own property, who has invested the most amount of their time and effort, will fight the hardest for that property.
At some point, stealing the property becomes more difficult than earning it through the current system.
"Property rights exist today. You are either killing someone to take their land, or you are not. The past is entirely irrelevant."
Because that's convenient for me. eh? So should someone come, kill you and your family and take your land as their own in 50 year that would be ok for them to say? It's mine forget about the past.
Remember; in the future, you are the past. Is the person who stole the land still alive, or dead? If they are still alive and still posses the property, then it is justified in taking the land back. If they are dead, and the current owners are innocent people who had nothing to do with the land theft, then no it is wrong to take it back.
If my bike gets stolen, and I find the thief riding it, I am justified in taking it back. If the thief pawns the bike, and some innocent person buys the bike, and I try to take it back from the innocent person, I am harming an innocent person.
But before you start talking about property rights, when's the date the rights start from? Social convention decides that. Most people in the U.S., Europe, etc., agree with property rights as they currently exist. Not only that, but the ending of property rights as they exist in those places would cause such an economic disruption that would turn into humanitarian disaster, because our society has evolved around these concepts. Even the First Nations are essentially dependent on tax-funded social systems that require private property as it exists to continue.
The property rights begin at the point that society couldn't be maintained any other way. They are a social tool that in general makes society work.
Many societies have tried to abolish property rights, and massively redistribute property. Think North Korea, USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Communist Cambodia, etc... essentially, thus far those attempts have been pretty disastrous. Morality is measured in the effects of those property rights, and right now no-one has come up with a system of abolishing property rights that doesn't result in mass-murder and mass-poverty. In the earlier 20th century people could claim ignorance, now people generally understand and agree with what I am saying. Most "Communists" nowadays are spoiled upper-class youth more interested in counter-culture street cred and Che Guevara imagery than real world revolution, and deep down don't want to abolish property rights.
Because the people who have worked hard to create/purchase/improve that property, are usually smarter and more cooperative with other property owners, and thus are more effective with violence, than the random "communists" who essentially want to freeload.
The type of people who have the sense of entitlement to the property of others, usually aren't that productive or cooperative, otherwise they would have property for themselves. At least in North America, where the majority of the working class are middle-class.
Property is an intellectual tool, that allows the property owners to become more powerful than non-property owners, and one that promotes long-term activity in the population (savings, investment, etc.). Property wins the social-evolution test as a stable and effective social system.
Social systems where anyone is allowed to take anything they want from someone else, pretty much only exists in a handful of pre-industrial societies, or in places where society gets messed up (i.e. immediately post-Katrina New Orleans)
Some of us live in these places called cities, where we can walk to places, and if that is too far we can take a bus or subway for next to nothing.:)
I don't know about the guy who posted the original message, but many people in cities don't even own cars. I own a car, but I only use it when I want to move furniture or buy a lot of groceries... my gas expenditure is nowhere near 1%.
1% is low for the suburbanite / rural folk, but not for the urbanite.
OK, I agree. If your system is 100% voluntary, then it wouldn't necessarily be authoritarian. And if you are proposing that sort of system, I could go along with it. I would at least give it my full consideration.
But your ideology is obscure enough that you should understand why it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me that is what you meant.
Centralized decision making is always authoritarian. A central authority is making a decision for the population as a whole, regardless of the method it employs to reach those decisions.
Prove it. From what I've seen, free markets allow greedy and selfish people to accumulate more money than cooperative people. Of course, non-free non-markets allow the greedy and selfish people to accumulate more money than cooperative people. Greedy people exercising power to do terrible things seems pretty much a universal part of history. See the old Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Cuba, as examples of state-run economies rife with inequality and greed.
The disagreement comes from people who believe authoritarian states can fight greed and inequality, so long as the "good" people are in charge... and those who believe that authoritarian states just provide yet another tool for the greedy to exploit more effectively.
Socialists seem to have a lot of faith in their own incorruptibility.
You're right - we actually have pretty extensive protection for free speech in the UK, with far less restriction than in the US. In the UK, I can say "Gordon Brown is a noxious prick" without any legal repercussions. If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested. You realize that not only do people say things like "G. W. Bush is a noxious prick" constantly, there are thousands of people who have openly advocated assassinating him without any legal repercussions.
In most circles in the U.S., you would face more disapproval and hostility for openly supporting the president (any president), than you would for criticizing him.
Short of actually calling in a bomb threat to the White House, there is no criticism of the president that can get you arrested.
I know it is popular to mindlessly bash the U.S., but it would help if you had even the vaguest clue what you are talking about.
It doesn't matter the definition of "cult". What matters is if there is a reasonable expectation that calling them a "cult", right outside of their headquarters, is likely to intimidate or cause offense.
Hate speech is determined by the distress it causes to the victim, not on the factuality of the speech itself. It can be argued by calling them a "cult" with a sign immediately outside their headquarters, as opposed to an online message board or something, was an explicit attempt to insult them or intimidate them.
The real topic of debate is whether we should regulate criticisms of people's religions at all. Once a society has decided to censor speech that religions might find insulting or offensive, which most "progressive" societies do nowadays, then these kind of small details like the definition of "cult" are no longer relevant.
Calling Scientology a "cult" makes them feel insulted, and the law clearly establishes that their right not to feel insulted overrides your right to free speech or your right to protest.
Sorry, it is institutions like the European Court of Human Rights and the philosophy that inspired it that caused the problem in the first place.
The Scientologists are claiming that their human rights are being violated by "hate speech" against their religion. It is a well established principle in Europe that negative statements regarding a religion is "hate", and the right not to be exposed to "hate" overrides any right to freedom of speech.
The European Court on Human Rights would most definitely support throwing someone in prison for calling Islam a cult in front of a Mosque, so why should they treat Scientology any different?
Well, in the absence of government-sponsored education, corporations are likely to step up to the bat. Very few parents are willing to put in the requisite amount of work to homeschool their kids, and those who are willing are oftentimes terrifying.
Labor unions, churches, political action groups, charities, are just a few examples of privatized institutions that are non-profit and not corporations. Of course, you would never learn that there are alternatives to government AND corporations in public education. It is always the either/or strawman.
All I remember learning about in highschool is the Kreb's cycle and Lord of the Flies. Unbridled material desire, on the other hand, was taught to me by advertising and Disney movies, all of which I encountered outside of the boundaries of the, ahem, fascist government zombie consumer factory.
In government schools you were taught how to show up in class when the bell rings. Since there was only one teacher to 20 or 30 students, there was no way the teacher could teach you individually - for the most part, you sat silently and absorbed without question what your teacher was saying (except for short question and answer periods during which an entire class of 20 or more could not all possibly participate). You learned that your test grades, attendance, and behavior would all be recorded and tracked and go on your permanent record. You were segregated by age and by ability (and although not officially, probably by race and class as well). You learned you would be evaluated by standardized testing set by a higher authority, and therefore learned to accept other people's goals as your own.
More importantly, you learned from the non classroom environment how to conform to social norms. You learned that if you didn't wear certain clothes, or listen to certain music, etc., that there would be certain peer social groups that you would be excluded from. Bullying, teasing, and social exclusion are almost universal in public education - You might not have been a victim yourself, but there was enough of it happening to some unlucky person for you to learn to fear and respect the superficial opinions of others.
While you didn't learn outright to buy Disney crap, you learned the type of obedience, conformity, and regimentation that is necessary to be a good worker and good consumer that would inevitably lead you to desire Disney crap.
Our current system of public education was designed by powerful industrialists in the U.S. and Europe in the late 19th century, in order to create a literate but obedient industrial worker class.
Remember the McCarthy era? Or was that just an incredibly complicated feint by the powers-that-be?
Fascists exploit Marxism when it is to their benefit... they also exploit anti-Communism when it is to their benefit. Fascism can attach itself to any authoritarian or reactionary ideology. Fascism isn't a self-contained belief system, it is a political and social system. It doesn't really care what the ideology of the authoritarian state is, it is simply the belief in an authoritarian state in and of itself.
In the post-1960s America, Marxism is a socially acceptable ideology, and therefore our modern education system uses Marxism as a tool to sell Fascism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marxism was taboo and therefore Fascists could exploit that. Fascists craft their propaganda to appeal to whatever pulls in the suckers.
Many times, rival factions of Fascists will be in conflict with each othe
I'd much rather have a McEducation or a Pepsi-brand bachelors in the Delicious Arts than this state-sponsored degree teaching me the works of philosophers like Marx, Foucault, Althusser, and Orwell. What is this McEducation you are talking about? The big corporations love the public education system, as government brainwashed dupes make excellent consumers. Also, consumers are more likely to buy things like dishwashers, cars, and big screen TVs if they believe that the government is responsible for their education, health care, and well-being, and that all they have to do is purchase petty consumer items. Only a brainwashed government zombie would believe that state-socialism and corporate-capitalism are somehow diametrically opposed. State-socialism and corporate capitalism work together just fine: The system is called Fascism, and most people are Fascist even if they don't or can't admit it.
And, of course the government wants you to read Marx, Foucault, and Althusser, because they opposed liberal democracy. Marxism, in its implementation in the real world (i.e. Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, etc.) has always been Fascist pseudo-socialism. If pandering to Marxist rhetoric is what it takes to convince you to support Fascism, the Fascists are happy to oblige.
Orwell wasn't anti-liberal democracy, and he was pretty anti-Fascist... However, he was smart enough to disguise his critiques of Fascism in enough allegory to be acceptable by the modern indoctrination machine. Given how many hardcore authoritarians claim to admire the works of Orwell, I would say that the allegory is missed on most people.
Oh, thank god. I though I might have to take responsibility for my ridiculous actions and beliefs. Now, I can just blame the government! We are not talking about you... we are talking about large populations of people in aggregate. You, as an individual, and morality in general, are irrelevant from the point of view of indoctrination and social engineering.
When you hand your kids over to the government for 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week, for an entire child hood of propaganda and social conditioning, it is a bit silly to worry about the government manipulating bloggers as an effective means of propaganda.
The government says jump, you *WILL* jump. The government says something is good, you *WILL* believe it is good. The brainwashing is too strong.
The only reason there is any sort of anti-war movement at all, is because there are brainwashed citizens of countries whose government finds it in their interest to tell their citizens to oppose U.S. interests. i.e., it is in the interests of countries like France, Germany, China, etc. who had pre-war oil interests in Iraq, to oppose the war. Those governments are therefore able to call on their own brainwashed citizens to universally oppose the war, and some of their propaganda and brainwashing will naturally carry over to an America already made vulnerable by years of conditioning by the U.S. government. (Consider it "propaganda blowback")
However, if other powerful countries didn't happen to have conflicting interests over Iraq or other conflicts, and didn't neutralize U.S. propaganda with their own counter-propaganda purely for their own purposes, few government-education people of any nation would have the intellectual ability to oppose the war.
You just can't hope to have a free-thinking critical democratic non-brainwashed society, and at the same time turn over the most trusting and vulnerable of our society, our children, to the government that wants to brainwash them. Much in the same way a free society needs a strict separation of church and state, a free society also needs a strict separation between education and state.
Arguing over the most insignificant forms of secret propaganda, when most nations have multi-billion dollar compulsory indoctrination programs operating right in the open, is a bit silly.
It seems to me that there's no real reason to "shoot down" this satellite, except as a test/demonstration of our ability to shoot down satellites (not necessarily our own)... The U.S. has had the ability to "shoot down" satelites since the 1960s. Any country capable of building a rocket and sending it into orbit is capable of "shooting down" satelites. Given the enourmous speeds these things are orbiting at, you don't need explosives or anything - with the right orbit, the kinetic energy should be enough to destroy any satelite.
So the U.S. doesn't need to demonstrate anything. Everyone always assumed that it can "shoot down" satellites. If anything the military are probably upset that they are going to have the world watching exactly how they "shoot down" satellites.
The reason for shooting down this satelite is:
1. Make sure it doesn't land on anything. Could you imagine the political repercussions if it came crashing down on a highly populated area and killed someone?
2. To make sure any top secret technology can't be recovered by other countries.
If there is a cyber-war in the Middle East, why aren't the people in the Middle East telling us? Or is the Iranian state media part of Bush's conspiracy as well?
1. Iran's internet access is not effected. Information is coming in and out.
2. Several of the line cuts have been fully explained, and were caused by common power outages.
3. The U.S. has attacked countries in the region before (remember Iraq?), and didn't cut the lines.
4. The petrodollar issue is overblown. A devaluation of the dollar means a boost for U.S. exports, and a big drop in E.U. exports, and would be devistating to countries like China with large dollar reserves (all that money we owe China suddenly becomes worthless). Except for a few isolated countries, no one wants to see the petrodollar end... and an end of the petrodollar could actually put the U.S. in a stronger position (an overvalued dollar hurts the U.S. in the long run more than it helps it).
"The researchers' estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of US domestic sales of US$235.4 billion."
Assume those percentages are off by an enormous 10% margin of error... advertising still outstrips R&D. A quick trip to Google shows that spending rose in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Except that "advertising" != "promotion".
Advertising is a much smaller subset of promotion. Promotion means things such as providing training in the use of drugs for doctors and nurses, distributing free samples of the drugs, having highly trained professionals on call to answer technical questions a doctor might have about a new drug. This type of promotion is pretty much a nessicary part of selling a drug, and even if we had an entirely socialist model of drug development a lot of these costs would still exist (we just wouldn't call it "promotion").
In 2004, about $265 billion was spend on advertising. Not too much different than U.S. drug sales in 2004. Since drug ads make such a small percentage of advertising compared to other products, it is very clear only a small chunk of "promotion" is spend on TV commercials, print ads, and the types of frivilous things people think of as "advertising".
Anyone capable of basic math can easily put the lie to your assertions. You do the math... there is no way that the drug industry is spending $58 billion a year on advertising. No way! Trying to imply that drug conpanies spend a quarter of their profits on advertising is very silly.
Corporations benefit from -- nay, depend on! -- public infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money. It's been proven time and again that private interests cannot provide neutral, equitable infrastructure at a reasonable price. Taxes are necessary. The government doesn't provide neutral equitable infrastructure... just compare roads, schools, public services etc. in any wealthy neighborhood and any poor neighborhood, and you will see that extreme inequality is a fundamental part of the whole system.
Tax funded infrastructure is a way to tax the working poor in order to provide for the needs of the middle class and rich.. not that I am complaining - A lot of poor single mothers had to take on second jobs so that the government can subsidize my dirt cheap 100mb internet connection. Tell those suckers to flip some more burgers, I want to download mp3s and do online gaming at the same time, god-damn-it! I am not poor, I pay low taxes, and my public services are great, so the whole tax-funded infrastructure thing is definitly working to my advantage! Not so much for people living in the ghetto though.
But on a more serious level, how much tax revenue do you think is wasted? It is one thing to defend taxes, but have you ever looked into how much money the government wastes on things? I would say it isn't a stretch of the imagination that the government could provide the same infrastructure at 1/3 the cost, or less. There is so much corruption and graft, that it is suprising that any infrastructure gets built at all.
The other major business of Washington state - Boeing - flies their planes just outside the U.S. territorial limit offshore to sign the transfer papers with international customers so that they won't have to pay tax. Should we complain about them too? I am sure that there are Americans that hope the U.S. closes that loophole... Just like I am sure there are many European Airbus executives and exployees who are hoping that the U.S. closes that loophole as well.
In the 1950's, the corporate share of taxes was about 50%. Citizens paid half, corporations paid half. Now? it is about 2%. And why is that? The top corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 60%. The average top corporate tax rate in Europe is 30%. On average, European countries charge *HALF* the corporate taxes that the United States does... and they only charge on the revenue generated in their own country, the U.S. claims global jurisdiction on taxation.
U.S. corporations are relocating to other countries in record numbers. You can complain about corporate taxes all you want, but pretty soon there won't be any corporations left in America for you to hate and tax. But, fear not, when the U.S. is a third world economy, no evil corporations will bother to lobby the government any more... Problem solved!
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I thought nuclear strikes were highly radioactive. That and other clues would be easy to gather very quickly. What do you mean "very quickly"? By "very quickly", do you mean "Mr. President, we believe this to be a Russian first strike, and you must decide in the next 5 minutes if we are going to retaliate" quick?
If you define capitalism = "private control of a market", and socialism = "state control of a market", then socialism = greater disparity in wealth.
Socialism creates an illusion of equality, because the people who exercise power over the means of production claim to do so "on behalf of the people".
However, whoever controls something for all intents and purposes owns something. State property = the private property of the ruling class. All the ritual and posturing aside, there is no such thing as public property. It is a perfect example of people trying to redefine the problem away - simply define the property of the wealthy ruling class as "public property", and then suddenly "inequality" goes away. Amazing!
It is dubious that European socialist programs help the poor. Europeans simply externalized the effects of 18th and 19th century imperialism, and the U.S. internalized it. It is easy to claim your socialist programs help the poor, when the poverty that Europe created with slavery and imperialism in the 18th and 19th century exists in Africa, Asia, and South America, where as the poverty the U.S. created during the 18th and 19th century exists in the United States.
Europe simply used nationalism to redefine its poverty to be a foreign problem (The British Empire, for example, didn't eliminate poverty in India, it just defined India as no longer "British", and voula - Euro-Socialism eliminates extreme poverty!). The people enslaved by the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries became U.S. citizens. Just because Europe has chosen to politically segregate itself from the people it devastated, doesn't mean that a Frenchman isn't as responsible for the poverty in Haiti as an American is for the poverty in New Orleans!
You can call someone in poverty a Haitian, but they are still a person suffering because of your economic system. You can call a capitalist a "Government Minister of Finance", but they are still a rich privileged white person who runs shit and tells other people what to do. The only difference is that a MoF has way more influence over the means of production than a typical capitalist.
My pessimism about America is that it has become TOO European and abandoned the liberal values is was supposed to represent.
Actually, their are widely varying opinions amongst industrialized nations. Much of Europe, for example, places societal rights higher than individual rights, not recognizing, the "right" of people to profit based upon heredity. This is reflected in taxation designed to cancel out wealth condensation and/or high inheritance taxes that attempt to return property and wealth to society as a whole for redistribution, when the current owner passes away. This is a sliding scale, with these measures being taken in different measure in different nations, but little of that has to do with the ethical/moral conventions or economic theory.
This is often the propaganda associated with European style socialism. My firsthand experience tells me that class-roles are much more rigid and established in Europe than in the United States.
An explanation of European socialism that makes more sense to me is that landed European upper-class, who were traditionally one and the same as the state, saw a way to take advantage of popular dissatisfaction with the burgeoning industrial capitalist class. They found they could easily manipulate the working underclass into supporting a state-elite ruling class with a little bit of populist rhetoric.
The landed lord became the socialist legislator, filling mostly the same social/economic role as a feudal lord.
European socialism does offer the promise of more comfortable poverty for the underclass, but it is a machine for re-enforcing class and hierarchy by making an underclass existence more tolerable.
Without intervention, extreme capitalism collapses under its own weight when the poor rebel and forcibly redistribute the wealth, with a lot of pain, suffering, injustice, and instability at the same time. Philosophers and moralist scoff at the idea that because you have deed to some land for historical reasons, you have any more right to it than others. You likely only have that deed because you were lucky enough to be born to a family with more wealth than others.
"Capitalism" is a term invented by Karl Marx, and doesn't objectively describe any real-life ideology or economic construct. In reality, all system of economic production could be called capitalism, in that the means of production are in the hands of a small minority. Your thinking is flawed because you assume that capital owned by a state elite class is somehow less "capitalistic" than capital owned by an industrialist/entrepreneur.
State intervention is not an alternative to extreme capitalism. State intervention is a form of extreme capitalism. However, state-education and nationalistic brainwashing has convinced people that the state-elite are somehow not a capitalist class, when it is the very epitome of it. The only real alternative to extreme capitalism (the extreme centralization of capital in the hands of a few), is extreme decentralization, what some people call a "Free Market" (although a true free-market is an abstract unrealizable concept) - Basically, when no individual economic player is powerful enough to have a significant effect on the economy.
Comparing societies in this light, the US has recently been moving more and more towards extreme capitalism and wealth condensation, where the wealthy are not taxed heavily enough to compensate society for the earning advantages their inherited wealth affords them. It has not yet come to a head as it did in the great depression and new deal, but it is certainly headed that way. If you're looking for an example of a more balanced and stable economy/society, look to the European countries with the high standards of living.
Western Europe and the United States have about the same amount of capitalism. On the Index of Economic Freedom (which is published by a pro-business organization), the U.S. clearly falls somewhere in the middle. The stereotype of "capitalist" U.S. and "socialist" Europe is a stereotype.
The United States is moving more and more towards capitalist extrem
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.So what about your grandmother? If the thug from down the block with the big guns and tough friends decides he wants her house, what's she supposed to do? It doesn't matter whether she's 'more committed' or not, she still ends up homeless or dead. Is that the way you want life to be?
And before you say 'oh, I'd help out my grandma', what about her widowed, disabled neighbour who has no family? Who is going to help her out in your brave new world?
The last time I checked, property rights were enforced by the state. Grandma has delegated some of her self-defense to a group of professionals who (in theory at least, if not reality), are supposed to protect her and her property.However, if the state is the only thing protecting your property rights, you are pretty much screwed. Police can be corrupt, government itself can be greedy. If the majority of people are armed and willing to defend their property, then that keeps the police and politicians honest.
But anyone who is totally at the mercy of the state (widowed, disabled neighbor with no family), or at the total mercy of anyone really, then yeah, they are screwed. If only a few people are helpless, and most people are able to defend themselves, then the disabled widows might benefit from a society where taking other people's property is generally discouraged. But in a society where people are intentionally kept helpless, there is very little hope for the disabled widow.
So you're happy with the situation in which the guy with the bigger gun can just take your property off you whenever he feels like?
Not the guy with the bigger gun, the guy who is most committed. You don't have to defeat everyone, simply put up a nasty enough fight to make stealing your property more work than it is worth.Generally, the person who feels it is their own property, who has invested the most amount of their time and effort, will fight the hardest for that property.
At some point, stealing the property becomes more difficult than earning it through the current system.
Because that's convenient for me. eh? So should someone come, kill you and your family and take your land as their own in 50 year that would be ok for them to say? It's mine forget about the past.
Remember; in the future, you are the past. Is the person who stole the land still alive, or dead? If they are still alive and still posses the property, then it is justified in taking the land back. If they are dead, and the current owners are innocent people who had nothing to do with the land theft, then no it is wrong to take it back.
If my bike gets stolen, and I find the thief riding it, I am justified in taking it back. If the thief pawns the bike, and some innocent person buys the bike, and I try to take it back from the innocent person, I am harming an innocent person.
The property rights begin at the point that society couldn't be maintained any other way. They are a social tool that in general makes society work.
Many societies have tried to abolish property rights, and massively redistribute property. Think North Korea, USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Communist Cambodia, etc... essentially, thus far those attempts have been pretty disastrous. Morality is measured in the effects of those property rights, and right now no-one has come up with a system of abolishing property rights that doesn't result in mass-murder and mass-poverty. In the earlier 20th century people could claim ignorance, now people generally understand and agree with what I am saying. Most "Communists" nowadays are spoiled upper-class youth more interested in counter-culture street cred and Che Guevara imagery than real world revolution, and deep down don't want to abolish property rights.
Because the people who have worked hard to create/purchase/improve that property, are usually smarter and more cooperative with other property owners, and thus are more effective with violence, than the random "communists" who essentially want to freeload.
The type of people who have the sense of entitlement to the property of others, usually aren't that productive or cooperative, otherwise they would have property for themselves. At least in North America, where the majority of the working class are middle-class.
Property is an intellectual tool, that allows the property owners to become more powerful than non-property owners, and one that promotes long-term activity in the population (savings, investment, etc.). Property wins the social-evolution test as a stable and effective social system.
Social systems where anyone is allowed to take anything they want from someone else, pretty much only exists in a handful of pre-industrial societies, or in places where society gets messed up (i.e. immediately post-Katrina New Orleans)
Some of us live in these places called cities, where we can walk to places, and if that is too far we can take a bus or subway for next to nothing. :)
I don't know about the guy who posted the original message, but many people in cities don't even own cars. I own a car, but I only use it when I want to move furniture or buy a lot of groceries... my gas expenditure is nowhere near 1%.
1% is low for the suburbanite / rural folk, but not for the urbanite.
OK, I agree. If your system is 100% voluntary, then it wouldn't necessarily be authoritarian. And if you are proposing that sort of system, I could go along with it. I would at least give it my full consideration.
But your ideology is obscure enough that you should understand why it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me that is what you meant.
Centralized decision making is always authoritarian. A central authority is making a decision for the population as a whole, regardless of the method it employs to reach those decisions.
The disagreement comes from people who believe authoritarian states can fight greed and inequality, so long as the "good" people are in charge... and those who believe that authoritarian states just provide yet another tool for the greedy to exploit more effectively.
Socialists seem to have a lot of faith in their own incorruptibility.
In most circles in the U.S., you would face more disapproval and hostility for openly supporting the president (any president), than you would for criticizing him.
Short of actually calling in a bomb threat to the White House, there is no criticism of the president that can get you arrested.
I know it is popular to mindlessly bash the U.S., but it would help if you had even the vaguest clue what you are talking about.
It doesn't matter the definition of "cult". What matters is if there is a reasonable expectation that calling them a "cult", right outside of their headquarters, is likely to intimidate or cause offense.
Hate speech is determined by the distress it causes to the victim, not on the factuality of the speech itself. It can be argued by calling them a "cult" with a sign immediately outside their headquarters, as opposed to an online message board or something, was an explicit attempt to insult them or intimidate them.
The real topic of debate is whether we should regulate criticisms of people's religions at all. Once a society has decided to censor speech that religions might find insulting or offensive, which most "progressive" societies do nowadays, then these kind of small details like the definition of "cult" are no longer relevant.
Calling Scientology a "cult" makes them feel insulted, and the law clearly establishes that their right not to feel insulted overrides your right to free speech or your right to protest.
Sorry, it is institutions like the European Court of Human Rights and the philosophy that inspired it that caused the problem in the first place.
The Scientologists are claiming that their human rights are being violated by "hate speech" against their religion. It is a well established principle in Europe that negative statements regarding a religion is "hate", and the right not to be exposed to "hate" overrides any right to freedom of speech.
The European Court on Human Rights would most definitely support throwing someone in prison for calling Islam a cult in front of a Mosque, so why should they treat Scientology any different?
Well, in the absence of government-sponsored education, corporations are likely to step up to the bat. Very few parents are willing to put in the requisite amount of work to homeschool their kids, and those who are willing are oftentimes terrifying.
Labor unions, churches, political action groups, charities, are just a few examples of privatized institutions that are non-profit and not corporations. Of course, you would never learn that there are alternatives to government AND corporations in public education. It is always the either/or strawman.
All I remember learning about in highschool is the Kreb's cycle and Lord of the Flies. Unbridled material desire, on the other hand, was taught to me by advertising and Disney movies, all of which I encountered outside of the boundaries of the, ahem, fascist government zombie consumer factory.
In government schools you were taught how to show up in class when the bell rings. Since there was only one teacher to 20 or 30 students, there was no way the teacher could teach you individually - for the most part, you sat silently and absorbed without question what your teacher was saying (except for short question and answer periods during which an entire class of 20 or more could not all possibly participate). You learned that your test grades, attendance, and behavior would all be recorded and tracked and go on your permanent record. You were segregated by age and by ability (and although not officially, probably by race and class as well). You learned you would be evaluated by standardized testing set by a higher authority, and therefore learned to accept other people's goals as your own.
More importantly, you learned from the non classroom environment how to conform to social norms. You learned that if you didn't wear certain clothes, or listen to certain music, etc., that there would be certain peer social groups that you would be excluded from. Bullying, teasing, and social exclusion are almost universal in public education - You might not have been a victim yourself, but there was enough of it happening to some unlucky person for you to learn to fear and respect the superficial opinions of others.
While you didn't learn outright to buy Disney crap, you learned the type of obedience, conformity, and regimentation that is necessary to be a good worker and good consumer that would inevitably lead you to desire Disney crap.
Our current system of public education was designed by powerful industrialists in the U.S. and Europe in the late 19th century, in order to create a literate but obedient industrial worker class.
Check out this interview which gives you a bit of background:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ&feature=related
If you are interested, check out the book "The Underground History of American Education", which is now available free, online:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
Remember the McCarthy era? Or was that just an incredibly complicated feint by the powers-that-be?
Fascists exploit Marxism when it is to their benefit... they also exploit anti-Communism when it is to their benefit. Fascism can attach itself to any authoritarian or reactionary ideology. Fascism isn't a self-contained belief system, it is a political and social system. It doesn't really care what the ideology of the authoritarian state is, it is simply the belief in an authoritarian state in and of itself.
In the post-1960s America, Marxism is a socially acceptable ideology, and therefore our modern education system uses Marxism as a tool to sell Fascism. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marxism was taboo and therefore Fascists could exploit that. Fascists craft their propaganda to appeal to whatever pulls in the suckers.
Many times, rival factions of Fascists will be in conflict with each othe
And, of course the government wants you to read Marx, Foucault, and Althusser, because they opposed liberal democracy. Marxism, in its implementation in the real world (i.e. Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, etc.) has always been Fascist pseudo-socialism. If pandering to Marxist rhetoric is what it takes to convince you to support Fascism, the Fascists are happy to oblige.
Orwell wasn't anti-liberal democracy, and he was pretty anti-Fascist... However, he was smart enough to disguise his critiques of Fascism in enough allegory to be acceptable by the modern indoctrination machine. Given how many hardcore authoritarians claim to admire the works of Orwell, I would say that the allegory is missed on most people. Oh, thank god. I though I might have to take responsibility for my ridiculous actions and beliefs. Now, I can just blame the government! We are not talking about you... we are talking about large populations of people in aggregate. You, as an individual, and morality in general, are irrelevant from the point of view of indoctrination and social engineering.
When you hand your kids over to the government for 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week, for an entire child hood of propaganda and social conditioning, it is a bit silly to worry about the government manipulating bloggers as an effective means of propaganda.
The government says jump, you *WILL* jump. The government says something is good, you *WILL* believe it is good. The brainwashing is too strong.
The only reason there is any sort of anti-war movement at all, is because there are brainwashed citizens of countries whose government finds it in their interest to tell their citizens to oppose U.S. interests. i.e., it is in the interests of countries like France, Germany, China, etc. who had pre-war oil interests in Iraq, to oppose the war. Those governments are therefore able to call on their own brainwashed citizens to universally oppose the war, and some of their propaganda and brainwashing will naturally carry over to an America already made vulnerable by years of conditioning by the U.S. government. (Consider it "propaganda blowback")
However, if other powerful countries didn't happen to have conflicting interests over Iraq or other conflicts, and didn't neutralize U.S. propaganda with their own counter-propaganda purely for their own purposes, few government-education people of any nation would have the intellectual ability to oppose the war.
You just can't hope to have a free-thinking critical democratic non-brainwashed society, and at the same time turn over the most trusting and vulnerable of our society, our children, to the government that wants to brainwash them. Much in the same way a free society needs a strict separation of church and state, a free society also needs a strict separation between education and state.
Arguing over the most insignificant forms of secret propaganda, when most nations have multi-billion dollar compulsory indoctrination programs operating right in the open, is a bit silly.
So the U.S. doesn't need to demonstrate anything. Everyone always assumed that it can "shoot down" satellites. If anything the military are probably upset that they are going to have the world watching exactly how they "shoot down" satellites.
The reason for shooting down this satelite is:
1. Make sure it doesn't land on anything. Could you imagine the political repercussions if it came crashing down on a highly populated area and killed someone?
2. To make sure any top secret technology can't be recovered by other countries.
Both these reasons are totally understandable.
If there is a cyber-war in the Middle East, why aren't the people in the Middle East telling us? Or is the Iranian state media part of Bush's conspiracy as well?
This big flaw in your conspiracy theory is that:
1. Iran's internet access is not effected. Information is coming in and out.
2. Several of the line cuts have been fully explained, and were caused by common power outages.
3. The U.S. has attacked countries in the region before (remember Iraq?), and didn't cut the lines.
4. The petrodollar issue is overblown. A devaluation of the dollar means a boost for U.S. exports, and a big drop in E.U. exports, and would be devistating to countries like China with large dollar reserves (all that money we owe China suddenly becomes worthless). Except for a few isolated countries, no one wants to see the petrodollar end... and an end of the petrodollar could actually put the U.S. in a stronger position (an overvalued dollar hurts the U.S. in the long run more than it helps it).
Assume those percentages are off by an enormous 10% margin of error... advertising still outstrips R&D.
A quick trip to Google shows that spending rose in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Except that "advertising" != "promotion".
Advertising is a much smaller subset of promotion. Promotion means things such as providing training in the use of drugs for doctors and nurses, distributing free samples of the drugs, having highly trained professionals on call to answer technical questions a doctor might have about a new drug. This type of promotion is pretty much a nessicary part of selling a drug, and even if we had an entirely socialist model of drug development a lot of these costs would still exist (we just wouldn't call it "promotion").
In 2004, about $265 billion was spend on advertising. Not too much different than U.S. drug sales in 2004. Since drug ads make such a small percentage of advertising compared to other products, it is very clear only a small chunk of "promotion" is spend on TV commercials, print ads, and the types of frivilous things people think of as "advertising". Anyone capable of basic math can easily put the lie to your assertions. You do the math... there is no way that the drug industry is spending $58 billion a year on advertising. No way! Trying to imply that drug conpanies spend a quarter of their profits on advertising is very silly.
Tax funded infrastructure is a way to tax the working poor in order to provide for the needs of the middle class and rich.. not that I am complaining - A lot of poor single mothers had to take on second jobs so that the government can subsidize my dirt cheap 100mb internet connection. Tell those suckers to flip some more burgers, I want to download mp3s and do online gaming at the same time, god-damn-it! I am not poor, I pay low taxes, and my public services are great, so the whole tax-funded infrastructure thing is definitly working to my advantage! Not so much for people living in the ghetto though.
But on a more serious level, how much tax revenue do you think is wasted? It is one thing to defend taxes, but have you ever looked into how much money the government wastes on things? I would say it isn't a stretch of the imagination that the government could provide the same infrastructure at 1/3 the cost, or less. There is so much corruption and graft, that it is suprising that any infrastructure gets built at all.
Now? it is about 2%. And why is that? The top corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 60%. The average top corporate tax rate in Europe is 30%. On average, European countries charge *HALF* the corporate taxes that the United States does... and they only charge on the revenue generated in their own country, the U.S. claims global jurisdiction on taxation.
U.S. corporations are relocating to other countries in record numbers. You can complain about corporate taxes all you want, but pretty soon there won't be any corporations left in America for you to hate and tax. But, fear not, when the U.S. is a third world economy, no evil corporations will bother to lobby the government any more... Problem solved!