All the companies you mentioned have an interest in keeping space flight and expensive, government-only prospect. While hiring engineers from those companies might be OK, those companies in themselves are part of the military-industrial complex and have no interest in making cheap consumer goods.
You realize, of course, that the U.S. has gun control laws similiar to most European countries, and the image of the armed American is more a quaint stereotype than reality? The Second Amendment has largely been gutted - with Americans being allowed to own a.22 hunting rifle or a shot gun, occasionally a small pistal - but the kind of infantry style weapons that could actually be used for revolution (like in Iraq with their ubiquitous AK-47s), are strictly illegal.
The only people who could really overthrow their government are the Swiss, and since they have been at peace most of the last 400 years, have no standing military and a police force smaller than most U.S. cities, and one of the highest standards of living in the world, they don't really need to do that, now do they?
Yes, but corporations can be boycotted... corporations go out of buisness... I can CHOOSE not to do buisness with a corporation.
Where as the schools are a government monopoly. Public incompetence is forced on you with a gun to your head! Don't like a public school teacher? FUCK OFF! You are dealing with the government and they don't have to give a shit what you think! Hows them apples!?
This difference between the U.K. and the U.S., is that the fascism has yet to effect most Americans in their everyday normal lives (I mean, only a handful of people were wiretapped, legal or not... less than a thousand people have been sent to Gitmo, none U.S. citizens... etc.)... Where as in the U.K., with Anti-Social Behavior Orders, Total Video Surveilance, Nannie State Controls, Speech Codes, etc., the fascist police state infiltrates nearly every aspect of everyday life. Every person in the U.K. is already living in Orwells 1984, where Americans are living in 1930s Italy.
The Americans who leave the United States are going to be going to Canada, or Holland, or whatever... but they aren't going to be going to ol' Airstrip One, which is already turned into the nightmare that fascists in the U.S. can only thusfar aspire to.
Sorry, too late, the Second Amendment has been dead for about 30 years. You can still go hunting, or shoot at a range, provided you fill out lots of paper work and pay your licencing fees... but the kind of armed citicenry the constitution intended as a last defense against tyranny only exists in places like Switzerland.
England is far more Socialist than the United States, which essentially means it is far more State Capitalist. While it seems worse on the surface of things that America is controlled by large corporations, it is actually a slight benifit compared to European style State Capitalism, as corporations have conflicting interests and can sabatoge each other, and hence (at least in theory) slow down the spiral into total facism. While corporate power is in itself very dangerous, the U.S. can at least pit corporate interest against corporate interest to create in-fighting and gridlock, while they figure out how to stop them.
Where as the U.K. government is controlled by one single profit making corporation, the U.K. government. The upper classes and corporate power have been fully assimiliated by the State, creating a government super-corporation that knows no peers or competitors. The super-corporation indoctrinates people from birth to grave with state-corporation education, state-corporation media, and state-corporation nationalism. Where as when smaller corporations in the United States approach monopoly status in the U.S. (like Microsoft), it is unpopular, when the U.K. state-corporation achieves monopoly status (such as when they take over health care or nationalize whole industries), they are indocrinated into thinking this is somehow "progressive".
Hence, when fascist controls come up in the United States, people actually oppose them, and there are actually a minority of corporate interests that have an interest in opposing them. But since Socialism means there is only one all-powerful mega-capitalist institution, and since people have been lulled to believe that this corporation somehow has the people's interests at heart because it is an army and a national anthem, you don't find the same skepticism over total domination by the state.
Teachers are used to enjoying non-stop pandering to by the media. Any criticism of the government educational complex is squashed in main stream media, exluded from any sort of political debate, and generally supressed. Free, decentralized, uncensored democratic debate and critism about the educational system is a threat to the power structure. Dictators and tyrants like Kim Jung Il feel threatened by the Internet and want to supress it, and so do petty classroom dictators.
The teachers thought that playing up manufactured outrage about an insignificant incident like this would drum up popular support for severe restrictions on the internet... restrictions that could be used to suppress critism of government education as well as annoying YouTube videos. Fortunatly, teachers are so out of touch with the reality of working class people that they gravely underestimated how many people would see them as big cry babies instead of rightous victims in this situation.
I don't see how letting people of different races, cultures, nationalities and geographic locations freely exchange goods and services could have anything but an enourmously positive effect on both society and economy.
Whenever you hear someone dissing "globalization", it is because they want the state to dominate and severly restrict the average middle class person's economic activity. If the anti-globalization movement is so concerned with middle class consumers, then why does protecting the middle class involve sticking a gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors or religions?
How are you looking out for my interests by telling me at gunpoint that I am not allowed to buy something from a guy in China? What is so moral about restricting consentual relationships between two people. Why is it fundamentally different if a person in Detroit wants to buy something from Canada, which is 100 meters away, than if he wants to purchase something from Hawaii, which is thousands of kilometers away?
The real thing that disturbs anti-globalization people is that in a global market, there is no longer a single nationalist state entity than can completly dominate and control the lives and economy of the people. For better or for worse, Globalization is inherently anti-authoritarian, and if your political ideology is based on the state dominating society, anything anti-authoritarian is a threat to your ideology.
I have seen LED track lighting bulbs, but I have never seen CFL bulbs for the smaller bulb sizes. If you have a cool vintage lamp from the 60s, you are pretty much screwed, at least right now.
A) CFL bulbs don't use any especially scarce resource. We aren't running out of bulb ingredients anytime soon. B) Enviornmental problems created by waste CFL bulbs are insignificant, compared to the problem of CO2 emmissions and global warming that they help eleviate. C) Recycling programs, when poorly implemented (as many municiple programs are), can very well do more damage to the enviornment than just dumping the stuff. A well planned and implemented recycling program is good for the enviornment, but many recycling programs are simply work programs and graft oportunities for local municipalities and waste management companies. D) Making things more difficult for companies like Walmart to promote energy saving technology will simply discourage them from promoting energy saving technology. E) Under WEEE, the manufacturers create the infrastructure for recycling (which has an enviornmental cost in itself), and then the vast majority of people just throw their broken ipod (or whatever) in trash without recycling... creating a double problem - extra wasted resources (and hence enviornmental cost) on an under utilized recycling program and still not solving the electronics waste problem.
Walmart promoting energy saving technology is a good thing, and the only people who are really gonna have trouble with it are the people who have some other agenda with Walmart (I.E. they are a big, bad, globalized multinational corporation where "lower-class" rural people shop, and so they are evil... unlike Ikea, who is a big, bad, globalized multinational corporation where middle-class urbanites shop, and therefore is awesome! - "Progressive Politics" of course being a way for the fashionable Bourgeois to lecture the poor about being so declasse!).
I'm not sure that paying more for food is necessarily a bad thing, especially considering the epidemic of obesity. Killing, or at least wounding, two birds with one stone might be good for us in the long run, much the way people believe higher pump prices would help wean us from oil. Getting the added value of safe food seems like a win-win.
I don't think higher food costs would nessicarily result in less obesity, as obesity isn't caused by over eating so much as eating really bad things. In theory, maybe some sort of tax on unhealthy food that would make unhealthy food more expensive, and fresh fruits and veggies and stuff cheap, might effect behavior... the trouble with that is that the political process is likely to declare domestic produced food healthy, or the food for companies that employes a lot of union workers healthy (so not to lost votes from the union), or foods from a company that donates a lot of money to political campaigns as healthy... and likely to declare imports unhealthy, or foods from a person who has politically unpopular ideas as unhealthful, or foods that are associated with percieved "lower classes" as unhealthy (lots of places want to ban fast food, but none seem to be banning foie gras which is just as bad... somehow the fact that rich people like it makes it less unhealthy:) ) The political process is really to manipulatable by special interests to be trusted with that kind of thing. (And I am ignoring the whole arguement that personal lifestyle choices should be managed by the government).
Why are you such a heartless, ruthless Dubya worshiping neocon? The number one killer in the industrialized world is heart disease, and the number one cause is the saturated fats found in our meat based diets. Obviously, millions of innocent lives would be saved by banning beef outright. How can you be so cruel, and heartless as to say the government shouldn't ban beef? If a disease that has killed maybe 20 people is a threat that needs national action, clearly a disease that kills almost half of all it's population needs extreme national action! How can you spit in the face of all those people who lost loved ones to heart attacks like that?
If you aren't going to support a ban of beef, a product which carries far greater health risks inherent in it's consumption, then why do you think regulation over a disease that is so astronomically unlikely that it will only effect a handful of people is any more reasonable?
Hopefully when you are dealt a tragedy, you will be dealt far more ruth than you are showing for all the innocent victims of heart disease that you are helping to murder! Given the millions killed by heart disease, I would say you should be convicted of hate crimes for your speech because you are actually advocating the death of an entire class of people (those with heart disease) by not supporting a total beef ban!
It is time for you to get of G. W. Bush's dick, stop voting Republican and hating gays, and abandon your support for FUD based fearmongering based knee-jerk solutions to non-problems like Mad Cow Disease!
One CAN say "high price = bad" and "low price = good" when people aren't given the decision for themselves. I have no problem if people want to purchase high quality food that has been extensively tested. But I also don't have a problem if people don't want to pay the premium to have their food tested. Our society can and should accomidate people's choice to consume whatever they want. When the government decides on "The One True and Proper Way People Should Live", it is always wrong, because there is no "One Proper Way". Diversity and choice are always more desirable than a government enforced monoculture.
As for the "factory farm" comment, there is pretty much no way to provide food to millions of urban dwellers in the way people are accustomed to without technology and mass production. Every nation without a starvation problem has what could be called "factory farming". The false belief that foriegn goods are somehow worse than domestic goods are perpetuated by domestic agribuisness in order to protect markets from foriegn competitors. You will find only minute differences between farming in most industrialized nations... despite the FUD exploited to force you to purchase domestic goods. Most food regulations are not about protecting citizens (because like I said before, heart disease is the #1 killer in the industrialized world - if they were really concerned about health risks, they would ban ALL beef, instead of worring about a statisticly insignificant health risk)... food regulations are about power and control.
The FUD, protectionism, tariffs, and subsidies are used to keep developing countries (which often have a natural advantage when it comes to agriculture because of climate and cheap labor) from competing with industrialized countries. It wouldn't be so bad if countries like, say Findland, were to say "We don't want our agribuisness to have to compete with developing countries - so we are restricting the choice of our citizens in order that our agribuisness can continue - screw the people in the 3rd world"... but it is falsly being represented as an issue of "food safety" (like you somehow aren't more likely to choke on your steak than catch mad cow disease from it). Don't tell me it is about safety, because eating beef in the first place is a vastly greater health risk than BSE ever was or ever will be!
Also, movies are a global market. An explosion translates far better into a foriegn language than subtle dialog. Special effect blockbusters do much better overseas than a witty drama (much of which can be lost in the translation).
That being said, there are more indie movies available now that there ever were... you just have to see them on cable, or on netflix, or whatever.
Really? Does this only apply to Europe? Because Japan banned the import of American beef for two years because we didn't test to their standards.
Duh! That is what I am saying. They can't ban beef and say "We are banning beef because we are trying to protect domestic markets", because that would be against trade agreements. So you implement costly and difficult testing standards (offering subsidies and tax breaks to compensate local producers), knowing that a lot of beef producers will not be able to afford to meet the standards, and that it will take many more a long time to purchase the equipment and implement the standards, and then there is also the difficulty of implementing 20 or 30 different standards for 20 or 30 different meat importing countries, and you have effectively limited the import of beef without actually having to use quotas or tariffs or other things that would get you in trouble with the WTO.
Beef is far more likely to give you a heart attack, or to cause obesity or obesity related illness, and kill you that way - than the extremly small chance of mad cow disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer in most industrialized countries, and beef consumption is directly related to heart disease. If governments were truly interested in protecting the health of their populations, instead of just protecting local beef producers from competition, they would ban beef, period.
So what if your friend died. People die of all sorts of things... heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, murder, airplane crashes. Life carries a certain amount of risk. Just because your friend died of something completly unlikely to happen, doesn't excuse your rabid right-wing totalitarian police state mentality. I don't want to ban cars, or restrict people from driving just because a friend of mine died in a car accident... so just because your friend died of something that has killed orders of magnitude less people, doesn't mean we should immediatly implement costly testing, of dubious effectiveness, to prevent an illness less dangerous than ball lightening.
If I said "If only your child died of terrorism, then that is all you would care about - Therefore you are a right wing terrorist apologist for not supporting warrentless wiretapping of suspected terrorists", you would be incredulous. Your arguement is just as insane, except for the fact that your chances of getting mad cow disease are even more astronomically unlikely than being killed by a terrorist.
If you are worried about mad cow disease (as opposed to something much more likely, such as meteorites, lightening strikes, or anthrax in the mail), the answer is simple - Don't eat beef. That reduces the risk of a healthy person from contracting BSE to zero. If you are too weak to give up beef, purchase beef from organic producers who only feed their cows plant products and who strictly test their beef. If you are too damn lazy to do that, and insist on purchasing your beef for the lowest effort possible from a drive-through window, don't punish the rest of society for your laziness by making beef more expensive for them.
The cost to test a cow brain is a small fraction of the value of the meat.
It isn't just the test, it is having a specific test for Finland. If there was some sort of global harmonized testing standards, it would be easy and cheap enough to implement testing. The investment in testing would pay off right away when selling meat on the global market. But besides the cost of each test, there are the fixed costs of tooling up for the test, the cost of the associated beurocracy and liability, the cost of training, the costs of dealing with language differences (after all, this is a Finn specific law, not a globally recognized standard), the cost of local legal council. This gives domesticly produced meat a great advantage in the market, and at the same time doesn't protect anyone (as BSE is so rare as to not really be a problem... the heart disease and/or obesity caused by eating too many hamburgers or steaks is a far greater danger than BSE).
I would say Finns requiring test for Mad Cow to be more about protectionism (it is against trade rules to outright ban foriegn beef, but if you require very specific and expensive testing on beef that isn't harmonized with other countries, and then subsidize the testing for domestic producers, you can essentially sidestep trade rules).
Unless the Vegan could care less about animal welfare, and instead is concerned with the female hormones in milk, or the antibiotics in meat, and that 10 times as much food can be produced on an acre of land from plants than meat... not to mention the fact that overconsumption of meat is leading to epidemic levels of heart disease and obesity.
In fact, those earthworms are probably more healthy for you to eat than a steak (or tofurky for that matter).
The internet generation is all about doing things... not watching passively about things being done. The TV generation were thrilled with watching space travel, because life was about passive consumption to the TV generation. But with the Internet Generation, it is about putting your own videos on Youtube, hacking your game console, building your own rocket powered go-cart. The Internet generation knows that there is no way they are going to participate in NASA projects, so NASA is really nothing but a very very expensive TV production studio.
You could abolish patents altoghether... and hence eliminate patent abuse.
As for the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, the constitution worked pretty well. It took damn near 200 years for the U.S. to sink into despotism.
Socialism addresses the FACT that not all problems can be solved by Market Economies. Not all human needs are met by Market Economies. This fact became evident when the Mesopotamians got together some thousands of years ago to do something about the impact of seasonal flooding on their agriculture. They thrived as a civilization where nomadic cultures that lived in that region for the previous thousands of years failed.
No one has anything against collective action. But there is a difference between a municipality being formed to help irrigation, or a non-profit public interest organization being formed, than there is a vast centrally planned nationalized system. Very few people would have a problem with communal,citizen owned health co-operatives and such - But that is not what people who advocate "socialized medicine" want. Socialized Medicine advocates want a vast, centralized, nationalized health system, with rigid controls.
As someone who lives under socialized medicine in a rich successful first world economy, I can tell you that the quality of care in the U.S. is better. Canada prides itself on its "fantastic" medical care, but the medical care is downright third world compared to what is available in the U.S. - I have seen this first hand. I know that as an average person living in Canada, and as an average person living in the U.S., my access to healthcare dramaticly dropped when I moved to Canada from the U.S. (if I wasn't for the fact that I am young and in good health, I would be forced to move back to the U.S.). So when you say that socialized medicine will be better, there are many cases (such as in Canada) when it is worse. If Canada, with a much smaller population, and (no offense) a more compentent and less corrupt government, can't properly provide health care for its citizens with a socialized system, what makes you think that the U.S. (with a much more fucked up government) is going to be able to do it? You want to see what socialized medicine will be like in the U.S.? Look at FEMA!
It would be nice, if humans were just naturally compelled to care about their fellow humans. But by nature, humans are selfish, and distrustful. In any case - in America - pursuing this Libertarian ideal, at least for the past 10 years or so, has meant giving your vote over to the Republican Party, who damn well does want to give the government a lot of control over your life - to their perverse Theocratic Socialism. And now; Corporate Socialism (which is exactly what a patent is).
Come on now, the Republicans are not Libertarian, and the U.S. hasn't been chasing some "Libertarian Ideal". People voted for the Republicans the last 10 years because they want to "stop them thar' terrorists from attacking, and the gays from marrying, and we want drugs for old people"... The Republicans won by completly abandoning any sort of limited government ideology (which was pretty much just lip service to begin with anyway) and embrasing something closer to National Socialism. Don't think for a second that anyone Libertarian as any love for the Republicans whatsoever... Libertarian and Classical Liberal thought in America is now, unfortunatly, as obscure as Communism or something like that.
So, the solution to the problem is to create a non-transparent process, run by a small elite, under the idea that being not directly democraticly accountable to the people would make them better decision makers?
Just because old Al Greenspan was a benevolent dictator with the Fed, doesn't mean that unacountable insulated oversight boards are inherently better than a transparent democratic process. It just means that we were damn lucky to have had someone like Greenspan all those years.
Any system that relies on having an extremly talented and knowledgeable elite at its head is a flawed system - it is a non solution. Once again it is an "appeal to god" (or other divinity)... There is nothing inherent in the structure or the form of the system you are talking about that would make it a better system - you just envision having some great genius or geniuses at it's head that will make things work well. Well, ANYTHING can work well if you have benevolent genius dictators running them - but that isn't something you can garantee. You must evaluate a system assuming a corupt and selfish idiot is going to be in charge. A good system should be able to function well, even with corrupt selfish idiots running it.
Do a CFR search for drug regulations (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html), and you find thousands and thousands of pages of regulations on the whole drug development process. This isn't a simple set basic, transparent safety rules in place to protect consumers, this is vast byzentine system that micromanages the entire drug development processes.
I prefer my drugs to be proven safe and do what they claim. They are very strict because the developer's "oops" is someone else's life.
Except that "safe" is a totally subjective concept. Tell someone with AIDS, or a terminal cancer patient, that they can't get a new experimental drug that might save their lives that they can't have the drug because it hasn't gone through 10 years of clinical trials, and is therefore not "safe". Yeah, and AIDS AND CANCER AREN'T SAFE EITHER!!!! Why the hell can't the patient and their doctors decide what is safe and what is not?
I prefer to own my own body and to be able to put whatever chemical I see fit into it... than to have my body owned by the FDA who decide what chemicals I have the PRIVLEDGE to be allowed to put into it. If a drug needs to be tested for safety, let doctors, medical journals, and the medical community do the testing and publish the results in an open, competitive, and transparent process - one open to judgement by doctors and patients on how much risk THEY are willing to take. There doesn't need to be a safety dictatorship to command us all on what is the risk we should be allowed to take.
Prove this statement. Be specific instead of just waving your arms around.
It is not an immediatly proveable or disprovable statement, it is a subjective analysis of the facts. No one disagrees that drug costs are rising dramaticly, that is fact... no one disagrees that drug company profits are rising dramaticly, that is fact... No one disagrees that the drug companies make political contributions to politicians, that is a fact. No one disagrees that drug regulations and cost of compliance is rising, that is fact... No one disagrees that it now takes orders of magnitude more capital to produce a profitable drug now, than it did 50 years ago, that is fact.
Now, the question is, is the massive government beurocracy designed to protect the people, or is it designed to create a barrier to market that only a few massive-capital corporations can meet, and therefore to limit competition. Well, you feel that even though that FDA officials are appointed by politicians in the pockets of the big drug companies, the FDA by the virtue of being a government agency, are uncorrupted and tireless crusaders for our welfare. I, on the other hand, see the FDA being in the pocket of the drug companies, still continuing to increase and increase regulation, determine that there must be a profit motive to encouraging all the regulation... otherwise the drug companies would pay off politicians who reduce regulation instead of ones who do. It is a completly reasonable, and in fact most reasonable analysis of the situation to conclude that the drug companies are working with the FDA to create barriers to market so that only big-pharma can afford to do buisness.
This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
How will a government monopoly on healthcare solve health care problems? For those of use who don't have complete faith in the infailability and benovelence of the government, why should I believe that a state capitalist institution with a armed-military and police force to ensure it's monopoly, will be any better than the current oligarchy we have now?
How does putting a single centralized authority in absolute charge of all healthcare functions make it better for people? How does creating a vast, nationalized system make it any more responsive to my needs?
I realize that most socialists, it is just implicit and assumed that government is good, everything else is bad, and so the question answers itself. But, please, assume that many of us are skeptical of ALL powerful institutions, and explain exactly how socialized medicine is supposed to help us exactly. I am not trying to be a smart ass, I am really interested. Other than personal attacks for disagreeing with them, or a link to some site or book written for people who are already socialists so completly ignores any arguement on why socialism is good, no one can tell me why I should be so excited to give government so much damn power over my life.
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All the companies you mentioned have an interest in keeping space flight and expensive, government-only prospect. While hiring engineers from those companies might be OK, those companies in themselves are part of the military-industrial complex and have no interest in making cheap consumer goods.
You realize, of course, that the U.S. has gun control laws similiar to most European countries, and the image of the armed American is more a quaint stereotype than reality? The Second Amendment has largely been gutted - with Americans being allowed to own a .22 hunting rifle or a shot gun, occasionally a small pistal - but the kind of infantry style weapons that could actually be used for revolution (like in Iraq with their ubiquitous AK-47s), are strictly illegal.
The only people who could really overthrow their government are the Swiss, and since they have been at peace most of the last 400 years, have no standing military and a police force smaller than most U.S. cities, and one of the highest standards of living in the world, they don't really need to do that, now do they?
Yes, but corporations can be boycotted... corporations go out of buisness... I can CHOOSE not to do buisness with a corporation.
Where as the schools are a government monopoly. Public incompetence is forced on you with a gun to your head! Don't like a public school teacher? FUCK OFF! You are dealing with the government and they don't have to give a shit what you think! Hows them apples!?
This difference between the U.K. and the U.S., is that the fascism has yet to effect most Americans in their everyday normal lives (I mean, only a handful of people were wiretapped, legal or not... less than a thousand people have been sent to Gitmo, none U.S. citizens... etc.)... Where as in the U.K., with Anti-Social Behavior Orders, Total Video Surveilance, Nannie State Controls, Speech Codes, etc., the fascist police state infiltrates nearly every aspect of everyday life. Every person in the U.K. is already living in Orwells 1984, where Americans are living in 1930s Italy.
The Americans who leave the United States are going to be going to Canada, or Holland, or whatever... but they aren't going to be going to ol' Airstrip One, which is already turned into the nightmare that fascists in the U.S. can only thusfar aspire to.
Sorry, too late, the Second Amendment has been dead for about 30 years. You can still go hunting, or shoot at a range, provided you fill out lots of paper work and pay your licencing fees... but the kind of armed citicenry the constitution intended as a last defense against tyranny only exists in places like Switzerland.
England is far more Socialist than the United States, which essentially means it is far more State Capitalist. While it seems worse on the surface of things that America is controlled by large corporations, it is actually a slight benifit compared to European style State Capitalism, as corporations have conflicting interests and can sabatoge each other, and hence (at least in theory) slow down the spiral into total facism. While corporate power is in itself very dangerous, the U.S. can at least pit corporate interest against corporate interest to create in-fighting and gridlock, while they figure out how to stop them.
Where as the U.K. government is controlled by one single profit making corporation, the U.K. government. The upper classes and corporate power have been fully assimiliated by the State, creating a government super-corporation that knows no peers or competitors. The super-corporation indoctrinates people from birth to grave with state-corporation education, state-corporation media, and state-corporation nationalism. Where as when smaller corporations in the United States approach monopoly status in the U.S. (like Microsoft), it is unpopular, when the U.K. state-corporation achieves monopoly status (such as when they take over health care or nationalize whole industries), they are indocrinated into thinking this is somehow "progressive".
Hence, when fascist controls come up in the United States, people actually oppose them, and there are actually a minority of corporate interests that have an interest in opposing them. But since Socialism means there is only one all-powerful mega-capitalist institution, and since people have been lulled to believe that this corporation somehow has the people's interests at heart because it is an army and a national anthem, you don't find the same skepticism over total domination by the state.
Teachers are used to enjoying non-stop pandering to by the media. Any criticism of the government educational complex is squashed in main stream media, exluded from any sort of political debate, and generally supressed. Free, decentralized, uncensored democratic debate and critism about the educational system is a threat to the power structure. Dictators and tyrants like Kim Jung Il feel threatened by the Internet and want to supress it, and so do petty classroom dictators.
The teachers thought that playing up manufactured outrage about an insignificant incident like this would drum up popular support for severe restrictions on the internet... restrictions that could be used to suppress critism of government education as well as annoying YouTube videos. Fortunatly, teachers are so out of touch with the reality of working class people that they gravely underestimated how many people would see them as big cry babies instead of rightous victims in this situation.
I don't see how letting people of different races, cultures, nationalities and geographic locations freely exchange goods and services could have anything but an enourmously positive effect on both society and economy.
Whenever you hear someone dissing "globalization", it is because they want the state to dominate and severly restrict the average middle class person's economic activity. If the anti-globalization movement is so concerned with middle class consumers, then why does protecting the middle class involve sticking a gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors or religions?
How are you looking out for my interests by telling me at gunpoint that I am not allowed to buy something from a guy in China? What is so moral about restricting consentual relationships between two people. Why is it fundamentally different if a person in Detroit wants to buy something from Canada, which is 100 meters away, than if he wants to purchase something from Hawaii, which is thousands of kilometers away?
The real thing that disturbs anti-globalization people is that in a global market, there is no longer a single nationalist state entity than can completly dominate and control the lives and economy of the people. For better or for worse, Globalization is inherently anti-authoritarian, and if your political ideology is based on the state dominating society, anything anti-authoritarian is a threat to your ideology.
I have seen LED track lighting bulbs, but I have never seen CFL bulbs for the smaller bulb sizes. If you have a cool vintage lamp from the 60s, you are pretty much screwed, at least right now.
Except that:
A) CFL bulbs don't use any especially scarce resource. We aren't running out of bulb ingredients anytime soon.
B) Enviornmental problems created by waste CFL bulbs are insignificant, compared to the problem of CO2 emmissions and global warming that they help eleviate.
C) Recycling programs, when poorly implemented (as many municiple programs are), can very well do more damage to the enviornment than just dumping the stuff. A well planned and implemented recycling program is good for the enviornment, but many recycling programs are simply work programs and graft oportunities for local municipalities and waste management companies.
D) Making things more difficult for companies like Walmart to promote energy saving technology will simply discourage them from promoting energy saving technology.
E) Under WEEE, the manufacturers create the infrastructure for recycling (which has an enviornmental cost in itself), and then the vast majority of people just throw their broken ipod (or whatever) in trash without recycling... creating a double problem - extra wasted resources (and hence enviornmental cost) on an under utilized recycling program and still not solving the electronics waste problem.
Walmart promoting energy saving technology is a good thing, and the only people who are really gonna have trouble with it are the people who have some other agenda with Walmart (I.E. they are a big, bad, globalized multinational corporation where "lower-class" rural people shop, and so they are evil... unlike Ikea, who is a big, bad, globalized multinational corporation where middle-class urbanites shop, and therefore is awesome! - "Progressive Politics" of course being a way for the fashionable Bourgeois to lecture the poor about being so declasse!).
I'm not sure that paying more for food is necessarily a bad thing, especially considering the epidemic of obesity. Killing, or at least wounding, two birds with one stone might be good for us in the long run, much the way people believe higher pump prices would help wean us from oil. Getting the added value of safe food seems like a win-win.
:) ) The political process is really to manipulatable by special interests to be trusted with that kind of thing. (And I am ignoring the whole arguement that personal lifestyle choices should be managed by the government).
I don't think higher food costs would nessicarily result in less obesity, as obesity isn't caused by over eating so much as eating really bad things. In theory, maybe some sort of tax on unhealthy food that would make unhealthy food more expensive, and fresh fruits and veggies and stuff cheap, might effect behavior... the trouble with that is that the political process is likely to declare domestic produced food healthy, or the food for companies that employes a lot of union workers healthy (so not to lost votes from the union), or foods from a company that donates a lot of money to political campaigns as healthy... and likely to declare imports unhealthy, or foods from a person who has politically unpopular ideas as unhealthful, or foods that are associated with percieved "lower classes" as unhealthy (lots of places want to ban fast food, but none seem to be banning foie gras which is just as bad... somehow the fact that rich people like it makes it less unhealthy
Why are you such a heartless, ruthless Dubya worshiping neocon? The number one killer in the industrialized world is heart disease, and the number one cause is the saturated fats found in our meat based diets. Obviously, millions of innocent lives would be saved by banning beef outright. How can you be so cruel, and heartless as to say the government shouldn't ban beef? If a disease that has killed maybe 20 people is a threat that needs national action, clearly a disease that kills almost half of all it's population needs extreme national action! How can you spit in the face of all those people who lost loved ones to heart attacks like that?
If you aren't going to support a ban of beef, a product which carries far greater health risks inherent in it's consumption, then why do you think regulation over a disease that is so astronomically unlikely that it will only effect a handful of people is any more reasonable?
Hopefully when you are dealt a tragedy, you will be dealt far more ruth than you are showing for all the innocent victims of heart disease that you are helping to murder! Given the millions killed by heart disease, I would say you should be convicted of hate crimes for your speech because you are actually advocating the death of an entire class of people (those with heart disease) by not supporting a total beef ban!
It is time for you to get of G. W. Bush's dick, stop voting Republican and hating gays, and abandon your support for FUD based fearmongering based knee-jerk solutions to non-problems like Mad Cow Disease!
One can't simply say, "high price = bad; low price = good."
One CAN say "high price = bad" and "low price = good" when people aren't given the decision for themselves. I have no problem if people want to purchase high quality food that has been extensively tested. But I also don't have a problem if people don't want to pay the premium to have their food tested. Our society can and should accomidate people's choice to consume whatever they want. When the government decides on "The One True and Proper Way People Should Live", it is always wrong, because there is no "One Proper Way". Diversity and choice are always more desirable than a government enforced monoculture.
As for the "factory farm" comment, there is pretty much no way to provide food to millions of urban dwellers in the way people are accustomed to without technology and mass production. Every nation without a starvation problem has what could be called "factory farming". The false belief that foriegn goods are somehow worse than domestic goods are perpetuated by domestic agribuisness in order to protect markets from foriegn competitors. You will find only minute differences between farming in most industrialized nations... despite the FUD exploited to force you to purchase domestic goods. Most food regulations are not about protecting citizens (because like I said before, heart disease is the #1 killer in the industrialized world - if they were really concerned about health risks, they would ban ALL beef, instead of worring about a statisticly insignificant health risk)... food regulations are about power and control.
The FUD, protectionism, tariffs, and subsidies are used to keep developing countries (which often have a natural advantage when it comes to agriculture because of climate and cheap labor) from competing with industrialized countries. It wouldn't be so bad if countries like, say Findland, were to say "We don't want our agribuisness to have to compete with developing countries - so we are restricting the choice of our citizens in order that our agribuisness can continue - screw the people in the 3rd world"... but it is falsly being represented as an issue of "food safety" (like you somehow aren't more likely to choke on your steak than catch mad cow disease from it). Don't tell me it is about safety, because eating beef in the first place is a vastly greater health risk than BSE ever was or ever will be!
Also, movies are a global market. An explosion translates far better into a foriegn language than subtle dialog. Special effect blockbusters do much better overseas than a witty drama (much of which can be lost in the translation).
That being said, there are more indie movies available now that there ever were... you just have to see them on cable, or on netflix, or whatever.
Really? Does this only apply to Europe? Because Japan banned the import of American beef for two years because we didn't test to their standards.
Duh! That is what I am saying. They can't ban beef and say "We are banning beef because we are trying to protect domestic markets", because that would be against trade agreements. So you implement costly and difficult testing standards (offering subsidies and tax breaks to compensate local producers), knowing that a lot of beef producers will not be able to afford to meet the standards, and that it will take many more a long time to purchase the equipment and implement the standards, and then there is also the difficulty of implementing 20 or 30 different standards for 20 or 30 different meat importing countries, and you have effectively limited the import of beef without actually having to use quotas or tariffs or other things that would get you in trouble with the WTO.
Beef is far more likely to give you a heart attack, or to cause obesity or obesity related illness, and kill you that way - than the extremly small chance of mad cow disease. Heart disease is the #1 killer in most industrialized countries, and beef consumption is directly related to heart disease. If governments were truly interested in protecting the health of their populations, instead of just protecting local beef producers from competition, they would ban beef, period.
So what if your friend died. People die of all sorts of things... heart attacks, car accidents, cancer, murder, airplane crashes. Life carries a certain amount of risk. Just because your friend died of something completly unlikely to happen, doesn't excuse your rabid right-wing totalitarian police state mentality. I don't want to ban cars, or restrict people from driving just because a friend of mine died in a car accident... so just because your friend died of something that has killed orders of magnitude less people, doesn't mean we should immediatly implement costly testing, of dubious effectiveness, to prevent an illness less dangerous than ball lightening.
If I said "If only your child died of terrorism, then that is all you would care about - Therefore you are a right wing terrorist apologist for not supporting warrentless wiretapping of suspected terrorists", you would be incredulous. Your arguement is just as insane, except for the fact that your chances of getting mad cow disease are even more astronomically unlikely than being killed by a terrorist.
If you are worried about mad cow disease (as opposed to something much more likely, such as meteorites, lightening strikes, or anthrax in the mail), the answer is simple - Don't eat beef. That reduces the risk of a healthy person from contracting BSE to zero. If you are too weak to give up beef, purchase beef from organic producers who only feed their cows plant products and who strictly test their beef. If you are too damn lazy to do that, and insist on purchasing your beef for the lowest effort possible from a drive-through window, don't punish the rest of society for your laziness by making beef more expensive for them.
The cost to test a cow brain is a small fraction of the value of the meat.
It isn't just the test, it is having a specific test for Finland. If there was some sort of global harmonized testing standards, it would be easy and cheap enough to implement testing. The investment in testing would pay off right away when selling meat on the global market. But besides the cost of each test, there are the fixed costs of tooling up for the test, the cost of the associated beurocracy and liability, the cost of training, the costs of dealing with language differences (after all, this is a Finn specific law, not a globally recognized standard), the cost of local legal council. This gives domesticly produced meat a great advantage in the market, and at the same time doesn't protect anyone (as BSE is so rare as to not really be a problem... the heart disease and/or obesity caused by eating too many hamburgers or steaks is a far greater danger than BSE).
Yes, but the Finns have a government that serves the people.
s ive+in+Finland+by+European+standards/1076153030941 ), and given the fact that 'Mad Cow' disease is so astronomically unlikely to infect anyone when absolutly no precautions are being taken, any reasonable person has to question the cost/value of food paranoia.
Given the fact that Finns pay (on average) 22% more for food than the EU average ( http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Food+still+expen
I would say Finns requiring test for Mad Cow to be more about protectionism (it is against trade rules to outright ban foriegn beef, but if you require very specific and expensive testing on beef that isn't harmonized with other countries, and then subsidize the testing for domestic producers, you can essentially sidestep trade rules).
Unless the Vegan could care less about animal welfare, and instead is concerned with the female hormones in milk, or the antibiotics in meat, and that 10 times as much food can be produced on an acre of land from plants than meat... not to mention the fact that overconsumption of meat is leading to epidemic levels of heart disease and obesity.
In fact, those earthworms are probably more healthy for you to eat than a steak (or tofurky for that matter).
The internet generation is all about doing things... not watching passively about things being done. The TV generation were thrilled with watching space travel, because life was about passive consumption to the TV generation. But with the Internet Generation, it is about putting your own videos on Youtube, hacking your game console, building your own rocket powered go-cart. The Internet generation knows that there is no way they are going to participate in NASA projects, so NASA is really nothing but a very very expensive TV production studio.
You could abolish patents altoghether... and hence eliminate patent abuse.
As for the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, the constitution worked pretty well. It took damn near 200 years for the U.S. to sink into despotism.
Socialism addresses the FACT that not all problems can be solved by Market Economies. Not all human needs are met by Market Economies. This fact became evident when the Mesopotamians got together some thousands of years ago to do something about the impact of seasonal flooding on their agriculture. They thrived as a civilization where nomadic cultures that lived in that region for the previous thousands of years failed.
No one has anything against collective action. But there is a difference between a municipality being formed to help irrigation, or a non-profit public interest organization being formed, than there is a vast centrally planned nationalized system. Very few people would have a problem with communal,citizen owned health co-operatives and such - But that is not what people who advocate "socialized medicine" want. Socialized Medicine advocates want a vast, centralized, nationalized health system, with rigid controls.
As someone who lives under socialized medicine in a rich successful first world economy, I can tell you that the quality of care in the U.S. is better. Canada prides itself on its "fantastic" medical care, but the medical care is downright third world compared to what is available in the U.S. - I have seen this first hand. I know that as an average person living in Canada, and as an average person living in the U.S., my access to healthcare dramaticly dropped when I moved to Canada from the U.S. (if I wasn't for the fact that I am young and in good health, I would be forced to move back to the U.S.). So when you say that socialized medicine will be better, there are many cases (such as in Canada) when it is worse. If Canada, with a much smaller population, and (no offense) a more compentent and less corrupt government, can't properly provide health care for its citizens with a socialized system, what makes you think that the U.S. (with a much more fucked up government) is going to be able to do it? You want to see what socialized medicine will be like in the U.S.? Look at FEMA!
It would be nice, if humans were just naturally compelled to care about their fellow humans. But by nature, humans are selfish, and distrustful. In any case - in America - pursuing this Libertarian ideal, at least for the past 10 years or so, has meant giving your vote over to the Republican Party, who damn well does want to give the government a lot of control over your life - to their perverse Theocratic Socialism. And now; Corporate Socialism (which is exactly what a patent is).
Come on now, the Republicans are not Libertarian, and the U.S. hasn't been chasing some "Libertarian Ideal". People voted for the Republicans the last 10 years because they want to "stop them thar' terrorists from attacking, and the gays from marrying, and we want drugs for old people"... The Republicans won by completly abandoning any sort of limited government ideology (which was pretty much just lip service to begin with anyway) and embrasing something closer to National Socialism. Don't think for a second that anyone Libertarian as any love for the Republicans whatsoever... Libertarian and Classical Liberal thought in America is now, unfortunatly, as obscure as Communism or something like that.
So, the solution to the problem is to create a non-transparent process, run by a small elite, under the idea that being not directly democraticly accountable to the people would make them better decision makers?
Just because old Al Greenspan was a benevolent dictator with the Fed, doesn't mean that unacountable insulated oversight boards are inherently better than a transparent democratic process. It just means that we were damn lucky to have had someone like Greenspan all those years.
Any system that relies on having an extremly talented and knowledgeable elite at its head is a flawed system - it is a non solution. Once again it is an "appeal to god" (or other divinity)... There is nothing inherent in the structure or the form of the system you are talking about that would make it a better system - you just envision having some great genius or geniuses at it's head that will make things work well. Well, ANYTHING can work well if you have benevolent genius dictators running them - but that isn't something you can garantee. You must evaluate a system assuming a corupt and selfish idiot is going to be in charge. A good system should be able to function well, even with corrupt selfish idiots running it.
Could you please point out which regulations you are talking about?
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Here is an example... this is just the regulations regarding filing the paperwork in order to be allowed to market a drug:
http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate
Here are regulations for the labeling of drugs:
http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate
Do a CFR search for drug regulations (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html), and you find thousands and thousands of pages of regulations on the whole drug development process. This isn't a simple set basic, transparent safety rules in place to protect consumers, this is vast byzentine system that micromanages the entire drug development processes.
I prefer my drugs to be proven safe and do what they claim. They are very strict because the developer's "oops" is someone else's life.
Except that "safe" is a totally subjective concept. Tell someone with AIDS, or a terminal cancer patient, that they can't get a new experimental drug that might save their lives that they can't have the drug because it hasn't gone through 10 years of clinical trials, and is therefore not "safe". Yeah, and AIDS AND CANCER AREN'T SAFE EITHER!!!! Why the hell can't the patient and their doctors decide what is safe and what is not?
I prefer to own my own body and to be able to put whatever chemical I see fit into it... than to have my body owned by the FDA who decide what chemicals I have the PRIVLEDGE to be allowed to put into it. If a drug needs to be tested for safety, let doctors, medical journals, and the medical community do the testing and publish the results in an open, competitive, and transparent process - one open to judgement by doctors and patients on how much risk THEY are willing to take. There doesn't need to be a safety dictatorship to command us all on what is the risk we should be allowed to take.
Prove this statement. Be specific instead of just waving your arms around.
It is not an immediatly proveable or disprovable statement, it is a subjective analysis of the facts. No one disagrees that drug costs are rising dramaticly, that is fact... no one disagrees that drug company profits are rising dramaticly, that is fact... No one disagrees that the drug companies make political contributions to politicians, that is a fact. No one disagrees that drug regulations and cost of compliance is rising, that is fact... No one disagrees that it now takes orders of magnitude more capital to produce a profitable drug now, than it did 50 years ago, that is fact.
Now, the question is, is the massive government beurocracy designed to protect the people, or is it designed to create a barrier to market that only a few massive-capital corporations can meet, and therefore to limit competition. Well, you feel that even though that FDA officials are appointed by politicians in the pockets of the big drug companies, the FDA by the virtue of being a government agency, are uncorrupted and tireless crusaders for our welfare. I, on the other hand, see the FDA being in the pocket of the drug companies, still continuing to increase and increase regulation, determine that there must be a profit motive to encouraging all the regulation... otherwise the drug companies would pay off politicians who reduce regulation instead of ones who do. It is a completly reasonable, and in fact most reasonable analysis of the situation to conclude that the drug companies are working with the FDA to create barriers to market so that only big-pharma can afford to do buisness.
This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
How will a government monopoly on healthcare solve health care problems? For those of use who don't have complete faith in the infailability and benovelence of the government, why should I believe that a state capitalist institution with a armed-military and police force to ensure it's monopoly, will be any better than the current oligarchy we have now?
How does putting a single centralized authority in absolute charge of all healthcare functions make it better for people? How does creating a vast, nationalized system make it any more responsive to my needs?
I realize that most socialists, it is just implicit and assumed that government is good, everything else is bad, and so the question answers itself. But, please, assume that many of us are skeptical of ALL powerful institutions, and explain exactly how socialized medicine is supposed to help us exactly. I am not trying to be a smart ass, I am really interested. Other than personal attacks for disagreeing with them, or a link to some site or book written for people who are already socialists so completly ignores any arguement on why socialism is good, no one can tell me why I should be so excited to give government so much damn power over my life.