No I'm not a mysogynist. I respect Mrs Dole; it's just that I've seen way too many Mrs Doles during my stays in North Carolina (where she's from). Her rise in the GOP ranks comes, in part, because she's very "nice" (in a charm-school-inculcated way). I find her husband to be the more genuine article of the two Doles, which isn't necessarily a compliment to Bob.
Remember: on election day, we don't just pull the lever for one person. It's very important to take a look at the company that person keeps, and whether or not he (or she!) will keep the more odious company (e.g. the Christian Coalition and supply-side economists) at arms-length. I don't have much faith in Liddy keeping right-wing monsters at bay, however "Oprah-like" she may seem on the campaign trail.
There's lots of good Republican women: Gov Whitman from New Jersey, and many New Englanders, like Sen Olympia Snowe. I'd vote for either one in a heartbeat, especially if Al Gore were the opponent. But Whitman and Snowe wouldn't survive the right-wing-skewed primary process, and they wouldn't stand a chance in the biggest primary of all: the "Money Primary" - Mrs Dole has spent years preparing for this run by hooking up to the necessary sources of money needed for the bid. That - and name recognition - is why she's a "viable candidate".
I drove 18 hours from Toronto so I could vote for Clinton last time (a last-minute decision); if I'm out of the country in 2000, I'll probably just smoke a Cuban cigar with the travel expenses I'll save.
Libby Dole has NEVER been ELECTED to anything in her whole life.
She was always the "token woman", appointed to be the pretty face in front of ugly policies. She's gotten the chances to put her finishing-school charm to good use, and succeeded - she's also quite capable of doing the job of POTUS. Unfortunately, behind the charm lies a snow job; her presidency would wipe the smile off of many a face.
[temp sig: my mind is in one time zone, my ass is in another; bear with me. At least I brought my password]
Glad to see you've started watching. Lott's "joke" is just another lame salvo in the campaign - he would have done better to just keep schtum and bask in the ridicule that Gore was receiving.
Unfortunately for your hypothesis, it will take quite a bit of marketing genius to pull off a GOP victory. There is much damage to undo, thanks to Hype, Barr, Livingston, Lott, and others who piled on Bubba.
BTW, Bob, not Liddy, is the real Oprah-like Dole. A prolonged campaign might reveal that.
(Thank you for going into more detail about Poland).
To me, a fully free market specifically means a 100% separation of economics and state, i.e. that the government has no power, as established constitutionally, to affect influence or regulate the economy. Under such a system there is no meaningful influence for gangsters to buy or sell. Of course, with enough systematic corruption, constitutional limitations can be made irrelevant. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
This is the part that scares me. Large corporations have already freed themselves from a good deal of oversight or regulation by governments - they subvert domestic labor or environment or tax laws by shifting capital elsewhere. They have almost total freedom in many non-Western countries. Some textile workers in Central America miraculously were able to organize themselves recently; the American contractor shut down the plant, rather than deal with collective bargaining. I don't see the gain in replacing one set of "dictators" (elected governments), with a new set (CEOs); I gravitate towards the former, since I don't get to vote for CEOs. All I see in your ideal New World is Brazilification, far and wide. Including my own back yard. And with such a Brazilification comes the (traditional) political instability of a Brazil or an Argentina. The freedom you seek is the socio-economic/political equivalent of the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theatre. So I see the quest for 100% separation as quixotic and harmful as my Christianity-mandated concern for the poor would probably look to you.
Viva Quixote!:)
Have a nice weekend. I'm glad to have elicited these good posts from you; it's the rare/. Libertarian who is able to explain things intelligently.
Clinton the most conservative Democrat since "solid South" days? You are using "conservative" in a sense alien to most "solid South" voters who have gone over to the Republicans precisely because of "conservative Democrats" like Clinton. Get your head out of your ass and pass some of that crack around for the rest of us.
The GOP have inherited Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats; they've inherited the old fellow himself, for that matter. The whole point of the DLC was to position people like Clinton and Gore as "pro-business" and moderate/center-right, which is what they were anyway; the positioning was needed in order to combat the "Democrat == liberal == commie" FUD that a generation of conservatives have been spewing. Why is it FUD? I refer you to the words of George Wallace (may God rest his soul): "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Donkey Party and the Elephant Party. Aside from a Maxine Waters or a Henry Gonzalez, the average Democrat on the Hill only differed from the average Republican on abortion rights and in rhetoric; much of the rancor is really just Bloods v Crips posturing on the periphery of issues. Or to quote Mike Malloy of Chicago's WGN (formerly of WSB and CNN; someone who spent a large chunk of his life enduring Southern politics): "Clinton's the best Republican president we've had in years".
Strange you should mention this ["If men were angels..."]. This is exactly the reason why Socialism fails so dismally. In fact, *any* economic system (or political system) will fail if the people lack honor and morality. That is the real key to a successful nation.
That was one of my points. We have a lot to learn from great economists of all stripes, whether we agree with their politics or not. But to swallow wholesale a school of thought, and advocate solutions divorced from ethics and morality, only rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic. I tend to get especially incensed at Libertarians, since I really have problems with being a slaveowner-by-proxy-and-timeshare: the all-benevolent invisible hand of the market place has seen fit to apportion a 50/hr wage to many factory workers around the world - a situation that would be more widespread if there were even fewer restrictions on businesses. Yeah, cheap goods are great, but at what expense? We end up paying for it in other ways.
All previous US ecnomic downturns ended _much_ faster. That certainly implies to me that New Deal style socialism is not the right answer to an economic downturn.
Come on. It implies nothing. "New Deal style socialism"++ didn't seem to cramp the German wirtschaftswunder that followed the "economic downturn" known as WWII. They've even managed to digest the East.
You've also ignored the rest of my post where I argued that the Great Depression was originally caused by economic interventionism, in the form of a newly established central bank making credit too cheap, leading to rising speculation.
It's the Fed's fault? Nobody put a gun to people's heads and said "speculate!", just as no-one's saying "do really bad derivatives deals!" today; no-one's saying "make economies brittle by searching for the lowest common denominator of labor laws!". The motivating factor is excessive greed. If the Fed helps it along, shame on them. But they are not to blame. Yes, some agencies can go overboard - witness the IMF making countries keep ridiculous interest rates in order to prop up their currencies. The Fed is an itty bitty lamb in comparison.
My mention of the Libertarian Party was on-topic because the poster I was replying too said he would not vote Libertarian because he believed that the Great Depression was caused by the free market. I believe I've made a decent case (considering the limited space in a post) that this is not true.
That's fair. I think he may have meant something like "rampant or unrestricted free-market", rather than just tarring the whole thing with one brush.
It happens that I am originally from a formerly communist country (take a look at my name) so this was a poor move on your part.
No, it was a deliberate move. Both because of your geographic origins and because of the "shock treatment" prescription of the Bush-appointed experts. If we're going to say how great the free market is, or how victorious capitalism has been, we should look at those countries where there is even less regulation than in the United States, and at those places where the think-tank denizens had a much freer rein than in the US.
Russia's pathology is the result of corrupt government officials selling out wholesale to so-called businessmen and other gangsters: selling off formerly state-owned industries at far below the market value as special favors, and generally passing a bunch of laws that favor the so-called "oligarchs". This is not a free market.
This is why I'm not fond of capital-L Libertarian solutions (though there's bound to be some aspects that I agree with): we already have corruption (the gangsters are just more well-heeled here); a corrupted super-free market wouldn't be any better than what Russia has now. There is no such thing as a Free Market; there is no Invisible Hand - just an iron fist in a velvet glove, backed by economic, political, and military power. I wish people would stop deifying capitalism and the free market. It's not a silver bullet. We don't live in a vacuum; there is more to life and economics than cold-blooded financial ideals. If men were angels, maybe your solutions would work.
Nontheless, despite the pain that Russia and some other post-communist nations are feeling, ultimately the process they are going through will lead to a far better society if they can get the corruption under control. I visited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic recently and already they are much better off than they were under Communism.
"They"? The US economy is only as good as the consensus opinion of it in Bed-Stuy and Appalachia; my opinion of Eastern Bloc economies would be the same, if I knew where to look. Please don't give me travelogues or macroeconomic statistics - I want to know the opinions of those at the receiving end of what's being dished out. I don't care about some amorphous "they".
Please argue with facts and logic instead of name-calling.
What names did I call you? Shall I show you what name-calling is?:) I don't know if you're aware of the origins of my little joke ending.
After that, the resulting depression was made far worse by FDR's New Deal policies - employment and output kept falling throughout much of FDR's term of office, bottommed out, and did not significantly rise again until the US entered WWII. This can clearly be seen in any graph of key economic indicators during the Depression.
Which shouldn't imply that other courses of action would have been a significant improvement over what actually happened.
I encourage you to study the subject further (and to vote Libertarian - the government screws things up just as much by messing with our economic freedoms as it does by messing with our social freedoms).
Which shouldn't imply that study of New Deal-era economic history has anything to do with the Libertarian Party platform. Talk about margins all you want, but dysfunction is dysfunction, and that's what ties the 20's to the 90's; the times are different, but the ethos is similar, and the postmortem of this boom (if there is to be a postmortem) will no doubt touch on the Roaring Twenties for comparisons.
If economic freedom is your thing, there's plenty of unfettered capitalism going on in Russia. Go take a look; you might like it there. Or if you know (or are married to) the right people, give Indonesia or Malaysia a shot.
Hey, ease up on Tipper! I should remind you that she used to be a rock'n'roll drummer. That PMRC junk? It was just trendy political maneuvering designed to shore up Al's "pro-family" credentials - I doubt the PMRC is even mentioned in Al'n'Tipper's press releases these days. You see how suck-cessful it was: he's had to wait until 2001 to become president. D'oh!
Yeah, I considered libertarians but they seem to forget what free-market capitalism did to America (prosperity in the 20s followed by....)
When I look at today's economy, I think of a steroid-enhanced athlete. We watch and cheer and marvel now, but in a few years, when the guy's body prematurely breaks down...
Hasn't someone alerted the Microserf Truth Squads to come out and join the festivities? "Microsoft Boy", where are you? And "MicroSerf", put down that bagel and set us straight! Where are the tide*.microsoft.com ACs? I don't have much time to wait; I need to go hack my I Told You Sobot so I can have it ready for the punishment phase.
First Al tries to fool us into thinking he's Joe Environment, now he wants us to think he's Joe Internet. He may be slightly more clueful than his opponents, but it probably won't show in his policies. Oh well. I need to brush up on my Dutch, I guess. Now where did I put my passport?
Were people saying things like this in the 1960's?
People have been saying things like this for millenia. The 60's was just a recent iteration of mass idealism. The top-level post was nice to see, but it was a bit Over The Top; recognition of Open Source® doesn't do a thing to change things like sweatshop labor or corrupt politicians. Sometimes I think we should all spend a little more time in the Big Room, and less time arguing on these pages.
Things did change, but more of a perturbation than a revolution (or do I just take the changes for granted?).
I think it was a revolution of sorts, but assassinations and covert ops got in the way. Every action breeds an equal and opposite reaction: the 70's "New Right", now known as plain ol' "conservatives" have, in a sense, worked hard to reverse (or create FUD about) many changes that came about back then. We now have a military-assisted War on Some Drugs... mass ennui about minority rights, women's rights, abortion rights, labor unions... censorship of music... compassion fatigue... consensus support for military ops against small third-world countries... a general hostility towards dissent...
Of course the major thing I did in the 60's was potty training - I'm an amateur 60's-ologist, not someone who really lived through all the upheavals. Ask instead some open-minded person who was actually there. Don't necessarily go for the textbook version, either.
My apologies; I shouldn't have skipped my afternoon nap:)
But the GPL and business can mix or coexist; not all business is proprietary software. It may become vitally important, as profit margins shrink, that businesses large and small embrace as many Free (or free) tools as they can, rather than be forever dedicating a chunk of their budget to proprietaryware and bigger and bigger hardware requirements. This makes the GPL also a Capitalist Tool, if I may borrow Mr Forbes' line. But if it can also de-FUD-ify the word "socialism" for the citizenry, I'm all for that. It may make for a healthier political climate.
This just clarifies the point again. GPL and business do not mix. Why? because Linux/GNU/FSF is SOCIALIST in nature. All you libertarian and capitalist freaks out there freak out and scream "GPL is about FREEDOM!". The GPL is not about freedom. The GPL embodies the ideal of socialism within the rules of a capitalist structure.
But so does a monastery. So do major professional sports leagues. Nobody complains about socialist monks or revenue-sharing socialist NBA owners.
The GPL actually restricts freedom. Nobody can "sell" a GPL product.
The GPL is a software license. Maybe it threatens me if I'm a (proprietary) software company, or my fortunes are tied to one, but that's not true in my case. I'm not trying to sell anything; if I do GPL something (RSN, sometime around Slash 1.1:) it will be audio utilities - software that, in various ways, helps reduce my cost of doing (non-software) business, and increases my flexibility in doing business.
Nobody can "sell" the linux kernel to somebody else (I dont mean selling an individual copy, I'm talking about selling the rights). This goes against the most fundamental tenets of capitalist structure - which protects the right to property and the right of sale.
The kernel belongs to Linus, doesn't it? Or "belongs" to the Community. The rights to property and right of sale are there in the license(s); it may be screwy from a traditional POV, but they're there (IANAL).
Even if you dont recognize it, the FSF/OSS/GNU/Linux phenomenon is socialist in nature.
I'll go alert the FBI. Look, nobody has a monopoly on truth. There is much to be learned from both Marx and Adam Smith, from Keynes and Friedman; a fundamentalist of any stripe is often more dangerous than an adept, open-minded pragmatist.
Near the end of the transcript of the "forum" at the expo, ESR says "Without Stallman, none of us would be here right now" and got a standing ovation.
I like that. Maybe ESR can be that explicit a little more often and a little more openly. Because the impression I got from the O'Reilly article (and some recent flamewars and articles on/.) was:
ESR: "We had to kill Free Software in order to save it."
ORA: "Agreed."
Whatever your opinions about RMS, his stances and the GPL at least provide a reference point or litmus test for software freedom. If we allow him to be FUD-ded out of the picture, it creates a vacuum in which anything (bad) can happen.
I thought the commercial Unixen adhered to a set of standards. Isn't that enough? Just because I can't run Solaris on MIPS, or SCO on Alpha (can I?), doesn't mean the whole thing is fragmented. It's variety, yes, but it's not fragmentation - that word should apply to the overall OS space (MacOS, Amiga, Linuxen/Unixen, Win*, etc); surely the learning curve is bigger when you transition from, say, a Mac to IRIX, compared to a transition from Solaris to IRIX.
I think Cuba is a pretty miserable place, but ignoring that.
Well, it's suffering a long-term embargo from a potentially great trading partner. It's suffering the pullout of Soviet investment. The new European and Canadian investments haven't made up for the fact that Cuba has two strikes against it.
Why is it that Cuban-American immigrants send millions of dollars back to their families.
The answer is a hell of a lot more complex than "Cuba's miserable"; grab some books on Cuban history that weren't written from an American Cold Warrior's POV.
Even the relatively poor here, in the US, are 10x better off than in Cuba.
That may be true now, but that would only be a relatively recent phenomenon. Cubans have (or had) much better healthcare than nearly all of the Western Hemisphere (the U.S. included). Better literacy rates (again including the U.S. in the comparison). I think for the average Cuban, the revolution was a success - life improved for them, in comparison to the faux-democracies that they lived under prior to Castro; those who are old enough to remember both Batista (and note that the current semi-capitalist reforms in areas like their tourist industry and currency have brought back some Batista-era dysfunction, like prostitution) and Castro would probably give Castro a big thumbs up.
As for those who escaped to Florida early on: note that those people were almost all light-skinned and fairly well off. Some had legitimate political reasons to run off - their lives may have been in danger. Most left because of greed, to be blunt about it. A greed that continues to show as the leaders of the exile community use Congress to further their agendas.
As for socialism being a "failure", I wish people would get off that high horse. Is capitalism a failure because Russia's economy stinks right now? Does capitalism suck because of the collapse of several Asian economies, or because of the impending disasters in Latin America? There are elements of socialism in economies from Stockholm to London to Tokyo to New York - it's not going away any time soon, especially since capitalism failed so miserably, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Moscow to Quito:)
I ask you to diversify your sources of information; methinks, for one thing, that they have been a bit too America-centric. And maybe even worse than that...
After all, everyone to the right of President Clinton is a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." And nobody in the media gave that moniker the belly laugh it deserved.
Because that's not how it works. The talking-head shows and op-ed people invite an Ann Coulter or a Barbara Olson into the mix so they can do the ridiculing. Meanwhile, no one seems to mention that Olson and her hubby are close friends of Ken Starr, and no one mentions the name of Richard Mellon Scaife, who has bankrolled many of the Get Clinton! projects (like the "Bubba killed Vince" melodrama, and the searches through every trailer park in Arkansas, amongst many other things). Frankly, I think Clinton is a GOP-wannabe, and a bad one at that; I'm the last person in the world to defend him. But if there isn't a "vast right-wing conspiracy", there's been something pretty much like it, going back to the days of Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich's late-70's prominence - it just didn't go into overdrive until they had a big fat saxophone-playing target to focus on. If you can't dig the idea of a "conspiracy", you're probably not old enough to remember the desperate aftermath of Reagan's failed 1976 campaign, or the name of his choice for a "running mate".
If you can't, for instance, explain who Father Coughlin was, or explain the trajectory of his national prominence, and how that relates to my earlier post (or to this one), then you're showing yourself to be someone who doesn't have a grasp of his own nation's history - you've already shown a script-kiddie ignorance of your own nation's politics. It's not like I'm asking you to dissect Indonesian natural-resources policy; it's your duty as a citizen to a) vote, and b) do a shitload of homework in preparation for that vote. This isn't something obscure, distant, or exotic, and it's really fucking important.
Come back once you've actually digested enough of that politics and history to be able to express your own thoughts (assuming you actually have any) in your own voice. Try to figure out why I, whose childhood heroes included Barry Goldwater and William F Buckley, would gladly piss on the shiny shoes of many of today's "conservatives". Don't waste bandwidth shitting out the pablum you've been fed.
Yeah we're well on the way there, you ultra-left and ultra-right republicrats have been making it happen gradually now for quite awhile..
If you think that Republicans and Democrats, who are so hysterically fighting over a center-right sliver of the spectrum (the current pollster-defined "sweet spot"), are "ultra-left" and "ultra-right", then maybe ewe'd do well to look in the mirror in your search for culprits.
How much do I owe you for your little piece of lunchtime entertainment?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup 'n' proud of it hyuh hyuh hyuh :)
No I'm not a mysogynist. I respect Mrs Dole; it's just that I've seen way too many Mrs Doles during my stays in North Carolina (where she's from). Her rise in the GOP ranks comes, in part, because she's very "nice" (in a charm-school-inculcated way). I find her husband to be the more genuine article of the two Doles, which isn't necessarily a compliment to Bob.
Remember: on election day, we don't just pull the lever for one person. It's very important to take a look at the company that person keeps, and whether or not he (or she!) will keep the more odious company (e.g. the Christian Coalition and supply-side economists) at arms-length. I don't have much faith in Liddy keeping right-wing monsters at bay, however "Oprah-like" she may seem on the campaign trail.
There's lots of good Republican women: Gov Whitman from New Jersey, and many New Englanders, like Sen Olympia Snowe. I'd vote for either one in a heartbeat, especially if Al Gore were the opponent. But Whitman and Snowe wouldn't survive the right-wing-skewed primary process, and they wouldn't stand a chance in the biggest primary of all: the "Money Primary" - Mrs Dole has spent years preparing for this run by hooking up to the necessary sources of money needed for the bid. That - and name recognition - is why she's a "viable candidate".
I drove 18 hours from Toronto so I could vote for Clinton last time (a last-minute decision); if I'm out of the country in 2000, I'll probably just smoke a Cuban cigar with the travel expenses I'll save.
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She was always the "token woman", appointed to be the pretty face in front of ugly policies. She's gotten the chances to put her finishing-school charm to good use, and succeeded - she's also quite capable of doing the job of POTUS. Unfortunately, behind the charm lies a snow job; her presidency would wipe the smile off of many a face.
[temp sig: my mind is in one time zone, my ass is in another; bear with me. At least I brought my password]
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Unfortunately for your hypothesis, it will take quite a bit of marketing genius to pull off a GOP victory. There is much damage to undo, thanks to Hype, Barr, Livingston, Lott, and others who piled on Bubba.
BTW, Bob, not Liddy, is the real Oprah-like Dole. A prolonged campaign might reveal that.
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myVector.addElement(new Integer(3));
mea culpa...
coffee... black... now...
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myVector.Add(Integer(3)); // or something like that
Oh, the joy of primitive data types not being objects!
1) As someone else has pointed out:
myVector.add(new Integer(3));
2) Why not just use an array? If it's that important, use JNI. Or just code the whole thing in C/C++.
I need some time to sort out HP's devilish political maneuvering.
Hangover and out :)
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To me, a fully free market specifically means a 100% separation of economics and state, i.e. that the government has no power, as established constitutionally, to affect influence or regulate the economy. Under such a system there is no meaningful influence for gangsters to buy or sell. Of course, with enough systematic corruption, constitutional limitations can be made irrelevant. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
This is the part that scares me. Large corporations have already freed themselves from a good deal of oversight or regulation by governments - they subvert domestic labor or environment or tax laws by shifting capital elsewhere. They have almost total freedom in many non-Western countries. Some textile workers in Central America miraculously were able to organize themselves recently; the American contractor shut down the plant, rather than deal with collective bargaining. I don't see the gain in replacing one set of "dictators" (elected governments), with a new set (CEOs); I gravitate towards the former, since I don't get to vote for CEOs. All I see in your ideal New World is Brazilification, far and wide. Including my own back yard. And with such a Brazilification comes the (traditional) political instability of a Brazil or an Argentina. The freedom you seek is the socio-economic/political equivalent of the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theatre. So I see the quest for 100% separation as quixotic and harmful as my Christianity-mandated concern for the poor would probably look to you.
Viva Quixote! :)
Have a nice weekend. I'm glad to have elicited these good posts from you; it's the rare /. Libertarian who is able to explain things intelligently.
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The GOP have inherited Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats; they've inherited the old fellow himself, for that matter. The whole point of the DLC was to position people like Clinton and Gore as "pro-business" and moderate/center-right, which is what they were anyway; the positioning was needed in order to combat the "Democrat == liberal == commie" FUD that a generation of conservatives have been spewing. Why is it FUD? I refer you to the words of George Wallace (may God rest his soul): "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Donkey Party and the Elephant Party. Aside from a Maxine Waters or a Henry Gonzalez, the average Democrat on the Hill only differed from the average Republican on abortion rights and in rhetoric; much of the rancor is really just Bloods v Crips posturing on the periphery of issues. Or to quote Mike Malloy of Chicago's WGN (formerly of WSB and CNN; someone who spent a large chunk of his life enduring Southern politics): "Clinton's the best Republican president we've had in years".
I hope this clears things up.
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That was one of my points. We have a lot to learn from great economists of all stripes, whether we agree with their politics or not. But to swallow wholesale a school of thought, and advocate solutions divorced from ethics and morality, only rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic. I tend to get especially incensed at Libertarians, since I really have problems with being a slaveowner-by-proxy-and-timeshare: the all-benevolent invisible hand of the market place has seen fit to apportion a 50/hr wage to many factory workers around the world - a situation that would be more widespread if there were even fewer restrictions on businesses. Yeah, cheap goods are great, but at what expense? We end up paying for it in other ways.
yr hmbl & obed svnt, PINGOU~1
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Come on. It implies nothing. "New Deal style socialism"++ didn't seem to cramp the German wirtschaftswunder that followed the "economic downturn" known as WWII. They've even managed to digest the East.
You've also ignored the rest of my post where I argued that the Great Depression was originally caused by economic interventionism, in the form of a newly established central bank making credit too cheap, leading to rising speculation.
It's the Fed's fault? Nobody put a gun to people's heads and said "speculate!", just as no-one's saying "do really bad derivatives deals!" today; no-one's saying "make economies brittle by searching for the lowest common denominator of labor laws!". The motivating factor is excessive greed. If the Fed helps it along, shame on them. But they are not to blame. Yes, some agencies can go overboard - witness the IMF making countries keep ridiculous interest rates in order to prop up their currencies. The Fed is an itty bitty lamb in comparison.
My mention of the Libertarian Party was on-topic because the poster I was replying too said he would not vote Libertarian because he believed that the Great Depression was caused by the free market. I believe I've made a decent case (considering the limited space in a post) that this is not true.
That's fair. I think he may have meant something like "rampant or unrestricted free-market", rather than just tarring the whole thing with one brush.
It happens that I am originally from a formerly communist country (take a look at my name) so this was a poor move on your part.
No, it was a deliberate move. Both because of your geographic origins and because of the "shock treatment" prescription of the Bush-appointed experts. If we're going to say how great the free market is, or how victorious capitalism has been, we should look at those countries where there is even less regulation than in the United States, and at those places where the think-tank denizens had a much freer rein than in the US.
Russia's pathology is the result of corrupt government officials selling out wholesale to so-called businessmen and other gangsters: selling off formerly state-owned industries at far below the market value as special favors, and generally passing a bunch of laws that favor the so-called "oligarchs". This is not a free market.
This is why I'm not fond of capital-L Libertarian solutions (though there's bound to be some aspects that I agree with): we already have corruption (the gangsters are just more well-heeled here); a corrupted super-free market wouldn't be any better than what Russia has now. There is no such thing as a Free Market; there is no Invisible Hand - just an iron fist in a velvet glove, backed by economic, political, and military power. I wish people would stop deifying capitalism and the free market. It's not a silver bullet. We don't live in a vacuum; there is more to life and economics than cold-blooded financial ideals. If men were angels, maybe your solutions would work.
Nontheless, despite the pain that Russia and some other post-communist nations are feeling, ultimately the process they are going through will lead to a far better society if they can get the corruption under control. I visited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic recently and already they are much better off than they were under Communism.
"They"? The US economy is only as good as the consensus opinion of it in Bed-Stuy and Appalachia; my opinion of Eastern Bloc economies would be the same, if I knew where to look. Please don't give me travelogues or macroeconomic statistics - I want to know the opinions of those at the receiving end of what's being dished out. I don't care about some amorphous "they".
Please argue with facts and logic instead of name-calling.
What names did I call you? Shall I show you what name-calling is? :) I don't know if you're aware of the origins of my little joke ending.
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Which shouldn't imply that other courses of action would have been a significant improvement over what actually happened.
I encourage you to study the subject further (and to vote Libertarian - the government screws things up just as much by messing with our economic freedoms as it does by messing with our social freedoms).
Which shouldn't imply that study of New Deal-era economic history has anything to do with the Libertarian Party platform. Talk about margins all you want, but dysfunction is dysfunction, and that's what ties the 20's to the 90's; the times are different, but the ethos is similar, and the postmortem of this boom (if there is to be a postmortem) will no doubt touch on the Roaring Twenties for comparisons.
If economic freedom is your thing, there's plenty of unfettered capitalism going on in Russia. Go take a look; you might like it there. Or if you know (or are married to) the right people, give Indonesia or Malaysia a shot.
America: Love It Or Leave It!
heh heh heh... couldn't resist!
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Hey, ease up on Tipper! I should remind you that she used to be a rock'n'roll drummer. That PMRC junk? It was just trendy political maneuvering designed to shore up Al's "pro-family" credentials - I doubt the PMRC is even mentioned in Al'n'Tipper's press releases these days. You see how suck-cessful it was: he's had to wait until 2001 to become president. D'oh!
Yeah, I considered libertarians but they seem to forget what free-market capitalism did to America (prosperity in the 20s followed by....)
When I look at today's economy, I think of a steroid-enhanced athlete. We watch and cheer and marvel now, but in a few years, when the guy's body prematurely breaks down...
There's always Greens.
Or emigration :)
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People have been saying things like this for millenia. The 60's was just a recent iteration of mass idealism. The top-level post was nice to see, but it was a bit Over The Top; recognition of Open Source® doesn't do a thing to change things like sweatshop labor or corrupt politicians. Sometimes I think we should all spend a little more time in the Big Room, and less time arguing on these pages.
Things did change, but more of a perturbation than a revolution (or do I just take the changes for granted?).
I think it was a revolution of sorts, but assassinations and covert ops got in the way. Every action breeds an equal and opposite reaction: the 70's "New Right", now known as plain ol' "conservatives" have, in a sense, worked hard to reverse (or create FUD about) many changes that came about back then. We now have a military-assisted War on Some Drugs... mass ennui about minority rights, women's rights, abortion rights, labor unions... censorship of music... compassion fatigue... consensus support for military ops against small third-world countries... a general hostility towards dissent...
Of course the major thing I did in the 60's was potty training - I'm an amateur 60's-ologist, not someone who really lived through all the upheavals. Ask instead some open-minded person who was actually there. Don't necessarily go for the textbook version, either.
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But the GPL and business can mix or coexist; not all business is proprietary software. It may become vitally important, as profit margins shrink, that businesses large and small embrace as many Free (or free) tools as they can, rather than be forever dedicating a chunk of their budget to proprietaryware and bigger and bigger hardware requirements. This makes the GPL also a Capitalist Tool, if I may borrow Mr Forbes' line. But if it can also de-FUD-ify the word "socialism" for the citizenry, I'm all for that. It may make for a healthier political climate.
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Thanks for making the Linux community look slapdash at best and illiterate at worst!
slapdash® is a registered name. I'm afraid you'll have to remove it from your post. While you're at it, remove the rest of the words as well :)
Don't give Rob all the glory. Many of us (myself included) do our very best to make slapd^H^H^H^H^H/. look slapdash and illiterate.
BZZZT!!
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But so does a monastery. So do major professional sports leagues. Nobody complains about socialist monks or revenue-sharing socialist NBA owners.
The GPL actually restricts freedom. Nobody can "sell" a GPL product.
The GPL is a software license. Maybe it threatens me if I'm a (proprietary) software company, or my fortunes are tied to one, but that's not true in my case. I'm not trying to sell anything; if I do GPL something (RSN, sometime around Slash 1.1 :) it will be audio utilities - software that, in various ways, helps reduce my cost of doing (non-software) business, and increases my flexibility in doing business.
Nobody can "sell" the linux kernel to somebody else (I dont mean selling an individual copy, I'm talking about selling the rights). This goes against the most fundamental tenets of capitalist structure - which protects the right to property and the right of sale.
The kernel belongs to Linus, doesn't it? Or "belongs" to the Community. The rights to property and right of sale are there in the license(s); it may be screwy from a traditional POV, but they're there (IANAL).
Even if you dont recognize it, the FSF/OSS/GNU/Linux phenomenon is socialist in nature.
I'll go alert the FBI. Look, nobody has a monopoly on truth. There is much to be learned from both Marx and Adam Smith, from Keynes and Friedman; a fundamentalist of any stripe is often more dangerous than an adept, open-minded pragmatist.
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I like that. Maybe ESR can be that explicit a little more often and a little more openly. Because the impression I got from the O'Reilly article (and some recent flamewars and articles on /.) was:
ESR: "We had to kill Free Software in order to save it."
ORA: "Agreed."
Whatever your opinions about RMS, his stances and the GPL at least provide a reference point or litmus test for software freedom. If we allow him to be FUD-ded out of the picture, it creates a vacuum in which anything (bad) can happen.
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Well, it's suffering a long-term embargo from a potentially great trading partner. It's suffering the pullout of Soviet investment. The new European and Canadian investments haven't made up for the fact that Cuba has two strikes against it.
Why is it that Cuban-American immigrants send millions of dollars back to their families.
The answer is a hell of a lot more complex than "Cuba's miserable"; grab some books on Cuban history that weren't written from an American Cold Warrior's POV.
Even the relatively poor here, in the US, are 10x better off than in Cuba.
That may be true now, but that would only be a relatively recent phenomenon. Cubans have (or had) much better healthcare than nearly all of the Western Hemisphere (the U.S. included). Better literacy rates (again including the U.S. in the comparison). I think for the average Cuban, the revolution was a success - life improved for them, in comparison to the faux-democracies that they lived under prior to Castro; those who are old enough to remember both Batista (and note that the current semi-capitalist reforms in areas like their tourist industry and currency have brought back some Batista-era dysfunction, like prostitution) and Castro would probably give Castro a big thumbs up.
As for those who escaped to Florida early on: note that those people were almost all light-skinned and fairly well off. Some had legitimate political reasons to run off - their lives may have been in danger. Most left because of greed, to be blunt about it. A greed that continues to show as the leaders of the exile community use Congress to further their agendas.
As for socialism being a "failure", I wish people would get off that high horse. Is capitalism a failure because Russia's economy stinks right now? Does capitalism suck because of the collapse of several Asian economies, or because of the impending disasters in Latin America? There are elements of socialism in economies from Stockholm to London to Tokyo to New York - it's not going away any time soon, especially since capitalism failed so miserably, from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Moscow to Quito :)
I ask you to diversify your sources of information; methinks, for one thing, that they have been a bit too America-centric. And maybe even worse than that...
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Although he apparently misspelled his own name :)
Can we call the MPEG-4 audio files something else? :)
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Because that's not how it works. The talking-head shows and op-ed people invite an Ann Coulter or a Barbara Olson into the mix so they can do the ridiculing. Meanwhile, no one seems to mention that Olson and her hubby are close friends of Ken Starr, and no one mentions the name of Richard Mellon Scaife, who has bankrolled many of the Get Clinton! projects (like the "Bubba killed Vince" melodrama, and the searches through every trailer park in Arkansas, amongst many other things). Frankly, I think Clinton is a GOP-wannabe, and a bad one at that; I'm the last person in the world to defend him. But if there isn't a "vast right-wing conspiracy", there's been something pretty much like it, going back to the days of Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich's late-70's prominence - it just didn't go into overdrive until they had a big fat saxophone-playing target to focus on. If you can't dig the idea of a "conspiracy", you're probably not old enough to remember the desperate aftermath of Reagan's failed 1976 campaign, or the name of his choice for a "running mate".
If you can't, for instance, explain who Father Coughlin was, or explain the trajectory of his national prominence, and how that relates to my earlier post (or to this one), then you're showing yourself to be someone who doesn't have a grasp of his own nation's history - you've already shown a script-kiddie ignorance of your own nation's politics. It's not like I'm asking you to dissect Indonesian natural-resources policy; it's your duty as a citizen to a) vote, and b) do a shitload of homework in preparation for that vote. This isn't something obscure, distant, or exotic, and it's really fucking important.
Come back once you've actually digested enough of that politics and history to be able to express your own thoughts (assuming you actually have any) in your own voice. Try to figure out why I, whose childhood heroes included Barry Goldwater and William F Buckley, would gladly piss on the shiny shoes of many of today's "conservatives". Don't waste bandwidth shitting out the pablum you've been fed.
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If you think that Republicans and Democrats, who are so hysterically fighting over a center-right sliver of the spectrum (the current pollster-defined "sweet spot"), are "ultra-left" and "ultra-right", then maybe ewe'd do well to look in the mirror in your search for culprits.
How much do I owe you for your little piece of lunchtime entertainment?
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