Or, are you an Rand-toting, Paul-worshipping libertard?
Well, at least you're true to form. Progressive Playbook Rule #1: Never attempt to address issues or history, always attack whoever is talking with any slur or insult that's handy.
See, I could bring up the history of Progressives doing things like locking away Japanese families because of their DNA, and instead of acknowledging that historical fact, you would come up with some new personal attack in a feeble attempt to pretend that another piece of history didn't happen. You're obviously too chicken to google on the topic of eugenics, lest you find that many progressive luminaries were really for it until Hitler made it too unfashionable even for them to keep selling.
On whose doorstep would you lay the entrenched welfare culture, the crushingly huge and exploding entitlement programs, the fact that half of the people in the country aren't asked to pay any income taxes, and all the rest? Never mind. You know I'm right. You're just reacting according to your assigned role of "useful idiot," right out of the playbook. Keep up the good work, Progressive Citizen! You should be able to spout some more ad hominem venom before the night is over, should you bump into any more unpleasant reminders of reality.
Progressive have been behind every great decade in the US.
Ah, yes. Progressives. Characterized by their movement's early and passsionate embrace of things like eugenics ("Really, it's for their own good - we're the best ones to decide who should be reproducing, don't you think?"). Fond of creating entire chunks of civilization that are simultaneously dependent on and resentful of a trickle of dole (tended to, of course, by ranks of career Dole Overseers who aspire to that position mostly while in Progressive-heavy lefty schools). Fond of enslaving one group of people so that they can claim to be taking care of another group who the say - because of their skin color - can't possibly look out for themselves, ever. Ah, Progressives - those fine young men and women who so staunchly protect freedom of speech unless they happen to disagree with what's being said, and then it must be made illegal, newspapers must be stolen and destroyed, and people speaking must be shouted down in the name of freedom of speech.
Yeah, who's the mysoginistic, racist, moronic group, I wonder? The ones who insist on dividing everyone into race and grievance groups? The ones who proclaim prosperity to be evil, but who will grant a properous person a pass if they (publicly, anyway) say that the Progressives have it all right, after all? Ah, Progressives, ardent defenders of ugly mediocrity or worse in every school, lest a labor union give in an admit that there are such things as lousy teacher on the payroll. Progressives, who would rather see a bright student's intellect burn away than lose a member of their forced-to-contribute-to-specific-political-operations-if-they-want-to-teach plantation.
Every great decade in the US has happened despite them, not because of them. They made the Great Depression longer and more ruinous, and we have a fanastic history-repeating-itself example of that sort of lunacy going on again, right now.
Just about ALL of the "evolution" I've seen in language lately is actually the poor translation to the written word from the sounds of words that people repeat without actually thinking. The result is usually the loss of clarity. The reduction in communication. Typical would be the inability of millions of people to distinguish between "loose" and "lose" when writing. Likewise when people lazily repeat a string a of syllables without actually thinking about what they mean, and end up saying the opposite of what they mean. A la, "I could care less" (when they mean exactly the opposite, and they've made the error out of laziness, not deliberate irony).
We're not taking about differences like "the audience is rambunctious tonight" vs. "the audience are happy to be here," where the American vs. British difference in treating "the audience" as singular or plural marks different evolution in the usage but doesn't diminish the ability to convey clear meaning. No, most of the internet-facing crappy spelling and grammar these days marks an active disinterest in clear communication. And that marks a bunch of sleepy, lazy minds who assume it's always OK to make everyone else do the work of guessing and parsing and asking for clarification.
Some of the smaller minded people in incapable of separating socialism from communism
Is that anything like the people who can't distinguish between supporters of market economics and Christians? Or those too caught up in their own high dudgeon to realize that it's possible to have principled reasons for disliking both illegal immigration and racists? Do you also consider "small minded" those who scream that anyone opposed to Obama's policies on one matter or another are racists? Or are people who fail to note your choices of appropriate labels for two kinds of Nanny State collectivism "small minded," but people who knowingly spout nonsense about the racism behind differences of opinoin on tax policy are...what, politically articulate geniuses?
I'd shake my head and wish you knew better, but of course you do know better, and you're just being a typical hypocrite, awash in your own faux condescension. You're not as clever as you think you are, and far more transparent.
lol I remember that... Nevermind that their ideas were often trivially shown to be unworkable
Hell, I remember when "never mind" was a phrase made up of two words, just like "always mind," as in "one should always mind one's grammar so as not to be thought a twit." Unless I missed the memo, and the proper usage is now "alwaysmind." It's possible, I suppose, since I've seen in a lot. Or is that, "alot," now, even though that's supposed to be a reference to a quantity of something (implying a large amount)... you know, one lot of whatever it is. A lot. Using those words contracted to together in writing seems alittle silly. Sort of like nevermind.
"Never mind" is a directive. As in, "never put your mind to this" (as in, "don't bother thinking about it."). OK, carryon.
No, I understand exactly what you want. You want to force people to provide services they may or may not otherwise want to provide. You want to impost an editorial position on other people's speech and business policies, to suit your own agenda. You've made that very clear.
You are ignorant and clueless. Hugo Chavez...
I'm not ignorant. You are deliberately cherry picking for the sake of spin. Try reading up on things like his dictates about broadcast music ratios, mandated government formatting of entertainment, etc. Of course you already know about that, but it takes the fun out of your love for Chavez to keep it in mind.
what I am defending is that everyone should be able to speak freely without having anyone put up any restrictions
And in order to fulfill your vision, you want to tell people what they must say, what they must allow their computers and networks to be used for etc. You want a business running a search engine, for example, to be forced to serve people and interests that they do not wish to serve. You want them to be slaves to you.
We are talking about preserving freedom, while you are advocating that private institutions should have the right to limit that freedom in any way they see fit. Understand now?
I understand that you want to define one person's freedom as being defined by what another person is forced to do for them. For you, a person is only free if everyone else is forced to do whatever that person wants. Which would be really funny if it wasn't so sinister.
If your local book store has decided not to stock a complete collection of French literature translated into Swahili, would you say that they are limiting someone else's freedom? Well, yes, you've already said that. But please defend that absurd notion.
Just so we are clear, the GP is saying that the companies above should have the freedom to reach their audiences and customers without being selectively blocked by ISPs.
There is no such freedom. The ISPs are businesses running separate networks for their own customers. They happen to make agreemens between them to pass along traffic as they see fit, though peering relationships. No business is obliged to carry any traffic they don't like, no more than they have to allow people to use their office parking lot as a cut-through connecting two nearby roads.
If an ISP's customers don't like how they're filtering or shaping traffic, they should take it up with the company from whom they are buying connectivity to other networks.
Freedom is not having my business's website blocked by my customers' ISP.
You don't have a relationship with your custome's ISP. Your customer does. He has the freedom to choose an ISP that shapes/filters traffic to his taste, or to choose one that doesn't. Or are you saying that the government is making your customer's ISP block access to your web site?
OK, so we're clear now. You want the ability to control (to limit the freedom) of other people as they communicate and run their businesses. Like every evil Nanny State buffoon - just like Hugo Chavez "protecting" his people's liberty by shutting down radio stations that didn't say the things and play the music as he directed - you are actually trotting back out one of history's ugliest urges. You want to be able to tell the New York Times, the BBC, Google, your local radio stations, Microsoft, all of the bloggers that ramble online, every book publisher, people who choose which songs to perform songs in bars (or used to be able to choose, before your illiberal Orwellian anti-freedom kicked in)... you want to define freedom for them by denyin them choice.
You want the editor of a web site to wake up in the morning, and go to work according to you rules, rather than in the service of their own vision and the audience they want to serve. You want slaves, and you're lamely - like every person with totalitarian sensibilities - trying to frame it as doing your slaves a favor.
The best part is how you characterize competing businesses that have brought huge new access to information - access unprecedented in human history - as being those who are limiting freedom. What a bunch of ignorant, perspective-less, whiny, adolescent, short-sighted nonsense. Or, you're exactly what you seem to be: someone who knows all of that, but is actively pursuing the sort of government control over private people and their communication that is and has always been seen in the worst of abusive nations. You'd fit right into North Korea, where they defend liberty in exactly the way you seem to prefer.
Who knew that having our access to information routinely censored meant we were free.
Ah, so your idea of freedom is being able to make slaves out of other people? Your idea of freedom is having the government dictate what someone running a web site must say, or must allow other people to say? Talk about your disingenuou hypocrisy.
So, what sort of arrangements do I need to make, under your system, where I get tell you how to do your communicating? Will you enjoy your the freedom of my getting to tell you how you have to speak? Please, do tell.
In America, censorship is only bad if the gubbmint is doing it.
Right. Because it only is censorship when the government is doing it. That's what the first amendment is all about: limiting the government's ability to mess with people's expression. That same constitution is also very serious about freedom to assemble and carry on doing your own thing... including doing things like running a business where you can say what goes on in your own publications. Google being able to limit what shows on their web site is freedom, and it's a good thing, too.
So, you make the legal distinction between being lucky and being inspired? Please provide an example of the language you would like to see in the tax code, and tax rates you would like to see applied to each of those situations. Please be specific. For example,.take two people who are starting up small restaurants, and one of them does a lot more profitable business one season because some celebrity tweeted about having a nice meal there. What should be tax penalty that person should pay for having a stroke of luck that the other business owner did not? Again, please be specific.
Those stations you say are pushing lefty politics would be considered right-wing in nearly every other first world country.
How far other countries have slipped into complete, bankrupted Nanny State-ness doesn't alter the context of the discussion here. The point is that we have the usual noise and breathless, shrill whining about a single cable channel, while dozens of other media outlets proudly wear their politics (or those of their audiences) on their sleeves, and that does't bother those who are bitching about one outlet doing so. I'm not talking about degrees of lefty/righty. I'm talking about hypocrisy.
How come everyone who's never been responsible for the consequences of not having a handle on those issues is so unable to use the word "fascist" correctly? Red lights in traffic are fascist! Banks that won't cash your checks when you have nothing in your account are fascist! Dogs that bark at squirrels are fascists! Government agencies that provide books to students for their education, but then discipline the students for tearing out the pages in order to make paper airplanes are fascists! Teachers that expect their students to pay attention in class: total fascists!
Congratulations! You've just described how FOX News works
Except, he cited a specific example of lies and fraud in the service of election manipulation by a high profile producer, anchor, and huge media business. You, on other hand, just hate Fox for not actively and aggressively (a la MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NYT and all the rest) pushing the same lefty politics as the other major outlets. As for your hatred of successful people: please spread it around, why not? Throw a little of your seething vitriol at rich hypocrites like Michael Moore or George Soros, so that you don't instantly short circuit your rants before they even get warmed up.
Not so. I have a say. All voters have a say. I am annoyed that half of the people in the country vote for people who make sure that they don't have to pay taxes, while always asking those of us who are saddled with that burden to carry more and more weight. Voting for what other people must spend their day working to produce while you don't have to give - only receive - is actually evil.
No, that should be "due to not making a plausible case for their product being even remotely profitable to make and sell any time in the intermmediate future" - because if it had been, some of the trillions of dollars in desparate-to-invest-in-something-viable cash that's sitting out there in private hands would have been beating a path to their door. We should be thrilled they didn't have the political connections that Solyndra did. Just saved the half of the population that does pay income taxes a pile of cash. Good.
Excellent straw man! No, actually, it's lame. How do you get to complaining about a fighter jet program from my complaint about taxpayers around the country giving cash to the people who buy these cars? These two things couldn't be more unrelated. Where's all the bitching about the 1%-ers getting away with stuff? Ah, it's about sexy, expensive electric cars, so it's OK to give people discounts on those with money taken from taxpayers to pay the interest on the capital borrowed from China to make the produce feel more competitive. Got it.
I'm surprised more/.ers aren't impressed with this car...
I'd be more impressed if the car was sellable as-is without collecting $1.5 billion from fellow Americans who won't be able to afford these toys in order to make the price more attractive via subsidies to people for whom the green faux prestige is more important than money anyway. Absurd.
I mean, really. I just cannot wait to be the first person on my block to go to work and spend part of each day working to pay for the help I'll be giving someone who can afford $50k-plus for one of these. Chicks will so dig the fact that I've helped to buy a bunch of these for vain faux-greenies with lots of money. I will be the man when I file my taxes! I wonder if my name will be stamped somewhere into part of that other guy's shiny new car?
A see a fallacious pattern, in the service of rhetoric, sure. But you know perfectly well you're ignoring the key part of this. It's not about "denying climate change." It's about raising an eyebrow when someone like Al Gore, who's positioned himself and his friends to make millions of dollars off of their hysterical characterizations of the situation, insist that human activity is the (and the only) driver of climate change. And that putting US tax dollars into specific funds, projects, and foreign investment groups - in which he is invariably invested - will solve the problem.
I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation. And there are millions of people who echo his lines, more or less word for word, or who have their own vested interests in similar distortions.
The largest creatures on our planet require water to support them.
Leaving aside Michael Moore for the moment, you do know that some very big creatures used to walk around. For millions of years and whatnot. Yes, the Blue Whale, at 190 metric tons, is big and floaty (as opposed to Moore, the Blue State Whale, who is just plain bloaty). A bull African Elephant is roughly 12 tons. That's not a Library Of Congress, but it is quite a few passenger cars. Regardless, there were Sauropods walking around at the better part of 60 metric tons.
Or, you just ask the farmers to, you know, build the $10 or so they might spend on postage in a month into the price of the tons of food they sell every year. Just like they build in the costs of the fuel that goes up the farther away they live from handy facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, are you an Rand-toting, Paul-worshipping libertard?
Well, at least you're true to form. Progressive Playbook Rule #1: Never attempt to address issues or history, always attack whoever is talking with any slur or insult that's handy.
See, I could bring up the history of Progressives doing things like locking away Japanese families because of their DNA, and instead of acknowledging that historical fact, you would come up with some new personal attack in a feeble attempt to pretend that another piece of history didn't happen. You're obviously too chicken to google on the topic of eugenics, lest you find that many progressive luminaries were really for it until Hitler made it too unfashionable even for them to keep selling.
On whose doorstep would you lay the entrenched welfare culture, the crushingly huge and exploding entitlement programs, the fact that half of the people in the country aren't asked to pay any income taxes, and all the rest? Never mind. You know I'm right. You're just reacting according to your assigned role of "useful idiot," right out of the playbook. Keep up the good work, Progressive Citizen! You should be able to spout some more ad hominem venom before the night is over, should you bump into any more unpleasant reminders of reality.
Progressive have been behind every great decade in the US.
Ah, yes. Progressives. Characterized by their movement's early and passsionate embrace of things like eugenics ("Really, it's for their own good - we're the best ones to decide who should be reproducing, don't you think?"). Fond of creating entire chunks of civilization that are simultaneously dependent on and resentful of a trickle of dole (tended to, of course, by ranks of career Dole Overseers who aspire to that position mostly while in Progressive-heavy lefty schools). Fond of enslaving one group of people so that they can claim to be taking care of another group who the say - because of their skin color - can't possibly look out for themselves, ever. Ah, Progressives - those fine young men and women who so staunchly protect freedom of speech unless they happen to disagree with what's being said, and then it must be made illegal, newspapers must be stolen and destroyed, and people speaking must be shouted down in the name of freedom of speech.
Yeah, who's the mysoginistic, racist, moronic group, I wonder? The ones who insist on dividing everyone into race and grievance groups? The ones who proclaim prosperity to be evil, but who will grant a properous person a pass if they (publicly, anyway) say that the Progressives have it all right, after all? Ah, Progressives, ardent defenders of ugly mediocrity or worse in every school, lest a labor union give in an admit that there are such things as lousy teacher on the payroll. Progressives, who would rather see a bright student's intellect burn away than lose a member of their forced-to-contribute-to-specific-political-operations-if-they-want-to-teach plantation.
Every great decade in the US has happened despite them, not because of them. They made the Great Depression longer and more ruinous, and we have a fanastic history-repeating-itself example of that sort of lunacy going on again, right now.
Oh, there's nothing at all confusing about that GP's reference to small-minded people and his choice of specific subject matter.
Just about ALL of the "evolution" I've seen in language lately is actually the poor translation to the written word from the sounds of words that people repeat without actually thinking. The result is usually the loss of clarity. The reduction in communication. Typical would be the inability of millions of people to distinguish between "loose" and "lose" when writing. Likewise when people lazily repeat a string a of syllables without actually thinking about what they mean, and end up saying the opposite of what they mean. A la, "I could care less" (when they mean exactly the opposite, and they've made the error out of laziness, not deliberate irony).
We're not taking about differences like "the audience is rambunctious tonight" vs. "the audience are happy to be here," where the American vs. British difference in treating "the audience" as singular or plural marks different evolution in the usage but doesn't diminish the ability to convey clear meaning. No, most of the internet-facing crappy spelling and grammar these days marks an active disinterest in clear communication. And that marks a bunch of sleepy, lazy minds who assume it's always OK to make everyone else do the work of guessing and parsing and asking for clarification.
Some of the smaller minded people in incapable of separating socialism from communism
Is that anything like the people who can't distinguish between supporters of market economics and Christians? Or those too caught up in their own high dudgeon to realize that it's possible to have principled reasons for disliking both illegal immigration and racists? Do you also consider "small minded" those who scream that anyone opposed to Obama's policies on one matter or another are racists? Or are people who fail to note your choices of appropriate labels for two kinds of Nanny State collectivism "small minded," but people who knowingly spout nonsense about the racism behind differences of opinoin on tax policy are ...what, politically articulate geniuses?
I'd shake my head and wish you knew better, but of course you do know better, and you're just being a typical hypocrite, awash in your own faux condescension. You're not as clever as you think you are, and far more transparent.
lol I remember that ... Nevermind that their ideas were often trivially shown to be unworkable
Hell, I remember when "never mind" was a phrase made up of two words, just like "always mind," as in "one should always mind one's grammar so as not to be thought a twit." Unless I missed the memo, and the proper usage is now "alwaysmind." It's possible, I suppose, since I've seen in a lot. Or is that, "alot," now, even though that's supposed to be a reference to a quantity of something (implying a large amount)... you know, one lot of whatever it is. A lot. Using those words contracted to together in writing seems alittle silly. Sort of like nevermind.
"Never mind" is a directive. As in, "never put your mind to this" (as in, "don't bother thinking about it."). OK, carryon.
Is this too hard for you to understand?
No, I understand exactly what you want. You want to force people to provide services they may or may not otherwise want to provide. You want to impost an editorial position on other people's speech and business policies, to suit your own agenda. You've made that very clear.
You are ignorant and clueless. Hugo Chavez...
I'm not ignorant. You are deliberately cherry picking for the sake of spin. Try reading up on things like his dictates about broadcast music ratios, mandated government formatting of entertainment, etc. Of course you already know about that, but it takes the fun out of your love for Chavez to keep it in mind.
what I am defending is that everyone should be able to speak freely without having anyone put up any restrictions
And in order to fulfill your vision, you want to tell people what they must say, what they must allow their computers and networks to be used for etc. You want a business running a search engine, for example, to be forced to serve people and interests that they do not wish to serve. You want them to be slaves to you.
We are talking about preserving freedom, while you are advocating that private institutions should have the right to limit that freedom in any way they see fit. Understand now?
I understand that you want to define one person's freedom as being defined by what another person is forced to do for them. For you, a person is only free if everyone else is forced to do whatever that person wants. Which would be really funny if it wasn't so sinister.
If your local book store has decided not to stock a complete collection of French literature translated into Swahili, would you say that they are limiting someone else's freedom? Well, yes, you've already said that. But please defend that absurd notion.
Just so we are clear, the GP is saying that the companies above should have the freedom to reach their audiences and customers without being selectively blocked by ISPs.
There is no such freedom. The ISPs are businesses running separate networks for their own customers. They happen to make agreemens between them to pass along traffic as they see fit, though peering relationships. No business is obliged to carry any traffic they don't like, no more than they have to allow people to use their office parking lot as a cut-through connecting two nearby roads.
If an ISP's customers don't like how they're filtering or shaping traffic, they should take it up with the company from whom they are buying connectivity to other networks.
Freedom is not having my business's website blocked by my customers' ISP.
You don't have a relationship with your custome's ISP. Your customer does. He has the freedom to choose an ISP that shapes/filters traffic to his taste, or to choose one that doesn't. Or are you saying that the government is making your customer's ISP block access to your web site?
OK, so we're clear now. You want the ability to control (to limit the freedom) of other people as they communicate and run their businesses. Like every evil Nanny State buffoon - just like Hugo Chavez "protecting" his people's liberty by shutting down radio stations that didn't say the things and play the music as he directed - you are actually trotting back out one of history's ugliest urges. You want to be able to tell the New York Times, the BBC, Google, your local radio stations, Microsoft, all of the bloggers that ramble online, every book publisher, people who choose which songs to perform songs in bars (or used to be able to choose, before your illiberal Orwellian anti-freedom kicked in) ... you want to define freedom for them by denyin them choice.
You want the editor of a web site to wake up in the morning, and go to work according to you rules, rather than in the service of their own vision and the audience they want to serve. You want slaves, and you're lamely - like every person with totalitarian sensibilities - trying to frame it as doing your slaves a favor.
The best part is how you characterize competing businesses that have brought huge new access to information - access unprecedented in human history - as being those who are limiting freedom. What a bunch of ignorant, perspective-less, whiny, adolescent, short-sighted nonsense. Or, you're exactly what you seem to be: someone who knows all of that, but is actively pursuing the sort of government control over private people and their communication that is and has always been seen in the worst of abusive nations. You'd fit right into North Korea, where they defend liberty in exactly the way you seem to prefer.
Who knew that having our access to information routinely censored meant we were free.
Ah, so your idea of freedom is being able to make slaves out of other people? Your idea of freedom is having the government dictate what someone running a web site must say, or must allow other people to say? Talk about your disingenuou hypocrisy.
So, what sort of arrangements do I need to make, under your system, where I get tell you how to do your communicating? Will you enjoy your the freedom of my getting to tell you how you have to speak? Please, do tell.
In America, censorship is only bad if the gubbmint is doing it.
Right. Because it only is censorship when the government is doing it. That's what the first amendment is all about: limiting the government's ability to mess with people's expression. That same constitution is also very serious about freedom to assemble and carry on doing your own thing ... including doing things like running a business where you can say what goes on in your own publications. Google being able to limit what shows on their web site is freedom, and it's a good thing, too.
So, you make the legal distinction between being lucky and being inspired? Please provide an example of the language you would like to see in the tax code, and tax rates you would like to see applied to each of those situations. Please be specific. For example,.take two people who are starting up small restaurants, and one of them does a lot more profitable business one season because some celebrity tweeted about having a nice meal there. What should be tax penalty that person should pay for having a stroke of luck that the other business owner did not? Again, please be specific.
Those stations you say are pushing lefty politics would be considered right-wing in nearly every other first world country.
How far other countries have slipped into complete, bankrupted Nanny State-ness doesn't alter the context of the discussion here. The point is that we have the usual noise and breathless, shrill whining about a single cable channel, while dozens of other media outlets proudly wear their politics (or those of their audiences) on their sleeves, and that does't bother those who are bitching about one outlet doing so. I'm not talking about degrees of lefty/righty. I'm talking about hypocrisy.
How come every I.T. manager turns into a fascist?
How come everyone who's never been responsible for the consequences of not having a handle on those issues is so unable to use the word "fascist" correctly? Red lights in traffic are fascist! Banks that won't cash your checks when you have nothing in your account are fascist! Dogs that bark at squirrels are fascists! Government agencies that provide books to students for their education, but then discipline the students for tearing out the pages in order to make paper airplanes are fascists! Teachers that expect their students to pay attention in class: total fascists!
Congratulations! You've just described how FOX News works
Except, he cited a specific example of lies and fraud in the service of election manipulation by a high profile producer, anchor, and huge media business. You, on other hand, just hate Fox for not actively and aggressively (a la MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NYT and all the rest) pushing the same lefty politics as the other major outlets. As for your hatred of successful people: please spread it around, why not? Throw a little of your seething vitriol at rich hypocrites like Michael Moore or George Soros, so that you don't instantly short circuit your rants before they even get warmed up.
Not so. I have a say. All voters have a say. I am annoyed that half of the people in the country vote for people who make sure that they don't have to pay taxes, while always asking those of us who are saddled with that burden to carry more and more weight. Voting for what other people must spend their day working to produce while you don't have to give - only receive - is actually evil.
due to not getting Federal funding
No, that should be "due to not making a plausible case for their product being even remotely profitable to make and sell any time in the intermmediate future" - because if it had been, some of the trillions of dollars in desparate-to-invest-in-something-viable cash that's sitting out there in private hands would have been beating a path to their door. We should be thrilled they didn't have the political connections that Solyndra did. Just saved the half of the population that does pay income taxes a pile of cash. Good.
Excellent straw man! No, actually, it's lame. How do you get to complaining about a fighter jet program from my complaint about taxpayers around the country giving cash to the people who buy these cars? These two things couldn't be more unrelated. Where's all the bitching about the 1%-ers getting away with stuff? Ah, it's about sexy, expensive electric cars, so it's OK to give people discounts on those with money taken from taxpayers to pay the interest on the capital borrowed from China to make the produce feel more competitive. Got it.
I'm surprised more /.ers aren't impressed with this car...
I'd be more impressed if the car was sellable as-is without collecting $1.5 billion from fellow Americans who won't be able to afford these toys in order to make the price more attractive via subsidies to people for whom the green faux prestige is more important than money anyway. Absurd.
I mean, really. I just cannot wait to be the first person on my block to go to work and spend part of each day working to pay for the help I'll be giving someone who can afford $50k-plus for one of these. Chicks will so dig the fact that I've helped to buy a bunch of these for vain faux-greenies with lots of money. I will be the man when I file my taxes! I wonder if my name will be stamped somewhere into part of that other guy's shiny new car?
Do you see a pattern emerging?
A see a fallacious pattern, in the service of rhetoric, sure. But you know perfectly well you're ignoring the key part of this. It's not about "denying climate change." It's about raising an eyebrow when someone like Al Gore, who's positioned himself and his friends to make millions of dollars off of their hysterical characterizations of the situation, insist that human activity is the (and the only) driver of climate change. And that putting US tax dollars into specific funds, projects, and foreign investment groups - in which he is invariably invested - will solve the problem.
I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation. And there are millions of people who echo his lines, more or less word for word, or who have their own vested interests in similar distortions.
The largest creatures on our planet require water to support them.
Leaving aside Michael Moore for the moment, you do know that some very big creatures used to walk around. For millions of years and whatnot. Yes, the Blue Whale, at 190 metric tons, is big and floaty (as opposed to Moore, the Blue State Whale, who is just plain bloaty). A bull African Elephant is roughly 12 tons. That's not a Library Of Congress, but it is quite a few passenger cars. Regardless, there were Sauropods walking around at the better part of 60 metric tons.
and so you lose the ability to farm there
Or, you just ask the farmers to, you know, build the $10 or so they might spend on postage in a month into the price of the tons of food they sell every year. Just like they build in the costs of the fuel that goes up the farther away they live from handy facilities.
The whole thing is just a show to get him to a country that will role over and give him to the US. I am not sure why the UK didn't ???
Why? Because your entire premise is wrong in the first place.