If tax is taking time away, the stuff it pays for more than gives it back.
Read my post again. This is one of the possible second-order effects that I mention! But you seem to be treating it as axiomatic, and it's very much not. There's no such thing as a free lunch - everything has both costs and benefits; and while you can certainly argue that the costs might outweigh the benefits, you can't just assume that.
Insurance that covers existing conditions, for example.
I'm afraid that that is a contradiction in terms. Insurance that covers pre-existing conditions is not insurance, it's just paying for the treatment of the condition. The whole point of insurance is that it's about pooling risk - if in any given year there is a 1% chance that my house will burn down, and I know I couldn't afford to rebuild it if it did, I (or more likely, an insurance agent) find 99 other people in the same position and we each put 1% of the value of our houses into a common pot each year, and that money is used to rebuild whomever's home happens to burn down. That, at its essence, is what insurance IS. But if my house is already on fire, the probability of me needing to claim the money from the pot is 100% - so my contribution TO the pot must be the full rebuild cost of my home, or what I'm doing is not buying insurance, it's taking other people's money.
Absolutely right? No, I think you're off track there. I could go with "on balance, in utilitarian terms, of overall benefit and therefore acceptable", but "absolutely right" it most certainly is not.
When you take money away from someone, you are effectively taking away the time that person spent earning that money. If you earn X dollars an hour, and I take X dollars from you, I am taking away an hour of your life. There is no moral difference whatsoever between doing this and forcing you to spend an hour working for me. But for some reason, we are more squeamish about "forced labour" than we are about "forced payments". Both are, in fact, absolutely wrong.
However... if that X dollars I am taking away from you results in another person living more than one hour longer, from a pure first-order utilitarian perspective, on balance I am doing good in the world.
However... there are second-order effects that need to be taken into account; and the nature and strength of these effects are what the whole debate is all about: - Does taking money away from you discourage you from working as hard as they otherwise would, so my confiscation of X leads to >X loss? - Does the fact that the transfer is forcible rather than voluntary make you extremely unhappy (or "create additional negative utility" - humans being notoriously loss-averse)? - On the other hand, does extending the other person's life allow them to spend their time productively, creating >X of value? - Does this create some kind of multiplier effect that eventually circles round and ends up indirectly compensating you for some or all of what I've taken?
I'm sure a few minutes of thought will come up with a whole load of other second- and third-order effects that play into the essential calculus; and these will be shifting constantly as conditions and attitudes change.
My point is that, while after intensive debate and discussion we might all come around to the view that forced payment for the health care of other adults is morally permissible, we can NEVER say that it is "absolutely right". That is the language of ideological blindness, not reason.
in the UK the costs of lung removals, limb amputations etc. etc fall on the NHS
Total taxes collected in the UK annually on cigarettes: £12 billion
Total budget of the entire NHS: £120 billion
Unless you're going to tell me that you think that cigarettes on their own account for a full 10% of all healthcare-related costs, I think it's safe to say that the "burden on the taxpayer" argument doesn't stand up even on its own merit (setting aside the moral question of whether offering people free healthcare gives you the right to control their behaviour).
For what it's worth, the Department of Public Health at Oxford University estimated that burden at £5 billion (in 2009, so let's adjust for inflation and call it £6 billion). Sounds to me like smokers are contributing about twice as much as they're costing, right?
"I have no sympathy. Smoking is entirely unnecessary."
That, I'm afraid, is the perfect totalitarian mantra: "I think it is unnecessary, therefore I will ban it."
"People keep doing it only because they are addicted to it, not for any other positive reasons."
[Citation Needed]
What you seem to be saying is actually "*I* don't enjoy it, so it is impossible that anyone else does."
"It can go entirely without any objectively negative impacts whatsoever."
So, you're the sort of crude utilitarian who assumes there are objective standards of which activities are enjoyable and which are not? And moreover, that your judgement of these "objective" standards is objectively perfect? Wow. Just wow.
I don't smoke, have never smoked, no stake in this game; but your post is a crime against logic and reason.
I think the likelihood of nuclear strike one way or the other is MUCH higher with Trump as president than any of the past several.
I don't disagree, but that's not the point. The point is, this is a DOOMSDAY clock, and the prospect of a nuclear strike leading to doomsday has fallen dramatically since the Cold War ended.
Let's just say Trump really is so irrational as to nuke most of the middle east, or North Korea - what would the result be? Millions dead, sure, and hundreds of square miles of uninhabitable land. But unlike in the Cold War, there would be no ballistic missiles heading in the other direction. None of that Mutually-Assured Destruction. The human race would have a dark chapter in its history, but that history would continue. Forty years ago, that would not have been the case.
We are marginally closer to doomsday than we were in 1990, I would guess; but we are so much further away than we were in 1960 or '70 or '80 that the difference is frankly laughable. So a Doomsday clock that says otherwise is not one worth paying attention to.
"Trump will probably order an immediate nuclear strike on the Middle East for the destruction of Trump Tower."
...and that will be Doomsday, how? A terrible event, certainly, but not one that is going to end with the extinction of the human race, now is it?
The point is, even if Trump turns out to really be the kind of cartoonish, childish villain that some people seem convinced he is, we are NOT closer to Doomsday when the prospect of global nuclear war was a genuine one.
This is a *Doomsday* clock, yes? As in, something that measures how close we potentially are to Doomsday - that is, an event that leads to the total extinction of the human race.
Can anyone - anyone! - say with a straight face that we are closer to that scenario right now than we were, say, at the height of the Cold War? That was a period when two nuclear superpowers were genuinely considering launching thousands of nuclear warheads at each other; where one bad day might literally end the species.
I don't disagree with the assessment that the world has become less stable recently. I think the prospect of some rogue dictator or terrorist group setting off a nuclear bomb is high and increasing. However, the retaliatory aspect is missing: If Russia had nuked New York, America would have levelled Russia in response. One nuke would have lead to thousands. But if, say, ISIS nukes New York... what target is there to hit back at? Any response would almost certainly be in the form of conventional weapons. There would be chaos and war, sure, but not outright extinction.
The truth is, we are waaaaay further away from Doomsday than we were in the '60s.
FX are *way* under-counting. There are an awful lot more than 455 scripted television shows out there. Hell, there are more than that on YouTube alone.
Their mistake is to assume that something only "counts" as a TV show if it's in standard half-hour-with-ad-breaks format, and it's "broadcast" on something that they recognise as a TV channel. But a looser definition - say, "scripted video content released on a recurring basis" would include literally thousands more, and it's a bad sign for FX that they apparently haven't acknowledged this fact.
What FX are doing is the equivalent of an oil company not realising that they're in the *energy* business (and therefore subject to competition from solar power and the like), or a car company not realising they're in the *transportation* business (and therefore subject to competition from rail, motorcycles and so on). Or perhaps a better comparison is the phone company not realising they're in the *communications* industry, and therefore failing to expand into mobile and internet provision until it was too late.
"That's how all shows are going to be once the network model fully dissolves."
Couldn't agree more. I realised the other day that roughly 50% of the "shows" I regularly watch these days are my YouTube subscriptions. And most of the rest are on Netflix. The era of running "TV channels" is all but over; the concept of "primetime" is on the way out too. Now it's all about content producers going directly to their target audience, who watch as and when it suits them.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that *broadcasting* is dead. Rather than one single signal going out to millions of people, we have millions of individual signals, which may or may not have the same content. And of course that's going to encourage diversity.
No, sorry, I'm afraid you need to go back to school and learn what "fascism" means. It's not the absence of democracy or participation (a "tyranny of the majority" is both democratic and fascist). It's not even strict top-down control (you can have a fascist oligarchy, for instance). It's the fact that individuals surrender their freedom in order to make the collective stronger. The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
An employee of a corporation (however hierarchical its organisation structure), has not surrendered their freedom. They have voluntarily signed a contract of employment, agreeing to perform certain tasks in exchange for money. Just because that contract doesn't include a share of "ownership" in the company (and why should it?) doesn't make this a fascist arrangement - it's a voluntary exchange, and one that either party can choose to end at any time (subject to certain contractually-agreed conditions). Try telling even a non-fascist government that you no longer wish to receive government services and will therefore cease paying taxes, and see how that goes...
And where a fascist state expands by forcibly bringing new people under its control at the point of a gun, a corporation expands by persuading new people to voluntarily hand over cash in exchange for goods and services (and then uses that cash to persuade other new people to work for it, again voluntarily). To try to equate the two is just silly.
Unemployment too high? You lost your job? What are we going to do about it? Sir, were you aware that your 11yr could possibly be addicted to Tentacled midget porn?
Would you prefer that they answered honestly: "Finding you a job is not the government's responsibility. This is Britain, not the Soviet Union."?
Given the choice between (a) antagonising a potential voter with a truthful response, (b) actually turning Britain into the Soviet Union in order to give a more pleasing response, or (c) changing the subject and moving on... I know what I'd pick.
If you believe anything Hitler said, because he said it, you're almost certainly wrong.
Hm. That's veering into Hitler Ate Sugar territory. Just because Hitler was a bad man doesn't mean every word out of his mouth was a lie. And in this case, I think tsotha is right - "National Socialism" is a pretty good technical description of "Fascism".
Bear in mind that the name "Fascism" comes from the symbol of the fasces - a bundle of sticks bound together. The message is: "Individually we are weak, but together we are strong." Fascism is, therefore, essentially a collectivist ideology - the nation becomes strong through joining together. And Hitler was very much all about suppressing the freedom of the individual in order to strengthen the nation.
The difference between National Socialism and conventional ("International"?) socialism is not the structure, it's the goals - fascists collectivise in order to be strong, socialists collectivise in order to help the weak. But to somebody who thinks about politics as essentially a question of the relationship between the individual and the state, there's very little difference between the two forms.
The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.
I stand open to correction here, but my understanding was that Jefferson inherited the vast majority of the slaves that he owned, and his only known purchases of slaves were in order to reunite family members who had been separated by sales to different masters. It's true that he didn't free many of his slaves, but that was (apparently) because life for an ex-slave in Virginia in the 18th century was arguably nastier than being nominally "owned" by a caring owner. He also attempted to pass laws through the Virginia state legislature that would have abolished slavery (his bill was defeated), and included an anti-slavery diatribe in the original Declaration of Independence, which was cut by the committee before it was published.
When you get right down to it, there is not a lot one man - even a President of the United States - can do when the culture of the time is against him. But he seems to have done about as much as he could in the circumstances, so criticising him from a perspective more than two centuries later seems a bit unfair.
Wrong. Fascism does not require a bigger federal government, in fact a larger government is generally the opposite of fascism. Fascism requires more power in the hands of fewer people.
Ah, I see the source of the misunderstanding here; it's quite a common problem when conservatives talk to liberals: you use the same words, but to mean different things. When GP talks about a "big government", he means a government that is big in terms of the scope of its powers and responsibilities. It's not a matter of headcount, which is how you seem to be using the term.
An absolute monarchy can be a "big" government if the monarch feels he is entitled to micro-manage the daily lives of his subjects. Or it can be a "small" government, if the monarch just lets people be. Likewise, a vast bureaucracy that does very little could be considered a "small" government, albeit a very inefficient one.
Sure, in practice, more power in the hands of government usually means more government employees required to deal with enforcement and administration, but the "size" of the government (to the right, who are usually the ones talking about it) is a philosophical point, not a practical one. So in those terms, a fascist government is by definition "big".
Incidentally, President Obama made the same mistake in his first inauguration address - he said something like "it's not about big government or small government, it's about a government that's the right size to help its citizens"; neatly missing the fact that big government v small government is about whether the government is there to "help" people, or just there to administer justice and provide national defence and basic public infrastructure.
No, no, it's the *supply* of stupid that has peaked; therefore as good economists we can anticipate the cost of stupid to rise in the future, as demand is unaffected. Now is the time to BUY stupid, and stockpile it for later when it will be rarer.
IANAL, but for my money the Fourth Amendment won't be any help to you Americans either. The authorities will argue that since the search is not mandatory (you have the alternative of not getting on the plane), and since you know at the time of purchasing your ticket that you may be scanned, your purchase of the ticket represents tacit consent to be searched, and the search is therefore not unreasonable.
Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983.
Surely, though, an EEC Directive can only govern issues pertaining to trade between EU countries? I can see how under this directive other countries in the EU could be freed of the requirement to comply (or at least, protected from prosecution if they failed to comply), but I don't understand how non-notification would invalidate the law itself.
True or false: If I, a British Subject, today sold an 18-rated DVD to a 12-year old, I could not be prosecuted because some civil servant forgot to tell Brussels that they changed the law 25 years ago.
Basically, I'm asking: is this bad lawmaking or just bad reporting?
If we were only talking about a requirement that made the law unenforceable when applied to importers from elsewhere in the UK without notification, you would be right. But in this situation, application of a law domestically becomes impossible without reference to an outside party. You don't think that limits sovereignty?
I'll admit it's a subtle difference, but I don't think a country can truly be considered sovereign when its internal laws can be invalidated by a failure to notify an external party.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
Not to mention the fact that the aliens would not have landed in South fucking Africa.
Yes, because all aliens are of course extremely well-informed about the geo-political landscape of Earth, and would therefore naturally land their broken down spaceship in an affluent first-world country with a successful film industry rather than, say, the first place they found.
Psychological dependence requiring more of the drug to get the same effect
Sleepiness
Difficulty keeping track of time, impaired or reduced short-term memory
Reduced ability to perform tasks requiring concentration and coordination, such as driving a car
Increased heart rate
Potential cardiac dangers for those with preexisting heart disease
Decreased social inhibitions
Paranoia, hallucinations
Impaired or reduced short-term memory
Impaired or reduced comprehension
Altered motivation and cognition, making the acquisition of new information difficult
Paranoia
Psychological dependence
Impairments in learning and memory, perception, and judgment - difficulty speaking, listening effectively, thinking, retaining knowledge, problem solving, and forming concepts
Intense anxiety or panic attacks
Plus...
Risk of liver disease
Increased agression and irritability
Dizziness
Vomiting
Chemical dependence
Depressed immune system
Weight gain
According to the Lancet journal (simplified graph on the Wiki), alcohol is both more addictive and more dangerous than cannabis. If adults can be trusted with booze, they should be trusted with weed.
I'm sorry about your friend, I really am, but I can tell you a thousand stories of lives ruined by alcohol and tobacco, two products that are medically more dangerous but legally more available. If you want to learn from your friend's example and never smoke weed, good for you. But you don't have the right to make that decision for me, or for any other adult.
If a man is not free to chose wrongly and irresponsibly, he is not free at all.
I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense
The thing is, though, the wealthy's affluence doesn't cause the poverty of the poor. Think about DSG again. Imagine a world in which DSG didn't do all their manufacturing in the far East. They'd have slightly less demand for their goods, and considerably higher costs. So, yes, they'd make less money. BUT, there would be a lot more unemployed workers in the far East. Lacking the expertise, capital and equipment to start their own electrical goods industry, those far Eastern workers would now be unemployed, or employed in jobs that pay even less. Everyone loses.
Maybe I'm missing something, but as far as I can see, DSG's decision to set up a plant in the far East benefits both sides. The fact that DSG benefits more from the arrangement doesn't mean that the far Eastern workers are somehow being exploited. They're better off than they would otherwise have been, and no one's forcing them to take jobs at a DSG plant.
My point is that when these arrangements are voluntary (as opposed to the sort that is "negotiated" at the point of a gun), both sides win. And when they are negotiated at the point of a gun, it's unfair to (as the GGGGP does) call it the "evils of capitalism". A mugging is not a capitalist exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
If tax is taking time away, the stuff it pays for more than gives it back.
Read my post again. This is one of the possible second-order effects that I mention! But you seem to be treating it as axiomatic, and it's very much not. There's no such thing as a free lunch - everything has both costs and benefits; and while you can certainly argue that the costs might outweigh the benefits, you can't just assume that.
Insurance that covers existing conditions, for example.
I'm afraid that that is a contradiction in terms. Insurance that covers pre-existing conditions is not insurance, it's just paying for the treatment of the condition. The whole point of insurance is that it's about pooling risk - if in any given year there is a 1% chance that my house will burn down, and I know I couldn't afford to rebuild it if it did, I (or more likely, an insurance agent) find 99 other people in the same position and we each put 1% of the value of our houses into a common pot each year, and that money is used to rebuild whomever's home happens to burn down. That, at its essence, is what insurance IS. But if my house is already on fire, the probability of me needing to claim the money from the pot is 100% - so my contribution TO the pot must be the full rebuild cost of my home, or what I'm doing is not buying insurance, it's taking other people's money.
Absolutely right? No, I think you're off track there. I could go with "on balance, in utilitarian terms, of overall benefit and therefore acceptable", but "absolutely right" it most certainly is not.
When you take money away from someone, you are effectively taking away the time that person spent earning that money. If you earn X dollars an hour, and I take X dollars from you, I am taking away an hour of your life. There is no moral difference whatsoever between doing this and forcing you to spend an hour working for me. But for some reason, we are more squeamish about "forced labour" than we are about "forced payments". Both are, in fact, absolutely wrong.
However... if that X dollars I am taking away from you results in another person living more than one hour longer, from a pure first-order utilitarian perspective, on balance I am doing good in the world.
However... there are second-order effects that need to be taken into account; and the nature and strength of these effects are what the whole debate is all about:
- Does taking money away from you discourage you from working as hard as they otherwise would, so my confiscation of X leads to >X loss?
- Does the fact that the transfer is forcible rather than voluntary make you extremely unhappy (or "create additional negative utility" - humans being notoriously loss-averse)?
- On the other hand, does extending the other person's life allow them to spend their time productively, creating >X of value?
- Does this create some kind of multiplier effect that eventually circles round and ends up indirectly compensating you for some or all of what I've taken?
I'm sure a few minutes of thought will come up with a whole load of other second- and third-order effects that play into the essential calculus; and these will be shifting constantly as conditions and attitudes change.
My point is that, while after intensive debate and discussion we might all come around to the view that forced payment for the health care of other adults is morally permissible, we can NEVER say that it is "absolutely right". That is the language of ideological blindness, not reason.
in the UK the costs of lung removals, limb amputations etc. etc fall on the NHS
Total taxes collected in the UK annually on cigarettes: £12 billion
Total budget of the entire NHS: £120 billion
Unless you're going to tell me that you think that cigarettes on their own account for a full 10% of all healthcare-related costs, I think it's safe to say that the "burden on the taxpayer" argument doesn't stand up even on its own merit (setting aside the moral question of whether offering people free healthcare gives you the right to control their behaviour).
For what it's worth, the Department of Public Health at Oxford University estimated that burden at £5 billion (in 2009, so let's adjust for inflation and call it £6 billion). Sounds to me like smokers are contributing about twice as much as they're costing, right?
"I have no sympathy. Smoking is entirely unnecessary."
That, I'm afraid, is the perfect totalitarian mantra: "I think it is unnecessary, therefore I will ban it."
"People keep doing it only because they are addicted to it, not for any other positive reasons."
[Citation Needed]
What you seem to be saying is actually "*I* don't enjoy it, so it is impossible that anyone else does."
"It can go entirely without any objectively negative impacts whatsoever."
So, you're the sort of crude utilitarian who assumes there are objective standards of which activities are enjoyable and which are not? And moreover, that your judgement of these "objective" standards is objectively perfect? Wow. Just wow.
I don't smoke, have never smoked, no stake in this game; but your post is a crime against logic and reason.
I think the likelihood of nuclear strike one way or the other is MUCH higher with Trump as president than any of the past several.
I don't disagree, but that's not the point. The point is, this is a DOOMSDAY clock, and the prospect of a nuclear strike leading to doomsday has fallen dramatically since the Cold War ended.
Let's just say Trump really is so irrational as to nuke most of the middle east, or North Korea - what would the result be? Millions dead, sure, and hundreds of square miles of uninhabitable land. But unlike in the Cold War, there would be no ballistic missiles heading in the other direction. None of that Mutually-Assured Destruction. The human race would have a dark chapter in its history, but that history would continue. Forty years ago, that would not have been the case.
We are marginally closer to doomsday than we were in 1990, I would guess; but we are so much further away than we were in 1960 or '70 or '80 that the difference is frankly laughable. So a Doomsday clock that says otherwise is not one worth paying attention to.
"Trump will probably order an immediate nuclear strike on the Middle East for the destruction of Trump Tower."
...and that will be Doomsday, how? A terrible event, certainly, but not one that is going to end with the extinction of the human race, now is it?
The point is, even if Trump turns out to really be the kind of cartoonish, childish villain that some people seem convinced he is, we are NOT closer to Doomsday when the prospect of global nuclear war was a genuine one.
This is a *Doomsday* clock, yes? As in, something that measures how close we potentially are to Doomsday - that is, an event that leads to the total extinction of the human race.
Can anyone - anyone! - say with a straight face that we are closer to that scenario right now than we were, say, at the height of the Cold War? That was a period when two nuclear superpowers were genuinely considering launching thousands of nuclear warheads at each other; where one bad day might literally end the species.
I don't disagree with the assessment that the world has become less stable recently. I think the prospect of some rogue dictator or terrorist group setting off a nuclear bomb is high and increasing. However, the retaliatory aspect is missing: If Russia had nuked New York, America would have levelled Russia in response. One nuke would have lead to thousands. But if, say, ISIS nukes New York... what target is there to hit back at? Any response would almost certainly be in the form of conventional weapons. There would be chaos and war, sure, but not outright extinction.
The truth is, we are waaaaay further away from Doomsday than we were in the '60s.
FX are *way* under-counting. There are an awful lot more than 455 scripted television shows out there. Hell, there are more than that on YouTube alone.
Their mistake is to assume that something only "counts" as a TV show if it's in standard half-hour-with-ad-breaks format, and it's "broadcast" on something that they recognise as a TV channel. But a looser definition - say, "scripted video content released on a recurring basis" would include literally thousands more, and it's a bad sign for FX that they apparently haven't acknowledged this fact.
What FX are doing is the equivalent of an oil company not realising that they're in the *energy* business (and therefore subject to competition from solar power and the like), or a car company not realising they're in the *transportation* business (and therefore subject to competition from rail, motorcycles and so on). Or perhaps a better comparison is the phone company not realising they're in the *communications* industry, and therefore failing to expand into mobile and internet provision until it was too late.
"That's how all shows are going to be once the network model fully dissolves."
Couldn't agree more. I realised the other day that roughly 50% of the "shows" I regularly watch these days are my YouTube subscriptions. And most of the rest are on Netflix. The era of running "TV channels" is all but over; the concept of "primetime" is on the way out too. Now it's all about content producers going directly to their target audience, who watch as and when it suits them.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that *broadcasting* is dead. Rather than one single signal going out to millions of people, we have millions of individual signals, which may or may not have the same content. And of course that's going to encourage diversity.
No, sorry, I'm afraid you need to go back to school and learn what "fascism" means. It's not the absence of democracy or participation (a "tyranny of the majority" is both democratic and fascist). It's not even strict top-down control (you can have a fascist oligarchy, for instance). It's the fact that individuals surrender their freedom in order to make the collective stronger. The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
An employee of a corporation (however hierarchical its organisation structure), has not surrendered their freedom. They have voluntarily signed a contract of employment, agreeing to perform certain tasks in exchange for money. Just because that contract doesn't include a share of "ownership" in the company (and why should it?) doesn't make this a fascist arrangement - it's a voluntary exchange, and one that either party can choose to end at any time (subject to certain contractually-agreed conditions). Try telling even a non-fascist government that you no longer wish to receive government services and will therefore cease paying taxes, and see how that goes...
And where a fascist state expands by forcibly bringing new people under its control at the point of a gun, a corporation expands by persuading new people to voluntarily hand over cash in exchange for goods and services (and then uses that cash to persuade other new people to work for it, again voluntarily). To try to equate the two is just silly.
Unemployment too high? You lost your job? What are we going to do about it? Sir, were you aware that your 11yr could possibly be addicted to Tentacled midget porn?
Would you prefer that they answered honestly: "Finding you a job is not the government's responsibility. This is Britain, not the Soviet Union."? Given the choice between (a) antagonising a potential voter with a truthful response, (b) actually turning Britain into the Soviet Union in order to give a more pleasing response, or (c) changing the subject and moving on... I know what I'd pick.
If you believe anything Hitler said, because he said it, you're almost certainly wrong.
Hm. That's veering into Hitler Ate Sugar territory. Just because Hitler was a bad man doesn't mean every word out of his mouth was a lie. And in this case, I think tsotha is right - "National Socialism" is a pretty good technical description of "Fascism".
Bear in mind that the name "Fascism" comes from the symbol of the fasces - a bundle of sticks bound together. The message is: "Individually we are weak, but together we are strong." Fascism is, therefore, essentially a collectivist ideology - the nation becomes strong through joining together. And Hitler was very much all about suppressing the freedom of the individual in order to strengthen the nation.
The difference between National Socialism and conventional ("International"?) socialism is not the structure, it's the goals - fascists collectivise in order to be strong, socialists collectivise in order to help the weak. But to somebody who thinks about politics as essentially a question of the relationship between the individual and the state, there's very little difference between the two forms.
The act of owning slaves, on the other hand, not so much.
I stand open to correction here, but my understanding was that Jefferson inherited the vast majority of the slaves that he owned, and his only known purchases of slaves were in order to reunite family members who had been separated by sales to different masters. It's true that he didn't free many of his slaves, but that was (apparently) because life for an ex-slave in Virginia in the 18th century was arguably nastier than being nominally "owned" by a caring owner. He also attempted to pass laws through the Virginia state legislature that would have abolished slavery (his bill was defeated), and included an anti-slavery diatribe in the original Declaration of Independence, which was cut by the committee before it was published.
When you get right down to it, there is not a lot one man - even a President of the United States - can do when the culture of the time is against him. But he seems to have done about as much as he could in the circumstances, so criticising him from a perspective more than two centuries later seems a bit unfair.
Wrong. Fascism does not require a bigger federal government, in fact a larger government is generally the opposite of fascism. Fascism requires more power in the hands of fewer people.
Ah, I see the source of the misunderstanding here; it's quite a common problem when conservatives talk to liberals: you use the same words, but to mean different things. When GP talks about a "big government", he means a government that is big in terms of the scope of its powers and responsibilities. It's not a matter of headcount, which is how you seem to be using the term. An absolute monarchy can be a "big" government if the monarch feels he is entitled to micro-manage the daily lives of his subjects. Or it can be a "small" government, if the monarch just lets people be. Likewise, a vast bureaucracy that does very little could be considered a "small" government, albeit a very inefficient one.
Sure, in practice, more power in the hands of government usually means more government employees required to deal with enforcement and administration, but the "size" of the government (to the right, who are usually the ones talking about it) is a philosophical point, not a practical one. So in those terms, a fascist government is by definition "big".
Incidentally, President Obama made the same mistake in his first inauguration address - he said something like "it's not about big government or small government, it's about a government that's the right size to help its citizens"; neatly missing the fact that big government v small government is about whether the government is there to "help" people, or just there to administer justice and provide national defence and basic public infrastructure.
No, no, it's the *supply* of stupid that has peaked; therefore as good economists we can anticipate the cost of stupid to rise in the future, as demand is unaffected. Now is the time to BUY stupid, and stockpile it for later when it will be rarer.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein.
Just out of curiosity, exactly how much money have you paid Google for their software?
IANAL, but for my money the Fourth Amendment won't be any help to you Americans either. The authorities will argue that since the search is not mandatory (you have the alternative of not getting on the plane), and since you know at the time of purchasing your ticket that you may be scanned, your purchase of the ticket represents tacit consent to be searched, and the search is therefore not unreasonable.
Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983.
Surely, though, an EEC Directive can only govern issues pertaining to trade between EU countries? I can see how under this directive other countries in the EU could be freed of the requirement to comply (or at least, protected from prosecution if they failed to comply), but I don't understand how non-notification would invalidate the law itself.
True or false: If I, a British Subject, today sold an 18-rated DVD to a 12-year old, I could not be prosecuted because some civil servant forgot to tell Brussels that they changed the law 25 years ago.
Basically, I'm asking: is this bad lawmaking or just bad reporting?
If we were only talking about a requirement that made the law unenforceable when applied to importers from elsewhere in the UK without notification, you would be right. But in this situation, application of a law domestically becomes impossible without reference to an outside party. You don't think that limits sovereignty?
I'll admit it's a subtle difference, but I don't think a country can truly be considered sovereign when its internal laws can be invalidated by a failure to notify an external party.
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
Not to mention the fact that the aliens would not have landed in South fucking Africa.
Yes, because all aliens are of course extremely well-informed about the geo-political landscape of Earth, and would therefore naturally land their broken down spaceship in an affluent first-world country with a successful film industry rather than, say, the first place they found.
Typical Alcohol Side Effects:
Most of yours...
Plus...
According to the Lancet journal (simplified graph on the Wiki), alcohol is both more addictive and more dangerous than cannabis. If adults can be trusted with booze, they should be trusted with weed.
I'm sorry about your friend, I really am, but I can tell you a thousand stories of lives ruined by alcohol and tobacco, two products that are medically more dangerous but legally more available. If you want to learn from your friend's example and never smoke weed, good for you. But you don't have the right to make that decision for me, or for any other adult.
If a man is not free to chose wrongly and irresponsibly, he is not free at all.
Like all fans of dreadful puns everywhere, I'm looking forward to the day we first see a robot yellow carded for simulation.
I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense
The thing is, though, the wealthy's affluence doesn't cause the poverty of the poor. Think about DSG again. Imagine a world in which DSG didn't do all their manufacturing in the far East. They'd have slightly less demand for their goods, and considerably higher costs. So, yes, they'd make less money. BUT, there would be a lot more unemployed workers in the far East. Lacking the expertise, capital and equipment to start their own electrical goods industry, those far Eastern workers would now be unemployed, or employed in jobs that pay even less. Everyone loses.
Maybe I'm missing something, but as far as I can see, DSG's decision to set up a plant in the far East benefits both sides. The fact that DSG benefits more from the arrangement doesn't mean that the far Eastern workers are somehow being exploited. They're better off than they would otherwise have been, and no one's forcing them to take jobs at a DSG plant.
My point is that when these arrangements are voluntary (as opposed to the sort that is "negotiated" at the point of a gun), both sides win. And when they are negotiated at the point of a gun, it's unfair to (as the GGGGP does) call it the "evils of capitalism". A mugging is not a capitalist exchange.