" All through 2001-2003 Sadam NEVER stoped the UN inspectors of doing their "job" and checking all over Iraq."
The Hans Blix report from 2003 specifically states that cooperation was improving, but had not happened yet. Blix was hopeful that Saddam's government would one day cooperate.
Actually, a well-designed program will have given proper considerations to such settings as they are "out of the box". Firefox usually does this. You shouldn't have to go to configuration just to kill annoying repetitive popups, when an option on the popup would do just fine. There's plenty of UI knowhow to satisfy me on this, if you just consider 1) no annoying popups in the first place and 2) if you have to throw one, put an option right on the popup to kill them.
"The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had"
Nobody? I recall, and surely you do too, the large numbers of people arguing that all these old WMD were gone and all had been destroyed during the 1990s as required. Here is one such story from shortly before the second Iraq war.
"Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote"
"I wonder why Chavez hasn't cracked down on freedom of speech if he is such an evil character?"
He has. Are you aware of the law he ran through just a few years ago that specifically demands lengthy prison sentences for the crime of criticizing government leaders? I pointed this out to someone who was a strong Chavez apologist, and he said "I know about this law. Chavez just does not intend to ENFORCE it". I read recently that he has started to enforce it, but have not checked into it yet.
"And this pisses off the monied interests that are losing to his so-called Bolivian revolution."
But he is one moneyed interest that is definitely winning.
"Not that I would want to argue much about your internal conflicts but The Revolution Will Not Be Televised has a much different (and literal camera) view of that 2002 attempt at a coup"
I watched this movie. Although it was sympathetic to Chavez, what I saw was an inside view of a bungled attempt to pull Venezuela bank from the brink of falling into a long nightmare of fascistic dictatorship that South America has not seen for a while. Never mind the US congressional election: the real important one is in December, when Venezuela has a slim chance to overcome another rigged election and send the would-be "president for life" home. A man whose mentor was a South American Nazi and who openly claims he wants to model Venezuela's society after the Western Hemisphere's worst and longest enduring fascist dictatorship can't really be good for anyone.
I'm surprised at so many people (like Michael Moore) being taken in by the "free heating oil" scheme that Chavez has put forth to cover up who he is. I'm also surprised that more dictators have not tried it. Saddam Hussein always had a distinct lack of fans in the US. Could you imagine how many friends he would have gained here with a similar PR move of "giving oil to the poor"? I bet Kim Jong Il would try the same thing now, except the poor guy doesn't have such resources to give away.
There are plenty of other things he has said and done. Announcing a mutual aggression pact with Iran is one recent thing. His speech a month or two ago where he said he would bury the United States (yes, that word, but no shoe!!!) was kind of funny. His calling Bush a "devil"? I find no reason to hold that against him.
"Well, many of the "communist" countries call themselves "democratic" or other reference to people having influence over the country, does that make it true too?"
That's actually a pretty good point. However, with "democratic" we have a strong conflicting definition of "democratic" offered by the somewhat democratic republics. With communism, where is the alternative definition in the real world?
Definition of socialism. Do you have a very different definition of it? If so, I'd like to hear it. Mine is a summary of the existing definitions which involve the mumbo-jumbo about "means of production" and all boil down to government controlling the people's private matters instead of the people controlling them. It actually fits in with the first few lines of the Wikipedia definition of "socialism", which has been there for weeks without my having edited it ever at any point in time. This definition appears to be noncontroversial and has resisted vandalism. The key term is "state or collective" which means that government (the ruling class) controls it.
"There were isolated acts of violence against people who had no connection to the terrorism but just looked vaguely middle-eastern. Now as far as I know there was not this kind of racism in the USA prior to 2001"
In my experience, I saw WAY too much evidence of racism against the so-called "towelheads" prior to 9/11 in America. The attitude was there among many. The instances of violence AFTER 9/11 were, I would guess, done by these existing racists rather than someone who thought Arab-Americans were great and then suddenly changed their mind at the time of 9/11. (Not to justify any sort of correctly-directed racism, but these existing racists actually were known to target Indian Sikhs, who are in no way Muslim, but do wear turbans!)
"That is, if the conflicts with Israel were resolved peacefully (or even non-peacefully!), would the violence towards Jews stop too?"
Very doubtful. Hatred of Jews is still too deep seated in the Islamic world. They hate Israelis because they are Jewish, rather than hate Jews because they are Israelis. For all of Israeli's bad deeds (occupation, shooting people, invading, etc), Arab countries such as Syria are worse in these aspects. Yet, you don't have massive anti-Syrian sentiment. The one thing that gives me hope that this antisemitic hardline could someday cease to be a mainstream feature of Islam is that, in much of Christendom 100 years ago, there was the same sort of antisemitic hardline. This is now almost entirely gone.
A malware company vs a web industry that generally loads its pages with popups and uses deceptive linking/indexing techniques. Come on, do we HAVE to root for one of them to win?
"To the extent that anti-semitism was mixed in, it was more about anti-Israel than against French Jews."
That's how they code-word it these days. Somehow, it is OK to hate the people of a nation that happens to be mostly Jewish even if it is not OK to hate Jews, and to hate this country specifically because of the Jews. The largest antisemitic (ahem anti-Israeli rally) several years ago was rife with signs about Jews in general, even with the old usual stereotypes (controlling all the money and banks, etc). (Imagine an anti-Africa rally rife with stereotypes about Black Africans).
" I think China is a good example of how to deal with a dictatorship"
But it has yet to see fruit. The place is still a dictatorship, Tibet (which never harmed China and was a benign country) is still under foriegn occupation by Chinese troops, and the Chinese government still makes open "We will invade and destroy you just for the hell of it" threats toward another country (Taiwan). There are WAY too many slaves (is one too many?), and the Chinese government is learning how to use the latest technology to keep its people from being informed ("Great Firewall", etc). I agree there has been some progress, but China's advances in technological totalitarianism might undo any progress the country has made.
"I mean this is the country that is running around killing people and refusing to let their family even see the body, prompting people to assume that they're organlegging"
You are right about the organlegging. Did you also know about the Kzin soldiers fighting alongside Chinese troops engaging in foreign occupation in Tibet? I tell ya, the last thing you want to see is Kzin interrogation. I only found this out from Art Bell and indymedia.org. The rest of the media won't touch it. I sure hope that Congress doesn't cut the AIM funding this time around just to spite Bush.
Good ol' Saddam was a rather strong authoritarian, able to project his troops at will all over in Iraq except for Kurdistan (which happened to be a place you would not need to bother with your scheme to "win over the people" anyway.
"People that were afraid of Saddam five years ago were dumbasses. People whose fear in Saddam persists to this day are. ..well. ..what can you call them?"
I think you are confusing those who thought Saddam was a real and current threat to the US with those who thought that Saddam was a real and current threat to the people in the country he actually ruled. The former tend to get called dumbasses. However, I am referring entirely to the latter situation. This latter situation (Saddam's power within non-Kurdistan Iraq prior to the 2003 war) is actually indisputed, and it is quite relevant to your plan.
" He couldn't teleport through walls, shoot laser beams from his eyes or fart atomic fire"
You forgot the sharks with friggin lasers on their friggin heads! In all seriousness, he had a lot of thugs with guns who kept his reign of terror going. He actually had prisons that from some accounts (gasp!) might have been worse than what the US ran at Abu Ghraib. He also had no problem shoving Kurds and Marsh Arabs into mass graves as fast as he could dig them.
"The most probable outcome of the invasion of the welfare agents is that..."
I think it depends on the size of the invasion. The covert "cash and 7-11's" invasion he could crush easily. Something like a massive huge manpower Peace Corps thing? Is that what you mean? I think he'd have had a harder time countering that.
(re: Blockades are an act of war) Not if they're UN enforcement action pursued under a Chapter 7 Security Council resolution."
Whether or not something is approved by the UN has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is an "act of war". That is why I laugh at the idiots who say "The Vietnam War was not a war. It was a police action". Yeah, so I guess the Punic War was not a war to those guys since Congress never called that war a "war" either.
"Not so. A statement "some crows are black", is a positive assertion."
The assignation of "positive" and "negative" to assertions is entirely arbitrary. You can reword anything that looks "positive" into something that looks "negative". An easy example is your statement ""white crows do not exist" which you called "negative". Assuming for brevity a list of colors "A" that contains all colors except white, you can say "All crows are of colors on list A". A positive assertion.
The statement "Iran has no nuclear weapons" is easy to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, considering the inspection regime. Or we can reword it to a positive statement "Iran is a nuclear weapons free place".
Neither is radical anything. CNN is a little to the left of center (liberal) and Fox is a little to the right of center (conservative). The radical fringe has no voice. Both CNN and Fox take care to air the opposite site on their shows, despite their overall bias. \
"That's because the rest of the civilized world is left of the USA right now."
As is North Korea and China, but what is your point? Actually, France has in recent years had massive "down with the Jews" rallies. Earlier in the 20th century, such events were considered to be right-wing.
What is ridiculous about paying someone $3 for a job worth that? What really is ridiculous is paying someone $5.75 an hour for a job worth only $3.00. It's how you end up with gas stations firing and not replacing gas pump attendants.
I think we should directly provide Iran with nuclear bombs. It gets rid of a lot of pointless arguing in the UN, cuts the crap, and lets Iran do the exact same thing it is doing but through a more direct route. No need for any "peaceful nuclear bom...er energy is our right as a nation!".
Actually, we need to completely abolish the minimum wage law. The level set by it has no relationship to the value of the work being done. It is a perfect example of a destructive government meddling that does no good but does do harm. I'm all for full labor protection rights (as long as the right to work and NOT be in a union is protected just like the right to work and be in one) and antidiscrimination laws. While it's perfectly fair to pay someone $2.00 an hour for a job that is worth that, it is not fair to fire them for being black. Skin color has nothing to do with the job.
"then you can voluntarily return a portion of your earnings to your employer"
When was this proposed? Not by me. People should be paid for the worth of their labor, even if it is worth less than some imaginary government figure.
Thanks for the lame insults. So you have US (or whoever) military installations handing out cash. Yes, it "wins the hearts" of a few people before Saddam ushers in another purge to stop it. This is the same Saddam who thought nothing of purging many hundreds of thousands of civilians along the way during his rule. He'd think nothing of cleaning out neighborhoods where these store and handout locations were located. You've not really shown how this can amount to much, but you are generous with lame insults. I don't think you've thought this through very well, hence the increasing insults when flaws with it are pointed out. You should take it before a legislature somewhere and see how far "Dumba**" gets you. I thought this was an interesting idea at first, but attempts to refine it are met with an unintellectual defensiveness.
"I want your daughter in my brothel. ..just business, mind you"
Is she a consenting adult? Then why not. It's legal in much of the "civilized" world, including parts of vaunted Western Europe.
"Now you have me laughing. ..there are a small handfull of corporations that control everything that all Americans see in the media..."
That has me laughing. There are hundreds, if not thousands of media outlets available in the US. Yes, thank you Mr. Powell. The restrictions he got rid of were censorship, plain and simple. Media concentration is a myth.
"The down side of democracy is that you don't always get your way"
This "down side" becomes much less of a problem when we realize that the proper place of democracy is to control government, not to control our personal lives.
"Please explain to me why the government's decision is not the people's decision"
Because it is made by the rulers, and the choice of each person is removed/banned.
"No. ..simply put, a bunch of people made a bad decision based upon lies and misinformation (likely that this group includes you)"
I made an informed decision this last time, but what does an apparent personal attack have to do with it?
"Let us put it another way. ..If you vote democracy away, it does not absolve you of the crimes committed by whatever replaces democacy"
Straw man. I never proposed voting it away. In fact, I have defended democratic control of government many times.
"This means that when someone dies of starvation in Africa because they couldn't afford food, you, as a supporter of the Market, killed them just as directly as Stalin killed any Kulak in the Ukraine."
This would be a valid example except that most of the starvation in Africa has been caused by socialism. Prior to the Soviet colonial era, Ethiopia fed itself and exported food. Agriculture was much more market-based.
"The truth that the Market supporter is responsible for more deaths than all of the 'communist' rulers combined is heady stuff indeed. For example, famine in Ireland, death squads in Central and South America"
The communists were not around for the Irish famine. However, the rather abusive tyrannical British government was. The communists were around, of course, in Latin America. Their deaths squads and wars killed hundreds of thousands until the USSR fell and the reason for the wars vanished. They clearly caused these deaths. The rest of it (industrial accidents???) can hardly come close to more than 100,000,000 killed by the great socialist leaders of the 20th century. The evils caused by free markets are few and far between.
"Sobering, no? And your recommendation will avoid such horror"
Certainly. Limiting the power of the ruling class would have prevented this if applied in China.
"In Firefox's preferences dialog, go to "Privacy", "passwords" and uncheck the "remember passwords" checkbox. I fail to see if this is an obscure setting or if it is even even burried in a menu.Have you even bothered to look at Firefox's preferences?"
That's a lot more obscure than having a "hell no never again" option on the pop-up. The option buried in the dialogue is downright obtuse in comparison. As for preferences, I usually do not bother with them. If it is set up right to begin with (and well designed), why should there be a need? There never has been for me, except for this one thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Very little of what he said was true, actually. He's hated by those who think that pseudo-populist strongmen are not a good idea.
" All through 2001-2003 Sadam NEVER stoped the UN inspectors of doing their "job" and checking all over Iraq."
The Hans Blix report from 2003 specifically states that cooperation was improving, but had not happened yet. Blix was hopeful that Saddam's government would one day cooperate.
"Well, there you have it."
Actually, a well-designed program will have given proper considerations to such settings as they are "out of the box". Firefox usually does this. You shouldn't have to go to configuration just to kill annoying repetitive popups, when an option on the popup would do just fine. There's plenty of UI knowhow to satisfy me on this, if you just consider 1) no annoying popups in the first place and 2) if you have to throw one, put an option right on the popup to kill them.
Are you worried about your Internet access being cut off? Chavez has already made it a crime to say negative things about him in the media.
"The only WMD that have been found are the ones that nobody on earth doubted he had"
Nobody? I recall, and surely you do too, the large numbers of people arguing that all these old WMD were gone and all had been destroyed during the 1990s as required. Here is one such story from shortly before the second Iraq war.
"Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote"
This from the same guys who set up "www.whitehouse.com" to trick those looking for government information....
"I wonder why Chavez hasn't cracked down on freedom of speech if he is such an evil character?"
He has. Are you aware of the law he ran through just a few years ago that specifically demands lengthy prison sentences for the crime of criticizing government leaders? I pointed this out to someone who was a strong Chavez apologist, and he said "I know about this law. Chavez just does not intend to ENFORCE it". I read recently that he has started to enforce it, but have not checked into it yet.
"And this pisses off the monied interests that are losing to his so-called Bolivian revolution."
But he is one moneyed interest that is definitely winning.
"Not that I would want to argue much about your internal conflicts but The Revolution Will Not Be Televised has a much different (and literal camera) view of that 2002 attempt at a coup"
I watched this movie. Although it was sympathetic to Chavez, what I saw was an inside view of a bungled attempt to pull Venezuela bank from the brink of falling into a long nightmare of fascistic dictatorship that South America has not seen for a while. Never mind the US congressional election: the real important one is in December, when Venezuela has a slim chance to overcome another rigged election and send the would-be "president for life" home. A man whose mentor was a South American Nazi and who openly claims he wants to model Venezuela's society after the Western Hemisphere's worst and longest enduring fascist dictatorship can't really be good for anyone.
I'm surprised at so many people (like Michael Moore) being taken in by the "free heating oil" scheme that Chavez has put forth to cover up who he is. I'm also surprised that more dictators have not tried it. Saddam Hussein always had a distinct lack of fans in the US. Could you imagine how many friends he would have gained here with a similar PR move of "giving oil to the poor"? I bet Kim Jong Il would try the same thing now, except the poor guy doesn't have such resources to give away.
There are plenty of other things he has said and done. Announcing a mutual aggression pact with Iran is one recent thing. His speech a month or two ago where he said he would bury the United States (yes, that word, but no shoe!!!) was kind of funny. His calling Bush a "devil"? I find no reason to hold that against him.
"Well, many of the "communist" countries call themselves "democratic" or other reference to people having influence over the country, does that make it true too?"
That's actually a pretty good point. However, with "democratic" we have a strong conflicting definition of "democratic" offered by the somewhat democratic republics. With communism, where is the alternative definition in the real world?
Definition of socialism. Do you have a very different definition of it? If so, I'd like to hear it. Mine is a summary of the existing definitions which involve the mumbo-jumbo about "means of production" and all boil down to government controlling the people's private matters instead of the people controlling them. It actually fits in with the first few lines of the Wikipedia definition of "socialism", which has been there for weeks without my having edited it ever at any point in time. This definition appears to be noncontroversial and has resisted vandalism. The key term is "state or collective" which means that government (the ruling class) controls it.
"There were isolated acts of violence against people who had no connection to the terrorism but just looked vaguely middle-eastern. Now as far as I know there was not this kind of racism in the USA prior to 2001"
In my experience, I saw WAY too much evidence of racism against the so-called "towelheads" prior to 9/11 in America. The attitude was there among many. The instances of violence AFTER 9/11 were, I would guess, done by these existing racists rather than someone who thought Arab-Americans were great and then suddenly changed their mind at the time of 9/11. (Not to justify any sort of correctly-directed racism, but these existing racists actually were known to target Indian Sikhs, who are in no way Muslim, but do wear turbans!)
"That is, if the conflicts with Israel were resolved peacefully (or even non-peacefully!), would the violence towards Jews stop too?"
Very doubtful. Hatred of Jews is still too deep seated in the Islamic world. They hate Israelis because they are Jewish, rather than hate Jews because they are Israelis. For all of Israeli's bad deeds (occupation, shooting people, invading, etc), Arab countries such as Syria are worse in these aspects. Yet, you don't have massive anti-Syrian sentiment. The one thing that gives me hope that this antisemitic hardline could someday cease to be a mainstream feature of Islam is that, in much of Christendom 100 years ago, there was the same sort of antisemitic hardline. This is now almost entirely gone.
A malware company vs a web industry that generally loads its pages with popups and uses deceptive linking/indexing techniques. Come on, do we HAVE to root for one of them to win?
"To the extent that anti-semitism was mixed in, it was more about anti-Israel than against French Jews."
That's how they code-word it these days. Somehow, it is OK to hate the people of a nation that happens to be mostly Jewish even if it is not OK to hate Jews, and to hate this country specifically because of the Jews. The largest antisemitic (ahem anti-Israeli rally) several years ago was rife with signs about Jews in general, even with the old usual stereotypes (controlling all the money and banks, etc). (Imagine an anti-Africa rally rife with stereotypes about Black Africans).
" I think China is a good example of how to deal with a dictatorship"
But it has yet to see fruit. The place is still a dictatorship, Tibet (which never harmed China and was a benign country) is still under foriegn occupation by Chinese troops, and the Chinese government still makes open "We will invade and destroy you just for the hell of it" threats toward another country (Taiwan). There are WAY too many slaves (is one too many?), and the Chinese government is learning how to use the latest technology to keep its people from being informed ("Great Firewall", etc). I agree there has been some progress, but China's advances in technological totalitarianism might undo any progress the country has made.
"I mean this is the country that is running around killing people and refusing to let their family even see the body, prompting people to assume that they're organlegging"
You are right about the organlegging. Did you also know about the Kzin soldiers fighting alongside Chinese troops engaging in foreign occupation in Tibet? I tell ya, the last thing you want to see is Kzin interrogation. I only found this out from Art Bell and indymedia.org. The rest of the media won't touch it. I sure hope that Congress doesn't cut the AIM funding this time around just to spite Bush.
Good ol' Saddam was a rather strong authoritarian, able to project his troops at will all over in Iraq except for Kurdistan (which happened to be a place you would not need to bother with your scheme to "win over the people" anyway.
.well. . .what can you call them?"
..."
"People that were afraid of Saddam five years ago were dumbasses. People whose fear in Saddam persists to this day are. .
I think you are confusing those who thought Saddam was a real and current threat to the US with those who thought that Saddam was a real and current threat to the people in the country he actually ruled. The former tend to get called dumbasses. However, I am referring entirely to the latter situation. This latter situation (Saddam's power within non-Kurdistan Iraq prior to the 2003 war) is actually indisputed, and it is quite relevant to your plan.
" He couldn't teleport through walls, shoot laser beams from his eyes or fart atomic fire"
You forgot the sharks with friggin lasers on their friggin heads! In all seriousness, he had a lot of thugs with guns who kept his reign of terror going. He actually had prisons that from some accounts (gasp!) might have been worse than what the US ran at Abu Ghraib. He also had no problem shoving Kurds and Marsh Arabs into mass graves as fast as he could dig them.
"The most probable outcome of the invasion of the welfare agents is that
I think it depends on the size of the invasion. The covert "cash and 7-11's" invasion he could crush easily. Something like a massive huge manpower Peace Corps thing? Is that what you mean? I think he'd have had a harder time countering that.
(re: Blockades are an act of war) Not if they're UN enforcement action pursued under a Chapter 7 Security Council resolution."
Whether or not something is approved by the UN has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is an "act of war". That is why I laugh at the idiots who say "The Vietnam War was not a war. It was a police action". Yeah, so I guess the Punic War was not a war to those guys since Congress never called that war a "war" either.
What specific right-wing views does CNN espouse?
"Not so. A statement "some crows are black", is a positive assertion."
The assignation of "positive" and "negative" to assertions is entirely arbitrary. You can reword anything that looks "positive" into something that looks "negative". An easy example is your statement ""white crows do not exist" which you called "negative". Assuming for brevity a list of colors "A" that contains all colors except white, you can say "All crows are of colors on list A". A positive assertion.
The statement "Iran has no nuclear weapons" is easy to prove beyond any reasonable doubt, considering the inspection regime. Or we can reword it to a positive statement "Iran is a nuclear weapons free place".
Neither is radical anything. CNN is a little to the left of center (liberal) and Fox is a little to the right of center (conservative). The radical fringe has no voice. Both CNN and Fox take care to air the opposite site on their shows, despite their overall bias. \
"That's because the rest of the civilized world is left of the USA right now."
As is North Korea and China, but what is your point? Actually, France has in recent years had massive "down with the Jews" rallies. Earlier in the 20th century, such events were considered to be right-wing.
What is ridiculous about paying someone $3 for a job worth that? What really is ridiculous is paying someone $5.75 an hour for a job worth only $3.00. It's how you end up with gas stations firing and not replacing gas pump attendants.
I think we should directly provide Iran with nuclear bombs. It gets rid of a lot of pointless arguing in the UN, cuts the crap, and lets Iran do the exact same thing it is doing but through a more direct route. No need for any "peaceful nuclear bom...er energy is our right as a nation!".
Actually, we need to completely abolish the minimum wage law. The level set by it has no relationship to the value of the work being done. It is a perfect example of a destructive government meddling that does no good but does do harm. I'm all for full labor protection rights (as long as the right to work and NOT be in a union is protected just like the right to work and be in one) and antidiscrimination laws. While it's perfectly fair to pay someone $2.00 an hour for a job that is worth that, it is not fair to fire them for being black. Skin color has nothing to do with the job.
"then you can voluntarily return a portion of your earnings to your employer"
When was this proposed? Not by me. People should be paid for the worth of their labor, even if it is worth less than some imaginary government figure.
Thanks for the lame insults. So you have US (or whoever) military installations handing out cash. Yes, it "wins the hearts" of a few people before Saddam ushers in another purge to stop it. This is the same Saddam who thought nothing of purging many hundreds of thousands of civilians along the way during his rule. He'd think nothing of cleaning out neighborhoods where these store and handout locations were located. You've not really shown how this can amount to much, but you are generous with lame insults. I don't think you've thought this through very well, hence the increasing insults when flaws with it are pointed out. You should take it before a legislature somewhere and see how far "Dumba**" gets you. I thought this was an interesting idea at first, but attempts to refine it are met with an unintellectual defensiveness.
"I want your daughter in my brothel. . .just business, mind you"
.there are a small handfull of corporations that control everything that all Americans see in the media..."
.simply put, a bunch of people made a bad decision based upon lies and misinformation (likely that this group includes you)"
.If you vote democracy away, it does not absolve you of the crimes committed by whatever replaces democacy"
Is she a consenting adult? Then why not. It's legal in much of the "civilized" world, including parts of vaunted Western Europe.
"Now you have me laughing. .
That has me laughing. There are hundreds, if not thousands of media outlets available in the US. Yes, thank you Mr. Powell. The restrictions he got rid of were censorship, plain and simple. Media concentration is a myth.
"The down side of democracy is that you don't always get your way"
This "down side" becomes much less of a problem when we realize that the proper place of democracy is to control government, not to control our personal lives.
"Please explain to me why the government's decision is not the people's decision"
Because it is made by the rulers, and the choice of each person is removed/banned.
"No. .
I made an informed decision this last time, but what does an apparent personal attack have to do with it?
"Let us put it another way. .
Straw man. I never proposed voting it away. In fact, I have defended democratic control of government many times.
"This means that when someone dies of starvation in Africa because they couldn't afford food, you, as a supporter of the Market, killed them just as directly as Stalin killed any Kulak in the Ukraine."
This would be a valid example except that most of the starvation in Africa has been caused by socialism. Prior to the Soviet colonial era, Ethiopia fed itself and exported food. Agriculture was much more market-based.
"The truth that the Market supporter is responsible for more deaths than all of the 'communist' rulers combined is heady stuff indeed. For example, famine in Ireland, death squads in Central and South America"
The communists were not around for the Irish famine. However, the rather abusive tyrannical British government was. The communists were around, of course, in Latin America. Their deaths squads and wars killed hundreds of thousands until the USSR fell and the reason for the wars vanished. They clearly caused these deaths. The rest of it (industrial accidents???) can hardly come close to more than 100,000,000 killed by the great socialist leaders of the 20th century. The evils caused by free markets are few and far between.
"Sobering, no? And your recommendation will avoid such horror"
Certainly. Limiting the power of the ruling class would have prevented this if applied in China.
"In Firefox's preferences dialog, go to "Privacy", "passwords" and uncheck the "remember passwords" checkbox. I fail to see if this is an obscure setting or if it is even even burried in a menu.Have you even bothered to look at Firefox's preferences?"
That's a lot more obscure than having a "hell no never again" option on the pop-up. The option buried in the dialogue is downright obtuse in comparison. As for preferences, I usually do not bother with them. If it is set up right to begin with (and well designed), why should there be a need? There never has been for me, except for this one thing.