"What I'm trying to say about them is to make it in their best interests to serve ours. "
But not on this:
"I believe we are already doing that, and they are acting on it."
Not really. We don't have a good idea how to do that. We don't even have a good idea how to measure that. And if you can't measure something, you can't control it, etc.
Please, try to remind these people that they are public servants.
Please try to get real. Public Choice Theory
"At the heart of all public choice theories then is the notion that an official at any level, be they in the public or private sector, "acts at least partly in his own self- interest, and some officials are motivated solely by their own self-interest." (Downs, Anthony, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967))"
That's a bad idea - it waters down accountability for policies. Arguing about accountability and effects of policies is bad enough as it is, believe me. In Europe proportional voting system sucks like hell. Better blame it on one guy instead of voters being completely bambozled by ten small parties fingerpointing blame at each other in a deadlock that never clears. Italy is a prime example of such crisis. It's a disaster.
Govt can't fix and provide simple systems, say, levees, roads, can't get itself to undertake rather simple means necessary to fix the school system. How could it fix a lot more intricate, complicated and advanced realm like technology then?
And beware of the negative side effects, like with "net neutrality" that is a bad idea whose time has come and, fortunately for us all, gone.
Suppose govt signs obsolete & proprietary tech into law (need I point at some document standards?). That would stifle innovation instead of invigorating it.
No, tech is better off without govt meddling. It's only basic research that it can't screw up because physics laws fortunately can't be screwed up by govt incompetence, at worst it can waste money or underfund important science like ITER.
Nonsense. Sure they bought the rights, so what? We're debating the meaning, not who makes the product. One can easily be a libertarian re rights of the producer and still debate the message that is tried to be conveyed across. You present a fake dilemma: your argument applied to books/newspapers would prevent a libertarian from arguing book's or newspaper's message just because somebody else has publishing rights. It's about cultural archetype, not who has the trademark rights or bawling that it's "it's just a plastic toy".
Truth is, Hollywood does have its own hare-brained, multiculti, feel-good, multilaterally failed agenda and writings such as presented on the blog in question cannot be written off as just a nutjob's ramblings. Those who claim so typically share the aforementioned hare-brained agenda.
Those might be the echoes of some leftie doctrines put forward by Gramsci that the left tries after failure of up-front commie revolution and then failure of New Left that wanted to try social engineering by "direct social action". Since real warfare has become economic drain as opposed to economic gain as it used to be in the past, now it's time of "cultural warfare".
Hence looking for homosexuality in that sponge-something character (idiotic) and blathering about class consciousness and "uninterested proletariat" (Marcuse) by the left. Not all of it is nonsense, though, there are real cultural archetypes, some of them expressed in form as basic as a plastic toy for kids and some people do try to push for their agenda this way as well. See e.g. attitude/stance of some people "no toy guns for kids".
"The 'improvised roadside devices' are as technologically advanced as those folks can get, and even those bombs are fabricated from materials that have to be imported in from 'the modern' and/or fabricated from cast-off or surplus munitions which again are from 'the modern.'"
I think they hope they can "make do" with that until they run over the modernist world. Remember those poles in Afghanistan with bunches of magnetic tapes pulled out of cassettes as symbol of sin and no electricity. They still retained pickup trucks and Kalashnikovs as means of struggling.
"Cut off their oil money and let their culture settle down. It will happen. The 'energy model' we presently live under has to subside and be replaced. And it will, long before a bunch of angry zealots can rein over the world."
That alone is worth replacing oil with other energy sources.
One problem with Islam is that people have peristent "double vision" when it comes to it: they think there is "wacko" warlike Islam and "moderate" peaceful Islam.
If what Spengler and Schiffauer write is true, namely, that Islam per se is designed as "republic of Islamist scholars" trying to impose traditionalist lifestyle as a ruleset of communal lifestyle on everyone and nothing can be allowed to be left out of its scope, then such distinction has no basis in reality.
" How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?
How about you put down your hate, fear, and bigotry, and learn what the ideology of actual Muslims is?"
How about reading and replying to sources on actual ideology of muslims that I have cited and you have simply cut out and pretended they don't exist, liar? E.g. al-Sistani, Rosenzweig, insightful texts written by Spengler at Asia Times. Or anthropologist, prof. Werner Schiffauer.
Since you lie by omission of what is inconvenient to you, you maniacal liar, there's no possibility of arriving of any conclusion in debate with you other than what you want and not what is out there. You liar. EOT.
How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?
You use fallacy of composition: just because some, formally Muslim, probably not very devout, people are not serial killers screaming jihad all the time, doesn't mean their ideology and purpose is not what it demonstrably is.
Plus, they are peaceful only because they are in minority. For now.
"Thus, the democratic culture of conflict implies the sceptical idea of duality, as against the optimistic idea of unity. Since no one owns the truth, regulated forms of dispute must be established. Islamicist dissatisfaction with this model is based on its predisposition to discord, strife, and sham conflicts.
Against this, they evoke the dream of a scholars' republic. Conflicts that arose were to be solved by reference to the Koran, by obtaining a legal report, a fatwa. The weight of such a report is substantially dependent on the personal authority of the issuer. Thus, unlike a court judgment, the legal opinion given is only binding on someone who acknowledges this authority. But personal authority develops out of the free play of forces. What political Muslims have in mind, therefore, is a scholars' republic or a legal opinion state."
Christianity is doctrinally about love, Islam is doctrinally about submission:
" Less important than the differences in content - "audience" rather than "dialogue", "submission" rather than "love" - is the difference in emphasis. With this perfunctory preface, Sistani begins a lengthy treatise on when, where, with what clothing, and in what bodily positions prayers may be said. His concern is not the spiritual experience of prayer, but establishing communal norms for prayer. Where the Christians and Jews gush with loquacity on the subject, Muslims have remarkably little to say about the experience of prayer. Reading through Muslim sources, I am at loss to find anything remotely resembling Ratzinger's quite typical discourse on prayer.
In fact, virtually all of Sistani's writings address communal norms for behavior, including the most intimate. Ritual impurity (janabat) is a central concern, especially in the case of sexual relations. He writes, for example:
[...] In calling attention to these portions of Sistani's theology I do not mean to deprecate him. On the contrary, he addresses the inhabitants of traditional society for whom spiritual experience means submission, that is, submission to communal norms, whence the individual derives a lasting sense of identity. In the most intimate details of daily life, culture and religion become inseparable. For traditional society it is the durability of communal norms that lends a sense of immortality to the individual, a life beyond mere physical existence. That is why prayer in the Judeo-Christian sense, the lovers' exchange between God and the individual soul, does not come into consideration within Muslim theology. Allah is the all-powerful sovereign of the world before whom the individual dissolves; the individual's submission to the ummah, the community of Islam, is a spiritual experience of an entirely different order.
To this the Americans can only come as destroyers, not saviors. America by its nature disrupts traditional order. It is the usurper of the Old World, the agency of creative destruction, the Spirit that Denies, to whom "everything that arises goes rightly to its ruin" (Goethe) - in short, the Great Satan. America is the existential threat to Islam."
In short, there can be no peace with Islam, as two ideologies underpinning the reflective lifestyles - Islam, the traditional and developed world, the modernist lifestyle, which more or less can be reconciled with Christianity - are in fundamental and irreconci
The problem is when you spout such futile and false banalities, you become a moron, and thus part of a problem, not a solution.
Clausewitz had it right: war is continuation of politics by other means (I might also paraphrase that politics is continuation of war by less violent means). Vegetius had it right, too: if you want peace, prepare for war.
Since nowadays shallow and hypocritical sentimentality and empty self-righteousness like yours have replaced the brains, we have General Public Idiocy on the rise. Effectively, those who want to have peace and no war whatsoever, are thrown by the real world into wars they don't really understand at all, even if they imagine they do. Witness 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. This is not over, and it's not the fault of "Bushitler", as some leftie morons simply use not very bright president as an evil scapegoat supposedly responsible for everything (Lisa Simpson's "campus" bicycle sticker "U.S. Out Of Everywhere" comes to mind).
"The United States is suffering again from a massive trade deficit -- $38.3 billion in 2006.".
Geez. Next year this will turn US economy inside out.
OK, no joking: frankly, the only reason of this deficit is that USA has money to spare and the rest of world doesn't (because it engages in war, or like in Europe, because it spends faithfully on govt projects and govt sectors, and then wonders why life gets worse instead of better).
Face it, with the money workers earn in the West, it's hard to compete with someone who's willing to work for a quarter or less of what you're earning, and lives in a cheaper country in terms of cost of living,
What makes you think he's willing to continue this indefinitely? He would like to have exactly what you have. More: people in 1920s/1940s in USA were materially off exactly like he is now. The momen he becomes JUST AS PRODUCTIVE - which you haven't shown - he becomes less competitive. Which is exactly what happened in Japan or Korea. Or at Airbus now.
unless people start demanding quality again (And what's preventing the offshore worker from providing that? Moving up the value chain isn't a notion exclusive to the West).
I'm not an American or Western European. Yet, when facing purchase of a car, I could consider buyign new Hyundai or pay actually more for used BMW. I bought used BMW. I love it and would never buy that Korean crap. I don't think a guy who sold me that BMW went to Hyundai dealer. So most likely I have indirectly increased demand for cars made in Germany.
It looks like this from the other end: developed countries have lots of advantages:
1. The western wages are high because western countries have rule of law and lots of capital, which enable them to have high productivity. Wages are function of productivity and not the other way around.
2. The quality of institutions outside first world is improving, but it still doesn't match. With higher corruption and worse functioning the other countries just _can't produce_ those goods that would supposedly put you out of work. The ones that are endangering your job are only just as good as you are or almost as good, but still hungry. This won't last forever, though.
3. And last but not least, _robots cost the same_ in Japan and Sierra Leone (in fact they are more expensive, in many African countries bikes cost several hundred dollars, and Americans visiting Europe are routinely shocked with loftiness of prices).
Take for example pharmaceuticals. What does it matter that Burkina Faso has cheap workers? It just doesn't have the infrastructure, rule of law, capital, peace, and workers educated enough to make new pharmaceuticals. In fact, the work of those people is cheap precisely because Burkina Faso doesn't have all those things, not the other way around!
Big companies like Lenovo being bought out by China, or more recently the US government blocking China from buying Unocal (US blocking on average 10% of US companies being bought up by China).
You might have missed in those news the strange fact that employment in China's manufacturing sector is actually falling.
If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices,
Thus increasing the wages of American Workers, which would in turn allow us to afford those higher local prices,
..and reducing overall purchases which would make a good portion of those workers unemployed (note: supply of labor would have increased, so its price, aka wages, would have fallen), in turn reducing purchases in the existing businesses which would go belly up and make their workers unemployed, which would again inflict downward pressure on wages, and so on until achieving new (old?), lower equilibriums of wages, employment and GDP.
The economy would be literally rolled _back in time_ this way, it would have been like running reverse on video. You just don't get the math of it.
This scenario has already been tried during Great Depression, when govt filled with sentimental illiterates like you prolonged depression of US economy into 1940s, while it could have been over by 1930 if govt didn't stupidly insist on enforcing high wages of union mob (nobody more was employed because wages were set artificially above their true, market price - no demand) enforcing high prices (which siphoned off the money that would have otherwise been used to make more purchases in new businesses and would get new companies rolling) while simultaneously strangling money supply (which caused severe liquidity crisis).
You're an offshot of that righteous, sentimental, and tragically harmful idiocy.
Enlighten me how either (1) Our wages won't drop a ton (2) Companies won't outsource in a race to the bottom?
Because that hasn't happened in the past and this scenario has already been played in smaller scale with Japan?
Japan several decades ago was a country of dirt-cheap wages, much like Phillipines now. When Japan got developed, its wages went up, to the point they are not competitive with USA even though their workers still get less purchasing power parity of their wages and work longer hours.
Now, all that didn't make wages in USA go to the rocky bottom, did it?
Hint: economy is not a fixed pie. Just because the other guy suddenly gets richer does not mean you have to get poorer. In fact you are probably slightly better off because he's much better off.
Hint #2: the employment in manufacturing sector in China is... falling. That's right.
Just as free trade puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
Bullshit. There is no transaction between you and those who, say, buy whatever produced in India. That transaction does not involve you, regardless of whatever sentimental hyperboles you spin.
I didn't agree to join the WTO, or NAFTA.
Similarly, I didn't agree for my govt to impose idiotic tariffs on my very own nation (to its own disadvantage, but people en masse think with sentiments like you instead of trying to use their brains and add the numbers up). That is not trade, that is politics and govt regulation, and you mix two realms that overlap but do not cover.
I didn't agree to let Wal*Mart put my local mom&pop shops out of business.
So? It's none of your fucking business if some people in the local community buy at Walmart instead of this "mom & pop" business. Not to mention that "mom&pop" is cost-inefficient in comparison. Which makes those local consumers spend more than they would have spent at Walmart. Which means they don't save what they save with walmart for the same quantity/quality of goods. So they are left with less money they would have spent otherwise. So ceteris paribus, "mom&pop" cost.. jobs.
It is a paradox of perverted reality that those selfish consumers benefit USA and altruistic, dim gooks like you actually put it at disadvantage, nevertheless, that's how calm, rational thinking indicates it happens.
For a supposed hacker, you can't count.
I didn't agree to let the market destroy my community. That is ALL fraud.
You're a sentimental fraud, that's all.
All profit is theft of wages.
That's what you get when you read marxism for dummies. FYI, the crucial point here is so called "transformation of prices" (labor into market prices), and marxists routinely "forget" to tell people that Marx has failed at this. As well as legions of lefties after him. Marx' labor theory of value is bullshit it turns out (go read e.g. Mark Blaug on rigorous mathematical proof), ergo this "profit is theft of wages" theory is bullshit.
Labor is a COST. Not value. profit is made on merchandise on market outside the company, not on labor within the company.
This businessman in 19th century has been employing lots of boys to turn the steam flowing to engine cylinders on and off. On off on off. One boy has cleverly tied the piston that was going down to the piston that was going up, and so it worked automatically and the boy went play. Businessman summarily applied his invention and selfishly and logically fired all the boys.
Question: what happened to supposed value of labor of those boys? Evaporated? If so, why the value of enterprise and product wen t up instead of down when boys were fired? Why did his profit go up since supposed value of labor has evaporated?
The key aspect here is of course necessity of labor. But its necessity does not make it _source of value_. It's still a cost, not value. That's why businessman's profit went up when he fired those boys. Thanks to which they could go to school while society as a whole had its production running without someone turning steam on and off in those engines (i.e. GDP has increased).
This merciless, selfish act of businessman made little boys
Profit is the difference between cost and price- and is therefore unpaid wages.
"Marxism for dummies" does a lot of harm...
Maximizing personal profit at the expense of your neighbors is indeed theft; and treason.
Nope. It's really a virtue. Investment comes from nothing but profit. The opposite of profit is waste. Without profit there would be no technology, no civilization, no economy. More: there are well-founded arguments that achieving a profit (as such) is a MORAL DUTY.
--
We should fire all Linux developers, without them so many little boys would have been employed in primitive and tedious jobs!
Teaching critical thinking when it comes to multiple views on a subject is one thing. Encouraging students to seriously consider the "opposing view" of global warming denial is another.
Oh my, oh my... That's bad. We could not actually allow any doubt or critique of our religion, err, science, could we?
Science classes should teach only commonly accepted science.
This is not science, this is your peculiar _cult_. Global warming may or may not take place, but what you and GW-cultists wish is ideological and religious supremation of their view.
Science is all right with that or without it. It's just a series of attempts to topple the hypothesis. Done by the book, a scientist actually should attempt to find data rejecting his hypothesis. Science your way is 19th century verificationism, which is obsolete.
That even applies if a significant number of non-scientists oppose the viewpoint of the vast majority of scientists. Science classes are for science, not for myths.
Promoting critical thinking and debate is exactly the idea of this decision.
Oh, bullshit. It's pandering to religious parents.
They have more right to be pandered to than the academic left, which sees brainwashing everyone as its inborn right.
I think it's also designed to avoid the issue ever being discussed in class again, because it makes it that much more difficult to deal with some parent mafia
"Parent mafia"?! Eat shit and die, scumbag - NEITHER YOU NOR GOVERNMENT NOR OBSESSIVE ACADEMICS GET TO DECIDE WHAT KIDS ARE TO BE TAUGHT.
You are not owner of the kids and though neither the parents are, THEY have the right to decide what their kids are taught. Not you or a few shallow careerists and leftie lobbyists. Get your hands off kids or you will have them shot away. Dumbass.
and stick to whatever their crazy ideas of "alternative views" are. Do you think the parent in question would be happy with alternative scientific opinions? I don't think so. He wants religious views included. In science.
It's not, idiot. Evolution is probably right - at least the part on natural selection - but it's still _ex post_ hypothesis. No predictive power = not very scientific really, hardcore falsifictionist would say not at all.
The critics are right, whatever their motivations. Painting all the critics of evolution in color of a fundie idiot is exactly against the core of scientific method, or at least falsification a la Karl Popper: it's argument ad hominem and trying to intimidate the critics with a lot shouting and hostility as opposed to involving in intellectual debate.
Vicious morons like you are little but "Darwin rottweilers", so aggressive that they don't even understand they are caught in Catch-22s and other fallacies:
I used to think that criticizing evolution at school is a bad idea, because all in all, it's the best hypothesis we have, but after reading about the issue I came to conclusion that it is actually very good: kids learn there are no simple answers and textbook problems almost always are skewed towards finding one and easy solution, while in real world it doesn't work like that.
Yes, this is done for sake of education, but it has bad side effect of too many people leaving school acquiring habitual attitude towards problems that resembles that textbook exercise attitude, and so they become simpletons like you, expecting one correct answer, evolution in this case.
You're abusing it. 10 million people movement (spanning just about any social group consisting of adults) in 40 million people country is no labor union. It was a massive political movement, organized mainly in workplaces only because communism liked mammooth workplaces and organizations. It mistook being big with being productive.
I'm Polish and my parents both belonged to Solidarity, but they've done it as a way of getting politically involved and not for sake of unionization.
That Solidarity was primarily labor union and not a political movement is one of the most persistent myths propagated by the Western unions, which are little more than self-interested cartels. Solidarity was a huge political movement first and union second.
You've just reinvented ad-hoc, debilitated, half-witted version of progressing pauperization a la Marx, the falling rate of profit et al.
There's just one problem: you see, it didn't work out that way. Somehow. And doesn't. In theory it doesn't work that way either. Hint: there's something happening to consumers money when they choose WM over other businesses. You missed that part on top of missing hundred other factors.
Ad hoc, silly, amateurish economics is just that. Group paranoia, folk economics:
"I can look at the people I know who work at Wal-Mart for $7.50/hr, have to live with family because they couldn't pay rent to save their lives, and are on state medical assistance."
Close down WM and make them unemployed, they won't have to live with their parents and be on state medical assistance.
No, if you closed WM down no better employer would have shown up. In fact, total employment would actually go down a bit, due to mysterious processes that black magic known as Econ 101 explains.
"Without WM there, all those people on $8/h would be unemployed.
Nonsense. Without Wal-Mart, someone (or, more likely, several someones) would step in to fill the void. People gotta buy shoes, somebody's gotta sell them."
At higher price, dumbass. Jones doesn't save half of price he would have to pay at the more expensive store => Jones doesn't employe SOMEBODY ELSE.
Unemployment increases, real wages go down, standard of living goes down. Economy your way DEVOLVES. It works like on rewind, going back to past.
"Those $8/hr Wal-Mart wage slaves would likely work for someone who (gasp!) may actually live there and give half a fuck about the community around him."
All those expensive store owners caring about community... it warms my heart...
You are too stupid on top of beeing too romantic, vague, and inspecific to understand how practical economy and society and community works, that's all.
"Because the vast majority of people in this great nation are fucking idiots who wouldn't know their own self-interest if it bit them on the ass, reared up on its hind legs, and said "Hi, I'm you self-interest.""
Nope, they understand their own self-interest much better than you understand your own. Evidence:
"Despite the philosopher's perplexity, people are fiercely attached to their principles --even to unintelligible or preposterous ones. . . . Their minds are clouded by childish myths and unspeakable fears. As a result, they often fail to grasp their private advantage or to act upon it when they do. Stephen Holmes, "The Secret History of Self-Interest" (1990:274)"
FYI, you're a feeble-minded looney, not a rational anarchist.
"You are being purposefully dense and disingenius."
Nope, I'm not. I am completely honest.
"Try to say, with a straight face, that consumers save more than, not only the wage difference (which may indeed be true, as far as that goes and for what it's worth), but the money the taxpayers shell out to send all those employees to the doctor when they're sick,"
Compare insurance rate at WM with other businesses and organizations. Present me with figures and numbers, why is it precisely WM that is so exceptionally bad in this area. It seems to me like you invented this ad hoc without seeing a single number about health of workers working, injuries, costs, insurance, etc. There is nothing special about WM in this area in comparison to other businesses.
Finally, suppose they do not work at WM but are unemployed instead: what, they would not need taxpayer's money spent on their healthcare?!
Your arguments don't make any sense.
" the money that (formerly) local manufacturing is losing to overseas competition,"
False. The amount of stuff manufactured in USA is more or less as it was in the past. Some even argue there was slight growth, esp. in capital-intensive industries, where labor costs matter less and long-term investment security matters more. You're preaching five years old's economics.
"and the money we're just throwing at Wal-Marts all over the country in property tax breaks and other municipal incentives."
Unless WM gets more corporate welfare than others, you have no case. It would be best to entirely eliminate corporate welfare, but you have made no case whatsoever why it is WM that is using it more than others. To me the most plausible explanation for you singling it out is because it seems to be winning business.
"Unless Wal-Mart's printing money in Arkansas, it's a zero-sum game by definition."
Definition? In economy? In economy what matters are people, interests and money, not your definitions. Real games, played in empirical reality, tend to be positive sum or negative sum games. That WM has to be zero-sum game BY DEFINITION is the dumbest piece of economic charlatanery I've heard in years. And if it is "by definition" zero sum game, why not any other large scale chain or business or corporation?
You know, by definition people in USA are just as happy as in North Korea - that's your way of "arguing". What's your IQ anyway?
"And that's the way economics works."
No, your mind is the way feeble-minded, but well intentioned and pompous moron's mind works.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on this:
"What I'm trying to say about them is to make it in their best interests to serve ours. "
But not on this:
"I believe we are already doing that, and they are acting on it."
Not really. We don't have a good idea how to do that. We don't even have a good idea how to measure that. And if you can't measure something, you can't control it, etc.
Please, try to remind these people that they are public servants.
Please try to get real. Public Choice Theory
"At the heart of all public choice theories then is the notion that an official at any level, be they in the public or private sector, "acts at least partly in his own self- interest, and some officials are motivated solely by their own self-interest." (Downs, Anthony, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967))"
That's a bad idea - it waters down accountability for policies. Arguing about accountability and effects of policies is bad enough as it is, believe me. In Europe proportional voting system sucks like hell. Better blame it on one guy instead of voters being completely bambozled by ten small parties fingerpointing blame at each other in a deadlock that never clears. Italy is a prime example of such crisis. It's a disaster.
It's a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Govt can't fix and provide simple systems, say, levees, roads, can't get itself to undertake rather simple means necessary to fix the school system. How could it fix a lot more intricate, complicated and advanced realm like technology then?
And beware of the negative side effects, like with "net neutrality" that is a bad idea whose time has come and, fortunately for us all, gone.
Suppose govt signs obsolete & proprietary tech into law (need I point at some document standards?). That would stifle innovation instead of invigorating it.
No, tech is better off without govt meddling. It's only basic research that it can't screw up because physics laws fortunately can't be screwed up by govt incompetence, at worst it can waste money or underfund important science like ITER.
Nonsense. Sure they bought the rights, so what? We're debating the meaning, not who makes the product. One can easily be a libertarian re rights of the producer and still debate the message that is tried to be conveyed across. You present a fake dilemma: your argument applied to books/newspapers would prevent a libertarian from arguing book's or newspaper's message just because somebody else has publishing rights. It's about cultural archetype, not who has the trademark rights or bawling that it's "it's just a plastic toy".
Truth is, Hollywood does have its own hare-brained, multiculti, feel-good, multilaterally failed agenda and writings such as presented on the blog in question cannot be written off as just a nutjob's ramblings. Those who claim so typically share the aforementioned hare-brained agenda.
Those might be the echoes of some leftie doctrines put forward by Gramsci that the left tries after failure of up-front commie revolution and then failure of New Left that wanted to try social engineering by "direct social action". Since real warfare has become economic drain as opposed to economic gain as it used to be in the past, now it's time of "cultural warfare".
Hence looking for homosexuality in that sponge-something character (idiotic) and blathering about class consciousness and "uninterested proletariat" (Marcuse) by the left. Not all of it is nonsense, though, there are real cultural archetypes, some of them expressed in form as basic as a plastic toy for kids and some people do try to push for their agenda this way as well. See e.g. attitude/stance of some people "no toy guns for kids".
State your politics up front instead of writing such "subliminal" drivel.
"The 'improvised roadside devices' are as technologically advanced as those folks can get, and even those bombs are fabricated from materials that have to be imported in from 'the modern' and/or fabricated from cast-off or surplus munitions which again are from 'the modern.'"
I think they hope they can "make do" with that until they run over the modernist world. Remember those poles in Afghanistan with bunches of magnetic tapes pulled out of cassettes as symbol of sin and no electricity. They still retained pickup trucks and Kalashnikovs as means of struggling.
"Cut off their oil money and let their culture settle down. It will happen. The 'energy model' we presently live under has to subside and be replaced. And it will, long before a bunch of angry zealots can rein over the world."
That alone is worth replacing oil with other energy sources.
One problem with Islam is that people have peristent "double vision" when it comes to it: they think there is "wacko" warlike Islam and "moderate" peaceful Islam.
If what Spengler and Schiffauer write is true, namely, that Islam per se is designed as "republic of Islamist scholars" trying to impose traditionalist lifestyle as a ruleset of communal lifestyle on everyone and nothing can be allowed to be left out of its scope, then such distinction has no basis in reality.
" How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?
How about you put down your hate, fear, and bigotry, and learn what the ideology of actual Muslims is?"
How about reading and replying to sources on actual ideology of muslims that I have cited and you have simply cut out and pretended they don't exist, liar? E.g. al-Sistani, Rosenzweig, insightful texts written by Spengler at Asia Times. Or anthropologist, prof. Werner Schiffauer.
Since you lie by omission of what is inconvenient to you, you maniacal liar, there's no possibility of arriving of any conclusion in debate with you other than what you want and not what is out there. You liar. EOT.
How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?
You use fallacy of composition: just because some, formally Muslim, probably not very devout, people are not serial killers screaming jihad all the time, doesn't mean their ideology and purpose is not what it demonstrably is.
Plus, they are peaceful only because they are in minority. For now.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-turkey/article_ 679.jsp
"Thus, the democratic culture of conflict implies the sceptical idea of duality, as against the optimistic idea of unity. Since no one owns the truth, regulated forms of dispute must be established. Islamicist dissatisfaction with this model is based on its predisposition to discord, strife, and sham conflicts.
Against this, they evoke the dream of a scholars' republic. Conflicts that arose were to be solved by reference to the Koran, by obtaining a legal report, a fatwa. The weight of such a report is substantially dependent on the personal authority of the issuer. Thus, unlike a court judgment, the legal opinion given is only binding on someone who acknowledges this authority. But personal authority develops out of the free play of forces. What political Muslims have in mind, therefore, is a scholars' republic or a legal opinion state."
Christianity is doctrinally about love, Islam is doctrinally about submission:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD16Aa02.h tml
" Less important than the differences in content - "audience" rather than "dialogue", "submission" rather than "love" - is the difference in emphasis. With this perfunctory preface, Sistani begins a lengthy treatise on when, where, with what clothing, and in what bodily positions prayers may be said. His concern is not the spiritual experience of prayer, but establishing communal norms for prayer. Where the Christians and Jews gush with loquacity on the subject, Muslims have remarkably little to say about the experience of prayer. Reading through Muslim sources, I am at loss to find anything remotely resembling Ratzinger's quite typical discourse on prayer.
In fact, virtually all of Sistani's writings address communal norms for behavior, including the most intimate. Ritual impurity (janabat) is a central concern, especially in the case of sexual relations. He writes, for example:
[...]
In calling attention to these portions of Sistani's theology I do not mean to deprecate him. On the contrary, he addresses the inhabitants of traditional society for whom spiritual experience means submission, that is, submission to communal norms, whence the individual derives a lasting sense of identity. In the most intimate details of daily life, culture and religion become inseparable. For traditional society it is the durability of communal norms that lends a sense of immortality to the individual, a life beyond mere physical existence. That is why prayer in the Judeo-Christian sense, the lovers' exchange between God and the individual soul, does not come into consideration within Muslim theology. Allah is the all-powerful sovereign of the world before whom the individual dissolves; the individual's submission to the ummah, the community of Islam, is a spiritual experience of an entirely different order.
To this the Americans can only come as destroyers, not saviors. America by its nature disrupts traditional order. It is the usurper of the Old World, the agency of creative destruction, the Spirit that Denies, to whom "everything that arises goes rightly to its ruin" (Goethe) - in short, the Great Satan. America is the existential threat to Islam."
In short, there can be no peace with Islam, as two ideologies underpinning the reflective lifestyles - Islam, the traditional and developed world, the modernist lifestyle, which more or less can be reconciled with Christianity - are in fundamental and irreconci
The problem is when you spout such futile and false banalities, you become a moron, and thus part of a problem, not a solution.
Clausewitz had it right: war is continuation of politics by other means (I might also paraphrase that politics is continuation of war by less violent means). Vegetius had it right, too: if you want peace, prepare for war.
Since nowadays shallow and hypocritical sentimentality and empty self-righteousness like yours have replaced the brains, we have General Public Idiocy on the rise. Effectively, those who want to have peace and no war whatsoever, are thrown by the real world into wars they don't really understand at all, even if they imagine they do. Witness 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. This is not over, and it's not the fault of "Bushitler", as some leftie morons simply use not very bright president as an evil scapegoat supposedly responsible for everything (Lisa Simpson's "campus" bicycle sticker "U.S. Out Of Everywhere" comes to mind).
Nope. You fell in the same hole as Greider did.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html
"The United States is suffering again from a massive trade deficit -- $38.3 billion in 2006.".
Geez. Next year this will turn US economy inside out.
OK, no joking: frankly, the only reason of this deficit is that USA has money to spare and the rest of world doesn't (because it engages in war, or like in Europe, because it spends faithfully on govt projects and govt sectors, and then wonders why life gets worse instead of better).
Face it, with the money workers earn in the West, it's hard to compete with someone who's willing to work for a quarter or less of what you're earning, and lives in a cheaper country in terms of cost of living,
What makes you think he's willing to continue this indefinitely? He would like to have exactly what you have. More: people in 1920s/1940s in USA were materially off exactly like he is now. The momen he becomes JUST AS PRODUCTIVE - which you haven't shown - he becomes less competitive. Which is exactly what happened in Japan or Korea. Or at Airbus now.
unless people start demanding quality again (And what's preventing the offshore worker from providing that? Moving up the value chain isn't a notion exclusive to the West).
I'm not an American or Western European. Yet, when facing purchase of a car, I could consider buyign new Hyundai or pay actually more for used BMW. I bought used BMW. I love it and would never buy that Korean crap. I don't think a guy who sold me that BMW went to Hyundai dealer. So most likely I have indirectly increased demand for cars made in Germany.
It looks like this from the other end: developed countries have lots of advantages:
1. The western wages are high because western countries have rule of law and lots of capital, which enable them to have high productivity. Wages are function of productivity and not the other way around.
2. The quality of institutions outside first world is improving, but it still doesn't match. With higher corruption and worse functioning the other countries just _can't produce_ those goods that would supposedly put you out of work. The ones that are endangering your job are only just as good as you are or almost as good, but still hungry. This won't last forever, though.
3. And last but not least, _robots cost the same_ in Japan and Sierra Leone (in fact they are more expensive, in many African countries bikes cost several hundred dollars, and Americans visiting Europe are routinely shocked with loftiness of prices).
Take for example pharmaceuticals. What does it matter that Burkina Faso has cheap workers? It just doesn't have the infrastructure, rule of law, capital, peace, and workers educated enough to make new pharmaceuticals. In fact, the work of those people is cheap precisely because Burkina Faso doesn't have all those things, not the other way around!
Big companies like Lenovo being bought out by China, or more recently the US government blocking China from buying Unocal (US blocking on average 10% of US companies being bought up by China).
You might have missed in those news the strange fact that employment in China's manufacturing sector is actually falling.
BTW - an insightful book wrote two centuries ago might be more relevant to what happens now than a flashy prattle of dumb journalists, who even if traveled, are typically ignorant. Here's a good example of one:
The Accidental Theorist All work and no play makes William Greider a dull boy
What makes you think America has it's main export markets in the Third World?
USA sells a lot of corn to Japan.
Oops. Japan isn't thirld world anymore. Strange. It used to be.
If we only bought american goods, then we'd inflate our local prices,
..and reducing overall purchases which would make a good portion of those workers unemployed (note: supply of labor would have increased, so its price, aka wages, would have fallen), in turn reducing purchases in the existing businesses which would go belly up and make their workers unemployed, which would again inflict downward pressure on wages, and so on until achieving new (old?), lower equilibriums of wages, employment and GDP.
Thus increasing the wages of American Workers, which would in turn allow us to afford those higher local prices,
The economy would be literally rolled _back in time_ this way, it would have been like running reverse on video. You just don't get the math of it.
This scenario has already been tried during Great Depression, when govt filled with sentimental illiterates like you prolonged depression of US economy into 1940s, while it could have been over by 1930 if govt didn't stupidly insist on enforcing high wages of union mob (nobody more was employed because wages were set artificially above their true, market price - no demand) enforcing high prices (which siphoned off the money that would have otherwise been used to make more purchases in new businesses and would get new companies rolling) while simultaneously strangling money supply (which caused severe liquidity crisis).
You're an offshot of that righteous, sentimental, and tragically harmful idiocy.
Enlighten me how either (1) Our wages won't drop a ton (2) Companies won't outsource in a race to the bottom?
Because that hasn't happened in the past and this scenario has already been played in smaller scale with Japan?
Japan several decades ago was a country of dirt-cheap wages, much like Phillipines now. When Japan got developed, its wages went up, to the point they are not competitive with USA even though their workers still get less purchasing power parity of their wages and work longer hours.
Now, all that didn't make wages in USA go to the rocky bottom, did it?
Hint: economy is not a fixed pie. Just because the other guy suddenly gets richer does not mean you have to get poorer. In fact you are probably slightly better off because he's much better off.
Hint #2: the employment in manufacturing sector in China is... falling. That's right.
Just as free trade puts me in a transaction I didn't agree to.
Bullshit. There is no transaction between you and those who, say, buy whatever produced in India. That transaction does not involve you, regardless of whatever sentimental hyperboles you spin.
I didn't agree to join the WTO, or NAFTA.
Similarly, I didn't agree for my govt to impose idiotic tariffs on my very own nation (to its own disadvantage, but people en masse think with sentiments like you instead of trying to use their brains and add the numbers up). That is not trade, that is politics and govt regulation, and you mix two realms that overlap but do not cover.
I didn't agree to let Wal*Mart put my local mom&pop shops out of business.
So? It's none of your fucking business if some people in the local community buy at Walmart instead of this "mom & pop" business. Not to mention that "mom&pop" is cost-inefficient in comparison. Which makes those local consumers spend more than they would have spent at Walmart. Which means they don't save what they save with walmart for the same quantity/quality of goods. So they are left with less money they would have spent otherwise. So ceteris paribus, "mom&pop" cost.. jobs.
It is a paradox of perverted reality that those selfish consumers benefit USA and altruistic, dim gooks like you actually put it at disadvantage, nevertheless, that's how calm, rational thinking indicates it happens.
For a supposed hacker, you can't count.
I didn't agree to let the market destroy my community. That is ALL fraud.
You're a sentimental fraud, that's all.
All profit is theft of wages.
That's what you get when you read marxism for dummies. FYI, the crucial point here is so called "transformation of prices" (labor into market prices), and marxists routinely "forget" to tell people that Marx has failed at this. As well as legions of lefties after him. Marx' labor theory of value is bullshit it turns out (go read e.g. Mark Blaug on rigorous mathematical proof), ergo this "profit is theft of wages" theory is bullshit.
Labor is a COST. Not value. profit is made on merchandise on market outside the company, not on labor within the company.
This businessman in 19th century has been employing lots of boys to turn the steam flowing to engine cylinders on and off. On off on off. One boy has cleverly tied the piston that was going down to the piston that was going up, and so it worked automatically and the boy went play. Businessman summarily applied his invention and selfishly and logically fired all the boys.
Question: what happened to supposed value of labor of those boys? Evaporated? If so, why the value of enterprise and product wen t up instead of down when boys were fired? Why did his profit go up since supposed value of labor has evaporated?
The key aspect here is of course necessity of labor. But its necessity does not make it _source of value_. It's still a cost, not value. That's why businessman's profit went up when he fired those boys. Thanks to which they could go to school while society as a whole had its production running without someone turning steam on and off in those engines (i.e. GDP has increased).
This merciless, selfish act of businessman made little boys
Profit is the difference between cost and price- and is therefore unpaid wages.
"Marxism for dummies" does a lot of harm...
Maximizing personal profit at the expense of your neighbors is indeed theft; and treason.
Nope. It's really a virtue. Investment comes from nothing but profit. The opposite of profit is waste. Without profit there would be no technology, no civilization, no economy. More: there are well-founded arguments that achieving a profit (as such) is a MORAL DUTY.
-- We should fire all Linux developers, without them so many little boys would have been employed in primitive and tedious jobs!
Teaching critical thinking when it comes to multiple views on a subject is one thing. Encouraging students to seriously consider the "opposing view" of global warming denial is another.
Oh my, oh my... That's bad. We could not actually allow any doubt or critique of our religion, err, science, could we?
Science classes should teach only commonly accepted science.
This is not science, this is your peculiar _cult_. Global warming may or may not take place, but what you and GW-cultists wish is ideological and religious supremation of their view.
Science is all right with that or without it. It's just a series of attempts to topple the hypothesis. Done by the book, a scientist actually should attempt to find data rejecting his hypothesis. Science your way is 19th century verificationism, which is obsolete.
That even applies if a significant number of non-scientists oppose the viewpoint of the vast majority of scientists. Science classes are for science, not for myths.
Science is true because it's true.
Go sit in dumbass corner, where you belong.
Promoting critical thinking and debate is exactly the idea of this decision.
i es.htm
p hia.shtml
Oh, bullshit. It's pandering to religious parents.
They have more right to be pandered to than the academic left, which sees brainwashing everyone as its inborn right.
I think it's also designed to avoid the issue ever being discussed in class again, because it makes it that much more difficult to deal with some parent mafia
"Parent mafia"?! Eat shit and die, scumbag - NEITHER YOU NOR GOVERNMENT NOR OBSESSIVE ACADEMICS GET TO DECIDE WHAT KIDS ARE TO BE TAUGHT.
You are not owner of the kids and though neither the parents are, THEY have the right to decide what their kids are taught. Not you or a few shallow careerists and leftie lobbyists. Get your hands off kids or you will have them shot away. Dumbass.
and stick to whatever their crazy ideas of "alternative views" are. Do you think the parent in question would be happy with alternative scientific opinions? I don't think so. He wants religious views included. In science.
It's not, idiot. Evolution is probably right - at least the part on natural selection - but it's still _ex post_ hypothesis. No predictive power = not very scientific really, hardcore falsifictionist would say not at all.
The critics are right, whatever their motivations. Painting all the critics of evolution in color of a fundie idiot is exactly against the core of scientific method, or at least falsification a la Karl Popper: it's argument ad hominem and trying to intimidate the critics with a lot shouting and hostility as opposed to involving in intellectual debate.
Vicious morons like you are little but "Darwin rottweilers", so aggressive that they don't even understand they are caught in Catch-22s and other fallacies:
http://www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_dawkinsfallac
You're a believer really, a lot worse than those fundies. They at least are not driven by viciousness and mindless screaming like you are.
Evolution per se has problems, and not just religious people noticed that. This guy put it very well:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/EvolutionPhiladel
I used to think that criticizing evolution at school is a bad idea, because all in all, it's the best hypothesis we have, but after reading about the issue I came to conclusion that it is actually very good: kids learn there are no simple answers and textbook problems almost always are skewed towards finding one and easy solution, while in real world it doesn't work like that.
Yes, this is done for sake of education, but it has bad side effect of too many people leaving school acquiring habitual attitude towards problems that resembles that textbook exercise attitude, and so they become simpletons like you, expecting one correct answer, evolution in this case.
"Oh, that's right, the Polish Labor Union"
You're abusing it. 10 million people movement (spanning just about any social group consisting of adults) in 40 million people country is no labor union. It was a massive political movement, organized mainly in workplaces only because communism liked mammooth workplaces and organizations. It mistook being big with being productive.
I'm Polish and my parents both belonged to Solidarity, but they've done it as a way of getting politically involved and not for sake of unionization.
That Solidarity was primarily labor union and not a political movement is one of the most persistent myths propagated by the Western unions, which are little more than self-interested cartels. Solidarity was a huge political movement first and union second.
Congratulations.
d =320940
You've just reinvented ad-hoc, debilitated, half-witted version of progressing pauperization a la Marx, the falling rate of profit et al.
There's just one problem: you see, it didn't work out that way. Somehow. And doesn't. In theory it doesn't work that way either. Hint: there's something happening to consumers money when they choose WM over other businesses. You missed that part on top of missing hundred other factors.
Ad hoc, silly, amateurish economics is just that. Group paranoia, folk economics:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
"I can look at the people I know who work at Wal-Mart for $7.50/hr, have to live with family because they couldn't pay rent to save their lives, and are on state medical assistance."
Close down WM and make them unemployed, they won't have to live with their parents and be on state medical assistance.
No, if you closed WM down no better employer would have shown up. In fact, total employment would actually go down a bit, due to mysterious processes that black magic known as Econ 101 explains.
"Without WM there, all those people on $8/h would be unemployed.
s sq.pdf
Nonsense. Without Wal-Mart, someone (or, more likely, several someones) would step in to fill the void. People gotta buy shoes, somebody's gotta sell them."
At higher price, dumbass. Jones doesn't save half of price he would have to pay at the more expensive store => Jones doesn't employe SOMEBODY ELSE.
Unemployment increases, real wages go down, standard of living goes down. Economy your way DEVOLVES. It works like on rewind, going back to past.
"Those $8/hr Wal-Mart wage slaves would likely work for someone who (gasp!) may actually live there and give half a fuck about the community around him."
All those expensive store owners caring about community... it warms my heart...
You are too stupid on top of beeing too romantic, vague, and inspecific to understand how practical economy and society and community works, that's all.
"Because the vast majority of people in this great nation are fucking idiots who wouldn't know their own self-interest if it bit them on the ass, reared up on its hind legs, and said "Hi, I'm you self-interest.""
Nope, they understand their own self-interest much better than you understand your own. Evidence:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/
This is what applies to you:
"Despite the philosopher's perplexity, people are fiercely attached to their principles
--even to unintelligible or preposterous ones. . . . Their minds are
clouded by childish myths and unspeakable fears. As a result, they often fail to
grasp their private advantage or to act upon it when they do.
Stephen Holmes, "The Secret History of Self-Interest" (1990:274)"
FYI, you're a feeble-minded looney, not a rational anarchist.
"You are being purposefully dense and disingenius."
Nope, I'm not. I am completely honest.
"Try to say, with a straight face, that consumers save more than, not only the wage difference (which may indeed be true, as far as that goes and for what it's worth), but the money the taxpayers shell out to send all those employees to the doctor when they're sick,"
Compare insurance rate at WM with other businesses and organizations. Present me with figures and numbers, why is it precisely WM that is so exceptionally bad in this area. It seems to me like you invented this ad hoc without seeing a single number about health of workers working, injuries, costs, insurance, etc. There is nothing special about WM in this area in comparison to other businesses.
Finally, suppose they do not work at WM but are unemployed instead: what, they would not need taxpayer's money spent on their healthcare?!
Your arguments don't make any sense.
" the money that (formerly) local manufacturing is losing to overseas competition,"
False. The amount of stuff manufactured in USA is more or less as it was in the past. Some even argue there was slight growth, esp. in capital-intensive industries, where labor costs matter less and long-term investment security matters more. You're preaching five years old's economics.
"and the money we're just throwing at Wal-Marts all over the country in property tax breaks and other municipal incentives."
Unless WM gets more corporate welfare than others, you have no case. It would be best to entirely eliminate corporate welfare, but you have made no case whatsoever why it is WM that is using it more than others. To me the most plausible explanation for you singling it out is because it seems to be winning business.
"Unless Wal-Mart's printing money in Arkansas, it's a zero-sum game by definition."
Definition? In economy? In economy what matters are people, interests and money, not your definitions. Real games, played in empirical reality, tend to be positive sum or negative sum games. That WM has to be zero-sum game BY DEFINITION is the dumbest piece of economic charlatanery I've heard in years. And if it is "by definition" zero sum game, why not any other large scale chain or business or corporation?
You know, by definition people in USA are just as happy as in North Korea - that's your way of "arguing". What's your IQ anyway?
"And that's the way economics works."
No, your mind is the way feeble-minded, but well intentioned and pompous moron's mind works.