Iraq Situation is Bullshit
POSTED BY: Succatash
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 10, 2024 22:11
VIEWED: 28270
PAGE 8 of 17
"If my bitching keeps just one person from voting for Bush in 2004 than I say it's productive as hell."
Is there a better candidate? I don't want to horse-trade my freedoms.
Is there a non-republican candidate who will respect my right to keep and bear arms?
--Anthony
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Howard Dean was against the Iraq invasion but is also against gun control.
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I'd love to find a good candidate for president. Nathan Fillion maybe?
Does anybody else rememeber Rumsfeld coming on tv a month or two ago giving a pathetic excuse for why they hadn't found any wmd? - because they were most likely in mobile transport labs? That's sad. If those ever existed, they are long destroyed by now too.
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I have heard many theories about the WMD issue since the end of active hostilities.
1) Sardinar: A person claiming to be KGB station chief in Romania states that the Soviets had a program called Sardinar to clean up chemical, biological and other illegal weapons programs that the Soviets had helped with. It was to dispose of the weapons, but leave the technical stuff, so that the programs could be quickly reconstituted.
2) Saddam's scientists lied, telling him that they had weapons when they didn't, because they were afraid of being killed.
While both and other theories sound reasonable, I just don't know. We are assuming that he never had them, since the first gulf war. We do know he had them beforehand, because of the dead Kurds and Iranians. It bothers me that they have not been found yet, (it makes me hope the Sardinar story is true) for different reasons than you. I think they were there, based on the fact that no one in the UN stood up and said he did not.
And at this stage of the political game, it no longer matters. If we do find them, and announce it, a large majority of those who believe there never was any will simply assume we planted the evidence.
Saddam was a nasty piece of work, and even if we went in for the wrong reasons, we still did a good thing by ousting him.
Okay, these definition are off the top of my head so bear with me. Labor: any action essentially, usually refers to actions which produce some material object. Mental labor never gets the respect it deserves, because you can't see it. All you can see is the outcome of the physical actions.
"Onwership" is a concept, one of those things like traffic lights which work because so many people buy into it. When you own something, it gives you the right to utilize that thing any way you desire or see fit. You own you, therefore you can do with yourself whatever you want, utilize your eyeballs for for watching Firefly, as an example. The only caveat I will place is that you do not use what you own to harm others. Hope this helps.
I think I understand where the difference is with the land reform issue. Usually, wealthy land owners of huge tracts of land subcontract the actual field work out to laborers. Pay them a wage for working land they own. The field laborer does not own the land he works, but instead exchanges his labor for wages, or a cut of the crop (sharecropping). Generally, this leaves the field hands less wealthy than if they owned their own land. That is problematic, and can slow economic growth as well as perpetuate a near aristocratic or semi-feudal type of system.
Which I think we can both agree is bad.
As with a lot of these debates, the goals are the same, its the means we differ over. How do you get the field hands up the economic ladder. I don't see theft as a viable solution, whether it is by the State or some other agency.
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Good. So all we have to do is make it clear why we went after the Taliban and why we are fighting in Iraq. Its the "not getting blowed up" civil liberty that Dennis Miller talked about.
You are safe as long as you mean us no harm, or do not interfere with us going after those guys who want to kill us. This is as close as I can get right now, but it obviously needs to be clarified. Economic competition is not harmful, even if you are eating my lunch (selling to my clients)
The concerns about civil liberties are overblown I think, from my readings of the Patriot act and such. BUT, I really don't want to dissuade you from your concern, nor really taking action against it, (as long as you are not too successful) It is that concern that prevents the government from going too far.
Some changes in the law are necessary, especially in light of changing technology. And on the intel side, some of the Church commitee stuff has to go by the wayside, as we cannot afford to be that blinded anymore. But you are right to be concerned about it going too far.
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I am not sure the Democratic party in general is trustworthy on the gun control issue. They have spent a great deal of the last decade slamming the NRA and other pro gun lobbies, and have shown no distain for gun control laws. (Sadly neither does Arnold here in California)
As for his (Dean's) position on Iraq, I am unclear what he would have done. Would he have stopped at Afghanistan? Would he have gone after Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria?
Its always easy to slam a guy for what he does, its a lot harder to come up with viable alternatives.
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"I think I understand where the difference is with the land reform issue. Usually, wealthy land owners of huge tracts of land subcontract the actual field work out to laborers. Pay them a wage for working land they own. The field laborer does not own the land he works, but instead exchanges his labor for wages, or a cut of the crop (sharecropping). Generally, this leaves the field hands less wealthy than if they owned their own land. That is problematic, and can slow economic growth as well as perpetuate a near aristocratic or semi-feudal type of system.
Which I think we can both agree is bad.
As with a lot of these debates, the goals are the same, its the means we differ over. How do you get the field hands up the economic ladder. I don't see theft as a viable solution, whether it is by the State or some other agency."
*****
I was intrigued by this tidbit. If we get all the lower rung people up the ladder, then who will clean the toilets? And what exactly will be their incentive for doing so? Who will stand out in the hot sun and cut sugarcane? Who will become sewage workers and telemarketers?
Why would they become these things? Because they dreamed of processing excrement ever since they were children? Their highest ambition was to bother people at dinnertime with attempts to peddle Long Distance bundles?
Is it bad to have people who are lower on the economic ladder? Is it bad to have people higher on the economic ladder?
Only if you can find some better, more universal motivation than earning money to buy goods and services.
If everyone owned a castle and 1000 acres of land, something BESIDES economic well being would have to be found to motivate them. The intrinsic goodness of mankind isn't sufficient to the task.
--Anthony
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"Some changes in the law are necessary, especially in light of changing technology. And on the intel side, some of the Church commitee stuff has to go by the wayside, as we cannot afford to be that blinded anymore. But you are right to be concerned about it going too far."
I have to admit that I liked it better when some of these actions fell under the category 'Black Ops' and 'illegal surveilance' rather than being sanctioned by the force of law.
Once upon a time, the government did all sorts of bad things. They did these things because they believed they were right. They did them with the full understanding that if they were caught, it was someone's ass.
Now they can do many of these things legally. With little evidence. There may be repercussions if they are wrong, but it's no one's ass. It's completely within the law.
That's a somewhat frightening prospect.
--Anthony
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"Is it bad to have people who are lower on the economic ladder? Is it bad to have people higher on the economic ladder?"
Generally speaking, the answer to your first question is yes, and the second is no. What wealth is, is capability, how easy it becomes to accomplish a greater and greater variety of tasks. A rich man can construct a factory, pay workers to build it for him. A rich man can start his own independent space agency, and get off this rock. Poor folks can't do that.
You worry about grunt labor, as in who will clean the latrines and cut sugarcane. As history has shown, when labor becomes too expensive for a given task, using automation or mechanical means to do the same job become more attractive. Automatic cane harvesting or self cleaning toilets. They may be more expensive, but if they become competitive with labor, people will start buying them.
Which means that those laborers can then do other jobs, like designing spaceships as one example. Granted it required more education to design a spacecraft than clean a toilet, but I am not one that sees education as a bad thing.
There is a down side however that should be noted. Called the Fermi plague. The direction of technology is to do more and more with less and less. That includes less people to decide whether something is to be done or not. The risk is that a single person could be capable of destroying the entire population. This is one proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox.
"If everyone owned a castle and 1000 acres of land, something BESIDES economic well being would have to be found to motivate them. The intrinsic goodness of mankind isn't sufficient to the task."
I think we have different views of the "goodness of man" as well as economics. I don't see the point of a gun, or keeping folks intentionally poor to be good motivators, however they have been tried in the past. Economic self interest, or greed, has proven itself time and time again to benefit mankind.
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"Is it bad to have people who are lower on the economic ladder? Is it bad to have people higher on the economic ladder?"
Two other points I wanted to make.
1) With more rich folks, and more wealth available, being created, this will tend to raise the wages of the poor laborers. It may not be in terms of dollars, but in availablity of affordable goods. Such that even though a poor person makes say 18,000 dollars a year, he still has a car, a house, a microwave oven, telephone service etc.
It is important to remember that rich and poor are relative terms, relative to each other. Rich folks have more money than poor folks, while the poor have less. What that money can do, that changes from year to year and new products and technologies come online. A thousand years ago, not even the King of England could buy a vial of penicillin.
2) There will always be "the poor" People have different desires, some folks can stick with 4 years in college, some of us will try to duck school and join the Navy. Some folks are highly motivated and self diciplined to run multi-national corporations, and some of us simply don't want the hassle and would rather spend time at home with our wives and children. So, some folks will do better than others.
The only way to prevent that, is to fix the rules such that the successful are penalized specifically for their success. This has a proven track record of not making more folks richer, but making everyone poorer. Why try if all you are gonna get is punished?
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