Timewaster's Guide Archive

There are tons of people who make it in life because their parents were well off, and didn't have to do a thing for it.  That's certainly not an ideal society.

Here lies the problem.  At the root of socialism and communism we find the desire to punish those who have more than others.  It's not about giving people an equal chance at success, it's about making sure no one gets ahead. Because if someone gets ahead while others don't it is, by there definition, not an ideal society.

The infuriating thing for liberals is that giving people an even playing field doesn't guarantee equal outcomes. Some people really are lazy and/or stupid.  Since legislating equal opportunity doesn't work, they have to start legislating equal outcomes, which means taking from the rich and giving it to the poor at the point of a gun.  Not where I want to live.

So, I'm worried about Palin.  She sounds dumb when she talks and that can't be good.

" "Lot ninety-seven," the auctioneer announced. "A boy." "
Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert Heinlein

Renkar:
I appreciate your taking the time to explain your ideal plan in detail.  It's a lot less loony than I was afraid it was, especially since you explicitly take the long, multi-generational view.

In the end, I'd love to live in a society like you describe.  My faith, or lack thereof, in the ability of human nature to exercise pragmatism, discipline, and altruism over extended periods is such that I can't ever see it happening though.  The answer to that, as you've already said though, is to change human nature.  Human nature changes  most readily when people are free from worry over the lower levels of Maslows hierachy of needs.  Currently, the vast majority of people in the world live at the bottom level.  The best system we have for bringing prosperity to large numbers of people is capitalism governed by democracy and the rule of law, which is what we're trying to spread, for largely selfish reasons (nods to Gorgon) in a couple of countries in the Middle East right now and elsewhere through less violent manipulations. When the opposition has guns, you'd better have guns too, no matter who you are.

Thanks for providing a different point ... blinders that those experiences have placed over our eyes.  That is the
historian in me I guess.

My experiences in training and overseas, have in fact changed me; for the better in my opinion.  But I'll get to that in a minute.

I have never liked MASH. It was a ridiculously unrealistic portrayal of a military unit designed to make a political statement about the Vietnam war. (Yes I know it was set in Korea)  To portray a bomber as being surprised and shocked at the havoc his bombs wreak is dishonest and offensive.  They know exactly what they're doing and carry on anyway. Fortunately, they're not asked to knowingly bomb civilians anymore.  From where I stood on the ground they were often annoyingly careful and picky about where/when they would drop precisely because of that knowledge.

As for being willing to talk about my experiences in the military, you bet.  I'll answer any specific questions you care to ask, or pontificate at length if you wish.

The role of experience.  You chose some interesting words in that last paragraph.  I would not have used the word "blinders" to describe the effect of experience.  In my life, experience has been the single greatest cause of mind expansion and eye-opening. You can only come to understand the reality of the world through experience, first hand or vicarious. Colored perceptions is part of that real world, of course, and must be factored in. Thinking and drawing conclusions in the absence of experience, either first hand or vicarious, though, is pure navel gazing and not terribly useful.  

Promise me you'll stop watching GOVERNMENT FUNDED news.

Which government funded news would that be?

Tell me those who hate the extremists for the things they do, are they able to distinct between the extremist and the TRUE muslim? Do you think that people even try? No. And why would they, it is much easier to hate then to understand.

This is kind of a broad brush with which to condemn everyone but your own culture, don't you think? 

I don't need to distinguish between anyone and a TRUE Muslim.  I don't care if you or anyone else is a TRUE Muslim anymore than you care whether I'm a TRUE Mormon.  All I care about is being able to distinguish between people who want to kill me and those who don't.  When the streets of Palestine (along with a lot of other places) filled with happy cheering people on 9/11 it was a little eye-opening.  When I was walking in the souk in Kuwait city, our ally in the Middle East, and refrained from purchasing little statuettes of the World Trade Center with a lighter built into the top and a bust of Osama Bin laden affixed to the base, it was a little eye-opening too.

Before anyone gets all foamy, let me say I don't hate Muslims.  I don't even hate the extremists.  I just hope the extremists die before they get a chance to kill my family or friends.  I've helped a few along in this regard, no hate involved.

Gorgon:

But they're factories that ... is in control of the country.

True enough.  Companies from our country take advantage of the dictator's policies that produce cheap labor.  I don't buy, really, that it's therefore our fault, but for the sake of the discussion lets postulate that it is or at least that we/the companies are responsible for it.

What do the companies do about it?  The thing that immediately springs to mind, and which is the only real option for a commercial entity, is 'pay the workers more.'  This, however, is not a good solution because of the immediate pay differential between the workers employed by Nike and the rest of the people in the country. You can see, I'm sure, the problems that will arise when the Nike workers are making ten dollars a day and the other people are making 10 dollars a month. It's called inflation. So, whatever the companies do it has to be something that benefits people in that country across the board.  Well, what is the root cause of the state of things there?  The dictator.  Unless you get rid of him, the disease will remain no matter how much you fight the symptoms.  Which brings us right back around to military action by our government to dump the dictator.

Also, I suspect that if you ask the actual workers in the Nike factory, they'd say they are very pleased to have the job. Fact is, those factories are already improving the quality of life for the people working in them.  It looks like shite compared to what we have but looks like fuzzy bunnies compared to what they would otherwise have.

Also, too often I hear ... agree to disagree on that point.

Agreed.  

Often I think that the debate is framed in a way that obscures the self-interest on our part.  When someone complains bitterly about the cost to the Iraqi people, the natural response is to focus on the good that's actually coming to them. And the cost to the Iraqi people or to our own soldiers is what the objections usually come down to; the cost in human life.  If we could have dumped Saddam Hussein and started Iraq on the road to democracy without bloodshed I don't think anyone at all would have objected or be objecting now.

Also, since the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer (and the middle class disappearing), I find it hard to swallow that capitalism is as great as we are often inclined to claim.

I too have seen statistics that indicate that the middle class is disappearing.  When the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer you're moving towards a more 'stratified' system.  The root cause of stratification is, essentially, the inability to move from one economic level to another. Over the last many decades our government has been making that movement harder and harder through regulation and taxation.  The regulation is always emplaced in the name of 'making it better for the common man' and usually involves higher taxes and/or higher regulatory burdens on businesses and the rich to 'even the playing field.'  Unfortunately, those taxes and regulatory burdens also make it harder to start and run a business and harder to hold onto your own money once you've started to make a lot of it.  The actual result is that only those people who already have the powerful business in place or who already have the money to invest in avoiding the regulatory burden and the taxes can do so.  Thus it gets harder for the little guy to pierce the barrier, to move up from one economic situation to the next. Result? More pronounced stratification.

I am by no means advocating a complete absence of regulation, as I said earlier, you need laws that prevent predatory and unfair practices on the part of the haves.  IMO, we've already gone too far down the regulatory road and it's causing alot of the problems we're seeing today.  Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac are perfect examples.  The federal government under Clinton implemented regulation that forced mortgage companies to relax their loan standards so that 'more people could own their own homes.' It sound very nice, who doesn't want to own their own home? But in order to swing the deal the government had to guarantee those loans.  So, the mortgage companies were making loans to people who couldn't afford them, comfortable in the knowledge that when they defaulted the government would cover the loss. Thus the risk was transferred, by regulation, from the people conducting the loan business onto the taxpayer in the name of 'helping poor people own their own homes.' And there was no monetary motivation for the business people to behave responsibly, there was in fact pressure to behave otherwise.  We see very clearly how that has turned out.

Another good example are universities.  The cost of a university education has skyrocketed in recent decades.  Every time the government provided any sort of grant or student loan the cost of tuition rose, magically, to exactly meet what the government would provide.  In response the government would provide bigger loans, with the same result.  

You really can't stir the bottom of the barrel and expect anything good to come up.  The bottom of the barrel has to stir itself.  My view of government's role in that endeavor is to make it possible for the bottom of the barrel to stir itself by providing basic education and removing barriers like over-regulation or dishonest competition practices.  Or, in other words, the government should be in the business of leading the horse to water, not jamming its head down and screaming at it to drink.

Edit:
Renkar:
By happy coincidence, I already responded to the salient points in your post in my response to Gorgon.  Have at.

No flame.

You've obviously read a great deal on why communism is a good idea. Now go read some works on what happens when  people try and put it into practice.

Return and report.

Ok, I've taken all I can stand in this thread:

I don't have a complete grasp of the international politics involved,

You can say that again. You complain that we didn't use diplomacy after 10 years of UN sanctions, weapons inspectors and oil for food programs?  What the hell would you call it if not diplomacy? It didn't work and then 9/11 changed the playing field forever.

You can't force a people's movement, you can't invade a country set up a new government with strong ties to American Companies, and create an occupation that is just as oppressive, if not more so, than the previous one then expect those people to sit by and watch and accept it.

Are you insane or are you really calling the Coalition presence in Iraq an occupation that's worse than Saddam's regime?  Step away from the Daily Kos and do a little research into what's actually happening over there.  I can tell you from personal, on the ground, eyeball experience that the people in Iraq desperately want to live in a Democracy and are willing to fight and die for that chance. So take your, "you can't force a people's movement" and shove it up your ass.

The powers that be have taken the Vietnam playbook and ran with it.  That didn't end well for any involved, but for some reason they think that this one will work out better.  Perhaps they truly don't care how it ends up, again much like Vietnam.

The only way the war in Iraq will end up like Vietnam is if we suddenly back out on our promises and commitments to the people on the ground and abandon them to the murderous terrorists they're fighting, with our help, right now.  That's obviously what you want so spare me your crocodile tears for the innocents you're so anxious to abandon to the tender mercies of Jihad.

As for the whole "Iraq had nothing to do with Al Quaeda, Iraq was an unnecessary war" crowd.   I respectfully disagree.

The Middle East is a vast teeming throng of people who have a storied and proud history. Considering the wealth that has been pouring into that area for the last 50 years they should be lounging about swimming pools or washing their SUVs while they think about how to get the next promotion or put Janny through college. Instead, they live in chicken coops, are barely literate and have no hope for their children beyond, usually, an early death from some trivial disease, long conquered in the west. This, understandably, pisses them off no end. It pisses me off and I don't even live there. "So what went wrong?" they ask themselves. "Damnit, where is the money for roads and hospitals and schools? " The obvious answer, of course, is it's sitting in bank accounts belonging to their rulers, despotic dictators all.

This poses a problem for the dictators. If the people they rule are allowed to draw and act on these conclusions, they stand to lose their power and privilege through bloody revolution. This is, of course, unacceptable, so a suitable target must be found. America is the obvious answer considering our involvement in the region over oil, but more importantly, the high visibility of our cultural exports. The fact that we advocate a lifestyle that is anathema to the religious zealots of the region is simply a bonus, since it automatically legitimizes anti-american rhetoric by striking that vast religious gong.

There is not a snowball's chance in hell that we could peacefully influence most Middle-Eastern regimes to liberalize in less than many decades. Those regimes know very well that the reason their people haven't twigged to their blame-shifting, "It's America not me!" is because they have the kind of iron control of the media and everything else that allows them to dictate what their people hear and believe. Even the most vanilla liberalization would undermine that control enough for their own people to turn on them. Not acceptable.

So let's take several decades dang it! Just let them stew and allow toothless sanctions to gum away at the dictators' will to power. It'll work eventually, right? Unfortunately, that stopped being an option on 9/11. Suddenly the fruits of that Middle Eastern Dictator's power hungry rhetoric turned into a direct threat to civilians in our country. I was not surprised on 9/11. I saw it or something like it coming. If anything, I was surprised it had taken so long. Next time it could be a nuke, or sarin gas, or a weaponized biological. With those kinds of threats on the horizon, we no longer had decades to sweetly wait for the dictators to see reason.

The benefits of democracy and capitalism can be summarized by the phrase: "We have never been attacked by a country with a McDonalds." (I don't know who made that observation or I'd give them credit) So how do you spread McDonalds in the Middle-East? Well, since the Jihadists would resist the McDonalds campaign with guns, you have to lead with your own guns, and while you're at it, why not pick a country with a history of secularism, like Iraq? (Just to clarify I'm listing Iraq's history of secularism as a reason TO invade that country instead of somewhere else) Iraq was the most likely source of WMDs for the terrorists at the time, they were still in non-compliance with a UN resolution calling for military action in response to non-compliance, we felt bad about abandoning the revolutionaries in '92, we had basing rights on their southern border, their official military was a known and pathetic quantity, etc...

Given the threat and the need for steps to prevent further action on our own soil, Iraq was an excellent choice of venue.