Hugo

The Terrible Sweal is making a running joke out of his claims to being a classical liberal. The only thing he seems right of is Karl Marx. True classical liberals are either guffawing at him or turning purple with rage that he would sully their title so. In any event, the whole "the rich get better stuff and that's unfair" notion is coming at it from the wrong perspective. Instead of approaching from the unwashed proletarian position, try looking at it from the rich man's viewpoint. You work hard all your life and make lots of money. Less than 20% of American millionaires inherited more than 10% of their money, over 50% inherited nothing, and less than 25% received a gift from a relative of more than $10,000. In 1892, the figures were almost identical. Then the government comes along and tells you that you do not have the right to give your money to your children when you die. It tells you that you do not have the right to give it to a doctor in exchange for medical services. It tells you that you do not have the right to try and help your children do well in life by sending them to a good school. It tells you that you do not have the right to bank it in a foreign country. It tells you instead that the poor have a claim on the money you made for yourself, and what's more, it's going to expropriate it from you and give it to them. If you refuse, then it's up to five years hard time - and between all of the money and double the money they originally asked for. Basically, it means you have no property rights. Since we live in a society with a great deal of class mobility (anybody who doubts this should look at societies like monarchical Europe or the Soviet Union, where your lot in life is completely dependent on who your parents were, and to which your own abilities are irrelevant), this is not a good situation for any of us. The system punishes success and teaches us to do as little as possible - do any more, and it will be taken from you. Since "the rich" is an arbitrary distinction (the overwhelming majority of Canadians are stinking rich from the perspective of the average Cuban or North Korean), this means that the state is basically denying property rights to a group it is arbitrarily defining. Poor people will be deceived if they think the same won't be applied to them. In fact, it already has. Poor people actually pay a greater tax burden than the rich, after all that. How are you going to level the playing field - by discriminating against some people and granting them fewer property rights than others? Mind you, I'm sure a Holocaust-apologist like yourself has no problem with this. This isn't the Rule of Law, Sweal, the Rule of Law is supposed to discriminate against nobody, be blind to personal attributes, and be equally applicable to all. Your laws are highly discriminatory, judge on personal attributes, and make gross exceptions for large groups of people. It's the Rule of Arbitrary Fiat, or the Rule of Tyranny. Maybe you should rename yourself "The Tyrannical Sweal."

No. You're confusing enjoying life with living. The two aren't always compatible. Some would rather live a short live and die in a blaze of hedonism, others would prefer comfort and old age. This is what I'm trying to get across to you: the objective of life is subjective. There will never be immortality or the possibility of it. As Chuck Palahniuk said, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero on an infinite timescale. Even if medical technology is capable of treating all diseases and injuries, there will still be accidents where a man is dead within seconds, and medical technology cannot save him because it can't get to him. There are guns, and cars, and farm machinery, and so forth. Lots of people die every year from slipping in the shower. If you live for a thousand years, and shower every day, that's 365,000 opportunities for you to slip in the shower and die. Basically, death comes to all men, and it's always going to be a question of when. The only way around that is to reconstruct the universe so that harm cannot be done to anything by anything - and then it's difficult to see how humans could even live in the first place since our very existence necessitates harm to other things. On the first count then, your argument is fallacious because the key premise is an unattainable scenario. It's one of those "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" questions. On the second, it is fallacious because it is purely speculative. Since immortality is not achievable we have no way of knowing what effect it will have on risk-taking. There is also no evidence to suggest that risk-taking decreases as longevity increases, which poses a grave concern to your argument. This doesn't address the issue of your strawman arguments at all. You had said, and I quote directly: "this could only suggest that 'self preservation, and the urge to reproduce' is guided by genes, and not by choice, which would still prove or lend credence to the notion that 'being' is a priori". However, self-preservation and procreation are urges and drives exactly like consumption of sugar. You also have not addressed the fact that your arguments on procreation and evolution assume their conclusions. You tell me that humanity's goal is "to be" and that is illustrated by these things, however, that presupposes that the goal is "to be" because otherwise procreation and evolution would be hindrances, like wanting to eat sugar or take crazy risks. What is to say that it is not vice-versa, and that the will to live is the incorrect one, and the urge to self-destruction the true goal?

Assuming that the only cause of death is old age. However, the statistics seem to show that life is rather fragile and the human body is quite vulnerable to trauma. It seems to me that the risk-taking nature of human beings means that we'll have to deal with our own mortality indefinitely. Again, this refutes the notion that our goal is to live, because humans are instinctively driven to do a great many things likely to cause an early death. Strawman. I'm arguing that it refutes the notion that having a desire to live, procreate and preserve the self means the true goal of humanity is to do any of those things any more than having a desire to eat sugar means the true goal of humanity is to eat sugar. Another strawman. I think we both know that that isn't really what Buddhism teaches at all.

Both these points are dead wrong. "Inflation" is the systematic devaluation of the currency, basically, it's counterfeiting committed by the government. This inflation causes an increase in the money supply, which leads the market to mis-invest resources. It seems that savings are up, which indicates a preference for capital goods over consumer goods. Therefore, more investments are made in capital goods. However, this is a false signal: consumer preferences haven't changed. The capital investments made with inflated currency are in products not in demand in the market, therefore, it is only a matter of time before they collapse. As soon as the influx of counterfeit money stops, the market adjusts itself and the malinvestments are liquidated in a recession. Continued and continually increasing inflation is the only way to stave off this recession, and this eventually leads to the collapse and abandonment of the currency as in the Weimar Republic. In our economy we suffer mild alternating recessions and booms because inflation is periodically increased, creating a boom, and then contracted again, which liquidates the malinvestments and creates a recession. The second point is woefully ignorant of history. The period of Great Britain's greatest economic expansion in history was accompanied by deflation, or falling prices. This is the natural order of the free market, because at that time, the currency was gold and thus not subject to inflation. The division of labour and technological advances cause prices in a free market to fall in the long term, which is especially visible when compared to commodity money that doesn't change in value much, like gold. Rising prices in inflation are actually not rising at all, it's just that the value of money is falling relative to everything else. Sweal has actually posted data himself that contradicts his point. Regardless, the original question is a false dichotomy. Unemployment and inflation aren't related, as the 70s taught us, it's perfectly possible to have both at the same time. This was (or should have been) the last gasp of the Keynesian school and the monetary cranks.

This still doesn't address anything I've said. The development of the food industry and division of labour have also enabled us to consume massive quantities of refined sugar, which we have a natural drive to do. Does that mean, then, that one of the primary goals of humanity must be to consume tons of sugar? I'd say it doesn't. Therefore, it's also impossible to say that since medical technology extends our lifespan, and since we have a natural desire to live, that means the goal of life is to continue living. Just as the drive to eat sugar is usually defeating to what you would say are a human's best interests (to be, since it causes disease and premature death), and just as the sugar-product industry is facilitating that drive, so also the Buddhists may be right when they say that the goal of living is to escape life, and what life offers is but a distraction and a hindrance in attaining that goal. Your argument assumes its conclusion as a premise. You say that the goal of life is to continue living, and that this is proven by evolution and developments that permit us to live longer. However, this assumes that continued life must be the goal, otherwise evolution and extended lifespans wouldn't be a development at all. You still haven't proven anything. I think your boast that you could refute the Buddha was made in haste!

Even if you were perfectly correct, all you have established is that God/nature has equipped us to be. It offers no explanation of why we should be. It also does not deduce that existing is the correct thing to do, as the Buddhists dispute. For instance, God/nature has given us an urge to eat sugar. However, it's bad for us. God/nature has also given us an appendix. We never use it. You have to concede that just because we are endowed with certain drives or qualities does not mean that they are necessary for or defining of our existence. You might also consider that the human body is designed to wear out and cease functioning after a limited span of years, which contradicts your point that nature has designed us to be. It seems that, conversely, nature has designed us to die. The ultimate conclusion of human existence is death, not life. Why, therefore, should the unattainable be the actual goal of our existence? But which kind of evolution? There are several schools of evolutionary thought, and no consensus as to what evolution is, how it happens or why it happens. Even here, there's no objectivity. I still see absolutely nothing here that proves Buddha wrong. All he'd say is that you're still being duped by your own desire to live, which, like your urge to eat sugar, is not compatible with your own best interests.

Call me cynical, but wouldn't it make sense for Quebec to have private clinics so that our politicians have somewhere to go when they don't feel like waiting in line for hours, weeks, months or years (depending on what's wrong) like the rest of us? Isn't that what they already do? Anyway, this will turn out well for Quebec. As the rest of Canadian public healthcare slowly goes down the sewer, their private clinics will be increasingly in demand. Their increasing clientele will drive their prices down and their quality up, and I'm sure that Quebec will have a booming healthcare-tourism industry before too long.

I never said it was. However, if you are going to say "the purpose of life is to be", and the Buddhists say, "the purpose of life is to cease to be", one of you has to be wrong. Go ahead and try to establish which, if you want - the arguments against Buddhism haven't swayed 350m Buddhists, and the arguments for it haven't swayed everyone else. Bear in mind that your personal beliefs are meaningless here, and only objective, substantial proof will be sufficient. However, do consider that while things like the atomic weight of copper or the wavelengths of visible light have been discovered and are now agreed upon, none of the multitudinous attempts to "discover" the meaning of life have ever reached anything even vaguely resembling such a consensus or irreproachability. I'd ask you to ponder whether or not that could mean there is no meaning to life. Alternatively, the purpose of life is whatever the living deem it to be, which is the libertarian stance, and one that necessitates libertarian rights theory if it isn't to be denied to some of humanity. Basically, this would say that you are right, but only for yourself, and the Buddhists are right, but only for themselves. The meaning of life is like beauty or goodness: it's entirely in the eye of the beholder, and no attempt to objectively define it will ever be successful.

No, I have provided that argument. See above. See also the quote from Murray Rothbard. You've not been paying attention, so it's unsurprising that you're five pages behind in this argument. Mention some names. How do you know it's the majority? What moral philosophers have you studied and what are their major theories? Then defend it. Convince me that some humans are more worthy than others. As I said, I have done so. In debate it is customary to posit a counter-argument. I'm waiting for your counter-argument. Where? How? Quote, link or repeat, please. Quote me saying that human behaviour can be known a priori, please, or stop putting words in my mouth. It isn't nonsense. You've argued for social justice, taxing corporations heavily, wealth redistribution, international peace, etc. All of these things are completely contrary to the "law-of-the-jungle" ideas you're putting forward now. If you really supported them, then you could not assert that the weaker members of our society could have any rights to "social justice" that they could not assert for themselves. You shouldn't see any problem with corporations exploiting people, with the gap between rich and poor growing ever wider, with some people living in multi-million-dollar mansions while others starve and die of exposure in the streets, with the US military flattening villages and towns in Iraq, or with the killing and destruction in the Sudan. All of those examples are of the strong exploiting the weak, which according to you is ethically acceptable, but which you rail against anyway. So basically, you don't believe what you are saying, and again, if you don't take yourself seriously, why am I to? That wasn't what you said. You told me that the purpose of life is "to be". The Buddhists believe that the purpose of life is "not to be", that all life is suffering and the goal of any living entity is to cease to live, and exit the living world. And there are 350 million of them, so your idea that there is any objective and a priori purpose to life is thus proven false.

You seriously can't get your head around this, can you? In order for all humans to have liberty the natural ending-points of that liberty are 1) where it infringes on another's liberty (the only way around that is to say that some humans are more deserving than others, which is logically indefensible) and 2) where it contradicts physical laws. It doesn't even need saying. If you think you can construct an argument against this, please try. It isn't enforcing. Such a situation is merely a defence against aggression and the defender would not be trying to enforce anything on the aggressor, just to prevent an infringement of his rights without reciprocation. So far, Thelonius (and Trudeau) your only avenue of attack against libertarianism has been that you think there is no such thing as morality and human action should be limited by nothing but practical possibility. Therefore, you reject a priori rights. However, your arguments elsewhere in this forum clearly show that you don't take this argument seriously. If you two don't pay any attention to your arguments, why should I, exactly?

Tell that to the Buddhists. I'm sure you'll hear 350 million mouths laughing. If it was possible to arrive at an objective meaning for life, don't you think we'd have found it after at least five millenia of philosophising? Some questions just don't have any answers. You're describing the Hobbesian war of all against all. This is the colloquial meaning of anarchy, but not the actual meaning of it. Anarchy just means an absence of imposed political authority or government. I don't think so. How many savings and investment accounts are held in Canada right now? All of those people are thinking of the future. They're just not thinking of the future the way you are and the way you want them to, however, there's no objective reason for your thinking to be superior to theirs. Who says they have to think of the future anyway? If a man lives entirely for the here and now, why is he less wise than you? Perhaps he's wiser.

Then I have to ask: is it that you aren't discussing 'rights' but are simply telling me what is practical - in which case, why are you bothering, since I think we all know that John can shoot Bob if John has a gun and Bob is unarmed! Or is it that you are saying there are no such things as 'rights' and anything goes, in which case, why have you argued against anarchy because of your repulsion to that idea? There is no objective way to decide what the goal of mankind should be. Anarchy allows each person to pursue what he sees as that goal, with the caveat that he must not aggress against others and so prevent them form pursuing their goals. Anything else means that somebody must decide what the goal of humanity must be, and hey presto - tyranny. Because of the fact that there is no objective goal for humanity, that latter position also has the ugly problem of being logically indefensible.

I don't think you're wrong. In fact, I think you're dead on. Rothbard asserts that the right to life, etc. is actually self-ownership: the proposition that we own our own bodies, therefore, we treat our bodies as our property and a violation of the sanctity of our person by another is a violation of our property right in ourselves. It also follows that if we own our bodies, we own what it produces (labour), and ownership rights over things stem from that. I'm going to borrow from one of your earlier posts, August. Infants are born selfish, but as they learn to accomodate other people the theory of rights that children arrive at is distinctly libertarian. "I had it first" is the essence of property rights and homesteading, he who finds or creates something before anyone else is the owner of it. "He started it" is the essence of nonaggression, the transgressor is not he who fights but he who began fighting. Of course, parents soon override the natural rights theory of their children. To be good citizens it is necessary to instil the ideas that sometimes, what you create or discover doesn't belong to you and can be confiscated and sometimes, initiating aggression against someone else is morally acceptable. These contradictions may be the cause of a lot of angst in children, frankly, I don't know. Being asked to accept a worldview that runs very contrary to your own is difficult. This is another argument for the libertarian rights theory: left alone, humans even at an early age will develop it by themselves. Non-libertarian, or statist, rights theories evolve to justify states which have themselves originally arisen through violations of libertarian rights theory. For example, the Canadian government exists through the conquest and colonisation of Canada by the British, who inherited their Parliamentary state through usurping the power of a monarchical system, which traces its roots back to William of Normandy, who began it by conquering the Anglo-Saxons. States begin not by some social contract or mutual agreement, but by violence, conquest and the systematic violation of rights. Oppenheimer's work on this is well worth reading. There are two possible explanations: either you are leaving your ideas of morality out of the equation and talking only of what is practically possible, which is essentially not a disagreement at all - I'm saying that it is possible to violate rights by force, but that force does not make right. Or you are telling me that you believe there are no rights at all, in which case, it puzzles me that you are so averse to actually applying that in the real world to situations such as the Holocaust. As to Sweal's blathering, I have repeatedly demonstrated how his arguments lead to the conclusions that he finds so uncomfortable. Not once has he even tried to refute that. Tirelessly bleating "liar!", "sh*tbag!" and so forth does not an argument make. Not only is Sweal a de facto Holocaust-apologist, but he is also foul-mouthed, incoherent and self-contradictory. I see no reason to pay him any further heed, and I am sure that he will get short shrift from Greg when he returns from his travels.

Well, I think of 'crime' as meaning a violation of rights. I don't see how any other definition can be valid or reasonable. That's very nice, but again, you're shrinking from actually applying your theory to the real world. Morals and rights are about human thoughts and actions, and if your theories about them remain divorced from thought and action, they're completely useless. As Nietzche would say, where's the life-value? You're avoiding the question. Your theory would seem to dictate that whether a killing was murder or euthanasia depends upon the opinion of the euthaniser. Again, wouldn't this make the Holocaust into eleven million mercy killings, since the Nazis get to decide whether it's murder or not? They would argue that it wasn't murder because what they were killing wasn't human. Ah. So the Jews had no right to live beyond what those with power were willing to grant them. What you are saying, then, is that the Holocaust, the Purges, the Cultural Revolution etc. were all perfectly just (or amoral, if you prefer, just actions without moral implications) because nobody has any rights, they may only live according to the whim of those with power. And you think my theories sound like Hitler's! Yes, Thelonius, that's what rights are. You're talking about rights in terms of 'what is possible', which isn't discussing rights at all. Anything within the laws of the physical universe is possible. Not everything within the laws of the physical universe is just. That's where 'rights' come in. You're confusing the physical and the metaphysical.

Quite simply, I can say that there was a person whose right to live free from aggression was violated. Now they are dead, they no longer have a right to live because they are not alive, but that does not abrogate the crime of the murderer. I thought you said that rights exist in the mind of the bestower? Euthanasia is only considered murder by the state. Surely if the euthaniser does not consider it murder, it isn't murder, according to you? The statement is correct from the point of view of you. You're flailing around because, like Sweal, you're caught in a trap where your moral relativism is forcing you to apologise for the most terrible crimes in history. Basically, you profess a theory, and then repeatedly shrink from applying it to any real-world or historical examples. If it wasn't a crime from the point of view of the Nazis, then what right would the Allies have punishing the Nazis? Why should the idea of 'rights' in the Allied mind supersede the idea of 'rights' in the Nazi mind? If that is justifyed only by the Allied 'overwhelming force', how does that make the Allies any better than the Nazis, since both basically imposed their ideas on others using violence? Your arguments boil down to an awful mess, Thelonius. Essentially what you are saying is that anyone who can impose his will on anyone else shall impose it without restraint, and nobody has any a priori rights. The most ridiculous thing about you is that you say that this is why you fear anarchy, yet according to your arguments, "anarchy" as you think of it is perfectly right and just, the only natural and correct order of things. You fear anarchy because you fear the absence of the Rule of Law, and then tell me that you don't believe in the Rule of Law. Basically, you put forward a theory, and repeatedly shoot it down yourself. All I've been doing so far is supplying you with the ammunition.

That's true. It is, however, quite a good way to conceal inflatory measures. It may be that the Canadian government has happened upon a better way. Switzerland and Sweden have abandoned the reserve method. However, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System finds in a paper (PDF required) that this is because those countries have found that they can manipulate inflation/interest rates sufficiently without a reserve, instead using a tunnel system. The Bank of England maintains a reserve, but this is to fund themselves rather than to manipulate monetary policy. The only sure way to abolish governmental manipulation of inflation and interest rates is to return to commodity-based money. There seems to be no indication that this will happen any time soon. The problem is that Dalton McGuinty evidently agrees with you. The law in Ontario stipulates that new taxes must be approved by referendum and McGuinty has flouted it. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation filed a lawsuit against McGuinty and Sorbara for violation of this law. I do agree that such laws would be meaningless. An Act can be flouted, evidently, and it is unlikely that an amendment to the Constitution either in Canada or the US would be passed without some sort of clause stating that it can be overridden in the case of national emergency (such as war or recession), in which case, such an amendment would be similarly useless. The political climate has changed since Reagan's time, and if such a measure couldn't pass then, it definitely won't now. I can't see any major political party in the US or Canada supporting it.

How is the BOC setting interest rates if it no longer has a reserve requirement? Furthermore, what is the use of a nominal interest rate if it has no effect on real interest rate? My point was true for the US or UK rather than Canada. The abolition of reserve banking is undoubtedly a good thing. There was a movement under Reagan, narrowly defeated, to set a Constitutional amendment that would limit government spending to a percentage of GDP. This would be a far better curb on government spending than either. It would never pass in this political climate, but setting a cap at 10% of GDP for government spending at all levels would do wonders for Canada. Link that to a flat income tax and a return to the gold standard and we'd be an economic powerhouse in no time. You could watch unemployment dwindle away and real incomes skyrocket.

No, the government has now recognised a right that I always had. That's my stance. Rights aren't conferred, they're a part of being human. What's conferred is the respect or lack thereof others have for them. If I kill you, that doesn't annul your right to live. I know this point is getting tired, but you've yet to explain away the fact that your rights theory essentially makes the Holocaust into eleven million suicides, since murder is by definition the intentional violation of the right of another human being not to be killed (so as to differentiate it from euthanasia, for instance). What you've said is that the right not to be killed comes from others, so if others don't 'confer' it, that right does not exist, which means the victims of the Nazis weren't murdered at all. The problem with the ubermensch aspect of Nietzscheian thinking is that it is self-contradictory. He rejected traditional 'slave' morality because it is supposedly suited to the 'herd-animal' and suppresses the superior man, and believed that there should be a 'master morality' for the ubermensch where good and evil were replaced by good and bad. This can be interpreted as might makes right, that the will to power will decide who gets on top, but Nietzsche gives us no clue as to how we might establish who the superior men are and, moreoever, ignores the fact that those with the will to power will ultimately end up suppressing anyone who might be or become superior to themselves, thus defeating the whole purpose of Nietzsche's master morality. Morality that favours the weak is reprehensible in his view, however, he does not account for the fact that the superior may well suppress the would-be supreme. There's the further self-contradiction that Nietzsche proclaimed that there was no truth, only interpretation, but yet spent so much of his philosophical career pursuing truth.

Your sarcasm aside, yes, that is the point, because you didn't take it into account. You had originally said that it didn't matter if governments spent from "credit or debit cards." I merely pointed out that the "credit card" makes it much easier for the government to hide the costs, therefore, the government that spends into deficit is likely more fiscally irresponsible not just in where the money is coming from, but what they are buying. In that way, it matters. You were claiming that fiscal responsibility was irrelevant from whether a government spent from taxes or borrowing. I'm arguing that, although the correlation is not absolute, a good way to lessen irresponsible public spending would be to outlaw governmental budget deficits. And because the government sets the interest rate and the banking reserve.

I don't think you're following me. The issue here is that spending someone else's money on the debit card (taxation) means you'll have to get it out of them at the time it's spent. If you try and take too much, they might get mad and refuse to give it to you (vote you out of office). People probably wouldn't like social programmes so much if they saw their income taxes skyrocket year after year, for instance. Much better if you can take it off their credit card (run a deficit) and send someone else to collect the bill later, i.e. the next party in power. In politics, people shoot the messenger. You get the kudos for buying that person all those nice things on their credit card, but when the bill comes in the mail, you'll be over the hills and far away. In the example I gave, the husband will spend more on his wife's credit card than on her debit card if he thinks he'll have divorced her by the time the bill comes. There's much less chance of sleeping on the couch. It'll work even better if he can work things so it looks like her next husband actually spent all the money. The likelihood is far higher that the government would spend wastefully if it was not going to be the government that would actually deliver the invoice. Someone else will pay, someone else again will get blamed - how can they lose?

There's one crucial problem here, August. In a democracy, it is almost certain that the government (party, leader) who builds up a debt won't be the one responsible for paying it off. To apply this to your example of the husband and the digital camera, ask yourself if the likelihood is greater that the man would make a frivolous purchase on his credit card or debit card, or on a credit card where the chances of him, personally, ever receiving a bill were slim at best. Obviously this contributes to more wasteful and irresponsible spending. Visa knows this, hence their "win what you buy" promotion. Even a slight chance of not being given the bill will apparently increase spending. Imagine what the effect is when you make that chance a near-certainty. Therefore, the government who builds up a large debt is almost certainly more irresponsible than the government who does not or who builds up debt that will mature within their realistic political lifespan. This goes a long way to explaining the massive debt that most Western governments are in. Government spending is popular, taxes aren't. What's the best way to solve this conundrum while preserving as much political capital as possible?

Correction: some of the people weighed his decisions and agreed they were correct. Almost half of the electorate thought they weren't. Isn't it immoral to be making decisions that are going to affect so great a number of people in so profound a way without their consent? For example, let's say that Ford was the most popular car in Canada. Does that mean you should be forced to drive a Ford? Let's now imagine that Ford was the most popular car, but that it would explode in 1 of 50 collisions, no matter how trivial, killing all the occupants. Would it be fair and just to force you to drive a Ford in that situation? I think there are quite a few things where the size of the mandate absolutely does not matter. As far as I am concerned, you can have the approval of everyone on the planet except one and it still would not justify murdering the one. That platform is now defunct. Somalia is actually rebuilding pretty fast and there aren't any terrorists of note operating there. If there were, the Somalis would turn them over in a heartbeat and collect the bounty. "Warlords" is a popular term in Western journalism used to describe militia leaders. These people don't actually have any power except to lead the militia when it is mobilised due to aggression. They aren't universal throughout the country, many areas don't have a militia at all and thus no militia leaders. The way it works is that in a crisis in Somalia, elders of the community will appoint a temporary militia leader, who will appoint henchmen and organise the community for defence. Not dissimilar systems are used in Switzerland and Israel, but you don't call them "warlords" there, you call them "officers". The term is deliberately insulting. Somali "warlords" gather no taxes, hear no cases and pass no laws. For instance, the movie "Black Hawk Down" distorted real events, creating a showcase "bad guy" in Mohammad Farah Aidid who was pure evil and organised troops to attack US soldiers on peacekeeping missions. The truth is that Somalis are used to defending their homes, and in that incident (and others) US troops were actually fighting militia from several clans and several warlords who had banded together to try and repel what they perceived as a US-led invasion of Somalia, no doubt to try and restore a central government. Understandably, after Siad Barre, they're not interested in that anymore. I thought the whole idea behind Reaganomics was the trickle-down theory of wealth, so that it would improve the welfare of the poor? If that's the case, your ideas on socialised medicine definitely don't fit in. It's "recovering" because of Greenspan's inflatory policy. This means that there'll be a recession further down the road. It's as inevitable as night following day. All Bush is doing with his economic policies is putting off a recession, and the longer you delay one, the harder it is. Some future President is going to have to deal with 20% unemployment at the rate things are going. How? He still maintains notions of "preferred trader status" and so forth. All the US tarriffs are still in place. Mercantilism is alive and well. His policy on Cuba is particularly dimwitted and anti-free-trade. If we had listened to Jefferson there wouldn't be any terrorism. The Middle Eastern terrorists don't oppose America because it exists, they oppose America because of its military presence abroad. If, as Jefferson advised, they didn't have one, the terrorists wouldn't be bothered.

Here's the funny thing. Remember all those people executed by terrorists in Iraq? All their families begged the US to withdraw and save their lives. It's easy to be "brave" when you're sitting in Washington DC sending people to a desert thousands of miles away to get shot at and (hopefully) shoot the enemy. People like Douglas Haig perfected this art. My point is that I will believe George W. Bush is "strong on terror" when I see him with the infantry at Fallujah carrying a rifle. You can also say that Clinton was strong in Somalia, because he made a difficult decision that would make him appear "weak" to many in order to save the lives of his soldiers. It's also worth noting that Somalia is a good deal more peaceful and quiet since the UN and US forces withdrew. How does that gel with Reaganomics, exactly? Foreign economic policy? Foreign markets are starting to lose faith in the dollar. There's growing doubts that the US will ever be able to repay its foreign debt, which spells near-certain doom for the US economy, built as it is on foreign capital. What is so great about his tax policy? Slight tax cuts combined with rising expenditures translates into whopping tax increases in the future. I wouldn't be looking forward to that. Luckily for Bush, he won't be in power when it happens - this may have been part of his plan. As regarding his defence policy, money allocated for defence is like any government spending, wasteful and economically destructive, with the caveat that with defence a lot of the resources allocated are actually destroyed and won't reappear in anybody's economy, ever. Jefferson and his school also realised that a standing army creates the temptation to use it, and war is the worst thing that can happen to any people. It's the end of security, prosperity and often life itself. The war on terror has become necessary because terrorists overseas are disgusted and threatened by the burgeoning power and influence of the US government. Growing the government in response to that is like leaving loads of food lying around at night because you have a rodent problem. I don't think that's fair to Blackdog. I've heard him argue that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans many times. Just today he agreed with me that the differences between the two were very slight. I also find it odd that you'd label him "radical left", I'm "radical right" and we agree far more often than we disagree these days. I think left-right labels are confusing and silly. It's far better to describe oneself in terms that aren't relative to other people. I'm a radical libertarian, for instance. That's not the big problem with China. The greatest threat from China is an increasingly liberal economy (already more free market than the USA) combined with a people possessed of great economic acumen and commercial instincts. It's likely that in the next 50 years, China will become the world superpower. The current US situation is unsustainable. The size of government cannot be maintained without a Soviet economy, and we all know what happened to the USSR.

How was intellect measured, exactly? What units is a man's intellect measured in? How do these units take into account the differences between various sorts of intelligence (artistic and creative, mathematical, analytical, lateral etc) and explain phenomena like idiot-savantism? Are you aware that IQ is widely derided into the scientific community because it favours certain types of intelligence and is even culturally biased, for instance? You see? You've been flailing around for a few posts now and you are absolutely no closer to providing a subjective definition of any of these things. Can we put this point of yours to rest yet? You're clutching at straws. The difference is that you can objectively separate humans from everything else, and say that humans are definitely superior on the whole. With 'human' described as an exclusive group we can make an average of anything and say that we are better than animals. However, since you can't objectively separate humans from other humans in any objective way, you can't make exclusive groups to measure against one another. Your definitions of "retard" are useless for this purpose, for instance, because we can't say with any certainty or agreement who is a retard, and who isn't, therefore, we can't assess the abilities of "retards" versus "everyone else". I said that rights should be extended to humans, and there is nothing subjective and arbitrary about the definition of humanity. I say this because, as I have demonstrated, there is no equality to be found between humans and animals (or plants, or minerals), and forced to make a choice, I make the choice for the more intelligent, more adaptable, more philosophising humans. It'd be nice if we could all co-operate with each other in this universe, however, this isn't the way that God or Nature or whatever you believe in seems to have laid things out. Since pretty much anything living on this planet must kill something else in order to live, there's no possibility of equal rights. If you ask by what rationale I put humans first, I ask by what rationale do you put non-humans first? Are you sure? That wasn't what you said a while back. I think it would be best if you'd clearly articulate your rights theory once and for all. I'm just getting piecemeal snippets so far and they don't gel well together. For instance, you tell me that we should assign equal rights to animals, but then that rights only exist in the mind. Well, animals don't have any rights in their minds, because they're not capable of thinking such abstract thoughts. These two ideas are mutually contradictory.

Can you articulate the differences between these people? Preferably in terms of their political beliefs and ideas? What policies of Clinton did you like? As far as I can tell, the only real differences between him and Bush are that Clinton is pro-choice, anti-gun-ownership and evidently pro-infidelity. They both like big government and big spending, neither worries about deficits, both believe that government can actually do something about poverty and other social ills (and then, worse, actually try to make it do something), both declared war on a country that hadn't actually done anything to them without the approval of the UN, etc.