Hugo

I don't think we "continue to do so" at all. The strides made by the free market in favour of environmentally sound policies have been enormous and should be lauded. Look at the hybrid cars, the industry in solar heat and electricity generation, biodegradeable clothing, biodegradeable cleaning products etc. I'm not arguing for wanton pollution. What I'm saying is that global warming and the greenhouse effect is simple fearmongering with little basis in scientific fact. As Walt Williams said, "if you know nothing, be an environmentalist." Environmentalists don't tend to be well-informed scientifically. Just look at the Exxon Valdez fiasco. You say that "the vast majority of the scientific community... are extremely concerned about global warming" which isn't my impression at all. The scientific community as a whole seem to regard the global warming doomsayers as quacks. I've read a lot of highly regarded career environmental scientists offering such opinions, such as those I cited, whose points you completely failed to address. It's a matter of selling books and getting publicity, quite frankly. "Disaster waiting to happen" sells a lot better than "everything's fine". Where do I confuse these terms? Ad hominem argument, invalid. Without evidence, you are simply slandering people. This is in addition to your unfounded and unproven libel that scientists who oppose your viewpoint must be beholden to big business. That's actually two logical fallacies rolled into one: an ad hominem attack and begging the question. Mud-slinging will get you nowhere, the only person you discredit is yourself. What if they're incorrect, and we act on their suggestions and cause untold damage? Now, MS, do you have any rebuttal to my arguments, or are you going to persist in trying to sideline this debate with attacks on my character and populist logical fallacies?

Maybe the world is getting warmer. However, there's a huge difference between knowing what is happening and knowing why it is happening. 30 years ago everybody was going nuts about global cooling - where's that now? The UK Telegraph reports that "a review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today’s temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather – in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists." This study also showed that "a little ice age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again – but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the middle ages." A lot of environmentalists take their cues from an article in Nature by B. D. Stanter showing 20 years of rising temperatures in the southern hemisphere. Unfortunately, this has been proven wrong by several other studies showing that the data he gathered was incorrect and that there were no significant changes in temperature between 1955 and 1995. The Harvard study that showed us the "little ice age" in 1300 proved that this caused famine from poor harvests and the failure of the English vine industry, amongst other things. Bearing that in mind, the report argues that a slight warming will be beneficial. The study, as confirmed by other sources, also shows that as humans are accountable for 3% of CO2 emissions, an increase in CO2 content could well be just the result of the world's oceans emitting CO2 in response to the planetary recovery from the little ice age. Now, tell me what's wrong with CO2 emissions. CO2 is an environmental fertiliser that stimulates growth rates and enhances efficiency of water use in virtually all plants. C. R. de Freitas, in an article for the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, showed quite a few examples where CO2 emissions were altered by temperature changes rather than vice versa. These cases were observed over months or millenia, and prove that CO2 = global warming is a simple case of confusing cause and effect. Nor are the sea levels rising. There has been no increase in long-term sea level rise during the last 100 years. Several scientists have also argued that global warming will cause greater snowfall over the polar caps and would actually arrest sea level rise. I'm hoping you'll respond with an argument, MS, rather than more citations from researchers denounced as "junk scientists" by their peers.

What do we think we know about the environment? The data we have collected about climate change has been gathered using a variety of methods that aren't mutually comparable. More to the point, we've been seriously gathering environmental data for, what, 50 years? Compared to the age of the earth, that's like taking your pulse for 20 seconds and claiming you know your heart rate for your entire life. We believe the Middle Ages were significantly warmer than today. We know that the Meditteranean Sea was once a dry basin. The sphinx shows signs of water erosion. Humanity had no role in these events. Environmentalism is based on ignorance. We don't have the faintest clue what we're doing.

No, how about you? My version is The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Ed., edited by Robert C. Tucker, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. What's yours? Let's look at a more relevant document where Marx himself talks about women in socialism, rather than where Engels alone talks about women in history. In Marx's manuscript of 1844 on private property and communism, he specifically refers to women as property. He describes marriage as "certainly a form of exclusive private property" and argues that women should remain as private property rather than be subjected to the "bestial form of counterposing to marriage" involved in regarding women as "a piece of communal and common property" as other socialist thinkers of the time had proposed. Do you think that Marx was not anti-woman when he referred to women as property to be privately owned by men and argued for the perpetuation of such a vision? Can I also take it that, since you have nothing to say in rebuttal, you agree that Marx hated "industrialists, bourgeosie, nobility, bankers, Jews... clergymen, [and] families"? I'm just wondering why you take cues from a man who hates such massive swathes of humanity and wishes massive violence upon them. Marx was as evil as Hitler, if you read his writings this becomes plain, as it also becomes plain when you consider that all those who applied his teachings were terrorists and despots. Marx was usually sarcastic. Sarcasm is simply an insulting mode of speech, and Marx had plenty of insults to dish out. I believe you mean "ironic" and challenge you to produce some examples.

Pure conjecture, not worth replying to. The fact is that the left's policies are rooted in anger and jealousy, and as with most things generated from negative emotion are of little value. This can be perceived easily in the writings of Marx, documents filled with hate against all kinds of people - industrialists, bourgeosie, nobility, bankers, Jews, women, clergymen, families - and it's still around now. Witness MS's proposed solutions to the income gap. He proposes to punish successful corporations with punitive taxation and labor laws and to confiscate the property of the rich simply because they have that property. The wrongheadedness of these notions are fully shown by how they treat the poor. Rather than abolish ideas such as price and wage controls that have been proven time and time again to be grossly injurious to the poor, he proposes to build on them and embellish them. Quite simply, leftist politics are about exacting revenge upon the rich for perceived wrongs, and they don't care how much they have to trample the working class into the dirt to do it. This is a gross error. In a capitalist system, society and markets demand nothing, they only reflect what the people demand. The worker does not have to satisfy anybody's demands, it is up to industry and society to satisfy his. Of course, as with all things, we all have bargaining chips, and a worker with no experience, no qualifications and no training isn't in a position to demand much. This is why self-improvement is such a prize of capitalism, because a skilled and experienced worker can demand a lot more from his employer, and his employer in turn can demand a lot more from him. Everybody wins. Looks good on paper, but as I've already said this is a great way to shed jobs amongst the poorest members of society. What such a policy invariably does is take those who are poor now and make them even poorer. Your intended targets - the rich - are barely affected. These policies are borne upon the backs of the working classes. Such are the contradictions of neo-socialism, like classic socialism before it. Exactly true, and this is why the mass unemployment that minimum wage laws create is so bad for the economy and for the working class. Minimum wage employees have little now, if you raise the minimum wage, they will have nothing.

Probably because the poor don't have the time or inclination to study economics and often believe the grade-A bullcrap that well-meaning but ignorant people such as the NDP feed them. Bullcrap that will, in practice, end up hurting them far more than fiscally right-wing policies ever will. Communism, socialism and neo-socialism are all great for grinding the working man into the dirt. Better yet, why don't we stop the fiscal policies that keep the poor down, like minimum wages, price controls and sales taxes? This is your problem, MS. The right-wing want to pull everyone up to the level of the rich, or as close as they can get. You want to drag everyone down to the level of the poor, or as close as you can get them. No, it's a human failing, and you can either make it work for you and turn it to your benefit or you can make it a millstone around your neck to drown you.

Oh, probably. It just won't be a Wal-Mart, because they'll only open a store where it will be profitable and they can't raise prices just in one store. What will happen is you'll add a hundred or so people to the unemployed in a small town when the Wal-Mart closes, and then a smaller competitor will move in employing less people, and consumer prices will rise because that competitor can't offer the prices that Wal-Mart offers. In short, there'll be less income and higher prices. Everybody loses. Ah, so what you're advocating is punishing success and rewarding failure. Gotcha. Economic collapse won't be far behind. If you want a good example of minimum wages harming employees, go back to the 1930s. The American economy was starting to get out of the depression when Roosevelt decided he'd raise the minimum wage. The unemployment rate peaked again and the economy collapsed anew. There's a good book on this called FDR's Folly, by Jim Powell. The Employment Policies Institute in the USA estimates that the first $0.50 of the $1.00 minimum wage hike in 1996-1997 cost 645,000 jobs. The greatest job losses were amongst teenagers, blacks and single working mothers. The simple fact is that wage and price controls hurt those they are supposed to help. If you really want to do something for the poor, abolish them.

Some Wal-Mart stores are more profitable than others. Some make only a small profit margin. If you raise minimum wage, you will move those stores from small profit-makers to small loss-makers, and Wal-Mart will close them because it makes no financial sense to keep them open, and all those who worked there, will be fired.

Because the Green Line, whilst unofficial, is a de facto boundary.

Wal-Mart Canada does not have any minimum wage employees. This comes from an official spokesperson for Wal-Mart, in a reply to an editorial article in the Toronto Sun a short time ago.

And the first thing Wal-Mart will do is fire thousands of people. A few will make more, many will join the ranks of the unemployed. Minimum wage laws create unemployment. You will make it much more difficult for them to make money and odds are they will close a lot of stores.

Yes. They are not. There is no "border". The Green Line is a temporary boundary pending resolution of a permanent border between Israel and Jordan. The Israeli Supreme Court rules that to build the fence on the Green Line would make a political statement that Israel is not interested in. Rather than recognise a temporary and transient border, they instead decided to build a fence that took into account topography, populations and threat assessment. There are three places where the fence deviates by about a mile to the East. These spots encompass the settlements of Enanit, Shaked, Rehan, Salit, and Zofim. There is one other spot where the fence deviates by about four miles, to protect the towns of Alfei Menashe and Elkanah, whose populations include 8,000 Jews. Note also that the fence actually lies on the west of the Green Line (i.e. in Israeli territory) in several places. No territory is being annexed. The Israelis have made every effort to avoid including Palestinian settlements within the wall, and the land in question is seized by the military authorities, not annexed, and remains the legal property of the original landowner. Every owner is legally entitled to file an objection, and Israel has set aside funds totalling $22 million for compensation to Palestinians. In June, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the fence was too far into Palestinian lands. Despite the fact that moving the fence compromised the security of Israel, the government immediately complied. This was in addition to a Supreme Court ruling in February that shortened the fence by 60 miles. That was not my experience when I was over there. The West Bank is a Jewish homeland and most of the settlers are Jews who yearn to return to their historical roots. The settlements and the fence are designed to show the Palestinians that they cannot sit this one out and hope to win by default, and to force them to come to the table and actually follow some kind of peace process. So far, the Palestinians have rejected every offer and broken every treaty.

That's a sweeping generalization if ever I heard one. Not really valid. It depends upon how you look at it. It's a proven fact that homosexuals are far more likely to abuse drugs, contract diseases or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. They are also more likely to be violent towards their significant others. I cited the studies somewhere else in this forum. The question is whether or not homosexuality causes these problems. I would say not. I would say that these people have some other underlying cause of their problems (for example, a very high percentage of homosexuals were sexually abused as children) of which homosexuality is a symptom, drug abuse is a symptom and so forth. Violent, drug-abusing and self-loathing people don't make good parents. Because not all homosexuals are like that, and because heterosexuals certainly can be like that too, it makes no sense to ban homosexual parenting based just on that. But I think an argument can be constructed. There's a logical precedent, i.e. risk assessment. Not all drunk drivers cause traffic accidents, however, we ban all the drunk drivers we can find from driving. Not all homosexuals are self-loathing, violent, excessively promiscuous and disease-ridden drug addicts either. I don't agree with this argument, but I can see that it is logical.

It depends if you believe that the means become part of the end. The USSR won in athletics by drafting the able into athletic programs that were, by Western standards, cruel, and often caused lasting damage. A very high percentage of Soviet athletes were, in fact, Soviet Special Forces (spetznaz). Soviet society encouraged athleticism and sport not for fitness and health, but to ensure that they had a good number of fit young men and women to draft into their vast military. Regarding their technological feats, it's worth noting how many human lives were sacrificed. The USSR had lost dozens of cosmonauts in accidents and tests before the USA had lost even one. In another example, the first Soviet nuclear submarine (the November class) was observed running at very high speeds, far faster than comparable US subs could do. US intelligence puzzled over this for years, until they learnt that the only reason Soviet subs went so fast was because they did not carry any reactor shielding at all, whereas US subs had to carry several hundred tons of lead shielding to protect the crew from radiation. It goes without saying that the crews of those subs all died very early. Even the achievements of the USSR highlight the fact that to Communism, human life and suffering is of no importance and citizens are resources to be spent and discarded like any other.

That depends upon the powers of the emperor or monarch. If absolute, as in Tsarist Russia, then yes, invariably these men (and women) were tyrants. Perhaps you can name an absolute monarch who was nothing but kindness and benevolence, but I don't think you can. Even the 'great' monarchs had the blood of innocents on their hands.

I believe in personal freedom. It is a safeguard against tyranny and the creator of a rich, vibrant and dynamic society. I cannot see how dictating to citizens what they may do with their own bodies gels with that. It is a fact that marijuana is harmful. It does cause respiratory diseases and so forth, because inhaling any kind of smoke is bad for you. It doesn't matter if it comes from tobacco, marijuana, or a wood fire. The fact is, however, that many things are harmful. Junk food is harmful. Soda loaded with sugar and caffeine is harmful since the sugar causes diabetes and high caffeine doses can cause heart palpitations and nervous problems. There's substantial evidence that coffee is bad for you, BBC Radio 2 reported a few years ago that of the >1000 chemicals in coffee, 27 were tested on rodents and 19 found to be carcinogenic. Based on the incidence of traffic accidents, you could say that driving was harmful. The point that I'm making is that life is full of risks. However, I believe that the best agent to assess these risks for themselves is not the government but the individual. By all means let them make an informed decision, but ultimately it is up to them. Certainly citizens can make bad choices, but it's their choice to make and I don't believe an all-powerful nanny-state should be mollycoddling citizens through life. I say legalise drugs. I would definitely restrict access to children, as tobacco and alcohol are restricted now, because children are of diminished responsibility and so not yet able to make important decisions for themselves. I would also, as is the case with tobacco and alcohol now, conduct campaigns to inform people of the risks of these drugs so that nobody may claim they were unable to make an informed decision. You could pass a law stating that harmful substances must have a special tax levied on them which will pay for the public information campaigns about them. Regarding the medicinal use of marijuana, I think it's irresponsible to be promoting reefers for this purpose. THC is available in pill form already, although apparently it's not potent enough. I think research should be directed at making a suitably potent ingested or injected vector of THC so that patients who need the drug can take it without running the risk of lung cancer, bronchitis and all the other harmful side-effects that go with smoking. A friend of mine was prescribed heroin and I don't remember the doctor telling him he had to use heroin of dubious purity with needles that may or may not be clean after he had liquified it himself with a teaspoon and lighter. Let's not add to the suffering of the sick with harmful drug vectors.

Once again, Eureka, I'm forced to say that, were what you say so self-evident, and were there "many examples" as you even just said, you should be able to produce mountains of corroboration and list a few of these "many examples." You have provided none and cited nothing, so I have to tell you that until you have some evidence behind your arguments or some sign that you have read any decent texts on this subject - or any texts at all - I will refuse to debate this any further. We are not even debating the issue at hand. I am forced to contest with you the principles of debate and argument, which you categorically refuse to acknowledge as you trail-blaze new paths of idiocy. It's a waste of time, and as this isn't the first time you've done this on this forum I can only conclude you are a troll. I would urge other forum members not to waste their time with you either.

That is not true. The old formula was found to be giving wildly inaccurate figures, so a new formula was devised. The main difference is that the old formula can, with income statistics to hand, be calculated in a few minutes. The new takes a lot of research because it not only involves incomes in local currency but also costs of living, in local currency. The lesson is that you can't take shortcuts. Why? Because - let me guess - you couldn't find one with both hands if it bit you in the face? If what you are saying is so obvious and true it should be ridiculously easy to find a wealth of sources that will confirm it. I can say that the earth orbits the sun, and if challenged I could produce reams of evidence and expert opinion to corroborate my allegations. But you have absolutely nothing. Quite right. I gleaned those snippets from papers and essays written by these men because I did not want to waste bandwidth quoting the entire article. Instead, I took a line or so that represented the entire argument. What he is saying is that a trade deficit is very probably a sign that the economy is healthy, whereas an unhealthy economy is highly unlikely to have a trade deficit at all. Any exceptions, should they be found, would be exactly that - exceptions. Why not use the intelligence of those who know far more about the subject than you do? Do you attempt to repair your own car or take it to a mechanic? Would you attempt to perform surgery on yourself or go to a doctor? If there was a rabid dog in your back yard, would you take it on with a broomstick or call the Humane Society? Oh? Tell me what empirical evidence an average man can observe that tells him the earth orbits the sun. It is obvious to you because you desperately want to believe it. The more we debate, the more it becomes obvious that you have no facts, evidence, or citations, that you have read precious little on the subject and are so staggeringly arrogant that you believe your layman's point of view is more accurate than that of those who have spent a lifetime in study of the field you are arguing about. This is an ad hominem argument and, because of your ineptitude, could be levelled against you as easily as your opponents.

The USA has given more humanitarian aid to Cuba than all the other nations of the world combined. It also freely trades medicines and medical supplies to Cuba. Castro, on the other hand, is a ruthless butcher who has murdered over 140,000 of his own people and continues to run a regime where intellectuals, dissidents and even children are jailed and tortured for criticism - or suspected criticism - of his regime. The USA has passed an act on Cuba that basically puts forward a plan for fostering Cuban democracy and attempts to help the Cuban people with humanitarian aid while working to topple Castro's evil regime. The sad fact is that money for Cuba goes to Castro. Cubans are not allowed to work for foreign companies, they instead work for the Cuban government. The government takes their paychecks from the foreigners, keeps a huge portion of it and gives the workers a pittance. It also deliberately maintains a dual-currency system, reserving dollars for friends of the Party and forcing the people to trade in worthless Pesos which barely buy the necessities of life. The average Cuban gets allocated one bar of soap every two months and food rations amount to a starvation diet. Communist party officials, however, can trade their dollars for as much food, soap and healthcare as they want in separate stores and hospitals that are forbidden to ordinary citizens. Castro's spending priorities are clear. Since the fall of the USSR he has shrunk healthcare and social programmes and expanded military and security spending. Therefore, when you trade with Cuba you are helping put innocent Cuban citizens in torture chambers and dungeons. I applaud the USA for taking a stand and refusing to do that. It's a shame more nations don't. So far only Israel has followed suit.

I'm still waiting for a response to my latest rebuttal on that absurd point. Repeating yourself does not make you correct.

The old formula is invalid. It simply averages the income and declares all those below a certain point "poor." Here's how it fails. If you gave everybody in the country a $50,000 p/a raise, or if you gave everybody in the country a million dollars, you would still have exactly the same percentage of people below the poverty line. That makes no sense, and this can easily be seen in the absurd figures it generates, for instance, that Slovakia and Hungary have far, far less poverty than Australia or the UK (1-2% as opposed to 12-20%). New measures based upon local purchasing power and local commodity prices are far more accurate. So you are saying that the five internationally renowned economists I cited have no intelligence and no common sense? Interesting. Please tell me what makes you more of an expert in economics than these five men. Please also tell me how a man without the "slightest intelligence" can attain the positions these men have. Slightest intelligence allied with a little common sense usually produces the wrong answer in complex matters. For instance, the sun appears in the east, moves slowly across the sky and then disappears in the west. An intelligent man, examining the empirical evidence, would conclude that the sun was moving around his apparently static viewpoint. But astronomy, like economics, is complex and frequently counter-intuitive.

Autocracy is not any kind of democracy. Nicholas II convened a Diet but dissolved it when it didn't go his way. That is not democracy by anybody's standard. No, you amuse me. Your callous dismissal of so much murder, however, sickens me. And you have an example of such a state? Oh, I'll cut this short. You don't, because every one-party state had large numbers of dissidents that it had to exile, torture, shoot or otherwise silence. "The people" won't ever agree because you are talking about millions of individuals, not an anthill. Individuals all have different ideas. Look at the membership of the Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP and you'll find that virtually all of them will disagree on one policy or another. They choose the party not because they agree, but because they disagree least.

That's not what the experts I cited claim, and I also note you have no citations of your own. The onus is on you to prove that. Because you say it doesn't make it so. That's not what you said. You said: Not the same thing. "Is" does not mean "caused by", at least in any dictionary I own. Which economists? What were their names and what publications are you referring to? Ah, so you must believe that the Swedish or Norwegian economies outperformed the American economy. Doubtless you have figures to back this up. I'll wait. The USA has around 11% of the populace below the poverty line. Canada has about 17%. Norway has 25%. The differences are indeed clear, unfortunately, they completely refute what you are arguing. Once again, referring to Reagan, you should note the sudden drop in unemployment after he instituted his sweeping tax cuts. And once again, the evidence is clear, and it clearly refutes your arguments. Still waiting for your proof. Or does it all contradict what you claim, as your proof so far has? It's been acknowledged now that the last American recession began under Clinton. John Kerry actually said so in one of his more recent speeches. Again, quote me where I said that. You've made yet another strawman argument. Ah, so you assumed I said something I didn't. What does that teach you about making assumptions? Perhaps you should re-examine your ideas in light of this revelation. Don't make assumptions. Seek knowledge.

"Trade deficit" is actually another term for "investment surplus." There's a good paper by world-renowned economist Richard M. Salsman which shows this. Salsman argues that the media should substitute the latter term for the former, because the former term prompts public outcry from the economically uninformed, such as yourself, and leads government to make fiscally disastrous policies such as were made in the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tarriffs, supposed to stop a trade deficit but in actual fact greatly accelerating the Great Depression. Andrew West, former Senior Portfolio Manager and Senior Vice President at Global Assets Advisors Inc., states that "trade deficits, by definition, are offset by net investment inflows" (emphasis mine). Bruce Bartlett, Senior Fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department and Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Policy Development at the White House, states that "when a nation has good economic prospects and attracts foreign investment, it tends to run deficits... Deficits may be a sign of strength, while surpluses are a sign of weakness." Dr. Daniel J. Mitchell, the McKenna Senior Fellow in Political Economy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, states that "a nation isn't harmed when it imports more than it exports, which is why the trade deficit is the most dangerous statistic collected by government." Perhaps you'd like to cite the economists who support your viewpoints. Debt is formed by accumulated deficits. A clay pot is formed by a potter, does that mean the pot is the potter? A debt is formed by accumulated deficits but accumulated deficits don't necessarily cause debt. A pot is formed by a potter but a potter doesn't necessarily have to make pots. Clear? Well, I'm going to need something other than your say-so. Unless you are a recognised expert economist, in which case, feel free to give me your resume. If you are saying that B follows A, therefore A causes B, you have to explain why that is so. Otherwise it's a logical fallacy, especially when what you are saying defies logic. It's a well-known fact, at least by economists, that taxation causes economic stagnation because it siphons money out of the economy and impinges upon the free market, so if you're arguing the complete opposite of that you will have to offer some substantial proof. Oh, and furthermore, where I said: I'm still waiting.

It can be formed when repeated budget deficits drain savings. However, you can run a deficit without going into debt. Your statement is, nevertheless, false. You have effectively said, "because A can cause B, B is therefore A." That is not so. Yes, it is. If you have a deficit it means more is flowing into your economy than is going out. It's called an "investment surplus." A deficit is a sign of economic confidence and health because it means that foreigners are investing in the country. You run a trade deficit with your grocery store. You buy from them, they never buy from you. Is that a problem? You said "Bush and Reagan", both of whom were Republicans. Even if you restrain yourself to "tax-cutting Presidents" you are still committing the post hoc ergo propter hoc error. Alright, then quote me where I said that Reagan lowered the debt.