Hugo

Yes, we do. I don't agree, however, that in the 18th Century everything was peaches-and-cream for democracy and it is only now under assault. Democracy is a high ideal and liberal democratic capitalism is the best social-political-economic system we have yet found for attaining liberty, freedom and prosperity. It's a hard-won prize and it needs maintenance. Back in the 18th Century, democracy was still under assault, from within and without. For example, 18th Century American democracy allowed slavery and did not grant blacks or women the right to self-government. For more than half of the people in America, democracy was still a pipe-dream. In Britain at the same time, perhaps one man in seven had the vote and once again, no women. These were not the glory days of democracy. I think since then, democracy has vastly improved. Perhaps we have television now. But we also have universal suffrage for all over the age of 18, regardless of gender, colour or creed. This gets us a more representative democracy. Since only landowners in 18th Century Britain could vote, British government would tend to represent the interests of landowners, for instance. I do agree that democracy needs maintenance and vigilance. I don't agree that democracy is in decline, if anything, it is in ascent.

Speculation. Furthermore, one does not evolve technology, one develops technology. There is a difference. Humankind did not evolve to include fire, the wheel or quantum mechanics. Humankind did evolve, however, the ability to communicate using language and abstract ideas. If language is technology, so are opposable thumbs and upright perambulation. Social organisation and government would have been introduced when humans first began collecting into groups and, archeologically, it seems that that was always the case. So, as humans have always moved in groups, humans have always had some social order and government. As our society has developed and grown more complex, so has that government. None of these are inherent to statehood, government or social order. Nomads don't recognise nations. Democracy is historically rare, but states existed without it. As to institutions of justice, that depends on your viewpoint. If you mean codified law, that began with Hammurabi, but there were states in existence long before his reign, so that's the end of that point. If you mean any dispensation of justice, then the judgements of chieftains and tribal elders qualifies so once again, we have had this since human prehistory.

Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter. Language is inherent to homo sapiens. What I am stating is that all members of homo sapiens possess language as an innate capacity. They will form social groups, as a rule, and will organise those social groups. This, too, is innate. There are so few human individuals who refuse to become part of a larger group that it can be written off as an anomaly, like human individuals who fail to develop language.

I believe this is a fallacy. Humans are social and political creatures, as Aristotle said. Humans organise themselves into groups and will create political structures for those groups that vary according to the complexity of their society. The state cannot be a technology because it needs no science, only language, and language is an inherent part of humanity. There is no culture in the world that has failed to develop a sophisticated language capable of expressing the abstract concepts needed for politics. In the 19th Century, linguists and anthropologists theorised that, as there were technologically primitive peoples in the world, there would also be primitive languages not yet capable of a full range of expression. As we explored and researched further, we failed to find any of these languages. Both language and politics are inherent intellectual characteristics of Man, just as bipedality and opposable thumbs are physical characteristics. All cultures have some form of politics, even tribal councils and elders. There is always structure since it is human nature to create structure and order from chaos. The state, like language, grows in complexity as we develop. It would be possible to use a less developed language in place of English but far more cumbersome and inefficient. English has 400,000 words, more than any other language. When technical and scientific terms are added, the vocabulary expands to 900,000. This vast complexity of English gives us great ability of expression and supports vast Western technological, scientific and artistic development. Similarly, we could use tribal councils and so forth as government. It would be terribly inefficient and wasteful, however, for a state such as the USA with over 290,000,000 inhabitants and an economy sporting an annual GDP of $10,450,000,000,000 to use such a government. Instead we have developed a similarly complex and advanced system that better suits the needs of the nation. Like English with it's 900,000 words, the US government is huge, highly complex and impossible for one person to fully understand or know, but it serves a similarly huge culture. The point, then, is that state and politics are not technologies. They are universal characteristics of human intellect and society. If the state is a technology, then so is existential thought or opposable thumbs. There is no appliance of science to any of these examples, only appliance of intellect. Yes, they do lead to more death and destruction, assuming they were used for those roles. A pen can't do much damage. You could stab somebody in the neck with it but they'd have to be pretty co-operative. You couldn't kill a few million people with a pen, but you could with a Soviet 50Mt SS-18 warhead detonated over New York City. On what grounds? Both religion and state have been with us since the dawn of humankind. In that time, religion has claimed a little over 3,000,000 lives, many of which could in fact be attributed to non-religious causes if I wanted to argue this more stringently. In the 20th Century alone, governments have been responsible for perhaps 170,000,000 deaths. Not that this is a new thing. Over the five centuries of the mercantilist, statist African slave trade somewhere between 17,000,000 and 65,000,000 Africans were killed. The Mongols murdered about 30,000,000 people in their 13th Century campaigns, mostly civilians, women and children. In the turmoil in China between the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period, 43 million Chinese were killed. That represented a staggering 86% of the population of China. By the time of the Sui Dynasty, over three centuries later, the population had recovered to the Han level, but in the transition to the Tang 2/3 of that population was butchered. In summary, we have about 303,000,000 mass murders in history. This is a conservative estimate. Of these, about 3,178,500 can be attributed to religion. This includes events such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, European Witch-Hunts, Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican religious sacrifice and so forth. I don't believe the case that the state is a greater protector of life than religion has any strength at all. Certainly it is irrefutable that states have murdered about 100 times as many people as religions. Now, August, let's hear some evidence and logic. Your feelings are not good evidence. Once again, all statistics from the works of Prof. R.J. Rummel. He has a website here which summarises a lot of the information available in his books.

technology: 1a) The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives. 1b) The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective. 2) Electronic or digital products and systems considered as a group: a store specializing in office technology. The state is not a technology as it depends upon no scientific discovery to exist. It is not an application of science because the science it uses varies enormously or may not exist at all. It is not a scientific method either.

The State is not a technology, it is an institution.

The governments of the world have murdered nearly 170,000,000 people between 1900 and 1987. This is a fairly conservative estimate, some sources believe it could be double that. Therefore, if you truly believe in the first point, don't you think we should eliminate government and prioritize that removal over and above the elimination of religion? The Crusades killed about 1,000,000 people, the Inquisition about 350,000, and witch-hunts perhaps 100,000. These figures pale into insignificance when compared to the secular wars of the 20th Century, claiming about 40 millions dead on the battlefield. Very few wars are truly religious in nature. Most "religious" wars can also be couched in terms of, for example, territorial conflict in the case of the Crusades. This refutes your second point. (Figures cited from Prof. R. J. Rummel) Next?

All true, and all are conditions magnified a million times outside Canada and the US. But man does have common wisdom. This is why democracy, juries, free public discourse and so on are of benefit to us. If man had no wisdom a democracy would be no better than a tyranny. You can never come close to the utopian dream. For one thing, what that dream is varies with whom you ask. Karl Marx's vision of utopia is my vision of hell. Pluralism is a practical system of compromise. Men are not angels and you cannot achieve paradise on earth, and since God has not ushered Man back into the Garden of Eden we have to make to with what we have. Democratic capitalism is not a perfect system, although that's meaningless since there cannot be a perfect system, but it's the best so far. Faith is important on a personal level but when you try to apply it to a whole culture you just end up with another tyranny, far from religious vision. The medieval Church had very little to do with God and a lot to do with wealth and power. To preserve pure religious tenets you have to hurt religion a little.

But no side "wins" completely, and not for any long period of time, so if the wrong side wins, it does not mean calamity. When we trust to pluralism and the wisdom of the common man, we win. We get democracy, trial by jury, liberty and freedom. When we stop trusting the common man and instead trust to experts to make decisions for us, we get tyranny, death and misery. Since God does not make his wishes clear, man is the highest agent of his own destiny. Therefore it is better to allow all men a say in that destiny rather than to restrict that say to only a few. Because in practice the competition and pluralism produces the best outcome. Theories are all very well, but I'm interested in what happens when you apply them. If the theory doesn't work when applied empirically, as socialism doesn't, as non-elected government doesn't, then that means the theory is wrong, no matter how hard that may be to accept.

It never will. Sooner or later, socialists are going to have to face up to what religion has realised for thousands of years: humans are flawed, always have been, and always, always will be. You can design a system around their imperfections, like capitalism, or you can design a system that ignores them, like socialism, which is why that system never works. Do you have any evidence? I have plenty of examples of political infighting, governments against corporations, corporations against governments, religious groups against both. There is no "powerful" in America. They are divided. Corporations are in constant competition, Republicans and Democrats are mutually exclusive, and the gay-rights groups and the Catholic Church are constantly at loggerheads. This is what I mean by dispersion of power, in America, no one individual or united group can gain any large measure of power. There are so many checks and balances and the very system is designed to produce opposition to power at every step. Ah, and since you mention the profit motive, perhaps I'll give you a few examples of the American system ignoring profit for other ideals. 1980, $100bn windfall profit tax from oil companies. Bethlehem Steel driven out of business by environmental concerns. Clinton and Bush administrations refusing to trade with Iraq. Department of Justice fighting Microsoft. You see? Once again, you don't put up your own examples because your points are false. Explain how.

But we already went over this! It seems to me that the main part of your argument is, "a whole crapload of trouble" as you put it. Maybe. Worthwhile things usually are trouble. Achieving democracy was a lot of trouble. Getting equal women's rights were a lot of trouble. This move would almost certainly be less trouble than either of those achievements. I think the majority of people would say the opposite. This issue is polarizing both the USA and Canada. Gay-rights groups are up in arms and people are marching on New York City Hall. Religious groups are up in arms too, churches feel that their rights will be endangered and so-cons are upset about the ramifications they feel this will have upon society. The issue is a problem, and just making gay marriage legal won't make it go away. The religious right are not going to shrug their shoulders and get used to it, and polygamists, NAMBLA and more will get stuck into the issue as well. Neither side is happy with the status-quo, and if you change it, you are going to polarize society even further because the demands of the gay-rights activists will be replaced by the demands of other groups, while the demands of the so-cons will just become louder and angrier. This is a way to circumvent all of that and produce a solution that can be acceptable to everyone. Laziness is not a good excuse, I feel.

Aznar was elected to do what he thought was in the best interests of his people. He went to war with Iraq because he believed that was in the best interests of his people, however, the people disagreed so vehemently that he was voted out of office. We on the right don't have contempt for democracy, we just understand what representative democracy is, and we agree with Mr. Aznar on Iraq.

Of course - just as large governments and large social and religious organisations exert more force on society, in the same ways. The world is a big place, with 6 billion inhabitants, and the tasks we face as a species are huge. Therefore, it's safe to assume that big organisations are here to stay. We are just going to have to find ways to get along. My final word is that abuses of power from the economic system will of course happen, just as surely as churches and governments abuse their power from time to time, and when this happens we should prosecute the abusers just as surely as we would prosecute corrupt ministers or child-molesting priests. This does not mean that all corporations are evil and do not contribute a net good to society, any more than it means that all governments or churches are evil and do not contribute a net good also. Regarding the original topic, the only objection I have heard thus far is Blackdog's, which is basically statist in nature and could be summed up as, "The government should have control" or, if you prefer, "All Power to the Soviets!" as their 1920s campaign went. Well, then I'm happy to have had a decent idea that many people approved of. Now what?

Yes. It adds sexual orientation to the attributes towards which it is a criminal offence to direct "hate speech" at.

An interesting sidenote: If Martin sticks to the original election date of May 10, that means he'll have to dissolve Parliament on April 4th at the latest, even if he calls the election later, that doesn't give us much more. That leaves very little Parliament session time left, and so any bills currently going through will in all likelihood not be completed when Parliament is dissolved and so die forever. Svend Robinson's Bill C-250 is currently going through. What this means is that a spring election will almost certainly be the kiss of death for this bill. I wonder how that will impact the NDP and the gay-rights activists?

Blockbuster is catering to the demands of its market and it has found that the greater share of its customers prefer a family-oriented store. They can choose to abandon this model at the risk of alienating a large portion of their customer base. Blockbuster is, too, a consumer of films from producers. As its customers expect a family-oriented business from Blockbuster, so Blockbuster expects family-oriented productions from producers. Those producers can either satisfy that or sell it elsewhere, just as Blockbuster can either satisfy their family-oriented customer base or find another one. In any case, this is merely democratic market forces at work. However, your choices are not limited. Some film producers may distribute two titles. Some may elect not to distribute via Blockbuster at all. In any event, your main complaint is that market forces may have denied you the chance of seeing an extra 10 seconds of Nicole Kidman in the nude, and if that's the price we have to pay for the greatest freedom and highest standard of living the world has ever known, so be it! I can't see it happening. If you find any places where it has, I'll reconsider, but I find it amazing that no matter how close any company comes to dominance some competition arises, often seemingly from nowhere. Take the computer industry. IBM used to dominate it, until a three-man operation called Micro-soft (it was hyphenated then) turned up and took their dominance away from them. Now everybody is worried about Microsoft, but suddenly Apple is turning profits again and stealing market share and the open-source software movement has gathered tremendous momentum suddenly and is stealing even more market share. Yes, and this is precisely what democratic capitalism is all about. True capitalism depends upon law and ethics as well as economics. Pure capitalism, as leftists put it, doesn't even exist. It's a system of impurities, as we live in an impure world. But we are way, way off topic, and I think we are essentially in agreement anyway, so...

If you are referring to cuts made to achieve a certain rating so that "family" chains such as Wal-Mart and Blockbuster will carry the title, you should note that the MPAA imposes these ratings and demands edits, so in this case it is the government, not Blockbuster, that is supposedly limiting your freedom of choice. They decide the ratings and often for highly questionable reasons. It is Blockbuster's decision not to carry ratings above R, and apparently that business decision seems to be working for them. There are plenty of outlets who carry NC-17 titles. I got my Criterion Collection DVD of Robocop from Amazon.com. It is the original director's cut, before they edited it for an 'R' rating. I didn't have any trouble finding it and I didn't pay over the odds for it. If not, I'd like to know what you are referring to. This statement was extremely vague. Ah, you don't know of any. Well, let's be charitable and assume that you are right anyway, and there is some town somewhere in North America that only has a Wal-Mart. Is Wal-Mart charging them more than they charge people in big cities? Does this town have no mailboxes so that it can receive mail-order catalogues and goods? Does this town have not a single phone line so that it can order goods to be delivered, or a single computer to be hooked up to a phone line so that it can use Amazon.com, Ebay or Netflix? I don't think so. The irony of your argument is that you are attacking capitalism for apparently not providing that which it provides in far, far larger quantities than any other economic system: choice! Controlled and planned economies give far, far less choice than capitalism. If it's consumer choice you want, you are already in the best system to provide it.

Then what is your complaint - that Blockbuster sells and rents videos exactly as the producer intended for a reasonable price? That doesn't sound much like an indictment. They make separate versions for Wal-Mart sometimes, but as I've shown, that by no means forces you to buy them. Which cities and towns are exclusively served by Wal-Mart? Name some.

I don't think that's a valid complaint at all. There are 22 independent video stores and 11 independent music stores listed in my Yellow Pages and I don't live in a big town! Wal-Mart and Blockbuster only control the media as long as you buy from them, and thanks to the capitalist system there are plenty of options for you if you don't want to. Consider the problem with state-owned industry. Up until very recently, electricity here in Ontario was state-run (now it's about 70% state-owned). The service was terrible. There were frequent brown-outs due to poor maintenance of equipment and the age of the generation hardware, and sometimes total black-outs. This service was also expensive. I pay about 3 times per month what my mother, in the UK, pays her privately-owned power company. What are my choices? None! I can take what they want to give me for whatever price they want to charge or I can start looking at very expensive and inefficient methods of generating my own power. Remember Winston Smith's Victory Cigarettes in 1984? Don't turn it filter-side-up, all the tobacco will fall out. That's what state-run industry gives you: a poor product, expensive prices and no consumer choice. Once again, there are still plenty of independent papers, magazines, films, books, record labels and so forth. What's the alternative, one state-owned publishing company? You might dedicate such a company to producing good content but pretty soon it would descend to becoming another Pravda. The CBC is almost there already.

Granted, but in the same way that the Canadian Criminal Code does not really allow for abortion-on-demand. I can see your point here. I think that it is the government that has failed to move with the times, quite honestly. It seems that a lot of governmental policy is rooted in old thinking, with trade protectionism, heavy taxation and so forth. No, but then, can you imagine the government of 1776 exacting a $100bn windfall profit tax from a group of companies, or the administration spending more on pursuing a business tycoon than on a known terrorist who had already claimed scores of American lives? Furthermore, lobbying is not a guarantee of success. There is a long list of congressmen who received money from technology firms but voted against the Trade Promotion Authority which they were lobbying for. I just don't think it's the case that big business runs government, if anything, it is a case of government bullying big business. I don't think "controls" is the right word, at all. How can a company without absolute control over it's market control consumers? I think this kind of talk is symptomatic of the tendency to view economic organisations as a united, monolithic entity, when in fact such an interpretation is very wrong. I absolutely agree with this, and this is why I am a staunch capitalist. It is capitalism that has produced by far the most wealth, well-being and liberty for the average citizen out of all the economic systems thus envisaged. Undoubtedly, but it is very difficult to get to that without endangering democracy. The empirical evidence is strong that it is far better to trust to the judgement of the average citizen than to trust vaunted experts, not just in politics, but upon juries, public discourse and so forth. It is this line of thinking that gives us advertising, additionally. Advertising succeeds because the average citizen is not an expert in every field in which he must conduct business. But what are we to do - have "experts" make his choices for him? That takes away a vast part of his liberty and undermines our democracy and our libertarian society. I disagree. Socialism means state industry ownership in whole or part, and state monopoly in economics deprives consumers of economic liberty just as surely as one-party monopoly over politics deprives citizens of political liberty.

This is true, it's all just idle speculation. I base my opinions on the following facts which lead me to arrive at my extrapolation: 1) The USSR was a highly aggressive and expansionist regime. It invaded other countries by military force, dissolved the native governments, stole gold reserves, public, and private property; annexed the country as a whole and imposed Soviet rule by brutal military force, crushing dissent with violence (see Hungarian, Czech and other uprisings). Their practice was to station Russian units in their satellite states to be assured of military loyalty should the Red Army be needed to put down a rebellion, as it often was. 2) Soviet expansion knew no bounds. After annexing Eastern Europe, the USSR promptly got stuck into the Middle East, Africa, Cuba and the Far East (from Nikita Kruschev's autobiography). Up until the Gorbachev era, all Soviet military plans in Europe were for a purely offensive war (from records of the NVA, or East German People's Army). There was no doubt that they were contemplating the invasion of Western Europe. There is no reason to believe they would have stopped there since the USSR acknowledged no kind of Sphere of Influence, Monroe Doctrine or anything else that would create a logical stop-line for their aggression. 3) The USSR had concentrated massive conventional and nuclear forces. In 1983, the USSR had more nuclear weapons than all the other nuclear powers combined. In Europe alone, they had massed 170 divisions that could be deployed for war (plus forces in Asia and rear-echelon/garrison units in Europe). For comparison, the BAOR (British) had 4 divisions in Europe at the same time (from The Nuclear War File, Christopher Chant & Ian Hogg). Based upon these facts, I can conclude the following: 1) Soviet expansion was planned and inevitable. As several Soviet defectors, particularly those from the Red Army such as Viktor Suvorov (pseudonym), have noted, the only way for an unsustainable state such as the USSR to survive is aggressive expansion. 2) Soviet military strength was so great that only the USA would have had the power to realistically oppose it. NATO without the USA would have been overrun in a few days (from NATO General Sir John Hackett, ret.). This is why I reach my conclusions. Do you have a different point of view? Perhaps you can explain it similarly?

Whatever. There's no point replying to this, since everybody else knows you have made a fool of yourself (as confirmed by the PMs I have received about our discussions), and you won't listen. This is true, and it's why we have democracy. It's also why public accountability is so important. When politicians are held accountable to the public, the theory is that they won't be able to spend against your wishes. Nevertheless, taxation is a necessary evil and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Freedom of choice is important economically as well as politically and state services remove that freedom. There have been many changes in democracy since those days. There have been many amendments to the Constitution, for one thing. The original Constitution allowed for slavery! The structure is much the same, but then so is the structure of the economy - just on a bigger scale. There were still multinationals back in the 18th Century, but they were mostly traders and merchants rather than manufacturers, for instance. Everything has grown since then - government, population, wealth, economy. This is a good example of law being used to protect the economic sector. After all, why should fast food companies be held accountable? They are not forcing anyone to eat there, and there is such a wealth of information about the health ramifications of a junk-food diet that nobody can honestly claim to have had not the slightest inkling that it was bad for them. The class-action lawsuits are purely about money-grubbing and denial of personal responsibility. Agreed, but only so long as any new Constitution was aware that the economy is just as vital to the well-being of the nation as anything else, and is just as vulnerable to damage. If we are to ask big business to butt out of politics, it's only fair that politics stop interfering in big business, and most of the interference these days is of the latter kind. I think what August is getting at with his examples is the fluid nature of the economic system. Leftists tend to think of "corporations" as a monolithic, power-hungry body, when in fact "corporations" reflects a massive, disjointed horde of organisations competing with each other and pulling in different directions. Even though Microsoft is powerful in the technology sector, it's power is by no means absolute. If IBM, Novell, Cisco, Apple, Sun, the Free Software Foundation, and so forth got together they could probably take Microsoft down. Microsoft can't accrue absolute power even in one field of the economy, let alone the entire economy, let alone the entire country. Ironically, it's socialism that produces the monopolies of economic power.

This kind of reply is typical for you. You have ignored everything I've said, rebutted nothing, provided absolutely no evidence or logic of any kind, and descended to insults and reiteration of earlier points that were already answered and refuted.

I never said that, in fact, I specifically said the opposite. But why meet facts with facts, BlackDog, when you can meet them with insults, lies and ignorance? What you have to recognise is that the USA has preserved freedom in the 20th Century far more than any other nation. You won't, and despite what history has to tell you, you insist on gouging out your eyes rather than looking at it and confronting the truth which is that your evil, evil USA has very probably saved your freedom and your very life. It depends, doesn't it? The Chinese regime will inevitably collapse, all communist systems do, because they are unsustainable and based upon tyranny. The momentum of liberty keeps growing. So the question is whether or not an invasion of China would cost more lives than would be lost by Chinese-government-sanctioned murder in the time period it will take for the PRC to fall. It's a difficult one, as all weighing of human life must be, with other factors such as the moral burden of sitting by while innocents are killed. The USA may feel it can do more without outright war, such as diplomatic and economic pressure, which was the method Reagan successfully used to topple the USSR.

Just to clarify that I'm debating with a true boor, and a woefully ignorant one at that. I've already explained this. Go back and read this thread again. Ah, you get your information from TV. That figures. Go to your library (if you know where that is) and check out "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism" by Michael Novak. Assuming you can understand it, all will be made clear. I think you have a serious inferiority complex. You hate success and achievement, and people and nations that attain them, you become shrill and vulgar when actually engaged in serious debate rather than allowed to foist your half-baked opinions, based on TV shows and hysterical Michael Moore-esque claptrap, on us, and when forced to concede you just sling insults and end the discussion. I'm sure that isn't far off in this thread.