Hugo

Read the thread. This has been gone over in too much detail and at too much length to rehash here solely for your benefit. The murder of Holly Jones concerns you or I about as much. Shall we strike down the laws about that, too? Don't worry, Svend Robinson is already working on that.

Answer the question. What are Asians going to do once they start being discriminated against thanks to AA, and how does switching discrimination from one minority to another end discrimination exactly?

Please explain how, in your narrow-minded view of things, the Asian population is going to get along. They are a minority, but they are going to get the shaft because they are generally far more academic than blacks or hispanics, and AA would disqualify them from jobs and university courses in favour of blacks and hispanics. So... AA is wonderful because it removes discrimination against minorities by discriminating against minorities. Great argument. Do you have any that you've actually thought through?

Please re-visit the thread "Gay Gene". Your statement is simply false, pure and simple. There is no consensus in the scientific community, and the majority of evidence and opinion trends away from any idea of innate homosexuality.

But the Congressmen and Senators they have to lobby represent their constituents. They have to, or they can kiss their chances of re-election goodbye. Reed actually gave an example of this, where a majority of Congressmen actually squashed a bill despite the fact that the corporations who would have benefitted from it had contributed generously to their campaign funds. Money does not always equal power.

Of course, if AA takes hold in a big way being white will become a curse.

Marriage is not a basic human right, and gays have been able to marry for centuries. Where have you been?

Black Dog, The following link is to an interview with Morgan Reed, regarding "questions about lobbying, undue industry influence on United States laws as they apply to the tech sector, the future of internet taxation, and more." http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?...3&tid=98&tid=99 Please read it. It will shed some light on American democracy for you.

Your post is good apart from this. The simple fact was that Germany marched a brigade into the Rhineland, and across the river were a hundred French divisions. German commanders were given a sealed envelope to open in case of French resistance. Inside was a piece of paper telling them to retreat and fall back as fast as possible. The British and French could have annihilated Germany in 1934, but the political will was just not there. They believed that concession was the road to peace, and as that road appeared to be open, why risk any level of armed confrontation?

In war, that which weakens you strengthens your enemy. America was at war, with the Soviet Union, and as I have said, if you think America was bad you should just take a look at what the good old USSR was getting up to. It was crucial for humanity not to let the Communists win. If you wonder why, just take a look at my post above, and if you think Guantanamo Bay prison is bad just imagine the lubyanka - how many prisoners have "died under interrogation" entered next to their names? I agree that the Contra scandal was bad. Many things were, war is never pleasant. Some of them were mistakes, some of them not important to winning the Cold War, but as I said, US Presidents are not comic-book-villains and what they do makes sense at the time. You and I are not privy to their information and so any judgement we make is flawed.

The People's Republic of China. What does that tell you?

Exactly. Socialism provides no incentive to work. There's an old Russian saying: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

It motivates you to compete, but for fairness you need more. For instance, imagine you and I are in a running race. What's the easiest way for me to win? If I attack you by surprise and beat you unconscious that then means that I can run the race unopposed. In order to have a fair race, I either need some morality and ethics that I should be a good sportsman, or some rules for the race and a means of enforcing them should I attempt to cheat. The idea is for more $$, as you say, but often the easiest way to make that more $$ is through lying and cheating. That is why morality or law is needed.

But it wasn't against the law. I keep telling you, 14 UN resolutions passed that all authorised force should they be broken, and all were broken! Gulf II was made legal the day the first one was passed. I also don't see how it can be called "rash" when the peaceful alternative was given 12 years to work. Over a decade's consideration seems rash to you? How long do you deliberate before making a decision? 20 years? 50?

What companies, and what evidence exactly do you have of their shareholders' political leanings and religious persuasion? This is just another one of your moronic and unfounded sweeping statements. Can you not do better?

Sure, but make it personal and you lose all objectivity. No, it isn't nice being knife-raped by a Contra, but I don't imagine it's pleasant being ground to pulp beneath the treads of a T-72 either, or having your extremities and genitalia cut off by a spetznaz team.

Or a decent moral/religious code. Just look at the early North American colonies - strict capitalism, distinct absence of government, and everything runs smoothly due to the Puritan and Quaker religious codes. Since moral relativism and secular humanism have run rampant, capitalism has gone rapidly downhill. We've gone from supplying the market to creating the market, from meeting the needs of the consumer to telling the consumer what their needs are, from selling a good product for a fair price to making crap in a far-eastern sweatshop and suckering poor people who shop at Wal-Mart into buying it. Capitalism works, so long as people can remain ethical. When ethics goes out the window, so does the system. Ethics isn't out the window yet, but it's clinging on to the windowsill and moral relativists and leftist nutcases are busy stamping on its fingers.

Riff, Basically, the "rightfulness" of US indulgence in proxy wars and so forth depends simply upon whether or not you are a utilitarian. If so, then it's good, because it's better to back a bunch of men who you think would kill, say, 10 innocents, in order to stop another bunch of men you think would kill 100. 10 people had to die, but 90 who would otherwise have died, lived. This is the rationale by which the Cold War was fought, basically. I beg to differ. I wonder how much you can truly know about Communism, and this also illustrates your blind anti-American bias since everything you complain about in the US can be laid a hundredfold at the door of the USSR. For instance: If you have not heard of the Great Terror, I invite you to read the book of the same name by Robert Conquest. To summarise, briefly and coldly, 20 million men, women and children, civilians and soldiers, were arrested and either executed or sent to slave labour camps (basically execution by malnutrition and fatigue over a 6-month-period). This is almost 350% of the casualties of the Holocaust. While the Great Depression was bad in the West, and Russia did not seem to be affected, you should also note that perhaps 30 million Soviet citizens died in an avoidable famine caused solely by the ineptitude and stupidity of the Soviet government, a bare decade before the Depression. Of course, the Soviet government cooks the books like any good Communist would, but these figures have been arrived at by independent outside study. You may criticise original American involvement in Afghanistan by proxy. You should also be aware that the Red Army was also there, directly, and indulged in torturing civilians and POWs, burning villages and mass executions. This goes double for every other proxy war. While you moan about US involvement and atrocities committed with American-supplied weapons, know that the Soviets were doing it all a hundred times worse, not just to foreigners but to their own people. Any comparison of US conduct to Soviet in these wars would be of a car stereo thief to a serial rapist and murderer. For an example of how callously Soviet leadership treated human life, visit the now-available archives of Soviet military doctrine. For instance, when Soviet forces planned to attack West Germany they would deliberately massacre civilians and burn towns and villages to create an exodus of refugees that would hamper the flow of NATO reinforcements to the front. Of course, when the Red Army found its way blocked by civilians it would simply mow them down, as it did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. By now, Communist tank drivers have lots of practice in running over unarmed civilians. If you decry racism in America, imagine Soviet society, where Jews were barred from any but the most menial of positions in civil or military life. While you're at it, remember that those cushier positions were reserved for Great Russians. Georgians, Lithuanians, Finns or Ingush need not apply, nor any others in the vast and highly multicultural USSR. You could complain that you feel that religious feeling runs too high in America, but in the USSR possession of a religious symbol was grounds for imprisonment and to actually be a priest, grounds for execution. How does that strike your idea of religious freedom? So, Riff, yes, the Soviet Union was an incarnate of evil as much as, if not more so than, Nazi Germany. Do you think the Nazis were not the potential end of the world and not as bad as everyone thought? After all, if you excuse Stalin, Hitler seems like a naughty schoolboy in comparison. The world might not end if you have to call everyone 'Comrade', but your world would end when you got sent to the Gulag because an essay you wrote in 8th-grade didn't praise Lenin highly enough, or when you were executed because your grandfather picked the wrong side in the Civil War. How nice. Twenty thousand Dutch were not given the same choice, and most of them were not vegetative at the time. Killing someone without their consent is not mercy, it's murder.

I do not understand why these leftists believe that proxy wars are somehow backing their arguments. Perhaps I haven't made myself clear before, I will try again. America did not fight proxy wars in order to be evil and kill people. Every US President was not a mad, cackling, psychotic Marvel-comic-villain just itching for some people in some far-off land to get bombed or gassed at taxpayer's expense. Since 1945, America has actually been at war. This is called the Cold War, and lasted until about 1989. The fact was that Soviet Communism was bent upon expanding it's influence wherever possible, by coups, insurrection or simple invasion. See Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Tito, the Middle East, China, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Cuba and Latin America, and so forth. Contrary to what some leftists think, the USSR was not a great place to live. It was truly an Evil Empire, that sent political dissidents to gulags or simply shot them, that completely suppressed all religious belief and free expression, that conscripted its youth (for two years), and perhaps 30% of it's GDP, into its vast and offensively-natured armed forces at the total expense of consumer comfort. When I say, comfort, I don't mean Chryslers and Playstations, I mean a 6-child-family having more than 2 rooms in their house and hot water more than a few hours a day despite the fact that both parents work like slaves in the local factory, inhaling asbestos and other carcinogens all day. American welfare claimants have it better than the average working Soviet family did. To anyone who doubts this, look at how hard the resistance movements in the former Soviet countries fought and how desperately movements like Solidarity wanted to end the Soviet way of life and become more like America. The Soviet Union and its satellites completely sacrificed the interests and well-being of its citizens, often plunging them into disease and poverty inadvertently when it did not actively persecute and kill them, in order to pursue the interests of the state bureaucracy. America felt that if Communism was allowed to run rampant, these forces of oppression, brutality and inhumanity would march all over the Earth, and they probably would have. So therefore, if fighting a few wars and backing a few dictators was necessary, so be it. If we back the Shah, we remove freedom in Iran. If we don't, we might well be removing freedom throughout the world. The costs of winning the Cold War might be high, but the cost of losing it would have been far, far greater, not just for Americans but for humanity.

As I have explained to you countless times, the fact was that America was at war, the Cold War, and had to back some questionable people in order to oppose even more questionable people. So, a more accurate question would be: is it good to finance and support a group of men who you have reason to believe would rape and murder five little girls in order to prevent another group of men raping and murdering fifty little girls? America did win the Cold War. If America had not indulged in all those proxy wars, maybe it would not have won the Cold War and we could all live in the workers' paradise of Soviet Communism. As it is, we don't, and even the former Eastern Bloc countries now have a chance at freedom. That would be the Northern Europe such as: Holland, where 20,000 people have been euthanised without their consent? Sweden, where crematoria are harnessed for electrical power and your last act on Earth will be knocking a few bucks off the funeral home's hydro bill? Germany, where you can buy borderline snuff movies but not a copy of Doom, the videogame? Oh yes, and "all Western companies" are guilty of killing the innocent, are they?

OK, then let's take an action. For instance, raping, sodomising, torturing and murdering a series of innocent and harmless 6-year-old girls. Do you think that would be good or bad? If some people think it would be good, does that mean that it is sometimes good, always good, or always bad?

You're missing the point. This is not about poverty and backwardness. I fail to see how human sacrifice, female circumcision or feudal tithing are caused by poverty anyway. What it is about, is the problem moral relativists have with recognising evil and distinguishing good from bad. They seem to believe there is no good and bad, just different, and that is not so.

Erm... this from a man who quotes Adolf Hitler in his signature?

Yes. Note that countries "liberated" by the Red Army became Soviet satellites, whereas countries liberated by the US became free and independent states again. The Truman doctrine has become waylaid from time to time, I'll grant you, but at least there was a Truman Doctrine. The same cannot be said for the Soviet Union. I'm not questioning the story. I'm just providing background information. Pinochet didn't arise out of a vacuum, you know. Yes, it is. See above - US vs USSR, clearly there's a side that we'd all prefer won that war. Unless you like gulags, thoughtcrime and martial law.

In it's "truest" form as you put it, and I understand you to mean capitalism unfettered by law or morality, yes, that would probably be the case. However, nobody, not even Adam Smith, wants total and anarchic capitalism, or what the Russians call "wild capitalism." All capitalists agree that capitalism must be tempered by law and justice, just as individual freedom cannot be allowed to run rampant lest those who wish to murder and rape could do as they will. Their freedom must be curtailed by law and justice too. A capitalist society tempered by just law and democracy will produce the optimum combination of living standards, material wealth (for all, not just for a few) and individual freedoms. A capitalist but tyrannical society can't offer that, and a socialist society never can, no matter what it's political mode.