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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Guardian 2000: [QB] I don't have time to be swarmed, so I'm going to just hit the highlights. Pardon any shorthand I might use, and please ask if something doesn't make sense rather than make an ass of yourself by jumping to stupid conclusions like "he said every NATO country is an enemy!" [QUOTE]The recession is a result of the free market and a lack of oversight and accountability vis à vis irresponsible banking practices.[/QUOTE]These irresponsible banking practices were largely necessitated by the government. The expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act (pushing banks toward riskier lending practices) plus the presence and expansion of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation . . . government companies, in essence (which were providing a largely false guarantee for risky loans). . . warped the natural market landscape. Once the government started trying to effectively subsidize housing in an effort to help with "affordable housing", the increased demand naturally sent home prices higher. Hence the housing bubble, which made homes less affordable. So much for government intervention. And now that the bubble is bursting thanks to government intervention in the mortgage market, the whole planet's in the shit. It's been said that we're all Keynesians now, which is true to an extent. Government's role in the economy should be as limited as possible, enforcing the laws of justice, supporting research that is too long-term to be readily profitable to companies, and keeping on an even keel the natural ebb and flow of unbridled capitalism. However, beyond that, government becomes the problem. It is the height of perversion to declare the present crisis to be the fault of the free market or Wall Street greed, because the free market in this case scarcely existed. Further, Wall Street is [i]supposed[/i] to make money, and they have to do it in whatever ways they can when government is involved. [QUOTE]In short, what America has been in the past is not what it can continue to be in the future if we want it to survive[/QUOTE]You list the sins of America, and they are grave ones, yes. There are many more you don't mention, and some you probably don't even know. The times were different then, and the understanding of many people was far less than it is now. Even the last 100 years has seen massive changes as classical-liberal ideals have finally begun to flourish. In response to your list, though, I'm interested to know . . . what of America's noblest successes and moral triumphs? Why can you not bring yourself to acknowledge those? See, when you look at America's past, you judge it by your own modern idealism and find it wanting. But, frankly, you're doing it wrong. Compare America to what came before. In a time when national democracy was a lost ideal, a collection of brave men gathered together to see a new democracy born. In a time when man held his fellow man in bondage, not even recognizing him as such, and in a country where plentiful slave labor was most needed, we fought a self-destructive war to destroy it, to free those who few then believed capable of equality. In a time when a whole race was being exterminated on one side of the globe while to the east the world was being conquered, we supported the good and, when attacked, became their destroyers. When an iron curtain was set to descend upon the world and millions lost lives and liberty, we held the evil empire in check and, almost without firing a shot, managed to make it crumble to dust. Through our capitalist ways came much good. The common man had incentive to innovate in a way the Romans never mastered. Men of energy found their reward. Our greatest heroes were entrepreneurs . . . those who created work and jobs and value, not out of thin air, but from the work of their minds. But that time is passing, and that candle flickers more and more. In so many ways, our system seems now more based on sapping the energy of men, not allowing it to flourish. Before burdensome taxes and excessive litigation and the departure from the gold standard, it was comparatively easy for a man to make a profit. But now? Hell, I wouldn't start a business here. And yes, that all ties in to the leftward drift. [QUOTE]there should never have been a war there in the first place[/QUOTE]Saddam spent years trying to convince everyone he had WMDs. He succeeded. Dumbass. This, while also thumbing his nose at the UN and trying to assassinate our former president. And, even before Bush's initial bipartisan administration, folks from the left and the right were saying there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda via Sudan. With all that to go on, over a decade of information Clinton had generally failed to act on, and after having seen 9/11, our president chose to remove that threat. As it happens, Saddam didn't have threatening levels of WMDs. But still, America is safer with modern Iraq than it was before 2003. And you know, it's really scary that Obama's opinion never changed no matter what the facts on the ground were. I also want to note here that I heard some guy on the radio the other day talking about how silly it was for us to be there, because why would a terrorist trouble himself to come here when he could go try to kill Americans closer to home in Iraq. I laughed out loud, because he had stated the best reason to be there without even understanding it. We kill them there so they can't kill us here. [QUOTE]So, let me make sure I've got this right. You are arguing that, because no war has been declared, the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay cannot, by definition, be prisoners of war.[/QUOTE]Wrong. It has nothing to do with declarations of war. It has everything to do with who we're fighting. Imagine, if you will, that we were terror-attacked by forces of the multinational corporation of Coca-Cola, and we wished to respond. Those arrested within the United States would probably be subject to relatively normal legal proceedings, just as we've done with AQ assholes on our soil. But suppose that, out on the battlefields of the world, as we tried to ferret out these terrorists, we captured some Coke employees on foreign soil who were shooting at our men. What do we do with them? Are they prisoners of war? How can they be for Geneva purposes? They have no country, no formal military, nothing. And hell, Coke employees would at least be wearing uniforms or Coca-Cola paraphernalia. Al Qaeda bitches don't even do that. Yet still, even without particular prompting, we gave them shelter, food, the Quran, and so on. Yes, those we believed to have actionable intelligence found themselves on the ass end of enhanced interrogations. We even waterboarded three guys for a grand combined total of like 90 seconds. Despite being the sort of nuts who are ready to strap bombs on themselves and die, thirty seconds of waterboarding was enough to make them sing like canaries. Bleeding hearts proclaim this to be torture and use an argument of self interest to try to stand against it, namely that our troops might be waterboarded by enemies. Oh, to be so lucky! Given what Al Qaeda does to our captured troops, waterboarding sounds like paradise. [QUOTE]You cite Vietnam and Iraq as other examples of undeclared—thus, not—wars.[/QUOTE]An unfortunate choice of example, since you then twisted it into something ridiculous: [QUOTE]By your logic, then, no American captured by an enemy force since 1945 has been a prisoner of war.[/QUOTE]Wrong. Think, man. [QUOTE]As an aside, how do you reconcille the untopian morals of Star Trek with these ultra-conservative, rights-limiting, torture approving, anything goes against an enemy viewpoints? [/QUOTE]I'm amused that by "untopian" you presumably mean to suggest that Trek shows a leftist utopia. I disagree with that completely. In the Federation, the people are free, possessing their liberty, and do not take it for granted. It is not a nanny state with whiny bleeding hearts who cry when the wind blows . . . the people we've seen are rational and resourceful. Such as economics are shown, Trek is compatible with a post-scarcity economic structure . . . in other words, the Federation has moved past the question of capitalism versus communism. As people become more and more separated from production from nature . . . e.g. when food doesn't come from labor and soil and dirt and blood but from the McDonald's Magic Mystery Truck . . . they lose that understanding of and conformity to nature and nature's laws that make me a conservative of the Objectivist mold. The fact that Trek shows Earth as a paradise of personal responsibility and common sense is hopeful, because it means that somehow we won't become whining Eloi, or a Malthusian ultra-environmentalist micro-society, or lost to evil as the strong, powerful nations standing closer to what is just than most fall to the truly evil ones because they pussed out due to false and weakening philosophies from within. And, of course, as was the Cold War fear, we didn't end up destroying ourselves, either. The way I think such a society would evolve is by colonialism, but I don't know how precisely that would hold. When colonization stops and the colonial spirit no longer moves the people and government, the Federation will crumble soon after. A non-leftist education system, teaching logic and no-BS philosophy early on (unlike the US system), would seem key also. I am a conservative agnostic. This puts me in a unique position, since whereas some conservatives get there via Goddidit and most agnostics just cling to their counterculturalism and go lefty, I was lucky enough to hit it all at just the right time and way to be able to think it all out, and to recognize early on that good and evil and right and wrong really do exist. There are a lot of "Star Trek Republicans", incidentally . . . National Review Online still has its Star Trek week. [QUOTE]I just dont see Picard's morals lining up with "preemptive warfare" or Kirk ordering torture of a prisoner, much less Sisko racial (species?) profiling debarking people from DS9.[/QUOTE]Funny, I seem to recall Kirk threatening (with rope around the neck) to strangle a Klingon on Organia for information . . . surely evil torture and war crimes in your book. Kirk was also prepared to destroy Eminiar VII. Et cetera. Picard had his pajama-clad hippy times, but he evolved. By the time of First Contact he was digging in the guts of his men for tactically useful equipment. As to your thought I do remember him going into the Neutral Zone to search-and-destroy the base from which the Romulans supposedly were going to strike. But that's not "preemptive warfare" in your book, I guess. Your Sisko example is poor because such things were more Odo's role. But indeed, "the only people who can really handle Klingons are Klingons." And indeed, Odo used profiling frequently . . . "Visionary", for instance, featured Odo going on alert because Klingons were around, it figured in his investigation in "Improbable Cause", et cetera. It's not like Odo was putting out APBs for a tall humanoid (ooh, can we even say humanoid without offending someone?) wearing full-body metal and fur and leather protective garments. In a leftist utopia, that would be how to describe a Klingon, because just saying "get the damn Klingon" would be racist . . . hence the silly APBs of some modern police. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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