We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war -- what else could we do?
Charlie Stross is hosting an open conversation on other things we could have bought with the money wasted in Iraq: for example, we could have sent a colony of over 500 astronauts to Mars, provided modern nuclear power to the USA and shut down its coal plants, built modern cities for 600,000,000 Chinese people to live in, and so on:
For $6Tn we could buy a lot of juice — a quarter of our global civilization's energy budget would go carbon-neutral at a stroke. (Yes, we just solved our carbon dioxide emissions problem by switching to a nuclear economy.) This probably isn't the ideal way of dealing with our environmental problems, and it's a naive treatment of the costs (has anyone done a proper treatment of the economic implications of shifting the planet over to a nuclear economy, say to the same extent as France?) but it's thought-provoking.LinkFinally, there's all the other little stuff we could solve by pointing $513Bn at it, never mind $6000Bn. Eliminating childhood diseases in South-East Asia? Piffle — Bill and Melinda Gates are trying to do that out of their pocket lint. Build first-world grade housing in shiny new cities for 600 million Chinese peasants, nearly a tenth of the planetary population? Yes, this budget will cover that. What else?
Yes, I'm asking you: what would you do with the cost of the Iraq war (take your pick: $513Bn or $6000Bn) in your budget? Colonise Mars? Solve our carbon emission problem and fix global warming? House half a billion people? Or something else ...?
(And what isn't going to happen now, because we pissed it all away on the desert sands?)
the latest
latest episodes
But of course, no we couldn't have ... because we would have been overrun by a population that does not believe in space exploration.
We could always by popcorn and sit back and watch Hussein and his goon thrw ppl nt wd chpprs nd lt hs sns rn thr rp rms.
Oh, yeah. That's buy not by.
An alternative analysis, with suggestions:
"If Bush had spent that $3,000,000,000,000 on shoes, no American child would ever have to wear the same shoes more than once. Or he could have bought everyone in Iraq an Aston Martin. Those would be the actions of a madman, of course, yet still more sensible than what he actually did do."
The US government should set up a Ministry of Hate / Discord / Strife / Intereference etc with an annual budget. Its job being to identify possible hotspots of the imaginary kind or to manufacture such (like in the past) and follow it up with large scale destruction (which it does)
They have managed splendidly to generate hate which will take some years to wilt, wash and disappear. Hillary already has said that she wouldn't mind bombing Iran and Mcain wants to remove Russia from G8.
Does it look like ending anytime soon. NO. It seems the most popular album of US Presidency is 'Appetite for Destruction' Ax, Slash etc etc
Truly a sobering read. But I have to keep reminding myself that it's not the money that is the biggest loss, it is the hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, homeless or orphaned human beings.
@1: True. So much better to do those things ourselves.
Thekin:
Good point. For $6 trillion we could buy 25 billion metric tonnes of maize with which to make it. (today maize is trading at ~ $6 / 25 kg).
That's enough to give every person on earth 3.7 tonnes of popcorn, which (if it were ever possible to grow that much maize) would instantly alleviate world hunger. But what's that compared to getting rid of Saddam, eh?
Come now- without this war, where would be Homeland Security? Don't you want us to be safe from the terrorists? You must be anti-American!
Besides, we don't need a Ministry of Hate. Are you crazy? We already have the Ministry of Love, Ministry of Truth, and Ministry of Peace- and the Ministry of Plenty is set to be in power by this time next year.
No matter who gets elected, the Ministries will be in power to protect and guide the citizens- so of course this expenditure was all worth it!
I think Charlie doesn't have the slightest clue about how economics work. Does he think that money being spent in Iraq is being loaded on a rocket and launched into the sun, never to circulate in global markets again? While he might have his own agenda for how to spend US tax dollars, the fact that they are getting spent at all should be a clue that someone, somewhere, is receiving a paycheck. That someone buys cheap Chinese HDTVs, uses electricity from Saudi Arabian oil to power it, drives a Japanese hybrid, wears trendy sandals from Amsterdam, and dines on fish and fruit from South America. Globalization, baby!
Why not complain to the fat, rich Saudi royal family that THEY aren't spending enough on hydrogen fuel cell research? Why not prod the Chinese to spend their gigantic trade surplus on going to Mars? Why not get the emerging democracies of South America to dispense clues to the corrupt dictatorships in Africa? Why does it fall to the US to wipe the noses and bottoms of the rest of the planet, Charlie? Those high and mighty expenditures of US capital you cite are just as ethnocentric and jingoistic as pissing it away in a big military/industrial circle-jerk in the Iraq sandbox. They are just wrapped in a hypocritical cloak of righteousness. The net result is the same. US tax dollars are being recirculated in a global economy. Maybe those other countries with stronger currencies, richer oligarchies, and huge trade surpluses should get off THEIR greedy asses and do something worthwhile for the planet for a change. Time for a new attitude, here.
Well, assuming that my hasty internet figures are correct*, we could have bought out all of Iraq's oil for just $3Tn in 2003 prices. Then we could have swum about in our pools full of oil, spitting fountains of oil into the air. Those less inclined to enjoy swimming in crude oil would be allowed to build Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pools full of money with the remaining $3Tn.
Yes, I'm being somewhat facetious, of course. Buying the entirety of Iraq's reserves would likely have caused an insane surge in oil prices, which, given that the $6Tn figure is based in part on "loss of economic productivity attributable to instabilities in the supply of oil from Iraq" might not be the solution we're looking for. It would also be a gigantic payoff to a dangerous dictator. I'm just sayin'.
*Internet numbers: Oil at or under $25/bbl from Wikipedia x Iraq oil reserves as of 2007 at 115 Bn bbl from CIA world factbook = $2875Bn
woah, thats alot of lotto tickets..
To be fair, it's not as if the US had $6T (or $513B) lying around waiting to be used. Then a case could be made for spending it on something else. Instead, the US essentially printed that money, choosing to go into public debt. I hardly think that the US would go $6T into public debt to send astronauts to Mars or feed the Third World. So it's really a false comparison.
Cshotton, #9:
Paragraph 1 - But if we did fire it into the sun, that would be fine of course, as the rocket manufacturers would still be getting a paycheck.
Paragraph 2 - let's summarise your argument here.
"2 wrongs = 1 right"
@ Robert, #12
It's not that the government chose "to go into public debt" over this war, it's that it chose to greatly increase the public debt. The already phenomenally huge public debt.
Were you or I asked in 2002 to choose what to spend 513 billion imaginary dollars on, I hardly think this would be it.
Seems to me they could at least have put some of that money into a reliable infrastructure in Iraq. Why has there been that much money spent there, and there is still not consistent electricity? Couldn't they have at least bribed all the insurgent leaders with a couple billions to stop fighting each other?
But to answer more directly, I would have spent that money on some really good scotch.
Oh, I don't think all that money was pissed away into the desert sands, never to reappear.
No, that money was placed into the pockets of the Chinese and our other debtors, and into the pockets of a lot of Dick Cheney's friends, and all of those people will one day (soon) step forward and announce, "Attention slaves: You now belong to us. Assume the position."
In fact, with talk already having gone on for some time that the retirement age will have to go up to at least 75, and possible 85, I think the first announcements have already been made.
I did a similar "what else could we buy" thing based on the per-day cost breakdown for a small forum I run based on some earlier numbers from Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes at the tail-end of last year, placing the cost at $720 million a day.
Using the per-day figure, it included things like feeding about 3,000 Americans from birth to death (based on an 85 year lifespan), putting 36,000 Honda Civic Hybrid cars on the road, or funding the Arecibo Observatory for the next 270 million years.
Page is here, if anyone is curious.
And I even figured out how much butter you need to build a castle on the same thread. Yeah, we're strange folk.
Haliburton, Black Water, and several others are certainly not doing their part of taking all that money paid them and recirculating it back into my economy. Don't they know how much good they could do with that money?
I'm still waiting for the invisible hand of capitalism to bring the greatest good to the world. You'd think with trillions of dollars of capitalism from the Iraq war alone, we'd have some awesomely good stuff trickle down by now.
Maybe Haliburton didn't get the memo?
I would buy a sweet car and go trolling for chicks.
And with the change take them to Taco Bell or someplace nice like that.
I think buying 600,000 houses for China is the most likely - since that's who we borrowed most of it from.
CSHotton @9: Has the money spent on Iraq done anything other than send US currency on a trajectory into the Sun? I can't remember when the dollar was last worth as little as half a pound sterling, and it's not as though sterling is doing all that well either.
The cheap chinese HDTVs happened despite Iraq, and the next big thing out of China will happen in China and not the US because of Iraq.
Why aren't we complaining about these other injustices? Well, we do, but at the moment we're complaining about this one, which is pretty enormous and hard to ignore. Especially since it is hitting us so hard in our wallets.
We could have spent the money researching a new form of energy that wouldn't need oil, put it on the market, put Saddam and the other oil leeches of the world out of business and put the States at the top of the world, making everybody richer.
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been."
P.G. Wodehouse
John Davis
"I think Charlie doesn't have the slightest clue about how economics work. Does he think that money being spent in Iraq is being loaded on a rocket and launched into the sun, never to circulate in global markets again?"
We have no way of knowing, due to the fact that KBR is unaccountable and all those pallets of bundled hundreds could have gone anywhere - unless you're speaking figuratively, and "the sun" is the bottom of the relative-worth chart for the US dollar on the open market.
Of course, it's not as if people attached to the US government's operations overseas have ever before set up massive criminal trafficking groups before **coughcoughAIRAMERICAcoughcough**, by (ab)using US military resources and US taxpayer funds.
-------------
I stopped my fundamentalist conservative mother cold in her rhetoric about the war: Three minutes into " ... and we /have/ to support our troops because ..." - I pointed out that for what we have spent on Iraq, /we/ could have fed the /entire/ world for over a /year/.
MY MOTHER, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE, CONCEDED AN ARGUMENT. I'm fairly certain this is prophecied in the Book of Revelations, folks.
I think it is important to criticize this situation , but I also think that it's important to try and fix the problems and discuss solutions. I have no idea really at this point what we could do, but I know that our government, (maybe theoretically), receives its power from citizens. Surely there is something we can do to end this. It just seems, (I'm probably off in some way), that if these loses of life and money bother us so much, why don't we take more action to stop it. Is it because we feel we are helpless or incapable? I hope no one takes what I'm saying offensively, because that is not my intention. I'm being self critical as well.
Ths my nt b th mst pplr f sttmnts bt th rsn w spnd s mch mny s tht w'r bsy bng s P.C. s pssbl- dncng rnd prblms nd strtgc cptrs nstd f gttng th jb vr nd dn wth.
Drng th bgnnng f th S prsnc n rq thr ws n fnny bsnss nd n mssn' rnd. G G G. nd th cmpgn ws vr vry qckly. Nw tht w'r cddlng ppl's mtns hr n th S nd ppl hv bcm cmplcnt bt thngs n th hmfrnt gn w blv tht w hv n bsnss thr. k s w sty t- dd th vnts tht tk plc bfr nd ftr rq nt tch s nythng. Trn th rgn nt sht glss. Lt lh srt t t. Prblm slvd nd lss xpnsv thn nw cty, nw shs, r stck f gm.
Interesting to see how strongly nuclear
everyone gets when gas is over $3.00
I wonder if anyone noticed how difficult it
is to mine uranium. There is a pretty
good study about this, which indicates that
if the world went 100% nuclear energy, the
fuel would be exhausted in just a few years.
Interestingly, I can't find much about this
in more recent studies which mostly seem to
written by industry boosters.
ref: http://www.stormsmith.nl/publications/EnergyPolicyJune85.pdf
@9 (cshotton)
It's fine to point out that the money spent is still in circulation, but:
1. There is an opportunity cost. It could have been spent on something more useful (the point of the article).
2. If the same amount of money was spent on something else, that money would still be in circulation anyway.
There is no way to justify the war in terms of economic benefits.
Please have a look at the parable of the broken window:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
#25 - we spent all that money to displace dictators whose mindset your comments recall.
Chrl Strss ws spwng crnl drrh n thrtcl vcm.
t's nt n wrld, nd th bd 'l S's wd-cd-shd dn't mn sqt f t dsn't mntn ts glbl strngth & pwr t fl ts mssv cnmc ngn t vn ~thnk bt dng stff t hs n bsnss dng. Lk bldng mythcl chns cts, r nclr pwr plnts whch th dmcrtc sclsts wll snk lk cmnt bg.
And what the h3ll does this utopian twit Stross think is going to make 500 'nauts on a barren wasteland productive or profitable?
nd gss wht, mr. cry? ll ths bllns pssd wy n th snd r jst drp n th GDP bckt - nd wll sly gt rmd thsnd tms vr n yr lftm.
Kryk.
Rebuild New Orleans levees out of pure gold. Heck the whole city.
Fried@25: During the beginning of the US presence in Iraq there was no funny business and no messin' around. Go Go Go. And the campaign was over very quickly.
Any fool can tell you that invading is hella lot easier than occupying. The only problem is our administration is run by super-fools who swore up and down that we'd be out in 6 weeks, 6 months at the most.
Now that we're coddling people's emotions here in the US
coddling?
and people have become complacent about things on the homefront again we believe that we have no business there.
complacent?
Ok so we stay out- did the events that took place before and after Iraq not teach us anything.
Well, for one, the events before told us that Iraq had disarmed its WMD program. The weapons inspectors repeatedly said this prior to the invasion. The events after the invasion only confirmed this.
For another, the events before consisted of a lot of handwaving to say that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. And the events after taught us that some people will believe anything if you say it often enough.
Turn the region into a sheet a glass. Let Alah sort it out. Problem solved and less expensive than a new city, new shoes, or a stick of gum.
Right. Given that the current hawk excuse for being in Iraq is that saddam was a dictator and tortured his own citizens, the best thing we could have done was to nuke the entire nation, killing everyone there, and saving those poor iraqis from such a terrible dictator.
"We could always by popcorn and sit back and watch Hussein and his goon thrw ppl nt wd chpprs nd lt hs sns rn thr rp rms."
why not, you did with rwanda.
MDHatter @28: One dictator. Still a few more out there. I don't think we can afford to bring freedom to the world at this price.
Locomotivebreath1901 @29: How has the mess the US has made in Iraq helped maintain its "strength & power"? The dollar is sinking like the Titanic and your natural allies are avoiding you as if you were a friend who has sadly gone mad.
Fried @25: You are an advocate for nuclear terrorism. No one will listen to you. Except, possibly, the FBI.
Greg @31: I think Fried meant the whole Middle East, not just Iraq.
Farmland in Canada sells for about $1200/acre on average, and there are about 130 million acres of it, therefore we could have bought every inch of farmland in Canada for only 155 billion dollars! Gee, what would we do with the other 5.845T?
#33 - Saddam was our man. The Shah of Iran (who started their nuclear program) was our man. The Saidi sheiks? Our men. Pakistans generals, many are our men.
We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them.
and we've been at it for 50 years.
I think Fried meant the whole Middle East, not just Iraq.
Doesn't that make the argument just that much more crazy?
If the U.S.A. had colonized Mars instead of Iraq we would be fighting a Martian insurgency. I think we should just let things be and allow Mars to continue to be ruled by the Supreme Martian Counsel. One only needs to look at the NASA pictures their Martian rovers have beamed back from the Red Planet. There has been absolutely no development of this planet. Martians are simply not ready for Democracy.
Cool idea for a site, but the implementation is godawful.
Among (many) other issues I encountered, I amassed close to $3 trillion worth of items, then added one more item that took my tally slightly over $3 trillion, and it mysteriously emptied my shopping cart.
Not ready for prime time.
It's 20-20, I know, but you could've offered half a million bucks to every man, woman and child in Iraq, provided they would houst their own regime, embrace democracy and set up trade negociacions with the West.
My guess is the U.S.A. would have made a lot of friends, have a great deal on the oil, and be cheaper off.
On the other hand, conflict is more dramatic, and drama has our fascination.
ned613 wins, comments over.
Reminds me of an old National Lampoon story encouraging America to just buy the rest of the world so we can make them shut up. Dig that change out of the sofa. Check the pockets of sport coats for stray twenties and run the Visa up to the limit. Ought to be enough to get a controlling interest in any country that ever gave us any static. Then just make them STFU and GBTW.
IIRC, that story was in the '70s and was by P.J. O'Rourke.
Money doesn't solve anything
For a miniscule fraction of all that money, couldn't we have just bought Saddam off? I mean, he was essentially a gangster -- ruthlessly committed to the sole purpose of increasing his own personal riches and power.
Surely, he and the Bush administration would share enough philosophical common ground to come to some sort of meeting of minds.
On the other hand, it's not like we had all that discretionary cash to begin with...
@ Doc Tourneau, #44
That was my first thought as well. Even strong opponents of the war, however, tend to agree that the man was more than just a gangster. He was a despot, and one that caused the painful deaths of a lot of people. While there are already plenty of folks like him who are astronomically rich and powerful, I would rather not add him to the list.
I ask the question, where has the 6 trillion dollars gone? What, specifically, was it spent on, and who received it. I think, unless the soldiers who deserve it got a hella raise, most of the money is going into the diseased coffers of some little known corporations like Halliburton, KBR, and a beast called Blackwater securities. Oh, I forgot that some of the money is going to Iraqi warlords, to keep them fighting on our side.
See Economist Bjorn Lomborg's TED talk on priorities. It turns out that doing a lot of good in some cases is pretty darn cheap. (Like fighting diseases and providing clean drinking water. Tremendous bang for the buck and pretty darn cheap in comparison.)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8730688320934276492
@WIL9000, # 46
Six trillion dollars hasn't actually gone anywhere yet. The number is an estimate that includes both direct expenditures and "indirect costs, and factor in the long-term additional expenses that the war has accrued — everything from caring for brain-damaged soldiers for the next 50 years through to loss of economic productivity attributable to instabilities in the supply of oil from Iraq."
As many others have mentioned this hardly means anything in the real world because the real world doesn't really do things like this. However I do find that just as a indicator of what the numbers could have done in any one endeavor is quite interesting. It reminds me of a ad I saw in a climbing magazine for Mountain Equipment Co-op. It lists if you sacrifice something you pay for on a regular basis you can use that money to climb for X amount of days, sacrifice coffee in the mornings climb for an extra two days etc... the last one is sacrifice rent, climb for an extra 31 days. Which is where we change the formula due to reality circumstances, as we all know reality does alter how everything works in our head. However it would be interesting to see if someone did take that amount of money spent over there to do one grand human endeavor, one great thing that is economically "super human" and changed the course of humanity with it, it would be something to see, really something to see.
For that much money I cold employ a hitsquad to remove all the right wing nuts, looney-lefties, religionazis, criminal gangsters and still have enough left over to get rid of all the politicians. And pay redundancy to the TSA.
There. Problem solved!
Thekin @1, I can't find a source on the wood chipper story that's better than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin. Do you have one? All the more responsible sources I can find say the story is fiction, long since debunked, and that it traces back to Ahmed Chalabi's people.
As for "rape rooms": son, not sons. Uday and Qusay were two very different people.
I won't argue that Uday wasn't a monster. However, at the point that we invaded Iraq he'd long since been recognized as a sociopath and political liability, was in permanent disfavor with his father, and had been quite obviously removed from the succession. He failed to reinstate himself via either of his two politically significant marriages, since both had to be dissolved after he mistreated his wives. He'd also been badly crippled since 1996, when gunmen shot up his car. It was only a matter of time until someone finished him off.
We didn't go to war over Uday Hussein. But if we had, we wouldn't have much room to complain if someone else invaded us.
No one is assuming it is the USA's duty to do anything. This started as a discussion of what the dollars spent (or to be spent) on the Iraq war would buy. More economic or mathematical than political.
As far a Bush being visionary and courageous, I completely reject that. Bush and his cronies wanted a war in Iraq long before he took office and long before 9-11. He is only following his personal agenda, consequences and the opinion of the majority of his constituents be damned.
I'm not sure Bush and his "soldiers" will be "heralded" by the generations to come who will have to pay for this war.
WWEBoing, #51:
I'll happily get my head out of my arse when you get yours out of the clouds.
"You start with the assumed premise that it is the USA's duty to give orange juice or clean energy to the world, but balk when we try to staunch the tide of jihadism while we still can."
1) Don't give anything to the rest of the world - spend it on your own social problems. Whatever, give it straight to Halliburton if you want, just don't use an insane and unjustifiable war as a conduit.
2) If you think that invading Iraq has done anything but swell the tide of jihadism around the globe then I'm surprised that you can even type.
6,000,000,000,000 bucks hey? What's that in dead people?
@cshotton:
For someone who accuses others of lacking clues, you seem rather, ah, differently clued yourself.
You point out that the money finds its way into paychecks and then trickles down into the global economy. Sure it does. The clue you are missing is that money spent on solar energy, education, health, and other non-destructive and sustainable efforts also makes its way into paychecks and into the global economy. So while you pretend that your point matters, it actually does not.
The question is, which agendas do we want to advance? The agenda of deepening our dependence on big oil by further committing valuable resources to it? Or an alternative agenda that includes any of a number of much better ways to spend the money?
Well we could make a few people very, very rich while propping up an ailing economy by vastly expanding national debt and turning it into military-industrial spending.
Oh. Wait.
Shame we can't do that without also killing people.
what else could we do? Mass produce nuclear fusion rocket packs? Nanotech powered flying carpets? hello? anybody there, U.S. government? It seems wrong to subsidise weapons manufacture if you don't also subsidise what people really need.
There's no way, I'm getting into an Iraq war was a good idea debate. Whoever still thinks it was a good idea after the mountains of evidence demonstrated that not only was it a mistake, but government intelligence knew knew it was a mistake and did it anyway, isn't about to change their minds now, neither of them will. Really they should show some dignity, fess up and cut their losses. We all had to put up with 'oh but they still might find weapons of mass destruction' for years, for years Iraq war apologists said this. So our turn now. Bush effed up by any standard. No two ways about it.
I do love how every time newspapers mention Bush's foreign policy they always talk about his vision, and if there's a photo, it's of Bush staring off into the horizon. Classic cliché of journalism. how heroic of him to sign a few pieces of paper and make a few phone calls. Ill bet his mum is real proud. You'd think he was Nitro off gladiators from the heroism he gets levelled with.
"military-industrial-congressional spending"
I don't know that WWEBoing is being serious. That's very elegantly written for such a nutso statement. I call shenanigans.
ahh... how much do congressmen go for these days anyway?
$6T = issue 'free gasoline for 10 years' cards to everyone in the USA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html
388M gallons/day * $4/gal * 365 * 10 = $5.6T
CShotton @9:
That would be why Paul Krugman reads his novels, and praises his use of economics in them?Not the money; the value. Wars destroy value. They require huge amounts of man-hours, resources, and manufactured goods, and what they do with them is largely destructive, or of use only to the military for the duration of that war or that campaign. They also consume young, fit, well-trained personnel, quite a few of whom get sent back damaged or dead.Among the second-order effects: We've lost a huge amount of international credibility and good will, built up over centuries. All kinds of deals go bad when that happens. Our loss of credibility has also hurt the US dollar.
Money spent on the war wasn't spent in productive ways that would have created value, so that's all lost too.
Lastly, the war has been ruinously expensive, far in excess of cash on hand. We essentially wind up borrowing money to pay for it, which means we're saddled with repaying both debt and interest in the years to come. More potentially productive uses of that money will never happen.
The fact that "...someone, somewhere, is receiving a paycheck" is not the whole of the story.
No. The fact that this makes you angry doesn't make him wrong.Robert @12:
No. His premise is that these are some of the things we could do by spending the same amount of money. If we can will to fight an unwinnable war on false pretenses, we can will to colonize Mars. The fact that we did choose to fight the war and did not choose to colonize Mars is a separate issue.Kibble @16, always be suspicious of assertions that there won't be money for your own retirement. Variants of that story have been the subject of a fully-funded disinformation campaign for at least thirty years now. Partly that's because usual pack of vultures would love to get hold of Social Security funds. Even more, though, it's because the fear of not being provided for in old age is such a reliable way to damage intergenerational faith in the social contract.
MaryofKentucky @24, don't apologize. Those are the right questions to be asking.
Brilliant intervention, as always, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Not to suck up to the mod, but you really can set a standard for reasonable debate
This money spent has meant the terrorists can't make a dent against a U.S. resident.
Repeat when needed during the day ...
It's not surprising, or particularly worrisome, to see the broken-windows fallacy in a blog discussion thread. (See Zepelini @ 27 above for a recap).
It is more worrisome, if perhaps not too surprising at this point, to see an argument for the continued military occupation of Iraq, by one of the primary architects of the US's Iraq strategy, lead off with the same broken-windows fallacy most people see in their first few classes of Introduction to Economics.
(I'm referring here to a National Review article from last month, which can be seen here.)
But this is just one of many cases where the advocates of Bush's international policies have failed to consider the benefits of alternatives, and the costs of not taking them. We see another example up-thread, where Wweboing @ 51 praises Bush for "staunch[ing] the tide of jihadism" and "getting democratic momentum underway in the Middle East", without considering whether we might have more effective and less costly ways of accomplishing these than invading and occupying Iraq.
The invasion and looting of Iraq began long before Bush. "Whirlwind"is a good read.
Greg @37: It's pretty far out into bat country whichever he meant.
Update to Thekin @1: Alexander Cockburn, who is imperfectly reliable but a vastly better source than Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, comments the wood chipper story:
Perhaps more usefully, he cites the story of Jumana Hanna, the source of many colorful stories about the Hussein regime, and Sara Solovitch, who was hired to write Jumana Hanna's memoirs but wound up debunking her story in an article published in Esquire. It looks to me like Uday was still no prize, but his genuine bad deeds have been buried under a heap of lurid and salacious propaganda. Someday, a historian will get his Ph.D. by sorting out which is which. A few links on the Solovich story:Phenomenological Analysis of Obscured Events.
Wikipedia on Jumana Hanna.
Journalism Prof. W. Joseph Campbell on the story.
Sara Solovich's article in Esquire.
The Washington Post retracts the story.
Research: it's not hard to do. Ideally, though, you should be the one doing it.
Colonize Mars?
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact it's cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them if you did.
MarlboroTestMonkey7 @43:
Fine. Give me all of yours.We invaded because Saddam was a gangsta who tortured his own people?
Then why must we torture people who torture people to show people that torturing people is wrong?
I'm not entirely sure that Justice can always boil down to the simple cry of "He started it!"
Tim @50, please don't propose plausible violence. If you're going to do it, make it grandiose, or silly, or otherwise out of synch with reality.
Nuclear power like the French?
Oh yeah. We should all do nuclear power like the French... Not!
We could eliminate the potential problem of one of the "axis of evil" by flat-out buying North Korea, backed up by a ubiquitous economic development project there and funding immediate reunification with South Korea.
We could spend a trillion to produce, bypassing the "free market", the industrial capacity to truly mass produce lithium-ion car batteries, driving the unit cost down to the point at which subsidy would no longer be necessary. And for that matter, given the batteries away for free. For a trillion, we could replace all the gasoline cars in the world with free electric cars. With the money we wasted, we could have taken the world off the gasoline drip. We could have flooded all those plucky electric car companies with hundreds of billions to build the Tango and all the other cars that are stalled because they can't tool up on the profits from hand-built production models. Let them build the cars. Give 'em all they need.
And as we wouldn't have invaded Iraq, practically stopping the flow of oil from there, and kick-started the present global meltdown, oil would still be around a dollar a gallon. Best of both worlds.
So we subsidized the oil companies for a few trillion instead by invading the Middle East... and they raised their prices 400 percent, just to start, as a token of their gratitude.
Teresa
If we can will to fight an unwinnable war on false pretenses, we can will to colonize Mars.
But we didn't will this war. It was chosen for us and sold to us on false premises. It was con right from the start. And I'm still surprized that people think Saddam is why we went into Iraq at this late date. It was really about that 50 trillion lake of our oil they happen to be sitting on.
This country is very nearly finished with. One more presidency like that of Bush or McCain will complete the job. What we'll end up with is a global Feudal economy. America and indeed much of the world will be of third world status with pockets of ultra wealthy "green zones" scattered around the world.
There are people who want this and have been working for a long time to bring about a global aristocracy for a few and grinding poverty for everyone else, including the US. To them that would be a really sweet deal. I'm not sure it can even be stopped.
I've always considered the Iraq war to be predicated on the belief that the U.S. needed to have full control over the dwindling supply of oil in the world in order to ensure it's continued status as the worlds only superpower, as the supply of oil is exhausted. (Which is strangely always predicted as 25 years from now, at least since the 80s, but I digress).
All the 9/11, WMD stuff, I didn't think anyone really believed...; scratch that, I didn't think anyone with a brain really believed that.
The basis of all of this is the control of energy supplies; if the U.S. had sufficient "cheap" supply to meet it's voracious demands most of these issues wouldn't exist.
I agree with CSHOTTON, in that the 6T wasn't shot into the sun; but to suggest that this was a "good" investment of America's future (remember this is debt spending) it was used to actually destroy capital value of Iraq infrastructure, the lives of Iraqi people, and probably created thousands more terrorists than it ever destroyed.
Further, if you are going to invest in this kind of debt spending, it would probably be a better idea to do something that will provide tangible value to the U.S. in the future; control of the oil supply in Iraq is in my mind not a sufficient gain for this type of investment, although I admit I don't understand enough about the Iraq supply to quantize that value, but I do know that both Canada and Saudi Arabia (already U.S. controlled supplies) vastly outstrip Iraq.
Frankly the money would have been better spent providing a distributed, deregulated and divested power-supply infrastructure to the U.S. Coupons for household investment in wind/solar; some nuclear deployement, some tidal energy deployment. And better research funding for alternate energy sources; fuel-cell technology; and public transportation. Attempt to limit oil consumption to what can be imported through Canada (NAFTA is pretty sweet to the US here). You win on the environment; you win energy supply; and mostly US companies benefit (GE, Applied Materials), so the US economy benefits; the distributed household power generation makes it impossible to knock the grid out, and so you make yourself more secure. The only real losers are foreign oil supply, (the refiners are already hedging their bets on the "alternates", so they'd likely benefit as well).
Not to nitpick....ok, ok, ok, precisely because I like nitpicking, I think it a tad optimistic to think we could colonize Mars for any of the monetary amounts mentioned here. Consider that simply to launch a space shuttle into low Earth orbit costs around a quarter billion dollars. This is with nearly 30 year old technology.
Consider that it cost around a half billion dollars to send Phoenix, an unmanned, low powered, non returning spacecraft that doesn't need to support life to Mars, and that's *after* figuring out most of the tech to build it.
By conservative estimates, sending a single robotic sample return mission would be a couple billion bucks.
At bare minimum, I'd place a single crew mission to Mars at around 5 trillion dollars, with only a short duration stay on the surface.
That being said, colonizing Mars with 500 people with even the most pessimistic version of Iraq war costs is just plain silly.
We could even have rebuilt the World Trade Center.
Aw, heck. If we'd colonized Mars, we'd have people bitching about how the money could have been used to hand out welfare checks to all of Africa.
@CSHOTTON #9
Perhaps Charlie has no such clue. It's not quite clear. What is clear is that neither do you - you have just succumbed to the Broken Window Fallacy.
Google it. Or use one of these pre-googled links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm
Essentially, that money was going to circulate. That's not caused by the Occupation of Iraq. The only difference is that instead of causing useful work as it circulated (if we pretend for a moment that moeny causes anything and isn't just an orgnizational aid), it merely caused the destruction of a country and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Honestly, it would have been better to shoot that money into the sun or spend it all on breaking and mending windows.
That's before even considering what could have been done with the amount of human effort and resources (the stuff that money is used to organize) if it would have been directed at something actually useful instead of merely pointless, or directly destructive as has been the case.
Thanks to people responding to #9. I think the gist of my point was missed, namely that there are other wealthy nations who choose to do nothing of value as well. That we choose to squander national treasure directly on unproductive endeavors is our fault. But why is it the sole burden of the US to advance the noble causes of humanity?
Charlie's indictment of the US is hypocritical in the extreme when you consider the vast amounts of wealth pouring into the pockets of A) Middle Eastern royalty, B) ex-USSR criminal enterprises, C) Chinese oligarchs, D) 3rd World dictators, E) European social welfare programs, F) well, you get the point (hopefully).
thr thn th smplstc, vcrs thrll f S-bshng, what is the justification for doing it while letting all these other (arguably larger in aggregate) wastes of human and financial capital continue unremarked and without apology?
Hmmm... #83, perhaps the underlying criticism is that the US could choose to lead the world with ideas and technology and solutions rather than with fear and domination... ?
yeah, but where's the money in that?
I know this is just a long laundry list of things we would do if we ran the circus (and some of them are really brilliant) but one of my pet issues would probably be the cleanup of the huge plastic continent that's forming in the middle of the Pacific.
And some left over to make sure it never happens again, maybe.
and that, Tak, is why it'll never happen. :-)
@83
TAGETODM = There Are Greater Evils so This One Doesn't Matter
But better argued than most.
DRINK!
Pizza party!
to CSHOTTON,
But why is it the sole burden of the US to advance the noble causes of humanity?
Well, ignore lets ignore the fact that its the most powerful nation in the world, and the most scientifically advanced. And focus on my favourite of quaint American notions, "Manifest Destiny" or are you a tarrist? And don't believe in "Manifest Destiny"?
Rossindetroit @ 88 -
I think you might need to spit that back out. CSHOTTON @ 83 never mentions "Greater Evils" in the world (e.g., "why do you care about global warming when children are dying in the Sudan" argument, he refers to other agents. More like There Are Other Nastier People In The World With The Capability To Solve Problems As Well so Maybe We Shouldn't Worry That We Only Try To Some Of Them, but that would make for a nasty abbreviation.
I can only give you love, Teresa. Is that ok?
#71 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator , May 27, 2008 10:10 AM
MarlboroTestMonkey7 @43:
Money doesn't solve anything
Fine. Give me all of yours.
Chuck @83: Unless you're suggesting that Charlie Stross is a Russo-Sino-Arabian third world dictator, where does this strawman charge of so-called hypocrisy come in?
As I said above, right now we're talking about this colossal waste of wealth, so why don't you address that point before trying to get us to charge off in all directions?
@91:
He says:
"what is the justification for doing it while letting all these other (arguably larger in aggregate) wastes of human and financial capital continue unremarked and without apology?"
and:
"Charlie's indictment of the US is hypocritical in the extreme when you consider the vast amounts of wealth pouring into the pockets of A) Middle Eastern royalty, B) ex-USSR criminal enterprises, C) Chinese oligarchs, D) 3rd World dictators, E) European social welfare programs, F) well, you get the point (hopefully)."
To me that's clearly a Them First, Then Us sort of argument.
The fact that a waste or injustice can be compared to other injustices and wastes doesn't make it any less wasteful or more just.
cshotten: But why is it the sole burden of the US to advance the noble causes of humanity?
You know, if everyone else were advancing the causes of humanity, we would likely feel compelled to do it out of a feeling of community.
And if no one else is advancing the noble causes of humanity, then we might likely feel more compelled to do it out of a feeling of neccessity.
I mean, isn't that the fricken point? To do something that isn't being done? Some people have proposed colonizing Mars, only because it hasn't been done by anyone else yet.
If Earth were an Eden, and all the noble causes of humanity were being sufficiently advanced on their own, one might argue that we could spend some money on a pizza party or whatever. But if the noble causes of humanity are falling to the wayside, that to me is even more reason that someone out to advance them.
Certainly, no other country but the US got suckered into sinking trillions of dollars into invading and occupying Iraq. So, no other country can really play the game of "What if we hadn't bought into the systematic lies of the Bush administration that led us into this boondoggle of a war and what if we had spent that money elsewhere?"
But, cshotten, my guess is when the US was the only country ready and raring to invade Iraq back in 2003, you weren't arguing against the US sending American troops and american money into the suck on the grounds that we were the only country doing so. You were likely spinning the lack of international support into some assinine notion like "coalition of the willing".
When the lack of international support should have been a red flag for self evalutation, you were probably ignoring it.
Now that some folks have proposed doing something beneficial for the world that doesn't involving invading a country based on lies, faked intelligence, and propaganda, you suddenly come up with the "Why do we have to go it alone" card?
I smell fresh earth, fertilizer, compost, and loam.
RossInDetroit, 94-
I agree that it's a Them First, Then Us argument.
But you've inverted the order of the paragraphs, which changes the meaning. My reading of the comment at 83 may have been predicated on my understanding of "these... other wastes of human of financial capital" as referring to the oligarchs and dictators as alternate agents, in the sense that I might refer to someone as a "waste of space," rather than as the problems to be solved. I assumed that the poster desired these other assholes be required to do some international do-gooding as we're forced to.
I suppose I'm wrong.
CSHotton, @83.
Because 1) The discussion puts the War in comparative economic perspective with other opportunities for the pricetag.
2)As (most of us here are) Americans, we can't tell the Saudis what to do. We do have some say regarding what the US government does with our tax dollars.
3)The Saudis (and Chinese, etc) use their oil money to build up their own infrastructure, and to educate their populace. Sure, they're also Wahabbi jerks, but again, we don't have authority over them.
How is it hypocritical "in the extreme?" It's not as if Charlie is funding one destructive, wasteful war while at the same time tsk-tsking this one.
I think you need to consult the dictionary entry for hypocrisy.
Other nations, while surely also wasteful, also build things and use funds constructively. So do we. Just not in Iraq, in terms of net money spent vs. net gain.
Here's an idea: we could have used it to repair our deteriorating infrastructure. In that case, some of it would have gone to labor right here in the good ole US, and then those people would have spent it, or invested it. and then...whoa...WHOA...WHOOOOOA
I blew my own mind.
MrFitz, you win the internet.
@49: You could do something like the Marshall Plan, I guess. The US spent about $12 billion on that, which translates to about $1.08 trillion in today's money.
I'm sure some people made the argument, at the time, that it was a waste of money, you know... giving money to our enemies to help them rebuild after a war we won.
I for-sure-as-hell ain't saying that the goals and objectives of the Iraq war (such as they are) are in any way similar to the Marshal Plan. But if you make the assumption (as many do) that the Marshal Plan had a great deal to do with stopping another world war in a generation, and in winning the hearts and minds of Europe over to a (more) American way of thinking... well, that $1 trillion is kind of a bargain. Though, at the time, they could have talked about moon houses for everyone or paying off the Russians with all that money.
You see... I have this nightmare where I wake up in 2025, and I hear a discussion on NPR where the whole band of pundits is talking about how the 2nd Iraq War was "the watershed moment that enabled a lasting peace in the Middle East and finally brought liberal democracy to the region."
You know... the "George Bush is right" nightmare. Shudder...
I note a conspicuous absence of input from people who actually live in Iraq
Charlie Stross' server went tits up because he's been 'boingboinged' i LULZ
Ponies!
You know... the "George Bush is right" nightmare.
I'm not familiar with that one. I dream some crazy stuff, but the chances of "Bush was right" being history's take on his presidency is about as likely as Dick Cheney being the tooth fairy.
Someone needs to deliver that list to George Bush accompanied by an atomic wedgie.
a few years into this war, i recall reading about the army's loss of an entire c-140 cargo plane loaded floor to ceiling with wrapped bricks of $100 bills totalling $2.59B. they just lost it. never another word about it. just 'lost!' to me that story pretty much epitomises this debacle of a 'war'. perhaps WWEBOING is being facetious. but if he thinks he is speaking truth, how does one deal with such idiocy? every bit of evidence points to the contrary. and bush being 'brave'? oh, sure. he gave up golf (kind of...), but what other brave thing has he done, ever? he wussed out of vietnam to help his grandfather (nazi sympathizer) get elected, then got rich selling access to his (then) president father. oh, so brave... has he even been to one soldier's funeral?
Tricotomy @103: Charlie Stross' server seems to be functioning fine from here. Or was that meant to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as everyone rushed off to look?
George Orwell had a similar nightmare. He called it 1984. War is peace, after all.
But seriously, take a look at the Marshall Plan for what it was: it was what the US got for winning the war: economic control over western Europe. the countries that received least, like Germany, Austria and Italy--all of which were hardly untouched by war--recovered the quickest while those who received most, UK Sweden, recovered slowest. About $2bn out of the $13bn Marshall Plan dollars went straight to the oil companies to help convert Europe and Japan to oil based economies. the aid to France was about equivalent to the cost of re-conquering Indochina--it was just the US buying its own guns, and giving them to France to kill the Vietnamese. how benevolent.
"Other countries pay taxes, but they get something for it, like health care. What do I get? I get to kill a bunch of Iraqis. Whoopdeedoo. What am I going to do with a bunch of dead Iraqis?"
--A. Whitney Brown
Johen @80
Sure, the economics of rocket science would make Mars colonies harder, but over-conservative estimates - with 100% (yes! 100%) - contingency put the cost of building a space elevator at a mere $40 billion dollars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics ). Including funding all the research in material/power/manufacturing that would be involved. Let's say you have an R&D cost blow out of 5x or even 6x... You still have money left over to actually power and use this elevator, build another elevator (which is unbelievably cheaper after you have one working SE due to fewer R&D and launch costs - but let's say another $40bn) and then we've spent just over half $513bn of the conservative estimate of the cost of the Iraq war. The other half of which (about $233bn) you can then use on the actual mission... Which, using SEs instead of rocket tech is MUCH cheaper now.
Plus the world now has two SEs. Which would be cool for soooo many reasons. Plus all the related research into materials science/power tech etc.
And this would be second worst case scenario. Worst case scenario, SE's don't actually work and all you've done is spend billions of dollars giving money to scientific research. Which I wouldn't cry about.
Best case scenario, you don't even need near that much money, you ring the globe with SEs and Mars is only the beginning...
George Bush did exactly what Osama wanted him to do. Since the mid 90's Osama said he wanted the US in a land war to bleed us of blood and money. If we had spent half that money on a Manhattan style project on developing hydrogen fuel cell tech. we would have solved the carbon/green house cycle, had something to sell back to the Chinese and Indians and provided thousands of jobs retrofitting our cars and setting up the distribution infrastructure. Not to mention amputating the grip they have on our throat. The National Guard could be on the border instead of getting blown up in the desert.
Think about the time span between the Magna Carta and the Constitution. We propose they make the leap from feudalism to democracy in a year and a half because its a damn good idea?
Dont kid yourself. The reason we are in Iraq is Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater and Lockheed. Its the only way they could get a hold of our tax dollars. Saddam proved himself an unreliable toady so we had to get him out. Billions unaccounted for, rampant corruption, no bid contracts. Its been a five year orgy of gluttonous bottom feeding.
Theresa @ #50 - OK, let me try again so that I may redeem myself.
"For that much money I could employ a hitsquad build a team of robo-mecha japanese schoolgirl assassins with deathray eyes, nerve gas farts and pathogen urine in my steampunk underground Moon laboratory to remove all the right wing nuts, looney-lefties, religionazis,intellectual property lawyers criminal gangsters and still have enough left over to get rid of all the politicians. And pay redundancy to the TSA."
So I hit the anime, schoolgirl, mad-scientist, steampunk, IP, space, political and TSA buttons. I think that covers everything for Boing-boing juicy goodness.
Oh, wait - Kan I haz lots ov $$$$ now? kthxbye
I think you're underestimating the cost of colonizing Mars. Then again, are you suggesting a terraforming project that would make Mars habitable or are you just suggesting building domed cities that would provide controlled environments? Either way, I think you're underestimating the cost involved.
The Bush administration are a group of pathological incompetents who sacrifice the live of other human beings for their own personal well-being.
If America declares war on the rest of the world she will lose.
Mind your own business, America. improve your own plummeting social indicators ie homelessness, falling real incomes (no raise for middle class in real terms since that "anti-Semite" Carter!) and now both husband and wife must work full time!) deaths in childbirth, more prisoners than China (who have one billion people in their living under their "dictatorship").
American politicians should take care of Americans , whose troubles are not to be solved by undertaking the most violent actions ever taken with the most sophisticated death tech the public can pay for against countries that have never ever threatened you.
Pre-emptive strike! Only Saddam was in a position to claim the right to a pre-emptive strike against the American attack which was so obviously coming...he couldn't believe, nor can I, that a President would embark on such an obviously criminal war......
That Bush is not being impeached, while his Party gleefully impeached Clinton, makes one want to vomit.
And the Justice Department lawyer who wrote "Torture is OK" is now a Federal Judge....like Rehnquist (in Hell now tormented by blasted Cambodians whom he opined it was legal for Nixon to bomb from on high) no doubt slated for a place on your Supreme Court .Oh yeah! President Torture appointed some fine young Jurists to that Bench no doubt torture is ok by them too that is if they can stop being confused enough to define the term...
Maybe we need to put up big signs, or blare it from a radio every hour in public, or post it at the top of everyone's internet browser. For now, though, I'll just say it here, and keep repeating it.
It is not the job of the government to get us to Mars.
It is not the job of the government to provide food for people.
It is not the job of the government to heal the sick.
It is not the job of any one country's government to care one whit about the people of any other country.
It is the job of the government to secure the rights of individual people under that government's protection. That's what the Declaration of Independence said, and that's good enough for me. That leaves two jobs for the government to do: catch criminals, and fight off foreign enemies.
I'd kindly ask those who want to persist in these socialistic fantasies to stop doing it with my tax dollars, and to stop doing it in despite of my security. wnt my gvrnmnt wllng t kll blln frgnrs t prtct my lf. wnt my gvrnmnt wllng t lt ppl strv f thy cn't gt thr wn fd. And I want to destroy this illusion of universal brotherhood. No one owes anyone anything as a birthright.
Hey Phonebook, you misanthropic asshole, (yes, I'm actually hoping to get disemvowelled for this one)...
RE: "I want my government willing to kill a billion foreigners to protect my life"... and all the rest of the hateful stuff you spewed. My only comfort is my belief that most of the rest of us don't feel the same.
Jake,
I was just headed over here to tell Flaming Phone Book what a tiresome little turd he is, so your vowels are safe.
Flaming,
In the world that you claim to admire, a little worm like you would have been crushed long before now. I've known enough loudmouthed bullies of your ilk to know that you turn tail and run when someone looks at you cross-eyed. Be careful what you wish for.
I want the same thing. Mister Phonebook, I'd vote you the first 'foreigner' and let all the other red, brown, yellow, and white people live in harmony as the human race.
117: And my comfort is in being right.
118: How can you claim to know me? Oh, that's right, because you know my group, and you don't believe in individuals, which is the point between us. Well, tit for tat: I've known enough socialists to know you're all going to fall down in the end.
119: Great. Come up with a country strong enough to take me out in a fair fight, and get back to me.
is there something about : "a decent regard for the opinions of mankind" or suchlike somewhere connected to that document Mr. Phonebook mentions?
A fair fight, Flamer? Your whole philosophy is based on the strong eating the weak. From where I sit, you look like breakfast for the real world.
I will assert that you are not right, guess I'm saying you are wrong (IMHO). You seem to be full of hate, jingoism and self-righteousness. Do you have any friends that are not American, or who are of a different color, belief system, or ideology than you? Are you willing to consign them to death to protect your way thinking?
$6,000,000,000,000.00 USD in cash still cannot regenerate one lost finger. Or eye. Or limb. Or life.
cannot regenerate one lost finger
Powdered pig bladder.
that was a dubious tip
While it is true that the primary goal of the federal government of the U.S.A. is to secure the rights of it's citizens and represent their interests, one might argue as to how killing foreigners achieves those goals.
More accurately, one might argue how representing the interests of gigantic transnational corporations through military actions in a sovereign nations that poses no true threat to national security truly serves the American people. That seems to me like a particularly egregious abuse of power on part of the elected president and those under him.
Wow, FPB, we're like totally never going to be happy in the same country. In fact, I think the only country you'd be happy in is Germany...in 1938.
And I've said before: I'd rather have 100 9/11s than live in the kind of America George Bush wants. To be perfectly clear: I'd rather have 100 9/11s than live in the kind of America FlamingPhoneBook wants.
I was sitting here wondering if I'd ever pay any attention to this bozo again if, say, he was commenting in a thread that wasn't about politics or the distribution of money...but I just realized that I don't have to decide, because he never will.
Hmm, phone books...like "every name in the phone book" is a sort of kenning that means "everyone." So a flaming phone book is a symbol of the willingness to kill everyone if it gets you what you want. I'm guessing. It fits the facts.
A BILLION foreigners. Wow. You're such a selfish asshole that you think your life is worth a billion others, even if they were the absolute dregs of humanity? A full sixth of the world's population? I mean, I knew you were a self-centered jerk, but you want your government to consider your life a billion times more valuable that that of any foreign person?
You might want to consider actually BECOMING more valuable. Right now you're pretty much at the value level of a crackhead skel, so you have nowhere to go but up.
fpb@116: That leaves two jobs for the government to do: catch criminals, and fight off foreign enemies.
I think I asked you this before and you ignored the question if I recall.
What political persuasion are you? What political party do you belong to? If labels and what not dont suit you, then put it to something measurable: which presidential candidates did you vote for in 2000 and 2004?
Me? Progressive. Democrat. Gore. Kerry.
You?
You talk like a particular flavor of Libertarianism. Or maybe even an Ann-Randian, objectivist. Or something. specifics would help understand where you are coming from.
Imagine what we could have done with the money the war on drugs has cost.
"It is not the job of the government to get us to Mars.
It is not the job of the government to provide food for people.
It is not the job of the government to heal the sick."
That's, like, your opinion, man.
1) Let the "free market" (scare quotes intentional) provide health care.
2) Note that a huge part of the US population does not have a decent level of health care.
3) Change your mind about 1)
It seems so logical.
Obviously, providing health care ("healing the sick") does not go well with making a profit. This is why your health care sucks. This is why a government should step in and provide basic health care.
If you want to be a total ass and make the point about you paying for someone else's health, consider that a healthy nation is beneficial for you as well. Healthy people will make a healthy economy. Sick people cost money, healthy people make money.
121: Yes there is. It is applied to when one people assumes the separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, and requires an explanation. I am providing such.
122: But how do you know? I can fight and can provide the economic support for a protracted fight. How many of your beggars for health-care can do so?
123: Yes to all four. They are my chosen friends. That choice spurs me to protect them. But not all people are my chosen friends, and to some I have no duty.
127: Yes, one might argue the effectiveness. But many are arguing the moral right. And I am defending it. But to effectiveness, we must measure our cost alone, not the other side's.
129-130: Do I objectively measure my worth against a billion others? No. I measure my right to live against them. The rights of one outweigh the needs of any number, and the rights of one citizen should, in the eyes of that citizen's government, outweigh the rights of any number of non-citizens.
131: My apologies if I ignored you. Yes, I am an absolute libertarian by political persuasion. I am Randian only in this maxim: that the initiation of force into a relationship is unjust, and justifiably met with force. I have not yet found anyone with whom I agree completely, so I consider my ideas original. To paraphrase Nietzche, who is more libertarian than I am, that I may rejoice in his teachings?
I did not vote in 2000 and in 2004 voted for George Bush. This year I will either abstain from voting or cast a blank ballot.
133: True, it is my opinion. But when the government takes on those jobs, while taking my money and ignoring its duty to my security, my opinion is relevant.
A healthy populus might be beneficial, but I must choose to support it. The fact that a forced decision may produce a benefit is no excuse. Kicking a man into heaven is no better than kicking him into hell. Human choice is my god.
"Oh, that's right, because you know my group, and you don't believe in individuals, which is the point between us."
"Great. Come up with a country strong enough to take me out in a fair fight, and get back to me."
It's funny, PhoneBook. You claim individual, but talk as a group.
So which is it? Are you one person, with the strength and resources to back up your mouth, or one mouth speaking for the strength and resources of many other people?
Honestly, if you want to be tested as an individual, against "a country strong enough to take me out in a fair fight" I think we can actually help you out there.. Have you any ideas for the location though? A stadium would provide good seating for a 100,000 or so, and we could broadcast free to the net.. How much should we charge for tickets? I know a guy who knows a guy, who can get pretty cheap popcorn and snacks, and my cousin is kinda arty, so maybe she could do up some posters and stuff (she has her own glitter and pens, so there's a little cashola saved already).
This is gonna be great!
@SFW #111
Even if one had SE for the lifting to low Earth orbit, you:
a) still need to assemble it in space (no SE can lift an assembled craft, no matter how much pixie dust you sprinkle on it)
b) need to do every last bit of R&D for radiation protection for the crew for the 12-18 month round trip
c) need to do the R&D for habitable modules on the surface, including food, water, and oxygen production
d) need to do the R&D for propulsion systems powerful enough to get the stuff there (if you opt instead for many ships with small loads, the cost is still huge)
and I'm sure many many more things can be listed such that you still blow 6 trillion out of the water.
Flamingphonebook:
"I have not yet found anyone with whom I agree completely, so I consider my ideas original"
This at least provided some comic relief. I've met plenty of people that enjoy pretending to be sociopatic and the occasional, apparently genuine sociopath. At least the latter tended to be better company than the former - I'm guessing you're the former. I think we've all met plenty of people that enjoy the attention from making controversial statements, too (on the internet, we call them "trolls").
Let's see, you're average intelligence, average education and you've had plenty of liberal peers throughout your life. You're also male and you're poorly-equipped. I don't mean in the military sense.
FPB 134: The rights of one outweigh the needs of any number, and the rights of one citizen should, in the eyes of that citizen's government, outweigh the rights of any number of non-citizens.
If this were the principle on which governments really operated, the world would be a lifeless radioactive rock by now.
I think justice is the task of good people. We have not accomplished justice in the world. You are the foe of justice, and you want the government to oppose it too, because you want them to hold your rights above the cumulative rights of any number of others, whereas justice requires that your rights and each of theirs be held to be equal, which means you lose by a billion to one.
Why is it that the very privileged always think they're privileged by right?
In occupations, the odds are in the house's favor.
So, I came up with a new quote. It is meant to point to the fact that military occupation has a cost over time and that not all military occupations are winnable over time. That individual operations might get lucky, but that there is a certain statistical level over the long run that should determine whether you should support an invasion/occupation in your name.
Because I'm noticing an interesting trend in the neocons that basically boil down to gambling addicts who've lost a lot of money, and who have convinced themselves if they can just win the next bet, the next roll, the next hand, then they'll make back enough to justify their losses, and then they'll quit.
But the decision to gamble, like the decision to continue an occupation, must separate the sunk cost of the past from the decision for the future. The question is simply whether or not the next gamble has any better odds than any of the previous gambles. Sure, if you bet double-zero on the roullette table, you could make back a lot of money and possibly take some sting out of your losses. But statistically, betting anything in roullette is a bad idea, because the odds are stacked against you. You might win some rolls, but in the long run, the house will win. The best decision might be to not gamble at all.
And in military occupations, the game is a long and costly one, usually taking years and costing thousands of lives, and sometimes, the gamble isn't worth it. Sometimes the best decision is to not gamble.
Meanwhile, the hawks think that their previous losses can be justified if they can just win a big hand in the next six months. And they can't wrap their head around the fact that in military occupations, the odds are in the house's favor.
So, if I were to spend 3T$ on some boondoggle, I'd get that saying "In military occupations, the odds are in teh house's favor" and put it on every billboard across the country, put it on the airwaves, put it on the web, inject it into the meme space, so that it becomes clear who the gambling addicts are.
not just money
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/27/iraq-soldier-discusses-hi_n_103698.html
fpb@134: A healthy populus might be beneficial, but I must choose to support it.
Actually, there are situations where your lack of support for society harms everyone in society. But there isn't much point in going into that with you.
I think you have a nice little dogma for yourself. To quote you:
Human choice is my god.
And you hold that god as infallible, as the answer to all things moral. You worship at its feet. And you would be quite resistant to suggestions that your god might make a mistake.
Not that it's specific to you. Lots of people hold their god as a just and perfect God. The problem is that lots of people don't actually know how to implement in real life their perfect idea of god.
The simplest example is that bank robbers didn't choose to agree to your set of morals, and if you worship at no god but the god of choice, then you can't force them to do something they didn't choose.
The god of choice is important, but you slip in your own personal absolute statements about what is right and wrong that you have chosen to enforce on folks who don't agree.
this maxim: that the initiation of force into a relationship is unjust, and justifiably met with force.
And how do you get to enforce the idea that this, and this alone, is the sole extent of what is just? It conflicts directly with the god of choice. I didn't choose that limitation on what is right. And you try to force it on me.
The problem is that while your simplified system of "initiating force is bad" is something many people would agree to, the implied moral rule in your moral system is simply this: No other morals.
And not everyone would choose that.
Initiating violence is wrong. I agree. I choose that. But that is not the sum total of all that is immoral. I don't agree. I do not choose that.
Now that we are at a disagreement, how do we resolve it?
It is no longer you operating in a vacuum with your dogma of "initiating force is bad". It is society. WE have to agree to something. And most people agree that "initiating force is bad" is an insufficient list of immoralities, is an insufficient charter upon which to establish a society.
Monopolists would never agree to anti-trust laws. Yet they do not "force" anyone to do anything. They simply leverage their monetary weight into removing choices from the market place. But since they aren't "forcing" anything and since they would never agree to anti-trust laws, your morality cannot allow anti-trust. Not because you neccessarily believe in the invisible hand of capitalism, but because you worship at the alter of the god of choice and think it will allow you into the kingdom of heaven.
sausage makers would never agree to food and drug regulations. They would argue that they make food-type products, and poeple can agree to buy them or not. Therefore, they aren't "forcing" anything on people, therefore your morality cannot support food and drug regulations. Not because you neccessarily believe that sausage makers will be encouraged by the invisible hand of choice to put only good products in their sausages, but because you worship at the alter of the God of choice.
There is little mystery to this philosophical set of rules: You are a Randian Objectivist. The window dressing you put around it is irrelevant. What matters is what is at the heart of your religion:
a dogmatic worship of the God of Choice as the one true moral god. A belief in the son of god "No initiation of force" as your saviour. And a belief in the Holy Spirit that is "no other morals can be added".
While I don't find yet another True-Libertarian-Philosophy[tm] argument all that interesting, it's worth pointing out that the basic argument of this post works for libertarians too.
The basic argument: on the one hand we have trillions of dollars expended for the state to wage a war whose value is questionable, to say the least. On the other hand, the money could have spent in some other way, not necessarily by the state.
One of those ways is to try to colonize Mars, which a lot of people here think is cool. (Though I do agree there's a fair bit of room to doubt about whether the cost of the Iraq intervention would actually suffice to produce a self-sustaining Mars colony at this point.)
Another way is to let taxpayers keep the money that would otherwise fund the Iraq occupation (and the compensation for the casualties and other aftereffects of that occupation). To a libertarian, *that's* cool. And even though I'm not a libertarian, I can still see how private investment of that money could lead to some cool things, like inventions to save energy, create new or more affordable kinds of art or play, cure diseases, or just let us live better at less expense. Or maybe even one day help produce an economically self-sustaining offworld colony.
Basically right now, we've got a sinkhole draining resources out of our society for dubious claimed benefits. We can differ about what we want to use the resources after this situation is past-- but I think a lot of us who differ can still see the point of filling in the sinkhole to stop the ongoing drain.
As we're all wasting our time on the troll FPB, I'd like to propose that we don't. It clutters the boards, it encourages him to post, it lowers the general faith in humanity.
All in favor of a community-wide 'cold shouldering' of FPB, say 'aye'.
Terms and Conditions:
By saying aye you forfeit the right to reply to FPB or mention him in serious discussion throughout the threads he trolls. Perfectly acceptable is citing his name as an avatar of ignorance.
All in favor?
but what if I get hungry?
Taku-san
While I may question your tastebuds, you ARE the Holy Cephalopod. You are, of course, free to ingest anything you see fit and there is nothing in the terms against a light snack. May cause heartburn, though.
-Offers the Pepto Bismol chaser-
ohh, I'm so tempted..
..but I also know how tempted I'll be to reply to him in the future..
aaaarrrgggghhh! the torture!
My poor feeble brain :(
There is in fact a greasemonkey script that allows you to block a commenter, and frankly Takuan, shouldn't you feed higher up on the food chain?
Come, Arkizzle! A show of solidarity!
We can have a support group, if you'd like, to discourage us from participating in the baser discussions.
AYE, folks, I haven't heard a single one!
ScottFree @64: Thanks. I start from the assumption that nobody sets out to be wrong.
Noen @77: I was using "will" in the loosest possible sense. Too much of human history has been ruled by the equivalent of Tony Soprano's gang. Personally, I like living in a responsive democracy. People who don't believe in counting votes are not my friends, no matter what else they say, because the world they're working for is one in which they only talk to me when they're giving orders.
CShotton @84:
They didn't start wars with Iraq, either. That's why Charlie isn't comparing their war expenditures with the other things they could have funded.More to the point, what makes you think that other countries "do nothing of value"? They fund basic research. They give assistance to people in other countries. It's a strange but persistent USAian belief that we're the only country in the world that does those things.
Your question is unanswerable because no one in this discussion has ever said that. Charlie Stross is talking about how much money the US has wasted in Iraq, giving us some sense of the scale, and suggesting some of the other endeavors that money could have financed. Since that's his starting premise, it's not surprising that he isn't discussing the finances of other countries.No, it isn't. The fact that his argument irritates you doesn't mean he's a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is deliberate dishonesty. If you have reason or evidence to back up that accusation about Charlie Stross, I haven't seen it yet. In fact, I haven't seen you citing much evidence on any point. But if you did -- if you could cite figures that demonstrate the validity of everything you've been saying, and undercut everything Charlie's been saying -- then you would at most be able to say that Charlie is mistaken. You'd still have to come up with evidence of deliberate falsehood before you could call him a hypocrite.By the way, you're not the only one around here who uses hypocrite/hypocritical/hypocrisy when they mean "I don't like what that person is saying." It's been bothering me for a while now.
The ones that have vast wealth pouring in are selling off their countries' petroleum resources to a world that desperately wants oil. How does that relate to the argument at hand?Do you mean: (1.) organized crime operating in the former USSR; (2.) the foregoing, plus criminal organizations based in or originating in the former USSR but which operate in other countries; (3.) either or both of (1.) and (2.), plus other businesses and organizations operating in the former USSR that are controlled or dominated by criminal organizations originating in the former USSR; and if (3.), are you counting all the money that goes to those organizations, or only the money that goes to persons who are acknowledged members of these criminal organizations?Whichever answer you choose, could you give me a rough estimate of how much money you think that represents?
Also: how does this relate to the argument at hand?
No way is China an oligarchy. In consequence, it doesn't have many oligarchs. Insofar as they can be said to exist, they're making money by selling extremely cheap manufactured goods to the rest of the world, most notably us. How does that relate to the argument at hand?Which ones? How much money? Third World dictators vary more than I think you imagine. I'd ask how they relate to the argument at hand, but since they're too diverse to handle as a class, you'd have to justify their relevance on an individual basis.The citizens in many European countries support governments and policies under which they voluntarily tax themselves to provide support for a wide range of social welfare programs. We, on the other hand, tax ourselves at a comparable rate, are the beneficiaries of a very few and very mingy social welfare programs, and instead let our government get us into pointless stupid insanely expensive wars we can't win (in spite of the fact that our annual prewar military budget was bigger than the annual prewar GNP of the country we've invaded). Aside from this being more or less what Charlie was saying in the first place, how is this relevant?Not at all. Not in the slightest. I am completely stumped, and would be grateful for a fuller explanation of your point.You really do need to learn how to say "I [dislike][disagree with] what he's saying" when you have no grounds for badmouthing someone's motives. Also, I think you'll find that badmouthing people who make arguments you dislike will not make their arguments go away and stop bothering you. It'll have even less effect on the factual bases of their arguments.Charlie likes the US just fine, though it's obvious he thinks it's been making some bone-stupid decisions of late. There's nothing especially simplistic about the piece he's written, and it isn't US-bashing. What he's doing is giving us a sense of the actual cost of the war in Iraq, and pointing out some of the other things we could have done with that much money.
Because it makes an interesting and thought-provoking point.Because the actual cost of the war has been considerably obfuscated, so it's a good idea to familiarize ourselves with the total.
Because for some people, one large number (= "more than five digits") looks a lot like another. I'm not saying these people are stupid. They may be very wise indeed in other languages, like engines or sales or teaching. It's just numbers that don't speak clearly to them.
(This is also the reason I won't trash people who let themselves be talked into impossible mortgages. Some of them were speculators, but many of them are people who rely on others to summarize the meaning and implication of numbers they can't decipher on their own.)
Since large numbers all look more or less incomprehensible, they can't judge relative proportions. The cost of the war in Iraq and the cost of the latest Mars probe both look Big. It's not easy for them to see that the total cost of the Mars probe over its entire development cycle is equal to six hours of the war.
Charlie is doing a good thing: he's giving everyone a tangible sense of the total cost of the war, and what else that money could have bought. I'd say that's justification enough.
And by the way: how often do you normally demand that weblog posts justify their existence?
Tell you what: how about you expand, explain, and justify that last paragraph?I'm awake! I'm awake!
hyp·o·crite Audio Help /ˈhɪpəkrɪt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[hip-uh-krit] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
2. a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, esp. one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.
[Origin: 1175–1225; ME ipocrite
—Related forms
hyp·o·crit·i·cal, adjective
hyp·o·crit·i·cal·ly, adverb
—Synonyms deceiver, dissembler, pretender, pharisee.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtXnUEW_OXw
FPB, it's true that I'm arguing a different point, talking about effectiveness instead of moral rectitude. Fair enough.
I will say that it isn't just about measuring effectiveness, but effectiveness vs. cost. There can be no doubt that a very direct and large cost is being inflicted on American citizens as a result of the war in Iraq (American lives & American taxpayers $$$). With regards to effectiveness, there might be some positives for a hypothetical future of a democratic and free nation of Iraq, that begs the question as to whether the past and current handling of American affairs in Iraq has been effective in obtaining that goal, as well as whether that was the original intent of the U.S. gov't in the first place.
All things considered: the national security of the U.S.A, levels of sectarian violence in Iraq, instability in the region (the kurds vs. turkey, posturing on part of Iran and/or Syria, etc.), the state of the American economy (hello national debt!), the price of oil... how has the war in Iraq been effective in securing the rights or representing the interests of the people of the United States of America with respect to the tremendous cost (6 trillion dollars)???
It hasn't been, and it's extremely doubtful that it ever will.
The only entities that have profited from this event have been the corporate contractors involved, and the positive effects on the American public from this profit has been negligible.
Tenn@143: I'd like to propose that we don't. It clutters the boards, it encourages him to post, it lowers the general faith in humanity.
But what's in it for me?
;)
Rodriguezseeds: Let's see, you're average intelligence, average education and you've had plenty of liberal peers throughout your life. You're also male and you're poorly-equipped. I don't mean in the military sense.
Wrong about everything except me being male.
Xopher: If this were the principle on which governments really operated, the world would be a lifeless radioactive rock by now.
Why, if we must be motivated by fear of force in order to be good, do we deserve to survive? Personally, I think that if it were, the right people would still thrive.
I think justice is the task of good people. We have not accomplished justice in the world. You are the foe of justice, and you want the government to oppose it too, because you want them to hold your rights above the cumulative rights of any number of others, whereas justice requires that your rights and each of theirs be held to be equal, which means you lose by a billion to one.
There is no such thing as a cumulative right. And if justice requires a conflict of rights, then your definition of rights has failed somewhere. In any case, I am not against justice, I am for perfect justice.
GregLondon: Actually, there are situations where your lack of support for society harms everyone in society. But there isn't much point in going into that with you.
Lack of support is not harm. If I pass a person who is drowning and don't help, I haven't done him any harm. Similarly, if I refuse to pay for someone's operatiion, I haven't harmed them. I didn't give them the disease/injury in the first place.
The simplest example is that bank robbers didn't choose to agree to your set of morals, and if you worship at no god but the god of choice, then you can't force them to do something they didn't choose.
This follows my rule of force. A bank robber initiates force. Therefore I can force them to stop, even though they don't choose to.
And how do you get to enforce the idea that this, and this alone, is the sole extent of what is just? It conflicts directly with the god of choice. I didn't choose that limitation on what is right. And you try to force it on me.
Nice use of semantics, but it still doesn't work. If you're not choosing that limitation on what is right, then you're adding some other case in which it's all right to use force, which means that by my code, it's acceptable to use force to stop you. So my code is consistent.
Now that we are at a disagreement, how do we resolve it?
If all you do is disagree in thought and in word, I have no issue with you. Only when you practice your position do I retaliate.
There is little mystery to this philosophical set of rules: You are a Randian Objectivist. The window dressing you put around it is irrelevant. What matters is what is at the heart of your religion:
Only in the political sphere. Rand also prescribed right and wrong outside of politics, with which I do not agree.
Cantfightthedite:All things considered: the national security of the U.S.A, levels of sectarian violence in Iraq, instability in the region (the kurds vs. turkey, posturing on part of Iran and/or Syria, etc.), the state of the American economy (hello national debt!), the price of oil... how has the war in Iraq been effective in securing the rights or representing the interests of the people of the United States of America with respect to the tremendous cost (6 trillion dollars)???
Excellent question. My answer is that after 9/11 and the retaliation in Afghanistan, if we had not initiated further military action, it would have marked us as predictible and limited by the borders of nations. It would have effectively said that our enemies can carry out n terrorist attacks if they simply establish in n countries. Iraq was the most politically attractive target.
Sounds a lot like your solution to the problem of bankrobbers is to execute some people for jaywalking near the bank.
You're a looney toon. Nothing more.
If you're not choosing that limitation on what is right, then you're adding some other case in which it's all right to use force, which means that by my code, it's acceptable to use force to stop you. So my code is consistent.
I can come up with plenty of consistent sets of rules that are completely immoral. Logic does not guarantee morality. Yet you argue that your logically consistent code is a moral code to live by. That it is right.
Assume, for the purpose of the exercise that you are a sausage maker, and your fellow citizens want to put restrictions on all sausage making that you do not agree to.
Assume these restrictions reflect health-related issues such as sterilization of equipment, temperatures at which sausage is stored, cooked, and processed, the types of ingredients that go into sausage, and how you must label it to customers. All of which is going to cost you a lot of money, to the point of potentially putting you in a lot of debt because you've got to get rid of all your old wooden counters and replace them with stainless steel, replace your crockpot cookers with stainless steel cookers that have thermostatic controls, get a sausage packer that keeps the contents refridgerated before and after, and hire an exterminator to get rid of that rat who keeps hanging around your meat locker.
You do not agree to these restrictions for business reasons. They will cost you too much you say.
But people are currently getting sick on a regular basis by tainted food. Occaistionally, a child or an old person dies because they get so sick. Some people have even gotten sick from your food. And you say it's better to let people get sick and occaisionally die than to force a sausage maker to sterilize her countertop against her will? You keep getting new customers to replace the ones who get sick and don't come back. YOu manage to stay in business selling tainted sausage. Is it moral to allow you to sell tainted sausage?
You're a bit of a savant. Extremely strong in logical skills, but very little emotional capacity for empathy and such. Probably place a low priority on your physical presence as well. Not a ballet dancer. And apparently zero spiritualality. I don't think I've run into as extreme of a case as you before, but it's interesting.
single? no significant relationships? Not into sports? What do you do for a living? Tatoos maybe? no college or maybe you're in college?
Me: married, not a jock, an engineer, no tatoos.
You manage to stay in business selling tainted sausage. Is it moral to allow you to sell tainted sausage?
Yes it is. Because it is still a mutual agreement. Now, if I advertise that my sausage is healthful, while knowing that it is not, then I have committed fraud and it is moral to stop me from selling it and to punish me. However, two parties can agree to engage in an activity that is less than healthful, and no third party has any interest in the transaction.
I have no problem with free transit of information, even to the point of voluntary inspections by the government. They could label businesses with "failed inspection" or "refused inspection," and publish them, letting the market take care of the problem business. However, if enough people can support such a business, no one should stop them. Social deviance that manages to thrive is, by definition, not deviance.
And I am single, enjoy sports as a viewer and an occasional pickup game, and work as a bookkeeper for a private school. No tattoos or distinguishing marks.
Shorter Flamingphonebook:
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. -- Aleister Crowley"
FPB:
Imagine a popular bar with a particularly mean bouncer. This bouncer makes it a habit of throwing out random patrons, who have done nothing wrong, in order to perpetuate a reputation and image that basically says "Don't fuck with me." He does this because he believes it makes his job easier because it subdues the other patrons via psychological effect, which requires far less physical effort. In the short term, he is correct. However, in the long term it will begin to have a negative effect on business for the bar because eventually the entire bar-going population will know about the bouncer, and will either avoid the bar entirely or will be overly cautious in buying drinks so as to not get as drunk and possibly raise his ire. Eventually the bar owner will catch on and fire that bouncer because the bouncer's actions are not representing the bar-owner's interests ($$$).
While I believe that military action and occupation in Afghanistan were and are justified as an equivalent response to the 9/11 attacks and did serve the American public, the war in Iraq has only perpetuated the stereotypical and prejudicial view of the "American Empire" as a violent aggressor to be avoided if at all possible. This might serve issues of national security in the short term, the long term effects on foreign relations and national economic well-being are so negative so as to make any short term benefits completely worthless.
Iraq was a politically attractive target, but the war in Iraq has NOT served the citizens of The United States of America, and therefore the gov't of said country has abused it's power to benefit a special interest group: Big Business.
There's no overall economic benefit if you can't eventually financially offset the original incurred cost.
Even shorter FPB: caveat emptor
FPB, I'd assert that the reason transactions with retailers are relatively painless, hassle-free, and not subject to large scale shenanigans is that most states have laws requireing implied warranties that usually require that a product such as a hammer should be able to function as a hammer, and be able to pound nails into wood, even if the buyer and seller do not chat prior to the sale to determine whether the hammer can indeed pound nails into wood.
What happens if a retailer sells something with no implied warranty? They must mark the item "As-is". As is, means that if you buy it, caveat emptor. No money back no matter what turns out to be inside the box.
I would suggest to you that if you truly believe in caveat emptor, if you truly believe that retailers should not be forced to provide implied warranties by law, then you ought not to take advantage of that social force without being complicit in that force.
Put another way, I suggest that to be true to your code, to be entirely consistent, you ought to make a point of buying "as is" products whenever they are available. Because if they are available, that means the retailer would be willing to sell products as is, but state laws enforce implied warranties on them against their will.
No, seriously. Go out and buy some stuff labeled "as is" from Best Buy and let me know how it works out for you.
The reality is all the social enforcements of minimum standards of quality, minimum standards of health, minimum standards of wage, and so on, are generally transparent to most people. You think you're buying a stereo from Best Buy purely by mutual choice? That retailer is forced to provide an implied warranty on every product they sell unless they mark it as is. If it isn't marked as is, and they sell it without an implied warranty, they can get sued.
What states have found is that without implied warranty laws, retailers did not provide implied warranties on their own. So states did not get retailers to agree to implied warranties, they passed them and enforced them on retailers. There is no monetary benefit to a retailer to be force to provide an implied warranty. In fact, retailers found that the best way to make money is to sell "extended warranties" for lots of money. They'd sell you "implied warranties" if they could, but the law won't allow it. It comes with every product by force of law.
Some might have agreed to follow the law, but obviously, if a law was required to make implied warranties have legal force behind them, then some retailers were not offering implied warranties of their own free will and had to have the law force it on them.
Force it on them.
Dont' think so? Go to your state legislature and propose repealing your implied warranty law. Start a petition, go around to all the retailers and talk with the owners, see how many of them would try to stop you from repealing that law.
So, while you go around in your day to day life in the good ol' US of A, you're benefitting directly from legal enforcements placed on retailers against their wills. Restrictions they did not voluntarily choose and had to have the law to force them to follow it. Much of this is completely transparent to people's day-to-day life, though.
You go into a store. You buy a hammer that has no labels on it and without talking to a single salesperson about that hammer. You take it home and find out is shatters as soon as you try pounding a nail into wood. You take it back and get your money back. And implied warranties enforce that transaction. They force retailers to provide implied warranties.
The hammer had absolutely no labels on it. It wasn't advertised in any way. It was sitting bare on a shelf full of hammers. You didn't talk to a single salesperson. You didn't ask if the hammer would be usable to pound nails. The salesman didn't tell you it would be usable for pounding nails. You simply go in, buy an unmarked hammer, without talkign to a single person, and go out.
No direct agreements whatsoever between you and the retailer, other than the price of the hammer.
And yet, implied warranties mean that if their hammer doesn't do what normal hammers do, you can get your money back.
I don't know if you've ever purchased a car, a TV, a stero, an MP3 player, a computer, or a laptop, and had the thing not work when you took it out of the box. But if you ever did, the only reason you got to take it back and get a refund or a new device, was because society forced implied warranty laws on retailers.
So, while it is easy to imagine that you could simply negotiate every sale, every transaction, you are involved in, the idea of implied warranties, of minimum health codes, and so on, make your life a whole lot easier than it would be if you had to deal with a real caveat emptor situation.
Noen 159: Actually I think FPB behaves as if he's made the most common mistake in interpreting that passage. 'Do as thou wilt' doesn't mean "do whatever you want." When Crowley says 'thou' he's referring to the divine self; 'do as thou wilt' means "obey the dictates of your highest self" which dictates are also called the True Will. Not everything you feel like doing is a manifestation of your True Will; Crowley spent a great deal of time considering what his True Will was.
FPB hasn't considered much of anything.
Flamingphonebook is a troll. As Tenn suggested many numbers ago (I'm too lazy to look back), from now on I will ignore him. He has nothing to teach me, is mean, selfish, full of himself and just seems to comment for no other reason than provoking people. I wrote a personal insult of him and got away with it. So... I'm done.
(Note to self: don't bother to respond to anything that FPB says).
Yeah, I think there's no candy in that piñata...or only poisoned candy.
It's not a piñata. It's a beehive. And they're not Apis mellifera.
GregLondon:
I have several times trafficked in goods without the implied warranty the the government provides, as the goods in question were of dubious legality. I was able to ensure the quality of the goods through researching the providers and listening to other customers' testimonials. On occassion, I have been an early customer of a provider without reputation, going on my own judgement of character. I was never burned on any of the deals, but even had I been, I was prepared to be in order to be able to give a negative testimonial. So yes, I believe that in the long run, caveat emptor is good doctrine, and it has the added benefit of cutting out the middle man.
Xopher 162: I'm not interpreting that passage at all. Don't know about Crowley, but I'll say it here: if it harms nobody, do whatever you want.
And would someone please explain to me how it is trolling if I'm answering questions put to me, engaging in discussion, and presenting my thought processes? The simple fact that my ideas happen to provoke people doesn't mean that that's my purpose in writing them. It isn't. I'd be just as happy to write if everyone agreed with me.
I thought ignoring a troll is a recipe for failure?
human society includes all humans, even those that aren't interested in altruistic contribution. It's all a question of ratio. So far, we've made it work.
But the ones who aren't interested in human society at all have to be imprisoned or expelled.
or ruling us
Actually I think our current rulers need to be imprisoned or expelled. Preferably imprisoned, and preferably gen. pop. in a Level IV facility.
ah yes, we can dream....
ps:not that I think he's a troll, just a very bad human.
Well, FPB isn't a looney. Just nearly completely without any emotional capacity. Blunted affect. whatever you want to call it. Well, I guess depending on how you define "looney", maybe he is. I believe he has a functional personality though, so not really looney. Just waaaaay different. Anyway, I don't think he's trolling for reaction so much as he's unable to see how just how much his model of the world is different from the real world. Which means he's likely to say stuff that's just not so, and say them with complete conviction in their truth. I don't think I've interacted with anyone to quite this degree of blunted affect before. Anyway, I was interested to see how his process works. I don't think he's a troll as in trolling for a reaction, but he's developed a morality system which he holds in a hermetically sealed mind, absolutely convinced of its absolute truth, and absolutely no chance of changing even the slightest bit of his thinking. It is a dogma, a religion, and like many religions is infallible in the minds of its followers.
In summation, he has a morality system that doesn't match the real world, he thinks its a perfect moral system, he thinks it is incapable of producing an immoral result, and he is impervious to real world data that shows it failing.
Given his lack of empathy, I'm not sure exactly why he's on this blog (or any blog for that matter), since relationships with others isn't a driving force for people of blunted affect. It just doesn't occur to them. He does respond to direct questions, but he doesn't seem to engage in relationship on his own here in any way.
Hm....
OK, a perusal of FPB's history of posts on BB show the vast majority of them contain almost no relationship component and could be viewed as little more that proselytizing his pure-logic-detached-from-the-real-world-perfect-morality system. And he is either incapable of or unwilling to engage in the level of introspection that would be required to evaluate his morality system and see any of its flaws.
Or as Tenn said at 143, it's a waste of time tryng to communicate with him, since he doesn't relate with the people here and he only seems interested in preaching his religion.
Middle East
May 28, 2008
Bush 'plans Iran air strike by August'
By Muhammad Cohen
NEW YORK - The George W Bush administration plans to launch an air strike against Iran within the next two months, an informed source tells Asia Times Online, echoing other reports that have surfaced in the media in the United States recently.
Two key US senators briefed on the attack planned to go public with their opposition to the move, according to the source, but their projected New York Times op-ed piece has yet to appear.
Can I pre-emptively apologize for my nations pre-emptive strike?
monkeys,orphans,phonebooks and society
"In the orphanage
If Harlow's monkey experiments might be considered cruel today, what can we say about the human deprivation "experiment" in Romanian orphanages? Carlson says she found the whole affair "pretty shocking. We thought the whole world knew that institutional care was insufficient to maintain the social capacity of the human baby."
But not in Romania, where the long-time communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was a zealous believer in technological progress. Highly skeptical of all things touchy-feelie, he clamped down on psychology and social work in preference to engineering and science. He favored policies to raise the birth rate and established institutions for orphans and children whose parents could not care for them.
After Ceausescu was executed in the coup in 1989, the orphanages were opened to a world that saw Dickensian warehouses for the unwanted. Scientific study confirmed what the untrained eye could see: The children were in the third to tenth percentile for physical growth, and "grossly delayed" in motor and mental development, Carlson says. They rocked and grasped themselves like Harlow's monkeys, and grew up with weird social values and behavior.
As they aged, many of the orphans became homeless, with what Carlson calls "clumsy, sad, all inappropriate" social interactions. To express affection, one boy might kiss another -- on the top of the head. Smiling and ingratiating, the youths are superficially friendly but unable to form permanent attachments. Like characters in a gloomy sci-fi novel, many found work in the secret police, where their lack of loyalty and ability to make "friends" were saleable traits.
Chemical analysis showed abnormal cortisol profiles, indicating a severe problem with the stress response. Carlson compared children living under improved conditions to the rest of the orphans -- and found their cortisol looking more normal. Another indication that the stress response can respond to conditions came from a study by Carlson of Romanian children in poor-quality day care. During the week, cortisol was abnormal, but when they returned home for the weekend, it looked more normal.
To Carlson, the issue is not simply science, but human rights. Romania, like every other country except the United States and Somalia, has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, obligating it to provide foster or adoptive parents to orphans, rather than cold institutions."
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-halliburton-charged-with-selling-nuclear-technologies-to-iran
Can I pre-emptively apologize for my nations pre-emptive strike?
Careful with that. Mutually Assured Appology is a madman's gambit.
Speaking for the socially detached, I'll try to explain how I see FPB from a psychological perspective:
FPB is likely a highly introverted individual who is good at focusing on and remembering technical details. He's aware of the way the world functions with regards to emotional and social connections, and has likely learned how to function moderately well in navigating them through a process of analysis and experimentation to develop governing rules (like an incredibly long list of IF-THEN statements). However, it's not intuitive and is a somewhat constant source of frustration, and he possibly feels that the rest of the world puts emotional reaction before logical reasoning, much to the world's own detriment. Rather than continuing to try to "fit-in" emotionally he's decided to just act naturally, approaching everything from a purely (or nearly pure) logically analytical perspective, not worrying about emotional reactions.
There's introverted, and then there's INTROVERTED. People really are born that way, and raising them in a highly social environment might mitigate that, but it certainly won't eliminate it.
And the reason why he writes things that he knows will annoy/anger people is because this is the internet and he has anonymity (see poorly moderated internet forums).
Unfortunately he hasn't put enough thought into the economic side of the argument, and thus his analysis falls apart on that basis with regards to the obligations of gov't and the failure of this one. So FPB has failed on both counts. (a bit tacked on, but I felt obsessively compelled to mention it)
Cantfightthedite, that's an interesting analysis, but it doesn't at all affect my fundamental desire for him to go away.
Oh really now... have no fear....it's not our money. It's our children's children's children's money! Borrowed from China. We'll just keep swiping that national credit card the same way the rest of the sheep in the land of the free and the home of the brain-washed keep on doing until it all falls apart. Debt, debt and more debt. Borrow borrow and bomb the world into peace. It's sad. The end result will be hollow. All fueled by a tool who claims to be living his faith. If that is representative of his faith...I don't want any part of his flavor of christianity. I think someone wasn't listening to the message. How many bombs would Jesus drop?
Well said, Xopher. I'm definitely not justifying him being a jerk/troll/etc., let's all be clear on that. Although FPB may be mostly incapable of intuitively understanding emotional reactions, he portrays the necessary intelligence to understand them on a logical basis, which means he knows when he's being a jerk or not. And yes, he's being a jerk.
I don't want to begrudge anyone their emotions or their collective benefits. I just don't want them for myself. I want to be able to look back on my accomplishments, however great or meager they may be, and say that it was all me, and that no one else has any claim to them. Even if all I could last was a week until I died of thirst, the last drink I had would be mine entirely, mine purely, and the pride I could take in that would be euphoric. I still don't think that would be my fate. I still think that a purely logical libertarian society would advance rapidly and not degenerate. But if I am wrong I would accept it. All I ask is my freedom and my rights.
(BTW, I do not only argue these points on the internet. I present them to my family and friends, who either argue back as the people here have, or smile and nod and change the subject.)
fpb@184: it was all me ... mine entirely, mine purely, and the pride I could take
Yes, yes, you've already clearly established that it's all about you.
I still think that a purely logical libertarian society would advance rapidly and not degenerate.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Your perfect moral world hinges on a conditional statement (if the world were populated by perfectly logical people) but that conditional statement isn't true. You've committed a simple logical fallacy called converting a conditional. To put it another way, you start with faulty premise.
When you get a world populated with nothing but perfectly logical people, let me know. Till then, I'll stick with a system that deals with the real world we actually live in.
smile and nod and change the subject
:)
yes.
So, back to the three trillion dollars...
We could generate an EM field to float a mini replica of a flat earth on top of mini re-engineered elephants, on the back of a giant Sea Turtle.
"say that it was all me, and that no one else has any claim to them."
you have the right intention, but lack understanding
No! No! No! Mine! Mine! Mine!
Holy crap. Daffy Duck was a sociopath.
Nuclear power-corporations are exactly like the billion-dollar oil corporations. They mined uranium out this way years ago. They made so many Navajo sick,mostly cancer,and the government STILL hasn't compensated for lying. All we'd do by using nuclear power is switch control from one money hungry CEO to another. Look into what they did in Monument Valley.
Bsh shld hv blwn rq n rn ff th mp. Then they could have taught millions of Americans how to garden to become self sufficient. f Chn nd Mxc nd nd wr wllng t cntrl thr mssns, lng wth thr rlntlss fscntn fr bldng cntlss dms,nd stp dmpng rw swg nt th R Grnd, w'd b n r wy t wrld pc. Or at least happy gardening.
th mny wld bst b spnt n ntnl scrty
Y ll y lbrls jst thnk f w ls hd th trllns f $'s spnt n th nvr-ndng "Wr n Pvrty". Whn s tht wr vr gng t nd? W ls hv nt hd nthr ttck n th S snc 9/11, wht s tht wrth?
Gee, three first-time commenters in a row, all with heavily- or completely-disemvowellable comments. I wonder what IP address they come from?
My comments are being messed with or something. Any help?
So much money to such a tragic cause. War sucks, we (should) all be able to agree on that. As "advanced" as we are, we still engage in battle for money, oil, pride, politics...on smaller scales we show our animalistic true colors on a daily basis.
I could list many worthy causes to spend such a gross amount of money on. Anyone who watches the news or reads the paper can rattle off the right answers; famine, disease, energy crisis, health care, etc. (Starting to sound like a political platform, yes?)
We should have invested in an escalator leading to nowhere.
I believe that going into Iraq and Iran is the worst thing we can do for our national security.
Sure. Health care and research too. Spending it at home would be the best thing we can do for our national security.
#10 cshotton, is correct. All these money spent on the war will "trickle" down and cause much economic activity. IIRC my economics class, it's called the multiplier effect.
The problem with all these other suggestions is that they are not self-sustaining. Send 500 people to Mars? Well, OK. But soon people will lose interest and don't want to spend any more money. Build 300 nuclear reactors? Build 4000 nuclear reactors? If you do it long enough, the electricity generation market will be fully saturated, plus you won't be able to find enough fuel for all those reactors.
All these alternative-spending scenarios suffer from the same problem. You either reach your objective, which means there'll be no more spending; or people will get sick of it, and stop spending.
The genius of Bush is that this war on the other side of the world is entirely self sustaining. Patriotic Americans will be loathed to lose another war after Vietnam, and are willing to sacrifice their sons, and pour limitless resources into the war. OTOH, Bush does not really want to win. Remember the benefits of the war? Keep it going and you can continue to reap the benefits.
That is why the Americans are fighting the war this way. Kill one insurgent and two more pop up to take his place. You cannot win against a popular insurrection. The only way to win is to first make the insurrection unpopular. The successful examples are few and far between. I can only think of one.
Crap, Dainel. Wars destroy value. That money isn't going anywhere except into the savings accounts of Haliburton execs...what doesn't get exploded in Iraq.
Also the money is going FROM the taxpayers into destruction and the idiots from Hali.
follow up #175
http://www.atlargely.com/2008/05/another-false-i.html
Daniel@199: this war on the other side of the world is entirely self sustaining
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
If it was "self sustaining" it would pay for itself, rather than us paying for it.
Remember the benefits of the war?
I seem to have forgotten.
"Patriotic Americans will be loathed to lose another war after Vietnam,"
please name one war America has won in the past half century
Grenada.
War on the First Amendment.
met a Grenada vet once. Rifle fire in the head. Friendly. Not a bad guy, glad he lived.
Grenada? Good grief. America, population 300 million, invades an island population 100 thousand, an island that is one-tenth the size of the entire state of Rhode Island.
t'was a bitter joke, Greg
Well OF COURSE we could've spent the money on HELPING people, but then the rich wouldn't have gotten richer and you know what happens when the rich don't get richer; the poor die.