welcome to the internet age, enjoy your stay!

I agree with your sentiments largely, but of course I have to nitpick...


I totally agree as it relates to the American people and our domestic issues.  Our voter turnout numbers are absolutely pathetic.  I'd just note that, with regard to foreign policy issues, the question shouldn't be so much about whether the people are interested enough or American industry and other interests are at stake in it, but whether we have the right to intervene in other nations' politics.  It's a distant part of our nation's history, but what if we had been going through our own Civil War in modern times, with another nation (say, China) as the dominant world power.  By what right would China send in masses of better trained and technologically superior military troops to take one side or the other to settle our dispute?  The point applies to Iraq and Kosovo as much as to Darfur and Rwanda.


We still do lead the world in many areas of technology and innovation.  The landscape is changing, but it's as much a function of globalization and technological ubiquity as it is an America in decline.


As with all government-provided services, our public education is atrocious!  But the answer isn't to throw more money at it (teachers at my prepping private middle/high school made significantly less than their taxpayer-funded bretheren), but to allow the system to improve itself through competition.

But back to your larger point, yes, our hobbled public education system is the source of a lot of the problems in our country and it's only going to get worse.


YESSSSSSS!!!!  Thank you, James, I'll kiss you at the next Penguinlan.  You couldn't be more right... except about the ingenuity thing.  People turn to the government because politicians promise them things for free.  People love to talk about the "top 1%" and a small percentage pays the lionshare of tax revenue because all the wealth is so concentrated.  That's true, but it also makes for a pretty small voting block, and when a politician can promise to give free stuff to a large number, he's going to win a lot of elections.


..................................you get a handjob too.

I disagree wholeheartedly. The wars in Darfur and Rwanda were not political struggles, they were genocides. I generally oppose intervention in any true civil war but these are cases of a state blatantly killing off its own citizens. Surely you wouldn't have opposed U.S. Involvement in WW2?


At least in Seattle, public school teachers are underpaid. I think private education is fine but I don't think instantly privatizing all public schools is a good idea. Like Ron Paul said about healthcare, there needs to be an adequate transition period because the current generation is raised on the idea of the government providing these services. I wouldn't send a kid to private school unless I was confident that they weren't being fed misinformation. If the gov't was to instantly privatize and deregulate all private schools and without the existence of some watchdog organization, I would be fearful that my kid was being taught by historical revisionists or religious nutjobs.



Yeah as far as Welfare other forms of handouts are concerned it has a lot more to do with laziness and amoral greed.

But I am ashamed of how everybody responds to the irresponsibility of corporations and other bureaucracies. In the black civil rights movement, people protested the segregation of buses by boycotting the buses. Today, people complain about Wal-Mart supposedly mistreating people and factories dumping industrial waste in natural areas, and they take action by throwing money at lobbying organizations who try to get politicians to force corporations into submission. This just pisses off the corporations and makes them retaliate by hiring more lobbyists. Somebody said power is only as good as how people react to it. In the scheme of things, those big evil corporations are only as powerful as the consumers that choose to buy from them. Don't like the company, don't buy their shit. And tell your friends not to buy their shit.

Wait, isn't Lead canadian? That's the only reason I ever disliked him. Were my preconceptions completely unfounded?

I overall agree, but with some exceptions:



This is a sticky issue. While it's horrible to see mass murdering within another country, I personally place great value into sovereign rights and national borders. To me, the precedence set in invading a country that hasn't acted outside their own borders, is an absolutely horrible one to set. It says to every other nation that it's okay to invade your neighbor if you don't approve of what they're doing. Now if the country invades another ala WW2 and the Gulf War, attacking them shows that national borders mean something and to step out of line is to invite retaliation by the international community.

When it comes to problems like Georgia, Tibet, etc., where the attacking nation doesn't recognize the sovereignty, things can get stickier. The simplest answer would be for those new "nations" to request membership into the UN. While the UN isn't necessarily a governing body the attacking nation would have to respect, it's the closest thing the world has.



Ingenuity is hard to come by in practice these days. Not due to a lack of intelligent and creative people, but because any significant advance that might be made will be welcomed by a plethora of lawsuits by those who stand to lose an advantage if some competing product comes of it. I can think of no example more notorious than alternative fuel technologies that would be accumulated by the oil companies. The sick thing is that a patent might not even be threatened by an advancement - just the sheer amount of legal resources corporations can bring to bear on small inventors can be enough to put them under. The fear of such lawsuits and general resistance isn't exactly something that would drive innovative people to invent new things.



I agree but only to an extent. Frankly, I don't trust the free market. Corporations are all too often self-serving giants willing to step on anyone or anything to further pad their wallets. To protect both the people as well as the government from them, I think we definitely need government regulations - in fact far more than we have in place now. I've heard more than a few times that our current economical crisis is largely due to a lack of regulations and companies over-extending themselves in the pursuit of more and more money.

Things such as welfare and bailouts aren't inherently bad ideas, they're just ideas that are hard to put into practice. Imagine how life could change if the single mother of three, who's far in debt, received some kind of government aid to get out of it - is that not a morally correct service to offer? Even morality aside, it's in the best interest of the country for her to be able to buy goods and for her children to be able to go to nicer schools. As I hear many saying, instead of bailing out the banks now, the government should be giving that money to the people to pay off their debt, mortgages, etc. That would be followed by a buying frenzy of the likes the world has never seen. How would that not jump-start the economy?



Such is the fate of a consumer society. You give people a few shiny things and they want more. As they get more they'll get lazy but still want more. Frankly this outcome of a consumer society might be worse than the outcome people feel from a socialist state: You'd end up with people who don't want to do anything and have a room full of toys to play with.

Then I'd point out that I'm in favor of abolishing or severely limiting the patent process. There are some industries that are driven by a type of product that can only be done a few different ways, and some patents are incredibly general and are still approved. Alternatively, or in addition to, individuals and companies need to be protected from larger corporations suing them when there's really no case, with the sole purpose being of financially strangling the individual or smaller company with court fees. I'm in such an industry and we now have to put money into a full-time legal department just to deal with all the asshole companies out there that are targeting us simply because they have the money to do so - money, by the way, that could go to their workers and cycle back into the economy.



That's certainly a can of worms as well and I can see how that could viewed as the other side of the coin. We definitely need to identify sensitive points of our political system that can easily succumb to corruption and keep a keen eye on them. But having not given that area much thought of late, I do not have any specific ideas at this time as to how to do so effectively.



I'm a firm believer that one of the chief purposes of any government is to bring order to what would otherwise be chaos; to ensure a stable society for those it governs. To that end, there will always be those who fall behind, whether it be due to laziness or just really bad luck - and in our case people are beginning to fall behind because our educational and health care systems are ineffective and inaccessible. If enough fall behind, society as a whole begins to fall behind or, worst, those who fall behind are in some way taken advantage of. Now I'm certainly not advocating a system that would reward someone who's fully capable of working but opts to sit on their asses, but I do think it's the government's inherent duty to help its people keep up with the group when it can. If that means tax money going to a single mother, then so be it. It's morally correct, it's socially correct, and most of all it helps stabilize our society.

Nations have interferred with conflicts outside their direct concern usually to make it their concern.  To my knowledge the US has never intervened in a country to simply add it to their "empire."  Germany, Japan, South Korea, Bosnia, all of these resulted in a stable independent government under the control of its own people.  Iraq is a work in progress, but I highly doubt we'll see Iraqis voting in US elections and adding a 51st star to our flag anytime soon.

Specifically on the WWII case, another benefit of hindsight is that you can never know with any perfect certainty what would have happened, even though you know exactly what occurred as a result of the action that was taken.  Who knows, if the US hadn't entered the theatre until directly attacked, a permanent Jewish state might have been ultimately set up in part of central Europe instead of Israel, and we wouldn't have the current conflict in that region.  I'm not arguing the likelihood of that, just saying we don't know.  The same could be said about the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; some say we would have had a protracted ground war to invade Japan, others say Japan was all but defeated already and would have capitulated in a matter of weeks anyway.  Choices were made, we'll never know for sure.

But my larger point isn't to argue against any particular historical conduct, but to say that intervention in other nation's conflicts should be by far the exception to the rule, rather than the default position all too commonly advocated these days.  Certainly there could be cases where intervention is the only wise course of action, but if you look at the number of places we're either being pushed towards or already involved in -- Iraq, Gaza, Iran, Afganistan, Darfur, North Korea, Taiwan, Somalia, Georgia, Tibet -- it validates my point that we've opened ourselves to all other kinds of intervention "in the name of human decency" by not even considering going in the other direction.