patrick.net

This is kinda disjoint and belongs down in Misc, but whatevs.

Adam Smith came up with the idea that individual profit-seeking would result in emergent order. This is largely correct of course but there are corner cases.

Nobody but ideologues believe that the Invisible Hand will actually do anything. All individual economic actors want is theirs, and let the devil take the hindmost.

MAD is neither here nor there, China is a patient nation and knows it has the strategic high ground with us. As Korea and Vietnam demonstrated, there is only so much military power we can project into their part of the world.

China only became a nuclear power in the 1960s and soon thereafter fell into the anarchy of Maoist radicalism, that didn't really run its course until Nixon's friendly visit in 1972.

As I often say, Politicans and lobbyists aren't the problem, the voters are. 30% of the Dems, 80% of the Republicans, and all of the independents are f---ing retards.

Troy

I disagree most profoundly with you that: "politicians and lobbyists aren't the problem, the voters are."

Thru out our upbringing we are taught to respect authority to rely in the unfathomable knowledge of the elite. Neer we are taught to be be critical and independent evaluating beings but listen to your elders and betters and do what they advise. We are constantly told that we dont understand the complex and myriad nuances of the law therefore to go seek "paid" opinion of members of the legal cabal.

I am not against legality for it under pins all civilization. But its working is obtuse to the average citizen and thereby a game for legal intellectuals.

I must emphatically state that the people are not at fault, if fault be theirs surely the lamposts would be swinging strange fruit.

It is the fault of the elites that manipulate the trust of the electorate. I cannot cast the first stone save at the mighty guilty.

@Troy, Re: your 30% vs. 80%---there is no imbalance in retards between Democrats and Republicans. Each camp is populated primarily by mindless ideologues, reciting sound bites with great certitude. None of them have any intellectual depth, nor are their views well considered. Watching them duel in bars, cafes and blogs is like watching a bunch of muppets bludgeon each other with foam bats.

Since you're (apparently) a Democrat who doesn't recite sound bites, I'd remind you that your fellow voters aren't any smarter because they coincidentally agree with you. That 50% intelligence gap could easily reverse if it happens that a different set of issues accidentally lines up with a Republican ideological solution instead of a Democrat solution. Both parties are broken clocks, and the real world blunders its way through cycles. Things line up with the parties occasionally; that doesn't make them "right". The Democrats appear to be right now (as Republicans seemed to be right in the 1980's), but a broken clock is rarely right and never truly useful.

Yes, I'm an independent voter. But at least I'm thinking about each issue instead of pulling a blue or red lever on reflex. Some consideration (right or not) goes into each of my selections.

@jackoByte: So let me get this straight. It's the fault of the elite, not the people, because the people are too dumb to understand when they're being manipulated? So effectively you're abdicating any responsibility as a citizen because "you can't fight City Hall"? Right. Americans have a sometimes-shocking ability to suddenly wise up as a country. I happen to believe that's in the process of happening right now.

Brand says

Since you’re (apparently) a Democrat who doesn’t recite sound bites, I’d remind you that your fellow voters aren’t any smarter because they coincidentally agree with you.

"Point of view is worth 80 IQ points". -- Alan Kay

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/15/palin-book-evolution/

If you think there's a supernatural entity looking out for you and your nation, you're going to make or support some real stupid decisions, like knocking over countries in the mideast without a clear casus belli.

The Republican presidential primary of 2008 was a bunch of tards running for office, and I use the term clinically.

None of them have any intellectual depth, nor are their views well considered.

I like Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean, Obama. Collectively they have more functional IQ than the 40 Republicans in the Senate.

The Democrats appear to be right now (as Republicans seemed to be right in the 1980’s), but a broken clock is rarely right and never truly useful.

I'd like to be an Independent, and thought I was when I came back to the US in 2000 (I even voted for Tom Campbell in 2000, a vote I do not regret now), but the present parlous state of the Republican party basically requires me to be a Democratic partisan.

I'll vote for non-Democrats at the state level, but never again at the national level, unless the Democrats really screw up health reform and I feel like pulling the purge valve out of spite.

Germany got behind Hitler out of pure venom against the Allies of WWI. People get radical when they've been impoverished for a decade or two. Did they know what they were getting? No, probably not. Neither did the Leninists or any other group of people who eventually get snookered. The only defense against that is education, and people are only so smart.

As far as the U.S., the problem is pure apathy. People here believe they're getting hosed, but even with obvious evidence they're not going to get off the couch. But there have also been plenty of moments in American history where the citizens abruptly pushed for the right thing. I think in five years we'll have better banking laws, although actual enforcement will still be in the hands of bureaucrats.

Brand,
yep.

His movement got going with lots of anger like what we're hearing from tea party folk nowadays.

sybrib: Meh. The tea party folk are a bunch of blowhards. Americans haven't been truly impoverished on a large scale in almost eighty years. The talk is loud, but the desperation isn't there. I fully expect that in another maybe ten years, we'll see increases in Social Security payments and Medicare benefits. The Boomers will push that through Congress, and the apathy of the American public will allow it.

People say they're "mad as hell about Wall Street", but is anyone actually doing anything other than mumble at the dinner table? No. If folks can't even be bothered to write their Congressmen, do you seriously believe there's going to be any major upheaval of the establishment? We'll get law improvements through the typical legislative process. The "new revolution" stuff is pure fantasy.

Brand,

I hope you are right.

If you read up on history of the Weimar Republic, you'll also read that the early days of Hitler's movement were similarly dissed off.

The hyperflation only lasted a little more than a year in the early 20's and it was a whole decade until Weimar gave way to National Socialist leadership. Hitler's reactionary anger movement slowly built itself up, one rally at a time, always giving itself as an alternative, always directing its anger at the elites' manipulation of the government, and always with its racism masked by anger over economic issues.

Berlin and major industrial areas sort of German equivalents of "blue states" were the last to succumb to that movement and some never really did, but were swallowed up by the national government going that way. Our system with the electoral college, may not permit such a red state movement to take over the way that the Nazis got control of the national government, but it could get really ugly as it runs its course.

For all her faults or whatever, Sarah Palin looks like a whole lot more reasonable and sane leader for such a reactionary movement in its early stages than Hitler did in the early stages of his movement. Still in spite of his cooky-ness he was patient able able to slowly build up his movement under his leadership.

sybrib, I find comparisons to the Weimar Republic to be fairly preposterous. It doesn't matter how long the hyperinflation lasted, because it basically crushed Germany's economy. All their wealth simply flowed out of the country to their European enemies. You can't compare that kind of monetary sledgehammer blow to the small ding (~30%) that Boomers took to their 401(k) accounts. The entire emergent German middle class was blasted back to zero after WWI, and the populace dragged bottom for a decade.

I do find it fair to compare the Great Depression to the Weimar Republic, though.

For how absurd the mainstream news channels are, I also still believe that the American press is pretty good at ferreting out all the negative points about political candidates.

Congressmen read very little other than notecards for prepared speeches. If you make a fat donation and have your lobbyists take lunch with them, then they get your words. Otherwise forget it.

Watch this video, as Sir James Goldsmith laid it out back in 1994. What would be the long-term implications of our messed up global trade policies. At the time he was dismissed as a kook but everything he said came to pass. He even talked about the dangers of financial derivatives briefly.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064665078176641728#

Vicente, that was a brilliant link. I'm going to buy Goldsmith's book, "The Trap". The interview was overall depressing, particularly how Clinton's talking head cited a bunch of "obvious facts" without actually citing any actual numbers or studies. A total politician in an economist's shoes, a la David Lereah. Goldsmith really drove home two pretty obvious points--that skilled and unskilled labor will flow to cheap locations as long as there are no barriers to imports (foreshadowing the current massive trade deficit), and also that the economy serves society, and not the other way around (a point that has been lost by the neocons and to some extent the liberals as well).

Hopefully Sir James writes as well as he speaks. Hats off for the link!

When they push jobs into a country, they can easily take those jobs away. If you look at the per capita income for the world's poor its barely budged and in may cases it has declined regardless of free trade.

We're not doing the world's poor any favors by shipping jobs overseas.

sybrib says

Brand,
I hope you are right.
If you read up on history of the Weimar Republic, you’ll also read that the early days of Hitler’s movement were similarly dissed off.
The hyperflation only lasted a little more than a year in the early 20’s and it was a whole decade until Weimar gave way to National Socialist leadership. Hitler’s reactionary anger movement slowly built itself up, one rally at a time, always giving itself as an alternative, always directing its anger at the elites’ manipulation of the government, and always with its racism masked by anger over economic issues.
Berlin and major industrial areas sort of German equivalents of “blue states” were the last to succumb to that movement and some never really did, but were swallowed up by the national government going that way. Our system with the electoral college, may not permit such a red state movement to take over the way that the Nazis got control of the national government, but it could get really ugly as it runs its course.
For all her faults or whatever, Sarah Palin looks like a whole lot more reasonable and sane leader for such a reactionary movement in its early stages than Hitler did in the early stages of his movement. Still in spite of his cooky-ness he was patient able able to slowly build up his movement under his leadership.

Yet, if you read the actual Nazi party platform points, which were largely put into effect after the Nazis took power (reference: Rise & Fall of the Third Reich), you would be forced, if objective and honest, to re-evaluate your assertion and analogy to blue vs. red states, as well as which part of the population put Hitler into power. While some may argue correctly that just because the Nazis had the word "Socialist" in their name doesn't mean that they were, their platform tells a different story. Make a two-column list of their points, putting those that compare to today's D's and R's in the correct column, and you might be extremely surprised at the resulting weight. This is all, of course, separate from their anti-capitalist propaganda, and Hitler's own anti-capitalist sentiments (Hitler said that national socialism was a more refined version of communism than that proposed/in place elsewhere).

Paralithodes says

While some may argue correctly that just because the Nazis had the word “Socialist” in their name doesn’t mean that they were, their platform tells a different story.

The relevant features of Nazism that made it so bad had nothing to do with socialism or anything else on it's early party platform. It was it's militarism, it's totalitarianism, and it's ethic hatred.

You might as well point to the places like Sweden or Norway, which are very Socialistic and say they're very close to being Nazis.

The comparison of the Nazis to the USA, red or blue state, is stupid.

"The relevant features of Nazism that made it so bad had nothing to do with socialism or anything else on it’s early party platform. It was it’s militarism, it’s totalitarianism, and it’s ethic hatred."

Central, South, and Eastern Europe was all this and much more long long before Nazis came to be. They didnt invent hatred, they only used what was already there. Ethnic hatred goes back thousands of years in these regions ever since the Turks tried to invade most of than was Catholic Europe.

If you look at the per capita income for the world’s poor its barely budged and in may cases it has declined regardless of free trade.

That is not true. More people are being lifted out of poverty than ever in history. India, China, Brazil and many countries are growing their middle classes, and have fewer and fewer poor.

There is plenty of info on this topic. For example here

Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006.........We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines.

That must be why a third of the world's six billion people get by on two dollars or less per day.
Up is down, black is white, war is peace.

However, it appears that much of the poverty reduction in the last couple of decades almost exclusively comes from China:

* China’s poverty rate fell from 85% to 15.9%, or by over 600 million people
* China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty

reference

MarkInSF says

Paralithodes says

While some may argue correctly that just because the Nazis had the word “Socialist” in their name doesn’t mean that they were, their platform tells a different story.

The relevant features of Nazism that made it so bad had nothing to do with socialism or anything else on it’s early party platform. It was it’s militarism, it’s totalitarianism, and it’s ethic hatred.
You might as well point to the places like Sweden or Norway, which are very Socialistic and say they’re very close to being Nazis.
The comparison of the Nazis to the USA, red or blue state, is stupid.

Its early party platform was its platform. The "relevant features" had everything to do with socialism, because it was a socialist platform. That you choose to redefine it and reinterpret it according to your own values is what is irrelevant. I might as well also point to places like Venezuela, Iraq (Socialist Baath Party - maybe that's why the Socialists are who organized almost all of the big protests in the US), etc., let alone the more extreme versions that existed or exist in Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. People like to point to the "nationalism" part as "right wing," but there have been plenty of nationalist movements that are or were Marxist-based, such as the Basque separatists, the Arab Nationalist movement and its offshoots, etc.

I agree that the comparison to places like the red and blue states is stupid. My entire response that you quoted was to someone who specifically made that comparison - of course making the red out to be like the Nazis. My response to you is likewise a continued response: It is a useless argument, but if someone on the left is going to make it, they should be prepared to hear some facts to go along with it - something more than just their "talking points."

thomas.wong1986 says

“The relevant features of Nazism that made it so bad had nothing to do with socialism or anything else on it’s early party platform. It was it’s militarism, it’s totalitarianism, and it’s ethic hatred.”
Central, South, and Eastern Europe was all this and much more long long before Nazis came to be. They didnt invent hatred, they only used what was already there. Ethnic hatred goes back thousands of years in these regions ever since the Turks tried to invade most of than was Catholic Europe.

This is true. Western Europe in particular, has only been a relatively peaceful place for 20 years (when the Berlin Wall fell).

Paralithodes says

My response to you is likewise a continued response: It is a useless argument, but if someone on the left is going to make it, they should be prepared to hear some facts to go along with it - something more than just their “talking points.”

I agree. Comparing the movement behind Sarah Palin or "red states" to Nazism is equally absurd.

MarkInSF says

Paralithodes says

My response to you is likewise a continued response: It is a useless argument, but if someone on the left is going to make it, they should be prepared to hear some facts to go along with it - something more than just their “talking points.”

I agree. Comparing the movement behind Sarah Palin or “red states” to Nazism is equally absurd.

Sarah Palin is hot. Hitler was not.
Hitler was a great orator. Sarah Palin mine as well be reading a jar of salad dressing.