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Total number of comments: 10 (since 2013-11-28 16:32:54)

fictional author

Showing comments 10 - 1
Page: 1

  • A Tale of Two Bombings: Libya too Weak, Egypt too Strong
    • CCD 07/26/2013 at 4:22 am

      You say it is paternalism run amok. That is exactly what so many children scream at their parents when the parents try to reform destructive behavior. What evidence do you have that the voters even understand what maximizing their utility would look like?
      Then even if a voter could understand what maximizing his/her utility would look like what evidence do you have that he her could apply the proper strategies to achieve the goal?
      These are problems before we even get to the problem of political systems getting hijacked by the rich to preform for the rich.

    • CCD 07/25/2013 at 4:14 am with 1 replies

      Yes politics is about marshalling resources and applying to get something done. Dreaming and wisshing for something is the first step. Sadly the irrational masses often do not have the intelligence to know what is in their short term intrests and what is in their long term intrest. But if they could understand the difference between long term nd short term they would often be stuck in a dilema.
      Dictatorship, Oiligarcy, Democracy, and Anarchy all usually suck. Sadly none of them have to suck. The key is skillful leadership, as opposed to skillfully exploitive leadership.
      A balance of power between various institutions seems to be important in achieving the correct kind of leadership. But that is food for another feast.
      We in America take it for granted that representitive democracy produces the best results over the long term. I take issue with that. When I was in an American public school we were taught to question authority to be able to avoid the mistakes of the Germans several decades earlier.
      Unfortunately the word authortiy was not very well defined.
      I think that for most students authority was understood to mean Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. I think that authority needs to be redefined as everything that you ever thought that you knew (know).

    • CCD 07/24/2013 at 6:30 pm

      Rational voters could be created but it should be obvious to any rational voter that it would be completely against the economic intrests of the rulers in any capitalist country to creat rational voters

    • CCD 07/24/2013 at 9:05 am

      Training in democracy? Why should we train people abroad to repeat our mistakes? Far more important is training them not to torture, to allow the expression of contraversial ideas, to create a system of fair trials, and to impose term limits on political and economic decision makers, as just a few examples.

  • Iraq: 92-Year-Old Iraqi Man marries 22-Year-Old Woman
    • CCD 07/21/2013 at 5:51 am

      "Would the comments be so benign if a 92 year old woman married a 22 year old man." Why should they be different?
      For example, Liz and husband number xy (unsolved*).

      *xy unsolved is a tv crime program. The forrunner for Entertainment Today.

    • CCD 07/20/2013 at 4:45 am

      And that concludes are episode of Main Street Media.

  • Bradley Manning Explains his Leaks in his own Voice in new Tape (Goodman)
    • fictional author 03/14/2013 at 6:07 pm

      Bradley Manning might only be a PFC but he has shown much more intelligence than all 4 million members of the DOD put together. He should not have to answer to them. They should have to answer to Bradely Manning.
      That military is not OUR military. It is the military of the Confederate States of America.

  • Harlem Shake as Protest in Tunis
    • fictional author 02/28/2013 at 12:19 pm

      I find it interesting that the Salafis used the issue of Palestine to oppose the dance, an issue on which the secular left and the Islamic right actually agree on. I wonder where they learned to mix apples and oranges?

  • Juan Cole: Real Petraeus Failure Was Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan (Democracy Now!)
    • fictional author 11/12/2012 at 5:34 pm

      What I think is classified.

  • America's Coming Space Wars (McCoy)
    • fictional author 11/09/2012 at 2:42 pm

      I get IT now. Those brown triangular flying craft that keep cicling our airbase are not from anotheer planet, or even anothher dimension. No, they are machines from the human future that have traveled back in time to make sure that this time around we do not exterminate ourselves.
      I do wonder why they care. They are after all just machines.
      But if these machines have Artificial Intellegence does it mean that they have more emphaty than humans or does it mean that they just want to sadistically see us humans suffer longer?

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