We also need a racism thread. Also, a script that automatically moves all of Trinca's posts into it.

i LOL'ed :) 

In his honour :P 

how about fuck you :p 

I was joking man. Freedom of speech - YEAH!!! 

SO


FUCKING


ANGRY 

What's happening ! 

Wanna try a little bit o' Italy?

Yeah, I didn't think so... 

 

 

40 years ago the United States had things like investigative journalism, freedom of speech, a constitution. Today, our "news" is mostly American Idol chatter and celebrity gossip and very superficial political news.

Today, disclosing "secret" information and the government has no regard for, say, what the US constitution says about freedom of speech, due process. Laws are written by "regulation", not passed by Congress. Wars are conducted without a declaration of war [although Vietnam was an undeclared war and so was the Gulf War]. All information about the conduct during the war is a state secret.

Revealing said info leads to brute force bully behavior.

The United States is sure acting a lot like China. Who are we to criticize China's censorship of things like Tienanmen Square and massive web censorship and jailing people arbitrarily without a trial.

There is a big and powerful religion that worships at the altar of "big government" and Washington culture and citizens must sacrifice freedoms and must not know government secrets. The Fed even sought to keep spending of the bank bailout and stimulus money secret [it failed, and several large companies like General Electric, Ford, Toyota received several billion $$$].

Both parties are fully immersed in this Washington culture.

And this system of government shrouded in secrecy, behaving in my opinion corruptly, free from oversight, waging a permanent war in Afghanistan for unclear reasons, with the ability to incarcerate or detain without trial is a kabillion dollars in debt.

And is on a collision course with a massive financial crisis unseen in the history of mankind ...

The immovable object --- a behemoth government deeper in true debt [including future obligations] than the wealth of the entire Earth times 3 -- is going to collide with the irresistable force of utter lack of credit and bankruptcy.

Part of me is very concerned about what will happen when this train runs off the track. Greece got bailed out by Germany. The Greeks protested reforms in the streets for months and resisted all change.

The entire world couldn't begin to bailout the United States. And yet, whatever happens, the sun always rises and years will go by. But it is quite puzzling how this all will resolve itself. 

The United State (singular) has no party system, not even a two party system. The State has a hydra, and either of its heads are 'elected' to serve its purpose. It serves no purpose other than to take social power and replace it with State power.

It is certainly true that the business of gov't, in maintaining freedom and security, and to secure those rights is to make recourse to justice costless, easy and informal; but the State, on the contrary, is primarily concerned wih injustice, and its function is to maintain a regime of injustice; hence, as we see daily, its disposition is to put justice as far as possible out of reach, and to make the effort after justice as costly and difficult as it can. One may put it in a word that while gov't is by its nature concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by nature concered with the administration of law--law, which the State itself manufacturers for the service of ts own primary ends. Therefore an appeal to the State, based on the ground of justice, is futile in any circumstances, for whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State's own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting in as great injustice as that which it pretends to correct, or as a rule, greater. 

 

@jt

I think the quote "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" is a better description.

The US governmental system is tragically dysfunctional and without a mechanism to change it.

I imagine the next few years the federal government is going to spend like crazy. The one misguided party will push for unfunded tax cuts and the other misguided party will push for unfunded social spending.

They will compromise and we will get BOTH!

In a few years, the US economy and government debt will finally hit that last point, where some sort chain reaction credit meltdown occurs over the course of 90 days or so ... and no one will be willing to lend the US government money.

What will happen at that point remains a mystery, but if somewhat like Greece there will be protests of some sort against who knows what.

But then, like now --- nobody is actually running the show. 

It seems more likely that the State is trying to take power, albeit incompetently. What do you think regulation is? The State decides that x industry isn't running their business the way the State wants it to be run, and passes legislation to force them to run it the way the State see's fit. Taxes are nothing more than theft. 

It would have to be incompetence.

The reason is ... the current state of affairs cannot last much longer (a few years at best). When government credit runs dry, the next stage is "printing money" (yes this will happen, it actually started last year when the Federal Reserve pulled $1 trillion out of thin air to buy securities to stabilize the market --- peeving China a bit).

That will kill corporate investment and the collapse of the economic system ensues.

Any system that's actions lead to the demise of the system by definition must be incompetent.

I'm just saying that if it is deliberate then the goal is self-defeating and shortsighted.

Taxes are nothing more than theft

Not really. Government isn't bad, they provide the public resources and the public goods to support the best interests of citizens (safe water, safe food supply).

But the US government suffers from a massive inefficiency of scale. The sheer size is absolutely unmanageable and gets a low return on investment. It could be several times more efficient, but the structure of the government and the administrative overhead of that structure was not designed to support the massive size of the federal government.

And our political system -- as you implied with your book reference -- is a duopoly not designed to allow any self-correcting behavior.

Governments in Europe are far smaller in comparison, more able to change, managed far better and closer to the citizens. 

When America collapses, will any of you Euro peoples let me room with you? 

The fed has been printing money since the U.S. went off the gold standard, in the 70's. That's nothing new.

Taxes have to be theft. I, and many other people, did not consent to give the United States gov't money from my paycheck, plus the plethora of other places the State dips it's greedy hands into. There's nothing that a government can provide that private business couldn't. 

We can go on a big pub crawl :) 

As much as I understand your anger and support your course - or rather WL's - would you please stop hammering Mastercard and Paypal so I can complete my Steam purchase? For I also see a point in the notion that these rage attacks may well prove counterproductive on the underlying debate in the long run. 

Or redirect the ddos attacks at Steam, because they're cleary incapable of making their paypal option work flawlessly. 

Attacking Paypal, Amazon because they stopped/closed WL related services is dumb. They stopped because of threats from the gov't. ddos defense.gov or something. 

negke wants it and he wants it now! Just get to a store and buy the game there? Has the added benefit of less DRM. So you could probably play it even if Steam itself was denialing its service to you.

jt_, you are kinda dumb. 

 

There's nothing that a government can provide that private business couldn't.

That's not really true. Private business has the need to make a profit. The government is about providing public services.

Roads, vaccinations, power plants, space programs, police, the legal system, libraries ... many of these things have no direct approach for a profit angle so no private business would ever have incentive to provide them.

You are correct in the sense that most of these things could be contracted or outsourced to private business and get far more bang for the buck. The US government is grossly wasteful.

One reason the United States is, in the short term, a lost cause is due to isolation.

In Europe, people get to see the way that other governments do things all the time.

In the United States, ignorance rules and the "way things are" is an institution.

To save the United States political system, you'd have to break the country into 8-15 pieces to get it functional again.

In the USA, people are numbed into thinking that the one party and that the other party have all the 2 points of the same view that are possible. It is reinforced in all news media.

And both parties are so very wrong, it is like watching 2 drunk people argue and issue without understanding both of them are absolutely wrong.

For instance, one party is "for" big government and the other party is "against" it. What about the idea of an efficient government?

And in the quest to fix the economy, they argue tax policy or monetary policy. But the real issue is no corporation has any interest in building factories in the US due to red tape, our legal system which fleeces large employers -- and since we have free trade with other countries .. no corporation needs to build anything here.

Taxes are theft

Money is an imaginary currency. So how can it be theft when it doesn't really exist to begin with?

Putting that aside, there is a lot of truth that the government is super-tax hungry because it is totally out of control. Rather than do an actual tax increase, they add backdoor fees to everything from phone service, car rentals, airlines increasing the cost of everything.

Taxes in some sense are a necessary evil. Yes people could survive without a government ... just look at Somalia ... 

But they also waste a lot of money.

How about this for a question - is it worth putting troops in Afghanistan? I mean that costs a lot of money. Put it also provides a lot of employment for starters..... If fuels the economy because its a collaboration of the usages of an awful lot of government and charitable services.

Do we have the right to pass judgement on the enemy there? Possibly - as a collective, western governments are playing god with it. We are a united front and military superpower, and we can judge you on our moral standards because no-one's gonna stop us.

How does a nation fight a war in the 21st century? With our wallets. Our Value Added Tax on purchased items (almost everything we buy in he shops or on-line or from public services) here in the UK is about to go from 17.5% to 20%. Our governments will mess around doing this and that, rebuilding roads, putting people in prison, paying doctors huge sums of money to do their jobs etc., and they will spend a shed-load on the military.

What would happen if they didn't do that?

There would be less employment for starters. Our government would probably give the unemployed load of money so that they can still spend and keep the economy rolling.

I wonder if less people would get killed by terrorists? Or more?