The 10 scariest words in English

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
Did you join the back-to-the-Palaeolithic brigade lately? Rejecting the exploitation of people is rejecting civilization.

Heck, you're supposed to be a capitalist. The reason capitalism is better than communism is that it's more efficient at exploiting resources, including people.

I hate it when consies start sounding like eco-hippies. If you have to be evil, why not do it with a modicum of consistency?

quibble - a capitalist is not the opposite of a socialist. A capitalist is someone who owns capital.

a supporter of market economies, the capitalist system, etc can be so for numerous reasons - some are utiltarians, but many, if not most, are not.

[chequita guevara]

Yeah, most are brainwashed or just greedy.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

quibble - a capitalist is not the opposite of a socialist. A capitalist is someone who owns capital.

You're technically right, but the word is not uncommonly used the way I used it here. I can't think of any other word for a supporter of market economics ATM.

a supporter of market economies, the capitalist system, etc can be so for numerous reasons - some are utiltarians, but many, if not most, are not.

Supporting an economic system on other grounds than it delivers good results is pretty nutty if you ask me, but as long as they're against the commies they're not all bad.

[lord of the mark]

Lockeans and neolockeans like Robert Nozick support it cause its inherently JUST - since its they see people as having a natural right to the product of their labor, and by extension a right to freely contract. Nozick spends a good deal of time addressing the question of rights over land - i cant recall all that - look, its not my position, but its an important one.

Others, esp some neocons, espouse capitalism on utilitarian grounds, but on other than economic grounds. They see it as most compatible with political freedom, and with certain personal virtues they like.

[Kuciwalker]

The neocon reasons aren't incompatible with those of utility. I support it because of both.

[lord of the mark]

Lockeans and neolockeans like Robert Nozick support it cause its inherently JUST - since its they see people as having a natural right to the product of their labor, and by extension a right to freely contract. Nozick spends a good deal of time addressing the question of rights over land - i cant recall all that - look, its not my position, but its an important one.

Others, esp some neocons, espouse capitalism on utilitarian grounds, but on other than economic grounds. They see it as most compatible with political freedom, and with certain personal virtues they like.

but this is starting to degenerate into a cap vs com thread, and so we should refrain.

[Last Conformist]

Lockeans and neolockeans like Robert Nozick support it cause its inherently JUST - since its they see people as having a natural right to the product of their labor, and by extension a right to freely contract.

I believe I have already explained why natural rights is a stupid idea on a level with God.

[Flubber]

The thing that is suprising me is how little it seems that people are banding together to assist each other. If 20,000 people are in a place, I'm assuming that between them they could wrap 5 or 6 bodies and put them somewhere.

With the reported rapes and violence in places with a LOT of people , is it that they are just so cowed by aggressive people with guns??

I understand breaking into stores for food and water so I don't even consider that to be lawlessness but it seems the reports are indicating widespread violence-- I would have thought there would be enogh "average folks" to forcibly dissuade that behavior


Also, the pictures I see of NO in particular show large chunks of the city that now appear to be above water and without major damages. Is there no one there with some stores of food.... because I haven't heard much in the way of positive stories from among the victims themselves. very little about victim helping victim or people taking positive steps to improve their lot.

At a very basic level, I wonder if you boil the water would it be acceptable ( I appreciate it might increase the risk of cancer or something). Don't anyone have gas barbecues that work??

and before anyone jumps on me, I am not blaming the victims at all-- they have undergone a major shock and injuries-- I'm just suprised that there have not been more indications of people banding together to help each other out. For all I know it might just be that the media is not stressing those elements

[chequita guevara]

The media is too scared to get in there. I hate to say it, but even before reports of violence and what not, they were too scared to hang around lower class blacks. That's just my guess though.

At a very basic level, I wonder if you boil the water would it be acceptable ( I appreciate it might increase the risk of cancer or something)

I would say no. That water has oil and sewage in it.

I'd drink my own piss first.

[MOBIUS]

Evicted from the other thread...

Originally posted by SpencerH
Do you yourself write for the liberal-whiner blogs or just scour them for pathetic comments to use as your own?

How about a former senior advisor to Clinton?

Feel free to discredit my 'liberal-whiner blog'

No president has allocated the billions of dollars it would take to build a levee/pumping system that would have survived Katrina, nor could one ever do so. The small decrease in funding (while foolish in hindsight) would not have had an effect.

And you have the cheek to call me ignorant...?

A bit of research is required on your part...

Your ignorance of the National Guard and its employment is simply pathetic and unworthy of further comment.

Oh sorry, their I was thinking it was called the National Guard - not the International Guard...

Their primary purpose is homeland security, which is a bit difficult to carry out when they are in Iraq!

After 3 days, New Orleans is in anarchy - part of the reason is might be the fact that the best command and control units of the La NG are currently in Iraq with a significant proportion of their assets...

"Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our people," said Lt. Andy Thaggard, a spokesman for the Mississippi National Guard, which has a brigade of more than 4,000 troops in central Iraq. Louisiana also has about 3,000 Guard troops in Baghdad."

[MOBIUS]

People are going to try their best to avoid reading this unless I post it in full...

"No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

By Sidney Blumenthal

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

An aerial view of the New Orleans airport underwater.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
What floored me though, is the media is actually talking about race & class! Conservative Slate magazine was even the first to raise this issue in the mainstream media.

Che, you just give creedence to DinoDoc's argument above when you characterize Slate as conservative. Slate is relentlessly liberal -- not progressive, but liberal in the old-fashioned sense. Calling any magazine right of Counterpunch "conservative" damages your credibility, not the magazine's.

[chequita guevara]

The only articles I ever saw quoted from Slate were always conservative. I made an assumption that they were the anti-Salon.

[Guynemer]

Christ no.

I wouldn't necessarily describe Slate as liberal (Salon, definitely), but it is most assuredly NOT conservative.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
The only articles I ever saw quoted from Slate were always conservative. I made an assumption that they were the anti-Salon.

No, they're actually pretty liberal in the sense that I just described. They're relentlessly anti-Bush, for one thing; they're also highly critical of corporate malfeasance and fairly environmentalist (though much more in the Sierra Club/Nature Conservancy mode than the Earth First/PETA mode). The founding editor, Michael Kinlsey, left The New Republic for Slate when TNR moved right and became the house organ for the DLC. It's politics are well to the right of yours, but it's a pretty interesting and thoughtful magazine. I read it and Salon daily, and find them very similar, though Salon is obviously farther left.

EDIT: Per Guynemer's comment, above, I would describe Slate as liberal and Salon as progressive.