>Yes, and I'd prefer to live in a land of gumdrop trees and the big rock candy mountain, but we live in the world we have and the world we have has nukes. I am frankly a lot more afraid of the ones in Pakistan than the ones-to-be in Iran. I'm not afraid of the Pakistani nukes leaving the country on a rocket, but in a cargo container. I believe in interfering in their internal affairs in *any* way necessary to keep that from happening.

Pakistan must be an interesting country... and they surely live in interesting times.

>As to Reagan ... if you believe the perpetuation of the USSR would have been a good thing then Reagan was definitely a bad thing. I don't and he wasn't. Not a big fan in some areas, but on the Evil Empire he had it right. Remember which way people ran when the wall went down and how quick the statues came down.

He got them down the wrong way and for the wrong reasons - and some other analyses mention that the system there has already crumbled and would fall by itself. But that would have taken away the joys of victory, wouldn't it.

>I don't know where you were from 1980 - 88 but as to the arms race petering out that just wasn't the case.

1980 - 88? Aren't those the Reagan-Thatcher years? That's when the rearmament began. It was about to peter out, but no, the country wanted someone who'd slam a fist on the table. And who could spin anything into a victory.

>Everyone was armed to the teeth, so it wasn't about throw weight or the number of missles anymore, but it was about a hundered proxy wars so that the missles wouldn't fly. And the subtext was about whether or not the West would accept that this totalitarian abomination would continue.

Whereas its own totalitarian abominations, like Pinochet, Reza and who knows how many others were perfectly fine, they were our thugs.

My apologies if I'm mixing rants here, but it's the totalitarian==USSR==socialism mantra that mixes them, trying to paint the image of these things being not just properties of each other (yes, USSR was totalitarian in many ways, and yes USSR was a socialist country, but that doesn't mean it was totalitarian because it was socialist, it was actually a contradiction in itself). Actually, I'm announcing Dragan's rule: whoever uses the totalitarian/etatist nature of Stalinism as a representative of socialism, either loses or gives me the equal chance to apply Spanish inquisition as a valid representative of Christianity, and fascism/colonialism as a valid representative of capitalism.

Tanj, too long for a tagline.

>Carter's peopel - notabley Zbiggy - accepted the advance of Soviet power as inevitable. Reagan - and good ol' Bill Casey - didn't believe it. They upped the ante and pushed the Soviets into bankruptcy (albeit without knowing how sucessful they were being.) But don't think for a minute the USSR just fell - it was pushed. Historical inevitablity wasn't so inevitable when the right people refused to believe it.

They could have dragged along for a number of years more - the push just made it happen a bit earlier. Stronger pushes didn't do it before.

Just don't dismiss good ol' Zbig too early. He invented the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, just to give the USSR their own Vietnam: http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm; he knew the effects of soldiers coming home from a pointless war upon the populace at home. Which means he appreciated the importance of masses ;).

>Countries that are in debt forever are more in debt because of the Swiss bank accounts of their leaders than the predatory lending policies of banks - who have a vested interest in their prosperity as it is as consumers that they are most valuable.

And the vested interest (and interest upon interest) of the lenders is that the governments there are pliable - easiest to do if they are bribed and corrupt. So, step one: start a few centuries in advance, do a bit of slaughter, install a religion strong on obedience, rule them as long as profitable, make sure they remain poor. Step two, give them independence officially, but make sure that the borders are drawn in a way which will guarantee decades of warfare; make sure their infrastructure still depends a lot on you. Step three, sell them weapons, give them loans for that, make sure they waste it, so they won't be able to develop their resources without foreign investments. Which means you'll own them again, without actually having the trouble and odium of being a colonial ruler - all the benefits, almost none of the responsibilities. When a finger is pointed, redirect to local corrupt officials. If they're too corrupt, arrange a coup, which buys you at least a decade until it's discovered that these new guys don't have Swiss bank accounts, they opted for Cayman Islands.

>These debts ARE worthless. That is why the banks keep restructuring the debt and taking advantage of whatever accounting fiddles they can to write off the losses and still keep the balls in the air.

Restructuring the debt is not writeoff. It's the "you still owe us, but under different conditions - lower payment rate over a longer period". Translates into "we'll take even more money from you, it will just take longer".

>What guarantees the sanctity of their property are the huge bribes they pay to the local governments you want us to respect.

OK, so why is Argentina so much better off since it told IMF to get lost?

>Used to be the royal navy or the Marines would discourage nationalization but now it has to be more subtle. You seem to think if the debtor nations refuse to pay you can take them to some court that will make all right.

Then why don't they do it? These loans were stacked against them since the get go - many have realized how exactly were they screwed, at least after removing the previous set of someone's thugs, so why don't they just default on the debts? Why don't they just nationalize their assets? There ain't no court.

>>>Exactly how do you get nations that are actively working to establish Sha'ria to sign on to international law?
>>
>>You get your best diplomats to work on it. You lead by example. C'mon, who am I to teach you diplomacy?
>
>The first example you must set is to show them you are not an idiot.

That's why I said "your best diplomats", not the cause of this thread.

> if you try to talk about our concepts of law and human rights to someone who believes that by definition any law that is not Sha'ria is evil you've got a lot of negotiating to do. I don't know who the "best diplomats" are you have in mind but any that I can think of know that. The others never got outside a classroom at the Woodrow Wilson school in Princeton.

I don't know whom you have, but you should. Are you saying the US are thin on good diplomats?

>Not sure that is an effective response. i am talking specifically about personal responsibility vs "I wash my hands from making judgments I will leave it to the Authorities"

Who's the person with the responsibility, you, me? I have zero jurisdiction in international affairs, and you don't have much more. Isn't it the principle in this country to elect a bunch of gals and guys and leave the decision making to them? Yell at them from time to time when you don't like what they do and that's it.

As a country having a responsibility...? I'm not a country, and also...


>>>Making decisions involves responsibility. Not acting is also a decision, but it is easier to deny responsibility.
>>
>>So you HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY? Wow. And that's the responsibility to react to whatever any government (not of the "our thug" persuasion, but of "their thug") does against its citizens and neighbors, but you don't have any responsibility to undo your own wrongs?

...you didn't answer this at all. Not a favorite question, but therein lies the substance of our dispute.

>>>Those are not the only two options. The golden rule sounds great but it is bumper sticker morality. If I were to try to kill someone's friend, I would want them to not stop me. Does that mean if they try to kill my friend I should not stop them?
>>
>>You may try to reduce it to a bumper sticker soundbite, but it won't go away from the foundations of Judeo-Christian culture.
>
>But it will continue as a platitude rather than a methology. The problem in if someone is doing something that you believe must be stopped you cannot simply say "Well, I wouldn't want *him* to stop *me* so I will do unto him as I would have him do unto me.

Why would you not want to be stopped from doing something you think is wrong when done by someone else? "I wouldn't wand him to stop me, because I want to do something of the kind myself"?

Probably the reason there are so many con artists in this country, and words "caveat emptor" must be somewhere in the Constitution. Nobody complains much because they don't abhor the deed - they'd like to preserve the right to attempt it themselves. They only complain when they're at the receiving end, and even then I've noticed some reservedness, as if they're trying not to change anything on principle, they just want this particular guy jailed.

Is that the Christianity or what?

> It is a moral cop out.

So instead we have a morally bold "we, as a country, will go on doing _this_ and _this_, because we don't see how anybody would imagine being able to stop us".

>>And you've asked your question the wrong way. It's "If I were to try to kill someone's friend, I should expect to be killed myself". Once you accept that, it's easier to deal with the rest.
>>
>If you accept that, then you can easily see that if someone were to try to kill your friend he should expect to be killed.

Yep, that's called self-defense and is legal everywhere. Also, saving a friend's life would get you leniency in most of the courts. Only the post-festum counter murder would get you at least locked up, specially if it's against the family; most jurisdictions don't look gladly upon a vendetta, not in its original blood-for-blood version.

>There were a whole lot of pretty ideological Communists who really did believe in something, who knows what they might have accomplished. But it wasn't the intervention that derailed that, but Lenin who had his own ideas about power.

And he was given ammunition by the whites, whereas they proved every point he made (about capitalism never ceding power peacefully, not after elections, not after a coup, so we must have a dictatorship by proletariat). He may have been sidelined too, or made into a propaganda tool without actual power. Imagine if Mahno's ideas were spread more widely instead.

> And the fact that so many of the Whites were scum didn't help. Russia was a prisoner of its history, so I guess I can see why the Marxist view of historical masses and helpless humans caught on.

I'm amazed over and over how it, as a method, fits with each time travel thing; practically all of them explain the aberrations in the timeline statistically, by history sorting itself out and things remaining the same with minor local differences... except in the crucial moments where the butterfly would have some effect. Asimov, Silverberg. The SF which tackles the matter differently, is, as a rule, comic: the Return to Future series, what The Hitchhiker's Guide says about the matter.

As to the inevitability of outcomes, I'm not that sure. A contradiction grows and builds pressure; it will have to burst somewhere - but the difference between possibilities of various outcomes, and their respective probabilities, may not be big. The marxist thinkers who explain certain outcomes as a direct result of the historic circumstances are usually right about the cause - but that was not a 1:1 relationship; the cause has produced that result, but it could have produced another, for a simple matter of people's perception of things; it's a material force which could have been swayed by an event.

For instance, a rock star has a bad day and overdoses because of simply being out of whack all day. The history of rock is changed. Now, given the number of stars and doses, it could happen to any one of them on any given day (which is the material reality), but which one of them, and when, will misstep, is practically random. And rock stars aren't exactly masses.

>And American bankers aren't the only team in the big leagues. The common language that drives international banking is money. That is one of the fiew shared cultural values.

Right, I didn't imply American - money is a whore anyway, knows no borders.

>>By Internet rules, you lost. You brought Hitler into dispute, twice.
>
><g> At least it was not to compare a current day politician with him because he voted against an increase of funding for some feel-good program <s>

Nor because another one compared will to talk with policy of appeasement.

Thinking this over, I wonder how much of that appeasement was done in the hope that Hitler will protect the West from the Spectre of Communism? He was up there on the frontier, more or less - the countries between Germany and USSR were stepped over in each war anyone ever had in that direction. I think there was some political pressure (from here too - there were important businesses, like IBM, Coca-Cola and who knows who else who had a lot of interest, and subsidiaries, in Germany) to leave him alone. Charles Lindbergh wasn't exactly an exception.

Which, if it was so, then makes Lenin right - capitalism would never cede power peacefully, not after elections, nor after a coup. It'd rather unleash nazism, hoping that it will spend itself on neutralizing Communism, than letting Communism become just a failed experiment. I think it was actually scared that it may work.

>>Or do you mean that we should watch for a silly illiterate guy with a fake Texan attitude?
>
>Yeah, Bush - Hitler . No doubt. Spot on. Is Perry writing your material is or that straight from Daily Kos

It's a weekend. I'm in no mood for this sort of games. The last guy who tried this on me was JVP and I never spoke with him again (actually, he tried it on Mike Helland, and when I tried to check whether he understood the implication - he did and then said something worse to me). If you think I can't think for myself, why are we talking? I usually take such allegations as an insult, but, it's a weekend.