Okay, now that I've got some spare time to slog through Viking's awesome volume of posts.
A wolf, like nearly any other mammal in existence, will rarely if ever eat more than it NEEDS.
Wrong. Wolves do, in fact, eat a lot more than they need. At mealtime, they don't eat all they NEED, they eat all they CAN. Because sometimes they go for as long as two weeks without a meal. The same for lions. The alpha males eat first, and most. At the expense of the other lions. Almost all intelligent species are like this; they eat as much as they can, and try to stash away whatever they cannot eat. Greed has a great deal of survival value; it is not learned, it is instinctive.
It doesn't help you survive as an ape to steal food from the other members of your tribe until they starve.
When there isn't enough food to go around, what do we humans do?
We go to war against each other.
Soviet Russia's five year plans... From producing almost no steel to becoming one of the world's leading producers of steel in just under 15 years, a feat that took the US about 80 years. It was successful.
A broken clock is still right twice a day.
No thing or being in this world is so totally screwed up that it does absolutely everything totally wrong. Except rap music, that's the only exception. Yes, Russia beat us at a few things, such as steel. But the U.S. beat Russia at most other things.
Oh, by the way, how is it not forced labor (wage-slavery) to tell a person, as in the US industrial revolution, work your 16 hour shift for less that $2 an hour or I'll fire you and you can starve to death?
Because in the U.S., the workers have always had the freedom to walk away and go get another job. And that, in the end, is what they did. They told their employers "we will not work for you until working conditions improve".
On a side not, communists, socialist, anarchists, and the entire-left wing, tend to have hirer IQ's. By nearly 15 points actually.
Wrong. Intelligence has no known relationship to political bent. I've read a wide variety of studies on the subject, and they all reach widely varying conclusions. One link I just read suggested that the world's smartest people are LIBERTARIANS. Libertarians are neither left-wing, nor right-wing. They're a mix of moderate liberal and conservative ideas. In my opinion, that's the way it should be--the smartest people are going to be willing to depart from cookie-cutter leftist and rightist philosophies whenever circumstances warrant.
On a side note: I really wish the natives hadn't been destroyed. I think they would've taken, as they had been prior to their annihilation, a completely different sociological evolutionary path. Funny, kinda'; to peaceful to survive... Really unfortunate.
For a system to be practical, it must be able to protect itself from known threats against it. The Native Americans failed.
Addenum: also, they were willing to use terrorist methods in wartime, so the Hell with them.
Largest single number of protestors at any one time in the history of humanity.
And when the protests fail? Nothing. Americans are accepting Bush's leadership. There are lots of insurgencies and revolutions happening around the world right now--why not in America???
Yes, and no one talks about the thousands of dissenting soldiers sent to jail for refusing to make war in Vietnam... Maybe the soldiers don't want to go to prison?
Wasn't talking about the soldiers' viewpoint here. I was talking about George Bush's viewpoint. Greenpeace was all up in my grille about how people would do the right thing more often if the few "good" people actually got a chance to sit next to their fellow citizens and coach them to defy authority. Not true. The majority of Americans are telling George Bush that they want the troops out of Iraq.
Bush is not listening. I've got the King of All Counterexamples there. Bush is staying on his course, and while American citizens are all
about it, they're accepting it.
Now, without government assistance, and with the increasing cost of living, how long do you think I'm going to have to work for $8 an hour until I can get into college? So how long am I being forced to essentially do the same job? 'Cause face it, pumping gas, or making food, or cleaning, or whatever, is all essentially the same job.
No. They are all different jobs. They just pay the same.
While I was in college, I met a whole lot of students who did in fact put themselves through college by working 8$-an-hour jobs. The difference between you and them is they didn't
about it. They put their noses to the grindstones and did the work. Now they have diplomas. And backbones. Certainly more backbone than me--my folks paid for my college ed.
Um... Bull. Cuba: according to the UN, one of the best health care systems in the world, no poverty line, no unemployment, one of the highest standard of living in any non-industrialized country, a GDP growth rate 3 times that of our own. A dash of democratic institution, and you've got yourself a pretty good model for communism.
Same reply as earlier: broken clock. Living standards are higher in
any part of the Free World (except Detroit), and the Free World DOES have a great deal more than "a dash" of democratic institution. Good model for Communism? No. Good model for totalitarianism.
Habitat for humanity... Volunteer numbers comparable to many large scale construction companies. Maybe you don't want to do them, but why? Is it really because of dislike for the activity
As a member of Boy Scouts of America, I did plenty. Hell, I've planted more trees in my lifetime than any three Greenpeace activists (the environmental group, not the CFC member). Did I enjoy it? Yes. But eventually I realized I was merely enjoying it because everyone else around me wanted me to, so I hung up the shovel, put the merit badges away, and started putting more effort into molding my own life instead of letting other people manipulate me.
1/4 of the American population worries about getting enough food to subsist properly for the day.
Just about everybody worries about accidents at nuclear power plants. Nobody worries about hepatitis.
Guess which one kills more people......? I've got lots more examples of this, but that one should be sufficient. Human worries are irrational. When I looked up
actual malnutrition problems on the Web, I got indeterminate results, because Americans are kind of crazy--prone to overeating, prone to obsessive-compulsive dieting, prone to eating what they like instead of what they should. In short, most of America's nutrition problems appear to be self-inflicted by poor choices rather than by poor circumstances.
Phew. That took a lotta work. Frankly, however, this post was a lot shorter than I had expected it to be.
