While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Golden1Knight]

The luck of the Americans is that they do not have compulsory recruitment. If my country engage in a war, I would be forced to participate. Something similar occurs in Israel, by what I heard.

 

[Symphony D.]

The curse of Americans is that regardless of the thing in question they will always be asking "What can we do?" and more likely shouting "We have to do something!" despite the fact that there are plenty of circumstances where nothing can be done and plenty more where anything short of doing something absolutely perfectly will make the situation in question worse. "Let's open-endedly invade the Middle East again!" is definitely in the latter category.

If we don't intervene, we get a China. If we do, we get a Vietnam. And either way, thanks Obama. >=(

No, if we don't intervene, we get the Middle East and still have China. If we do, we get a Vietnam and still have China. There is nothing particularly impressive about the Islamic State. At present in our rogue's gallery it rates as if Egghead had somehow wound up in Christopher Nolan's Batman films.

 

[Amon Savag]

the creation & maintenance of a free market requires more state intervention than most of us on this planet are comfortable with

The free market requires no creation. It exists naturally. This NES forum for example, is a free market of ideas. Intervention would destroy the freedom.

 

[m.t.cicero]

This forum is unmoderated? News to me.

 

[das]

But those moderators are not appointed by the government!

 

[Symphony D.]

I would support the American military invading this forum.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Advertisement: It's happening!!!

The free market requires no creation. It exists naturally. This NES forum for example, is a free market of ideas. Intervention would destroy the freedom.

Hear, hear.

 

[Nuka-sama]

The Iraq War was about liberating oil supplies to reduce the global price of oil. We did not go to Iraq to kill terrorists or stop terrorism or make the world a safer place, although that was how the public was sold on the affair. Nothing about the rise of ISIS or Al Qaeda in Iraq or any of the other groups has any reflection on the success, or lack thereof, of our policy objectives in Iraq. The intended mission was in fact accomplished (and also totally unnecessary).

Well at least we did what we came in there to do. Rack that up as another win for America

Though to be fair, I guess we should stop calling it Iraq War II: Quest for Freedom

 

[North King]

Pretty sure the default state of humanity is less a free market and more a barter economy.

Though traditional economies are more sustainable so I could understand a desire to return to them.

 

[Symphony D.]

Though to be fair, I guess we should stop calling it Iraq War II: Quest for Freedom

I hear FreedomQuest is the next big YOGSCAST Minecraft thing. They previewed it and everything.

 

[Amon Savag]

The free market of NES is such as there is no coercion or force requiring us to spend our time here. We voluntarily agree to the rules of the forum, voluntarily agree to the rules of the individual NESes, and we may stop participating at any time we wish. A free market is a market where there is no gun pointed at us telling us that we can't voluntarily trade with people under terms of our own that we would otherwise mutually agree to.

 

[Lord of Elves]

I'm going to go back in time and throttle Adam Smith because I suppose that is about as likely to happen as free market uber alles advocates ever going away.

 

[Amon Savag]

Pretty sure the default state of humanity is less a free market and more a barter economy.

I cannot think of a more free economy than this.

 

[JohannaK]

The problem of the US is that it is like a hotel guest trying to fix what he perceives as the rest of the guests' problems, even if they have nothing to do with him.

 

[Thlayli]

I'm definitely open to hearing what is worse than the active pursuit of genocide. Yes, ISIS isn't attempting to unlock the seventh seal and release a horde of demons into the world, but it's hard to imagine things getting much worse.

 

[Azale]

The free market requires no creation. It exists naturally. This NES forum for example, is a free market of ideas. Intervention would destroy the freedom.

I could say lots of stuff to rebut this, but read some Ha Joon-Chang or Karl Polanyi and see if you're convinced otherwise. No reputable economic historian (that I know of!) agrees that there was ever a naturally existing "free market" as you mean it, and typically the exact opposite is implied (that it requires gross amounts of state intervention to construct the necessary conditions for the commoditization of land/labor/money).

I'm going to go back in time and throttle Adam Smith because I suppose that is about as likely to happen as free market uber alles advocates ever going away.

I like Adam Smith.

 

[Symphony D.]

I'm definitely open to hearing what is worse than the active pursuit of genocide. Yes, ISIS isn't attempting to unlock the seventh seal and release a horde of demons into the world, but it's hard to imagine things getting much worse.

Calling for the quantification of suffering. There are at most 40,000 Yazidis in those mountains under apparent threat of death. There are 10 million or so Uighurs and 6.2 million Tibetans in the PRC according to the 2010 census.

Reprisals for the 1959 Tibetan uprising involved the killing of 87,000 Tibetans by the Chinese count, according to a Radio Lhasa broadcast of 1 October 1960, although Tibetan exiles claim that 430,000 died during the Uprising and the subsequent 15 years of guerrilla warfare, which continued until the US withdrew support.

The PRC admits to killing at least twice as many people as the number of Yazidis apparently under threat. Ignoring all the other information about Tibet (and other inhabitants of the PRC) before and since, this single incident alone makes the PRC at least twice as bad as ISIS in intent and several hundred times worse in practice.

Acknowledging that the current regime of the PRC has direct continuity with the PRC regime that perpetrated that act, and classifying the actions taken against the Yazidis as genocide, one is forced to conclude that the PRC is guilty of genocide and must be held accountable.

Where is your advocacy of US Marines landing in Shanghai? How will the US respond to its own genocides against Native Americans, among others?

 

[ChiefDesigner]

Where is your advocacy of US Marines landing in Shanghai? How will the US respond to its own genocides against Native Americans, among others?

How is that relevant? Those deaths aren't in consideration; there is nothing that can be done to save lives now. 40,000 Yazidis, now, are in trouble.

 

[Symphony D.]

How is that relevant? Those deaths aren't in consideration; there is nothing that can be done to save lives now. 40,000 Yazidis, now, are in trouble.

1. Presumably the entire population of Tibetans is also under threat. The PRC has repeatedly demonstrated an affinity for torturing and killing them. You cannot be absolutely certain they are not just as you cannot be absolutely certain that ISIS was in fact going to march into those mountains and kill the Yazidis or siege them until they all died of thirst or hunger.
2. What is the statute of limitations on crimes against Humanity?
3. Why is a potential crime against Humanity of greater gravity than one that has actually occurred?
4. Why do crimes against Humanity only matter when they're not happening in Africa or Asia? I mean, right now, the newly reformist Burmese government is still waging genocide against various ethnic groups on its nation's peripheries. Hell, the Hmong are still fighting the Vietnam War on America's behalf; don't we owe them? Neither has stopped our growing ties with both parties. I guess genocide's actually not really a big deal, past or present, in determining who we work with.
5. Is ISIS therefore a special case?
6. Why?

The following quotes are attributed by multiple sources to American Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey, Jr., GBE:

"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."
"Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!"

He was clearly an advocate of genocide. Why has he not been retroactively stripped of rank, disavowed, and dishonored?

 

[Symphony D.]

North Korea burned down a concentration camp that once housed 30,000 people in 2012 after letting 27,000 people in it starve over a few months before moving the survivors to another camp. It was one of many.

Where's the war with North Korea over all of its actively ongoing genocide?