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rodonn

Listed below are comments made by rodonn between Monday, 3rd November 2008 and Monday, 9th February 2009.

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Unfair? We may have to hope so 8:16pm on 09 Feb 2009 I'd say the whole mess has discredited the concept of Anacho-Capitalism. The long held belief (and it is simply an article of faith) that the market will always select the 'best' solution has been disproved time and time again. If that was the case, we'd not need anti-monopoly and anti-cartel legislation.

A bail out was needed to prevent the financial services sector becoming a monopoly or small cartel. However, the companies are, to all intents and purposes, victims of their own venality and greed. The 'market', which used to be defined as the customer, was really just a bunch of banks in a ponzi scheme, all desperate to deny the Emperor was naked and all wishing to pass on the package before it stopped ticking and blew up (to mix metaphors...) In the end they screwed themselves, and it's all their own greed and ineptitude. There seems to be a tendency to blame the 'product' being traded in this closed market (people's debt), rather than the way the market was trying to sell scrag end as prime fillet.
If the banks, now they're floated, can afford bonuses to the executive end, then we've givene them too much money. The want Chicago-Austrian school, then they can have it... cut the loan until they can't afford the exec bonuses, and then they have just enough to relaunch or die.
McCain's lost battle 2:23pm on 05 Nov 2008 #101 Chris

A pretty good overview.

Not all of us find it merely comical, since the idea of the US becoming an expansionist theocracy is a very dark joke, in the way a cherry bomb with a smiley face painted on it is.

The world would do well to remember Pascal's comment, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
McCain's lost battle 11:20am on 05 Nov 2008 I'll readily confess, I 'liked' neither candidate during the election, but there was a level of cognitive dissonance between what I was seeing from Mr McCain, who I was thought was a statesman, and not the strange soundbiting creature I was seeing on various news channels. There were flashes of the McCain I seemed to remember. The man who silenced the crowd when Obama was accused of being an 'A-rab', and the man who gave a great speech last night (the impromptu parts being better than the scripted ones) was the McCain I remembered.

Would things have been different if the GOP spinners had had less power and McCain had been allowed to use his undoubted skills? Who can say? I think that McCain, and America would have been better served to have allowed the man to be the man, rather than play to a marketing composite of the 'typical Republican voter'.

To have the hubris to respond to Mr McCain's speech, the failure was not his, but the GOP spin doctors. They spun the plate out of the stadium.
Political muscle 10:15pm on 04 Nov 2008 The governor has been spliffing again?
Sinister motives? 1:06pm on 04 Nov 2008 #128 selfevidenttruths

Yes, indeed it is... but it sums up exactly how I feel on the behaviour of US GOV, more or less since Teddy Roosevelt's day...

#132 DameMaggieThatcher

You closet pinko you!
Neither of the candidates are as 'socialist' as your moniker was.

(Note: Most Americans wouldn't know a Socialist or a Marxist if one fell on them)

#137 endorfin

Flush the Fashion, why don't ya? (BTW, best use of punning titles since 'Asprin Damage'! Without side or malice, a Bravo from this mad limey )
Sinister motives? 11:20am on 04 Nov 2008 # 7 TimothyR444

"....and the people of other nations who are obsessed with our elections and have a compulsion to tel us how to think, believe, respond, vote and live can scuttle, scamper and trundle off to their own lives, which must need attention by now."

When the US Government stops behaving as a stumbling, demented, child-king on the International Stage, then I'll cease to be interested in what is basically an embarrassing freak show.
Too 'European' 2:57pm on 03 Nov 2008 One of the things that irritates me about American political 'thought'... the bandying about of the words 'Socialist', 'Communist', and 'Marxist' about people with politics well to the right of the Thatcher Govt.

One of the problems with the 'American abroad' is the convenient single packaging of loud arrogance and ignorance (having said that, UK 'culture' is pretty much the same these days).

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