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frostynorth

Listed below are comments made by frostynorth between Wednesday, 4th June 2008 and Wednesday, 29th October 2008.

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Crumbling bridges 2:23pm on 29 Oct 2008 How come nobody in the Democratic or Republican campaigns, the news media, or the majority of the posters on this blog has any inkling of what socialism is? Do they not try to get even a basic grasp of what the "insult" means before they start blindly flinging it around? Do they not read books? (I guess it's like "Pres. Schwarzenegger" in the Simpsons Movie, elected to lead, not to read).

America isn't so lucky as to have either of the two presidential front-runners be a socialist. If they were, Americans who work for a living might be presented with actual solutions to their financial problems: incentives for private sector job creation, make-work programs (some blogger somewhere mentioned that the US' infrastructure needs fixing...), democratization of the central bank to get debt, credit, inflation, etc. under control, skills training and job placement programs for people recently laid off to find new careers (I have not heard either candidate mention this, though someone might have).

Instead, these two intend to prop up a system where people who do actual, productive work not only lose their jobs to preserve their bosses' (and lose their savings to preserve the bankers') Second Porsche Funds, but are robbed by the government to prop up the shady dealers who put them out of work with their imagination/"magic"-based financial policies (market speculation, lending more money than they actually have, etc.)

To hear Washington tell it, this is to preserve the foundation of the financial system - a foundation that's built on fairytales or something - but in effect it's really to save their friends in high places... and to give the poor guys a break.
Colin Powell's America 3:31pm on 21 Oct 2008 #222,

I would applaud Obama if he is indeed against missile defence, as I believe every self-respecting taxpayer should be against the government taking a trillion dollars out of their pocket and making a bonfire out of it - and the waste is the least of the criticisms one could level against the "missile shield". We could also discuss how it only works sometimes (and other times they can't even get the anti-missile rocket to launch!), is stoking the fires of international unrest, is ineffective against a MIRV delivery system, and can be rendered mathematically useless. Bush himself gave a big speech saying that the US should be more worried about a nuclear explosive in a suitcase than in an ICBM warhead.

If the accusations against Obama and #239 (Punkin) are accurate, this is a plus in Obama's favour. Punkin claims that the military's servicemen are underpaid and its equipment at risk of falling into disrepair. I'd also add that pensions, health care, and other benefits (such as giving servicemen a top-quality education, which I believe many Republicans including McCain voted against) are not given the priority they deserve. I would argue that all these things can be paid for if Obama indeed does axe the trillions of junk defence spending - canceling the missile defence paperweight alone might be enough to finance some appropriate salaries for your troops.

Instead you want a president that will line the board members of defence contractors' pockets by funneling ludicrous amounts of your money into science fiction fantasy weapons, summer blockbuster fodder, billion-dollar aircraft that blow up because of a pebble on the runway or moisture on the electronics, etc...
Bailout failure shows Bush's weakness 04:26am on 30 Sep 2008 Slightly off-topic, but #118 I assume that by "billions" of wasted Liberal spending, you mean the tax cuts, spending cuts, budget balancing, and privatisation of crown corporations during the ~13 years they ran the show. It baffles me how people point to the Chretien-Martin Liberals as stereotypical corrupt/incompetent tax-and-spenders when their fiscal record reads about as left-wing as Mike Harris. There's plenty bad about the Grits (liars, thieves, weathervanes) without projecting partisan stereotypes onto them.

But that does tie into one of the common threads of thought running through this discussion, and that is the fundamentally corrosive nature of partisanship. It colours our perception of the world around us; impairs our ability to make reasoned judgments, recognize problems and enact effective solutions. 41 and the others have it right - there are people in the United States who are either a) willing to put the US and WORLD economy on the line just to sock it to the "other guys", or b) are simply more interested in the grand theatre of the election than the actually *real and immediate* problem of the economy.

They may not be the majority of Americans, but they ARE the politicians, and they ARE the various interest groups that mobilize voters and apply pressure to the government - they ARE the people who run the show. Everyone in the US knows that what's happening in their economy right now has global ramifications (hell, a good number of Americans, many who have TV and radio programs, are PROUD of it!). With the predominance of the US in the world economy now comes the responsibility of the American people to toss partisanship, toss these groups that are pushing a partisan agenda at the cost of economic integrity, and get to the business of fixing the problem before this obsession with "R"s and "D"s drag us all down with them.
Fingers on buzzers 4:43pm on 17 Sep 2008 This story reminds me a lot of the experiences I had growing up in my small northern Ontario hometown. Individuality and community are often presented as mutually exclusive ideas, but that's not necessarily true. As poster number 8 pointed out, Mr. Rose's story is an example of people bridging the two ideals.

Regarding universal health care ("socialized medicine") there are some things people in both camps don't understand about it. People in favour of it don't understand that you can still end up paying some costs (such as paying for your ambulance ride), and people's health can become a target for political stunts by the governments of the day (as was the case with the Calgary quadruplets - the provincial government in Alberta made deep cuts to the public health system there so that something like this would happen, and they could point to it as evidence that universal health care doesn't work). People against it don't understand that you pay a LOT less for healthcare taxes than you do for insurance premiums and those occasional ten-percents that torpedo the finances of any household not swimming in money, and universal healthcare also comes with a better system of arbitration for legal disputes involving medicine.

But ideally, people should control their own health care - not corporations, not politicians, but co-workers, neighbours and communities in a democratic fashion, divorced from outside interests that use people's health for financial or political profit.
Accusations fly 4:03pm on 06 Aug 2008 #21: "Wasn't in fact Europe that saved the US from its own folly in both World wars?"

No. In both world wars, Europe's constituent states fought each other for years before the United States became directly involved.

Additionally, wars aren't about saving this or that country from their own follies (as I'm sure there will be an avalanche of claims that it was the other way around). Countries fight wars in order to create or maintain a balance of power which they find favourable to their interests, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Accusations fly 3:54pm on 06 Aug 2008 #62,

I always found the Swiftboat campaign quite intriguing. How is it that 200 Vietnam veterans specifically remember one low-ranking naval reservist? My favourite part about that was the former medic who personally recalled that a scratch on the hand was the extent of his injuries. Amazing photogenic memory, considering he was presumably reattaching limbs and putting young men's "insides" back in throughout his tour, yet he recalls in particular one at-the-time nameless soldier coming to him for a band-aid.

Or could it be... politics?
Anti-Americanism will continue, whoever wins 2:12pm on 24 Jul 2008 It is a natural reaction for people to be hostile toward the politics of violence and coercion that have shaped the history of our world since the very beginnings of civilization. We might not realise it, steeped as we are in the fanatical religion of realpolitik, but as fundamentally moral creatures, we instinctively know it is wrong. A century or two ago, Britain was the global aggressor demanding all peoples within its reach conform not only to its political and economic interests, but its culture as well. Then, people were hostile toward Britain. From 1914 to 1945, it was Germany (and it still is today - how many people feared a "Fourth Reich" in the union of East and West? How many see one in the EU?). From 1917 to 1991 it was Bolshevik Russia/the USSR. Now it's the United States - not because we citizens of the world are "jealous" of American wealth and power as some would contend (I don't care to have my nation wield "power" over third world peoples, and I have just as many opportunities here as I would in the US), but because the United States is writing just another chapter in a long history of empires seeking to impose its interests, morality and control over the rest of the world. Come back in a decade or two and it'll be China.

Anti-Americanism isn't an informed position, any more than anti-Sovietism, anti-Britishism, anti-Germanism were. They're a knee-jerk, emotional reaction to the symptom of a disease we don't understand... or refuse to understand, because it conflicts with the popular nation-centric worldview and creates cognitive dissonance. Hating Americans is stupid. Hating the negative things the US government does in the world is natural (far more natural than violence and coercion are). But viewing those negative things in the broader context of human history and realising that the so-called "American Empire" is just a continuation of every other empire, of a morality of "might makes right" stretching back to Egypt and Babylon, is the only way forward. Otherwise we'll all just keep on sliding back.
Gutsy Gates 6:59pm on 01 Jul 2008 The situation regarding Iran is disheartening. After being under the thumb of the west for centuries (here I'm counting Russia as an imperialistic European power), with their internal business and collective aspirations influenced by outsiders, sometimes by force of arms, are Iranians wrong to anticipate and fear an attack by the west? I believe it is morally wrong for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon (just as it was morally wrong for the US, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan...), but is it unreasonable given the current geopolitical climate?

If anything, the rhetoric coming out of Washington strengthens the position of hardline elements in the Iranian government. Unlike Iraq's top-down style of government - democracy without a democratic culture - Iran has vibrant democratic ideals at the grass roots. Reactionaries and religious fundamentalists in the government are using the US sabre-rattling as an excuse to crack down on pro-democracy groups and activists, accusing them of being a "fifth column" intent on handing the country over to foreign agents on a silver platter. Hard-line conservatives in Iran and the US have much in common here.

There will never be any hope of democracy in Iran if it is attacked. If the United States is victorious there, Iran will be ruled by a phoney-democratic puppet regime. Iran's pro-democracy movement is certainly no US lapdog, after all, which is what the US government has never liked about it in the first place. If a hypothetical attack on Iran is unsuccessful and the present government survives, the domestic democratic movement will suffer the same fate as the German communists in the '30s: labeled a dangerous subversive element, rounded up, and eliminated. The elements in the Iranian government that westerners fear most will gain total control... and there won't be any question of nuclear armament.
Why Obama won 8:12pm on 04 Jun 2008 I think Obama won because Americans are sick and tired of corrosive personality politics, dirty tactics, demagogue-like "winner-take-all" attitudes, the perpetual state of campaigning Scott McClellan (sp?) talks about in his book (wasn't a fan of his before, still not now, but he has a point in that respect)... in general the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney sort of politics. The voters are tired of their government having a self-important authoritarian character that pits its own people against each other. The fact that they're tired of it is evident in how people keep voting for him despite the amount of traction the "evil muslim" and "anti-American angry black man" caricatures get in the media.

Clinton ran her campaign almost as if Rove himself was in the driver's seat. The Republicans are already being even more vicious (though McCain has had the good sense to at least appear distanced from it). The people are sick of it, and Obama says he'll put a stop to it. Whether he will or not as the hypothetical president... I guess we can only wait and see.

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