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anonymous

Letter to a whiny young Democrat - 0 views

  • See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?
  • Did you see the polls and studies that said that most fresh-faced, Obama-swooning Dems like you are now refusing to support our beloved Nazi Muslim president because he didn't wish-fulfill your every whim in a week? That he was, in fact, not quite the instant-gratification SuperJesus of your (or rather, our) dreams?
  • The Obama administration sure as hell could've done more to keep young activists inspired and involved. It's an opportunity squandered, no question. Then again, dude was sorta busy unburying the entire nation, you know? And the twitchy Democratic party has never been known for its savvy cohesion. Maybe you can give him/them a break? Whoops, too late.
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  • And let's not forget a shockingly unintelligent Tea Party movement that stands for exactly nothing and fears exactly everything, all ghost-funded by a couple of creepy libertarian oil billionaires -- the leathery old Koch brothers -- who eat their young for a snack. Who could've predicted that gnarled political contraption would hold water? But hey, when Americans are angry and nervous, they do stupid things. Like vote Republican. It happens. Just did.
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    "Oh, now you've done it. See? You see what happens when you young liberal voters get so disgruntled and disillusioned that you drop all your party's newborn, hard-won ideas about Hope™ and Change™, without any patience, without really giving them sufficient time to mature, without understanding that hugely foreign, anti-American concept known as "the long view"?" A hilarious piece by Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle on November 3, 2010.
anonymous

5 things you didn't know you could do on your Kindle - 2 views

  • Read actual books! Because, what if you run out of battery power, will you just have to stop reading? With actual books, you can read for however long you want. And what if something goes wrong with the Kindle, like it breaks or something? With actual books, you can't break a book, you can tear a page but you can just tape it back. Books are meant to be read on paper, not a screen. That's how it always has been until the invention of e-books which are silly. Don't we people get enough screens and buttons in our lives? Why must we read books on screens, that's like the only thing left that people read on paper.
  • Even newspapers are starting to go down because people read the news on their computers. It doesn't count to read a book on a screen and call yourself an avid reader. I think it would be sad to see books totally die out so please, can you help keep books alive by not buying an e-book? Please? Aside from the benefit of its size and weight, the Kindle is a manufactured product, which means that the Kindle not only takes up natural resources to produce the end product, but that the Kindle is made with human hands, Chinese hands to be more specific. Is the Kindle a fair-trade product? Were the hands that produced this luxury for Americans treated justly, humanely and respectfully? Were they given a fair price for the work done, a safe environment to work in, fair labor hours?
  • Are the people who labor over our products treated well? What of the cost of transporting thousands of Kindles from Asia to America? What of the cost of packaging and delivering the same product into the hands of the consumers once in America? While it’s true that most everything we do requires energy consumption, one must take into consideration the things behind the scenes. For example, one can download a book from Amazon in 60 seconds flat. How does that book get from Amazon’s library to your Kindle? By their Whispernet technology, a wireless coverage in all 50 states. Just think of all that energy expended to supply Kindle followers of unlimited entertainment. Or how about the battery installed in each Kindle? Amazon thoughtfully installed a rechargeable battery, but one must use power to recharge that said battery. Where does that electricity come from?
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    The first comment (highlighted herein) is one of the funnies anti e-book tirades I've read in a long time. Did you know that the kindle is a "manufactured product?" Quite unlike books, of course.
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    Books grow organically on Book Trees at the end of Reading Rainbow.
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    HAH. That's more plausible than most of this thing. I realize that linking to this is way petty. I routinely ignore comments, but I was looking specifically for solutions and this thing just slapped me. I get this picture of an earnest, well meaning, high-schooler who's making college plans. He has this single-ply construct of How the World Works. In a certain light, the thing is quite an endearing picture.
anonymous

The India-China Rivalry by Robert D. Kaplan - 1 views

  • Indian elites hate when India is hyphenated with Pakistan, a poor and semi-chaotic state; they much prefer to be hyphenated with China.
    • anonymous
       
      Why does this strike me as singularly hilarious? Sadly, it also makes a degree of sense...
  • This is normal. In an unequal rivalry, it is the lesser power that always demonstrates the greater degree of obsession.
    • anonymous
       
      Okay, I'm starting to mentally characterize this as the goofy nerd with a weird hate-crush on the hot girl.
  • China's inherent strength in relation to India is more than just a matter of its greater economic capacity, or its more efficient governmental authority. It is also a matter of its geography.
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  • the Indian army is constrained with problems inside the subcontinent itself.
  • Both Afghanistan and North Korea have the capacity to drain energy and resources away from India and China, though here India may have the upper hand because India has no land border with Afghanistan, whereas China has a land border with North Korea.
  • Because India's population will surpass that of China in 2030 or so, even as India's population will get gray at a slower rate than that of China, India may in relative terms have a brighter future.
  • Were China ever to face a serious insurrection in Tibet, India's shadow zone of influence would grow measurably. Thus, while China is clearly the greater power, there are favorable possibilities for India in this rivalry.
  • India and the United States are not formal allies. The Indian political establishment, with its nationalistic and leftist characteristics, would never allow for that.
  • That is the silver lining of the India-China rivalry: India balancing against China, and thus relieving the United States of some of the burden of being the world's dominant power.
    • anonymous
       
      This state of affairs has been brought to you by the letter B, also the U.S. military-industrial-trade system and a million other intentional, unintentional, and accidental elements whipped into the air by policy, technology, and history. Sorry. I'm speeding along on too much coffee right now...
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    As the world moves into the second decade of the 21st century, a new power rivalry is taking shape between India and China, Asia's two behemoths in terms of territory, population and richness of civilization. India's recent successful launch of a long-range missile able to hit Beijing and Shanghai with nuclear weapons is the latest sign of this development.
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    It's been a long time coming. I remember this playing into my 9/11 freakout, because I was pretty sure WWIII was coming and I was draft bait.
anonymous

Obama Is Making Bush's Big Mistake on Russia - 0 views

  • Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev, reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin.
    • anonymous
       
      If true, this could be a grevious mistake, as Russia has shown a historic knack for tightly managed foreign policy under strong leaders (which Putin is).
  • After his first meeting with then-President Putin in June 2001, George W. Bush famously said: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
    • anonymous
       
      That was hilarious, even at the time. My sincere hope was that the statement was intended for the domestic audience (to give comfort), because if it was for the international audience, then Bush very likely came off as very, very naive.
  • And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin.
    • anonymous
       
      My hope is that *this* is a conservative, careful way to say that Obama will give the benefit of the doubt. While I have only epheremal reasons to think this, Obama seems a bit shrewder than Bush.
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  • For all his talk of reform -- and so far it is just that, talk -- Medvedev still claims that Russia is a working democracy that protects the liberties of individual Russians despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
    • anonymous
       
      Which is as laughable as that earlier Bush quote about "sensing his soul."
  • On Medvedev's watch, Georgia has been invaded and Abkhazia and South Ossetia effectively annexed, and Russia has continued to threaten its neighbors and put forward a "new security architecture" whose obvious goal is to undermine NATO's role in Europe.
    • anonymous
       
      Aggressively reclaiming Russia's near abroad is still their aim. Can you blame them? What's important here is that Medvedev really *is* tightly in line with Putin. It's best to think of his presidency as the continuation of the Putin administration, not a thing that's distinct from it.
  • In short, there is little reason to believe that basing a "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations on increased personal ties between presidents Medvedev and Obama will buy Obama any particular advantage. If anything, doing so reinforces Moscow's incentive to continue the "good cop, bad cop" routine.
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    Tagline: "Remember when George W. Bush thought he could get things done by making nice with Vladimir Putin? Barack Obama is repeating the same error with Dmitry Medvedev. " By Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt in Foreign Policy on March 22, 2010
anonymous

Who Makes The Randroids? Inside an ARI Weekend Workshop. - 0 views

  • A typical Objectivist assurance that rational debate is welcome and encouraged. So how did it measure up? Well, let's find out.
  • One, while arguing that abortion is permissible in the third trimester, added this classic Objectivist line to his argument: A is A. A is A entails that abortion is moral? Call the press! The pro-lifers have been officially refuted. And absolutely hilarious was the debate between a Randroid and an ideological anarchist (Editor: did the anarchist call the Randroid a "statist"?? They really hate that!). If only we had a dogmatic libertarian, we could have had the cultist right trifecta!
  • And another remarkable statement: Mr. Biddle told several students that morally we would be justified in overthrowing our government because it is more powerful than the one the Founders overthrew (he does not advocate it because it would be unpractical - but then what happened to Rand's claim that the moral is the practical?)
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  • To be fair, I don't think that most students were as enamored of the book as he was, but still there was an air of fawning about the sessions. The professors helped guide the discussions but otherwise generally stayed out of the way. Interesting to note that the handful of times I criticized Objectivism or Atlas, they were sure to 'correct' me. Not brusquely or rudely, but nonetheless the message was that we were supposed to believe what Rand said (in the group think model, they would be the "mind guards").
  • Unfortunately, his topics were pretty standard fare for those well versed in libertarianism: communism is evil, the welfare state is pretty darn bad too, we need to go back to a commodity standard, and the Fed was the prime mover behind America's Great Recession.
  • So what is the net sum of this potpourri of ideas, quackery, and economics? Some good, I'm sure, but a dangerous potential for evil. I had been a libertarian and Objectivist fanatic for long enough to be familiar with most of the ideas presented in Clemson, but my roommate, who is new to the movement, said he learned a lot, so there's a good chance that many students picked up on a lot of radical right ideas. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
  • The trouble is that there were almost no caveats. Dr. Thomson's encouragement to free thinking aside, Rand's ideas were presented as the truth, without any warnings that they were controversial.
  • All too often, as Robert A. Heinlein once said, man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. And what's been 'proved' with 'reason' usually turns out to be some arbitrary claim by Rand. As Dr. Eric Daniels said: "To understand political economy, you need to understand man". Sadly, man is perhaps what Objectivism understands the least.
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    "Our ARCHNblog mole "Mr A" goes undercover at an Ayn Rand Institute weekend student workshop. Once a year, the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism hosts a free conference for college students on "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" and the greatest book ever written in defense of it...oops, I forgot, Atlas Shrugged isn't primarily about capitalism, but hey, it STILL made the best defense of capitalism in the history of the world!"
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