New Testingstan

I don't even think they realize....

I mean, the guy can be sympathetic some times, but this, right here ? The contempt he show for a country he know next to nothing about ; the disregard he has toward anything close to nuance ? : This is why I heavily dislike the revolutionary type.

I mean, people ?! You think fostering positive change in Society is as simple as overthrowing the whole power structure and putting your own puppets in their place ? Man, you're so out of touch with reality it isn't even funny.

...

God, I'm so fucking glad I live in a functional Democracy.

Oxymoron wrote:God, I'm so fucking glad I live in a functional Democracy.

sounds like an oxymoron to me

errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrf :habsburg:

Well, yeah, to be precise it's less dys-functional that the US. There's that.

At least we have more than two political parties and when we elect new people, there's a real change in policies, not just more-of-the-same.

yeah that does sound fairly boss

Oxymoron wrote:I mean, the guy can be sympathetic some times, but this, right here ? The contempt he show for a country he know next to nothing about ; the disregard he has toward anything close to nuance ? : This is why I heavily dislike the revolutionary type.

I mean, people ?! You think fostering positive change in Society is as simple as overthrowing the whole power structure and putting your own puppets in their place ? Man, you're so out of touch with reality it isn't even funny.

...

God, I'm so fucking glad I live in a functional Democracy.

I don't think he cares. Like Starglider, Marina, J or any of the other shitheads, they don't care who suffers as long as their right.

The funny thing is, the other day, I went to a debate/conference organized by the City about its environmental policies, and come the time to let the public ask its questions, I had the impression of hearing the Crucible's Gestalt.

T'was a freaky experience...

can i start the console vs. pc debate again in the space shooter thread lolololololol

i'm saving this one for later


The enormity of Steve Jobs makes Hitler look like Martin Luther King, Jr. His wretchedness makes Satan look like Jesus Christ. His evil makes... something... look like Captain Picard.


gah i'm coming up blank but i have to use all three

(00:20:53) destructionator4: hey I need something more evil than both Hitler and Satan, and it can't be Steve Jobs

i'm expecting him to reply "laura roslin" but apparently he's afk

edit: more likely name!!!!!!11

hey have you guys seen those gold commercials they play on fox news?

my fav is still the rosland capital one with g. gordon liddy

GOLD

he has a great way of saying it


but in second place, i think another rosland capital one, has this loser guy interviewing two ppl

"we always get your gold to yo in ten days or less. here's economist blah on why he uses us"

"i always buy my gold from COMPANY because i know i'll get it in 10 days or less"

btw on teh screen it lists him as "Sr. Economic Advisor for COMPANY"

so he works for them..... surprising endorsement


but turn off the sardonic tone because this is truly surprising!!!11 the commercial continues:

host walks over to another guy at a table

"here's doctor picard"

label: DR. LARRY PICARD, DDS

"i always buy my gold from COMPANY because i know i'll get it in ten days or less"

but i'm not even misquoting that

he just walks up to this random dentist and introduces him as "here's doctor picard"


like are we supposed to know who this guy is?

it just seems so

random



i love it

Oxymoron wrote:I mean, the guy can be sympathetic some times, but this, right here ? The contempt he show for a country he know next to nothing about ; the disregard he has toward anything close to nuance ? : This is why I heavily dislike the revolutionary type.

i think he's some kind of trotskyist, they're pretty big on the whole vanguardist "force the revolution on people" thing, even liking to infiltrate somewhat likeminded groups and take them over from within

as for the "resounding meh", that should be shown to anyone who still believes a system of "profit for the sake of more profit for the sake of even more profit" is an awesome idea

i mean a country that "needs" an industry of slave children digging out shiny rocks, so that rich people in a far away country can keep up their social standard of living

they don't need that, the people need food, but they are too poor to buy it, they don't own the arable land, etc., and that's why they "need" profitable blood diamonds

and if the rich people decide to be "ethical" and stopped buying that shit, well fuck me, another african country collapses because they have nothing to sell, and millions suffer anyway

awesome!

God, I'm so fucking glad I live in a functional Democracy.

what power do the people really have? you may be able to decide what people should wear and who should rule them for a few years at a time, but can you even theorically within this kind of democracy decide that people should get to keep their access to the means of life (through money) if some industry goes unprofitable (and the money goes away)? this superficial democracy is however great for making the people accept the system, because it makes it seem to them that they have some kind of control and if something is bad it must be because of bad greedy leadership or something. certainly it can't be a systemic flaw in any case

environmental crisis? stupid greedy anti-science americans

unemployment? stupid greedy politicians

food crisis in africa? stupid overpopulated africans having too many babies (guess america's obesity problem is a case of underpopulation???)

adr wrote:i'm saving this one for later

The enormity of Steve Jobs makes Hitler look like Martin Luther King, Jr. His wretchedness makes Satan look like Jesus Christ. His evil makes... something... look like Captain Picard.

gah i'm coming up blank but i have to use all three

Stalin? Pol Pot? Or if you're wanting to stick with Star Trek villains that are identifiable without (too much) explanation even to non-nerds: the Borg or Klingons.

I already used a dictator, though. Meh, I probably won't use that anyway.

Dooey Jo wrote:what power do the people really have? you may be able to decide what people should wear and who should rule them for a few years at a time, but can you even theorically within this kind of democracy decide that people should get to keep their access to the means of life (through money) if some industry goes unprofitable (and the money goes away)?

I'm not sure I understand the exact meaning of this sentence, but... yes ?

A functional Democracy does not function so much in a Top-Down manner than in Down-Top one. And I've seen things done this way plenty of time around here ; at least at the local level - our National Government being held by a bunch of autistic people totally cut from the realities of the terrain and running the country from an accountant's perspective without any long-term vision.

Dooey Jo wrote:food crisis in africa? stupid overpopulated africans having too many babies (guess america's obesity problem is a case of underpopulation???)

The funny thing is, if I trust some statistics I overheard, Africa is actually underpopulated when you compare its actual population with the amount of food a modern and reasoned agriculture sector would allow them to produce. That's not to say the population growth of countries like Egypt, Soudan or Nigeria isn't worrying in itself, but I still find this bit of irony kinda funny.


EDIT : Oh, yeah, I think I just understood what you meant. Yes, it's still not a true democracy, but there's still enough leverage for the people that there's real hope for them that casting their vote isn't an ultimately futile act and that it will have real repercussion on how the country is run. That's already something, I think.

pretty much any time someone bitches about overpopulation, i get annoyed on a lot of levels.

adr wrote:i'm saving this one for later


The enormity of Steve Jobs makes Hitler look like Martin Luther King, Jr. His wretchedness makes Satan look like Jesus Christ. His evil makes... something... look like Captain Picard.


gah i'm coming up blank but i have to use all three

(00:20:53) destructionator4: hey I need something more evil than both Hitler and Satan, and it can't be Steve Jobs

i'm expecting him to reply "laura roslin" but apparently he's afk

edit: more likely name!!!!!!11

how about ronald mcdonald

Oxymoron wrote:EDIT : Oh, yeah, I think I just understood what you meant. Yes, it's still not a true democracy, but there's still enough leverage for the people that there's real hope for them that casting their vote isn't an ultimately futile act and that it will have real repercussion on how the country is run. That's already something, I think.

Well what I meant is that the important decisions that actually affect people's lives the most aren't made in the government, but in boardrooms, or in entirely different countries. Consider Botswana and the ethical consumers. If demand for blood diamonds disappeared overnight, what chance would the government have of making up for that lost income? Not much. If you look historically, pretty much the only times when governments' employment policies "work", are when the market is doing fine anyway and can afford it (ps unemployment is a necessary part of the profit making as well, as it provides a work force to draw from for industrial expansion, and keeps the wages down).

The funny thing is, if I trust some statistics I overheard, Africa is actually underpopulated when you compare its actual population with the amount of food a modern and reasoned agriculture sector would allow them to produce. That's not to say the population growth of countries like Egypt, Soudan or Nigeria isn't worrying in itself, but I still find this bit of irony kinda funny.

That's true. Africa has huge tracts of arable land that's either not used at all or farmed with obsolete methods. But despite that, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the total amount of food produced in the world today (actually ten years ago) is something like 2700 kcal per person. That's like 20% more than the whole population of the world would actually need.

Dooey Jo wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:EDIT : Oh, yeah, I think I just understood what you meant. Yes, it's still not a true democracy, but there's still enough leverage for the people that there's real hope for them that casting their vote isn't an ultimately futile act and that it will have real repercussion on how the country is run. That's already something, I think.

Well what I meant is that the important decisions that actually affect people's lives the most aren't made in the government, but in boardrooms, or in entirely different countries. Consider Botswana and the ethical consumers. If demand for blood diamonds disappeared overnight, what chance would the government have of making up for that lost income? Not much. If you look historically, pretty much the only times when governments' employment policies "work", are when the market is doing fine anyway and can afford it (ps unemployment is a necessary part of the profit making as well, as it provides a work force to draw from for industrial expansion, and keeps the wages down).

The funny thing is, if I trust some statistics I overheard, Africa is actually underpopulated when you compare its actual population with the amount of food a modern and reasoned agriculture sector would allow them to produce. That's not to say the population growth of countries like Egypt, Soudan or Nigeria isn't worrying in itself, but I still find this bit of irony kinda funny.

That's true. Africa has huge tracts of arable land that's either not used at all or farmed with obsolete methods. But despite that, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the total amount of food produced in the world today (actually ten years ago) is something like 2700 kcal per person. That's like 20% more than the whole population of the world would actually need.

Don't you kind of need to over produce though? I'd think it's better to overproduce than to risk having your food supplies wiped out because of a freak natural event.

Also, one of the biggest problems surrounding food is one of distribution. You can produce all the food you want, but it's not going to do much good if a) poor people can't pay for it, or b) some shithead warlord steals it.

Plus a lot of food produced today comes from American factory farms, which have their own sets of problems on top of the distribution problems.

Also you have "countries" like Europe or the US that overproduce so much that something like 20 to 40% of the production end trashed even before hitting people's plates (for a number of reasons I'm not going to list here unless asked) ; while you have other countries that could have the capacity to nourish themselves and their neighbours, but still suffer of widespread malnutrition because all their attempts to build an indigenous agriculture is squashed in their inception by the fact that it cost 50% less to simply import European food surplus whose production is heavily subsided by the European Union - so more or less indirectly the Common Agricultural Policy is responsible for the Hunger in the Third World : good job breaking it, dumbasses !

The fundamental problem isn't the global rate of agricultural production, but the geographical distribution of said production.

The important point is that we need a system where warlords have no reason to hoard food (or indeed exist), and where redistributing the results of overproduction to areas with chronic underproduction won't harmfully impact what little food industry there is in those areas (so that it can develop and such redistribution will be largely unnecessary, and then of course stop overproducing so damn much).

Zod wrote:Don't you kind of need to over produce though? I'd think it's better to overproduce than to risk having your food supplies wiped out because of a freak natural event.

You certainly need buffers at least, but remember that a billion people go hungry and thousands starve to death every day. It'd be one thing if everyone at least got what they need every day...

Dooey Jo wrote:The important point is that we need a system where warlords have no reason to hoard food (or indeed exist), and where redistributing the results of overproduction to areas with chronic underproduction won't harmfully impact what little food industry there is in those areas (so that it can develop and such redistribution will be largely unnecessary, and then of course stop overproducing so damn much).

Zod wrote:Don't you kind of need to over produce though? I'd think it's better to overproduce than to risk having your food supplies wiped out because of a freak natural event.

You certainly need buffers at least, but remember that a billion people go hungry and thousands starve to death every day. It'd be one thing if everyone at least got what they need every day...

but but but socialism!!111!1

hmmmm

the final solution of the capitalist question

what could it be?

Temporarily solving the hunger problem by eating the Rich ?

the problem is even if you exterminate the rich, more will just rise up to take their place