White House Correspondents Dinners & Drone Strikes

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He's generally good at that, if a bit intense at times. He's really the only reason I read Salon, although some of the political hackery on display in their politics section can be chuckle worthy.

I still remember how shocked I was when some on the right went peacenik under Clinton. I know better now.

Currently the right is confused. They hate Obama but spent eight years cheering the wars. Some have gone dove, claiming that it's all a waste or that they don't trust Obama to do it right and so we should stop now. While others are still claiming that Obama is surrendering and not doing enough.

The slow withdrawal but continued long term presence in Afghanistan is going to be a challenge for Romney to attack. I assume he'll say that Obama has surrendered. He wants to increase the size of the military so I wouldnt be surprised if he campaigns on doubling down on the surge. Costs be damned. But we'll see. The predator strikes are popular so I doubt he'll say much about them. I have no doubts that he would continue them.

There is a very depressing fiscal response to this. The value of a life can be described by how much GDP/wealth the person generates over the course of his or her lifetime. As Americans are paid more and create more GDP than people in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan American lives are worth more than foreign lives. Such reasoning can also go some way to explaining why Canada continues to sell asbestos to India and why the global North dumps its toxic waste in the global South.

Needless to say that as a socialist I find such reasoning repulsive.

Oh I don't think they will be for much longer. I think your scenario is very plausible given 20 years or so. It's the logical outcome of the premises behind the WoT.

Socialists are by definition irrational and non-objective due to an over focus on egalitarianism and being the "holocaust deniers" of economics.

Take a person whom a public education system has invested let's say 100.000 in educating, vs a person whom the public education system has invested let's say 30.000. In this case person 1 has higher value, because he or she represents a higher investment by society.

The sooner socialists open their eyes and realize that not everyone was created equal, the sooner it can start its move towards being a reason based rather than emotional based ideology.

I don't know that it has much to do with economics. It has to do with empathy. Groups have more empathy for their own than outsiders. So it's not just a process invented by wealthy white people in the west. It's been a feature of human civilization for 10,000+ years.

For example, Islamists have killed more Muslims than Westerners. Their diagram for "us" only includes fundamentalists. But they don't even agree on how to draw that diagram. Global Al Qaeda (Bin Laden and Adam Gadahn at least) thought that Al Qaeda Iraq were nuts and killing far too many ordinary Muslims. Whether that was a political instinct or a moral instinct is a mystery.

Well excuse me for thinking that we should avoid killing anyone.

They recently released some of the material from Bin Laden's camp. In it is a letter to his chief of staff urging that AQ pull out of Pakistan due to the predators. He urges them to go hide in the mountains of Afghanistan because the Americans know what they are doing with surveillance and strikes in tribal Pakistan.

More confirmation that the predator campaign has been ripping them up.

Value is subjective, price is objective.

We never observe value in others. Prices can be observed.

ruveyn

I don't see even the tiniest trace of logic in right wing ideologies. All I see is a gaggle of emotionally needy adult bullies, doing it for the same reason children do. Thus the irrational obsession with hierarchy etc.

The right-wing economic schools have produced mostly disaster and failure when applied in the real world. Mostly because they have almost nothing to do with the real world. A fundamental assumption behind all of them, for instance, is that consumers always act logically and attempt to purchase the most suitable product to meet a want or need, for the least money. Obviously this is sheer fantasy; consumers purchase things for all kinds of reasons, including colourful packaging, and are frequently scammed.

Doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't kill anyone.

That is beyond low and if you think economic theories (or, more aptly, which market models actually apply to the economy in question) are as firmly established as the holocaust, than you're dumber than I thought.

Now, please, go away and dazzle people with the memory parlour tricks your genius IQ allegedly gives you. I'd rather have an adult conversation here.

I think you're attacking somewhat of a straw-man here. For one thing not all socialists advocate equal outcomes for everyone. Many simply didn't/don't believe capitalism is a system that rewards primarily on individual merit. Not unless you somehow start including inheritance and luck as innate. It may be true that the very wealthy had to be more ambitious than average to get where they are, but the things separating middle and upper-middle class from the poor are more sociological than constitutional. People born into lower class families have considerably less options available to them. That's just a fact, no emotional or moral judgements are needed to see it. There's also the notion of inherent human dignity, that there is more to the value of a human being than one's economic worth to society, and thus nobody should be forced to suffer for lack of basic needs.

Wrong. It's true that prices can be observed, but in many cases they are determined through subjective processes. The values of goods, services, assets, and/or stock shares are only as objective as the subjective demands of an irrational collective, namely the body of willing consumers and/or traders. Prices subject to the art of speculation are especially subjective, and thus may become unstable in times of rapid economic change or panic. The only economists who believe prices are universally objective are old-school Marxists who tout the labor theory of value.

You have conceded my point. Value is subjective. Making it a collective outcome is irrelevant. You never saw a value outside your own consciousness. Have have -inferred- value, you have guessed value but you never established or even quantified anyone else's values other than your own. Only overt public things can be observed and intersubjectively discussed.


You can't even prove than anyone but you has a mind. It is logically possible that everyone in the world but you is a machine, an automaton with no consciousness and run by some kind of internal program. You cannot even prove that his message is written by a very complicated 'bot. And if that is the case you cannot establish an objective basis of value. All you can do is look at bid and ask prices and see what prices is struck in any given transaction.

ruveyn

I wasn't speaking of economic models, I was speaking based on socialisms love affair with egalitarianism. Furthermore, how egalitarianism in overdrive have negative consequences.