"I’m about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself!" - Anti-Muslim rhetoric ramps up..

I would naturally expect that sort of reasoning to be used as an excuse for answering "no". "Why should I give up half of my purchasing power when I don't even know for sure if it'll accomplish anything? That'll just make us poor while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and everyone else gets rich, and then they'll come take all our stuff!"

Yes, it's a seemingly good enough excuse to avoid any form of economic self-sacrifice and pass the buck onto others to solve the world's problems, but then again as J.P. Morgan once said, "A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason." I'm merely speculating on voter attitudes and real reasons, trying to get others to consider a viewpoint they might not have thought about before.

Which is more important- cutting off funds to terrorists and corrupt tyrants, or cheap memory cards made by disenfranchised migrant labourers whose wages couldn't buy a bottle of spit? Let's ask some of the lucky shoppers below.

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If political action requires the same quality of evidence and demonstrable cause-and-effect as quantum electrodynamics, then you might as well give up on having elections altogether.

 

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One thing that really pisses me off more than anything else is how Western politics often seems to label intellectuals as all being detached from society, and how the intellectuals allow their opponents to get away with it. Career politicians are in fact the ones most detached from society and the ones destroying politics, because by definition they never really participate economically in society other than to govern it from afar, while their practical skills and understanding of objective reality range from lacking to completely non-existent.

How could a guy like Donald Trump be getting all this attention as he runs for president, along with a conga line of halfwits running as his competition, but there's never any consideration for a Steve Jobs or Sergei Brin or even Bill Gates as presidential material, even though these 3 are/were all richer than Trump?

 

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If that were what it was, sure, but you won't find such convenient selective two-faced-ness from me. In another thread just this morning, I was praising the repeal of our protectionist oil export ban (an you'll never guess who posted in support of the ban...).

Of course, the other fatal flaw of your question is that it lacks a description of the actual action, which, again, appeals to the party susceptible to fantasy ("Hope"). The actual action may have merit, but you'd never get me to say "yes" to something unless you tell me what it is.

In order to be disenfranchised, one must first be franchised.

I'll save my rebuttal of the poverty/exploitation hoax/fantasy for another thread where it is more relevant.

 

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Well, despite one being dead, we might point out that as businessmen all were very successful; unlike Mr. Trump's company bankruptcies, Apple's biggest financial challenges came after they kicked out their CEO in favor of more traditional business methods. When they called Mr. Jobs back to save the company, he did everything to make certain his next successors couldn't make the same mistakes.

Mr. Brin is Russian-born, and cannot serve as President of the United States.

Mr. Gates, however, represents a reflection that can be applied to all three: They're smart enough to not run for president.

What does running for president get anyone? Slandered and libeled and abused, on the best of days. Perpetually sued if you're a Democrat. Speaking fees for personal profit and fundraising clout seem to be the benefits an actual president gets from the job.

Mr. Gates is smart enough to not want that.

Look at the businesspeople who do: Ross Perot? Donald Trump? And look at what Carly Fiorina has to do this year; not only does she have to pitch to men that she is the perfect counterpoint for a female Democrat, she must also do so by victimizing women.

And think of how fast Gates' candidacy would crash. First question at the first debate: Mr. Gates, of all the accomplishments you might tout, one question remains: How do you properly justify and apologize for Microsoft Windows?

Next question: Mr. Gates, how can you claim to be able to get out in front of American challenges when you were perpetually trying to catch up to security deficiencies in your software?

And the next: If you wish to bring Microsoft wisdom to the whole nation, how is that not a threat?

It's kind of a problem.

(No, really, if Mr. Brin could run for president, the first question he would face is, "So ... what ever happened to 'Don't be evil'?")

Notice that Trump and Fiorina alike are the sort of businesspeople whose reputations don't mingle with the market as much. As far as I can tell, it took until this morning for someone to make the obvious point about Fiorina, and Kurt Sampsel↱ did so in passing:

When Carly Fiorina wasn't bragging about how innovative Hewlett-Packard is (leading many in the audience to wonder if she was talking about the same Hewlett-Packard that we know – that company that made your grandmom's beige desktop computer), she retreated to her credentials, and, as she's done before, she seemed to be reading from her driver's license and resume. She's a woman, she explained, which means she certainly won't have to deal with conflict or disagreement when it comes to deploying our military might. And on top of that, she ran a company, which means that she … you know … can run things.

(Boldface accent added)​

And this is just the surface. Americans fume about corporate culture all the time, but a large portion of those complaints will evaporate, or decide to blame someone else, when a businessperson decides to run for president on the merits of their business record.

I think of Herman Cain. It's one thing to say he's a successful businessman, but the problem with that success is that anyone who knew about it already knew how awful the product was. Seriously, the first question he should have faced: How can you stand in front of the American people and cite your business acumen? The only real answer would have been to argue that he was successful because enough Americans bought it to keep the chain in business.

Imagine Brian Niccol running for president. Why wouldn't we ask him, straight out of the gate, how he justifies the excrement Taco Bell calls food?

We ought not wonder why so many of the successful businesspeople who run for office are so bad at it.
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Notes:

Sampsel, Kurt. "Donald Trump’s hilarious admission: I don’t really know how the Internet works". Salon. 16 December 2015. Salon.com. 16 December 2015. http://bit.ly/1NTzTEJ

 

I'm not advocating for protectionism personally, just an end to all trade between democracies and dictatorships, or at least those dictatorships not hurrying to seek human rights improvements.

What hope does your viewpoint offer? More of the same? Maybe if you ask often and nicely enough, then Putin, Xi and the rest will eventually come around to our way of doing things? Maybe we'll have really awesome lasers to shoot down the nukes, when we finally decide we can't let China and Russia continue gobbling up territory and pursue a military response?

What I advocate is simple enough. Heavy US tariffs or a total ban on imports and exports to and from dictatorships, as well as any and all nations who allow themselves to serve as intermediaries. That means policies such as an end to trade with China and all other slave economies, along with an end to trade with any nation that refuses to go along with such a ban, and all the nations which trade with those nations, all the way up and down the line. It means ending trade with Germany and all of its trade partners unless they start weaning themselves off of Russian oil, gas and all other economic exchanges. It means no more Saudi oil exchanged for weapons and cash to finance Wahabbis and keep the population repressed.

And what if, heavens forbid, a resultantly weakened Saudi Arabia were to be occupied by Iran and its partners in tyranny while the US stands aside? Great, let them assume the costs of that occupation on top of all the other costs they would be made to pay as part of a meaningful economic cutoff; the occupiers would simply collapse all that much sooner, and a meaningful incentive would be delivered to Saudi Arabia and all other dictatorships to seek human rights reforms before such a scenario were to play itself out.

Oh yes, there would be an enormous amount of economic chaos and lots of corporate psychopath narcicists jumping from office windows, but the alternative simply gives nuclear-armed dictatorships more time to enrich themselves and prepare for WW3 with ever more courage to approach the brink... I figure - and it might simply be one of those silly wishful fantasies of mine - that economic cutoffs would be far cheaper than WW3, at least for the poorest 99.9%.

One should wonder then why there was the whole stink about slavery in the US back in the day- was it worth fighting a civil war over?

Ok, let's go sit down at Red Lobster and debate it over shrimp packed by Thai slaves at gunpoint.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-seafood-slavery-20151214-story.html

 

Being a multi-racial religion, there doesn't seem to be any incentive for people to judge because of race. No, I think it has more to do with the violence that Islam generates. We see it's benefits by looking at it's place of origin. Really, is there any wonder why people wouldn't want to open our doors? I see no reason to rush out the red carpet. There's an obvious divide between our two cultures, one that may never be bridged.

There are 8 million Muslims in the U.S. (not all are brown). There are 245,532,000 whites in the U.S. When grabbing numbers on violence, it might be wise to compare those to the overall population of the people in question.

 

And? What's the per capita crime rate for American Muslims? Seems to me that a far bigger concern should be the lack of human rights enforcement in several of America's Muslim trade partners, i.e. Egypt and Pakistan, where blasphemy is still officially punishable by death. If the West stopped financing and trading with the dictators who maintain ultraconservative regimes in the Middle East and breed terror, it would also help to prevent such extremism from being exported abroad, and the genuine "moderates" would be able to step forth into the limelight.

 

But where Islamic ideology has hold, the violence is far worse. That's what people fear. Is it honest to give all Muslims the label of extremist? No. Yet there is a problem on their side of the farm, one that needs to be resolved.

Race, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the issue. We are a diverse nation, culturally and racially.

 

Maybe... The sad fact seems to be that dictatorship and theocracy work in those regions. That's not me giving it legitimacy, but just seems to be the case. I honestly thought our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan would help usher democracy into the region. Perhaps I was naive. Our recent actions seem to have done more to destabilize than improve the situation.

 

It seems to me that nearly any dictatorship anywhere in the world works when it enjoys strong trade relations with the US or one of its other trade partners. You put money in Pakistan's right hand and they hand it to the Taliban with their left, so how did you expect anything to be accomplished in Afghanistan? How could the Iraq occupation have ever succeeded, with or without a friendly local population, while a continuous stream of military supplies and militants poured in back and forth from Iran and Syria nearly unhindered, and freedom of action against hostile population centres was highly restricted compared to the way America once handled Tokyo and Dresden? Today, the US and western countries in general neither fight to win- if you're not willing to watch thousands or even millions of the enemy's children burn to death, if that's what it takes to win, then whatever you're fighting for isn't worth the cost- nor do they bother to cut off the trade partners who finance the people they're fighting against.

In my eyes the whole Afghan war was, in reality, Bush's warning shot to Pakistan to stop funding and enabling terrorists, with the hopes of avoiding a direct confrontation and nuclear exchange somewhere down the road. Pakistan's unelected President Musharraf has since claimed that Bush had to threaten him with Pakistan's destruction before he agreed to cooperate on the Taliban and Al Qaeda issue; in my view, the fact that the conversation even reached that point after the events of 9/11, says even more about Pakistan's people and government than it does about the US and Bush.

 

I suppose it's possible. But we probably shouldn't have been funding the Taliban ourselves; and hindsight suggests funding their startup venture might have been a really bad idea, too.

Quite honestly, it didn't seem at the time we had any intention of going after the Taliban in Afghanistan or anywhere else until Al Qaeda hit the U.S. directly.

No, really, 2001? The U.S. gave the Taliban two hundred million dollars earlier in the year.

 

I'm not very knowledgeable about the specifics, but I do know a bit about past dealings between Karzai, the Taliban, Bush and the Unocal pipeline company prior to 9/11. To me, it's just another example of why it doesn't pay to seek shortcuts and deal with dictatorships, nor does it pay off in the long term to be propping up one dictatorship even simply to counter-balance another dictatorship propped up by someone else. No dictatorship or theocracy on the planet today has been able to get by without profitable dealings either directly with the United States, or with another trade partner who only has money and goods to trade for the dictator's produce because they're enriched by the U.S. in the first place. I say it's time for Americans who are serious about achieving global peace and prosperity to use that linchpin in a way it's never been used since WW2, and clip every last branch connecting their economy to tyrants and sworn enemies.

 

Interesting. That sounds too simple to actually resolve what I assume to be a very complex issue. If we were to isolate those economies would it create a vacuum and further destabilize an already tenuous situation?

 

So stop buying oil? Stop buying lithium to make batteries for electric cars? Stop selling grain to most of the rest of the world? I don't think that would be good for our economy - nor would it advance the cause of peace. Starving people and forcing them into poverty generally doesn't result in peace.

 

Who would fill the vacuum, if not more economies equally reliant on trade with the US and its other partners? Dictators fighting amongst themselves would only increase the costs for all involved and hasten their mutual downfalls, once disconnected from all economic lifelines to the West. Letting countries like Saudi Arabia hold you hostage under the vague threat that Iran could take control of the region is what's been getting Americans into so many ruinous stalemates.

 

Yes, learn to walk more and live without Dunkin' Donuts drivethroughs. Move to a real city that wasn't planned by rednecks in pickup trucks, if need be. I'm sure you'll find a way to survive; I hear there's this huge, relatively cheap supply of oil to America's north, but some bumbling high-level bureaucrat found it more expedient to pander to aging hipsters partially concerned about the environment while avoiding any fights with domestic and foreign producers who pollute even more.

Find a democratic supply for lithium, or else seek alternative technologies. Your life doesn't depend on abundant supplies of lithium.

Yes. Let those who starve hold their unelected governments accountable for failing to provide what was promised. Most of the grain only ends up in the hands of the dictators and their friends anyhow- ordinary impoverished folks can't afford to buy American products, and truckloads of free foreign food assistance already go to waste rather than being permitted to reach their intended recipients.

You're right, let's just stick with the status quo where no one is poor and no one starves, and nuclear wars indirectly financed by American trade will only hurt people on the other side of the planet.

 

With that sort of blow to the economy, a lot of the people starving would be here.

I never suggested "sticking with the status quo." Perhaps you were answering someone else?