Oakes

This is the first time I've seen an ARI guy on any major media, and I'm excited with Brook's performance, for all the reasons you've given. Every time O'Reilly said that we'd "alienate the world" or that "the rest of the world doesn't see it that way," I wanted to shout Who cares?! If anybody gets around to watching it again, look for all of Bill's responses when Brook brings up Hiroshima. First he responded that "the rest of the world didn't have nukes then," then he said that "we asked those nations to surrender," and his final attempt to distinguish Fallujah from Hiroshima was to say "Iraq didn't attack us! That's a very important difference."

All I have heard Patrick argue was that slave nations like Saddam's Iraq cannot claim national sovereignty. He has not advocated that the U.S. should invade them on this premise alone. The government's job is not to police the world; it is to protect its citizens. Therefore it should only attack threats. Let's start with the principle (courtesy of Peter Schwarz): If a government has, or is actively seeking to acquire, the capacity to endanger the U.S., and has shown a willingness to use it -- then it is an objective threat and military action is warranted. Now for the facts: (1) Saddam possessed and used WMDs in the '80s, and any American administration would be negligent not to assume he still had them and sought them absent of evidence to the contrary. (2) He harbored terrorists, including Abu Nidal, and gave monetary rewards to the families of suicide bombers. (3) He invaded Kuwait (threatening our oil supplies) in '90 and tried to assassinate President Bush in '93.

You didn't answer Patrick's point. When a nation becomes a threat to us, we have the right to invade it and occupy it as long as we wish. It's true that occupations are only beneficial to us if the populous supports the effort. When it doesn't, we should incinerate their cities and leave - not a single boot needs to touch the ground.

I was obsessed with Diablo II in 8th/9th grade. I remember writing out detailed plans for my characters during English class, always seeking to make the perfect setup. I succeeded to a certain extent with my barb, who was unstoppable. Then I attempted to reach the same success with a sorc. My end goal was to build up an account of ultra-powerful players and sell them on eBay. But I never did. I quit after some asshole hacked me and stole months of my work.

For those who didn't get the email:

I never noticed a philosophical bias in those games, but then again I haven't played them in a long while. What I remember from playing FFVII and FFVIII is the epic feeling they had, the extraordinarily beautiful scenes like Balamb Garden and the futuristic city of Esthar, and the memorable music like Aries' Theme.

I doubt they would do anything - we spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. More importantly, the Global Left doesn't have the spine to back up their whining with action.

I'm trying not to take this thread seriously but here goes: Easy? Changing the name requires an extraordinary effort, including making new postcards, decorations, books, songs, and merchandise of all sorts, with absolutely NO reward. I am perfectly capable of practicing and enjoying Christmas as a celebration of capitalism, even though many aspects of my culture and my language are rooted in a mystic past. Is your mind so vulnerable that you need to purge the English language from any subtle roots pointing to religion?

I agree with Zoso. Renaming it is just ridiculous.

Thanks for the correction

I thought skepticism was a varient of subjectivism, meaning that subjectivism is broader and more encompassing. Sure! It was very helpful.

I'll take that as a 'yes' to my question, then.

How does it involve faith? Are you a subjectivist - i.e., do you believe that no knowledge is possible?

Objectivism regards God as neither true nor false, but arbitrary.

That's fine with me. I wish you luck in the future, and I hope that throughout your studies you stubbornly stick to what you know existence to be, not what you want existence to be. I know I will

We seem to have come full circle. You've only shown that there is no meaning in non-existence. That says nothing about my life right now.

How did you deduct that?

Right, but why must my life right now not have meaning to it? I exist.

Welcome to the forums, Ambrose. One of the few people I converse with on a daily basis in my high school happens to be a Catholic. Why must life be endless for there to be meaning to it? Who created that rule?

You mean the rights he just sold off? This is a blatant contradiction.

What a great post! Thanks.

There seems to be a misunderstanding. I don't advocate a free-for-all pursuit of intelligence - by analogy, that would mean that Blitzkrieg involves throwing officers out into the field to do whatever they want. There is still a central authority to set the goals and generally manage the war, just as in intel we'd still need a central authority to collect the information and prevent the problems some of you have mentioned like repeating each other's work. The way I see it, the difference is in degree. Will the central authority set broad goals, or specific goals?

Anyone involved in the discussion on William Lind is aware of his pragmatist foreign policy, but that's just the philosophical side of war. Lind has a lot to offer when it comes to strategy, and that showed in his July article Reorganization, Not Reform. He argues that a National Intelligence Director will further centralize an already top-heavy intelligence bureaucracy, and that the real answer is decentralization. There is a parallel in the military world: In WWII, a big part of the German Blitzkrieg strategy was to decentralize command by giving their generals and other field officers only broad goals, leaving them the flexibility to reach those goals the way they choose. This means that decisions can be made sooner, and changed if needed, thus doing justice to the term "lightning war". Lind even draws a parallel in the police world: "The key to dealing with manifestations of 4GW on the local level is to keep it local. That, in turn, requires community police: cops who walk a beat in one neighborhood, which they get to know very well. We happen to have a good Federal program to train and create more community police, called the Police Corps. What has happened to that program since 9/11? Every year, its budget gets cut more, to the point where it may soon be squeezed out of existence. The money all goes to Big Brother, the centralized, Washington-based Department of Homeland Security." Decentralization of decision-making, whether in intelligence-gathering, military strategy, or law enforcement, is a necessity, which is why the National Intelligence Director is a bad idea.

Am I supposed to ignore the subtitle to this thread, "Can the right to life be bought and sold"? How can you retain all your rights if you sell them off?

Anyone who says it would be okay to sell oneself into slavery is ignoring the hierarchy of rights. Your right to property comes AFTER your right to life, and cannot exist without it.