I think you may be correct that this argument is getting nowhere. We’ve both turned to attacking each other’s styles rather than the evidence. The standard that I’m trying to clarify is not one where any national interest trumps corporate ones, though my original argument could read that way. I’m not a professional political author, so sue me. I’m trying to clarify that any corporate interest would have to be more significant than the national one that is believed to be served in order to be a war to “support corporate interests.”

Let me ask you something about evolving arguments (which I don’t believe I’ve had, though it’s still possible I may have a blind spot there)… if a scientific argument can not continue to defeat evolving arguments against it, does it remain a valid argument? I realize that is another analogy, which you are going to say is a bad one, but in my view, the scientific process is just another method for finding the truth.

Let me point out that my standard is the basis under which I will operate. If your standard is lower, than that’s fine for you. I think the reason that we continue to argue these fine points is that you want your evidence to stand up to criticism. If I’m intellectually dishonest with myself, there is nothing you can do to make me be intellectually honest. I don’t think that you are intellectually dishonest with yourself, I think you have a bias that is based on the belief that oil is a dangerous and corrupt industry, something that I agree with. Be that as it may, the world’s economy is based upon energy and the Gulf War and Iraq War were both conducted for a myriad of interests, including maneuvering that economy via the oil industry. Even if that was the primary interest, it was not a corporate interest.

instead seem to expect us to determine intent through telepathy.

Damn the harshness of internet debates. People assume they are writing all that they are thinking and turn up with something that may not even be good grammar, let alone conveying their point.

That’s not the problem, the problem is that there is such a thing as making a reasonable inference due to the evidence and that if you just ignore much of the evidence it makes it easy to avoid coming to a probable determination as to motive.

Nothing is wrong with making a reasonable inference, as long as you also consider all other alternative explanations, which you don’t seem to want to do in this case. Don’t get me wrong, I have the same fault, but my standard is that if the information is damning, I better have a pretty tight set of reasoning to show that competing interests aren’t more significant.

Which is just another way of saying that the USA toppled a regime that was of little to no threat, in order to protect the oil market. The next question is who benefited the most from that action since by your own earlier admission an increase in oil prices would in the long run reduce oil demand?

I’m not arguing that it is in the U.S.’s best interests to continue playing big brother to every other nation. However, that is the role that our current policies have set us into and so by the standards of interventionists, getting rid of Saddam, AT THAT TIME, appeared to be an effective policy for strategic reasons. In hindsight, there are plenty of reasons to question its effectiveness and, if you can prove decision makers were primarily motivated by the desire to cultivate Iraq’s oil fields, its purpose.

Yet strangely nobody in the entire thread said that the USA didn’t sometimes go to war for reasons other than primarily economic ones. Again you are arguing points that no one ever made. I already pointed that out to you in my last post, but I noticed that you still haven’t been able to show were anyone in the thread made a claim that the USA has only engaged in wars for corporate interests.

No, I was making a general statement about international political action. I’ve already clarified that I don’t believe you or anyone else is trying to make that argument. It’s interesting that you accuse me of arguing to points that no one has made when you are arguing to points I have specifically refuted.

Yet somehow it just happens to be the corporations, and not the nation, that benefits the most from Desert Storm….funny that.

No, it doesn’t. The corporations did not get military bases in Kuwait and Saudi out of the war. The corporations didn’t get another steadfast friend in the Middle East from the war. The corporations didn’t build yet another alliance to achieve their results during the war. Again, those are just hindsight considerations. In the considerations of the time, there was the destabilizing factor to the world economy. Are you arguing that a motive based on the capitalist model is corporate interests? You ARE still suggesting that oil is a primarily corporate interest, which only makes sense if the world had the means to immediately switch from oil dependency and it refused to do so. If the United States started a full court press to get off of oil forever, how long would it take to accomplish? The answer is that it would NEVER happen. Sure we could get the majority of our energy from other sources at a cost, but we’d always have processes that need oil, at least until the oil became prohibitively expensive and alternatives were found. Even then, two, maybe three centuries from now, I bet we’ll still be using oil.

It’s very simple…..assume a reasonable hypothetical scenario were the USA fights a war for corporate interests. What might it look like, and how would you prove that when by your own criteria if there are other possible national motives, or benefits to others, then any corporate benefit gets dismissed as secondary (or tertiary) to national interests or humanitarian goals?

I don’t see a benefit to this, but assume that Cuba was found to have a reserve deposit of copper. The % of the copper in the ore is below 0.6%, like much of what we are seeing in Chile today. We’ve been successful in embargoing Cuban goods for way too long (don’t get me started on the wrong or right of that) and Cuba couldn’t use that ore with its impurity to wage an economic war. However, Cuba is much closer than Chile and so refined ore coming out of Cuba would be a benefit to corporations that use copper, which are quite a few. If we were to invade Cuba after this long, it would serve a national interest in getting them off of our borders, but we’ve mitigated their rather insubstantial danger for a long, long time now. On the other hand, to invade now would certainly provide a long term benefit to copper-using companies.

Or, in the oil side of things, say we conquer Venezuela to get at Chavez’s oil deposits, which he has marshaled to economically power his empire. He is not creating instability in the region, much as he’s talking against the U.S. He’s still trading actively and hasn’t tried to invade any neighboring countries. Were the U.S. to invade there, with no obvious national benefit to doing so and quite a large backlash, it would be a clear cut bid for the oil. Not sure it was corporate, but it would still be a straight bid for resources and a throwback to pre-1918 style wars (among the large nations).

Both are plausible scenarios, though not likely because no national interests are served. The exercise does nothing, because it is playing what-if with the facts. It doesn’t argue to your side of the argument or mine because none of them have happened. Maybe it could be repurposed to serve my argument since we haven’t done the second despite the ample evidence of antipathy between the U.S. and Chavez. We don’t conduct wars to support corporate interests when they fail to also support national ones.

Of course, your argument would be that my two scenarios are implausible, but the reason they are implausible IMO is that they fail to accomplish anything for the country that can be achieved by other means. Wars are expensive in terms of political capital at the level of nations and there has to be a significant return for a nation to conduct them. If a statesman corrupts that process, it is a significant condemnation of the entire international system of laws we’ve grown in the last century. If a person like Bush or Cheney can be actually blamed for unleashing all the forces of government on another nation for a little bit of pocket change, then it really is time to scale back governments to the point that they can not effectively be a threat to people again, until they grow out of hand again.

It’s like asking a creationist “What would it reasonably take to convince you that the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is true?” They won’t answer the question since by their own logic they can’t.

Since I am a patriot, that analogy works pretty well. I can, however, answer it in the case of the United States. I would need evidence that a war was PRIMARILY conducted to achieve a corporate interest vice an interest that serves the government itself.

Yet you seem to want us to provide a simple example were the politicians all just admit “Sure! We did it for Exxon!” and where no politician ever claims alternative motives for a war.

If you have simple evidence like that, I would accept it. I am not looking for it. I’ve been in the military. I know that any of our plans for action, even small ones, have to consider the civilian side of things, especially civilians on the battlefield and reconstruction efforts. The only evidence I’ve seen of active corporate involvement comes from the linked documents showing which foreign companies have an interest in Iraqi oil. What you have provided shows a taint, but it does not equal cause. I think that the jumping to a conclusion based on that sketchy of evidence shows just as much of a bias as much your belief that my refuting evidence shows a bias on my part.

See the problem with that line of reasoning?

Absolutely. It also isn’t my line of reasoning. Someone like me could say whatever someone like me wants to say. I haven’t said that. I’ve asked for evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. That would be beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now who’s making conclusions without evidence?

LOL. That was my original point.

And motive, and examples were the administrations were caught lying to make an excuse, and the primary beneficiaries to the wars, and the systematic suppression of contrary info in the decision making/justification process, and that in both cases the the national interest to the USA was minimal to the point of being almost non-existent, but for the oil companies (which both Bush’es were closely tied to) huge.

I see no proof of motive here. I do see plenty of examples of lying, but no motive. The primary beneficiaries of the wars are not at all clear. You have shown NO viable proof that “the national interest to the USA was minimal to the point of being almost non-existent”. I would agree that the achieved benefit in the Iraq War was minimal but there is no evidence that the administration KNEW it would be minimal. The achieved benefit in the Gulf War, for a small government guy like me, was also minimal but for interventionist politics, the achieved benefit was significant if in the long-run damaging.

You mean the same USSR that was trying to get on the USA’s good side, for aid, as it was falling apart?

Yes, the same USSR that was falling apart. The definition of falling apart in its case is having different parts of the government acting differently. I’m merely pointing out that this evidence could be taken many ways and should be confirmed through other means.

And yet where is this important military photo from the early 90’s?

I don’t know, and that is pretty damning. It is not proof.

BTW, I’ve already seen the Keller photographs. Oh, and if you are getting much of your information from Wikimir, which makes such accusations as “The U.S. is funding Baitullah Mehsud” which they fail to back up with evidence, you should be careful. I hope you take anything there with a grain of salt or just pulled the photos based on a Google search.

Your point was that the rest of the world had no similar interest, I clearly demonstrated that they did and I was pointing out that it was a “viscous circle”. Also, because it not only speaks to motive, but also speaks to a past history of fossil fuel subsidization on multiple levels to the detriment of other energy policies.

My point was that the whole of the world believed it to be in their national interests to intervene, which certainly suggests that the corporate interests would have to be pretty rich and powerful (and rich) to encourage such a large portion of the world to get involved. Additionally, my point is that oil, being so central to our economy, is not a corporate interest in and of itself. That would be like saying gold is a corporate interest. Its not, since it is so valuable.

Which I made clear in the hypothetical that it’s wasn’t actually a real word example, but I was creating a fictional example where the economy of the world was far more dependent on computers that it actually is.

My point was that your hypothetical failed to do just that, but I went ahead and played along.

Yes it is, and it’s ironic for you to be complaining about straw-men. It became yours when you started arguing that even if companies benefited from the war, that as long as the nation could be said to benefit that we can’t claim that it for the good of the corporations.

Perhaps you forgot your own words… “If national interests are served, however cynically or corruptly, then I see that as trumping corporate interests. “. Remember?

Yep. That was bad language. In the same post I wrote “I have pointed out in not so direct terms that I don’t see problems with wars being engaged THAT support corporate interests, but I don’t believe, in the main, we have ever fought a war specifically TO support corporate interests,”. By this logic, if the corporate interests are primary, then you are correct. If they are not primary, then you are wrong. The burden of proof, for me, is on the side of innocence.

No, you mentioned a court of law since in that serves your position better than making a decision based upon a rational inference

Making a decision based upon rational inference is the heart of quite a bit of faulty logic out there. A rational inference was made by a researcher to show a link between autism and vaccination. It was faulty as well.

You think that stopping AGW, reducing pollution, reducing funding and motivation for terrorism, and not having to be heavily tied to such a volatile region of the world are “arbitrary values”? Interesting.

I do when I they are applied against other costs without values attached. Arbitrary means without firm foundation.

So…. It wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to go to war with Iraq, but it wasn’t for corporate interests because it was in the nation’s best interest to go to war with Iraq?
Right….got it.

I don’t think you do. The difference is between my opinion (that it was not in the government’s best interests to go to war in Iraq) and that of the nation (which believed it was in the nation’s best interests to go to war in Iraq). You have to measure based upon what was known at the time.

Not quite….we have a situation were the fossil fuel industry has been heavily subsidized (not to mention the hidden costs) in many ways for at decades and has been running FUD campaigns about alternatives for a long time. In such a situation the market has been heavily distorted for decades, and the current situation probably doesn’t represent what the market would normally be without such interference. This also creates a greater need for oil (and less market flexibility) than would otherwise likely be the case.

A greater need, yes, but at what value? Does any other material, aside from nuclear materials, contain as much energy per ounce as fossil fuels? Does any other material, adjusted for all market distortions and long-term costs, produce energy for cheaper than oil? The answer to the second may be yes, especially when you attach some of the more pessimistic projections to the long term costs, but the answer to the first is no. We wouldn’t want nuclear materials in all of our planes, trains, and automobiles, so that leaves us kinda stuck, unless you want to slow down the economy a significant degree (which may not be a bad idea, I don’t know and that has not been my argument in the slightest from the beginning).

What I said is that it disproportionally benefits the oil industry. Remember the same changes to the market use and demand if the price of oil increased?

That can only be true if your other suppositions that energy can be derived from other means as economically are true. If you do not drive a car to work, nor live in a city where the food is shipped in, nor work in a business that uses transportation or communications, then maybe cheap (blindly damaging) energy doesn’t benefit you but for the majority of Americans that isn’t the case. You can’t show me a vehicle that is as reliable, as safe, and as energy efficient as an internal combustion engine. You may have one or two, but not all three. Until you come up with that, we are simply stuck on oil for transportation. Alternative power may replace other energy sectors, but not transport.

Yes… at current technologies based on a market that has been distorted for decades.

No debate here, just pointing out that the economic realities are the economic realities. We can wish for a different set of circumstances, but we don’t get it unless we work for it. The national interest in a given action must be determined based upon realities, not based upon wishes. Problem is, we base it on wishes.

As long as you’re willing to send your kids out of state for their education should the need arise.

Nah, there are plenty of good private schools in Texas. And if we are comparing public education in Texas with California, California is consistently below national averages while Texas is continually at or above. If I have to fill in the gaps in my kid’s education (especially on Science), at least they will know how to do basic math when I do.

If you want to justify your inability to provide the proof by saying that I have changed my standards of proof, fine.

Well lets see…first you ask for a war to support corporate interests, when given one you then want evidence, then you come up with a ridiculous hypothetical where the USSR rides in to save the day and oil never changes “one iota”, then you decide that if there is any other possible motive then it can’t be considered for corporate interests, then you decide that now we have to abide by the standards of a judge in a court trial rather than a reasonable inference on a blog thread.

Yeah Terry…you haven’t changed a thing there.

My point is and has been that you and anyone else can not show a war TO support corporate interests.

As I already pointed out repeatedly, by your own standard even you apparently can’t come up with a reasonable hypothetical situation that would meet your definition of war were it could be conclusively proven to be for corporate interests.

You then argue that that is splitting hairs, which I don’t believe it is. BJN asked about wars TO support corporate interests.

No….. BJN didn’t ask about wars to support corporate interests…you did. BJN just made a comment about it, you are the one that wanted to make it a big deal and start playing ideological games about it.

I am sorry that proving what you believe to be the truth is tiresome.

No, I find it tiresome since you have consistently used bad analogies to argue a position while often arguing against positions that no one ever said. all while assuming that if there are any other interests that might be served then corporate ones can be ignored as a motive. Discussing the subject with you has become like having a discussion with a young Earth creationist that will not accept any scientific evidence since it depends on the “assumption” that the laws of physics have been relatively constant, or with an anti-vaxer that will not consider any thing less that a large scale vax vs. un-vax study as evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism.

That is why I asked you, a few posts ago, for you to come up with a realistic hypothetical scenario that would meet your own criteria of a war for corporate interests. That is also why I brought up the point that by your own criteria that even if we had a recording of Bush being told by oil company execs to invade Iraq, that it could still be rationalized as being for other reasons by your own arguments. It was a test of how willing you were to continue this discussion in an intellectually honest manner and to evaluate your own position.

If it does allow you or I to see our own blind spots (of which I’ve found and acknowledged a few during this whole blog discussion) then there is no value in it.

Yet apparently a few still remain for you since you seem to have a problem with a reasonable inference due to evidence, and instead seem to expect us to determine intent through telepathy.

Well, since the analogy was to show that there can be competing interests, it showed my point.

That’s not the problem, the problem is that there is such a thing as making a reasonable inference due to the evidence and that if you just ignore much of the evidence it makes it easy to avoid coming to a probable determination as to motive.

The Iraq War was a war TO topple a destabilizing regime in the Middle East THAT maybe could open up Iraqi oil fields to the businesses, and keep those fields from being used as an economic weapon.

[sigh] Which is just another way of saying that the USA toppled a regime that was of little to no threat, in order to protect the oil market. The next question is who benefited the most from that action since by your own earlier admission an increase in oil prices would in the long run reduce oil demand?

The biggest hiccup in that belief was the policy of Containment. We went to war for much more overriding national purposes than any corporate interests.

Yet strangely nobody in the entire thread said that the USA didn’t sometimes go to war for reasons other than primarily economic ones. Again you are arguing points that no one ever made. I already pointed that out to you in my last post, but I noticed that you still haven’t been able to show were anyone in the thread made a claim that the USA has only engaged in wars for corporate interests.

though they have been influenced by corporate interests, the United States is still generally acting in national interests, however cynically it may be doing so.

Yet somehow it just happens to be the corporations, and not the nation, that benefits the most from Desert Storm….funny that.

I don’t understand your request here.

It’s very simple…..assume a reasonable hypothetical scenario were the USA fights a war for corporate interests. What might it look like, and how would you prove that when by your own criteria if there are other possible national motives, or benefits to others, then any corporate benefit gets dismissed as secondary (or tertiary) to national interests or humanitarian goals?

If you can’t answer such a simple scenario then there really is no point in discussing that subject further since by your personal standards there is no way to ever make such a case of a war for corporate interests. It’s like asking a creationist “What would it reasonably take to convince you that the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is true?” They won’t answer the question since by their own logic they can’t.

Look, I can prove direct corporate involvement in a number of simple issues of the government, but War is never a simple issue.

Yet you seem to want us to provide a simple example were the politicians all just admit “Sure! We did it for Exxon!” and where no politician ever claims alternative motives for a war.

No, I think that would be beyond a reasonable doubt. Do you have a recording of that?

Like I said the first time, that was a hypothetical example. The problem is that someone like you could then just say….”Well sure Bush was told to invade, but he really did it for the national interests and humanitarian reasons. After all he’s the President of the USA, he doesn’t have to obey them!”

See the problem with that line of reasoning?

I don’t believe that little green men were visiting earth, but PBB didn’t try to investigate most UFOs, they just looked for a quick explanation, truthful or not. Taken in isolation of EVERYTHING else, That gives the appearance of a conspiracy to cover up ETs

And yet somehow there are mountains of declassified government documents showing that many of the government wanted it investigated, and that many feared if was top secret Russian aircraft.

Now who’s making conclusions without evidence?

Your video analogy is also a bad analogy because you don’t have anything like that cut and dried of evidence.

It’s to show the difference between proving something in court and making a reasonable supposition based on the evidence. Would that alone (a video from a civilian) be enough to convict someone? Not in most courts AFAIN, but that doesn’t make it unreasonable to conclude that something illegal is occurring.

You have a handful of documents out of thousands that must have been put together in response to any plan to topple Iraq

And motive, and examples were the administrations were caught lying to make an excuse, and the primary beneficiaries to the wars, and the systematic suppression of contrary info in the decision making/justification process, and that in both cases the the national interest to the USA was minimal to the point of being almost non-existent, but for the oil companies (which both Bush’es were closely tied to) huge. I will admit though that in the case of Iraqi Freedom that the second Bush also claimed to have had a personal motive (that Hussein may have attempted assassinating the first Bush (then a former president), but obviously never did), but that wasn’t in the nation’s best interest either.

In addition to saying a confirmation bias, you’ll remember that I also said someone was possibly lying.

First of all I was responding to your implying that I was somehow accusing you of not saying the Bush administration may have lied, when I never said anything to that effect . Secondly, I had already pointed out several posts before as well as why that was unlikely. See, this is why the subject gets tiring, you keep arguing against positions that nobody is making and we keep going over the same points again and again.

Do you know that the photos weren’t provided from Soviet stocks to discredit the USG in the first place?

You mean the same USSR that was trying to get on the USA’s good side, for aid, as it was falling apart?

Though I certainly can’t see any military troops massing, I still say it could be a confirmation bias because I DON’T KNOW what they saw in their, completely different, photo

And yet where is this important military photo from the early 90′s?
Why is it that the only people to “see” the alleged 265,000 Iraqi soldiers and 1,500 tanks were massing on the border to invade Saudi Arabia are those that were trying to persuade the public that Desert Storm was necessary to protect the supply of oil, by protecting Saudi Arabia?
Why was there no other evidence to support the claim of such a large buildup?
No casus belli? Invent one!
As for the photos in question….
Satellite Images Showing Iraqi Forces

And what does that have to do with my point? Just because it’s the fault of the entire world doesn’t make it less true. If that is the economic reality, that is the economic reality.

Your point was that the rest of the world had no similar interest, I clearly demonstrated that they did and I was pointing out that it was a “viscous circle”. Also, because it not only speaks to motive, but also speaks to a past history of fossil fuel subsidization on multiple levels to the detriment of other energy policies.

Computers themselves don’t drive our economy.

[sigh] Which I made clear in the hypothetical that it’s wasn’t actually a real word example, but I was creating a fictional example where the economy of the world was far more dependent on computers that it actually is.

As for the rest, your hypothetical proves my point. Despite the government’s best interests in the ‘computer manufacture’ sector, it invades.

[sigh again] No…in the hypothetical they invaded specifically because it benefited the computer industry through lower resource costs, but as a result the current hypothetical computer industry benefited disproportionally more than the country as a whole (just as other competing alternatives were harmed by the market distortion). Just like with the oil industry.

Nice, straw-man there. Keep fighting against that definition all you want, because it wasn’t mine.

Yes it is, and it’s ironic for you to be complaining about straw-men. It became yours when you started arguing that even if companies benefited from the war, that as long as the nation could be said to benefit that we can’t claim that it for the good of the corporations.

Perhaps you forgot your own words… “If national interests are served, however cynically or corruptly, then I see that as trumping corporate interests. “. Remember?

I mentioned a court of law because it is an instrument designed, however faultily, to gain access to the truth.

No, you mentioned a court of law since in that serves your position better than making a decision based upon a rational inference, since it holds to a higher standard (especially since it tends to have greater resources for trying to discern the truth, like subpoenaing witnesses).

arbitrarily asign values to the benifit of the status quo versus changing to oil.

You think that stopping AGW, reducing pollution, reducing funding and motivation for terrorism, and not having to be heavily tied to such a volatile region of the world are “arbitrary values”? Interesting.

First, let me remind that we aren’t disputing whether it was in the nation’s best interest to go into Iraq or any other country. In the main, I don’t support foreign wars unless there is a clear need and in this case there wasn’t.

So…. It wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to go to war with Iraq, but it wasn’t for corporate interests because it was in the nation’s best interest to go to war with Iraq?
Right….got it.

The crux of your argument can only be supported if one believes that we are avoiding transitioning from oil because of companies’ propaganda and lobbying rather than the fundamental lack of an equivalent and versatile replacement.

Not quite….we have a situation were the fossil fuel industry has been heavily subsidized (not to mention the hidden costs) in many ways for at decades and has been running FUD campaigns about alternatives for a long time. In such a situation the market has been heavily distorted for decades, and the current situation probably doesn’t represent what the market would normally be without such interference. This also creates a greater need for oil (and less market flexibility) than would otherwise likely be the case.

Your argument also assumes that switching to alternative resources would be equivalent to what we use now.

Not necessary “equivalent”, just more economically viable, there are other ways the market can adapt.

At current technologies, that isn’t the case.

Yes… at current technologies based on a market that has been distorted for decades.

The pumping of the oil and the refinement into fuel and petroleum products may only benefit a small segment of the population, but the energy derived from those products, and the manufacture that couldn’t happen without petroleum byproducts, benefits everyone who uses energy on Earth, whether they like it or not.

What I said is that it disproportionally benefits the oil industry. Remember the same changes to the market use and demand if the price of oil increased?

Only way to get passed that is research and free competetion of ideas, which needs everything we’ve already discussed.

No disagreement there, my point is that now are stuck playing “catch up” with where we should have already been at, and as a society the USA has had to pay in both lives, money, and opportunity for at least two sizable wars.

On the other hand, Texas seems very good right now.

As long as you’re willing to send your kids out of state for their education should the need arise.

If you want to justify your inability to provide the proof by saying that I have changed my standards of proof, fine. My point is and has been that you and anyone else can not show a war TO support corporate interests. You then argue that that is splitting hairs, which I don’t believe it is. BJN asked about wars TO support corporate interests. Look, I don’t go to the movies TO get popcorn. Someone might, but I don’t. I go to the movies TO watch a movie and while I’m there, I almost always get popcorn. I don’t go get a haircut TO chat with the haircutter; I go to preserve my inimitable style. I don’t teach TO get a good paycheck; I teach to help others learn to expand their thoughts. I don’t go TO church to get a bit of wine and bread; I go to church to take a nap.

I am sorry that proving what you believe to be the truth is tiresome. I don’t find it tiresome to read your arguments nor to write counter-arguments. Your documents are not enough to prove what you are claiming they prove. They wouldn’t be enough by any method of ferreting out truth, be it in a court of law or by a peer review process. If you find it too tiresome to continue, there is no need to. As you say it is pointless if no one learns from it. If it does allow you or I to see our own blind spots (of which I’ve found and acknowledged a few during this whole blog discussion) then there is no value in it.

Poor analogy again.

Well, since the analogy was to show that there can be competing interests, it showed my point. If you think I’m needlessly splitting hairs, fine. Personally, I believe quite simply that there is a significant difference between a war TO do something and a war THAT does something. World War II was a war TO stop the conquest of Europe and the Pacific by Axis powers THAT established the United States as the leader of the free world in the face of the Soviet Union. The Civil War was a war TO reunite the nation THAT kick started the industrialization process within the United States. The Gulf War was a war TO reinforce U.S. dominance in the Middle East which looked like many other proxy wars against Russia that had been fought up to that time THAT gave the U.S. favorable bases within the ME for years to come and maybe, just maybe, influenced oil prices. The Iraq War was a war TO topple a destabilizing regime in the Middle East THAT maybe could open up Iraqi oil fields to the businesses, and keep those fields from being used as an economic weapon.

The United States has acted repeatedly to achieve its primary national interests for a stable, worldwide, open market, at least since the late 1800s. Its foreign policy for more than 100 years has been guided by the belief that an interconnected, open market creates peace between nations. The biggest hiccup in that belief was the policy of Containment. We went to war for much more overriding national purposes than any corporate interests. That has been my point from the beginning.

Those kinds of actions have become more and more imposing upon the world system as time has gone on, especially in the monopolar world that emerged following the fall of the Soviet regime, but though they have been influenced by corporate interests, the United States is still generally acting in national interests, however cynically it may be doing so.

I noticed that you haven’t yet been able to provide a realistic hypothetical scenario that would meant your own criteria for concluding that a war was done primarily for corporate interest.

I don’t understand your request here.

My response to your post was your request to “Show me one U.S. war to promote corporate interests. Show me one.”, and that is what I did.

No, you didn’t. You didn’t show a single U.S. war TO promote corporate interests. You want some foreign wars to promote corporate interests? I can certainly show you those, especially from the historical record, but you haven’t shown convincing evidence that corporate interests in any engagement we’ve fought have overridden the national ones.

Which you have been provided with but just summarily dismiss.

Nope. You have provided a few documents that fail to prove what you are claiming. See below about the crux of what I believe to be your argument. And I did not summarily dismiss them, you’ll notice. I considered them first and then found alternative arguments to explain them as evidence and when they failed to provide proof of what you were claiming I dismissed them.

Look, I can prove direct corporate involvement in a number of simple issues of the government, but War is never a simple issue. It has a number of causes, long periods of diplomacy leading up to the decision and a final act of aggression that has more to do with the history of the conflict than any casus belli that people use to justify themselves. I don’t see any case where all of that is overruled by corporate interests in U.S. history. I can see it in European history, especially during the era of colonialism. I can see it in some banana republic wars. I can see U.S. corporations making the equivalent of wars over resources in some places in South America, but I don’t see any one war in U.S. history in which the corporate interests were greater than the geopolitical factors and national interests involved.

Like I said before, by your criteria…even if we have a recording of the heads of oil companies telling Bush to invade Iraq for cheap oil, it still wouldn’t be good enough for you since it could still be claimed that maybe Bush did it for other motives. That’s unreasonable.

No, I think that would be beyond a reasonable doubt. Do you have a recording of that?

No project Blue Book was to find the cause of UFO sighting, but they failed to find proof of extraterrestrials. What Blue Book does prove though is that enough people in the US government were concerned enough about UFO reports to have it looked into, it does nothing to prove a conspiracy. Another bad analogy.

It is only a bad analogy if you go by your history of the project. Why did scientists involved with the project call it the “Society for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated”?. I don’t believe that little green men were visiting earth, but PBB didn’t try to investigate most UFOs, they just looked for a quick explanation, truthful or not. Taken in isolation of EVERYTHING else, That gives the appearance of a conspiracy to cover up ETs.

It would be like you going to the police with video footage of your neighbors trading what looks like bags of powdered cocaine in exchange for cash, and the police telling you “Well how do you know it’s not just baking soda?” Sure it could be baking soda, but how plausible is that?

Your video analogy is also a bad analogy because you don’t have anything like that cut and dried of evidence. You have a handful of documents out of thousands that must have been put together in response to any plan to topple Iraq. It is more equivalent to giving police a piece of paper with the names of several local street dealer hangouts that you found outside your neighbor’s house. It’s not enough to convict, but certainly enough to investigate further.

You did though try to rationalize the US military declaring that a satellite photo of empty desert was an impending invasion as a possible case of “confirmation bias”, which is a rather implausible justification.

In addition to saying a confirmation bias, you’ll remember that I also said someone was possibly lying. Have you looked at the photos and compared them to the original ones? Do you know that they are of the same exact area? Do you know they were at the exact same time? Do you know that the photos weren’t provided from Soviet stocks to discredit the USG in the first place? I don’t really doubt they were probably the right photos at the right time, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve looked at Heller’s photos (Heller is the reporter who broke the story for the St. Petersburg Times) now, but hadn’t at the time I wrote that. Though I certainly can’t see any military troops massing, I still say it could be a confirmation bias because I DON’T KNOW what they saw in their, completely different, photo. If I don’t know, I can’t jump to a conclusion. The USG hasn’t released the photos so there has been no direct analysis of the information they were seeing so how you know they were lying is beyond me. I didn’t jump on any bandwagon. That is my point.

I’ve even stated where one of my biases is in this argument. It is up to every person to determine whether or not your documents prove beyond a reasonable doubt that corporate interests were a motivating factor. I try to get beyond my bias, by looking at evidence objectively. You think I’ve failed, fine. I think you also have objectivity issues in this argument because of your dislike the oil industry and its government ties. I also dislike the use of oil, but I don’t blame the companies for seeking a profit, I blame the individuals within the government for not rising above it.

As I’ve already pointed out repeatedly, it is precisely because the governments of the world (including the USA) have been subsidizing fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly, that oil is so import for the current economies.

And what does that have to do with my point? Just because it’s the fault of the entire world doesn’t make it less true. If that is the economic reality, that is the economic reality.

Perhaps a hypothetical might help (but at his point I’m beginning to doubt it)…

Using your words, that is a false equivalency. Computers themselves don’t drive our economy. Work drives the economy and the energy sector makes work much much easier meaning that it drives the economy. As for the rest, your hypothetical proves my point. Despite the government’s best interests in the ‘computer manufacture’ sector, it invades. Your “why?” is answered by: it is afraid of change and the computer companies lobby them not to change. My “why?” is answered by: it gives the government a presence in the region most central to the world’s economy at the moment, and the government is afraid of change, and the computer companies lobby them not to change.

Now by your definition this would not be a matter of fighting for corporate interests because others besides the computer manufactures benefited, and as long as others benefited in some way (which will always be the case for every war) we can’t say that it was for corporate interest.

Nice, straw-man there. Keep fighting against that definition all you want, because it wasn’t mine.

What I and the others are saying (especially since this is not in fact a court of law) is that if the major corporations (that maintain large numbers of paid politicians) greatly benefit, and that the benefit to the country as a whole is a relatively minor (not to mention harmful in the long run) maintaining of the approximate status quo, and there is evidence to the effect that a large part of the government’s concern was to ensure the low price of said resources.

I mentioned a court of law because it is an instrument designed, however faultily, to gain access to the truth. The truth is what we are arguing and my point is that your evidence fails to prove your version of the truth.

Your test, as to whether the whole of the nation benefits is a good one, but your logic is faulty in this case because you arbitrarily asign values to the benifit of the status quo versus changing to oil. First, let me remind that we aren’t disputing whether it was in the nation’s best interest to go into Iraq or any other country. In the main, I don’t support foreign wars unless there is a clear need and in this case there wasn’t. We are disputing the primary cause to that war.

Your argument in this example comes down to “If we went ahead and shifted to another resource instead of oil, we wouldn’t have to fight wars to stabilize the Middle East and its oil revenue, and so since I believe oil companies are primarily at fault for keeping the U.S. from switching away from oil dependence, we are fighting wars in their interests.” The crux of your argument can only be supported if one believes that we are avoiding transitioning from oil because of companies’ propaganda and lobbying rather than the fundamental lack of an equivalent and versatile replacement.

Your argument also assumes that switching to alternative resources would be equivalent to what we use now. At current technologies, that isn’t the case. We can’t get off of gasoline for cars because nothing is as energy dense enough and stable enough to replace gasoline there. If we can improve car batteries to the point that they can charge in five minutes and run for 300 miles, then I’ll think about switching from gasoline.

Your argument also forgets ALL of the history behind the situation. Our nation has long acted as the shepherd of the world and the main enforcer of U.N. edict and its national policy directives focused on stabilizing the world system. I don’t agree that is as it should be, but that is as it WAS. That national policy believed it was in the nation’s interest AS A WHOLE to take out rogue actors on the world theater, at least when they could have a strategic impact on our interests. In the case of Iraq in 2003, the world did not agree with President Bush’s interpretation of that mandate, especially with the concept of preemptive war, but the concept that corporate interests in Iraq’s oil were the motivating factor misses the point entirely and minimizes the other concerns in the world system that had plagued the U.S. government for decades.

Even speaking of oil as though it only benefits a small segment of the United States is disingenuous. The pumping of the oil and the refinement into fuel and petroleum products may only benefit a small segment of the population, but the energy derived from those products, and the manufacture that couldn’t happen without petroleum byproducts, benefits everyone who uses energy on Earth, whether they like it or not.

True, but you also have to consider that one of the main obstacles faced by alternative energy tech is not just economy of scale and efficiency, but that it is competing against a fossil fuel industry that is already being heavily subsidized, both directly and indirectly, and has been for decades.

I don’t dispute this. I certainly agree with your second point about ending oil subsidies too. I also would point out that even with the oil subsidies gone, oil would still have an edge over current alternatives, especially in terms of portability of power. Only way to get passed that is research and free competetion of ideas, which needs everything we’ve already discussed.

So to be honest I don’t see an exodus of jobs from California (which I think is somewhat overstated, IMO) as having as big of an impact on CA’s energy consumption as you seem to think.

I don’t know if it is overstated or not. My feeling is that the continued intrusiveness of the government, the high tax rate, and the inconsistent track record of the state government would make me loath to open a business there (especially a new fast food place in San Francisco). On the other hand, Texas seems very good right now.

Again, I’m talking the primary motivating factor.

Yes I’m well aware of that. The problem is that you’ve gone from “for corporate interests” (BJN’s original position), to ” for primarily corporate interests”, to “primarily motivating factor”, and you’ve now defined the situation in such a way that it can never be demonstrated in a way that fits the definition that you have established.

If a person kills another person and stands to gain a fortune from it, that looks cut and dry. The motivation could be said to be financial. However, when you find out that the ‘victim’ was pointing a gun at the killer’s friends, is the motivation financial or is it in defense?

Poor analogy again.
A more comparable analogy (assuming Operation Desert Storm, since you didn’t specify but it’s closer to your analogy) would be if the victim had in the past argued and made general threats to the one of the shooter’s friends which were never acted upon, and had attacked a different friend in the recent past. It also turns out that both the prior victim and the shooter’s other friend both have long standing business deals with the shooter, and frequently cut the shooter deals that helped the shooter’s business. Then forensics determined that during the shooting the shooter planted another gun on the victim, to claim that he was about to shoot his second friend that earlier had only been verbally threatened.
Would you really want to be the defense attorney in such a case?

In a court of law, the prosecutor would have to prove otherwise.

We’re not in a court of law, even so see the above analogy. I noticed that you haven’t yet been able to provide a realistic hypothetical scenario that would meant your own criteria for concluding that a war was done primarily for corporate interest.

The key point I am making here is that there is a burden of proof that must be reached.

Yes, and just like a defense attorney that knows he/she has a guilty client you’re trying to get as much of the evidence thrown out as possible on minor technicalities by insisting on an unreasonable level of evidence. Such as expecting a corporation to be so large and important to the USA’s interests that it can influence policy, but at the same time not be so large that it has any national or economic impact.

By contrast, if you factor in military suppliers, every conflict, no matter the national interests can be called corporate interests, which I don’t believe you intend to mean.

You are correct that I don’t mean that, but there is a big difference between military suppliers that are paid to provide equipment to the military benefiting from conflict and companies profiting from cheaper resources from another country when the rest of the country would most likely be fine if no action was taken.

The other suggests that we are fighting wars primarily make corporations rich.

Go back and read what BJN originally stated in post #75. There was nothing in there about the all of the wars being primarily for corporate interest, just that some wars were. You are the one that made it “primarily IN ORDER TO”, not BJN. Just as you started to lecture me on anti-trust when I never even got close to that issue. My response to your post was your request to “Show me one U.S. war to promote corporate interests. Show me one.”, and that is what I did. Now were keep moving away from the original question since you’re trying to shift the focus away from what was originally said and towards a position that would be easier for you to defend.

In the Climategate example I was providing the same thing, in my mind.

It would be if the two situations were remotely comparable.

You should look, instead, for a preponderance of evidence.

Which you have been provided with but just summarily dismiss. Like I said before, by your criteria…even if we have a recording of the heads of oil companies telling Bush to invade Iraq for cheap oil, it still wouldn’t be good enough for you since it could still be claimed that maybe Bush did it for other motives. That’s unreasonable.

Um… so the existence of Project Blue Book is proof that there was an alien conspiracy?

No project Blue Book was to find the cause of UFO sighting, but they failed to find proof of extraterrestrials. What Blue Book does prove though is that enough people in the US government were concerned enough about UFO reports to have it looked into, it does nothing to prove a conspiracy. Another bad analogy.

I can go to the police and say that my neighbor is selling drugs out of his house. That is not enough for the police to arrest him. It isn’t even always enough for the police to get a search warrant, nor should it be.

False equivalency. There is verifiable evidence of the government lying, suppressing contrary information, and planing what to do with the country’s resources long before the actual invasion.

It would be like you going to the police with video footage of your neighbors trading what looks like bags of powdered cocaine in exchange for cash, and the police telling you “Well how do you know it’s not just baking soda?” Sure it could be baking soda, but how plausible is that?

Did I ever deny that the Bush administration may have lied?

No you didn’t, but I think you misread what I was saying there since I didn’t imply that. You did though try to rationalize the US military declaring that a satellite photo of empty desert was an impending invasion as a possible case of “confirmation bias”, which is a rather implausible justification.

Oh, and world economic stability, which of course is based on oil. So… is oil the goal or world economic stability… hmm….

As I’ve already pointed out repeatedly, it is precisely because the governments of the world (including the USA) have been subsidizing fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly, that oil is so import for the current economies. Therefore it becomes impossible to separate the two, regardless you can see who benefits the most. Slightly higher oil long term prices would hurt the economy, but they would hurt the oil companies more as the use changes in response to the prices (even a relatively inelastic demand had some elasticity). Even you have admitted to that (changing demand) earlier.

Perhaps a hypothetical might help (but at his point I’m beginning to doubt it)…
Let’s say (hypothetically) that most of the worlds computers a cheaper than they are today and are in far more products, but they break down all of the time (much more so that today). so they need to be more frequently replaced. Let’s also assume that these same computers are dependent on minerals from a relatively few countries and so the price of the minerals impacts the price of the computers, which in turn effects the rest of the economy. Now let’s say that one of the exporters of the needed minerals takes over one of the other exporters. Now this will possibly have an impact on the price of the minerals and therefore on the computers, and therefore on the rest of the economy.
Now the US government knows that while there will possibly be an impact on prices, that it won’t be the end of the world, and that there are alternative manufacturing techniques to rid the computer industry from needing such minerals, but progress there will take time and money and the current manufactures are heavily tied to the current processes. So does the US invest in the alternative manufacturing technologies to promote a more stable economy and not be so tied to foreign powers? No, instead it invades the other country to insure that the current manufactures get a steady supply of the mineral that they need and then continues to largely ignore the alternatives that threaten the market share of the current manufacturers.

Now by your definition this would not be a matter of fighting for corporate interests because others besides the computer manufactures benefited, and as long as others benefited in some way (which will always be the case for every war) we can’t say that it was for corporate interest.

What I and the others are saying (especially since this is not in fact a court of law) is that if the major corporations (that maintian large numbers of paid politicians) greatly benefit, and that the benefit to the country as a whole is a relatively minor (not to mention harmful in the long run) maintaining of the approximate status quo, and there is evidence to the effect that a large part of the government’s concern was to ensure the low price of said resources. Then it’s reasonable to conclude that corporate interests were at the very least a significant factor (probably even the primary factor), especially when any other benefits to the country as a whole were minor or questionable. Especially when the country could have easily survived without having gone to war in the first place over the resources. But the corporations in question would have had a much harder time surviving themselves as alternatives are sought out and used.

Frankly, it’s getting tiresome and pointless to argue the point further since you want us to provide an unreasonable quality of evidence for a type of conflict that you have defined in an unrealistic manner as opposed to what was originally argued.

—————————————————————————————————————-

Well, except to say that this is a simplistic view of the situation, but the only thing wrong with that is that simplistic views suggest that there may be simple answers, which I don’t really believe in this case

On the contrary the description was intentionally simplistic, since more detail wasn’t necessary for my point, nor did I assume a “simple answer” hence the other articles I linked to earlier. Obviously moving the USA off of oil will take time, money, and social adjustments. But, it will be cheaper to start making such adjustments now rather than fighting another war(s) over declining supplies, not to mention the hidden cost of environmental impacts.

That said, because the damages of oil have been so easily ignored and externalized, as you pointed out, it falls upon the government to act. This is one of those cases that are clearly in the common good, which I haven’t argued against.

Glad to see that we are in agreement there.

As to possible abuse…Yes that concerns me too, that is why I think that any funds from such a program need to be earmarked exclusively for efficiency and non-fossil fuel base energy projects, to avoid it being “diverted” to other projects. Of course that is the same risk with any government program, the potential for abuse, that’s one reason I like “Cap and Fade” better than “Cap and Trade”. The Fade program sounds like it should be simpler and less prone to abuse than Cap and Trade, not that would make it immune to abuse of course.

Eventually, the cost of alternative energy will fall to the point that only the coal miner states will vote to continue to subsidize fossil fuels.

I’m sure that it will eventually, the problem is that “the meter is running” here, with more environmental damage being done everyday that will also need to be paid for later. The fact of the matter is that even with current technology, we could move a large way towards energy independence for a fraction of the cost of the current wars, and in the bargain maybe prevent the next one too.

We can accelerate this process only by randomly discovering new techniques or commercially developing already discovered techniques.

It’s not entirely random, there are some well known paths to be explored. That is why I made my earlier comparison to R&D in World War II.

We can’t discover new techniques without investment in research, of course, but subsidizing something that is by nature more expensive is not a process that can continue forever without burdening the economy

True, but you also have to consider that one of the main obstacles faced by alternative energy tech is not just economy of scale and efficiency, but that it is competing against a fossil fuel industry that is already being heavily subsidized, both directly and indirectly, and has been for decades. The subsidizing of the fossil fuel industry tends to give them more of an edge in the market than they would otherwise have. IMO any subsidies to the fossil fuel industry should be ended immediately (I’m betting you would agree with that) and that alone would help to make alternative power more attractive in the market.

Of course, I predict that as more jobs leave CA for economically greener pastures, they will have less energy demand and that will drive the whole local energy issues completely out of whack, but that’s just a prediction.

Perhaps, but don’t forget that even with the economy CA is adding more and more non-fossil fuel based energy. There have been recent approvals for solar farms, and between California and Nevada 31 geothermal plants “broke ground” this year with more planed and funded for 2011. So to be honest I don’t see an exodus of jobs from California (which I think is somewhat overstated, IMO) as having as big of an impact on CA’s energy consumption as you seem to think.

Again, I’m talking the primary motivating factor. Let me put it this way. If a person kills another person and stands to gain a fortune from it, that looks cut and dry. The motivation could be said to be financial. However, when you find out that the ‘victim’ was pointing a gun at the killer’s friends, is the motivation financial or is it in defense?

In a court of law, the prosecutor would have to prove otherwise. The key point I am making here is that there is a burden of proof that must be reached.

I am not redefining evidence. I’m defining why the evidence you have given doesn’t prove what you assert it proves. It is not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of guilt in the U.S. It proves that the government made plans to deal with a post-Saddam Iraq, not that they acted in corporate interests.

By contrast, if you factor in military suppliers, every conflict, no matter the national interests can be called corporate interests, which I don’t believe you intend to mean. Not to say that this isn’t an issue that needs to be addressed, but I don’t believe you mean to say then that every war is just a corporate profit engine in disguise.

If you feel that I am is splitting hairs, great. I personally think there is a big difference between “corporate interests have become such a part of the considerations of foreign policy and military actions that it tends to push us into conflicts that otherwise might not be fought” and “wars [we have] engaged to serve corporate interests”. One suggests that any consideration of corporate interests by the government is thereby corrupt. The other suggests that we are fighting wars primarily IN ORDER TO make corporations rich. You call it splitting hairs, I call it defining the actual issue I first responded to.

How is that logical?

It’s like when a Young Earth creationist is asking for evidence to prove the Earth is more than 6,000 years, but not allowing geology, radiometric dating, etc to be used to make the determination in the first place.

I’ve asked for proof and I haven’t disallowed any evidence. I’ve argued that the evidence isn’t ENOUGH. I’ll say again that is it more akin from that same young earth guy saying that because someone wrote an email looking for ways to drive a scientific publication out of business extrapolating that it is proof of a vast conspiracy. They are DIRECTLY equivalent and both just as flawed thinking. There are many leaps that have to be made to arrive to those conclusions.

Do you think that I’m being unfair about your “definition”? Then perhaps we should try turning things around a bit. Can you come up with any realistic scenario were a country would go to war for a corporations(s) that where were so small that it would have no impact on other national interests and were there was no way to “justify” in terms of other (perhaps humanitarian) grounds?

Right, so, why does everything have to be extremes? Talk about a straw-man argument. The whole first part of your argument is a straw-man argument. My point was the distinction between primary and secondary goals. Let me be clearer, if you fight a war that extends your borders, it supports short-term national interests (though not long term in todays world). If that was only to gain access to a deposit which a corporation can use to achieve profit, that was PRIMARILY for corporate interests. If it also allowed strategic access to a possible sealane you lacked before, it could be either corporate or national and national trumps corporate on that scale. The documents you referred to, a handful of documents which I have read before, supposedly comprise the entirety of a government plan to invade Kuwait?

As a skeptic, I have to ask: Do they (the Commerce Department documents) define the reasons or are they possibly an annex of the plan that deals with the commercial elements of how to stabilize the world oil markets after the invasion, hence why those documents would be at the Commerce Department, rather than, say, the DoD. What other explanations are there?

WE DON’T KNOW, so I can’t, as a skeptic, jump to the conclusion that it was a war to support corporate interests. I can suspect all day long, and keep investigating, but not conclude. I personally don’t suspect, but that’s my bias. Maybe I should. What I don’t do, as a skeptic, is make the statement without convincing proof. You do suspect, so investigate further. Maybe you’ll get evidence that REALLY proves it, rather than proves that corporations were thought of in the plan.

Finally, your question was unclearly written, but I assumed that you meant to ask me to come up with any hypothetical where corporate interests were the only interest and no national interests were to be served, and obviously I can not because national pride is itself a national interest. That isn’t the crux of my argument, however.

So you ask for evidence that you could have easily looked up yourself, but apparently didn’t.

That is an interesting assumption. You are assuming that I didn’t look up the so-called evidence and must be simply uninformed if I disagree about the interpretation of the evidence. Could it possibly be that you are seeing something that your biases call for in the evidence and I am seeing something else that my biases call for in the evidence. I frankly believe that the government probably made plans to invade Iraq TEN YEARS before it did. If it is a smart government than it would have. Personally, I don’t believe in foreign adventurism and I support the current conflicts only as far as necessary to get our troops out of those theaters. I am not a neo-con. I believe that the government is too highly tied into corporations and that corporations are too effective at manipulating the government. I believe that monopolies only work the way anti-trust folks claim when they have government support. I believe that enough people have been killed or hurt in the name of corporations that they must be controlled and, if possible, shrunk. I believe that the same applies to government. I don’t think it is possible to shrink either in our current system.

Yes, because the USA is highly dependent on it and it continues to be so largely due to the same oil companies attempts to manipulate the government, and public opinion about AGW. Once again, greater energy independence would avoid (or at least reduce) that complication in the future.

Unfortunately, greater energy independence is something we may have in the future. It was not something we had at that time, or even now. In addition to public perception manipulation (by a conspiracy of oil companies) we are also dependent on oil right now because there is no energy solution that is denser than oil, both per gram and per dollar, in feeding our hungry system. Solar power isn’t there yet. Wind power isn’t there yet. Hydroelectric power is already being used, and causing environmental damage in the process in lots of places. Battery technology isn’t there yet to get cars moving enough.

Second, the foreign suitors document is interesting, since that doesn’t even provide a benefit for the U.S. people.

I thought you had already admitted that oil is a strategic resource. Why then wouldn’t cheaper oil be to the USA’s corporate short-term benefit?

Dude, I was agreeing that it would be bad, read in context with the next sentence. And I already said above that it would be, so the question serves no purpose. It also happens to serve the interests of every single American.

By “pie in the sky documents” I think you mean plans for after the invasion that were submitted to the Commerce Department, and were turned over due to a court order.

“Pie in the sky” is a term used to mean a plan for the future, usually impractical, but also just unlikely. As these were supposedly prepared in 2001, they were at that time “pie in the sky” thinking. They are proof that the government plans for things it wants to accomplish, however despicable. They do not prove that the government engaged in behavior that was primarily to support the interests of corporations. Having the taint of corporate involvement is not what I disagreed with. I disagree that the government has carried out wars IN ORDER TO support corporate interests. They had to have an overriding national interest as well. That is a very key distinction. The British government carried out wars to support corporate interests of the East India Trade Company many times. I don’t doubt that governments do so. I doubt that the U.S. government has done so.

If so then that speaks to a possible bias on your part. There is nothing whatsoever in the stolen “Climategate” emails that would be considered damning when taken in context and with a modicum of understanding of science.

My point was and is that your bias is making a handful of documents (unclassified documents at that) into a smoking gun, not that I believe the Climategate scandal proved anything beyond the fact that people hate it when others disagree with them, especially when they think they are right. If they happen to actually be right, so what. Everyone THINKS they are right until they realize they were wrong and then they still think they are RIGHT at the current moment.

In the Climategate example I was providing the same thing, in my mind. It is a handful of documents taken out of thousands, which suggest that they are ‘hiding the decline’ in global temperatures and ‘using that trick’ to keep people in the dark, and that they are manipulating publications to drive out voices of dissent. I also happen to think that AGW is very real, I’m just saying that I can find so-called ‘smoking guns’ in there. You should look, instead, for a preponderance of evidence.

So now not even evidence is enough for you now? See what I mean about trying to define things so that there can never be good enough evidence.

Um… so the existence of Project Blue Book is proof that there was an alien conspiracy? I can prove PBB, but I can pretty effectively argue why aren’t being visited by aliens. You call it redefining all you want. I call it expecting a standard of proof. I can go to the police and say that my neighbor is selling drugs out of his house. That is not enough for the police to arrest him. It isn’t even always enough for the police to get a search warrant, nor should it be.

And the link I already provided showed that most of those claims were contradicted by other far more credible evidence that was systematically ignored by the administration.

Did I ever deny that the Bush administration may have lied? I certainly suspect that they could have. It proves that Colin Powell, a man known for his integrity and honor, told Congress something that may have not been true. I can tell you that every investigation of the intelligence picture used at the time said that the great likelihood is that there were WMDs in the country, right or wrong. The administration had a lot of impact on that, but the evidence was there, just not the proof. See this whole thing about proof versus evidence? All of this still fails to prove that the reason for the supposed lie was corporate interests in Iraqi oil.

So let’s see even if Hussein was still indenting to invade other countries (with what little was left of his military from the first war) what would be the USA’s main interest there again? Oh yeah…oil.

Oh that’s right…the bought politicians and a public mislead by decades of propaganda campaigns from the fossil fuel industry.

Yes. No argument here. Well, except to say that this is a simplistic view of the situation, but the only thing wrong with that is that simplistic views suggest that there may be simple answers, which I don’t really believe in this case.

Also don’t forget that various states across the USA have different levels of fossil fuel based energy production, California for example gets less of its power from fossil fuels than most other states (IIRC). Either way it still would just be adding the cost of CO2 emissions, that had previously been externalized to the point of being ignored, back into such economic calculations.

Okay, I agree that we’ve been ignoring the costs of CO2 emissions, just as we have been ignoring the costs of other environmental damage. I still think that the cap and fade scenario you linked would end up being corrupted by politician’s earmarks to subsidize their reelections (in a very roundabout way). That said, because the damages of oil have been so easily ignored and externalized, as you pointed out, it falls upon the government to act. This is one of those cases that are clearly in the common good, which I haven’t argued against.

The impact may be very significant, I don’t know. However, I don’t think we will be able to achieve the political will to act by subsidizing or taxing anything indefinitely. The difference in cost/kwh of energy is significant between the energy alternatives, but falling all the time. Eventually, the cost of alternative energy will fall to the point that only the coal miner states will vote to continue to subsidize fossil fuels. We can accelerate this process only by randomly discovering new techniques or commercially developing already discovered techniques. We can’t discover new techniques without investment in research, of course, but subsidizing something that is by nature more expensive is not a process that can continue forever without burdening the economy. That, of course, includes oil.

Finally, to bash on my state for a moment, the only state that gets less total power from fossil fuels is Texas. That said, there are only 11 states that get less percentage of power from fossil fuels. It gets complicated because CA is a net importer of power, but mostly from the Hoover Dam, a hydroelectric solution. Still, 38 states are behind CA on alternative energy. Of course, I predict that as more jobs leave CA for economically greener pastures, they will have less energy demand and that will drive the whole local energy issues completely out of whack, but that’s just a prediction.

I originally asked for BJN to provide one example of a war to support corporate interests, not a war that supports corporate interests.

Frankly that sounds a lot like “hair splitting”. Do you really think that for any such war the government will just come out and publicly admit that corporate interests were the motivating concern? For that matter, do you really think that there can ever be a war were the government can’t in some way justify it on some other grounds?

All of that is even just setting aside the problem that I already, repeatedly, mentioned that when the country’s military and economics capacity is so tightly linked some corporations, that any action to the benefit of those corporations will by definition be of “national interest” (at least in the short term).

Whether you realize it or not, you are trying to define “war for corporate interests” in such a way that no conflict can ever be called as being “for corporate interests”. Even if we (hypothetically) had a tape recording of Exxon, Texaco, Haliburton, BP and the other usual suspects ordering Bush to invade Iraq then by your definition we still couldn’t call it a war for corporate interests, since it could still be tied to national short-term interests and “humanitarian goals”.
How is that logical?

It’s like when a Young Earth creationist is asking for evidence to prove the Earth is more than 6,000 years, but not allowing geology, radiometric dating, etc to be used to make the determination in the first place.

Do you think that I’m being unfair about your “definition”? Then perhaps we should try turning things around a bit. Can you come up with any realistic scenario were a country would go to war for a corporations(s) that where were so small that it would have no impact on other national interests and were there was no way to “justify” in terms of other (perhaps humanitarian) grounds?

You seem to see it as not mutually exclusive.

Correct, especially since they are so tightly linked. One of the other benefits to push non-fossil fuel energy is to help minimize such ties, and allow the military decision making to be more about what is in the USA’s long-term strategic interests while minimizing entanglement in such a volatile region of the world as the Middle East.

I don’t believe that, because I still have faith in the system though I think it has gone out of bounds.

Respectfully… I think that your “faith” is part of the problem here.
You admit that things are broken, yet you seem to not want to admit just how broken things have become. Granted the problem of the the USA’s government are fixable IMO, but at this time things largely seem to be moving in the wrong directions.

It needs to be reined in, but I don’t think that corporate control of Washington is to the point that they have start wars with impunity to achieve their aims.

Saying that corporations are able to “start wars with impunity” is a straw-man here.
Even BJN didn’t make that claim, and I certainly didn’t. As usual the real world is more complicated than that. What I have in fact been saying is that corporate interests have become such a part of the considerations of foreign policy and military actions that it tends to push us into conflicts that otherwise might not be fought, just as it tends to push us away from long term solutions for things such as energy independence and therefore promotes further conflicts in the Middle East. Nobody here has made the claim that politics and it’s ramifications aren’t involved.

You seem to be trying to state that we are making such a overly simplistic view of such policies, in order to deny the corporate influence on the societies of the USA and other countries. That is not just rude, but intellectually dishonest both to others and yourself. Please try to keep your replies to the positions that have actually been stated, and not to what you seem to wish we were saying.

On the Iraq wars, specifically, the Desert Storm incident proves that someone within the government lied or was incompetent enough to allow a confirmation bias to take over logic.

Several someones I would say, since official military spokespeople presented it as the motivation to the public. But I don’t see confirmation bias as an explanation for saying a photo of empty desert showed a large military force building up. So we’re back to lying.

Saddam’s own rhetoric about tearing down Saudi Arabia and that the Saudi royal family was unfit to in charge of the Two Holy Mosques, was not a government manufactured lie

I never said that part was a lie, in fact if you recall I had earlier specifically pointed out Husein’s desire to “unite” the oil producing countries, the lie was saying that he was about to try just that with Saudi Arabia. The problem that you seem to be missing is that goes right back to my point that the federal governed publicly stated that maintaining oil exports from the Middle East was the USA’s national interest. As was trying to keep oil cheaper for a country of whom many voters still remembered the gas lines.

That only makes my earlier points, it doesn’t refute them.

Was the UN similarly altered? And the British government? What about the rest of the coalition? Several other western bloc nations saw it as within their national interests to act. They were not manipulated by corporate interests to act, but national ones.

All of the other countries, aside from Saudi Arabia which was more concerned about a potential future military threat from Iraq, had the same motives as the USA. Or do you think that they aren’t oil dependent too? As to the UN, with most of the biggest member nations backing the war for economic reasons, why wouldn’t the smaller, but no less oil dependent, countries oppose it, especially when it costs them nothing and may gain them political points with the bigger nations?

You still seem to be having trouble with the observation that any country that is so economically and militarily tied to a few corporations, will find those corporate interests as being tied to their national interests (see above).

Why would it logically only be the US who was manipulated by corporate ones instead?

Another straw-man argument, I never claimed that it was solely a case of the USA having been motivated by corporate interests, I simply assumed that if you realized that little detail then it would have been easy to see a similar motive for many of the other countries. Care to point out where I made such a claim that is solely the USA that had an corporate/economic interest?

Either way, even if we did enter Kuwait for oil, and later Iraq for oil, it is not a corporate interest.

Then do you care to explain why in the second Iraq war the US government had oil surveying map draw up for oil companies nearly two years before the actual conflict? Again you are defining any benefit that isn’t exclusively just for that specific corporation(s) alone as not being in their benefit.

Oil is a strategic resource.

Yes, because the USA is highly dependent on it and it continues to be so largely due to the same oil companies attempts to manipulate the government, and public opinion about AGW. Once again, greater energy independence would avoid (or at least reduce) that complication in the future.

Unless you can prove that we engaged in two separate wars to make a corporation or group of corporations happy, I don’t see this as proof.

But, as I pointed out above, you have tried to define such evidence in way that no amount of evidence can ever be considered sufficient to make such a conclusion.

If the business interest was more central to the doctrine than these links suggest, you really might have something here.

Same problem as above.

That presumes that those who want to keep government smaller also want to ignore global warming.

Incorrect.
Granted if you go and look at many in the Republicans, Libertarians, and Teapartiers you’ll find a large number of them do in fact deny AGW is occurring or would be a problem, but if you go back and read my replies to you, you’ll see that I’ve never made that assumption about your position. That is why I kept my AGW related replies to you confined to the effects of AGW on it’s current path and the costs/benefits of controlling AGW.

The problem I’ve brought up previously is that by not taking government action to correct AGW, in order to “keep government small”, that we may be on the track to create an even larger and more intrusive governments world wide in an attempt to compensate for the problems AGW will be causing and the conflicts that it’s likely to produce.

Many of us who feel we need to keep government smaller, believe in the Austrian School of economics, which suggests that larger governments subsidize growth for a nationalist reason.

I’m already well familiar with the Austrian school of economics.
The problem here is that much of the damage has already been done, and it’s increasing daily. This problem is a direct result of the fact that the damage to the environment created by CO2 is a very externalized cost, and so it isn’t properly accounted for economically. This is why many of the proposals to reduce CO2 emissions is to add a cost to it’s emission and try to help compensate for centuries of fossil fuel getting an indirect (and inadvertent) subsidy by not being properly accounted for in cost calculations. The “Cap and Fade” article I linked to at my post #203 is such an attempt to correct such an error while minimizing the increase in government bureaucracy while adding an economic cost to CO2 emissions.

Okay… first, enjoying the snark, especially when you fail to provide proof. I can get Kuhnigget all in an uproar by providing proof that Washington has plans for Alien Invasions as well.

Right…..
So you ask for evidence that you could have easily looked up yourself, but apparently didn’t. In it are links to evidence that the US government made plans to invade Iraq two years before the invasion, had drawn up oil exploration maps to divide the territory up among oil companies after the invasion that was still two years away. Then in the years leading up to the war, that the Bush administration had repeatedly and systematically ignored reports that didn’t match with the publicly announced agenda. But apparently none of this is still good enough for you according to your conveniently re-defining such evidence in a way to make any such evidence impossible.

Second, the foreign suitors document is interesting, since that doesn’t even provide a benefit for the U.S. people.

I thought you had already admitted that oil is a strategic resource. Why then wouldn’t cheaper oil be to the USA’s corporate short-term benefit?

It would also be a lot more damning if it was more than a couple of pie in the sky documents.

By “pie in the sky documents” I think you mean plans for after the invasion that were submitted to the Commerce Department, and were turned over due to a court order.

I can find a lot more damning information in the Climate Gate scandal than “U.S. administration planned for how to topple the Iraqi government the Government had been dealing with for a decade and planned for ways to stabilize the oil market afterwards”.

If so then that speaks to a possible bias on your part. There is nothing whatsoever in the stolen “Climategate” emails that would be considered damning when taken in context and with a modicum of understanding of science. How you can compare that to planing to divide up a country’s resources after it has been conquered years before the actual invasion, is somewhat baffling.

This could certainly be evidence in a conspiracy, but it is not proof.

So now not even evidence is enough for you now? See what I mean about trying to define things so that there can never be good enough evidence.

I don’t see anything from these documents that trumps the unstable geopolitical situation in the region where Saddam had been pestering neighbors with cross-border incursions, lying to UN inspectors, hindering inspections, and acquiring materials that COULD be used to make WMDs for a decade.

And the link I already provided showed that most of those claims were contradicted by other far more credible evidence that was systematically ignored by the administration. So let’s see even if Hussein was still indenting to invade other countries (with what little was left of his military from the first war) what would be the USA’s main interest there again? Oh yeah…oil.

If they did go to war to support corporate interests, its just more proof that the nation has usurped its authority granted by the people to it in the Constitution.

It’s would also be proof that we have become far too economically dependent on the energy from other countries, and that has gotten us far too entangled in the politics and wars of other regions of the world. So why does the USA keep directly and indirectly subsidizing such the oil industry? Oh that’s right…the bought politicians and a public mislead by decades of propaganda campaigns from the fossil fuel industry.

Its interesting and it does incentivize energy solutions, but does so at the expense of the economy and in our current system, it would eventually cause the USG to subsidize a number of other industries to prevent their losses, such as further farming subsidies, American manufacturing (especially unionized factories) and energy heavy information technologies.

Not necessarily, that’s part of the reason for gradually increasing the carbon tax in such a system. To give companies time to adjust and for non-fossil fuel based energy technology to begin planning and construction. Also don’t forget that various states across the USA have different levels of fossil fuel based energy production, California for example gets less of it’s power from fossil fuels than most other states (IIRC). Either way it still would just be adding the cost of CO2 emissions, that had previously been externalized to the point of being ignored, back into such economic calculations.

Unintended consequences, huh?

Yes, like ignoring the even greater cost of the effects of AGW if we continue the business as usual of ignoring the cost of continued CO2 emissions.

I’m not sure I understand the Consumerism arm of that consumerism/liberty/regulation triangle. Any recommended reading you could point me to (I’m not picky, a Wiki article is just fine).

I’m having trouble finding a good resource for this one. I read it the professor’s notes in one of my books on international relations and politics, specifically Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law . I believe it is in there, but I don’t have my copy available right now. As I can’t find that triangle anywhere on the net right now, it might have been his original analysis. I’ll keep looking.

@ Zetetic 203:

I wrote up a long treatment answer to your post and my internet subsequently crashed. As I have to get to work, a shorter response will follow.

On the corporate interest warfare bit, I think that fundamentally or difference of opinion here has to do with a fundamental definition problem. I originally asked for BJN to provide one example of a war to support corporate interests, not a war that supports corporate interests. If national interests are served, however cynically or corruptly, then I see that as trumping corporate interests. You seem to see it as not mutually exclusive. I have pointed out in not so direct terms that I don’t see problems with wars being engaged THAT support corporate interests, but I don’t believe, in the main, we have ever fought a war specifically TO support corporate interests. The closest would be the Spanish-American War that Kuhnigget mentioned which we fought following and during a propaganda campaign carried out by Hearst. That gave me pause to think about, but the reason I don’t count that one personally is that the American People and Congress authorized combat actions based on a perceived series of human rights violations.

BJNs original comment was that we engaged in wars to support corporate interests. I don’t believe that, because I still have faith in the system though I think it has gone out of bounds. It needs to be reined in, but I don’t think that corporate control of Washington is to the point that they have start wars with impunity to achieve their aims.

On the Iraq wars, specifically, the Desert Storm incident proves that someone within the government lied or was incompetent enough to allow a confirmation bias to take over logic. Government satellites have historically been better than corporate ones, but its hard to prove that empty desert is full of troops. Saddam’s own rhetoric about tearing down Saudi Arabia and that the Saudi royal family was unfit to in charge of the Two Holy Mosques, was not a government manufactured lie. The rest of the propaganda work by the Kuwaiti government on American public opinion certainly was a great example. Was the UN similarly altered? And the British government? What about the rest of the coalition? Several other western bloc nations saw it as within their national interests to act. They were not manipulated by corporate interests to act, but national ones. Why would it logically only be the US who was manipulated by corporate ones instead?

Of course, their national interest could be “Keep on the Beast’s (the U.S.’s) good side”, but history is really muddy, as was pointed out before. My dad (the Roman Historian) would have been upset with me for writing that.

Either way, even if we did enter Kuwait for oil, and later Iraq for oil, it is not a corporate interest. Oil is a strategic resource. Unless you can prove that we engaged in two separate wars to make a corporation or group of corporations happy, I don’t see this as proof. I may be seemingly raising the bar on the proof, but that was my thought process behind my original argument.

It’s not that hard to find related information.
Indian removal
Indian Removal Act

Related information that says, among other things, that southern leaders wanted to avoid future wars along their borders. Its a national, even though racist, interest. There were business leaders involved. The document doesn’t contend that they had the primary interest. I haven’t studied this piece of history as well as I should. My only detailed knowledge of it is a fiction novel which is not a good place to base your arguments. If the business interest was more central to the doctrine than these links suggest, you really might have something here.

On the other hand, as I mentioned in my last post, those that are determined to keep government smaller by trying to ignore AGW may be setting us all up for a much bigger government than they ever feared as a result of the effects of AGW.

That presumes that those who want to keep government smaller also want to ignore global warming. Many of us who feel we need to keep government smaller, believe in the Austrian School of economics, which suggests that larger governments subsidize growth for a nationalist reason. Such unnatural growth is prone to failure as planned economies are attempts by very limited human minds to control something extremely complex. The Austrian school sees growth as a slow process, not a boom. Slower growth is better for the environment in the long run.

You were saying something about wanting proof of corporate interest?

Okay… first, enjoying the snark, especially when you fail to provide proof. I can get Kuhnigget all in an uproar by providing proof that Washington has plans for Alien Invasions as well.

Second, the foreign suitors document is interesting, since that doesn’t even provide a benefit for the U.S. people. That would be the ultimate corruption. It would also be a lot more damning if it was more than a couple of pie in the sky documents. I can find a lot more damning information in the Climate Gate scandal than “U.S. administration planned for how to topple the Iraqi government the Government had been dealing with for a decade and planned for ways to stabilize the oil market afterwards”. This could certainly be evidence in a conspiracy, but it is not proof. I don’t see anything from these documents that trumps the unstable geopolitical situation in the region where Saddam had been pestering neighbors with cross-border incursions, lying to UN inspectors, hindering inspections, and acquiring materials that COULD be used to make WMDs for a decade.

Frankly, if we did go to war with Iraq for nothing more than to give the Brits more oil I’d be even more upset at the government’s actions than I am now. If they did go to war to support corporate interests, its just more proof that the nation has usurped its authority granted by the people to it in the Constitution. And that the Constitution must be returned as the primary document of the land.

The Cap and Fade is one that I’d have to look at more closely. Its interesting and it does incentivize energy solutions, but does so at the expense of the economy and in our current system, it would eventually cause the USG to subsidize a number of other industries to prevent their losses, such as further farming subsidies, American manufacturing (especially unionized factories) and energy heavy information technologies. It would also become a deterrent for new technology development as research can use a lot of power. That would have to be subsidized more heavily as well.

Unintended consequences, huh?

@Terry: I’m not sure I understand the Consumerism arm of that consumerism/liberty/regulation triangle. Any recommended reading you could point me to (I’m not picky, a Wiki article is just fine).

Anyway, thanks for clearing up the earlier comment – I’m fairly sure I understand the definition of socialism we’re using, now.
Unfortunately, I’m only vaguely familiar with Keynesian economics or the Austrian school; that’s some more reading I’ve got to do! I’ve yet to take any economics courses yet, but then that’s yet another thing that should really be taught in (public) high school that isn’t.
So I’ll take your word for it for the time being

Here is a new article recently published in Skeptical Science, it deals with several studies forecasting the economic impact on the GDP of the USA for various CO2 reduction strategies compared to no change in policy, also known as Business As Usual (BAU).
Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing

The upshot is….

The majority of these analyses find that the evaluated climate policies impact the US GDP by less than 1% as compared to BAU.

Apparently they would also lower the Federal deficit [emphasis added]…

The CBO analysis of Waxman-Markey found that the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $9 billion by the year 2019. The CBO analysis of a similar bill proposed by Senators Kerry and Boxer found the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $21 billion by 2019 and “would not increase the deficit in any of the four 10-year periods following 2019.” And the CBO also found that Kerry-Lieberman would decrease the deficit by $19 billion by 2020.

The cited article also goes into further detail as to other benefits and costs of the various proposals.

I was talking there about James Hansen.
Not Al Gore.
I would have thought that was clear from the description.

Respectfully, you were first talking about Al Gore, then brought up the remark in question, in your first post (#186 and #187). The first time you mentioned Hansen by name was after that line (in your next post at #188), so no it wasn’t clear. That’s why I wasn’t sure if maybe you were talking about someone other than Gore.

Now that’s cleared up, the only thing I could find that comes even close to what you said Hansen had called for was to phase out coal fired plants by 2030, and not to just stop them now period. That’s a big difference. If you could find a citation for the comment I would like to read it, but from what I’ve found so far it sounds like a denialist was misrepresenting what he (Hansen) said.

As for Hansen becoming a “political agitator”…lets consider a hypothetical.
Let’s say a large asteroid is found on it’s way to Earth in a few decades and that it looks big enough to kill a large amount of the human race, with the only real uncertainty being the final body count due to an uncertainty of it’s point of impact. At this scientific revelation, many in the Republican party decide that it’s a conspiracy to promote big government by those “pinko socialist one-worlder scientists”, while other Republicans think that the asteroid is “god’s will” and that we should not try to prevent it through an international effort to alter it’s trajectory. Then there are large companies that stand to profit from selling shelters and survival supplies that want nothing to be done so they try and launch a FUD campaign. Of course Fox News et al., are all too willing to go along with the party line on this, and so much of the public believes them too. Because of this any action to prevent the impact is being delayed, perhaps indefinitely.

Now would any scientists calling for action be a “political activist & agitator” in your book? Would that be a bad thing under the circumstances? Would this be an example where scientists should avoid getting involved in politics? How specifically would you propose convincing enough of the public, if you think that such activism is incorrect?

Nothing political is fully or purely rational. Unfortunately. Therein lies the problem.

True but that is precisely my point. You seem to under the impression that as long as those that are calling for action on AGW stop trying to convince people, then suddenly everyone will become more rational on the subject, when there is no reason to make such an assumption, and history indicates otherwise.

Now I think that sucks and I think the system is broken but that’s how it is.

I agree completely.

Right now, Gore is divisive figure with a few ardent & still loyal fans but an awful lot more folks who can’t stand the sight of him. Which is why he makes a bad figurehead and spokesperson / salesperson – for anything.

Respectfully, while I agree that he’s not the ideal advocate (I think someone more charismatic would be better) you seem to be getting an opinion of what others think of him largely from people that have a vested psychological interest in finding any excuse they can to deny AGW. He doesn’t even figure that much in most of the anti-AGW arguments and he’s rapidly being supplanted by Mann as the demon du jour. Long after everyone has forgotten about Al Gore, and the poles are melting away the denialists will still be blaming someone else for why they don’t accept AGW.

If we go by what those who make a point to deny the evidence say they want, then the rest of the public will never be convinced because we’ll be dancing to the tune of those that can never be convinced by arguments and evidence until they open themselves to the possibility that they are wrong.

Of course that is my opinion as well….

I’m not adverse to the idea, I just want proof. There is a lot of rhetoric in debate on both sides and I want fact, not rhetoric. The fact is, no one has ever proved that we went to Iraq to serve for corporations, yet the argument is still made as if it were fact. I don’t accept that.

And yet when confronted with the fact that the US government declared maintaining the oil supply as part of the reason for Operation Desert Storm, and lied about Hussein being ready to invade Saudi Arabia. You come up with a list of assumptions for why you think that oil prices hypothetically wouldn’t have gone up (even if the US Government didn’t agree with it). Additionally you seem to be engaging in a form of binary thinking, where if there are any other possible reasons (even good ones) for getting involved that therefore corporate interests weren’t a factor.

The efficiency boost was because the oil had become so expensive that it spending more on converting to efficient technologies was incentivized.

Not just incentivized but there was also a big government push for such development. Also don’t forget (I know that I accidentally left this out in the last post) that the USA in the 70′s also had price controls in effect to keep gas/petrol prices low. This is another reason why OPEC’s plan didn’t work out, although it had the result of gas lines and rationing in the USA (odd/even days, etc.). In other words, part of the decrease in demand in the USA was due to a reduced ability to consume created by price control created shortages. Please understand I’m not arguing in favor of such controls, I’m merely pointing out the history.

When the cost of fuel doubled in the U.S. a couple of years back, the SUV market crumbled, the Hybrid market exploded, small cars took off, and national demand for oil began to come down,

True but it still didn’t come all the way back down. Also this was when the economy was doing relatively better and more people could afford to buy a new car to save money. In the meantime to total global consumption of oil has been increasing rapidly making the market less elastic too. Also don’t forget about the problems that many business had due to the temporary spike in price. It didn’t just boost small car sales, it seriously hurt the auto makers in the USA that were more heavily invested in making the SUVs. Shipping and transportation was also negatively impacted for a while.

Eventually, the cost will be so high that solar power is finally cheaper and people will start to REALLY go solar.

I don’t doubt that, the problem is that in the process CO2 emissions will also continue to increase just as rapidly, increasing AGW even more, and the oil supplies will run out that much faster. Also don’t forget that solar will have to be competing again a fossil fuel industry that has been far more heavily subsidized for a long time.

Already, I think nuclear power is cheaper than coal power in second order costs.

Quite possibly true especially since coal is apparently running out faster than was earlier thought. The other problem though with nuclear (speaking from your point of view of wanting a smaller government) is that nuclear also tends to be heavily subsidized for not just construction, but decommissioning plants, and waste disposal. I have nothing against nuclear per se, and I much prefer it to coal, but that also needs to be taken into account.

We have TONS of friendly countries in the gulf. TONS. Saudi is very friendly to U.S. business interests.

You mean the same countries that have also been sponsoring anti-US terrorism? Are you familiar with the term “fair weather friend”?

It is not in our interests to upset that egg cart

On the contrary, my point was that the US government sees it as stabilizing the area for US interests.

It would certainly provide a public benefit, to ALL AMERICANS, if we had lots of really cheap, oil.

For the short term and ignoring both peak oil, AGW, and possible future military involvements to keep the oil flowing…yes it would. If you ignore the long term that is.

It could keep our economic engine running at high octane for a few more decades even, but it doesn’t serve a corporate interest, it serves a national one.

As I had already pointed out in my last post the two are not mutually exclusive. Especially when so much of the USA economic and military well being is dependent on those same corporations. It’s not a matter of all one way or the other, reality is more complicated than that.

My exception is the assumption that putting money into research equals quantitative results.

True, but that all the more reason to have expert opinion as to courses of action and to try and maintian a diversified research program pursing multiple strategies. For example during World War II many of the involved countries (including the USA) pursue multiple research paths simultaneously for weapons, communications, etc. Some delivered, some didn’t.

I don’t know that we’d be better off right now in terms of technology because you never know if the research you are doing will actually pay off.

True, we don’t know that for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption especially if we had started a couple of decades ago.

That said, you can’t gamble on new technologies if you don’t pay the house.

Quite so…and it’s probably much cheaper than repeatedly blowing up another country.

They certainly could have. Do you have something concrete?

It’s not that hard to find related information.
Indian removal
Indian Removal Act

Perhaps, do you disagree with my original argument that the people who are most concerned about run away industrialization are the ones that want big government which in return causes run away industrialization?

Things can certainly go that way, we do live in a world of unintended consequences after all. But I found it confusing since I never even came close to the subject of anti-trust legislation.

On the other hand, as I mentioned in my last post, those that are determined to keep government smaller by trying to ignore AGW may be setting us all up for a much bigger government than they ever feared as a result of the effects of AGW.

Again…unintended consequences.

Either way, its just another example of competing causes and effects and elements achieving an overall result economically.

No disagreement there, although I think that Macs are overpriced due to their IMO overly-proprietary design. That’s a large part of the reason why Windows has long held the majority of the market share. Apple could easily provide an OS for the typical IBM compatible PC, but they don’t want to give up that much control of their consumers. Nothing wrong with that per se, people still get to make their choices.

That comes down to “Dishonest” or “Incompetent” but proof has not been supplied for either argument. For Desert Storm, I don’t know what lie you are talking about. Please provide proof.

No offense but for someone that argues for a smaller government you seem to be very unaware of it’s tradition abuses of power especially in regards to war. You might want to look up the Gulf of Tonkin some day.
As to Operation Desert Storm…
In war, some facts less factual
and Iraqi Freedom…
Iraq War
This part is especially “good”….
“According to documents provided by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush, ten days after taking office in January 2001, instructed his aides to look for a way to overthrow the Iraqi regime. A secret memo entitled “Plan for post-Saddam Iraq” was discussed in January and February 2001, and a Pentagon document dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts”, included a map of potential areas for petroleum exploration.”
You were saying something about wanting proof of corporate interest?
Maps and Charts of Iraqi Oil Fields
Funny what you can find with just a little searching….isn’t it?

And proof.

As demonstrated, proof wasn’t the problem. It’s a matter of political will, especially when many of those that would have to call for such hearing were themselves involved in voting for the war and may have benefited from the same corporations that stood to gain. It’s much easier to get an impeachment for a sex scandal that only effects one politician than a war that was voted in favor of by the majority of congress.

My practical choice is that having a sustainable economy is more important than having a sustainable ecology in the short run.

Yes a functional economy is important, but as I’ve pointed out earlier, you don’t have to sacrifice one to protect the other…as long as you go about things intelligently. Also, in the lo0ng run (again assuming intelligent decision making) the economy will be better off in the long run.

I disagree that you can achieve that via anything short of making more incentivized energy solutions available.

I don’t recall saying that we should incentivized energy solutions, I’m not sure were you got that from. I merely stated that there are different way, some better than others, that can be employed to reach such a goal.
Here, for example, is an approach that I like much more than “Cap and Trade”
Cap and Fade

My point was someone complaining about runaway industrialization.

Ironically moving to a cleaner economy would also help with mitigating at least some of those issues to.

“Having a lead scientist becoming a political activist & agitator for the most stupidly unrealistic and ideological fringe proposed solution of all – ie. just cut all coal usage right now & never mind that everybody still get almost all their electrical and other energy from fossil fuels.” [Me.]
I’m not sure who you are talking about here…. Al Gore was never a scientist IIRC.

I was talking there about James Hansen.
Not Al Gore.
I would have thought that was clear from the description.

If the other side was even trying to be rational about the subject in the first place what difference would it make? None.

Nothing political is fully or purely rational. Unfortunately. Therein lies the problem.

Politics is not science – it is a tribal popularity contest where two camps vie for control of the country based on appealing most to most people. Its full of emotion and symbolism, manipulation and dirty tricks and logic and reason are not featured much or held in high regard there.

In science the arguments and whether they make sense based on the available evidence are the key things.

In politics it is the people who are talking and how folks feel about them that matter most.

Now I think that sucks and I think the system is broken but that’s how it is.

Right now, Gore is divisive figure with a few ardent & still loyal fans but an awful lot more folks who can’t stand the sight of him. Which is why he makes a bad figurehead and spokesperson / salesperson – for anything.

In My Humble Opinion Naturally.

Messier Tidy Upper @ #187:

But having the ex-leader of one political camp preaching it?

If the other side was even trying to be rational about the subject in the first place what difference would it make? None.

Does it change the facts of AGW? No.
Does it change the seriousness of the problem? No.
Does it change what needs to be done to improve the situation? No.
Did the Republicans embrace AGW before AL Gore, to suddenly stop just because he spoke up about the subject? No.

The Republicans (as a group, there are exceptions) have been in denial about AGW since long before Al Gore started on the subject. The fact of the matter is that politicians have been ignoring AGW since at least the late 1950′s. The problem has been getting increasing attention recently since it’s effects have been getting more obvious around the world, and more governments around the world are starting to take action.
Climate science 1956: A Plass from the past.
Please be sure to play the embedded video!

1969 Global Warming White House Memo

Gee! I guess that just Al Gore’s birth was powerful enough to motivate the denialists in the Republican party!

The problem isn’t with Gore, he’s not even that big of a figure in the debate IMO, as convenient as it is to point fingers at him as a scapegoat for the denialism of others. The problem is that fossil fuel money sponsored FUD campaigns, religious dogma, ideological blindness, and self-imposed intellectual isolationism (to maintain ideological purity) have all conspiring to deny the truth. Do you really think that someone that honestly believes that “Climategate” was actually evidence of scientific wrongdoing, or that the the majority of scientists around the world are conspiring to take over the world are going to suddenly believe that AGW is real just because Al Gore stops talking in public about it?

It seems more like you want a convenient answer to a very old and complicated problem. Please go back and look at the past few AGW threads, exactly how many of the comments against AGW were actually about Al Gore? Not many…

In fact you seem to be doing more complaining about him than the anti-AGW side!

Having a lead scientist becoming a political activist & agitator for the most stupidly unrealistic and ideological fringe proposed solution of all – ie. just cut all coal usage right now & never mind that everybody still get almost all their electrical and other energy from fossil fuels.

I’m not sure who you are talking about here…. Al Gore was never a scientist IIRC.

As to the claim that someone (presumably Al Gore) has advocated to “cut all coal usage” right now, I can’t find such a comment from Gore. Do you have a citation for the comment? Al Gore has talked about trying to civilly stop the building any more coal fired plants that don’t use CO2 sequestration, but I can’t find such a statement as what you have claimed. It seems to be far more likely to be a misrepresentation by denialists, and if so that’s still not Gore’s fault.

but once he opened his gab it stopped being about science and entered a lower sphere of discussion becoming a political debate by virtue of the : “Oh look this is what Al Gore, lead liberal is arguing for …” factor.

And soooo…What exactly makes you think that the reaction would be any different for any other “liberal” on the planet that publicly urged action on AGW?

Automatically and inevitably then the other side gets their back up and starts opposing by political tribal reflex.

Thanks for making my point for me.

Once politics gets dragged in the debate stops being scientific and starts being a political debate. And political debates rarely – if ever – solve anything, usually involve a lot of partisan screaming and name-calling and end up causing a lot of divisions and polarisation.

Yeah, gee, if only the world’s governments could find solutions to problems without politics getting involved at all. Oh wait…they can’t as long as one side (in this case the Republicans) refuses to deal with facing the issue objectively.

That’s exactly why playing into their hands having Gore speak on this issue pretty much at all is such a bad idea. Do we really *need* to play into their hands? People seriously concerned with making a good scientific case for AGW would have done so much better to have told Al

OK, since you seem think that you have such a good grasp on guiding on public opinion…
Who specifically would be a better choice to reach the public?
Why would they be better choice?
How could they avoid being demonized too?
Why would the enough of the public suddenly start to listen to this other person, and not find an excuse to ignore them as well?

Many in the Republican party already know that the majority of the scientific community says that AGW is real, but they think it’s a conspiracy to take over the world. Why wouldn’t they also just write-off any scientist as part of the conspiracy? Also the majority of Republicans are even ignoring the few high-ranking Republicans that do want to take action against AGW. I guess that’s Al Gore’s fault too, right?

So should the Republicans and Democrats alike.

Agreed, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of the Republicans have been denying AGW since long before Al Gore started to talk about it (see above).

Just like all politicians on both sides should be able to agree the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and goes around the Sun which is a G2 V star located 1 AU away. Those are the basic, pretty much beyond doubt, realities.

And yet many (again, mostly Republicans) deny those facts too, as part of a scientific and “liberal” conspiracy to hide the truth and take over the world.

Or, is that Al Gore’s fault too?

But let’s look at that example further….
When these same Republicans that deny the age of the Earth try to alter the school system to hide such information, is it the fault of the scientists and activists that want to educate the public? Should the scientists that know the Earth is older than 6,000 years just shut-up about it because they’d be getting involved in politics? Should the activists that aren’t scientists stay out of it too since it might inspire the Republicans to engage in tribalism? Who then exactly should be doing the talking…we can’t have the scientists “getting involved in politics” by trying to tell the public the truth, and we can’t have non-scientists talk either because they might be a convenient target for the opposition to demonize. So who?

Everyone should agree on the science basics and keep them non-political arguing only about what to do about it.

And yet that can’t happen if the other side won’t even agree to the scientific facts due to dogma, ideology, and conspiracy mongering.

But Gore just had to speak about the science itself as his personal cause ( ) thereby making it political, making it contentious, and thus here we are.

And not publicly discussing the issue will help how exactly? And it was political since long before Gore ever took his first office. Why are even the few high-ranking Republican that support acting on AGW being ignored too?

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Messier Tidy Upper @ #188:

Yes, science should *informing* politicians – but in a party-neutral a-political *un-politically-involved* way.

Which is exactly what the scientists have been trying to do. The problem is that when one party almost universally denies the issue and presents it to the public as an ideological issue (instead of a scientific one), then any attempt to scientifically discuss the issue is then portrayed as an attempt to undermine and attack the party and to “undermine America”. Look at the last Bush administration’s alteration of the objective and apolitical climate reports, this is the fault of Gore and the scientific community how exactly?

Yes.

Not *no* opposition sure, but considerably *less* opposition, yes I do think that

Really? And how exactly do you know this to be a fact? That there would be less opposition to AGW if Gore and the scientific community would just be quiet on the subject? Do you have any evidence yet that the majority of anti-AGW comments are directed against Al Gore? Have you found an explanation yet for the denial of AGW before Gore became involved?

Don’t know about you but when someone is shouting it usually makes *me* less likely to listen seriously to them NOT more.

And so a movie that people had to choose to go see, and some interviews counts as “shouting” now?

If the volume is too loud it gets turned down or muted & ignored altogether.

And if it’s not loud enough to be heard over the denialists, no one will ever believe the science, and nothing will ever be done.

Turning it up more is already causing people to ignore AGW or say its too much, too extreme to beleive.

Of course the dogma, ideological blindness, and FUD campaigns from the fossil fuel industry have nothing to do with it, correct?

I guess the reason why so many Americans think that Earth is less than 10,000 years old, is because of all the “shouting” that it’s 4.5 billion years old, and not the shouting of Creationists?

I guess the reason so many Americans don’t know the Earth goes around the Sun is due to the “volume” of Heliocentrism, and not due to Geocentrists making their arguments?

I guess the anti-vax movement is a result of trying to educate the public on the importance of vaccines?

Do you see the problem with this line of reasoning?
You seem to be trying to find a simple solution to a complex problem by blaming the people on the side of science, instead of those that refuse to accept anything that doesn’t conform to their limited view of reality.

From a strategic Point-Of-View, understatement might be more worth trying, sounding more moderate and les like ranting eco-nuts.

Yes. because the fossil fuel industry and their bought-politicians have obviously been silent all this time on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck. What you are asking for is for only the denialists to actually have the floor and then expecting the public to just *somehow* come to the correct answer.

No. The problem is that the scientific community hasn’t been “loud” enough and that the majority of the news media is more interested in “hearing both sides” of every issue (to encourage controversy not enlightenment), no matter how wrong one of the sides is.

Just that I think the quieter, calmer, more logical stuff is what’s more likely to work on more people – as I see things natch.

Yes, I guess that explains the success of Fox News, Beck, and Limbaugh in the USA. For some people that many be true, but reality tends to show that is not usually very effective as long as the denialist side is still able shout of scientific conspiracies to their twisted little heart’s content.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Messier Tidy Upper @ #189:

Better inform the public – yep, indeed youre right but, hey, good luck with that – esp. now. Its not like that has not been being tried for a long time already.

True it has been tried…poorly. That’s part of the reason the Republicans in the USA want to undermine the education system, look at Texas for example.

Of course even if the education was suddenly improved, it won’t have much effect for many years even under idea circumstances. I meant it as a long term approach. Sadly short of a major disaster that can clearly be directly linked to AGW, the current situation is likely to continue for a while. Even then there would still be many among the Republicans that claim it was part of a conspiracy, so it might not be enough.

Frankly, I’m not too optimistic about civilization’s future. The technical and economic obstacles are solvable, but humanity has an unlimited capacity for self-delusion and is generally lazy.

But I also think you have to admit that the “Gore factor” really isn’t helping things either.

Frankly I’ve yet to see anything convince me that it’s a factor at all. IMO nearly everyone that is a denialist would still be one regardless. The majority of the arguments don’t actually concern him. AGW denialism has been around since long before he got involved in the subject. Finally, his efforts have seemingly helped to get more people interested in the subject by bring it a little more to the public’s attention.

IMO… I’d say that either it’s “a wash” or that he might help slightly, albeit not much.

I won’t argue the point. It is too easy to lose that argument. Just consider the primary medical techniques for diagnosis and treatment used by doctors across the world. Take the list of the top 100 treatments and tell me how many were developed in a single-payer system? I haven’t done the research, so i can’t tell you. I can tell you that my argument is unwinable because most of those procedures will be from the U.S. Since the U.S. has long lead most scientific development, tying it to one factor or another will be difficult. You would have to define WHY the U.S. has been one of the top locations for science, which is undoable.

As for LASIK, that is a very cool procedure. It is also anecdotal in this context, but since my argument was that NO innovation will occur, touche. I should revise to say very little innovation will occur.

You can edit your posts, for a few minutes.

I can’t from this access point. From my other computer, I can, but not here. I know why, but its a side-effect of my build.

And I have no problem with that.

Sigh… my snarkometer is in the shop, so… I do. We regulate for no good reason, other than someone is upset that someone else is hurting themselves. The excuse to legislate away self-destructiveness will only get stronger now that the public is clearly harmed by having to pay higher insurance premiums when other people get fat. Your argument was that we only legislate radio because it is a limited resource. Where is the back-up proof that if it was an unlimited resource, not protected by free speech concerns, that it would be left alone. The only way that is the case is if the market is small (The market for sea salt, for instance) or the market is unoffensive to almost anyone (the market for sea salt, for instance).

Effective limitlessness is not an acceptable criteria, in my mind, because it doesn’t actually describe the limits between what we do regulate and what we do not. It is an artificial distinction that the public doesn’t actually follow.

You can edit your posts, for a few minutes. Just click anywhere on the comment after you’ve posted it and a box will pop up with the editable text in it. You’ll see a little countdown clock showing you how much time you’ve got left. (No pressure or anything.)

Great for removing really stupid comments before anyone else sees them, too.

BTW…

And my response is that there are no other markets in the U.S. that are essentially free of government regulation, regardless of whether it is unlimited or not

And I have no problem with that.

I can tell you that a single-payer system can work for a long time as evidenced in Canada and Europe. It may even be sustainable, but not without something giving somewhere. Either cost or quality of service will have to give. What it won’t be is innovative. To correct that, it WILL innovate, in the management of health care. It won’t innovate in the curing of diseases, just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

I would disagree with that. For example, LASIK eye surgery, of which I am a happy recipient, came out of research from Spain, Italy and Greece. It was first performed clinically in the U.S., but wasn’t adopted at large – and covered by private insurance companies – until after it had been in use in Canada and Europe for nearly a decade.

@Kuhnigget:
And my only argument with that would be, in the latter case, there is actually some benefit to the neighbor. If the guy who has no job gets back on his feet again because of the handout, he is now a productive member of society and contributes to its well-being once more.

Agreed. If, unfortunately, this becomes an impetus not to bother really looking for a job and lasts forever without a deadline, it is a broken system. Even better would be if all those roadside projects and ‘shovel ready’ jobs were given to something like the CCC so that employees who want a guaranteed, low-paying, menial labor job would be given it and that would be the only government handout they got.

And my response is, that is NOT why the internet is unregulated, unlike radio. See above. Again. Radio is regulated because it’s bandwidth is limited by the laws of physics. The internet has no such limitations. It doesn’t require regulation the way radio does. That’s why I don’t think you can reasonably compare the two.

And my response is that there are no other markets in the U.S. that are essentially free of government regulation, regardless of whether it is unlimited or not. Only illegal markets completely free and there are plenty of abuses in those because of the inability for victims to gain redress for their hurt. The only ones that remain free are the ones that are protected otherwise or completely governed by anarchy.

BTW, about the whole Halliburton thing. I would also posit, with no way of proving it, that the profit made by Halliburton during the Balkan wars was exactly what set the stage for their greater involvement in the wars to come.

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.” (Since we’re quoting Star Wars.)

I could repurpose that quote for welfare…

And I could posit that climate scientists are colluding much more actively to sow fear about AGW so that they can gain funding and support their viewpoint at the expense of evidence. Without proof, I’m stuck making conspiracy theories.

Is Halliburton a profit seeking, amoral company who has sucked off of the government teat to enrich itself. Yep, and worse, then it relocated its headquarters to a foreign country that is much more friendly to corporate policies, taking away tax dollars from the country that continues to pay a good portion of its less lucrative contracts. They won no-bid contracts. Big government feeds them well.

@AJ in CA:

It takes an issue-by-issue slog through what most people are willing to trade for freedom or security.

Don’t forget, there is a third arm to that freedom v. security tension you mention. That is the dimension that Kuhnigget seems most worried about, which is the tension between freedom and consumerism. There is also a tension between security and consumerism. This is mostly modern communist theory, I believe, but the model is useful. In a perfectly consumerist world, there would be little freedom and little security. The corporation would monopolize the workers time and they would have near immunity to killing off their employees indirectly (Foxconn anyone?). Imagine that as a triangle

Consumerism
/ \
Freedom — Security

Going to any of the extremes would be an unpleasant world in my view.

Another issue that comes to mind is public police cameras. I understand London has something like several hundred thousand.

By the same token as the police cameras is payday lending practices. I might have mentioned that one earlier. Payday lending practices are predatory. They are designed to feed off of the parts of our population that are working the hardest and getting the least for it. In states where they outlaw the practices or regulate them out of business, foreclosures go up, bankruptcies go up, suicides go up, and, a second order effect, the jobless rate goes up. Which is more important, the predatory nature of the practice, or the ultimate results? By outlawing it, we protect people from themselves and end up, perversely, helping them.

On the police cameras, if they are in public places and record only video, they are not an invasion of liberty. They are an invasion of privacy, but you have no expectation of privacy outside of your own home, your car, or your place of business if it is not public. I’m still an advocate of privacy as well, but I’m not debating that here. In fact, outlawing the payday lenders in an invasion of liberty, it just might be morally preferred by some.

Could you please elaborate on that? By the current system, do you mean the one that existed prior to the latest healthcare bill, or the system at present? Or are you speaking more generally, beyond the healthcare issue?

I am speaking more generally. We can’t keep cutting taxes and raising budgets. Our government does too much already. We need it to do less. It also needs to get over this Keynesian crap. The Great Recession is not evidence of the failure of deregulation. It’s evidence that any complex, chaotic system can have ups and downs.

A note on Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics are akin to a binge drinker. When he’s feeling down, he throws back some drinks to get happy again. He rocks out to the music, and then crashes hard later. The next morning, hungover like crazy, he immediately grabs for the hair of the dog. The money the government throws into the economy can make the economy boom but payback always comes later. Eventually its gonna be Leaving Las Vegas and the economy doesn’t get better ever again. And the funny part is that Republicans complaining about the stimulus are complaining about the purposes it was used for, not that it existed at all. The parties are both the same in that regard as well.

And by socialism, are you including stuff like fire, police, schools etc? Every nation has public infrastructure – I’m not sure where we can agree to draw the line on where that ends and socialism begins?

I don’t dispute the public infrastructure. The Fire, police, and schools are needed. Some places in the U.S. have private police agencies, and they work fine, but they are supported by an insurance program so it comes out to much the same thing, especially with laws that now require those private police agencies to protect people who haven’t paid the insurance, which is driving them out of business. Professional firefighters are really important to protect city infrastructure, so they are necessary. Fire brigades just don’t cut it. There will always be services that the state must provide for safety and protection of the populous, which is the duty of the state under liberal theory. I will also note you didn’t mention the postal service. This is much better run by private industry than public.

None of those industries are what I mean by socialism, though I will point out that schools seemed to do much better before we essentially nationalized their administration. What I mean by socialism is when nominally private industry is turned into or completely supported by a public industry. This doesn’t include companies that exists solely to perform a service for the government at the cost of the government but are still privately managed (for example, H&R Block), but does include private companies that the government manages.

The reason it is unsustainable has already been covered, but is simply companies and individuals that can’t fail, don’t try to succeed, thereby becoming inefficient. Second, the more services the government provides, the more it drives up the tax burden, the more private businesses fail to make a profit. When businesses fail to make a profit, they do one of several things. First, they streamline by getting rid of jobs, driving up the burden on the government making the tax burden that much higher. Second, they may turn toward government subsidy, driving up the tax burden against. Third, they may just move out from the tax burden. Fourth, they stop doing business.

Any of those happen, the middle class disappears.

Is there no nation with a national health care system that IS sustainable? Are they all unsustainable?

I couldn’t say, I haven’t looked at all the national health care systems out there. I can tell you that a single-payer system can work for a long time as evidenced in Canada and Europe. It may even be sustainable, but not without something giving somewhere. Either cost or quality of service will have to give. What it won’t be is innovative. To correct that, it WILL innovate, in the management of health care. It won’t innovate in the curing of diseases, just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Just to be a nitpicking PITA, the internet also needs regulatory agencies to keep it working, groups that assign and coordinate domain names and IP ranges such as the IANA and ICANN. Those could (loosely) be said to be doing work that’s similar to what the FCC does with radio frequencies…

A few more comments than I intended, I guess. This is a very interesting debate guys.

Just to be a nitpicking PITA

The original point was made regarding radio’s dependency upon a limited resource (the electromagnetic spectrum’s finite amount of available frequencies), not the techniques used to broadcast over them.

Consider the nit picked.

Astronomy? That’s that silly column in the newspaper every day, right?

@#Terry: (re Iraq, Afghanistan) By the way, good on you and thank you for your service!

@#194 kuhnigget: Just to be a nitpicking PITA, the internet also needs regulatory agencies to keep it working, groups that assign and coordinate domain names and IP ranges such as the IANA and ICANN. Those could (loosely) be said to be doing work that’s similar to what the FCC does with radio frequencies…
Of course, they’re not US government agencies, so… Point?
Also, since IP v6, we don’t have the spectre of address exhaustion hanging over us anymore. Though they did help us stretch that out a few years by developing subnetting systems.
Er, what was I saying again?

Oh yeah, astronomy!

So, people wouldn’t have learned to get off of each others’ frequencies if they want to be heard? It is in the best interests of broadcasters to organize their own actions so that other broadcasters stay off of their frequencies too.

No, you’re still not clear on this point. There are a limited number of frequencies available. That is the difference between radio and, for example, the internet. The tendency amongst broadcasters, being humans after all, is to do the equivalent of shouting louder. Boost your signal, drown out the others, so your message, i.e. your commercials gets heard instead of the competition’s.

I grew up in California. Pirate radio is a response to regulation and a rebellion from the system, not a sign of what the lack of regulation would be.

I wasn’t referring to so-called pirate radio. I was referring to Mexican stations that blast their signal so strong it drowns out other stations on nearby frequencies. Again, the issue gets back to that limited resource: broadcast frequencies.

Show me another unlimited industry that is unregulated, aside from those that are protected by free speech issues, which is the only reason that the internet is unregulated.

And my response is, that is NOT why the internet is unregulated, unlike radio. See above. Again. Radio is regulated because it’s bandwidth is limited by the laws of physics. The internet has no such limitations. It doesn’t require regulation the way radio does. That’s why I don’t think you can reasonably compare the two.

My premise is that letting anyone walk into the home of your neighbor and take away money at gunpoint is a harm. Forget that, and you forget mutual respect. Some harms are necessary for the good of the populous, but some go beyond the good of the populous. If you are taking money from your neighbor at gunpoint to use in rebuilding the road, that benefits everyone, even your neighbor, and may be justified. It is still a harm, but one that also helps. If you are taking money from your neighbor by force to give to the guy at the street who has no job, that is a harm which benefits only the guy down the street.

And my only argument with that would be, in the latter case, there is actually some benefit to the neighbor. If the guy who has no job gets back on his feet again because of the handout, he is now a productive member of society and contributes to its well-being once more. He starts buying stuff, some of which might be manufactured by the business owned by your neighbor, and generally speaking just becomes a better citizen again. There is value in that. It might be a temporary intrusion on your neighbor’s “liberty,” but for society as a whole there is a long-term benefit.

BTW, about the whole Halliburton thing. I would also posit, with no way of proving it, that the profit made by Halliburton during the Balkan wars was exactly what set the stage for their greater involvement in the wars to come.

“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.” (Since we’re quoting Star Wars.)

I’m not adverse to the idea, I just want proof. There is a lot of rhetoric in debate on both sides and I want fact, not rhetoric. The fact is, no one has ever proved that we went to Iraq to serve for corporations, yet the argument is still made as if it were fact. I don’t accept that.

This is partially true, but you need to remember that part of the decrease in demand was due to an unprecedented push in most industrialized countries for increasing conversation, efficiency, use of nuclear power etc.

The efficiency boost was because the oil had become so expensive that it spending more on converting to efficient technologies was incentivized. Either way, OPEC learned their lesson and since then have had strenuous arguments about raising the price. The fuel rationing was before my time, but I understand the concept. It doesn’t fundamentally change my argument. Fuel rationing can easily come back.

The problem with this is that you seem to be thinking that the demand for oils is very elastic, on the contrary it’s very inelastic for the last couple of decades. It takes time for an economy that becomes increasingly dependent on energy production with each year to suddenly “change gears” or develop new technologies, that also imposes additional costs on businesses.

When the cost of fuel doubled in the U.S. a couple of years back, the SUV market crumbled, the Hybrid market exploded, small cars took off, and national demand for oil began to come down, which drove the speculation costs WAY down causing the price to tank. It was seriously elastic in my view. I will accede that I am not an expert on the oil market, but I will tell you that any economist knows we will never run out of oil. It will just get so expensive that other forms of power are cheaper at which point the era of nearly free energy is over and we get to go back to slow growth. If you increase the cost, people will get more efficient or the will go elsewhere for power.

As China and India become more industrialized, they will invariably use more energy, causing overall energy demands to go up, which will decrease supply and increase price, that is absolutely true. Eventually, the cost will be so high that solar power is finally cheaper and people will start to REALLY go solar. Already, I think nuclear power is cheaper than coal power in second order costs. Eventually it will be cheaper than coal in dollar point at which point no matter what the Sierra Club does to derail it, it will take off again.

Does it really seem that hard to see how an government other than oil-less Israel that is friendly to the USA would improve the USA’s position in the oil market?

We have TONS of friendly countries in the gulf. TONS. Saudi is very friendly to U.S. business interests. So is Oman, though they are more careful with their investments. The UAE practically wants to become the America of the Future, without losing its religious monotony. It is not in our interests to upset that egg cart. Consider this, compare and contrast how much oil costs in Europe, and how much it costs in the United States.

That said, having a puppet regime could certainly support us that way. It would certainly provide a public benefit, to ALL AMERICANS, if we had lots of really cheap, oil. It could keep our economic engine running at high octane for a few more decades even, but it doesn’t serve a corporate interest, it serves a national one.

If instead of fighting wars for oil and providing massive subsidies for the fossil fuel industries (as I linked to earlier @ #135), we had diverted even a fraction of the resources devoted of even one of the wars with Iraq to researching renewable energy/efficiency, improving the countries use of energy, etc. The USA would be far less dependent on oil now, the market for oil would be more elastic, Middle Eastern terrorism would be less funded (and motivated), and the USA’s economy would be more stable and vulnerable to politics on the other side of the world.

I agree wholeheartedly with that argument, with one tangential exception. I think you may be channeling the spirit of Ron Paul a bit there, but I do certainly agree. My exception is the assumption that putting money into research equals quantitative results. I don’t know that we’d be better off right now in terms of technology because you never know if the research you are doing will actually pay off. That said, you can’t gamble on new technologies if you don’t pay the house.

Do you really think that the politicians that made such land grants didn’t benefit either directly (in contributions and “retirement funds”) or indirectly in the sense of building the US economy and military?

They certainly could have. Do you have something concrete?

Are you confusing me with someone else?

Perhaps, do you disagree with my original argument that the people who are most concerned about run away industrialization are the ones that want big government which in return causes run away industrialization?

I would argue that much of Apple’s recent success is due to marketing and hype. Also, that Windows has been dominant for so long due to a more open, and therefore competitive manufacturing system reducing prices of computers and creating a greater range of options.

I would argue that for some people Apple’s recent success is the “it just works” type of customer. And that marketing and hype account for other parts. I would also argue that some people go with Windows because they hate some Mac fanboi. Either way, its just another example of competing causes and effects and elements achieving an overall result economically.

It’s a matter of historical record that the government had lied in both Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

It’s a matter of the media rhetoric that the government lied. Another outlook could be that it was mistaken for Iraqi Freedom. That comes down to “Dishonest” or “Incompetent” but proof has not been supplied for either argument. For Desert Storm, I don’t know what lie you are talking about. Please provide proof.

Because it take s a lot of political effort for a impeachment hearing

And proof.

True. Just a reminder, I’m not a Republican. They are certainly responsible for their share of recklessness about denial of reality. As are the Democrats. Both essentially say, in their own field of idiocy, “We can maintain the status quo and it won’t hurt anyone?” The one side is economic. The other is ecological. Both are calling for unsustainable practices.

We have a choice…
We can either commit economic seppuku.
Or we can become more energy independent, meaning cleaner air, a more stable economy, and less war/terrorism.

I don’t disagree with anything here. I disagree that you can achieve that via anything short of making more incentivized energy solutions available. A national policy to support energy alternatives is not a bad thing. My point was someone complaining about runaway industrialization.

I don’t believe any society, anywhere, can long survive without compromise, mutual understanding, and a shared ideal. I think that when I nation has lost its idealists and everyone has become practicalists, that nation has no future. It will go on, but it won’t thrive.

You are right in that I cannot prove my position, but I can posit realistic possibilities.

Point of disclosure, I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also served in Kosovo. In Kosovo, under President Clinton, K&B, the unit of Halliburton which had all the lucrative contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the main logistic supplier to all of our operations out there. They had a lucrative 10 year contract. It was obscene, but also unfortunately predating Afghanistan and Iraq.

I am not arguing that Halliburton and other corporate insiders did not benefit. I’m not even arguing that the militarism of the United States foreign policy has not served the corporate interests. I’m not arguing that the awarding of no-bid contracts to Halliburton and other corporations is not corruption. I’m arguing that neither Iraq nor any other war was fought to serve corporate interests. They were fought to serve national interests, which are strongly influenced by corporate interests. AND THEY WERE PROBABLY STILL IMMORAL.

It’s rare in history – military or other – that you say with certitude, “this happened because of this.”

As if a million historians called out in terror… and were silenced.

If you’ve got stations broadcasting willy nilly wherever they want, you will end up with chaos.

So, people wouldn’t have learned to get off of each others’ frequencies if they want to be heard? It is in the best interests of broadcasters to organize their own actions so that other broadcasters stay off of their frequencies too. They form a private organization to see to that broadcasting, but built of the people who it interests rather than politicians who don’t recognize the value of the medium. That private organization has no enforcement powers, unfortunately. I guess they could just be ignored, at the peril of the broadcaster that ignores them, because anyone can jam anyone else’s signal easily.

If you’ve ever listened to the radio near the Mexican border, you know what that would be like

I grew up in California. Pirate radio is a response to regulation and a rebellion from the system, not a sign of what the lack of regulation would be.

And I’m sorry, but I don’t get the second part of your question. Clarify, please? Sleepy tired grammar apparently.

My original question, way up there, was if your argument is that radio is regulated because of its limited nature and action on the internet is unregulated because of its unlimited nature. Show me another unlimited industry that is unregulated, aside from those that are protected by free speech issues, which is the only reason that the internet is unregulated.

Chowderheads need human contact, too. Though I resent being called an “it.” More sleepy tired grammar. Apparently I need an editor… Meant to say “to you”.

I know what fiction is (proof in name), but I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about in the beginning of that sentence. I looked at your books with interest, actually. As far as the first, I should have said tabletop roleplaying games. DMing means dungeon mastering. In both cases, I made an assumption that by saying that it would be clearer than explaining I play roleplaying games with friends and act as the storyteller. I’m good at bringing disparate elements into my stories.

Wrong on both counts. First, I’m just having a hard time figuring out what the root of your argument is, and I don’t buy what I take to be your basic premise that business/industry/the free market is somehow better or less worse than government by definition.

Not my premise at all, actually. My premise is that letting anyone walk into the home of your neighbor and take away money at gunpoint is a harm. Forget that, and you forget mutual respect. Some harms are necessary for the good of the populous, but some go beyond the good of the populous. If you are taking money from your neighbor at gunpoint to use in rebuilding the road, that benefits everyone, even your neighbor, and may be justified. It is still a harm, but one that also helps. If you are taking money from your neighbor by force to give to the guy at the street who has no job, that is a harm which benefits only the guy down the street. If you keep taking from your neighbor to give to everyone else, because times are tough, that neighbor may quit your protection racket and leave. If too many of your neighbors leave, the protection racket turns to using force to prevent people from leaving. If they keep complaining about it, might as well use force to keep them from talking about it too.

Nothing in my belief means I think government is bad and business is good or less bad. My believe means I think that government can use force and business can not. It can still use fraud, which is also bad, but not force.

If only they would compromise…

If I want the liberty to do as I please, and I personally see no harm in, say, building a huge factory in the middle of a once quiet residential neighborhood, a factory that requires constant truck traffic to deliver raw materials and take away manufactured goods, so much traffic that my neighbors cannot move out of their own driveways, I’ve pretty much bound them up, haven’t I?

Up there I did talk about the value of zoning laws. Some are good, others are not, but they still can serve a purpose. Still, we are discussing my philosophical leanings, not my practical ones so lets go ahead. That would be something for courts or arbitration to decide, in my philosophy.

There will be disputes in any system of government and there is no perfect system of government. There will be winners and losers in any system of government. To think that you can prevent loss for everyone is asinine and truly naive, and I don’t believe that. Progressives seem to believe that, while conservatives don’t seem to care as long as it stays the same as now.

I dunno about you, but I’m just putting off typing up the treatment that’s due on Monday passing the time until my wife and kids get back from a weekend trip, as well as expanding my understanding of philosophy with challenges and discoveries.

Another issue that comes to mind is public police cameras. I understand London has something like several hundred thousand. The argument that they reduce crime may indeed be true. Still, were you to propose a system like that in the US, it’d probably be strongly opposed, even if you did have undeniable proof that it reduces crime. The calculus of liberty, as you eloquently put it, depends on the culture and history of the society that, er, calculates it.

Personally, I believe that the public good of a national health insurance system (not nationalization of health care institutions themselves, as they do in some places) would far outweigh the costs. I haven’t always believed that, though – I’ve done quite a bit of position reevaluation in the past several years, so I do understand where the “other side” (I hate to use that phrase, but you know what I mean) is coming from here.

BTW, For what it’s worth, the bit of the bill about an insurance company not being able to refuse you for a pre-existing condition is hogwash, as I found out first-hand. Sure, they technically can’t refuse you, but they can set your premiums so ridiculously high that you can’t possibly pay them.

I’ve been accused of naivete on occasion here. I think it is plainly naive to consider it possible to sustain the current system without bankrupting the nation. Socialism is unsustainable. Marx said so. Smith said so. Hayek said so. Keynes said so.

Could you please elaborate on that? By the current system, do you mean the one that existed prior to the latest healthcare bill, or the system at present? Or are you speaking more generally, beyond the healthcare issue?
And by socialism, are you including stuff like fire, police, schools etc? Every nation has public infrastructure – I’m not sure where we can agree to draw the line on where that ends and socialism begins?

I wish there was a way that everyone could be taken care of without breaking down the system and if there was a cheap form of health care reform that didn’t created an insurmountable and growing burden on the populous I would love it. I don’t see it.

Is there no nation with a national healthcare system that IS sustainable? Are they all unsustainable?

So yeah, bing bang boom, one man’s freedom, another man’s bondage.

That is a great example and a great case of a moral dilemma. Any philosophy that is without moral dilemma is without moral fiber too. On that note, I am sorry that you and your friend are both suffering. My condolences and my prayers, fwiw.

Now, I know you mentioned a single-payer socialized medicine as your point, but I’m going to talk the current law first. As a thinking man I can’t say that the current form of health care reform is all bad. There are good points and bad points, just as with the USA PATRIOT act there were good points and bad points. Overall, the requirement that everyone buy insurance is an usurpation of liberty, as is forcing insurance to accept people with pre-existing conditions. You also can’t have one without the other or else you would drive the insurance companies out of business or make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Both of those are, as I see it, the most fundamental aspects of the new health care act. Both of which are going to HAVE to raise costs on the populous as well, despite the claims by the administration. Ignoring reality seems to be the specialty of politicians of all stripes.

A single-payer system stifles innovation and cripples research. It also provides for the overall health care of more people at today’s standards. It just means that research on all of those diseases and disorders that aren’t hot-button issues effectively becomes nil. However, this wasn’t about the practical reasons why single-payer system works or doesn’t, it was about the liberty element and on that, there is a clear moral calculus for the concepts of liberty. Take the government out of the equation. If the government is equivalent to the will of the people, then it is equivalent to going to your neighbor and demanding that they pay your hospital bills. Since the government uses force to secure tax money, it is equivalent to doing it with a gun.

On the other hand, you already go to your neighbors house and say “Fix the damn roads!” with a gun, and “Protect me from those foreigners!” with a gun. Both of which are invasions of liberty, but both of which are necessary to a functioning society. The question is which is better for the most people. That is a debate I have seen and can see both sides of, but I don’t believe that the current legislation on the matter is good for the most people. I’ve been accused of naivete on occasion here. I think it is plainly naive to consider it possible to sustain the current system without bankrupting the nation. Socialism is unsustainable. Marx said so. Smith said so. Hayek said so. Keynes said so.

I wish there was a way that everyone could be taken care of without breaking down the system and if there was a cheap form of health care reform that didn’t created an insurmountable and growing burden on the populous I would love it. I don’t see it.

@148. Zetetic :

Ultimately, the only way to avoid politicization of science for such issues is to either better inform the public as to the science to an unprecedented level, or create some kind of technocracy (an idea I don’t find too appealing).

You know the more I look at the politicians “running” our democracy – in Oz as well as the States – the more temptingan effective, competent, halfway sane technocracy seems!

Better inform the public – yep, indeed youre right but, hey, good luck with that – esp. now. Its not like that has not been being tried for a long time already.

“If Gore was less associated with Climate change I have a strong feeling that the Republican side would be a lot more open to accepting the reality of the science.” [Me.]
Not likely since so many of them get their money from fossil fuel interests, stay devoted to corporate welfare, and/or think that God won’t let anything bad happen.

Yes, you *do* have a point there I have to admit.
But I also think you have to admit that the “Gore factor” really isn’t helping things either.