Ron Paul wins presidential straw poll at CPAC

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I always find such speculations amusing. If some other species developed the technical capability to reach us from the other side of the galaxy, I doubt they would have difficulty destroying us if they wanted to. Any "war" between humans and aliens would more likely be an extermination.

To respond to MAD: We only used the atomic bomb twice. Since then, there has generally been a consensus of "never again" regarding the use of nuclear weapons. We can fight a conventional war and just refuse to use nukes. Indeed, we have done so in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Now, granted these were not earth-shattering wars in the geopolitical sense, but we were (by proxy) fighting the Soviet Union or the Chinese in some of these wars. You can say that a major war is impossible because of MAD, but given the strong push towards nuclear disarmament, there is no guarantee that MAD will exist in 50 years. Besides that, MAD only applies if we are fighting against a very clearly defined enemy that is geographically restricted. It can do nothing against, say, a civil war that is not geographically based like the last one was.

You are correct that incentives do not favour war, but you make the typical neoclassical mistake of assuming that humans are rational creatures. I think we have both recently observed that this is not universally the case, and sadly it is not the case nearly as often as we would like to imagine.

Orwell, none of your examples involve MAD. The other power in this case couldn't assure our destruction, so our use of conventional weapons was only to avoid being too heavy handed. If we had a real war with both sides having nukes, then guess what? As soon as either side starts getting an advantage their opponents will threaten nuclear holocaust. In fact, threats of nuclear holocaust will probably precede a conventional war in the first place which will prevent it.

Proxy fighting doesn't count. Proxy fighting is closer to skirmishing, not to total war.

Ok, unless it is a US civil war though, it isn't going to be a major issue as the question is only about conventional military forces and a war between powers. Minor things are pretty much irrelevant. If you look back to the earlier issue it was whether isolationism was a tenable strategy. The issue is that nothing you have put forward has actually undermined the validity of isolationism. This isn't to say "isolationism is the *best* strategy" or even "isolationism will have results that most people will like", only whether it is tenable without major harm to the nation implementing it.


We didn't see that. Neoclassical rationality has nothing to do with human arguments, at all. You'd only have a case if you were able to bludgeon this person with something and if there was no reduction in action. As it stands though, more developed nations are more likely to be more rational. The cases where there are beings that will act against incentives are going to be things like suicide bombers and crazy third world tinpots, and those kinds of figures aren't as susceptible to conventional military force to take care of them in the first place. As it stands, to disrupt this peace would require a new power and some international struggle with an old power, and even then such a power isn't likely to go into a major war, and if we just ignore it, then it is likely not to even get into a Cold War.

I don't really know what you are trying to argue. Are you trying to argue that it may potentially be theoretically possible that a major war between the powers will occur at some undefined date? If so, then I am forced to accept that premise. But the idea that it is likely given the institutional set up is very difficult for me to see supported. I mean, the kind of rationality we are dealing with here is more of the sort "pain hurts" kind of rationality that even simple animals can understand.

The very rapid advance of robotics with manufactured automatic armies is getting new variations of war very close. The robotic (or remote controlled) aircraft are already making an impact in Iraq and when this is coupled with computer control automatic strategies unfortunate and unpredictable things might well happen.

Owners of capital certainly do use the public education system. Their workers must be educated. They use the infrastructure far more than most people - most people aren't shipping goods by road and by rail. This wears down these infrastructures. The owners of capital even make more use of public domain technologies, such as wheels for instance. They're freeloading off of the dead! When the army invades some place to help put a government more friendly to their investments in power, this again is another benefit of government spending to the rich.

Again, the issue that the first dollars made are more valuable than the last ones is an important one. If you don't think so, then it's an easy matter to defend slavery. After all, the slaves don't work for free, they are paid a pretty penny to keep them alive, and who is to say that those miserable slaves deserve that any more! It's the slave owners who are the victims when these slaves become lazy. How much private property was plundered when slavery was abolished - and those slaves had it good, didn't they! Those who say slavery is wrong is suggesting that financing people to keep them alive is no great act of generosity. Well, to those who say every penny is equal be it the first or the 1 millionth dollars worth of pennies cannot say this.

By the way, they have a flat tax in Latvia and it is an absolute disaster there. They do everything the right wing way more than any other country in the world and not only has the economy contracted by 25% but Latvians are going to disappear if this keeps up.

Last edited by xenon13 on 21 Feb 2010, 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

And you think that instead of a diplomatic fiasco or a nuclear holocaust we'll have a conventional war? Or do you think that a bunch of aliens with super technology are going to be scared by some poorly designed robots? Which ridiculous idea do you want to strap yourself down to?

You mean education doesn't benefit the worker? After all, worker education is something that makes them more employable and a lot of workers actually pay for their own education to get ahead. That being said, public education systems generally don't do a great job in terms of useful training and really they work more as propaganda tools for the state and a way for us to feel as if we have sufficiently educated society. If they had accounting classes or more substantive technology training, even writing classes that actually focused on business communication, then I might actually believe your claim to some extent. But, public education is questionable as capital, and it is questionable in terms of the distribution of benefits.

Most of our budget isn't spent on railroads or roads. Additionally, you're talking about companies, not rich people. Companies are the ones who ship things, and I actually held that they shouldn't be taxed at all. Even if the rich did personally use these things more, most of our budget isn't roads. To go even further, why not just say that those damnable consumers are the real ones who are using shipping infrastructure. The rich aren't the ones consuming most of the things transported, but rather the middle class is, so why not tax them more for having things shipped for *their* benefit? In fact, as it stands, many railroad rights are owned privately.

Everyone freeloads off of the dead. However, neither the current government nor the current people can take credit for the works of dead people. Are you trying to reductio ad absurdum your own position?

There are only a few nations invaded every so often, and I consider the military a waste. So justifying proportional income taxes off of programs that should rightly be abolished is kind of pointless.



Defending slavery already is easy. The only reason why we don't see it as easy is because we have anti-slavery values. The entire proposed satire apart because of that issue.

That being said, slavery is hard to defend on economic grounds in many ways, because of the fact that slaves are unlikely to make good workers for things other than farming.

Financing people to keep slaves alive is no great act of generosity simply because we have studies that show that slavery was an profit-seeking industry with decisions on slaves dominated by economic considerations rather than humanitarian concerns.

That being said, I never denied the marginal utility of money. I dismissed the normative analysis. The fact that you think that positive analysis, such as the marginal utility of money, leads to normative conclusions merely shows some ignorance. The distinction is often noted in many economics classes.

However, the value of profits never depended upon the changes in the marginal utility of money anyway. Profit is a matter of benefits - costs, and is a net value. That being said, in slave issues, the real issue is the time value of money, and frankly time values are more subjectively based in the first place, as we actually can't know what a person really would egoistically demand for a return, so a slave-owner who was actually altruistic is hypothetically possible just so long as we don't have a way to show that the slave owner's actions really correspond to profitability rather than human consideration.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 21 Feb 2010, 10:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Aside from the fact that robots are very much a part of current technology I wonder why you have to bring aliens into that scenario? The alien thing was obviously a joke but I guess you didn't catch that. Your ruling out unknown factors to establish basically that things don't change was my point. Already the primitive war conducted by the highly technical US Army in Afghanistan has kept the USA tied up longer than WWII and unknown developments are never predictable.

Still, such skirmishes had the potential to draw us into a total war. It almost happened in Korea. In any case, I mentioned the fact that MAD may cease to exist fairly soon if the policy of nuclear disarmament is followed (as mandated by our treaty obligations, I might add). All we would have left is conventional warfare in that case. And the use of tactical nuclear weapons (a policy endorsed by the current Russian administration) allows the possibility of non-apocalyptic nuclear war where MAD does not apply.


There are plenty of non-nuclear powers who can beat the hell out of each other with conventional weapons. We watched Iraq and Iran do it for about a decade. I mean, at best you haven't demonstrated that war is impossible, you've demonstrated that it would be suicidal at this particular point in history for anyone to seriously attempt a direct attack against the United States. I'm willing to agree on that point, but I don't see how it's all that meaningful. For centuries, it was suicidal for anyone to attack the Romans.


Mahmoud Ahmedinejad recently announced that Iran is a nuclear power and has enriched uranium to 20%. That is not (yet) weapons-grade material, but it's getting there. An Iranian nuclear strike against Israel would lead to an international geopolitical crisis and the world's remaining nuclear powers would have to choose sides, and it is believed that Israel has a large undeclared stock of nuclear weapons. You laughed off Russia earlier, but remember that they still have enough nukes to end our species. In fact, by some estimates their arsenal is larger than ours. Britain, France, and China also have enough nuclear weapons to counter us; so we have enough to kill them a thousand times over, they have enough to kill us once and that's more than enough. India and Pakistan are bitter rivals and both are nuclear powers; we can't ignore the possibility of an Asian nuclear war.


You claimed we're at the end of history. That's probably just false on the face of it. You also claimed that war is basically impossible, at least all-out war between major powers. Again, I think this is wrong. We have come terrifyingly close to nuclear armageddon before, and I gave you a list of several nations that currently have the capability to basically end the world. Essentially, I doubt MAD as an absolute guarantee, and I can easily envision a possibility where the MAD deterrent would disappear within our lifetimes. Even if I grant you MAD (which I don't entirely buy) the argument still breaks down when MAD goes away.

Afghanistan isn't a real war though, there is no draft, there is no full war economy, nothing like that. Extrapolating from the Afghan war thus serves no point when the real issue is actually a full war economy having to emerge to deal with a threat.

Potential, maybe, but still, there aren't other major powers for us to proxy battle with though.

Ok, fine, I'll grant you that if MAD is extinguished major power upsets are significantly more likely. However, I kind of doubt that any intelligent nation will fully disarm. Including the US. If a war ever looks likely, then nations will just have programs where they don't "really" have nukes, but they basically do.

Tactical nukes don't remove MAD. Tactical nukes only mean that a nation can get into a fight without destroying the opponent, but MAD is really a deterrent to opponents that can't be crushed easily and things like that.


Are you somehow just completely ignorant on the matter that's really at hand here? If attack is suicidal, and to an extreme extent, then that solves most conventional use of military forces. We only need as much of a military as it takes to crush any real threat and only a real threat. So, if this is true, we don't really need a lot of bases open to be essentially quite safe. Isolationism would still be a relatively successful policy.


Ok? But an asian nuclear war still doesn't use conventional military forces. The entire original conversation was about our bases and how removing bases is a *terrible* idea for the US.

As it stands though, I really think that most powers aren't going to go to a nuclear war over this. Nuclear arms radically alters the deal. What will happen is that millions of people in the middle east will die and the major powers are going to discuss this amongst themselves. Almost no similarity to WW1. I mean, MAD still holds, and no power has some super-strong moral commitment to the Middle East, most of them would rather not die.

I laughed off Russia earlier because they aren't going to launch a conventional military assault, any time soon, at all. The notion of a nuclear arms battle is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT! The original discussion was on conventional military forces, not nuclear arms, as the latter isn't relevant to that issue of foreign bases.


Ok? It was also an overstatement to stand against the notion that foreign policy realism is going to be as essential as it was during past ages. The statement had a context.

Let's see, you mean between the two ALREADY OPPOSED *GREAT* POWERS of the USSR and the US? Orwell, nothing from the Cold War holds. We don't have a dualism in our world, and we aren't likely to get one either. Is MAD an absolute guarantee that no nuke will ever be used? No. MAD is a guarantee that no nuke will ever be used between sane political agents, such as developed nations. Now, seriously, I've already given you the one issue where I can actually see a world war, and that would require China as a power and fights over ideology given that. The problem though is that China will likely increasingly take on elements of Western ideology as time goes on, despite what the US thinks, and that China will have difficulties ever establishing itself as having enough power to overrun everyone. After all, if China makes it, it is also likely that India will start to make it too, and if China shows too much spunk then the US and the EU are going to be very questioning of its role.

Do I think that you have reasonable concerns? No. Do I think you are really addressing the heart of the criticism between myself and Tech? No. I am not a person who bothers with pointless possibilities. If a nuclear war breaks out, it won't really matter WHAT the US actually does, so long as we don't entirely disarm. Period. Give me possibilities where strong conventional forces will actually be useful. Not a Vietnam like what we've seen so many times over. Not a terrorist attack where there aren't enemies to really go after. Not a nuclear war either. I want you to give me a foreign policy issue that should cause us to really require certain policies on US armed forces to make a significant difference, in which the argument is in favor of greater militarization.

I think we did get carried away with tangents a bit in terms of talking about future wars. However, control of trade routes, particularly the oceans, is something that could inflate certain countries slowly while diminishing others, all while being well below the threshold of humanity making itself extinct with nukes. Different ownership of the Oceans, and then what those powers decide to do in the next twenty to fifty years after gaining ownership, or who may gain more dominance over them; it could shift quite considerably, hopefully not frequently, but it could very easily change the shape of the global dialog entirely, not quite perhaps to the magnitude of trying to imagine say South America as the cradle of civilization and how having it there instead of Africa could have given us an unrecognizeable history to what we have now but the general idea is there in a more subtle degree, and while I say subtle I'd say that it would be a constantly building force and enough to change the future-history of the next three or four hundred years quite significantly by eddies of cause and effect brought about by that.

That's not at all arguing on whether its a good or bad thing that the U.S. has control of the shipping lanes or of much of global commerce in the Atlantic and Pacific, that's just saying that I think a shift would be significant. I don't know what Ron Paul's thoughts on that are, if he either discounts that too much or, alternately if he just has faith that its better for us to pass the torch off in that regard. I guess though, being the kind of guy who's been largely for the U.S.'s intentions and activities, I can't say that I'd agree with that decision.

Wait, people still give a s**t about that senile, racist old f**k?

He's never going to be president. Get over it and move on.

Ron Paul is also against abortion. That so-called libertarian wants to make women the brood-mares of the human race.

ruveyn

Yes, but he also considers abortion to be a State issue, not something the Federal Government should be banning. He's at least that consistent enough to not demand the maximum use of Government power in order to prohibit things he personally finds objectionable.

I'd be willing to eat the abortion issue in light of all the other positives a Ron Paul candidacy would bring, I'm never going to get a perfect candidate, so I have to pick and choose my dealbreaker issues.

Oh Goody! Local thugs will compel women to bear young, rather than Federal thugs. I am totally underwhelmed by your thinking on the matter.

ruveyn