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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (337765)	5/17/2007 2:16:41 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575025

It must be disturbing for Tim to see from his views that he's an authoritarian fascist! He should embrace them and be proud that they could make the trains run on time, or else!

To: tejek who wrote (337765)	5/24/2007 7:59:36 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575025

In the fact, the first chart tells you that it was a professional team that created the chart. So its the opinion of a team, and if the three charts are made by different teams, its the opinion of three teams. Big deal. That means that Bush has elements found in an Authoritarian but is not considered Authoritarian. If Bush is on the statist/authoritarian side, then many French leaders should be even further to that side. The US has more freedom than France. Not night and day, not enough to put France in a totally different category, but the state does control more in France. "The 2nd one I've commented on before. The problem is not as much that it places France at the center (although I would disagree with that as well) but that it sets France's area to be such that you can't be at the center unless you are very like France. Also the idea that France is overall freer then the US isn't a very reasonable one." We are not talking about France's culture but we are talking about its political system. And its still silly to insist that the political system has to be anything like Frances to be centrist. Do you know how to read these charts? Laissez-faire, a French construct btw, sits on the far right of the line labeled Economic Right. That means Bush/Reagan is much more laissez-faire than Clinton, and in turn, Clinton is much more laissez-faire than Greenpeace. Laissez-faire is the opposite of totalitarianism in more ways than it is at the middle between leftist totalitarianism and "Corporatism", so it should be more like what you describe, but that's not the way the chart is actually drawn up. Look at the third chart. The green area in the chart says "laissez-faire capitalism". Clinton bumps up against its boundary, barely outside of it. Greenpeace is close to it than Reagan. And Hitler is close to it than Bush. That's ridiculous. Labeling France as the center isn't really objectively wrong, its just subjective. But whatever you pick as the center, the idea that Chirac was less authoritarian than Bush and that Arafat is barely more authoritarian, is silly. That chart (the 1st one) even has Bush as closer along the top to bottom, authoritarian to libertarian access to Mugabe or Saddam Hussien, then he is to the center. I suppose the 2nd chart is the best of the bunch, but that isn't saying much. Its just wrong, as opposed to off the charts crazy. Its main weaknesses are 1 - That it places the US as more authoritarian than France, and 2 - That it considers capitalism and freedom to be two separate issues. All else being equal, the more you move from socialism to capitalism, the freer you are. Of course all else doesn't have to be equal. A particular somewhat socialist country can be freer than a particular somewhat capitalist country, if the capitalist country limits freedom a lot in other ways. But capitalism is connected to freedom. Free markets aren't the only aspect of freedom but they are an important one.