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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (154414)	1/15/2011 9:35:54 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541848

Look at China's pollution problems (just to take one awful example- there are plenty of others). I'd take this country over there's any day. I wouldn't live in China even if you paid me a million dollars to be there. No way. Mr. e was at one time considered as a lead in China, and we were so glad that fizzled and we went to Scotland instead.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (154414)	1/15/2011 9:56:16 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541848

You aren't alone. I think that way about peak oil, too. Climate Scientists Deepening Skepticism of Democracy Jan. 7 2011 - 1:40 am By WILLIAM PENTLAND Does a liberal democracy have sufficient resolve to stomach the economic and political sacrifices required to stabilize global warming? A growing number of climate scientists believe the answer is “no.” In their view, democratic institutions are perpetuating climate change by precluding implementation of the politically unpalatable actions needed to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. For example, in The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, David Shearman, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia argues that democracies are no match for the complex challenges posed by climate change. A liberal democracy are inherently incompatible with the governance measured needed to establish a sustainable society. After arguing that democracy is impotent and destined to fail humanity, Shearman goes off the deep-end, concluding that an authoritarian form of government is necessary to combat climate change. The back-of-the-book blurb, which I would strongly urge readers NOT to buy, describes the author’s argument like so: Climate change threatens the future of civilization, but humanity is impotent in effecting solutions . . . Society is verging on a philosophical choice between liberty or life . . . Having brought the reader to the realization that in order to halt or even slow the disastrous process of climate change we must choose between liberal democracy and a form of authoritarian government by experts, the authors offer up a radical reform of democracy that would entail the painful choice of curtailing our worldwide reliance on growth economies, along with various legal and fiscal reforms. In my view, this argument wreaks of the worst brand of “hubris.” History is replete with examples of the dangers human arrogance of this ilk poses. Winston Churchill worried that Britain would lose World War II because the nation’s legal system circumscribed his control over the military. Unlike Britain, Adolf Hitler exercised virtually absolute control over German military. Democracy, Churchill believed, could not prevail against authoritarianism, which enabled more effective governance for purposes of fighting a war. Ironically, Hitler profoundly hampered his nation’s military campaign by micromanaging the effort, which ultimately ensured Germany lost the war. Meanwhile, the restraint imposed by England’s democratic traditions prevented Churchill from similarly self-destructing. History is replete with similar lessons of the abiding value of caution and restraint. Icarus, Julius Caesar . . . “Primum non nocere.” This is where the rubber meets the road. Scientists are wrong to believe the public will act decisively against global warming based on a rational assessment of the scientific evidence. The great judges of the world know this well. Oliver Wendell Holmes put it like so: “the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” Soldiers don’t follow their commanders into the heat of battle because they have carefully considered all of the evidence and concluded that running into a field full of existential threats was the most compelling choice based on the cost-benefit calculus. Human beings are not calculators. Scientists can easily forget this, which is why politicians who failed math in high school – and not scientists – have historically led humanity. blogs.forbes.com

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (154414)	1/15/2011 10:10:48 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 541848

I'm beginning to think we need a benevolent dictator. Being stuck with a democracy is starting to suck. It is bogging us dow The problem is guaranteeing the "benevolent" part. And combining the benevolent with really really smart and wise all at once. Not to mention the problems of selection and succession. Unhappily, no one person has all of those qualities, especially in a complex world like ours. At least China rules by committee, not by one person, which lessens some of those problems. They still have the issue of how to ensure that the committee and those that they really represent don't get stuck in a "class" mentality. Unhappily for this country, we have fallen prey to class and party mentalities; we pretend that we don't have them, but of course we do and the pretense actually makes us even more vulnerable to those ravages than actually acknowledging them would. That is one thing that many of the people at the Constitutional Convention understood far better than we do. They all knew that they were representatives of a class, and they knew that they needed to pay attention to the other classes if the country was to succeed, and were trying to make what Aristotle called a "mixed government," one that tries to balance the interests of each class, give them all some say and some power to affect the way things were going. They didn't kid themselves in the way that some people who call themselves "conservatives" today do, that all the central government needs to do is to protect contracts, defend the country and maximize "freedom"--they would have looked at these people as being crazy. To do that would be to invite disaster. And that is what we are doing.