What I find slightly curious is that they'd bother to transport the patient for a disease that (at present) has no treatment other than supportive therapy to try to keep the symptoms from killing you. The Liberian medical system is not exactly a shining star; but this isn't one of those "Oh, sure, we could cure that; but this hospital doesn't have an endoscopic microsurgery suite and we'd need $250k worth of drugs that you can't even buy here." diseases.

Is there a research interest? Is supportive therapy that much better here and the CDC is the place with isolation expertise? What advantage is being sought?

I don't agree that the only way to fix the issue is by the communist path. You don't need a complete re-distribution to fix things, you only need to dismantle a very small number of monopolies (including financial monopolies).

But you do need to accept, once and for all, that economy can't be left to itself. Otherwise you'll get the same push to deregulate, followed by new monopolies and economic ruin. And that means that "communism" and "socialism" need to stop being boogeymen and become social and economic options that can be mixed with other options as needed, without this being a slippery slope to Stalinism and gulags.

I think you might have some of this the wrong way around. The British Empire had institutionalised racism and concentration camps in its colonies long before the Nazis existed.

You're a bit late on that one. Pretty much everything is propaganda, and what's more, virtually all of it is fear-based; the remainder focuses on allaying fears, often reasonable ones. My favorite example is automotive advertising. As much as half of it is designed not directly to sell cars, but to make customers feel better about their purchases to try to induce repeat business "down the road", pun intended.

If it bleeds, it leads. Hope is not interesting to people who have more than they need.

We got there because of decades of people systematically giving their money to the most sensational press, which enabled them to become more powerful. It's not something that just happened.

I think that there probably oughta be a law that you can't knowingly tell an outright lie and call it news, but even that seems to be a minority view, which is just another symptom of the same damned need for entertainment.

There's nothing wrong with that, so long as they don't propose to use force to retrieve the data.

I think it's important to remember that the court ruling that started all this did not say that anyone should be able to require information to be removed just because they didn't like it. The outcome relates to information that is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive". Also, it was explicitly stated that such determinations would need to be made on a case-by-case basis, balancing the individual's private life against the public interest.

In other words, what the ruling actually said, as distinct from the hype around it in the media or the frequent misrepresentations in on-line debates since then, isn't a million miles from the kinds of issues you raised there.

Are you this stupid to compare long working hours and ability to quit any time to being literally worked to death?

They can quit any time, and then do what? Beg for a job in another factory that's just as bad?

Chains are always the most effective when they're invisible. Slavery is a crude form of a few dominating the many. Our current society looks nicer on the surface, but the underlaying mechanic is still the same: exploitation based on coercion. We have simply hidden the violence needed to keep such a system going in our property laws, ready to be used on anyone who opts out of the game yet refuses to voluntarily starve, and legitimated as defending someone else.

Of course, the problem is that such a society is fundamentally unstable: everyone hates living under someone else's thumb. Our current method of placating the masses is a promise of social mobility: if you work harder than everyone else, you can become one of the exploiters instead the exploited. But the problem with that is that it's a threat to those currently on top: for everyone who rises to the ruling class, someone else must fall, otherwise the hierarchy will flatten and erode the associated privilege. So they do everything in their power to stop social mobility and make the hierarchy steeper. The final stages are what we're seeing now: all the wealth concentrates on top, people at the bottom get heavily in debt, and finally you get a revolution when desperation reaches a critical level (or an oligarchy if those on top are smart enough to pay basic maintenance for the system their position depends on). But a revolution simply changes who's at the top, it doesn't solve the real problem - the concept of a social pyramid - so it'll just be the same system of exploitation in a shiny new package.

This is what happened to Russian revolution: Lenin and later Stalin were all too happy to use Tsar's methods to wield Tsar's power, so how could the end result be anything but Tsarism under a new name? And as Putin keeps demonstrating, the form of the system might have changed but the spirit is still quite intact.

Balderdash. There is not a press. What is this, communism, comrade? We have many presses. The problem is that the public follows the sensational ones instead of the informative. We The People have the government, and thus the press, which we deserve.

But it in fact is; it's not all obvious. Being forced to work is slavery even if you get paid, because you're not choosing the terms of your employment. It's like being raped and then having your rapist throw you a few currency units.

There's actually a long story behind this, and Von Braun was actually arrested because Hitler suspected he was a traitor. Von Braun was a visionary who just loved rockets and wanted to land on the moon and colonize space. The Nazis were a funding means-to-an-end for his rocketry studies. After the Nazis tried to arrest him and his team, he escaped with some equipment and top scientists to defect to the allies.

So no, it's not at all accurate to speculate that Von Braun was a Nazi or into that whole ideology.

Heinrich Himmler betrayed Hitler near the end of the war. Would it therefore be inaccurate to speculate that Himmler was a Nazi, or at least had sympathy for the ideology?

Well no, sometimes the monsters are actually real.

But those who fight them should still take care not to become monsters themselves. It's hard to not see a frightening similarity between Hitler's attempt to take his country with him in the last days of the Fourth Reich, and the US's - and the USSR's - policy of taking the world with them - MAD - in the Cold War. How much of it was the superpower's own inherent evil, and how much was absorbed from Nazi Germany during the war?

That's one of the nastier aspects of cultural evolution: fighting an opponent exerts pressure on you to fall on his level. Nazis terror bombed London, so the Brits firebombed Dresden. An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies, just like an aspect of it seeped into the United States, and later an aspect of Soviet-style communism - the omnipresent surveillance systems that are apparently impossible to dislodge.

I'm not sure if such contamination can be prevented, and that rises some serious questions about whether using warfare to deal with rogue nations is not unlike trying to stop Ebola by wrestling the victims to the ground.

Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.

I think it's unfair to characterise UKIP as racist. Racism is an opinion, and opinions lead to policies. As such, it has no place in the UKIP agenda.

Really, the only way of fixing this is to have time-outs for politicians. If you propose something completely obnoxious, then you just have to go and sit in a corner and have no part in legislative discussions for the next year.