Except that, because of our arcane and byzantine tax laws, we really don't have private-sector insurance or health care. It's all tied in to the guvmint one way or another, by regulations and requirements written by bureaucrats and lawyers.

To hawk is to peddle or sell, or to clear mucus from the throat.

To hock is to pawn.

Whichever meaning you intended, you got the wrong word.

And, from the context, you clearly meant peddling.

Hawking, you mean.

Right, whacky conservatives like Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Sandy Berger were driving the view of Saddam Hussein as a WMD-crazy outlaw before the 2000 elections, preparing the ground for Bush to launch an attack.

The fact is, Bush made a tactical error focusing on WMDs as a justification for the war. Saddam had violated the spirit and letter of the UN sanctions long enough and often enough to fully justify booting him out. Bush would have saved us all a lot of grief if he had just focused on that.

By the way, would you consider mustard gas or sarin to be WMDs? Many of us do, and the army found literally hundreds of warheads filled with (at least) these.

Just tell me this one thing: Do you believe the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein dead, or alive and in power?

Oh, one last thing. Apparently, you believe that I, personally, am responsible for all the hyperbole and heated overstatement of the Right on this matter. Does that make you personally responsible for the same thing from the Left?

Or, maybe, it's not as simple as that. The tradeoffs are hugely complex, and whether we think a particular country can "free themselves" has a lot more input than just how prosperous they appear to be.

Pardon me, but I looked at most of your 54 incidents. A fair number are from comics, gaming, or science fiction communities. Not, strictly speaking, FOSS.

One of them is about a real-life massacre at an engineering school. Are you suggesting that if Mark Shuttleworth were more "evolved," the killer would have killed 7 men and 7 women, instead of 14 women?

Yes, I know, social climate, blah blah. But, seriously, was the killer contributing to Linux Kernel patches? If not, why is it included in this discussion?

Don't weaken your case by diluting it.

Also, perhaps a major factor in the heat of this discussion is the perception that the FOSS community is uniquely sexist. Would this whole debate evaporate if we said something like "There is some sexism in Western culture. IT in general, and FOSS in particular, is not free from some level of sexism."

Or is the heated discussion the whole point?

Who gets to draw the line? Are you volunteering to determine who is too poor to help themselves? I'll vote for you, because I don't want that job.

Oh, and by the way, it's not difficult to grasp intellectually, but it seems to be a bit arrogant, in a moral sense.

How difficult is that to grasp? (See, I am sarcastically turning your snarky ad-hominem comment back at you.)

So, it's okay to rescue poor oppressed people, but if they are prosperous and oppressed, we should leave the insane dictator in place, let him continue to pull out dissident tongues with pliers, let his sons continue to kidnap and rape women, let him continue to buy weapons from western European suppliers with his food-and-medicine allowance?

Don't forget the 1-for-6 reverse split a while back. If you include that, $6 today is equivalent to $1 a few years ago. Yeah, I bought SUNW at $17, watched it crash down to about $4, watched my number of shares shrink, watched the price keep falling, and finally got out with about a 90% loss. Woo hoo. Tax break.