I'm not so sure about that. By that point in the war, the USSR had the most powerful army in the world, but its navy sucked. Especially in the Pacific, since quite a few of its ships had been sent to reinforce the Baltic. I was poking around on some alternate history websites a month ago, and it looks like if the bomb hadn't been used, the Russians probably wouldn't have been able to invade Hokkaido until the spring of 1946. And, even then, Hokkaido is basically the Alaska of Japan. The Russians might have been able to help with the invasion of Honshu later in 1946, but, if so, they'd probably would have been doing it in American and Canadian vessels.

If we hadn't used the bomb, there wouldn't be too much "North Japan" to worry about (just Hokkaido, which, present day, only has a population of 5 million), but Korea might have been unified under the Communists.

Corporate agency is actually a field of study in metaphysics. So, yeah, corporations can be said to have intentions, beliefs, and desires, and these propositional attitudes might not be shared by the individuals that constitute the corporation.

No walking down the streets naked, though. Which is probably a good thing, since I don't think the world is ready for Stanley Morgan in its birthday suit.

Your theory would be a lot more plausible if the history books showed any indication that the Americans even knew where Korea was before the Korean War. The partition between North and South happened because the USSR declared war on Japan at the very end of WWII. The Americans took a look at the map for a good five minutes, and then proposed the split just to keep Russia from claiming the whole thing. Stalin, who was more concerned about Eastern Europe, agreed.

Ironically, the South was more agrarian, and had a existing Communist movement; and the North was relatively industralized and more pro-Western. Both sides of the partition were put under dictators since the Koreans on both sides of the divide weren't exactly happy with their new imperial overlords. South Korea finally became democratic at the end of the '80s.

There is a theory that one of the causes of the Korean War was Truman having a brain-fart during a speech, and left it off the list of places America would protect if they were attacked by the Commies. Not entirely his fault, since South Korea was a long way away from being the economic powerhouse it is today.

Sure, the current situation isn't the fault of the North Korean *people*. I'd put the blame on the North Korean *government*, the usual nasty-ass Cold War leftovers, and, as in all things, a heaping helping of Hanlon's Razor.

Voodoo Economics don't work because the rich have a lower Marginal Propensity to Consume - they tend to spend a smaller proportion and save a larger proportion of their income than the poor. Here, we have something that might convince the rich to actually cough up some of their dough instead of just sitting on it. That should help both the economy and us, the poor.

I'd feel better about that if thought the DPRK's ambassador represented a people instead of just an illegitimate government. I don't have a lot of hope for the DPRK peacefully reforming. I'd like to be proven wrong, mind.

He's a 52 year old IT manager who was fired. He probably didn't have a good chance of getting a new job (in IT at least) anyway.

Sure, Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, but the governments they were fighting against were about like the current government of Iran.

Why wouldn't it have happened if the government stepped in? Does government intervention rule out private charity? What makes you think that people *usually* give more in such a vacuum, and the case you cite isn't just a fluke? There is plenty of unmet needs out there right now, and I don't see private charities stepping up to the plate.

You're right that we can't expend infinite resources on a single individual, but I would think that universal health care systems would tend to use a triage system rather than a hard cutoff. Also, public funded universal health care doesn't rule out private health care. If you don't like a central planning group (which, hopefully, would have some level of democratic oversight), then you're quite welcome to use your own money to buy health care on the open market. Universal health care would just make sure that everybody gets *some* level of protection vs. our current allocation system of "screw you, you're poor." It's not like universal health care would make private practices illegal, you know.

It looks more like the idea is to enable governments to see if random migrants are criminals, and maybe make it easier for migrants to cross borders. I don't see anything in TFA about access to socialized services. I suppose nations could handle that simply by issuing IDs to their own citizens - no need for a transnational ID system there, unless different nations want to work out some sort of exchange. TFA mentions something about this cutting down on corruption (by making it unnecessary to forge IDs saying that the migrant is a citizen?) and something about an electronic remittance system. Does anybody have more details on this? What is in it for the migrants? If I never leave my native member country, would I have to sign up for this system?

Or, you know, we could RAISE TAXES! Or rather, undo the reckless tax cuts that the previous administration put in place.

Our American medical dollars might be stretching further if we did more *preventative* care. There's a lot of uninsured people who just wait until they have to go to the emergency room - and then don't pay the bill, raising the costs for people who *can* pay for health insurance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Also, I think lack of access to health insurance is a major driver of lawsuits. If you get hurt, you want somebody to pay for the bill, even if it is a bit of stretch to think it was their fault. Some level of socialized medicine would do a lot to make our economy more efficient. (I would prefer a public single-payer system to an individual mandate, though.)

Sorry to be horribly obvious, but money is just a way of allocating resources. If you want more education, then teachers are going to have to eat and will need a place to live. They need chalk, blackboards, paper, books, etc. That's resources that won't be going to doctors, or some other sector of the economy. If you use certain chemicals to make drugs, that's chemicals that aren't going to research. The only difference between raw capitalism and pure socialism is how our votes on resource allocation are weighted - under raw capitalism, the 'votes' of the rich are weighted, under socialism, our 'votes' are equal, at least in theory.

I don't think most people even care about their genes winning out. They care more about getting it on and maybe having kids. And for quite a few people, the second thing is just a side effect of the first thing. If everyone cared about their own genes, let alone their 'race,' then the Europeans wouldn't be 'losing' the population game, would they? It's not like there is some vast Muslim conspiracy to sterilize the Crusaders, is there. I might care about having kids myself, but why should I care about the fate of my 'race'? If my genes want to mingle with those from elsewhere, more power to them. Sounds more like a win-win than a loss. On the other hand, I *do* care about my kids living in a free society.

Ironically, the neo-Nazi helps demonstrate my point. Assuming that the neo-Nazi isn't horribly misquoting the Talmud, it does appear that Jews used teach that "gentiles are less than human," but they're getting along with modern democracy just as well as anybody else. Everybody's religious texts say some crazy shit, but we're mostly able to get on with life despite that. There is no reason to think that Muslims are any different.