re: #5 Curt

You either want to fund the military or you don’t.

Isn’t there some amount of funding between 0 dollars and infinity dollars? Would you buy a car from a salesman who, when asked how much the car cost, replied, “Hey, either you want to buy the car or you don’t.”?

If you pick to fund it you have to do one of two things: Create a massive governmental set of factories manned by government employees, or you buy from contractors…some one, any one, but a contractor.

There’s nothing wrong with buying things from non-government owned companies. I get all my stuff from them. Literally. But that doesn’t mean I think I need to buy a new computer because HP says I do. That doesn’t mean I think I need to buy a new car because Honda says I do. The fact that they sell these things makes me all the more skeptical about their advice that I need to buy them.

If someone worked for a company that sold stuff to the government and then became an appointed official, or an elected one, speaks their mind, does that mean the message is invalid, or the messenger’s past determines if it’s validity or not?

The messenger’s past is a key factor in one’s assessment of the message’s validity. It reminds me of the running gag in Charles Shulz’s Peanuts comic where Lucy inevitably tricks Charlie Brown into attempting to kick the football one more time no matter how many times she tricked him in the past. Charlie never learns to factor Lucy’s past into the assessment of whether he can trust her or not.

Image: i041010peanuts.jpg

The links I posted were just meant as real life examples of your hypothetical “people who like to complain how ‘it’s a waste of money’” to fund fire fighters and EMTs.

And I resent your assertion that people in our armed services manning weapons are idiots.

I was speaking metaphorically about national defense strategy, anthropomorphizing the very abstract sum total of ideas about of how the nation as a whole goes about defending itself. I wasn’t referring to any actual people. It was poorly written. Sorry about the confusion.