Peaceful protest my ass

Montcalm · Post by **Montcalm** » 2003-07-28 10:50am

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2003-07-28 10:52am

They want to stop the meeting, saying international trade is driven only by profit and capital.

Well. Duh. So? Oh, right. *strikes up the Internationale*

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2003-07-28 10:54am

Ste Catherine Street!?! Bastards! Burn them!

The Anarchist Movement: Helping the poor by burning down thier workplace since 1970.

Posbi · Post by **Posbi** » 2003-07-28 12:24pm

They want to stop the meeting, saying international trade is driven only by profit and capital.

Yeah...and? By what else should it be logically driven? Candy and pineapples????

Maybe the capitalist is just too much bred into my genes, but isn't the only reason to conduct trade, especially international one, profit? I mean, if there wouldn't be profit, why the hell would any sane person take the costs and conduct trade???

Leftist idiots...

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-07-28 02:13pm

Stop judging the anti-globalization movement by the worst of them.

The equivalent would be if I expected all conservatives to defend Pinochet, or if I expected all vegetarians to defend the ALF.

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2003-07-28 02:32pm

Simon H.Johansen wrote:Stop judging the anti-globalization movement by the worst of them.

The equivalent would be if I expected all conservatives to defend Pinochet, or if I expected all vegetarians to defend the ALF.

i'm not. i'm passing judgement on the anarchist movement. nowhere did i say all anti-wto protesters are bad.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-07-28 03:09pm

Col. Crackpot wrote:
Simon H.Johansen wrote:Stop judging the anti-globalization movement by the worst of them.

The equivalent would be if I expected all conservatives to defend Pinochet, or if I expected all vegetarians to defend the ALF.
i'm not. i'm passing judgement on the anarchist movement. nowhere did i say all anti-wto protesters are bad.

I was referring to Montcalm's title of the thread and thusly the way that he implied that all anti-globalists were violent.

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2003-07-28 03:21pm

Simon H.Johansen wrote:
Col. Crackpot wrote:
Simon H.Johansen wrote:Stop judging the anti-globalization movement by the worst of them.

The equivalent would be if I expected all conservatives to defend Pinochet, or if I expected all vegetarians to defend the ALF.
i'm not. i'm passing judgement on the anarchist movement. nowhere did i say all anti-wto protesters are bad.
I was referring to Montcalm's title of the thread and thusly the way that he implied that all anti-globalists were violent.

no, all are not violent. However you can truthfully say that all anti-globalization protests end in violence. Until the movement filters out the violent people who act in thier name, they will forever be associated with them in the court of public opinion, regardless of how truthful that association is.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-07-28 04:06pm

what exactly IS globalisation and why is it bad?

Andras · Post by **Andras** » 2003-07-28 04:16pm

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65278,00.html

Capitalism Key to Ending Poverty
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
By Radley Balko

At about the same time a hodgepodge of protesters descended on Washington, D.C. last month to protest capitalism, globalization and free trade, the United Nations and the Institute for International Studies released a triad of studies declaring that humanity is, for the most part, in the best condition it’s ever been.
World poverty is down. Income gaps are narrowing. And the reasons for all of this are, to the protesters’ chagrin, none other than capitalism, globalization and free trade.
The first study is the 2002 edition of the United Nations’ annual "Human Development Report." The report informs us that as of 2002, 140 of the world’s 200 countries -- 70 percent -- now hold multi-party elections. Eighty-two countries representing 57 percent of the human population are fully democratic, the highest percentage in human history. After a century in which totalitarianism -- Nazism, fascism and communism -- killed more than 170 million people, a clear move toward universal political freedom is afoot.
The numbers on world economics are good, too. World poverty fell more than 20 percent between 1990 and 1999, a decade of aggressive globalization. The number of world Internet users is expected to double by 2005 to one billion. In those regions of the world most sympathetic to liberal reform, the news is even better. In ten years, poverty halved in in East Asia and the Pacific regions.
Since 1990, 800 million people have gained new access to improved water supplies, and 750 million to improved sanitation. In the last 30 years, infant mortality rates have dropped from 96 deaths per 1,000 live births to just 56.
A study from the Institute for International Studies boasts even more good news. The author of that study, Surjit S. Bhalla, employed accounting statistics based on individual incomes instead of national incomes, which allowed him to more accurately measure wealth and poverty rates. Bhalla concludes that the world poverty rate has declined even more dramatically than the U.N. reports, from 44 percent in 1980 to just 13 percent in 2000. Bhalla attributes the decline to progress in China and India, the two most populous nations in the world, and two nations that have made significant moves toward more economic freedom in the last 20 years.
But not all the news is good. Huge swaths of humanity still fester in abject poverty. Not surprisingly, the regions witnessing the most poverty also happen to house those cultures and regimes most averse to markets and capitalism -- sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world.
Twenty countries in sub-Saharan Africa are poorer now than they were in 1990. Another 23 are, astoundingly, poorer than they were in 1975. Three hundred million people in the region now live in extreme poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa also scores lower on the "freedom index" than any region on the planet.
A third study, conducted by a group of Arab scholars and also released by the U.N., draws similar conclusions about the Arab world. It offers a scathing indictment of Arab culture’s self-imposed isolation from international markets and of its oppression of political and economic freedom. The report points out that over the last 20 years, the Arab world has produced the second lowest per-capita growth rates in income in the world. Total productivity in the Arab world actually declined between 1960 and 2000, a period that saw the rise of militant Islam and, paradoxically, unprecedented economic growth almost everywhere else.
The last half-century has seen an Arab world increasingly hostile to capitalism, particularly to property rights and trade. Consequently, the last half-century has also seen an Arab world lapsing further and further behind the rest of humanity. Arab industrial labor output was at 32 percent of North American output in 1960. By 1990, it had fallen to just 19 percent.
The Atlantic Monthly points out that since the ninth century, the Arab world has translated only about 100,000 books into Arabic. That’s equal to the number of books the nation of Spain translates in one year. Consequently, the Arab world is suffering a "brain drain," as its most promising minds migrate to societies more conducive to learning. Arab scholars have left in droves to pursue academic freedom in other countries. An astounding 51 percent of Arab adolescents told U.N. researchers they wanted to emigrate.
These studies, taken together, paint a telling picture of the state of humanity, and of what steps we can take to make it even better. When countries embrace free markets, trade, and political freedom, they thrive. Incomes grow. Lifespans lengthen. Social maladies mend. When nations isolate themselves from international markets, when they deny citizens free elections, free press, and property, they falter. Incomes wane. Disease and famine swell. Strife looms. Communist and isolated North Korea, for example, has lost 10 percent of its population -- two million people -- to famine since 1995. And that’s in an allegedly "developed" country.
Anti-globalization protesters can rail all they like against the evils of capitalism, international markets and classical liberalism. But the numbers are unmistakable. Wealth is the only remedy for poverty, and capitalism is the only real way to create wealth.
Radley Balko is a writer living in Arlington, Va. He also maintains a weblog at www.theagitator.com

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2003-07-28 04:33pm

wow. Id love proof of that.

but it makes me fuzzy anyway!

Straha · Post by **Straha** » 2003-07-28 04:39pm

Hey, I'm against the WTO too. I think any and all restriction on trade is a bad thing... doesn't mean I'm going to break into stores and burn cars...

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2003-07-28 04:56pm

Straha wrote:Hey, I'm against the WTO too. I think any and all restriction on trade is a bad thing... doesn't mean I'm going to break into stores and burn cars...

um, straha, if you if you think any and all restriction on trade is bad, then that means you support the WTO.

Posbi · Post by **Posbi** » 2003-07-28 05:22pm

Straha wrote:Hey, I'm against the WTO too. I think any and all restriction on trade is a bad thing... doesn't mean I'm going to break into stores and burn cars...

That doesn't exactly make much sense, you know...

Dark Hellion · Post by **Dark Hellion** » 2003-07-28 05:35pm

I have no problem with you ass Montcalm, so I am not going to protest it, peacefully or otherwise.

But, on topic, these groups only hurt themselves by even allowing themselves to be associated with hooligans and ruffians (damn when did I become a 90 year old lady). As a matter of fact, I still have no clue what the hell WTO protestors are exactly protesting against. They don't want a better distrubition of wealth through free-trade? I don't understand these people at all. Why protest, and then why protest more violently than pro-war demonstrators.

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi · Post by **Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi** » 2003-07-28 08:12pm

I'm sure if kids in China weren't laboring in shoe factories for extremely low pay by American standards, they'd probably be starving. Do these protestors think that they'd be eating tofu burgers in an eco-friendly house if it wasn't for globolization?

Posbi · Post by **Posbi** » 2003-07-29 06:19am

Sadly enough, that's probably exactly what they're thinking they'd be doing. It's for a great part a problem created and cultivated at universities. My girlfriend sometimes tells me stories about all those leftist activist groups you can find on universities (she's studying economics), jeez, hearing them you really start to doubt a human's ability of logical thinking...

Col. Crackpot · Post by **Col. Crackpot** » 2003-07-29 07:17am

Dark Hellion wrote:I As a matter of fact, I still have no clue what the hell WTO protestors are exactly protesting against.

not to worry, neither do they!

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-07-29 02:12pm

WTF is globalisation??!

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-07-29 02:55pm

kojikun wrote:WTF is globalisation??!

Lowering of trade barriers and promotion of a globally interdependant economy, as is my understanding.

Posbi · Post by **Posbi** » 2003-07-29 04:28pm

Pretty much sums it up, afaik.

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2003-07-29 04:40pm

Globalisation:

Dictionary.com wrote:internationalisation

so you follow that link and get...

a link to the american spelling.

which says the following

To make international.
To put under international control.
n : the act of bringing something under international control

i thought it was when multinational big companies put their cheaper better products all over the world for greater profits at the expense of the littler companies.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-07-29 05:21pm

Rye wrote:i thought it was when multinational big companies put their cheaper better products all over the world for greater profits at the expense of the littler companies.

That happens to be a facet of globalization; small companies are generally unable to effectively compete with large multinationals. They tend to have higher costs as well - manufacturing in China is a lot cheaper than making something in Small Town, USA.

EDIT: You should be careful about using general dictionaries for specific terms; for example, Dictionary.com gives a rather vague description (for that matter, the OED isn't so good, either).

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-07-30 02:43am

phongn wrote:
Rye wrote:i thought it was when multinational big companies put their cheaper better products all over the world for greater profits at the expense of the littler companies.
That happens to be a facet of globalization; small companies are generally unable to effectively compete with large multinationals. They tend to have higher costs as well - manufacturing in China is a lot cheaper than making something in Small Town, USA..

The problem is that while globalization usually is better than isolation, I prefer the market divided by small corporations rather than huge conglomerates.

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2003-07-30 02:26pm

ph34r the megacrops of 2024.