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Re:Refugees Welcome by logfromblammo on Thursday September 03, 2015 @11:52AM (#10165615)
What audience? I'm just some guy complaining about things on the Internet.

Rent-seeking behavior seems intrinsic to human society, such that any group of people larger than a certain size will be forced to deal with it in one way or another.

At this point, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is likely to put a dent in the military industrial complex. And that's not happening any time soon.

Complaining about it helps me to not lose my sanity. And that's good, because without my sanity, I might do something like endorse an armed revolution to reduce the political and economic influence of the military in the U.S. See, as a sane person, I know that doesn't make any sense. There is a right way and a wrong way to fight fire with fire; that's the wrong way.

And it gets a dissenting opinion out there, on the off chance that someone might stray far enough from their own echo chamber to see it.

Re:Refugees Welcome by Kalium on Thursday September 03, 2015 @12:58PM (#10166048)
On the off chance that someone strays outside their echo chamber and encounters your dissenting opinion, the likely response is not what you would hope for. As written, the likely response will be for them to conclude that people outside their echo chamber are disconnected from reality and not worth paying attention to. Then they'll go back into their echo chamber, and your dissenting voice will have wasted a perfectly good opportunity.

So, friend, I ask you to stop and consider how you want people who encounter your lone voice in the wilderness to react. Assuming you care - perhaps you value having something to complain (and thus wish to ensure its continued existence) about more than you do persuading people that It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

Re:Refugees Welcome by logfromblammo on Thursday September 03, 2015 @02:14PM (#10166612)
The reactions of others are irrelevant to my desire to express my own opinion.

As a political minority, I am well aware that there are literally tens of millions of people who will dismiss my opinions without even pausing to think about them. That doesn't mean that I should stop having them, or stop expressing them in whatever way that pleases me.

I'm not exactly sure what you hope to accomplish by your responses. It almost sounds like you agree with the sentiment, but not the expression. If so, it is not a tad hypocritical to complain about how I am arranging my words rather than try to say it better yourself?

There's always going to be something to complain about. If not how the military-industrial complex is preventing the realization of peacetime prosperity, it might be how we have all this peacetime prosperity, but can't keep the mosquitoes from biting everyone at the picnic. If we run out of truly awful things to complain about, we can always complain about the merely annoying things. So I find your suggestion that complainers would actually prefer that the things they complain about not be fixed to be misguided.

Re:Refugees Welcome by Kalium on Friday September 04, 2015 @03:34PM (#10172433)
I'm suggesting that if you want to standing a snowball's chance in Hell of fixing the things you identify as problems, you need to think about how to persuade people. Bluntly, ranting in a person's general direction tends not to be a great way to change their mind, and changing minds is almost certainly what you need to further your stated goals.

I perhaps could say it better myself, but that's not my goal at this juncture.