Comments by MatheusR

How could you change the previous title?! "Farewell, earthlings!" was the funniest moment in your newspaper's illustrious history! Bring it back!

I wonder if it ever occurred to the writer of this article that socialized medicine in general sucks overall, and Japan is no example. Their people live as long as they do, despite their bad medical system, because they have a rock-bottom murder rate, relatively low motor vehicle deaths, and most importantly, way better diets than Westerners in general.

Factor out motor vehicle accidents and murders (which kill people no matter how good the healthcare), and Americans are the longest lived people in the world... despite their appalling diet and exercise habits. This is because of the availability of cutting edge treatments. It's called the free market, and I thought The Economist was supposed to support it.

@Jose Hartley,

"It doesn't really matter which you choose, there's plenty justification in the three major Abrahamic religions for killing people you don't like, if you want to find it and act on it."

We are not talking about "finding" justification in a religion for violence against "people you don't like". Crazy people "find" pictures of Jesus in clouds and see Elvis around every streetcorner.

Islam COMMANDS, in extremely clear and direct language, that a follower MUST, if able, wage war upon infidels until they die, convert or submit to second-class status.

Note also that the object isn't "people you don't like", but very specifically nonbelievers. If you don't like a fellow Muslim, tough, you have to follow rules of conduct towards him that are broadly similar to the rules commanded by the Old Testament for Jews (which are themselves far harsher than Jesus' teachings in the New Testament). When dealing with nonbelievers, however, everything is fair game - and this is the crucial difference between Islam and other religions and what makes Islam so dangerous.

Don't buy into the "all religions are the same" KoolAid just because you would like it to be true. All human beings are the same, but all ideologies (and religion is to a large extent an ideology) are by no means the same.

@Lanna,

You may have scored some points in the school playground with the pointless ad hominen attacks but if you want to sit at the adults' table you should at least try to make some kind of argument.

@curtica,

Christians are not better than Muslims. Christianity (and Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and pretty much every other religion I know) IS morally superior to Islam, due to the simple reason that it tolerates other believers in a way that Islam does not.

And no, I don't believe Obama is a Muslim. I also don't believe he's a Christian. He has "atheist" written all over his forehead - which wouldn't be a problem if he came clean about it, but since he tries to hide it as hard as he can, I believe it does say something about his character.

@brookse,

Please do not confuse Muslims with Islam. I have no quarrel with Muslims, and believe they should be judged by their actions just like any other human being. That does not change the fact that the religion they espouse is materially different from Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and pretty much every other major world religion. It is intrinsically intolerant of others and totalitarian in its outlook - it is a political religion, unlike Christianity and Judaism.

@gocanucks,

Please show me a single passage in the Old or New Testaments that command Jews or Christians to kill, convert, or subjugate every nonbeliever in the world. You might have some difficulty in locating it, given that it doesn't exist.

You are making the same mistake as brookse and confusing religion with its adherents. I will grant that Christians have acted in this way in the past, but they did so against the teachings of Jesus. Muslims that act this way (and they are a substantially higher proportion of total adherents that in Christianity) do so according to the teachings of Allah as related by Muhammamad.

In short, the violent Christian and the religiously tolerant Muslim are both violating the teachings of their respective religions.

That is why I repeat that to me, Allah is not the same as the Chistian deity.

"and 60% think that Muslims worship a different God than Christians do."

As president Lincoln said, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.

Muslims may call Allah God in the same way that Jews and Christians do, but the nature of his proscriptions, especially the commandment to subjugate, convert or kill every non-Muslim in the world, sets him apart from the Judeo-Christian deity.

It's articles like these that make me seriously consider canceling my subscription to The Economist.

Never mind that the "usurpation" of federal power comes after decades of federal governments not only refusing to enforce the laws in the books but going so far as to actively sabotage their enforcement (supporting "sanctuary city" regulations at the local level, for instance).

Never mind that the majority of legal Hispanic immigrants in Arizona support the law. Never mind that the majority of Americans of Hispanic origin living in Arizona support the law. You still manage to claim that the law has had a negative effect on legal immigrants and American-born citizes of Hispanic descent.

You report as authoritative a research by a Mexican bank that claims with a straight face that illegal immigrants willing to work for US$5 an hour don't replace but complement American jobs. Not satisfied with making a fool of yourselves and your dear readers, you throw out a huge number of, on average, undereducated and poor people who have left the state and claim it is related to the law. Given that US unemployment is at a multi-year high, do you think maybe their leaving has something to do with the lack of jobs, particularly unskilled ones?

You should also at the very least note that the Center for American Progress is an avowedly partisan organization, down to its very name. Readers who don't know the institution or the peculiar meaning of Progressive in American English are liable to believe they are a nonpartisan research group.

Your assertion that immigrants pay more in taxes than they send back home in remittances is completely meaningless. If you mean to gauge the direct impact of illegal immigrants to public finances (a questionable goal to begin with), you should factor in the public expenditures in schools, hospitals, and very importantly, jails, to cater to illegal immigrants. I suspect your conclusions would be slightly different.

But all the above is just bad journalism and uncontrolled leftist impulses. Implying that neo-nazis form a relevant constituency in Arizona and are a significant support group for the law is scandalously false and downright offensive. I honestly hope for an apology of the author or the editorial board. This is way over the line.

I have given up on trying to argue with the Economist's leftist bias. I would just like to understand the rationale for perpetuating the household myth: news flash, households aren't alive, people are. Given that average household size has been shrinking for decades, if you stop comparing household income and look at median gdp per capita, the picture is a lot less bleak in the last decade, and positively encouraging over the last 30 years. But I guess this wouldn't support the Economist's liberal bias.

BTW, I am not denying that many trends highlighted in this article are true. I am just unwilling to accept conclusions based on faulty data. Any "per household" data is complete BS.

Ethnic groups comparisons also suffer from statistical distortions. The simplest of them is age: Whites are, on average, older than blacks or hispanics. This goes a long way towards explaining the differnce in income, education, et al.

@Cloudwarrior,

Can you cut the melodrama and the ad hominem attacks? Look up how many of the 13.000 patriots that were willing to die in order to protect our bigoted asses were actual front line troops that signed up during wartime.

To me, a much nobler example is set by the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of gay veterans that served their country in actual shooting wars and kept their mouths shut and their pants zipped in order to do so.

Unlike most conservatives, I don't believe that the rise in open homosexuality is the cause of our cultural decline. I think it's a symptom. People nowadays are so pampered that they believe they have a right to express every aspect regarding themselves and don't care about the practical consequences. The Wikileaks incident is a much graver example of the same problem. The disease is not homosexuality, it's a lack of limits to personal expression dictated by common sense.

@Deathisha,

The "national war" part was in referral to your "black men serving" argument, since this came up in WW2 and the solution (segregated units) was the most reasonable and effective. I will grant that the current war on radical Islam is hardly WW2, but in the end it's just a matter of numbers. Do you think a few dozen dead soldiers is an acceptable price to pay for allowing open gays to serve, whereas a few thousands might not be? To me, one unnecessary death is too much.

I think the real question is deeper: why do gay people have this need to shout from the rooftops that they are gay? DADT allows them to be who they are as long as they keep to themselves. Their superiors are forbidden to investigate claims that they are gay.

Given that social attitudes towards homosexuality are constantly changing, it is not unlikely that in the future, effects of accepting open homesexuals in the military will be irrelevant on military readiness. Your black men example is a perfect illustration of this. If that day comes, then I will gladly support the integration of open gays into the military. The point is that this day has clearly not come yet.

As for your other arguments:

- The "right to serve" as the correspondent of the "duty to defend" is a superficially nice but rather meaningless syllogism. If push comes to shove, then obviously gays, women, elders and even teenagers can be pressed to fight for national survival. The Soviet Union did all this during WW2. This doesn't mean we should accept 15 year old boys in the military. If a time comes when need for manpower requires then recruitment of open gays, then let the DoD make its case and if it's consistent, throw open the door for open gays.

- As for the "biting the hand that feeds you" argument, military decisions necessarily imply some degree of "they don't understand it but I'll take their money anyway" thinking. To reject this is pure naivité. If the day comes that public resentment towards the military due to DADT is so large to impinge funding, then maybe a pragmatic decision can be taken to revoke it in order to keep on defending the country. Given that all polls show the military as among the most widely trusted institutions in the US, I'd say this is also very far off.

@DeathIsha,

To be blunt, in your rather exaggerated hypothetical example, if there were convincing evidence that integrating black men into the military would have deleterious effects on military readiness, in time of a national war, I believe that black men should be barred from serving too. National security comes first.

As for the other reader who mentioned that almost all of NATO's armies allow gays to serve openly, here's a news flash: the vast majority of NATO armies haven't fought a war since WW2 (and no, Serbia and Afghanistan don't count).

Lexington once again greets us with another liberal biased article. I honestly shouldn't bother, but

1. Your description of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) was very precise on the "Don't Tell" part, but skirted on the "Don't Ask" part. Bias, anyone?

2. Why the rigmarole of a military survey to take a measure most Americans already supported?

Why, isn't it just possible that maybe most Americans have absolutely no idea what the potential impact of the repeal of DADT may be? Do you think maybe Lady Gaga and other liberal luminaries have very little insight on the effect that open homosexuals serving in the military would have on esprit de corps, unit cohesion, morale, and other "details" that just maybe sorta kinda affect the effectiveness of the world's most powerful military, that just happens to be at war?

There is no "right to serve". There is an obligation for the federal government to provide an effective defence for all its citizens. If an individual's sexual identity has the potential to harm military effectiveness if declared, the government can compel him to keep quiet about it, and to can him if he violates this order. That's just common sense.

On what planet can the PSDB be considered a "centre-right" party?

The PSDB is at most centre-left. There is no relevant party in Brazil of the political right.

In what sense of the word does the Economist label the accusations against Erenice Guerra unproven? Although formal investigation has yet to start (thanks in large part to the federal police dragging its feet), your journalist must be aware that the evidence is overwhelming. I don't think you should have to wait for a final decision by a court of law (which in Brazil can easity take 10 years) in order to state that the allegations are largely true.

I would very much like to see the research that underpins this article's claim that the pre-Columbian population of the Amazon was 10 million people. This number is wildly overstated. The semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer life of these Indians will not support even a fraction of this population.

Lexington's reading that the intent of the Constitution was to strengthen the central power is technically correct but the conclusions he draws from this are totally incorrect, since he ignores the wider context.

The reality is that the US Confederation was less a political state than a league of quasi-independent nations, more like the present day UN than a true nation state. The Federalists saw that this arrangement was unstable, not least because of the threat of new foreign imperialists and the relative weakness of each individual state, and therefore intended to create a unified political entity. They did want to centralize government, but from an extremely decentralized starting point.

As for the relevance of an 18th century text to our political questions, suffice to say that the US Constitution itself, despite all its brilliance, is little more than a compilation of enlightened Greek and Roman political principles that were compiled between the 6th and 1st century BC. As long as men don't change, political problems won't change.

Will the Economist please stop drinking the Democract kool-aid and quit referring to earners above the 250k bracket as "rich"?

Try raising two or three kids in the Bay Area or NYC on 250k a year and see how much money is left over for Obama's arugula-eating, golf-playing lifestyle.

Latino culture and heritage were not a significant part of America's past, and to imply otherwise is ridiculous. In the scale of things that made America great, Tex-Mex ranks slightly lower than European rule of law, free speech, focus on education, hard work, etc.

There is no doubt Latino culture and heritage will be a significant part of America's future - I'm just not sure if this is a good thing.

I shouldn't have to say this but I am a Latin American of mixed race, so please can all the "racist" attacks.

"Sight deposits"? Really? Has Google Translator started to write pieces for the Economist?

The correct translation for Depósito à Vista is Demand Deposits.

Last week it snowed 6 inches in a single day in a city in Southern Brazil, the highest amount in 12 years! Global warming obviously caused this too!

Heck, weather forecasters can't get this weekend right, you expect me to believe they can forecast decades ahead?