Ok, I take pity on you, Anonymous. I mean it's just so cute how you're trying so hard, waving your little arms in the corner and yelling "notice me! notice me!" Come on, fellow Salon posters, where's the love? It seems like this guy's head is close to exploding. If we don't start paying attention to his identical posts on every single Salon article, he might wither away, just like Tinkerbell.

To answer Andrew's question, we'll have to see how Japan reacts. If they start pulling out some of their investments, the video will have made a big difference. And the fact that this is even being discussed should count for something, no? But I'm not sure how much Japan can do - it seems like no major change will come without China's cooperation.

Right, because any time a Jewish guy outmarries, it must be because of 'self-hatred'. Seriously, people like you and David Sugarman need to take this little nationalistic eugenics-tinged obsession of yours back to the 19th century where it belongs and shove it.

Actually, it's the neocons who are claiming that we've already been at war with Iran since the Revolution so we might as well attack them anyway.

He's a paid shill who's been trolling Salon consistently for the past couple of months posting his cute little 'omgz Salon hates jewz' accusations that only he finds clever on any article his fat little fingers happen to click on, even if it was about the revolution in Burma. If you think he'll ever actually respond to a comment, engage you in actual debate, or even read past the headline of any article he comments on, you must not have much experience dealing with hardcore Zionist neocons.

Oh no, I used the word Zionist. Guess that means I'm anti-semitic. Got anything else?

~~~~, I think you miss the point. Just because a work of SF is set in the future, doesn't mean it's necessarily about the future. Most dystopian writers (as opposed to anti-utopian ones) are commenting on a particular aspect of today's society, magnifying it by asking the question "What if this trend were taken to its logical conclusion?" Which makes them anything but conservative.

As for the accusations of politicizing, I doubt very much that Lessing falls into the standard caricature of a liberal, what with her sufism and disavowal of feminism. But really, someone says something like this every time the prize is given. This is a moot point: the art/literary world as a whole is liberal, and for good reason. Whom would you suggest - Tom Wolfe?

Our Founding Fathers did not arrogantly presume to derive our Constitutional Principles ab nihilo. They implicitly incorporated the wisdom of thousands of years of Western Civilization of the Greeks and Romans as well as basic Judeo-Christian religious thought derived from Divine Revelation.

This contrasts markedly with leftist liberals who follow the less than 150-year old and now thoroughly discredited Marxist-Leninist-Darwinist-Freudian dogma in their interpretations of the Constitution.

First of all, let me ask you a direct question - who's paying you and how much? Because you cannot seriously expect to convince anyone with these half-assed arguments recycled from your favorite righty blog. Nor can you be a regular Salon reader - certainly not enough to actually register. In fact, were your tone not different I might assume you were the same person as ~~~~ (aka the 'Anonymous' guy who's obsessed with the idea of Salon hating Jews). But maybe you guys all just hang out at the local bar (church? I don't know, where do right-wingers hang out?) together.

Because surely even you (especially you) can see how absurd your argument must appear to the impartial observer. You claim there is a constitutional basis for everything the president and corporations are doing. When presented with textual evidence to the contrary, you do not respond in kind, but rather make lazy assertions that sound like they came straight from a freshman philosophy course. Your reference to Hobbes alone is enough to defeat your own arguments, since Hobbes found the very idea of a Constitution (and therefore a Republic) laughable. Perhaps someone has neglected to inform you that we do not live under a leviathan-ruled religious monarchy. Clearly you wish we did, but this does not make it so. Also, the rest of us got over the use of cliched Latin phrases back in undergrad. We all know what they mean. You're not impressing anyone. Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.

At least your understanding of Hobbes is at a freshman level. Your looping together of the conservatives' four favorite 'liberal' bogeymen is 8th grade at best. Yes, I see exactly how a limit on authority and the separation of powers is consistent with Lenin's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". I also see how it relates to genetic mutations that combine to confer advantageous traits on organisms over billions of years. Or was your throwing Freud in there an ambitious attempt to parallel the three branches of government to the ego, superego, and id? I'd love to hear your further thoughts on the matter.

Really, my dear nabob, these shoddy arguments do us all a disservice. You are unable to get your point across, and all of us are deprived of what must be your ineffable wisdom. Please, I know you must be very busy plotting a coup in Africa or selling arms to South American paramilitary groups, but do condescend to lower yourself to the level of us mere mortals and engage in this silly ritual we call logical textual argument, if only to humor us.

P.S. Even if we granted you the other three, please show us where Darwin has been 'thoroughly discredited'.