Overall historically the idea that there must be a way of organizing human society which does not rely on coercion as the default organizing principle, and which extends to the economic / material sphere the same principles of democracy we appear to admire for the political sphere, has received comparatively little thought, comparatively speaking.

One set of people who do regularly pursue this line of inquiry cluster around the notion of a "Participatory Economy," with the rather ugly, unwieldy shortened name of ParEcon.

A lot of people have heard of the notion of a "participatory democracy," in which decisions are really taken by ordinary people instead of chosen representatives who decide in their name. This ParEcon approach extends that notion into economic matters.

It may be that such a democratic society is impossible, but it hardly seems sensible that something which would appear to be so beautiful an expression of human aspirations would simply be dismissed without working really hard to realize as many of its principles as possible.

For those curious about some thoughts on why and how we might someday move in that direction, here's a link.

http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm

No children were ever detained. Your bringing it up shows that you wish to enable and defend Al Qa'ida.

If they were detained, however, it was entirely a necessary initiative by Our Commander In Chief to Keep Us Safe.

However, at no time was any high administration official aware of this policy and the lower level appointees who carried it out exceeded their authority but didn't mean anything bad by it.

Yet, as your candidate for president, I promise to double and expand this program of detaining children which never happened and which helps keep us safe but which was designed by low level appointees exceeding their authority.

This is another episode of stupidest macho illogic of the new century.

If it were proven (or very realistically alleged) that the US was now detaining, and, even worse, torturing children, this would deter no terrorists.

Given that organized terrorist groups are already understood to be run by criminals who are not nice; who depend on the existence of lawless and chaotic geographic territories in which to base their groups; and who depend on ideologically motivated volunteers for their recruits...

...then stories of the US detaining and possibly torturing children would be another absolute, wonderful, spontaneous, impressive gift from Our Republican Idiots to fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups seeking recruits and propaganda tools.

"Thank you for this beautiful and unrequested recruiting tool", terrorists would say for this, not "Oh noz everbudy run frum the Macho Republikins who iz comin to git us".

Ha, we see, we dum raht wingerz alwayz been wrong 'bout everything, like Plame 'cause she wuz covert (but just her job not the dressed up like a ninja and blow stuff up kind) and anyway we made up the Niger uranusium stuff and anyway Irak already done had thousands a tons a yallercake, but it don't matter what's true or not 'cause we just have to let Sean Hannity keep sayin' it and it one day comes true and truer, and ha ha we lied every dam time anybody asked us about the eavesdroppin but it took a while for all them e-mails and Congris testimoney to prove it, and my favorite dum dum Macho Man Bush Jr like the most retardedest preznit ever pretty much gave up on signin' statements once the Democrats won 'cause though we don't like ta admit it he's a chicken**** coward like all Republikin big mouths and they skeered a gettin' hearin's or supeenaz. Huey cries for injustishes which I don't know realitees.

And any dam way Bush Junior ain't keepin' no secrets from nobody cause if he did and he thot you oughtta know he'd a done told you by now. But it ain't true because Bush Jr really ain't Satan because Satan already got a kingdom he don't need no fake ranch in Texas or some hidden palace in Dubai.

Go back to the post I made on the first page ("It Never Happened; It Was Awesome; We Don't Recall It; We'll Do It More"), and notice how many of the points I imitated being made by the right have already been checked off in comments right here on this very blog.

The really impressive evolutionary finding of the last few years has been the US' right complete and utter immunity to any considerations of irony or hypocrisy.

...then I'm sure it's no problem for DARPA to come up with a virtual reality to make children seem to be tortured when they're not, all so more stupid Republicans can inspire more terrorist volunteers while finding no useful information, arresting no terrorists, shutting down no terrorist financing, nor bringing some degree of control to the territories of lawless warlord chaos on which terrorist organizations depend.

But then, nballzgrabbr was just joking, no one is stupid enough to think that DARPA is employing giant virtual reality generators to simulate torturing children when it's far cheaper and easier to hire the security forces of other nations to actually torture people.

Someday, hopefully in the short term, Americans will look back at how utterly counter-productive these right wing idiots were for American and international security.

American security policy under Republicans is like an pest exterminator company run by bitter ex-pro wrestlers who are blindfolded and given only methamphetamine, Red Bull, and axes and told to go into every home with full force in order to teach those damn insects a lesson, so that their insect sisters and brothers will hear about what horrible things happened in the house torn apart by the confused blind muscleheads.