This is so interesting. For years, we've had one political group at the throat of another group, just cursing each other out.

Now, here I am talking to a Libertarian and agreeing with much of what he's saying. You're right, nightsilver, over what you say about the support of dictators. All because they serve our needs, regardless of how they serve the needs of their own people.

How a dictator affects the world doesn't impact my life on Long Island (Egg Island if you read the Great Gadsby, home of the Long Island Ice Tea.). Wrong is Wrong. We have bloody hands because of this.

I don't know about the war on drugs. I really don't know the impact on people. The government hype is out there. I don't know the reality behind the hype. But the drug pushers are bad guys. I was in a shooting match with one of them for 2 yrs, taking pot shots are each other, until finally the guy was sent away for murdering the wife of an anti-drug activist. He tried to get the guy, missed, and got the wife. A little weasel of a man, who use to beat his wife, which is how I became involved with him.

I use to live in the worst of the NYC neighborhoods, and someone pulled a knife or gun on me, on average, once every 8 months. Most of them were druggies. In NYC drugs were bad news. (Things have improved a lot over time. Not like it use to be.)

nightsilver might know this because Tenn. is still mostly rural, right? How is speed affecting your area? From the hype, I understand it's hit the rural areas badly.

As I'm typing this I realize we all agree on what's wrong when we see it. We differ in the information we work with however. I suspect that if we all had the same data to work with, we would all probably agree.

Ocean_Soul is right about privatization. It's a nice idea on paper, but Ocean_Soul has captured the reality.

This is what politics should be like. Different people talking, sharing information, not insults. Because we all know wrong when we see it; we just work with information of varying degrees of accuracy.

My own particular hobbyhorse is finding a practical method of implementing the most good.