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You're right, it's neo-liberalism.

It's absolutely neo-liberalism!

Idiot Socialists bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Well obviously! Any socialist who buys into the mainstream of either of the Wall Street Parties is an idiot socialist almost by definition.

Meanwhile, the identitarian* "left," who really were the ones to buy in (and still are) leave little room for anything resembling Marxist analysis, "as [it's] white leftist men [who] love referencing Marx." Echos of "Bernie Bros"? All of which makes the misguided designation of these vampires as "cultural Marxists" all the more ridiculous.

[*which, I admit, is a loaded (but ultimately sound) way to refer to those who subscribe to "intersectional" identity theory.]

People who think such an earth-shatteringly vital issue such as whether they are addressed as 'he,' 'she,' 'them,' or 'it,' is somehow more important than the plight of the inter-generationally underemployed working class in the rust belt, for example, have no business passing themselves off as being of the left, much less as being the Left.

Christianity worked as designed by giving the people hope of an afterlife.
So did Judaism.

Whether you accept it or not is irrelevant as you're giving a choice of belief.

Say a prayer that you grew up in a society founded by Christian ideals where you can spew your vitrole for a religion that lets you leave and not die. Unlike Islam where when you're born into it, if you decide to leave you die https://www.opendemocracy.net/...

Do you agree or disagree with Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly about the need to seperate moral considerations like end user freedom, privacy and democracy from the question of having "open" access to source?

That's a town in Guizhou. Did you mean baizuo?

Name one American the Russians drone murdered.

I hope, you don't insist on it being done by drones, which Russia does not really have — and what it does have, it uses for intelligence-gathering and artillery-coordination only. But, here, I'll list a few:

• Joseph Stone, an American paramedic who was killed in eastern Ukraine on April 23
• Mark Gregory Paslawsky, the sole American fighting on the Ukrainian side of the war in the east of the country, died from injuries sustained in battle in the town of Ilovaysk on Tuesday.

You can also safely chalk up a sizeable fraction of American deaths in the Middle East to Russians — but we may not know the exact details of their coordinating ISIS and other terrorists against the US for decades...

Now, why is it indicative of anything? Why don't you list the Americans killed by American government — and we'll compare that to the Russians killed by Russia... Ah, you are an American — protected by these people you despise — and not worrying about what Russians do to others? Ok, do you suppose, all an enemy can do is kill? How about spying — on your country? How about lying online with millions of "voices" through hijacked accounts?

GTMO like prisons

Darling, GITMO is a tropical paradise compared to the installations run by the enterprise formerly known as GULAG.

Tell me about the Russian detention without charges + torture program.

What exactly would you like to know?

Now explain why would you rather have the CIA on your stuff?

Because whatever abuse you may accuse CIA of was aimed at the sworn enemies of the US and our allies, not US citizens, however politically active and oppositiony...

How do you think _anybody_ gets rich? It's by gambling with other people's money If you win the bet, you get paid off big time, if you lose, you pass off your losses to some other poor sucker (usually the bank that lent you money), or simply declare bankruptcy. Do this enough times, eventually you get rich. What I can't understand is, giving the number of times Trump-controlled businesses have gone bankrupt and screwed their creditors, why does anyone still lend him money? Other than lucrative bribes, I can't think of any logical reason.

This is an excellent point. It is ironic that the economist Adam Smith (who is held up as a poster boy by proponents of the "free market") was utterly opposed to the concept of limited liability. He foresaw that a system that allowed corporations to reap huge profits from success while avoiding any of the negative consequence of failure would inevitably lead to a culture of "gambling with other people's money".

indeed, this is the feeling in parts of Scotland (which is a separate country within the governance of the United Kingdom) where the BBC played a huge part in last years independence campaign. Unsurprisingly, the state broadcaster, funded by the tax payer, took the side of the "no" campaign instead of being unbiased in their reporting and this is causing huge ruptures in Scotland right now and calls are being made to revolutionise the BBC in Scotland. There has been a lot of reporting on this situation here and even before the referendum here and here.

Many in Scotland think that the BBC was a major force in swinging the vote in the final days before the referendum vote when both sides were close to 50/50 of the vote. This caused quite a few protests at BBC Scotland (although, these were played down by the state media).

Whilst it is obvious what the role being played by the BBC in NK and Eritrea is; bear in mind that it is a state broadcaster and will even attempt to exert power over residents within the UK.

indeed, this is the feeling in parts of Scotland (which is a separate country within the governance of the United Kingdom) where the BBC played a huge part in last years independence campaign. Unsurprisingly, the state broadcaster, funded by the tax payer, took the side of the "no" campaign instead of being unbiased in their reporting and this is causing huge ruptures in Scotland right now and calls are being made to revolutionise the BBC in Scotland. There has been a lot of reporting on this situation here and even before the referendum here and here.

Many in Scotland think that the BBC was a major force in swinging the vote in the final days before the referendum vote when both sides were close to 50/50 of the vote. This caused quite a few protests at BBC Scotland (although, these were played down by the state media).

Whilst it is obvious what the role being played by the BBC in NK and Eritrea is; bear in mind that it is a state broadcaster and will even attempt to exert power over residents within the UK.

There is a strong argument that China is more of a Fascist state than a Communist state. I sincerely doubt that Karl Marx would agree that the crony capitalism instituted in China is anywhere near an ideal communist state.

China has arguably moved from communism to fascism and as Mussolini stated "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." One can see many of the tenants of an oligarch's paradise: a single party police/surveillance state, labor unions are outlawed, environmental regulations are practically non-existent, imminent domain is abused, and there is an income inequality that even surpasses the US. Capitalism has chosen the most profitable government model and is hedging their investments on it. China is already the largest trading nation and is expected to soon surpass the US as the largest economic power. In the 1930's many American investors flocked to the economic growth in fascist germany. and Prescott Bush(perhaps indirectly) come to mind. Given the current political climate in the US perhaps there may be another Business Plot in our generation.

I imagine many of these large investment firms have direct or indirect access to zero percent federal reserve loans (going on six years with no end in sight) and they would be foolish not to speculate on Alibaba with house money.

Politifact rates it as only "half true." http://www.politifact.com/pund...

Here is another Russian source that includes some relevant facts you left out, mainly the part about Ukraine having not actually done what you accuse because you excessively focus on a "vote" when there are more steps than a single vote for a law to be enacted, or repealed. The law wasn't repealed. http://en.ria.ru/world/2014030...

Reading your description, or the RT description, it would appear that the pro-EU groups in Ukraine supported the repeal. The fact is that the Parliament took an unpopular vote, that resulted in Ukrainian speakers in Kyiv protesting(!), and none of the major pro-EU politicians supported that vote. None of the pro-EU candidates in the recent elections supported repealing the 2012 law.

So while it is "half true" that they voted to repeal the law, it is not true as stated, and certainly not true in the claimed implication that the pro-EU Ukrainians are anti-Russian-speakers.

Here is an in-depth analysis. https://www.opendemocracy.net/...

Private corporations holding government over a barrel, to the detriment of the populace.

This is pretty much exactly what the Tea Party is looking for, even if nobody has ever truly appreciated that fact.

Thanks, assholes, for exporting your ridiculous oligarchy and concept of economy ... the rest of the world won't be far behind when TTIP comes into effect.

America has been exporting this drivel for years, and I'm glad you're starting to feel the pain of it.

I really, really want to be against net neutrality, because free market and such

Well, then let me disabuse you of that notion.

There is no 'free' market, and there never has been. The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information. This is a completely false assumption, and has been proven so time after time.

It completely ignores human nature whereby someone will always lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their own ends -- this is what we see here.

Industry players will always form cartels and collude in anti-consumer behavior -- price fixing being the prime example.

Without someone to keep corporations in line, the market would steadily skew to all of the power being in the hands of a few.

There is no such thing as a 'free' market, and there simply never has been. It's a utopian myth which can never be true.

People who go around spouting about the 'free' market are either naive, self deluded, or actively lying.

What proponents want is a situation in which corporations are free to do as they choose, under the premise that, in the long run, consumers will have perfect information and be able to make informed choices.

A 'free' market is incapable of addressing things like pollution, product safety, and ethical behavior. In fact, it's almost designed to encourage it.

When Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations", he wasn't writing a rule book, he was making a series of observations. The problem is things have become so skewed, that what we see is an ever-increasing trend where corporations hold all the cards.

Governments who actively support de-regulation have been putting more and more power into the hands of corporations. By allowing industries to 'police' themselves (which isn't what actually happens) they can do as they see fit, for their gain, and to our detriment.

Economics isn't a science, and it isn't based in fact. It is an ideology of how things should work assuming impossible conditions and premises. And, like all ideologies, it is inherently blind to its own flaws, and taken as a matter of dogma to be true.

Taking steps towards a 'free' market has the net effect of removing restrictions on corporations -- which are typically there because we've already seen examples of grossly bad behavior.

The US has been steadily creating (and forcing other countries to adopt) a global oligarchy whereby the corporations call all of the shots. For instance, the TTIP:

The consultation has been called largely to assuage growing pressure from civil society groups concerned about the rights being granted to corporations under the guise of âinvestor protectionsâ(TM), and the system of private tribunals - the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism - that allows corporations to sue governments when they feel that these rights have been breached by a government policy or court decision.

Basically, governments are no longer free to set evidence based policy if it would impact the bottom line of corporations which are the ones causing harm in the first place. They can be over-ridden by these private tribunals which exist to protect the interests of investors and corporations, to the detriment of the rest of us.

This is an oligarchy, and definitely NOT a free market. You could not transition from an oligarchy to a 'free' market by simply removing the laws and regulations governing corporations -- this would not magically create a free market, it simply removes their obligations to society, and frees them to do as they please.

The free market is a complete and utter myth. It has never existed. And the reason society has had to develop laws and regulations around their behavio

We have numerous agencies in the US to investigate complaints against the Police. It's just as effective as the UK's IPCC, meaning not that effective. Their main job is to keep citizens quiet by pretending to do something. In the most obvious and heinous criminal acts by police they may take some action, but that's not even true with the IPCC who has a record of never convicting an officer.

It's kind of like arguing that the US needs a Parliament to manage the NSA like they do in the UK with the GCHQ.

The legal definition of a "Controlled Substance Analog" hinged on the concept of "substantial similarity" to an already scheduled substance. Alexander Shulgin, the AUTHOR of the book you cite has made his feelings about the stupidity of the analog drug laws quite clear:

http://bitnest.ca/Rhodium/chem...

http://www.opendemocracy.net/c...

There is NO clear definition of "substantial similarity" that all chemists will agree on. And I certainly wouldn't want to have my freedom depend on a typical US jury being able to sort it out either (It must be an analog drug--it's made of the same types of atoms as heroin, cocaine, and meth!)

Reread what you wrote, and what I quoted. You said "the civilian populace must therefore be armed." That is a gross misstatement of the Second Amendment, and undoubtedly reveals your real agenda.

As for being shipped off to Siberia or a gas chamber, consider the spirit of Gandhi: "They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then, they will have my dead body, not my obedience."

Consider Hitler and the challenge of non-violence, by Jorgen Johansen:

For Hitler, arms production was a way to reduce unemployment and poverty. Everyone saw what was going on, but no steps were taken to change that policy. What if, twenty years earlier than 1948, the US and other countries had delivered a package of economic support similar to the European Recovery Program (named the Marshall Plan after the then US Secretary of State, George Marshall)? What would the impact have been if that scale of economic stimulus and not armaments had been an option?

---

The German army was well prepared to meet armed resistance, but less able to cope with strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of nonviolent action. A famous example is when the Norwegian teachers were told to join the Nazi party and teach Nazism in schools or face the consequences. When 12,000 teachers signed a declaration against the new law, 1000 were arrested and sent to prison camps. But the strike continued and after some months the order was cancelled and they were allowed to continue their work. In a speech, Quisling summarised: ”You teachers have destroyed everything for me!” We can just imagine what would have been the consequences if many professions had followed in the footsteps of these teachers. Or if they had prepared such actions well in advance and even had exercises prior to the invasion.

---

Even in Germany itself people opposed the arrests. In one famous example 6000 ”Aryan” German women took part in a nonviolent protest in February and March 1943, outside the prison in Rosenstrasse in Berlin, to get their Jewish husbands and friends released. Thanks to these brave women 1700 prisoners were indeed released. These examples illustrate that some groups have more impact than others. It was difficult for the Nazis to attack German women.

I get bored in lines and if there are advertising that I am interesded in displayed I will be more entertained. I can do without adds for tampons and justin bieber albums. That is the usefulness to me.

What benefit are some people being denied. The benefit of seeing ads they are not interested in?

Would you not be better served by a worker that you can say "no thanks" to as opposed to a CCTV system that will scan your face and pop up ads as you browse for your butter as it feels fit, not as you see fit? I think you are making my argument for me, though you may not realize it. The "automated" system will not be yours to turn off as you see fit, it turns on as the company sees fit.

Reference please. Where is your proof that the government was involved when it was the government that found it and stopped it.

You did not try very hard.

No, I am claiming that they will be easily caught and stopped if they tried it.

Because everything that the GCHQ does is public information available for you to scrutinize? Even if you knew something you would receive data on request? Come now, you can't be that daft can you?

We have, there's just no alternative (that stands a chance of being nationally elected.) Post-Blair Labour are every bit as enthusiastic about privatising everything because the wonderful magic of PFI allows them to keep costs off the books as "technically" not being government debt, at the mere cost of the project being a disaster that costs twice as much to deliver a worse service every single time.

As to the Thorium, I spotted this in an web article, but could not find much out more about it and was not entirely satisfied that the information was 100 percent good. But here goes anyways. Coal contains Thorium and other radioactive materials that are released into the air when it is burnt. They do not purify coal before the burn it. Coal is a mixture of all sorts of stuff, most of flammable, but some of it other stuff. The scaremonger writing the piece claimed that coal plants spewed more radiactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant. Who knows for sure. I could not google enough up.

Factiods I remember:
1. A coal plant releases more radioactive material than a nuclear plant produces
2. There's more potential energy in the radioactive materials in coal than you can get from burning the coal itself

Okay, here goes: Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Uranium and Thorium content of coal. CO2 production of a coal plant,
500MW = 3 million tons of CO2/year. The carbon is 27% of that, and coal is 'almost' pure carbon. Call it 1.7M tons of coal consumed per year for a 1GW plant. Of course, this site says 2M tons of coal. At 1 part per million Uranium and 2 parts per million Thorium, that's ~5-6 tons of radioactive material released per year, 1% of it up the flue(EPA limit). It says that you need about 162 tons of Uranium to fuel a conventional reactor a year.
However, conventional reactors are only about 1% efficient at their fuel burn - if you go to breeder reactors, that could, theoretically at least, drop to 1.62 tons of nuclear material needed per year per GW. Outside of accidents, the nuclear waste isn't released.

Realistically speaking, you could get more electricity out of the coal via nuclear power if you were using breeders. Thorium reactors would be required, but at least they are naturally breeder-type.

So I'd tend to say that my 'coal plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear plants produce' is true - only limited amounts, less than 1%, are actually being converted into more highly radioactive material. It's producing 2 tons of radioactive material*, vs 'release' of 5-6.
Your 'emits more than a nuclear plant' is also very much true.
My last statement - 'more energy in the heavy metal traces' depends on using highly efficient processes and somehow having an energy-cheap way to collect the relatively diffuse uranium and thorium.

*I'm ignoring waste that isn't annual, like the reactor vessel, at the moment, though it's probably only a ton or so more.

I hear about the Chinese Economic Miracle. But when I see the youtube videos of the 'Fog' in Bejing, the price they paid was too high. You could be the richest man in Bejing, but your quality of life, as a living creature, is horrible. This is not some abstract human rights issue. This is breathing filth into your lungs with every breath.

I figure that if you give them another 10 years or so, they're going to start taking their own environmental rules much more seriously, precisely because of this.

Forced conversions are the subject of differences among Muslim scholars:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/patricia-crone/no-compulsion-in-religion

So we get the philosophical question: is the religion what the doctrine says, or what the adherents do (which is itself variable)?

The fact that it's using figures regarding the Chernobyl death toll that were later admitted as bogus and recanted should ring a bell.

But even if you use the revised WHO figure, the death rate is still lower than all other technologies. So your point, while valid, doesn't change the argument.

Also the notion of counting roof falls as a consequence of solar energy sounds to the very least like an extremely contrived argument to me, if not outright partisan bullshit.

Why? Panels have to be installed in order to be used. How do you suggest that should be done? Not only that, but the blog author suggests ways that the risk from PV installation could be brought down - hardly a partisan attack piece.

However the fact that I'm able to easily spot a few glaring crocks in an argument unfortunately doesn't make me magically able to come with better figures.

And that right there is your problem. You've called bullshit a few times but you don't have any better information yourself, and the "crocks" you think you've spotted are not the big news you seem to think. Maybe that's why it gets "cited by each and every nuclear apologist on Slashdot" - it's a helpful contribution to our understanding of the risks.

The fact that it's using figures regarding the Chernobyl death toll that were later admitted as bogus and recanted should ring a bell. Also the notion of counting roof falls as a consequence of solar energy sounds to the very least like an extremely contrived argument to me, if not outright partisan bullshit. However the fact that I'm able to easily spot a few glaring crocks in an argument unfortunately doesn't make me magically able to come with better figures.

You may want to check out, well, the facts.

Your "facts" are utter bullshit, and you're an idiot for putting them forth. This well-known page, that comes back each time an idiot feels like defending NP, says that the WHO announced 4000 deaths from Chernobyl in 2005 but fails to indicate that the same WHO admitted later that the report was "a political communication tool" and issued a new statement in 2006 pointing at very different figures.

Also comparing rooftop fall deaths to nuclear is ridiculous because you're comparing very shoddy construction practices to the extreme requirements of nuclear, but nothing prevents people from using proper equipments and practices when going on roofs. Also it ignores solar thermal energy which is probably the cleanest and safest way of generating electricity bar none.

Ultimately the issue here is that you need to consider the intrinsic risks, which are high with nuclear, not the mitigated risks, which indeed have been reduced but mostly by pure luck.

Anyway believe what you want but don't blind yourself with partisan bullshit when trying to form an opinion.

Solar (or geothermal and definitely not wind) isn't even a viable option yet.

Not less than breeder and thorium reactors that people need to push forward as soon as proposing NP as an acceptable solution, because in its current form it is not.

And in 2006 revised this number in a new statement. Interesting read about that here.

according to the World Health Organization [who.int], there will probably be around 4000 deaths attributable to Chernobyl,

Note however that this figure that everybody nuclear apologist is parroting is totally bogus and was discredited a long time ago. The fact that no thorough, independent estimate of the real health impact of Chernobyl was ever produced being probably part of the reason why people are so wary of the nuclear industry, and rightly so, as Fukushima has demonstrated so clearly.

• Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
• Nobody died because of Chernobyl (comfortable to believe).
• Nuclear waste is not a problem, the French reprocess their waste easily (they don't).
• All issues with nuclear (raising costs, aging designs, no R&D, etc) are basically due to environmentialist whackos/Jimmie Carter.
• Sun doesn't shine at night so solar energy is unusable.
• Thank God nuclear energy is our only option.

Yes sleeping does feel good.

That's the trouble. Nuclear plants are held to a massively high standard of "safe" already.

Did you know, for example, that Coal kills 4,000 (not a typo) more people per wattHour than Nuclear does? But its a slow, boring kind of killed, like the 40,000+ who die every year in automobile accidents in the US alone, not the fun exciting kind of killed that you get every couple of years when an airliner crashes and kills 200 folk halfway around the globe, making national news.

To have a meaningful discussion you need to compare nuclear safety to other power-generation mechanisms (more people fall off roofs installing solar panels and die every year than have been killed by nuclear power generation disasters). And then scale them to account for the power generated. Once you do so, you realize just how unsafe many of the alternatives actually are.

The interesting thing is to follow up your numbers (you don't give a citation and nor does this seth guy). Looking at them, we see that he includes a low figure for Chernobyl deaths (4000) and even then discounts those saying "cause and effect becomes more tenuous" whilst completely failing to take into account other studies. Now, as this article points out it's incredibly hard to work out which numbers are correct, but even the WHO which put out the 4000 death number has since published a correction which says that there have been more than 9000 deaths. Numbers of deaths go up to a million in other studies of varied credibility.

My fundamental conclusion has to be that we have yet another nuclear safety "expert" who's telling us that it's safe, but turns out to have no clue what he's talking about. Numbers of deaths go up to a million, and studies like that seem to be deeply dubious too, but I'm really not going to accept these numbers without a big bit more clarity. The worst thing about this is the open admission by the IAEA that "the total of 4,000 deaths was highlighted to counter much higher figures" - in other words they set out to manipulate perception.

Going on from there; I agree with your point about visible public death being more worrying than hidden death. If the death rate in planes was anything like the rate in cars they would be banned. However, there's another bias factor in here. The small nuclear incidents are not really so worrying. What is worrying is outlier major events. We seem to have come close to a reactor melt down; the reactor containment failed but still we have been lucky. If cooling had failed for longer what might have happened? I see lots of assurances that nothing. These come from the same people who tell us that exposure to beta decay and gamma rays is the same as exposure to UV light (see recent articles in the Register)

First off, you speculating on what might have happened - while enlightening as to the depths you're willing to go to invent boogymen - has little to do with reality

What you don't seem to understand is that I speculate with the information that I have access too. I'm not willing to invent boogy-men; I was at some point this past week genuinely worried for my two little kids, although I live on the very opposite part of the planet.

I'm too young to remember much about TMI, however I vividly remember Chernobyl. What I retain from this event is that: first the disaster was shamelessly denied by the Soviets, but we really didn't expect much more from them. The consensus in western Europe at the time was that the USSR was a tyrany with gulags and thought police, pretty much similar to what North Korea is now, and that the guys in power would have dropped babies in the nuclear furnace if it would have advanced their fucked-up ideology.

Secondly the French governement lied openly to the public by pretending that the radioactive cloud stopped at the German border. How nice of this pretty little cloud! So the conclusion, right or wrong, was that the nuclear industry in France, in bed with the governement and the military, was ok to let some kids absorb some amount of radionucleides and get a few additional thyroid cancers, provided it could be hidden and avoid turning the public against nuclear energy.

Then the IAEA issued an official report evaluating the consequences of the disaster to 4000 additional deaths by cancer. This figure was afterwards challenged by the WHO itself it seems(!) as being a "political communication tool". Greenpeace says 60,000 deaths, some russian biologistsays 985,000. Who to believe? Definitely not the IAEA who appears as a corrupt organization in bed with industry interests.

Finally a quick search on google brings back haunting images of a world where "the living envy the dead". Since those consequences were seemingly not even considered by the IAEA, brushed away as collateral casualties to the advance of a certain concept of "progress", it reinforces the feeling of a bunch of people who would saw your kids legs if it would allow them to line their own pockets, just like with the Iraq war (who cares about the Iraqi children? Not Cheney nor Rumsfeld it seems), the BP and countless other oil spills, the incredible pollution in Niger, in China, etc, etc. That's for the background.

None of the six reactors would go "full meltdown" - an event incidentally not even remotely as horrible as you seem to believe it to be. Furthermore, now that we have had visuals on the spent fuel pools we also know that there wasn't a risk of any of them drying out, catching fire or in any other way exploding in a nasty way.

Again what you don't seem to understand is that nobody gives a shit about what the situation ends up to be, same thing with TMI. What people want to know, need to know is very simple: a precise description of a realistic worst case. If there was an incident on your plane and you land safely you don't want the company to tell you "What are you worrying about, you're safely on the ground now aren't you? Move along." You need to know what happened and how close to dying you went.

I've tried several times now to get a clear picture of a reasonable worst-case scenario for Fukushima from several seemingly knowledgeable persons here and elsewhere, and haven't been able to get any answer yet. And in fact nobody seems to have the answer, so ev

Not just the cost of the plant itself. Getting the fuel will get more and more difficult/expensive.

There is around 50 years of fuel in the reserves at current usage levels.
Uranium from seawater requires 5300 cubic metres of water to be processed per second continuously to supply one reactor.
Uranium from granite requires a block 100 metres wide, 100 metres high and three kilometres long each year, for one reactor.

While the equivalent cost of nuclear plants spent on solar would produce around 35% less energy once it is built the running and maintenance costs are orders of magnitude lower. With solar there is no need to store waste and the fuel is free to collect.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/2587.jsp

Er, no.

I'm going to let Google make me look smarter than I am, here, since I haven't seen this story before:

Why the FSB is not the KGB!

They can cite you for refusing to talk to them, but the citation comes with no punishment. And you can get a court to tell them to fuck off entirely if they're bothering you.

They can still investigate your shady neighbors, boss, and parents, but they can't lean on you to do their investigation for them.

End of an era.

_All_ governments want to restrict some information, and a lot of that is valid. Some sensitive information about military operations, and covert agents, for example should be censored and restricted IMO, at least while they are operational. The question is firstly which information should be witheld, and secondly (and most importantly) : how can we set up government withholding of information so that they do not withold information they have no right to?

No one has got even close to answering that second question. Basically all current major governments have the ability to withold any information that they see fit, whether it be sensitive or in the public interest to know. There should be no need for websites like wikileaks (at least in terms of governments, companies are different beasts) - _anything_ that does not potentially compromise current or future operations that is owned by the government should be released. No quibbles. No matter if it shows someone in a bad light.

The trouble is the nature of governments, and the nature of people. No one ever wants anything released that makes them look bad, and governments very very rarely relinquish powers they gain.

Having said all that, by _far_ the best thing that New Labour did for us in the UK was introduce the Freedom of Information act, which Labour has been bitten itself by in a couple of cases, and which is what actually was used to expose the entire expenses scandal recently. That is a very important piece of legislation, and a great one, though I'll wager now they wished they never introduced it. Unfortunately the FOI act only applies to information about governmental institutions, and not about privately held stuff. The data protection act is a pretty good act too - it allows any individual to request of _any_ organisation any information that they hold on that individual. Though I personally didn't know they essentially had to pass that legislation to come into compliance with the EU until just now.

I'm not saying those laws are perfect - far from it, there are exceptions to the FOI act, and it can be vetoed by government ministers (which has happened twice). They do need to go further. However, before their implementation, there was basically no formal requirement for information transparency at all in the UK... Hopefully, some future government will give the FOI act a few more teeth (though it has already been proven very useful).

I'm not a New Labour apologist by any means, detention without trial is 100% wrong in my opinion. The Surveillance State is getting worse. The DNA database for people who have not ever been convicted of a crime is utterly wrong, and is truly questionable even for those (like myself) who have been convicted of minor offences. And for me, personally the absolute worst thing, especially coming from a "Labour" government, is that the wealth gap has become far worse. The wealth gap is a very good indicator of societal happiness in western societies : bigger gap = more unhappiness. This was a major pledge, to narrow it, from New Labour, and they've widened it. Anyway, I just started this paragraph to show I wasn't a Labour apologist, and I've ended up ranting. Oh well...

Right... and instead of a million Britney Spears clones getting all the air time since they can be easily sold to teenagers, we may hear more from modern day Beethovens and Bachs, who produced incredible artistic works without copyright protection.

GP's point was that creative people will still create and the talented would certainly find ways to support themselves. Eliminating copyright would just remove the incentive for large corporations to churn out material from talentless hacks to turn a quick buck. And it would give people more freedom at the same time.

That being said, I personally believe some patent and copyright protection is desirable, but with *much* shorter terms than are currently in force in most of the "civilized" world. Ten years feels like it's probably in the right ballpark for most copyrighted works, but I also strongly agree with Richard Stallman's framework for looking at copyright in terms of the purpose of the work in question and the type and purpose of the copy being made.

Stallman breaks works down into those that are primarily functional, works mainly expressing someone's opinion, and work that is mostly intended to be aesthetic. He then considers the way the work is being copied - verbatim or with modifications - and whether the copying is commercial or non-commercial. Then he looks at each combination to evaluate what is the best policy for that particular situation. I think there's a lot of benefit to be had from looking at it in this way, and I'm surprised that it's not used more widely.

This interview contains a good summary of this idea. The sections entitled "A new copyright bargain" and "Three new models of copyright" are the parts that specifically address this, though the whole interview is good reading. I was lucky enough to see his "Copyright vs. Community" talk in April, and it was great. Stallman can be a bit rough around the edges personality-wise and his views are certainly misunderstood by a lot of people, but he's a great thinker.

you might be interested in this chart:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/economics/admin/2008/11/18/mollom-beats-spam
that shows what Mollom did to our forum spam after just 2 months. The interesting thing is that the spammers actually seem to have stopped trying to attack this url.
Tony

I can't say he raped and murdered thousands, but the historical record generally indicates that he was not the nicest guy in the world who loved puppy dogs.

Attempting to limit the slave trade to the Europeans for all those centuries is just counterproductive to your argument. While some African slaves were bought from tribes who sold them after capturing them in warfare, the vast majority were taken by Muslims.

No compulsion in religion? What about apotasy? What about jizya? Etc.

I believe that the list of main problems you listed with islam today are actually at its core and until the overwhelmingly majority mainstream Muslims repudiate them, as has happened in other Abrahamic religions, they will remain problems.

For instance your point a. Islam, to my understanding, means submission. In fact in paradise (as stated in 23:101), there is no "neither will they question one another". So if you're taught that the most enjoyable existence that you can expect is filled with gently accepting what is taught to you, why would you strive to improve your education level? Furthermore, to try and assert that only the poor ignorant people commit the terrorist acts ignores the fact that . And while I don't consider all Muslims to be terrorists, I do believe that it is enshrined in their religion. The G.P. who cared for my brother, sister, and myself when I was a child was an Indian immigrant who happened to be Muslim. If I was still living in the same area, he would still be my doctor; especially considering his considerable skill at suturing.

Your point b is interesting because of the fact of abrogation, as permitted in Surahs 16:101 and 2:106. So, without being a full-time Qurinic scholar, how is the average lay-person to know which Surah is correct and which has been overturned?

I also strongly disagree with your assertion about the Quran being a good set of rules in the 6th Century and ALSO being a good set of rules today. It's taught my Islamic jurisprudence that there is no other law that Allah's law, which has been interpreted, and withstood the test of time/inquiry, as Sharia. A harsh and brutal system that leaves little room for innovation or critical thinking.

the so called judges don't know a thing about Tibet, the history, the human conditions in Tibet, and talking through their noise about nothing. No wonder the Chinese people are angry.

I am the poster to whom you are replying.

What am I blind to? What am I ignorant of? Instead of calling me ignorant, tell me what I am ignorant of. I will listen to facts!

You see, I'm sympathetic to your argument that the Western media values sensationalism -- which sells newspapers -- over the truth. (The US once got into a war with Spain for almost entirely that reason, when the sensationalist press falsely reported that the USS Maine was sunk by a Spanish mine.) That's why I've been doing some research. Motivated by these arguments on Slashdot, I've taken the time to actually look for a good, logical case for Chinese control of Tibet.

It has taken a little bit of wading through ad-hominem attacks and other logical fallacies like those addressed in my previous post -- but I have found some real fact-based arguments. So here's the short story of how I found them:

I first stopped here . One can understand to some extent the arguments given -- and see why Chinese people are angry -- but they tend to suffer from the logical fallacies I addressed previously, so I moved on, looking for a logically coherent case for Chinese control of Tibet.

My next stop was here. Don't read the article itself; read lingjiewang's reply. The problem is that it mostly lambasts the British media, rather than addressing the accusations themselves. So, although I could sympathize with much of what was said, it still didn't pass the logic test for me.

So I followed her link, and ended up here. Finally, I found someone making a logical, well-reasoned case for the Chinese side, instead of falling back on ad-hominem arguments.

The arguments are, for the most part,

1 - Before China came, Tibet was a backwards feudal society where what was essentially slavery was practiced, and women were treated terribly. The average Tibetan is more free now than he was before China came.

2 - China has invested a lot of resources in Tibet, and Tibetans have seen concrete benefits: Life expectancy and other measures of quality of life have gone steadily up thanks to China.

3 - Claims of Chinese massacres of the Tibetan population are exaggerated. The numbers given are too large, it is said, to be plausible.

4 - Tibet is not being Sinoized: Han are not replacing Tibetans, Tibetans remain the majority of the population, and Tibetan culture is still very much alive and well.

Some of these arguments may well be valid, but I can't help but notice the striking similarity between them and the arguments Europeans used to justify their colonial empires. For instance, here is an excerpt from the poem, "The White Man's Burden," by Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
[...]
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Here, Kipling is essentially saying, "We white men selflessly lift the poor savages from their ignorance; we bring them the light of civilization, and though they resent us for it, this work is good because it improves their qu

the so called judges don't know a thing about Tibet, the history, the human conditions in Tibet, and talking through their noise about nothing. No wonder the Chinese people are angry.

I am the poster to whom you are replying.

What am I blind to? What am I ignorant of? Instead of calling me ignorant, tell me what I am ignorant of. I will listen to facts!

You see, I'm sympathetic to your argument that the Western media values sensationalism -- which sells newspapers -- over the truth. (The US once got into a war with Spain for almost entirely that reason, when the sensationalist press falsely reported that the USS Maine was sunk by a Spanish mine.) That's why I've been doing some research. Motivated by these arguments on Slashdot, I've taken the time to actually look for a good, logical case for Chinese control of Tibet.

It has taken a little bit of wading through ad-hominem attacks and other logical fallacies like those addressed in my previous post -- but I have found some real fact-based arguments. So here's the short story of how I found them:

I first stopped here . One can understand to some extent the arguments given -- and see why Chinese people are angry -- but they tend to suffer from the logical fallacies I addressed previously, so I moved on, looking for a logically coherent case for Chinese control of Tibet.

My next stop was here. Don't read the article itself; read lingjiewang's reply. The problem is that it mostly lambasts the British media, rather than addressing the accusations themselves. So, although I could sympathize with much of what was said, it still didn't pass the logic test for me.

So I followed her link, and ended up here. Finally, I found someone making a logical, well-reasoned case for the Chinese side, instead of falling back on ad-hominem arguments.

The arguments are, for the most part,

1 - Before China came, Tibet was a backwards feudal society where what was essentially slavery was practiced, and women were treated terribly. The average Tibetan is more free now than he was before China came.

2 - China has invested a lot of resources in Tibet, and Tibetans have seen concrete benefits: Life expectancy and other measures of quality of life have gone steadily up thanks to China.

3 - Claims of Chinese massacres of the Tibetan population are exaggerated. The numbers given are too large, it is said, to be plausible.

4 - Tibet is not being Sinoized: Han are not replacing Tibetans, Tibetans remain the majority of the population, and Tibetan culture is still very much alive and well.

Some of these arguments may well be valid, but I can't help but notice the striking similarity between them and the arguments Europeans used to justify their colonial empires. For instance, here is an excerpt from the poem, "The White Man's Burden," by Rudyard Kipling:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
[...]
Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Here, Kipling is essentially saying, "We white men selflessly lift the poor savages from their ignorance; we bring them the light of civilization, and though they resent us for it, this work is good because it improves their qu

You shouldn't be embarrassed - I thought you did 2 things very well:

1. defend JZ against those who attributed all sorts of stuff to him, almost certainly not having read JZ or my account too closely, and

2. summarise my argument

Tony

========

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsp

1. psychodelicacy is right to get everyone to go listen to JZ - it's a great experience

2. psychodelicacy has also made the best summary of the argument that I present as JZ having presented (...and which I think JZ presented, but judge that for yourselves) in all his commentary here (for example this but also in his other comments

3. yes, the free, open internet that we know and love is what JZ (and I) are keen to preserve, and there _are_ forces looking for reasons to impose authority over it. It happens law by law, regulation by regulation. This is the best account I've heard to date of the coalitions of convenience that threaten. I think we should listen hard to JZ's argument.

Tony

======

http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Tony_Curzon_Price.jsp

Yeah. Sure. "The people is dumb".

Let's see...

> The 4,000 deaths of cleanup workers at Chernobyl is completely unexcusable.

This estimation was touted by the IAEA, which runs in order to disseminate nuclear powerplants, and by the OMS (censored by the IAEA for all nuclear-related matters).

Moreover the IAEA announced "4,000 deaths, grand total, definitive and scientific (United Nations) estimation" in September 2005 (it wasn't definitive, nor sci, nor UN) before discreetling backing up in April 2006 ("9000, stated only for a subset of the Soviet population and for solid cancers"). Here is an overview and an article.

> 800 deaths are objectively fewer than the 105,000 reported in Wikipedia.

On WP (en and fr) there are too many pro-nuke agit-propers, eager to relay disinformation and censor facts.

> 4,000 deaths are objectively fewer than "the six-figure death counts that opponents of nuclear power once cited".

The most famous report published by the opponents (titled TORCH) was published AFTER IAEA's report.

The IAEA estimation ("4000 ...") is mainly based upon scientific material from E. Cardis (who served as the scientific secretary for the study which leaded to the report), and they properly credited her. Know what? As soon as the ''4000 deaths'' thesis was published she declared that 30,000 to 60,000 cancer deaths is "the right order of magnitude". See New Scientists and Nature. Her most recent study leads to "By 2065, models predict that about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400 72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000 59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident and that about 16,000 deaths (95% UI 6,700 - 38,000) from these cancers may occur).". Abstract: no less than 6,700, approx 16,000, maybe up to 38,000 ... remember that the main "opponents" report (TORCH) authors estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 may die. Therefore the 'total mortality' estimation published by the very expert committed by the IAEA are more on the same ballpark of published by scientific "opponents" than IAEA's.

The IAEA's "4,000 total" is ridiculous. Quoting it, as you did, is at best naive.

> don't see people debating the accuracy of the numbers they use
> Grow up

Yeah. Sure. Good advice, chief. Thanx! Here is my hint: avoid propagating lies. The ongoing propaganda campaign "eat nuke! good for health! yummy!" is already well funded, they don't need any help.

How about you stop pretending what their ideology really is?

You use fallacy of composition: just because some, formally Muslim, probably not very devout, people are not serial killers screaming jihad all the time, doesn't mean their ideology and purpose is not what it demonstrably is.

Plus, they are peaceful only because they are in minority. For now.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-turkey/article_ 679.jsp

"Thus, the democratic culture of conflict implies the sceptical idea of duality, as against the optimistic idea of unity. Since no one owns the truth, regulated forms of dispute must be established. Islamicist dissatisfaction with this model is based on its predisposition to discord, strife, and sham conflicts.

Against this, they evoke the dream of a scholars' republic. Conflicts that arose were to be solved by reference to the Koran, by obtaining a legal report, a fatwa. The weight of such a report is substantially dependent on the personal authority of the issuer. Thus, unlike a court judgment, the legal opinion given is only binding on someone who acknowledges this authority. But personal authority develops out of the free play of forces. What political Muslims have in mind, therefore, is a scholars' republic or a legal opinion state."

Christianity is doctrinally about love, Islam is doctrinally about submission:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FD16Aa02.h tml

" Less important than the differences in content - "audience" rather than "dialogue", "submission" rather than "love" - is the difference in emphasis. With this perfunctory preface, Sistani begins a lengthy treatise on when, where, with what clothing, and in what bodily positions prayers may be said. His concern is not the spiritual experience of prayer, but establishing communal norms for prayer. Where the Christians and Jews gush with loquacity on the subject, Muslims have remarkably little to say about the experience of prayer. Reading through Muslim sources, I am at loss to find anything remotely resembling Ratzinger's quite typical discourse on prayer.

In fact, virtually all of Sistani's writings address communal norms for behavior, including the most intimate. Ritual impurity (janabat) is a central concern, especially in the case of sexual relations. He writes, for example:

[...]
In calling attention to these portions of Sistani's theology I do not mean to deprecate him. On the contrary, he addresses the inhabitants of traditional society for whom spiritual experience means submission, that is, submission to communal norms, whence the individual derives a lasting sense of identity. In the most intimate details of daily life, culture and religion become inseparable. For traditional society it is the durability of communal norms that lends a sense of immortality to the individual, a life beyond mere physical existence. That is why prayer in the Judeo-Christian sense, the lovers' exchange between God and the individual soul, does not come into consideration within Muslim theology. Allah is the all-powerful sovereign of the world before whom the individual dissolves; the individual's submission to the ummah, the community of Islam, is a spiritual experience of an entirely different order.

To this the Americans can only come as destroyers, not saviors. America by its nature disrupts traditional order. It is the usurper of the Old World, the agency of creative destruction, the Spirit that Denies, to whom "everything that arises goes rightly to its ruin" (Goethe) - in short, the Great Satan. America is the existential threat to Islam."

In short, there can be no peace with Islam, as two ideologies underpinning the reflective lifestyles - Islam, the traditional and developed world, the modernist lifestyle, which more or less can be reconciled with Christianity - are in fundamental and irreconci

they're both run by evil dictators

China is so complicated and so tragic. The control of the central government there is weakening. Much of the evil in China is a consequence of that loss of control. Recently, for example, up to 53,000 slave workers were discovered in the brick industry Shanxi province. That's 50,000 pepole in one industry in one province. The central government doesn't want this. Nor does it sanction the kidnapping and mutilation of children used as beggars, or the sale of women in the countryside or any of the many other terrible things that happen in a country encompassing over a fifth of the word's population.

What do you do if you have political power in a place like China? Do you try to further weaken the control of the central government? Or do you try to work within the system? There aren't a lot of alternatives in a system that does not permit other power bases and where capitalism appears to be in its most destructive, dynamic, and materialistic phase. This is a place where one of my first impulses on arriving in Beijing a decade ago was that the pollution was so bad that cleaning the air was more important than democracy. I can't bring myself to blanket the human beings running China with the label "evil". Some of them, I'm certain, are heroes.

The government has lost the moral authority of Communist ideology, so it's trying to leverage nationalism without letting it get out of control. China has a deep-seated sense of historical wrong, a memory of millenia when it was the only civilized place in the world, and an insecurity about the disrespect of the West that wronged it (and don't doubt that our ancestors did). China makes me very sad, but it also scares the hell out of me. If it collapses, watch out: the first half of the 20th century saw the horrors of a fragmented out-of-control China. Right now, I fear it looks at least a little bit like pre-war Germany.

If you do a little research the head of the committee that researched and advised on this recommended REDUCING copyright from 50 years and introducing some "fair use" and "parody" uses. This was overridden because the music industry pushed so hard. But it tells me that some very intelligent (the head of the committee was in the Financial Times) people CAN see past he lobbyists and the recommendations he came up with need MUCH more publicity...
Try the interview at http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/go wers_4160.jsp

When the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich (owner of the British soccer champions Chelsea, among a lot of other things) started his Chukotka project, on the inlet to Bering's Strait, there was some speculation on whether he knew someting that others didn't.
Maybe he did? Check out Chukotka on a map and see for yourselves :-)

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institu tions_government/chukotka_3904.jsp

Without any supporting evidence, it's quite a jump from "they have the power do it" to "they have done it." Your unfounded assumption is that anyone who has the power of an entire country at his disposal will use it mainly to enrich himself. Accumulation of personal wealth is not everyone's primary motivator.

You would deny that the sky is blue. When people have absolute power, they will use that power to enrich themselves, as Lord Acton observed, as Kim Jong Il has.

http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/04/royalsphotoshow_5 .html:

"North Korea's 'Dear Leader' reportedly buys Mercedes Benz cars by the dozen and is said to be one of the world's biggest importers of Hennessy's cognac."

http://www.opendemocracy.net/xml/xhtml/articles/26 86.html :

"The stories told about the extravagance of Kim Jong-Il's lifestyle are so lurid that at first they seem hard to believe. A number of former cooks, including an Italian and a Japanese sushi chef, have described in detail his gourmet obsessions. One chef published a book in Japan under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto; at the very time people were starving in their millions, he travelled to Iran and Uzbekistan to buy caviar, to China for melons and grapes, to Thailand and Malaysia for durians and papayas, to the Czech Republic for Pilsner beer, to Denmark for bacon, and (regularly) to Japan for tuna and other fresh fish."

"When I tracked down a member of one of Kim's "happiness teams" of dancers and masseuses in Seoul, I asked her if these tales could be true. O Yong-hui, a petite slender woman with a pale porcelain complexion and almond eyes started out as a professional gymnast until she was recruited to join one of the four all-girl dance troupes. She is now 33."

"She described how, on joining Kim's court , she was given handmade Italian shoes, Japanese designer clothes (Yamoto, Kenzo, Mori) and an Omega watch inscribed with Kim Jong-Il's name. A check of Swiss trade statistics shows that in 1998, North Korea did indeed import $2.7 million's worth of luxury watches."

"At breakfast she enjoyed French croissants, fresh yoghurt and imported fruits because Kim said they must have clear and healthy skins. At lunch there was fresh raw fish, Japanese-style, and at dinner Korean or western dishes."

"We ate off porcelain dishes inlaid with roses and used silver tableware. Everything was imported. Nothing I have ever seen in South Korea is as good", she said. When her five years was up - no girls stay longer - she decided to flee with her husband, a former bodyguard."

"I double-checked their stories with an ex-bodyguard, Lee Young-guk who observed Kim at close quarters during eleven years of service."

"In a real sense, he is the richest man in the world. There are no limits on what he can do", Lee said. "He has at least ten palaces set in sprawling grounds and insists each is always occupied by thousands of staff so his enemies are never sure where he is. They contain golf courses, stables for his horses, garages full of motor-bikes and luxury cars, shooting-ranges, swimming pools, cinemas, funfair parks, water-jet bikes and hunting grounds stocked with wild deer and duck."

You need to go to Sweden to see the benefits to a well implemented National ID system.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/xml/xhtml/articles/25 37.html

The reason businesses require that you have one is (I think) because they can trace you and collect debts via the kronofogden. People with an ID are thus a much lower risk than those without. It's not so much the physical card that makes it possible, more the personummer it contains. And because businesses need it, the tax people can rely on you having one.

Of course, if you're trying to work in the UK without paying tax, or you want to be untraceable, it's a pain, but that's the whole point.

The problem I have with the UK is that well meaning but naive liberals are lining up with scum like George Galloway and old hippies like Glenda Jackson to campaign against something which is designed to make life hard for people who want to welch on their debts and avoid taxes. In fact if you Google for it, the first page or so of entries are uniformly hostile. But if you look at other European countries, an ID register defintely has it's uses.

Not that it matters, both of the parties that actually have a chance of winning an election are committed to some kind of ID register at least.

Have you seen Shadia Drury's work? She's been after the Straussians for a long time. You can find a very informative interview with her here.

Some people have called her a conspiracy theorist, and in fact, when I first heard her interpretation of Straussianism, I thought she was nuts. I had heard Wolfowitz interviewed and to me he sounded like an exceptionally bright , compassionate guy.

However, the events of the last few years have convinced me otherwise. Not about the bright part either. Things have gone quite badly for the US on the ground in Iraq. I have a hard time believing that a group of people as smart as Wolfowitz and Feith are screwing up "accidentally." Thus I am left to give credence to Prof. Drury, that this is an organized plan on the part of the neo-cons.

I've read some Plato, and it seems to me that if Wolfowitz et. al. are deeply influenced by The Republic. They are the philosopher kings, while people like Tommy Franks are the guardians. Pretty clear cut. To paraphrase Prof. Drury, an admirer of "The Republic" could not be in favor of democracy. So if Strauss and his students venerated the classics as much as they claim to have, then Wolfowitz etc. are lying. They don't believe in democracy. They believe in perpetual war as a means to keep the unwashed masses off balanced, and the elites firmly in power.

If Google is willing to cooperate with China on their "Great Firewall"--an attempt to suppress democracy-related information and control the Chinese people--they can hardly object to this. Google has already demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with totalitarian governments in suppressing peaceful, pro-democracy information. Hard to see how they can draw a line now. If anything, Google's "Don't be evil" motto requires them to actively try to subvert Chinese censorship.

Australia is making a reasonable request that Google voluntarily censor a very small number of images of a nuclear reactor--images that could clearly be used for violent and dangerous terrorist activity. Aside from satisfying idle curiosity, there aren't many important, legitimate uses for those images.

Since Google has long since slid down the slippery slope, why stop now?

How many mass murderers has the UN stopped?

The UN isn't in the business of overthrowing governments.

I think you might want to read up a bit on why, exactly, the United Nations was founded. This article may or may not be believed in its entirety, but the fact of the matter is one way or another, the UN was conceived during WWII and was officially founded directly afterwards specifically to prevent dictators running roughshod over their neighbors all over the world. That was the original mandate, and that's why the five permanent members of the security council are who they are.

Even the UN's official history is perfectly up front about its origins as a tool of the Allies in fighting Germany and Japan during WWII.

Now you see why many people in the US (and other countries) think the UN has gotten so far off track from its original mandate that it is no longer relevant. It was intended to at least contain, occasionally fight and if necessary overthrow dangerous governments like those of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Whether you want to believe it or not, and whether you agree with that cause, that is the truth.

I am no neo-con (or even a traditional-con); I voted against Bush both times. But I get just as annoyed as anyone when people speak of the UN as if its purpose is to keep anyone from fighting, ever. That was not why it was created. It was created to keep rogue states in check - that is the entire reason it exists. It was created during wartime, with a mandate that specifically told member nations to keep fighting. Yet nowadays, it is only ever used as an excuse to do nothing because of competing political interests from those who have something to gain by standing on the sidelines.

As for the UN taking over the internet... read any of what I just posted (either the two links or my commentary, whether you subscribe to the same view or not) and tell me how this would make a lick of sense.