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Your Right to Travel Anonymously: Not Dead Yet
ChiralSoftware writes "Remember John Gilmore's fight to be able to travel on commercial airlines without having to show ID? It has dropped out of the news for a while, but now it appears that the fight is continuing. I remember in the 80s we used to make jokes about Soviet citizens being asked "show me your papers" and needing internal passports to travel in their own country. Now we need internal passports to travel in our country. How did this happen? The requirement to show ID for flying on commercial passenger flights started in 1996, in response to the crash of TWA Flight 800. This crash was very likely caused by a mechanical failure. How showing ID to board a plane prevents mechanical failures is left as an exercise to the reader. How mandatory ID even prevents terrorist attacks is also not clear to me; all the 9/11 hijackers had valid government-issued ID. I hope the courts don't wimp out on this fight."
Way to go! Let's bring handguns onto the airplane for terrorists to use!
This is me. Don't like it? That's unlucky.
(hint: it happened in France and involved guillotines)
Mass produced Freedom Fries?
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Given the "free speech zones" (a cage within a cage surrounded by barbed wire at the DNC, the "no-protest" areas, and the arrests of people with unpopular opinions)
Come on. I'm all for free speech, and I think you should be able to have whatever opinion, however unpopular it may be, that you want, but what these protestors want to do is actually disrupt the convention itself; that is, they want to restrict the rights of the Democrats to express themselves. And the arrests of the 3 protestors were done because these protestors were acting unlawful/violent; otherwise, if it were for merely protesting, there would have been far more people hauled away. And while they have the right (that has been protected in this case) to say whatever they want, just think about how silly they're being; they're protesting against the war at a convention where the delegates are over 90% anti-war. They're just out to make some trouble.
lasindi
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
But then he started sending email spam, and look where he is now. Do I feel bad for him? Not a bit.
Where is he now? He's one of the most well-known politicians in America. Despite the edited campaign rally scream pushed by TV networks afraid of his unprecedented Internet fundraising (leaving TV behind), he's increased his political influence, and that of the Internet. Where are you?
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make install -not war
Documentary:
AKA: Docu
A non-fiction narrative without actors. Typically a documentary is a journalistic record of an event, person, or place. See also: cinema verité.
Genre Browser: Documentary
No one has discredited Moore's statements, or even argued coherently with them. His political opponents depicted so disparagingly in his film could sue him for libel, but have no grounds.
And for good measure:
" bald faced liar"
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make install -not war
Typical of Moore's detractors, who dislike what he says yet cannot argue articulatly and must resort to the most trivial and banal of semantic attacks. Like the pathetic meatbags who whined about the Charlton Heston speeches being used "out of context" in Bowling for Columbine or the precise timeline of events in Roger and Me. I'm all for accuracy, too, but if you're going to use these semantic quibblings to dismiss entire arguments and points of view out of hand, then you're a cock.
The right loves to trash Moore for this idiotic bullshit, but notice how they never argue the real issues. You think he sucks, fine, then argue about what he's saying.
I saw the bit Moore did with Bill O'Reilly where O'Reilly baited him into that same semantic bullshit about whether or not Bush "lied" about WMDs. There's no shortage of solid reportage about how and why the WMD argument came into being, and I just saw the spinsanity.com guy on the Daily Show talking about how brilliant the Bush administration is about never letting themselves being cornered into an actual lie. As far as I know, it's not possible to trap the Bushies into a rock-solid semantically-accurate lie about WMDs, but take the time to read and it's painfully obvious what they were doing. It may be more accurate to call it deceptive, but I think wasting time debating the finer points and what-ifs of a "lie" detracts from what should be the real debate: did the administration "cook the books" (you know, in the Halliburton/Enron sense) in their case for war, and if so, was that appropriate?
Anyway, tell you what - we'll stop calling Moore a documentarian on the day that you stop calling Fox News "news."
And as far as your A) is concerned, Moore has an extensive bibliography on his website where you can check his references for yourself, and B) I'll tell you with a straight face that I don't see "fictional matter" in Moore's films, and if you'd care to point to specific examples of substantive fictional content, I'd like to see it. And by "substantive," I don't mean stupid shit like, "Moore made it seem like it was the South Park guys who made that animated short, when really it wasn't."
First, you're protesting the outcome of an election ... bad start. Generally even semi-democratic processes are better than coups.
No, you're protesting the outcome of a stolen election. You would admit that anyone protesting the outcome of Saddam Hussein's last 99% vote in the election would probably be justified, right?
As for refusing to work, this may be doable in some areas, but for a great portion of the populace that relies on public services for water and power, the government is in a water-monopoly position (rebellions lasting 3 days tops are easy to deal with)
That's something I hadn't thought of, however, most of the people working at water treatment centers and public works are citizens like the rest of us. The main point though is that all the government would have to do is seize water treatment plants and public utilities and they could pretty much control the citizenry for a temporary or long-term amount of time.
The thing is, once all of these events happen:
1. Citizenry protest a corrupt and non-democratic election by work-stoppage (no taxation without representation).
2. Government dispatches the military to seize public utilities in order to extort work out of the citizenry in exchange for water and food.
3. Citizenry realizes that the government is totally fucking them over and they are not free.
Once all of these things happen, the government will be overthrown, because people will realize how corrupt they are and I'm sorry, but there is no way that our small military can stand against 280 million citizens, armed or unarmed. Besides, don't you think that most of the military are normal people too with families and relatives that are civilians, and wouldn't stand for that shit?
I'm not saying it has to come to that, but trust me, the government would lose more than it would ever gain by trying to force all of the citizens to work at the barrel of a gun, or by extorting work from them by witholding water.
My question for you is this: What type of penalties could someone expect to face for "inciting" this type of action? Life imprisonment? Public hanging? I'm talking about the US here.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon