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Democracy Player Is Dead, Long Live Miro
MrSpin writes "Democracy Player has relaunched today as Miro. Developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro aims to make online video "as easy as watching TV", while at the same time ensuring that the new medium remains accessible to everyone, through its support for open standards. The open-source application combines a media player and library, content guide, video search engine, as well as podcast and BitTorrent clients. But why the name change? According to last100, who have published a full review and guide to Miro: "When Democracy Player launched back in February 2006, the feedback received was that the name evoked different, yet equally negative responses. For many Americans it conjured up an image of yet another left wing media project, and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. In contrast, the new name is purposely abstract.""
Is there any reason to use Miro rather than VLC or BS Player? These seem to handle everything I've encountered.
Creepy that so many people associate "Democracy" with bad things. Actually scares me...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
... and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. I hope, for the sake of everything that I believe in, this is a false statement. It's sad that I have to go on living knowing that while I was alive a man was elected president of my country (twice!) & in that time, he was able to put a foul taste in your mouth upon saying "democracy."I guess we can still say that the core ideas of democracy are good, that only awful men with awful goals and intentions used democracy to do wrong. I guess today Marxism sounds like an idea with potential though historically men like Joseph Stalin & Mao Zedong have given it a social stigma that the terrible things they did under its name are inherent and must occur when the idea is put into practice.
I hope the rest of the world is not convinced that democracy comes hand in hand with the actions of the United States of America today. Hopefully other countries will become model democracies for the rest of the world.
I hope the theory of democracy is resilient enough to withstand the current administration and that it survives as a concept that can be taught to children as the model of the most fair form of government. I also hope that the rest of the world aspires to become democratic--as has been the popular progression for quite sometime. Ironically, we are tarnishing the image of a system that we hope the Iraqi people to embrace--quite possibly the reason that effort fails.
The history books will indeed be interesting to read when I am a withered old man.
I like this quote from Winston Churchill that explains while democracy is not perfect, it is the best we've got: Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
My work here is dung.
I wouldn't call the name abstract, as miro is Spanish for "I watch." Seems perfectly suitable to me.
If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
So now Bush has tarnished Democracy as badly as Stalin tarnished socialism.
Particularly sad, since neither one practiced either doctrine.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Not 'bizarre' at all. Actually I and everyone I know expected exactly those reactions, and were therefore puzzled by the name choice of 'Democracy Player'. It was just a half-step better then 'Freedom Player' (to make the comparison to 'Freedom Fries' even clearer, not that there is any need).
The project itself is a nice idea. Hopefully the misguided name choice didn't set it back too much.
has cleared their trademark with Joan Miro's estate?
If not, queue intellectual property lawsuits in 5..4..3..
It's happened before.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
So how about we focus instead on getting some free resources for the production of decent content? Right now, there is a VERY sharp divide between professional studio productions (that are heavily DRM'ed and can only be accessed by paying $ at sites like iTunes) and crappy home videos/video podcasts that look like they're made in a junior high AV room.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mist is slang for manure or sh*t. But, it is often used for a device that does not work like the English phrase "what a piece of sh*t"
Everytime you hear crap about "saving our democracy" you ought to cringe. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing. You can have a monarchy and have a free society. You can have a democracy or representative democracy and have a society that is all but a police state. The abuse most commonly occurs when leftists criticize actions by regimes like the Bush Administration.
Truth is, America was a lot freer when we weren't even a democracy in name. When our founders created our country, only 1/3 of the federal body politic was directly elected. We had the lowest taxes, fewest regulations, our federal civil service was actually serving, rather than ruling, the people and federal police powers were few and far between. Today, well, speaks for itself.
I'm glad they changed the name. Their project has a lot more to do with freedom than democracy.
In Japanese, "miro" (or the closest phonetic equivalent) is the imperative form of "look", so it works there too.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
The problem is, people confuse communism with dictatorship and/or totalitarianism when really, they are mutually exclusive.
There has never been any modern communist government in the past few hundred years.
A real communist country WOULD BE a democracy; in fact if you take democracy to it's logical course (where everyone has a say) you inevitably end up with a communist state.
A true communist country would have
- A democratically elected government with 100% transparency
- 100% nationalized economy where all work equally and are compensated proportionally to their capabilities
- Total freedom of expression and speech
You can't have any of these things without the others. The problem with reaching this goal, which all totalitarianist status that started out with the end goal of communism (Cuba, China, The USSR, North Korea) have encountered, is it is impossible to nationalize the enconomy while having a democratic government at the same time, because it is a violent process by necessity. So the government needs to have absolute power for awhile, so they can take over industries for the good of the people.
The way it is supposed to work is the government should weild absolute power for a period of time ONLY - say a few years - then totally revoke it and give it back to the people. The problem is once the government gets this power they don't give it up easily - in fact it usually gets worse.
This is why transitioning to true communism is so difficult - in fact it has never yet been archived. Hopefully someday we can all as a society put aside our differences and make it work for the good of the world.
There's no such thing as an "inappropriate" comparison. The results of the process of comparing two things reveals the level of resemblance between them - which might be zero, of course, but that's still a comparison. Granted, either you compare things fairly or you don't. The oft-repeated mantra "you can't compare Bush to Hitler" is bullshit, though - I can compare fish to the Dirac Sea if I want to.
If you studied predator to prey relationships, you'd probably recognize that two wolves and a sheep scenario as non-sustainable in any case. You probably need a wolf to sheep ratio of something like 1 : 10 or 1:20. If what we're talking about is one wolf and ten sheep voting on what's for dinner, the wolf is SOL unless he learns to eat grass.
So this explanation of why the republic subtype of democracy works better than the direct democracy subtype doesn't work.
There are two reasons that do explain the value of a democratic republic. The first is the impracticality of deciding on everything by a direct vote. The second is that we each play different roles on different issues: we aren't always the sheep or always the wolf in every single question. If we were always in the sheep class, our rational interest would say throw wolves to the, er.. wolves.
But the reality is that we're all minorities. Maybe it's the people we like to sleep with. Maybe its the fact we like to collect guns. Or look at dirty pictures. Or have heretical ideas. Pure majoritarianism means everybody sooner or later feels the hand of tyranny.
Our democratic republic works because of a rough and approximate egalitarianism, in which we can see ourselves as belonging to the wolf class or the sheep class. That was the genius of FDR, who was considered a class traitor by many. He realized that a society which was polarized into wolves and sheep had to end up in one kind of tyranny or another, most likely something like what happened in the Soviet Union: a tyranny of a small set of erstwhile sheep. A "social democracy" is not necessarily one of radical egalitarianism, it is one in which no person is for practical purposes relegated to perpetual sheep status.
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I haven't used DP since it originaly started (and I have to say it didn't sound either right- or left-wing. to me it was just plain stupid). Does the linux version stil suck? It was pretty unusable back then.
hate to burst bubbles, but to the miss informed the U.S. is NOT a democracy. :
have you all forgotten your history lessons.
I looked it up to confirm it with the world fact book which list us as
Constitution-based federal republic; strong democratic tradition.
even on wiki.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stated
as you can see we are a republic, the democracy we practice as a matter
of tradition is so we don't get stuck with a king or dictator for life(only 8
years max). any country can have a bad leader we just don't get stuck with one for too long.
democracy in software is good. because the software can become the sum of a collective knowledge.
democracy's in in politics are usually very week, because it becomes the sum collective bullshit.
(note: the bigger it is the less stuff gets done)
hence the reason why we like to spread it to other countries.
Which is why other countrys see us as the democracy spreaders. and it gives them a big distaste.
a thing to think about it that while that iraq is a developing democracy
and Afghanistan is a islamic republic.
Afghanistan had a leader immediately(president Hamid Karzai, i always seem to remember that kwel hat he wears),
and is almost self sufficient in its public works/schools/security (though it'll be a while before we totally leave there,
example: still in south korea) there major current problem is the drugs because its there primary cash crop,
which they are trying to train farmers to switch to alternative crops(this will be a while). (note: that not every one wants drugs)
Iraq on the other hand is trying to develop a democracy, Has anything improved????
Do you know who is there leader? What is there cash crop... OIL? (last i checked every one has fought over that since WWI)
Another thing to think about.....
how many senators can you name? i think i can name about 20
any major changing policy's come from it? I can think of several.
how many members of the house can you name? i think i know 2
any major changing policy's come from it? I know there are some things(i just cant think of any)
Which one is based members based on population again?
Which one is more effective?
The house is there as a check and balance for the senate.
BTW, can you name one Communist country that wasn't totalitarian? You said they're 'mutually exclusive' however I have yet to see an instance where a Communist country was NOT totalitarian.
That is my whole point. Communism is the antithesis of capitalism, which are both economic ideologies, not political ones. Totalitarianism is the antithesis of democracy, which are political ideologies, not economic ones. But the general public is always grouping these things together when really they have nothing to do with each other than the fact that up to this point all communist societies have turned out to be totalitarian.
It is perfectly possible for a communist socienty to exist democratically if all residents endorse it. The problem lies in the transition because you have all these wealthy and/or powerful individuals who don't want to give up that power for the benefit of everyone else.
I should say so. If the State came along and said I had to operate an engine lathe because the State needed it thus, what do you think I would do?
This is a straw-man argument because in a true democratic communist society YOU would elect the people who run the state and local governments, so in effect it would be YOU who decide you want to operate the lathe.
There has never been any modern communist government in the past few hundred years.
A real communist country WOULD BE a democracy; in fact if you take democracy to it's logical course (where everyone has a say) you inevitably end up with a communist state. It doesn't matter what "real" communism is. Every attempt at Communism has turned into vicious totalitarianism. "Real" Communism is an abstraction. The fact is, there is something about either the Communist system, or the people who are attracted to Communism, that makes any real world attempt at "real" Communism impossible.
It would be kind of like I started a philosophy called "Chocolatism" that said "If you eat nothing but chocolate, you will live forever"... Then, when people ate nothing but chocolate and inevitably died, I said "That isn't real Chocolatism... In real Chocolatism people live forever".
Maybe you should check out Switzerland's government more carefully, because that country has a bicameral parliament. So that counts as a representative democracy. Direct democracy in the Swiss system mainly consists of the power of a popular veto by simple majority vote, which is a pretty good idea, IMO. There are a number of other interesting and unique features to the Swiss system, but it is certainly not a direct democracy.
It may well be nonsense to say that direct democracy is awkward for large groups, but you still don't have an example of a modern state that operates that way.
By way of example, I live in New England, where many "minor civil divisions" still have old fashioned government by town meeting. I've seen this process fall into disuse as towns grow into the exurbs of the vast eastern seaboard conurbation that used to terminate in Boston, but now stretches all the way to Nashua. Gradually the town meeting/moderator system is replaced by a system of "town meeting representatives" with a hired city manager. Eventually even that becomes impossibly awkward and is replaced by a compact municipal assembly/mayoral system.
If you can't vote on the school budget for a large town using direct democracy, try voting on something like the Defense Authorization Act by plebiscite... Although a popular line item veto along the Swiss line would be an interesting feature.
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According to the story, the media player had to be renamed because the word "democracy" now has negative political connotations.
The media player itself is the product of a non-profit which has a political, although non-partisan mission: "to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture."
So it seems to me that this story is very much about the issue of power in a democratic society. Naturally, whenever this comes up, the people who like to make a distinction between a "republic" and a "democracy" also appear -- and they are in fact on topic here. To them "democracy" means "direct democracy" which in turn has negative implications of mob rule. Bringing this full circle, this is precisely the complaint of the mainstream media about YouTube and the blogosphere. These remove the media's cultural gatekeepers, creating an immense crush of material unfiltered for any property, whether it is taste, factual accuracy, or pleasing orthodoxy.
This trend is one that the program is intended by its sponsoring organization to accelerate. The trend can be called with equal truth the democratization of media, or the undermining of media standards.
So, on the whole, a discussion of power, democracy and egalitarianism is equally if not more on topic in this than a discussion of the player's technical and artistic merits (e.g. whether the player's skin sucks, neat features in play list management etc.).
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They may not be starving, I agree, but many do not have vehicles. Here in Nashville, we do have MTA (Metro Transit Authority), but the schedules make it difficult to get to work and get back home. I know I had a job once about 15 minutes away by car. I could take a bus there, if I left three hours early, but I couldn't get back home. None of my co-workers could give me a lift, and I couldn't find anyone to carpool with. The poor here DO have a lot more money than people elsewhere in the world, but consider the cost of living is also much, much higher.
They make just enough money to get to work every day. I'm not kidding you. The cost of food, clothing, shelter, and transportation JUST to get back to work is dead even with that they're paid, and sometimes even then, it's not enough. If the "richer people" decided to take a little pay cut, these working poor (which is probably most poor people) could have a much higher standard of living.
No! Absolutely wrong! Imagine if every cashier decided not to work. Retail would go out of business in a day. Just because their work is 'menial' or doesn't seem to require much skill doesn't mean it's not highly-valued. It's this sentiment that's caused "customer service" in general to take a nose dive. Do you really think someone making six bucks an hour is going to care if they made your sandwich correctly, or if they smile, or if they say "thank you come again"? They have nothing to lose here. Just as easily as there's another employee waiting to replace them, there's another company that pays shitty wages waiting to hire them. Smiling, or paying attention to detail, or anything else they can do isn't going to get them out of the poor house. The only thing that might is education, and that's not going to be available to someone who can barely afford food.
You realize that SOMEONE has to work those shitty paying jobs, right? SOMEONE is always going to be pushed into that wage bracket because there aren't enough 100k a year jobs for every American to have one. Most of them max out their credit cards because they have unexpected expenses and bills. Not flat screen TV's. An education is expensive. Even with all the programs out there to help you, it's expensive. You have to have support from somewhere in order to be able to do it. You can't work for $6 an hour, have to fully support yourself, and go to college all at the same time. Sure, there might be some rare exceptions to that, but for the majority of the "working poor" it's just not possible.
As for the kids, I agree with you there, actually. People who can't support themselves shouldn't be having kids. As for drugs, I can't say I blame a lot of people for turning to drugs. If you life sucked as much as theirs, you might, too. And once that process starts, it's vicious. What people who are addicted to drugs needs is -- wait for it -- medical care. Which you know they won't get because they have no heal insurance. Rince. Repeat.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild