Slashdot Mirror
US House Subcommittee Votes To Kill Net Neutrality
angry tapir writes "A US House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the US Federal Communications Commission's recently adopted net neutrality rules. The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's rules."
Walden added. "These regulations will cost jobs," he said.
I know, this is the standard-issue republican response to anything they don't like, but really could we have an explanation this time? Exactly how would net neutrality kill jobs?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
His point was not that they have different party names, but that their policies are all but indistinguishable. Which is how it looks to me, too.
As a New Zealander, I have to say that the Democrats are more right wing than our current ruling right wing party. You have nothing as left as our left wing Labour party, who are not especially leftist, by NZ or world standards. I'm not sure I that most Americans appreciate just how right wing, conservative, pretty, ill-educated, reactionary, selfish, jingoistic, partisan, anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-reason US politics appears from the external point of view. I look to politics in the UK, Australia, France, Germany. I understand what's going on there, it looks similar to what's going on here. I look at US politics and I'm thinking "What the.,..."
I really don't understand how a country that purports to be a democracy has allowed its political discourse to be so railroaded into one tiny spectrum of ideas. You have two parties which are largely indistinguishable. You change the name of the party in charge, but the ideas don't change. You guys really need to ditch first past the post elections - most of the rest of the world has already figured this out.
Actually it would make for a statement that is accurate. His entire point is that American politicians and rhetoric are shifted far to the right relative to much of the western world overall.
But he didn't say that. He made an absolute statement. Further, I find that a lot of statements about left versus right seem to be based on feeling rather than fact and in near complete ignorance of the tribulations and constraints that the politician faced. For example, someone might claim Obama is right wing because he triangulated to catch the center or didn't try to implement a single payer health care system. They didn't ask what a left wing politician, who wasn't a total waste of oxygen, would look like in context. Answer is that they probably wouldn't do anything differently.
My view is that Obama would be a very left wing politician in an European country. But he's not in such a country so he can't act that way and get elected.
As I see it, back in the 17th through 19th centuries, immigration to North America generated an ideological split that has lasted to this day between the US, my home country and Europe. Partly, it was that the more adventurous and criminal-minded ended up in the US and partly that the revolution that formed the US pretty much worked right the first time aside from notable, but temporary problems. We had the early failure of the Articles of Confederacy which was resolved within a decade with the current federation. And there was the conflict over slavery and North/South economic competition which ended with the "Late Unpleasantness". Since the end of the US Civil War, the US has been remarkably unified with a flexible society and democracy unlike those in most other countries. We didn't have to go through half a dozen republics.
So it is with some bemusement that I consider the statements of many Europeans who might have a culture going back millennia, but a government going back at best half a century, perhaps even a mere 20 years in the case of the Eastern Bloc countries. So where does this great political wisdom come from?
Wouldn't a European roll their eyes if am American were to boast about the 150 year old outhouse that his town has? How then are US citizens to take the similarly provincial claims of people from Europe who boast of their governments (particularly such things as services and cost of governance) given the extreme youthfulness of most of the governments in question? Sure, if you're from Switzerland or England, you can back that boast with some of the oldest governments in the world. But France? Germany? Italy? Spain? Greece? etc. There are a lot of braggarts who back young, untested governments.