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Ron Paul's New Primary Goal Is "Internet Freedom"
Charliemopps writes "Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom. From the article: 'Kentucky senator Rand and his father Ron Paul, who has not yet formally conceded the Republican presidential nomination, will throw their weight behind a new online manifesto set to be released today by the Paul-founded Campaign for Liberty. The new push, Paul aides say, will in some ways displace what has been their movement's long-running top priority, shutting down the Federal Reserve Bank. The move is an attempt to stake a libertarian claim to a central public issue of the next decade, and to move from the esoteric terrain of high finance to the everyday world of cable modems and Facebook.' This seems like welcome news to me. Let's see if they can get more traction here than they did with the Fed."
Ron and Rand Paul are shifting the central focus of their family's libertarian crusade to a new cause: Internet Freedom.
Depends what you mean by freedom. According to this Ars Technica Article, he means the freedom of corporations to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say on the Internet.
This seems like welcome news to me.
I'd say that depends pretty heavily on whether you want citizens to be free to speak, or network providers to be free to generate revenue by restricting speech.
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He was reelected 11 times, often by overwhelming margins. So it seems his constituents disagree with you.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Because in an era of unchecked, unlimited federal power, an equally extreme counterpoint is not only refreshing, but necessary. Sure, it's better to take the middle ground. You only end up at the middle when both sides are equidistant from it. If you start in the middle, you'll only end up skewed to one side, just less so than if everyone was at an extreme. Which is what we've been seeing these days.
There are, of course, many different axes, and just because one is at one extreme on one axis does not imply that person is the same degree of extreme on any of the others.
I'm not a libertarian, but I do recognize that they have a place in this government.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Uh... dude, have you actually READ the proposed "net neutrality" rules?
Hint: They have nothing to do with what you and I mean by "net neutrality." They're just a Government power-grab, and nothing else. THAT is what Dr. Paul opposes.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Right, in the same state that elected W and Perry for Governor.
Obama's executive record features some of the most and largest legislation ever passed by any president.
It apparently escaped your notice that it's not the prerogative of the president to pass legislation. That's OK, he doesn't seem to know it either, what with him deciding that he has the power to imprison or kill people on nothing but his own say-so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The US elected W as their president. So I would say that Texas is good at churning out politicians that have a chance at the federal level.
Its not what it is, its something else.
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
So every founder of this country that favored a weak central federal government was just trying to hide some "immoral motive", and wasn't thinking about how we'd just come out of a war with a central federal government system that had repressed pretty much whatever it wanted even though it was on the other side of an ocean from us?
Or is the concept that the best government is the one closest and most responsive to the citizens that have granted it the right to exist somehow an "immoral motive"?
My main beef with Obama is that he claims to be everything he is not.
The biggest whopper is that he claimed to want transparent government. That apparently didn't matter when he unilaterally ratified ACTA without taking it through the senate (as is normal for any treaty) and without anybody but himself even being able to read it (granted there were leaks, we shouldn't depend upon leaks from a supposedly transparent government) He just signed our digital freedoms away without asking anybody.
Whats pathetic is how he happily parades around hollywood with the celebrities, and the fans of celebrities eat it up. Meanwhile they don't even realize that the celebrities themselves lobbied hard for him to take these freedoms away from us.
http://www.ustr.gov/webfm_send/1862
Among a bunch of other supporters:
http://www.ustr.gov/acta/
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You'll notice they did away with that an adopted the constitution.
I don't know how you call it "doing away with" the concept of a weak federal government when they enacted a constitution based on that concept, and which explicitely said at the end "anything not taken by the feds in this constitution is left to the states and the people."
And, since "marriage" doesn't appear in the US Constitution, it's one of those things that are, by default, left to the states to deal with. Maybe it's some ICC-based issue? Selling wives across a state line would be hindered if different states had different laws about marriage?
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
Speaking as a Californian who doesn't like the DEA harassing sick people who need marijuana, I'm going to say fuck you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If by "failure" you mean refusing to change his beliefs no matter how many checks get waved at him? well then i guess you'd call him a failure.
Sadly having principles in such a corrupted system will get you a record no different than his, because he won't "sweeten the pot" to get his way, pile on the pork or "play ball" which is why every damned bill that gets passed has so much shit added its not even funny anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Seems to me, Obama is still running the "I'm not GWB" campaign. He sure isn't running proud of his accomplishments for the last 3.5 years. Problem is, he isn't the great HOPE and CHANGE people were expecting. Just more of the same, only worse. Problem is, Romney isn't much better. But then again, I'm a (L) so ... the same old song and dance doesn't affect me much. More selling us to the highest bidder, and security for liberty exchange we always get using the same scare tactics.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same. The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
If you're going to take that line of thought, then "marriage" in that sense should be automatic between any couple who have children together, and excluded from anyone who doesn't yet have children. If marriage is to be about childrearing, then there should be (legally) no such thing as a childless marriage or a child out of wedlock. If you have a kid, you're "married"; if not, you're not. No contesting it.
Of course, there are other things involved in marriage besides the rights and responsibilities of children. Mutual rights in each others' property and lives (e.g. medical decisions in case of incapacitation). I can see a reason why people who aren't romantically or sexually involved at all might want to do something like that. Say you have two very straight guys who have no intention of ever settling down with one woman but plan to play the field their entire lives; but they are very close friends, have been housemates for years, etc, and want to buy a house together, file joint taxes on their mutual incomes and expenses, and have the other guy watch out for them if anything horrible should ever happen to them. Neither has any sexual or romantic interest in the other, and they each plan on having a different girl over every night, in their separate rooms, for the rest of their lives.
Why shouldn't they be able to make such financial and legal arrangements so resembling what we now call marriage? We don't have to call that marriage, call it a kind of incorporation, partnership, or union... a civil one, you might say. And let men and women in love with each other planning to raise a family get that exact same thing, and call it the exact same thing. And if those two guys want to make that arrangement, and are also having sex with each other, what difference does that make? What if more than two people want to live together and pool their lives and finances together -- whether or not any of them are having sex with each other -- what's wrong with letting them? And the slippery slope stops there, because children, dead people, goats, and furniture can't enter into contracts at all, and so there's no worry about anybody "marrying" any of those things if we replace marriage with a generic civil contract.
And then there's the social ceremony. This is legally meaningless, and should be the thing that gets the term "marriage". Let your favorite church, temple, mosque, coven, social club, or renaissance faire guild decide who they want to give what ceremony and recognize what title to, and let the law not give a shit about any of that. "Marriage" should be legally meaningless. Civil unions for everyone!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved. Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I.e., Obama has added more entitlements without addressing the question of cost control in any meaningful way. In different words, the young are getting shafted even more than they already are by the current system.
The change in attitudes is due to large numbers of people engaging in grass-roots advocacy for years and years. Obama ("my views are evolving") opportunistically took advantage of this change when it seemed politically prudent.
In different words, taxpayers are subsidizing people who bought homes that were too big and expensive for them.
Targeted killings, unlawful detentions, kill lists: Obama was supposed to end all this and he has failed to do so.
You are right, things are not the same: under Obama, crony capitalism, race baiting, pork, and politically motivated killings have reached new lows. With his policies, Obama is targeting a carefully selected portfolio of voters in order to get reelected, regardless of the long term consequences.
24.4% of eligible voters voted for W. 24.7% of eligible voters voted for Gore. 49% of eligible voters did not bother show up at the polls. Irrespective of your political leanings, it's more true to say that a quarter of you are idiots and half of you are dangerously apathetic.
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You mean like the whole Ayn Rand fanaticism, the racist newsletters, and the anti-choice and anti-women crap?
I love how everyone fawns over Ron Paul for one issue and ignores all the other batcrap crazy stuff that he does.
I can't tell if I get more disappointed by seeing tired parrot arguments like these or seeing tired parrot arguments like these get modded insightful. Ron Paul could provide free medical care to a black family, declare his hero to be Martin Luther King, and expose the racism in the drug war and uninformed people would still call him racist because of some implications in newsletters he didn't write.
He actually did those three things.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I think you're dead-on about Romney. He's super rich. He has no idea what problems average Americans struggle with. He's tried his hand at the financial market, he's been a governor, so what now? A bored rich guy's gotta find a hobby. Why not be President? Ever notice how uncomfortable he looks when he has to hang around "normal" people? He has no clue how to relate to them. He doesn't understand why he has to do all this silly song-and-dance just to get a job he wants.
I've never gotten the impression he wants to be President because he truly cares about this country and its people. For all McCain's faults, I never doubted his motives--he clearly cares about this country, even if his actual policy ideas are no good. Romney just comes off as bored and aloof. Being President is just something for him to do, not something he's truly energized about or something he brings real policy ideas to.
He seems intent on spending his whole campaign attacking Obama rather than putting forth his own ideas. He has no vision.
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