Not that this change.gov website is an avenue for any decision making by the "mob." It's just PR. The real power-brokers are still those with money—those who fund the campaigns, pay the lobbyists, reward government officials with cushy jobs when they leave office and have the ability to extort favorable legislation by their ability to sabotage the economy (moving their capital to greener pastures).
Voting doesn't change anything except which corporate shills are running the political patronage system. Website forums change even less.
I may not understand your "ethics" and "cloning" technology... I'm just a caveman! But there's one thing I do know... my client deserves to be compensated for the blatant theft of his genetic intellectual property!
We have one candidate that opposed the Iraq war from the beginning...
REALLY? Which candidate is that? Because Barack Obama has repeatedly voted to fund the war in Iraq and he plans to continue it indefinitely. He plans to keep open the giant embassy (bigger than the Vatican) from which we direct our puppet regime in Baghdad. He plans to keep open over a dozen massive military bases from which we routinely bomb innocent civilians. He plans to continue using lawless mercenaries like Blackwater. And the handful of troops he has proposed to maybe withdraw someday if the generals say it's ok? He wants to send them to Afghanistan—because both he and McCain agree on escalating that war.
Obama has proposed increasing military spending (from the already stratospheric level of $600+ billion Congress just passed for 2009) and he wants to increase the size of the military by over 90,000 troops. Obama has repeated the same blustery, discredited lies about Iran as Bush and has stated he's willing to bomb both Iran and Pakistan. There is virtually no difference between McCain and Obama on Iraq, except that McCain is more honest: he says he wants us to remain there for 100 years. Obama is a fraud because he is deceiving millions of voters into believing he's an anti-war candidate, when he clearly is not.
Obama has no problem with war—he just doesn't like losing. His plan for Iraq is not to end the war but to continue it in another guise—in effect, a repackaging and re-branding of the war. He's not running for antiwarrior-in-chief, he's running for commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful imperial army—and that is the role he's going to fill.
The Vietnam war was ended when widespread revolt among GI's meant that the US could no longer count on the military to fight the war. Open rebellion within the ranks is what brought that 12+ year war to an end. It will take nothing less this time around. Voting for a pro-war candidate like Obama will only serve as an endorsement of more war. If you really want to cast a vote against war then you need to vote for a genuine anti-war candidate like Nader or McKinney. Voting for the Democrats only tells them they can keep betraying us and pay no political price—it's as irrational as rewarding someone for misbehaving and then expecting a positive change in their behavior.
What rubbish. I'd imagine that most Democrats are socialists who look towards the Nordic welfare states.
Since you brought up the subject of rubbish... most Democrats are corporate tools, just like the Republicans. They are loathe to advance any agenda which might hurt their masters' profits. The only progress we've ever won in the US was not because of Democrats in office, but because of independent mass movements that forced the government (regardless of which corporate party was in power) to submit to our demands. Let's not forget that for most of its existence the Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow. It wasn't until the 60's and the power of millions of organized people refusing to submit to segregation that the Democrats shifted on this issue. Then they co-opted and de-mobilized the social movements in the 70's—leading to the sorry state we're in today where people think the only choice we have is between two corporate parties, neither of which serve the public interest.
As for the original post, I think the vast majority of Slashdot readers will agree that trying to censor the Internet is an exercise in futility. The "fairness doctrine" makes more sense for more restricted and monopolized media like television—which are dominated by corporations and typically only present views that acceptable to their owners. The media deregulation of the 90's (thanks Clinton!) accelerated the consolidation of the mainstream media and the explosion of right-wing BS-based punditry that is so prominent on TV and radio.
In the 60's the Black Panther Party for Self Defense tailed cops and confronted them when they harassed citizens. It was the only way to defend their communities from rampant police brutality and criminal misconduct (as is the only way to deal with bullies). Needless to say, the cops did not like it. I suspect they would not react favorably if they caught one planting GPS devices on their cars (they certainly don't like it when people review them).
The police and FBI have a long, sordid history of intimidation, harassment and disruption of dissident groups and activists (up to and including murder). Any state surveillance of people should require a warrant—both to provide some oversight (which isn't much, considering the way some courts like to rubber-stamp these requests) and make a record of the state's activities against its own citizens.
This value comes from the improvement of the efficiency it causes.
Efficient? Capitalism? Have you been spending your profits on ganja?
Look at the health insurance system in the US. Hundreds of different insurers, all with their own little bureaucracies and red-tape (ironically designed not to provide care, but to DENY it). Each has their own marketing departments and collection of overpaid executives. Every clinic and hospital in the US has to navigate this maze of bureaucracies in order to get paid, which wastes countless hours and dollars. Medicare spends 7% of its budget on overhead, whereas private insurance companies spend 15-30%. Collectively the people of the US spend as much on health care as a single-payer system would cost, and yet we have 50 million uninsured people and 18,000 die premature deaths every year due to lack of coverage. A marvel of efficiency at getting the capitalists paid, but not at healing people.
Or consider the millions of out of work people in the US. It's not that there isn't any work to be done--there's plenty of stuff that needs working on: fixing our crumbling national infrastructure, repairing levies, building mass transit systems, schools, hospitals... the list goes on. Yet none of that happens because it wouldn't be profitable for the capitalists who have all the money. Efficient at making a handful of parasites rich, but not efficient at providing necessary public services.
What about the 6 million children who die of hunger and treatable illness worldwide each and every year? UNICEF estimates it would cost $80 billion annually to feed them all--a figure that is a fifth of the US's annual military budget (and not including supplemental budgets for our wars or interest payments on those debts). The government would rather pay companies to not grow food or destroy their surpluses than to feed the hungry.
Or consider the billions of people who will never get a chance at a decent education. There could be Einsteins, Bachs and geniuses all over the world who will never be allowed to achieve their potential because capitalists are loathe to spend money on educating people any more than is required for them to work in their factories and offices.
So much human potential is squandered and so much misery is caused all in the name of profit and "efficiency." The only thing capitalism is efficient at is ruining lives and generating profits for those parasites at the top who perform no labor but reap the rewards of others' labor. Thanks, but no thanks.
No? The freedom of capital to do as its owners wish of necessity requires a reduction in everyone else's freedoms. If a capitalist wants freedom from labor unions--the corollary is that workers lose the freedom to form labor unions, the most basic way in which workers can fight back against attacks on their standard of living. If a capitalist wants freedom from environmental regulation, it necessarily means that workers who live in areas polluted by the capitalist will suffer more (a reduction in the freedom to live a healthy life). Capitalists are a tiny minority who profit from others' labor and contribute nothing to society. They are already the most free people on the planet, with power and privileges that the vast majority of us will never see. Increasing their freedoms means a reduction in workers' freedoms. So yes, it is a necessity to reduce the freedom of capitalists to run roughshod over the rest of society in pursuit of their own narrow, selfish aims in order to increase freedom for workers--the vast majority of people on this planet.
If you don't believe that, then either you are a millionaire or you have OD'd on the capitalist Koolaid they feed kids in school.
Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor. They reap the rewards of others' labor. Without workers capitalism could not exist, because the entire system is based on the exploitation of labor. Capitalists are the very definition of parasites.
Under capitalism production is socialized--we work together to produce commodities. However, the product of our labor is appropriated by private individuals and sold for their profit. Social production with private appropriation is organized theft. The capitalists need us to create their profits, but we don't need them. We can re-organize society so that everyone benefits, not just a handful of tiny parasites who think they "own" everything.
PS: in anticipation of others' diatribes, the USSR, China and Cuba are not and never were socialist. They were/are capitalist--because they employ the capitalist mode of production (exploitation of workers, accumulation of capital for accumulation's sake). Only in their systems there's one big capitalist: the state. These regimes merely use the language of socialism to lull workers into accepting the status quo--much as capitalists in the US and Western nations talk about "democracy" to delude their workers into thinking they're free. It's much easier to control people with these illusions in place.
PPS: Robert Owen was a utopian socialist who thought he could dream up a new society and bestow it upon the poor, hapless workers. Marx and Engels were scientific socialists, who discovered how capitalism works, what its internal contradictions are and how the working class (capitalism's essential product, without which it cannot exist) holds the key to overturning it and ending class society forever. Utopian and scientific socialism have little to do with each other.
The far left and the far right both have exactly the same goal: To tell others how to live their lives. They only way they differ is in how they think people's lives should be lived.
This is hardly a case of "the far left" telling people how to live their lives--just silly bureaucrats who don't know any better.
The far left (ie: socialists) are actually about increasing freedom and democracy—although the only way to achieve that is to reduce the freedoms of the capitalists (who use their wealth and "ownership" of the means of production to control society in their narrow, short-sighted and selfish interests).
The Christian right (or any fundamentalist religious sect—be it Zionist, Islamic or whatever else there is) wants to reduce everyone's freedoms based on their religious dogma. The far right (ie: libertarians) wants to reduce restrictions on capital. When there are fewer restrictions on the rich and how they are allowed to push the rest of us around with their wealth, power and privilege, then it means the rest of us have less freedom. Libertarians want freedom from public services, freedom from labor unions, freedom from environmental regulation, freedom from anything that might reduce their profits and help those who create their profits.
Do I have any cold hard facts to back up my assertions? No. But I posit that a big factor is cost. We're also entering a recession. Debate that as you wish--but unemployment is on the rise, consumer credit is maxed out, millions of homes are being foreclosed in the US, inflation on essential things like food and energy is on the rise and the dollar is swirling the toilet bowl. Quibble over semantics and nomenclature all you like, but the fact is that consumers are hard-pressed to spend money on luxuries like $300+ players and $30 blu-ray discs--even if the picture quality is superior.
Wow. So much ignorance and so little time to address it all. I'll hit the highlights.
...let's not forget those nations had already turned themselves into a basket case without Western involvement.
Read your history. No western involvement? These nations were turned into "basket cases" thanks to colonization and brutal exploitation by western powers. They left behind invented nations with borders carved up by their former colonizers. Thanks to divide-and-conquer tactics used by their colonial rulers, it left many such nations with bitterly feuding peoples (Rwanda, anyone?).
...government has no incentive to run the organisation efficiently...
And capitalist enterprises are efficient? Let's take a look at the US healthcare "system." Nearly 50 million people are without coverage. Capitalist logic dictates that they don't deserve health care because they are too poor to afford it, or it's too expensive to cover them--despite the supposedly monumental efficiency of capitalist enterprise. In the US we collectively spend as much on healthcare as it would cost to cover everyone under a single-payer system. Our Medicare system (for the elderly and infirm) is far more efficient. Only 7% of their budget goes to overhead, the rest goes to pay for patient care. In the private sector the figure is 15-30%--because every single insurance company replicates their own wasteful bureaucracy whose primary purpose is to deny care. Plus there's the money wasted on advertising, lobbying and excessive executive pay.
If Haiti can't grow rice profitably, then they should stop growing rice.
This exemplifies the kind of muddled thinking that is so common among capitalists and libertarians, and which is responsible for so much human misery. For the most part, the people of Haiti who are currently starving probably couldn't give a rat's ass about profitably growing rice. They used to grow rice to FEED themselves. Thanks to lowering of trade barriers and the introduction of subsidized rice from the US (funny how we "advanced" nations think "free" trade is good for the developing nations, yet we are loathe to end our massive crop subsidies) cheap foreign rice undercut the market within Haiti, driving small farmers out of business. Now with prices on the rise no one can afford the foreign rice and there's not enough grown domestically to feed people. This is a man-made social catastrophe, all thanks to western ideas about "free" trade which benefit no one except the wealthy shareholders of big-agribusiness and banks.
...Stalin was no capitalist...
The former USSR had a system known as "state capitalism." The primary feature of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth for accumulation's sake. In our western "democracies" we have lots of small capitalists competing with each other and globally with foreign capitalists. In the USSR there was one capitalist: the state bureaucracy. Workers were exploited, and the surplus value extracted from them by the state was re-invested to build up industry and compete with the west militarily and economically. The USSR was socialist/communist in name only--just as the US is a democracy in name only.
The Russian Revolution brought no gains at all...
A brief list of the gains workers won by overthrowing their capitalist masters: women won the right to vote--a first among western nations. Collective laundry, child care and kitchen facilities were established to relieve women of the burden of housework and enable them to more fully participate in politics and the workplace. Old Russia's colonies and annexed populations were granted the right to self-determination and succession. There's a long list of rights and progressive reforms won by the workers in their revolution.
Western economic policies (structural adjustment policies, privatization, lowering of trade barriers and such) are to blame for the vast, deep poverty that grips the rest of the globe. Half of humanity lives in slums and survives on less than $2 a day. That is because of capitalism, not in spite of it. Western corporations extract billions of dollars in wealth from these impoverished nations--and yet that is somehow supposed to help them?
Tariffs are useful to protect developing nations' fragile, burgeoning industries and protect them from US bullies. I notice you don't complain about the vast subsidies and corporate welfare our government hands out. These artificially lower prices and enable US companies to wreak havoc on the economies of developing nations. This is why Haiti, a land that once produced all of its rice, is now starving: because local rice farmers have been run out of business and no one can afford the imported rice any longer. It's because of cheap, subsidized US corn that millions of small farmers in Mexico have been driven out of business and risk life and limb immigrating to the US to find wage labor.
And we both agree about Stalin: he was a major asshole. However, his rule was a product of capitalism, not socialism. He wiped out all the gains of the Russian revolution and returned workers to bondage--cogs in a giant industrial machine whose primary purpose was to accumulate wealth for the bureaucracy and compete with the west. Stalin's policies had not a thing to do with Marxism--he merely used Marxist-sounding language to justify his rule. He was not so different from how western capitalists throw around words like "democracy" and "freedom" to justify their unjust, unequal and undemocratic rule or wars of conquest and plunder. True socialism is marked by broad, grassroots democracy: where workers decide how to run their workplaces and communities decide how to distribute the wealth they create.
I'm not sure why unions act like every person should be guaranteed a job. What universe you have to live in for things to be so certain?
I don't know about you, but I live in the richest nation on Earth (which has a government that acts like it owns the universe). We spend more than 5x on our military each year (not counting "supplemental" spending on wars, interest on loans for said wars and other related costs) than it would cost to feed every hungry person on the planet, according to UN figures. The workers of the United States are some of the most productive in the world and we collectively create vast riches--for a tiny minority of people at the top who "own" the factories and businesses from which this wealth is extracted. This is nothing more than organized theft.
Under a sane, rational system all workers would share in the wealth we create. When we discover new techniques that make our jobs more efficient, we would all work less--instead of under capitalism, which results in layoffs and fewer people working more. We wouldn't waste trillions on killing people--we'd spend trillions to create good jobs that serve important needs: like educating people, healing them, building efficient mass-transit and clean, renewable energy sources (all of which create more and better jobs than military spending does).
Instead we live in a world where a handful of parasites lets their own short-term, profit-oriented interests dictate policy for the rest of us. They get to force their pro-capitalist dogma onto us in schools, textbooks and via the media they own, so that people believe that the current system is the way things should be and always will be (just as the Church and nobility once taught serfs and merchants to remain in their places).
There's no reason we can't provide a job, food, clothing, shelter and health care for every single person on the planet--except that it wouldn't be profitable for the people at the top, and they are not going to give up their power and privilege without a fight.
In the United States, odds are that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. For college-age women the rate is 4 times higher. Women earn approximately $.80 to a man's $1. Most women in the US are not allowed to control their own bodies, as numerous State and Federal government regulations have been imposed on their reproductive systems and available medical procedures. The brunt of housework and child-rearing still falls primarily on women. ALL of these forms of oppression stem from misogynistic beliefs--primarily pushed by those in power, but to a certain degree they are perpetuated by ignorant fools who buy into them.
The anonymous individuals advocating rape on a message board are part of that system of oppression--which causes concrete harm to women every day in the United States. Based on the content of this "speech" there is nothing worth protecting. Combating oppression is far more important than protecting the anonymity of those who would propagate oppression.
No speech is being outlawed here. Troglodytes are still free to shout their hateful words all they want--but they can't expect to do it as anonymous cowards (to borrow from Slashdot's own term).
IF the government were to ever turn around and use a progress-setting precedent like this for regressive purposes, then we have another battle on our hands worth fighting. But to defend the anonymity of these abusive people is to uphold the "right" of bigots to persecute others anonymously.
If and when there is actually a political movement that threatens the established order, the government won't need cases like this to persecute their opponents. The FBI has a long record of intimidation (and even murder) against dissident groups. The period of McCarthyism in the 40's and 50's virtually wiped out the once-rich tradition of radicalism in this country. The ruling class will use whatever means are at its disposal to hold on to power, and they certainly won't let any laws get in their way.
I mean, how long before speaking out against a candidate or elected official automatically nets you fines or jail time?
This classic "slippery slope" argument is baseless.
Calling for the rape of two women is hateful. There is no gray area here. There's nothing sacred about this "speech" that deserves to be protected, nor do the authors deserve any protection. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression need to be rooted out of society. Allowing these hateful ideas to be propagated anonymously is harmful to society and the oppressed minorities they target.
Revealing the identities of the authors isn't going to lead to the widespread revocation of people's free speech rights. However, it might just teach some neanderthals to keep their disgusting mouths shut.
This sort of "speech" should not be tolerated anywhere. Womens' rights and their safety is far more important than the "right" for misogynists to remain anonymous. Allowing them to remain anonymous is a tacit acceptance of allowing hateful speech and the fostering of anti-women attitudes (at the school and in society as a whole). The concrete harm done to these women (and women in general) trumps the abstract "harm" to the troglodytes who posted the messages.
The cell phone companies have a huge incentive to offer competative minute plans since people tend to shop around when buying a phone.
Is that why virtually all pricing plans in the US share the same basic pricing tiers and fee structures? Is that why it's nearly impossible to find a monthly plan that costs less than $30/month? And is that why all the companies are jacking up their prices on text messages at the same time?
Ah, the glorious efficient free market. Efficient at parting you from your hard earned dollars and putting them in the pockets of the already-rich.
As observed already, the bandwidth of a text message is a tiny fraction of that used by a voice call or a download--yet the cost for that bandwidth is astronomical. Why? Because they can get away with it. Because they collude on prices--it's to the benefit of the carriers for them all to gouge us. This is a lesson cartels have learned a long time ago. If there were such a thing as a "free" market and its alleged efficiency were a reality, then the price of text messages should be virtually free. This is an area that clearly needs more government regulation in order to protect consumers.
Blaming Congressional Democrats for not getting done what they wanted is highly disingenuous, regardless if you agree with them or not.
The problem is, the Democrats don't want to do what they promised, namely ending the war in Iraq. They keep passing funding bills for the war and giving Bush more money than he has asked for. If they were really an antiwar party they could stop funding the war. The history of the Democrats proves they are just as big a war party as the Republicans. WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Clinton made more military interventions abroad than Reagan and Bush Sr. combined (not to mention he killed 1 million Iraqis with economic sanctions and committed war crimes in the "humanitarian" bombing of Kosovo). Both parties share the belief that the US government has every right to use its military to maintain its superpower status. The only complaint the Democrats have with the Republicans is not that the Iraq war is bad, but that we're losing it--and that it's a "distraction" from the "real" war in Afghanistan (which is no more justified than the one in Iraq).
The Democrats aren't the party of the people and they never have been. They are the other party of big business and imperialism. They make some progressive-sounding squawkings once and a while because they need a political base to get themselves elected--but they have never delivered any progress without a mass struggle to force them to do it. They are the party that lied us into the Vietnam war and it was under Nixon that it was ended--not because Nixon was a peace-loving hippie, but because of widespread revolt within the military, mass unrest at home and a Vietnamese independence movement that refused to lay down and die.
The problem isn't individual bad politicians, Democrat or Republican. The problem is structural. The system is organized so that the exploiters (capitalists) "earn" their money from the labor of the exploited (workers). The capitalists use their money and power over the economy to run the system in their interests. The state belongs to them. They ensure it represents their interests through open bribery (aka campaign finance and lobbying) and by rewarding players with lucrative jobs when they leave office (on the boards of top corporations, and cushy jobs at law and lobbying firms). Those who don't play along are forced out. The higher you get in office the more compromised you are, of sheer necessity.
If we miraculously elected 535 honest people to Congress and they actually started looking out for the interests of workers, then the capitalists will sabotage the economy by moving their capital overseas. A state requires an economic base in order to function. The threat of economic collapse is more than enough to bring the state to heel. This is *precisely* what happened when the "Socialists" and Francois Mitterand came to power in France in 1981. They promised all sorts of great reforms, the economy tanked, and all of a sudden Reaganism/Thatcherism never looked so good to the them. (This should also serve as a notice to those "socialists" who think you can simply vote a new economic system into being.)
The long and short of it is: don't expect to win reform by voting. It's not going to happen. If voting could change anything it would be illegal! The people in power have too much power and privilege to lose to allow genuine democracy to occur. As the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said:
The whole history of progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted.
One of the best books on science I've read in the past decade is "A People's History of Science," by Clifford D. Conner. Along the same lines as Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" (and Chris Harman's "A People's History of the World") this book explains the development of science from the standpoint of regular people. It debunks the myth that scientific advances come primarily from "great minds" and shows how much of our scientific knowledge (and the basis for advances) comes from the knowledge gained by workers--people interacting with their environment on a daily basis. Miners, midwives, sailors and others have played an invaluable role in the development of science, and while great minds have played their part, most history books give them far too much credit. My little paragraph here can hardly do the book justice, so grab a copy from the library and read it for yourself!
If you don't see the difference between his platform and mccain, you need some serious readjustment of perspective.
National Intelligence Estimate: Iran does not have a functioning nuclear weapons program.
Bush: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, we must bomb them!
McCain: What he said.
Obama: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, so let's try some sanctions first and if that fails, bomb them!
People of Iran: WTF? Is there any candidate that doesn't want kill us and justify it with another lie?
The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance. They both support using the US's military unilaterally as they see fit. Obama has said thismanytimes. If you believe that Obama isn't going to do whatever he can to maintain and extend the US's hegemony then you are the one who needs some serious readjustment.
I get the feeling that a darpa under Obama will grow and prosper.
It is possible that DARPA will grow and prosper under Obama. After all, he wants to increase military spending, increase the size of the military by up to 80,000 troops and send even more cannon fodder to Afghanistan. Possibly to Iran as well. Maybe he'll decide to increase funding for DARPA too. After all, regardless of what their PR department claims, the purpose of DARPA is to help the US military. Destroying countries and killing people is what the military does best.
Frankly, I think most people give Obama too much credit. He's a hawk and he's pro-empire. Electing him isn't going to change anything except the rhetoric used to justify the US's imperial ambitions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that this change.gov website is an avenue for any decision making by the "mob." It's just PR. The real power-brokers are still those with money—those who fund the campaigns, pay the lobbyists, reward government officials with cushy jobs when they leave office and have the ability to extort favorable legislation by their ability to sabotage the economy (moving their capital to greener pastures).
Voting doesn't change anything except which corporate shills are running the political patronage system. Website forums change even less.
I may not understand your "ethics" and "cloning" technology... I'm just a caveman! But there's one thing I do know... my client deserves to be compensated for the blatant theft of his genetic intellectual property!
REALLY? Which candidate is that? Because Barack Obama has repeatedly voted to fund the war in Iraq and he plans to continue it indefinitely. He plans to keep open the giant embassy (bigger than the Vatican) from which we direct our puppet regime in Baghdad. He plans to keep open over a dozen massive military bases from which we routinely bomb innocent civilians. He plans to continue using lawless mercenaries like Blackwater. And the handful of troops he has proposed to maybe withdraw someday if the generals say it's ok? He wants to send them to Afghanistan—because both he and McCain agree on escalating that war.
Obama has proposed increasing military spending (from the already stratospheric level of $600+ billion Congress just passed for 2009) and he wants to increase the size of the military by over 90,000 troops. Obama has repeated the same blustery, discredited lies about Iran as Bush and has stated he's willing to bomb both Iran and Pakistan. There is virtually no difference between McCain and Obama on Iraq, except that McCain is more honest: he says he wants us to remain there for 100 years. Obama is a fraud because he is deceiving millions of voters into believing he's an anti-war candidate, when he clearly is not.
Obama has no problem with war—he just doesn't like losing. His plan for Iraq is not to end the war but to continue it in another guise—in effect, a repackaging and re-branding of the war. He's not running for antiwarrior-in-chief, he's running for commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful imperial army—and that is the role he's going to fill.
The Vietnam war was ended when widespread revolt among GI's meant that the US could no longer count on the military to fight the war. Open rebellion within the ranks is what brought that 12+ year war to an end. It will take nothing less this time around. Voting for a pro-war candidate like Obama will only serve as an endorsement of more war. If you really want to cast a vote against war then you need to vote for a genuine anti-war candidate like Nader or McKinney. Voting for the Democrats only tells them they can keep betraying us and pay no political price—it's as irrational as rewarding someone for misbehaving and then expecting a positive change in their behavior.
It's a result of gross class inequality--which is the REAL pity.
Since you brought up the subject of rubbish... most Democrats are corporate tools, just like the Republicans. They are loathe to advance any agenda which might hurt their masters' profits. The only progress we've ever won in the US was not because of Democrats in office, but because of independent mass movements that forced the government (regardless of which corporate party was in power) to submit to our demands. Let's not forget that for most of its existence the Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow. It wasn't until the 60's and the power of millions of organized people refusing to submit to segregation that the Democrats shifted on this issue. Then they co-opted and de-mobilized the social movements in the 70's—leading to the sorry state we're in today where people think the only choice we have is between two corporate parties, neither of which serve the public interest.
As for the original post, I think the vast majority of Slashdot readers will agree that trying to censor the Internet is an exercise in futility. The "fairness doctrine" makes more sense for more restricted and monopolized media like television—which are dominated by corporations and typically only present views that acceptable to their owners. The media deregulation of the 90's (thanks Clinton!) accelerated the consolidation of the mainstream media and the explosion of right-wing BS-based punditry that is so prominent on TV and radio.
In the 60's the Black Panther Party for Self Defense tailed cops and confronted them when they harassed citizens. It was the only way to defend their communities from rampant police brutality and criminal misconduct (as is the only way to deal with bullies). Needless to say, the cops did not like it. I suspect they would not react favorably if they caught one planting GPS devices on their cars (they certainly don't like it when people review them).
The police and FBI have a long, sordid history of intimidation, harassment and disruption of dissident groups and activists (up to and including murder). Any state surveillance of people should require a warrant—both to provide some oversight (which isn't much, considering the way some courts like to rubber-stamp these requests) and make a record of the state's activities against its own citizens.
Efficient? Capitalism? Have you been spending your profits on ganja?
Look at the health insurance system in the US. Hundreds of different insurers, all with their own little bureaucracies and red-tape (ironically designed not to provide care, but to DENY it). Each has their own marketing departments and collection of overpaid executives. Every clinic and hospital in the US has to navigate this maze of bureaucracies in order to get paid, which wastes countless hours and dollars. Medicare spends 7% of its budget on overhead, whereas private insurance companies spend 15-30%. Collectively the people of the US spend as much on health care as a single-payer system would cost, and yet we have 50 million uninsured people and 18,000 die premature deaths every year due to lack of coverage. A marvel of efficiency at getting the capitalists paid, but not at healing people.
Or consider the millions of out of work people in the US. It's not that there isn't any work to be done--there's plenty of stuff that needs working on: fixing our crumbling national infrastructure, repairing levies, building mass transit systems, schools, hospitals... the list goes on. Yet none of that happens because it wouldn't be profitable for the capitalists who have all the money. Efficient at making a handful of parasites rich, but not efficient at providing necessary public services.
What about the 6 million children who die of hunger and treatable illness worldwide each and every year? UNICEF estimates it would cost $80 billion annually to feed them all--a figure that is a fifth of the US's annual military budget (and not including supplemental budgets for our wars or interest payments on those debts). The government would rather pay companies to not grow food or destroy their surpluses than to feed the hungry.
Or consider the billions of people who will never get a chance at a decent education. There could be Einsteins, Bachs and geniuses all over the world who will never be allowed to achieve their potential because capitalists are loathe to spend money on educating people any more than is required for them to work in their factories and offices.
So much human potential is squandered and so much misery is caused all in the name of profit and "efficiency." The only thing capitalism is efficient at is ruining lives and generating profits for those parasites at the top who perform no labor but reap the rewards of others' labor. Thanks, but no thanks.
No? The freedom of capital to do as its owners wish of necessity requires a reduction in everyone else's freedoms. If a capitalist wants freedom from labor unions--the corollary is that workers lose the freedom to form labor unions, the most basic way in which workers can fight back against attacks on their standard of living. If a capitalist wants freedom from environmental regulation, it necessarily means that workers who live in areas polluted by the capitalist will suffer more (a reduction in the freedom to live a healthy life). Capitalists are a tiny minority who profit from others' labor and contribute nothing to society. They are already the most free people on the planet, with power and privileges that the vast majority of us will never see. Increasing their freedoms means a reduction in workers' freedoms. So yes, it is a necessity to reduce the freedom of capitalists to run roughshod over the rest of society in pursuit of their own narrow, selfish aims in order to increase freedom for workers--the vast majority of people on this planet.
If you don't believe that, then either you are a millionaire or you have OD'd on the capitalist Koolaid they feed kids in school.
Please. Capitalism is the ultimate parasitic system. The capitalists add no value. They perform no labor. They reap the rewards of others' labor. Without workers capitalism could not exist, because the entire system is based on the exploitation of labor. Capitalists are the very definition of parasites.
Under capitalism production is socialized--we work together to produce commodities. However, the product of our labor is appropriated by private individuals and sold for their profit. Social production with private appropriation is organized theft. The capitalists need us to create their profits, but we don't need them. We can re-organize society so that everyone benefits, not just a handful of tiny parasites who think they "own" everything.
PS: in anticipation of others' diatribes, the USSR, China and Cuba are not and never were socialist. They were/are capitalist--because they employ the capitalist mode of production (exploitation of workers, accumulation of capital for accumulation's sake). Only in their systems there's one big capitalist: the state. These regimes merely use the language of socialism to lull workers into accepting the status quo--much as capitalists in the US and Western nations talk about "democracy" to delude their workers into thinking they're free. It's much easier to control people with these illusions in place.
PPS: Robert Owen was a utopian socialist who thought he could dream up a new society and bestow it upon the poor, hapless workers. Marx and Engels were scientific socialists, who discovered how capitalism works, what its internal contradictions are and how the working class (capitalism's essential product, without which it cannot exist) holds the key to overturning it and ending class society forever. Utopian and scientific socialism have little to do with each other.
This is hardly a case of "the far left" telling people how to live their lives--just silly bureaucrats who don't know any better.
The far left (ie: socialists) are actually about increasing freedom and democracy—although the only way to achieve that is to reduce the freedoms of the capitalists (who use their wealth and "ownership" of the means of production to control society in their narrow, short-sighted and selfish interests).
The Christian right (or any fundamentalist religious sect—be it Zionist, Islamic or whatever else there is) wants to reduce everyone's freedoms based on their religious dogma. The far right (ie: libertarians) wants to reduce restrictions on capital. When there are fewer restrictions on the rich and how they are allowed to push the rest of us around with their wealth, power and privilege, then it means the rest of us have less freedom. Libertarians want freedom from public services, freedom from labor unions, freedom from environmental regulation, freedom from anything that might reduce their profits and help those who create their profits.
Do I have any cold hard facts to back up my assertions? No. But I posit that a big factor is cost. We're also entering a recession. Debate that as you wish--but unemployment is on the rise, consumer credit is maxed out, millions of homes are being foreclosed in the US, inflation on essential things like food and energy is on the rise and the dollar is swirling the toilet bowl. Quibble over semantics and nomenclature all you like, but the fact is that consumers are hard-pressed to spend money on luxuries like $300+ players and $30 blu-ray discs--even if the picture quality is superior.
Wow. So much ignorance and so little time to address it all. I'll hit the highlights.
Read your history. No western involvement? These nations were turned into "basket cases" thanks to colonization and brutal exploitation by western powers. They left behind invented nations with borders carved up by their former colonizers. Thanks to divide-and-conquer tactics used by their colonial rulers, it left many such nations with bitterly feuding peoples (Rwanda, anyone?).
And capitalist enterprises are efficient? Let's take a look at the US healthcare "system." Nearly 50 million people are without coverage. Capitalist logic dictates that they don't deserve health care because they are too poor to afford it, or it's too expensive to cover them--despite the supposedly monumental efficiency of capitalist enterprise. In the US we collectively spend as much on healthcare as it would cost to cover everyone under a single-payer system. Our Medicare system (for the elderly and infirm) is far more efficient. Only 7% of their budget goes to overhead, the rest goes to pay for patient care. In the private sector the figure is 15-30%--because every single insurance company replicates their own wasteful bureaucracy whose primary purpose is to deny care. Plus there's the money wasted on advertising, lobbying and excessive executive pay.
This exemplifies the kind of muddled thinking that is so common among capitalists and libertarians, and which is responsible for so much human misery. For the most part, the people of Haiti who are currently starving probably couldn't give a rat's ass about profitably growing rice. They used to grow rice to FEED themselves. Thanks to lowering of trade barriers and the introduction of subsidized rice from the US (funny how we "advanced" nations think "free" trade is good for the developing nations, yet we are loathe to end our massive crop subsidies) cheap foreign rice undercut the market within Haiti, driving small farmers out of business. Now with prices on the rise no one can afford the foreign rice and there's not enough grown domestically to feed people. This is a man-made social catastrophe, all thanks to western ideas about "free" trade which benefit no one except the wealthy shareholders of big-agribusiness and banks.
The former USSR had a system known as "state capitalism." The primary feature of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth for accumulation's sake. In our western "democracies" we have lots of small capitalists competing with each other and globally with foreign capitalists. In the USSR there was one capitalist: the state bureaucracy. Workers were exploited, and the surplus value extracted from them by the state was re-invested to build up industry and compete with the west militarily and economically. The USSR was socialist/communist in name only--just as the US is a democracy in name only.
A brief list of the gains workers won by overthrowing their capitalist masters: women won the right to vote--a first among western nations. Collective laundry, child care and kitchen facilities were established to relieve women of the burden of housework and enable them to more fully participate in politics and the workplace. Old Russia's colonies and annexed populations were granted the right to self-determination and succession. There's a long list of rights and progressive reforms won by the workers in their revolution.
Western economic policies (structural adjustment policies, privatization, lowering of trade barriers and such) are to blame for the vast, deep poverty that grips the rest of the globe. Half of humanity lives in slums and survives on less than $2 a day. That is because of capitalism, not in spite of it. Western corporations extract billions of dollars in wealth from these impoverished nations--and yet that is somehow supposed to help them?
Tariffs are useful to protect developing nations' fragile, burgeoning industries and protect them from US bullies. I notice you don't complain about the vast subsidies and corporate welfare our government hands out. These artificially lower prices and enable US companies to wreak havoc on the economies of developing nations. This is why Haiti, a land that once produced all of its rice, is now starving: because local rice farmers have been run out of business and no one can afford the imported rice any longer. It's because of cheap, subsidized US corn that millions of small farmers in Mexico have been driven out of business and risk life and limb immigrating to the US to find wage labor.
And we both agree about Stalin: he was a major asshole. However, his rule was a product of capitalism, not socialism. He wiped out all the gains of the Russian revolution and returned workers to bondage--cogs in a giant industrial machine whose primary purpose was to accumulate wealth for the bureaucracy and compete with the west. Stalin's policies had not a thing to do with Marxism--he merely used Marxist-sounding language to justify his rule. He was not so different from how western capitalists throw around words like "democracy" and "freedom" to justify their unjust, unequal and undemocratic rule or wars of conquest and plunder. True socialism is marked by broad, grassroots democracy: where workers decide how to run their workplaces and communities decide how to distribute the wealth they create.
I don't know about you, but I live in the richest nation on Earth (which has a government that acts like it owns the universe). We spend more than 5x on our military each year (not counting "supplemental" spending on wars, interest on loans for said wars and other related costs) than it would cost to feed every hungry person on the planet, according to UN figures. The workers of the United States are some of the most productive in the world and we collectively create vast riches--for a tiny minority of people at the top who "own" the factories and businesses from which this wealth is extracted. This is nothing more than organized theft.
Under a sane, rational system all workers would share in the wealth we create. When we discover new techniques that make our jobs more efficient, we would all work less--instead of under capitalism, which results in layoffs and fewer people working more. We wouldn't waste trillions on killing people--we'd spend trillions to create good jobs that serve important needs: like educating people, healing them, building efficient mass-transit and clean, renewable energy sources (all of which create more and better jobs than military spending does).
Instead we live in a world where a handful of parasites lets their own short-term, profit-oriented interests dictate policy for the rest of us. They get to force their pro-capitalist dogma onto us in schools, textbooks and via the media they own, so that people believe that the current system is the way things should be and always will be (just as the Church and nobility once taught serfs and merchants to remain in their places).
There's no reason we can't provide a job, food, clothing, shelter and health care for every single person on the planet--except that it wouldn't be profitable for the people at the top, and they are not going to give up their power and privilege without a fight.
In the United States, odds are that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. For college-age women the rate is 4 times higher. Women earn approximately $.80 to a man's $1. Most women in the US are not allowed to control their own bodies, as numerous State and Federal government regulations have been imposed on their reproductive systems and available medical procedures. The brunt of housework and child-rearing still falls primarily on women. ALL of these forms of oppression stem from misogynistic beliefs--primarily pushed by those in power, but to a certain degree they are perpetuated by ignorant fools who buy into them.
The anonymous individuals advocating rape on a message board are part of that system of oppression--which causes concrete harm to women every day in the United States. Based on the content of this "speech" there is nothing worth protecting. Combating oppression is far more important than protecting the anonymity of those who would propagate oppression.
No speech is being outlawed here. Troglodytes are still free to shout their hateful words all they want--but they can't expect to do it as anonymous cowards (to borrow from Slashdot's own term).
IF the government were to ever turn around and use a progress-setting precedent like this for regressive purposes, then we have another battle on our hands worth fighting. But to defend the anonymity of these abusive people is to uphold the "right" of bigots to persecute others anonymously.
If and when there is actually a political movement that threatens the established order, the government won't need cases like this to persecute their opponents. The FBI has a long record of intimidation (and even murder) against dissident groups. The period of McCarthyism in the 40's and 50's virtually wiped out the once-rich tradition of radicalism in this country. The ruling class will use whatever means are at its disposal to hold on to power, and they certainly won't let any laws get in their way.
This classic "slippery slope" argument is baseless.
Calling for the rape of two women is hateful. There is no gray area here. There's nothing sacred about this "speech" that deserves to be protected, nor do the authors deserve any protection. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression need to be rooted out of society. Allowing these hateful ideas to be propagated anonymously is harmful to society and the oppressed minorities they target.
Revealing the identities of the authors isn't going to lead to the widespread revocation of people's free speech rights. However, it might just teach some neanderthals to keep their disgusting mouths shut.
This sort of "speech" should not be tolerated anywhere. Womens' rights and their safety is far more important than the "right" for misogynists to remain anonymous. Allowing them to remain anonymous is a tacit acceptance of allowing hateful speech and the fostering of anti-women attitudes (at the school and in society as a whole). The concrete harm done to these women (and women in general) trumps the abstract "harm" to the troglodytes who posted the messages.
Is that why virtually all pricing plans in the US share the same basic pricing tiers and fee structures? Is that why it's nearly impossible to find a monthly plan that costs less than $30/month? And is that why all the companies are jacking up their prices on text messages at the same time?
Ah, the glorious efficient free market. Efficient at parting you from your hard earned dollars and putting them in the pockets of the already-rich.
As observed already, the bandwidth of a text message is a tiny fraction of that used by a voice call or a download--yet the cost for that bandwidth is astronomical. Why? Because they can get away with it. Because they collude on prices--it's to the benefit of the carriers for them all to gouge us. This is a lesson cartels have learned a long time ago. If there were such a thing as a "free" market and its alleged efficiency were a reality, then the price of text messages should be virtually free. This is an area that clearly needs more government regulation in order to protect consumers.
Yeah, we really need an accomplished fraud who's good at lying to the world to be in charge of the most powerful military in the world or its PR department.
The problem is, the Democrats don't want to do what they promised, namely ending the war in Iraq. They keep passing funding bills for the war and giving Bush more money than he has asked for. If they were really an antiwar party they could stop funding the war. The history of the Democrats proves they are just as big a war party as the Republicans. WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Clinton made more military interventions abroad than Reagan and Bush Sr. combined (not to mention he killed 1 million Iraqis with economic sanctions and committed war crimes in the "humanitarian" bombing of Kosovo). Both parties share the belief that the US government has every right to use its military to maintain its superpower status. The only complaint the Democrats have with the Republicans is not that the Iraq war is bad, but that we're losing it--and that it's a "distraction" from the "real" war in Afghanistan (which is no more justified than the one in Iraq).
The Democrats aren't the party of the people and they never have been. They are the other party of big business and imperialism. They make some progressive-sounding squawkings once and a while because they need a political base to get themselves elected--but they have never delivered any progress without a mass struggle to force them to do it. They are the party that lied us into the Vietnam war and it was under Nixon that it was ended--not because Nixon was a peace-loving hippie, but because of widespread revolt within the military, mass unrest at home and a Vietnamese independence movement that refused to lay down and die.
The problem isn't individual bad politicians, Democrat or Republican. The problem is structural. The system is organized so that the exploiters (capitalists) "earn" their money from the labor of the exploited (workers). The capitalists use their money and power over the economy to run the system in their interests. The state belongs to them. They ensure it represents their interests through open bribery (aka campaign finance and lobbying) and by rewarding players with lucrative jobs when they leave office (on the boards of top corporations, and cushy jobs at law and lobbying firms). Those who don't play along are forced out. The higher you get in office the more compromised you are, of sheer necessity.
If we miraculously elected 535 honest people to Congress and they actually started looking out for the interests of workers, then the capitalists will sabotage the economy by moving their capital overseas. A state requires an economic base in order to function. The threat of economic collapse is more than enough to bring the state to heel. This is *precisely* what happened when the "Socialists" and Francois Mitterand came to power in France in 1981. They promised all sorts of great reforms, the economy tanked, and all of a sudden Reaganism/Thatcherism never looked so good to the them. (This should also serve as a notice to those "socialists" who think you can simply vote a new economic system into being.)
The long and short of it is: don't expect to win reform by voting. It's not going to happen. If voting could change anything it would be illegal! The people in power have too much power and privilege to lose to allow genuine democracy to occur. As the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said:
One of the best books on science I've read in the past decade is "A People's History of Science," by Clifford D. Conner. Along the same lines as Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" (and Chris Harman's "A People's History of the World") this book explains the development of science from the standpoint of regular people. It debunks the myth that scientific advances come primarily from "great minds" and shows how much of our scientific knowledge (and the basis for advances) comes from the knowledge gained by workers--people interacting with their environment on a daily basis. Miners, midwives, sailors and others have played an invaluable role in the development of science, and while great minds have played their part, most history books give them far too much credit. My little paragraph here can hardly do the book justice, so grab a copy from the library and read it for yourself!
National Intelligence Estimate: Iran does not have a functioning nuclear weapons program.
Bush: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, we must bomb them!
McCain: What he said.
Obama: Iran is developing nuclear weapons, so let's try some sanctions first and if that fails, bomb them!
People of Iran: WTF? Is there any candidate that doesn't want kill us and justify it with another lie?
The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance. They both support using the US's military unilaterally as they see fit. Obama has said this many times. If you believe that Obama isn't going to do whatever he can to maintain and extend the US's hegemony then you are the one who needs some serious readjustment.
It is possible that DARPA will grow and prosper under Obama. After all, he wants to increase military spending, increase the size of the military by up to 80,000 troops and send even more cannon fodder to Afghanistan. Possibly to Iran as well. Maybe he'll decide to increase funding for DARPA too. After all, regardless of what their PR department claims, the purpose of DARPA is to help the US military. Destroying countries and killing people is what the military does best.
Frankly, I think most people give Obama too much credit. He's a hawk and he's pro-empire. Electing him isn't going to change anything except the rhetoric used to justify the US's imperial ambitions.