As somebody who sounds like a copyright moderate, what do you think of the idea of simply de-criminalizing private non-commercial copyright infringement?
Well, I can't speak for other copyright haters, but what I've been advocating for a while is de-criminalizing private (that is, done by a private citizen, rather than a commercial entity) non-commercial (no money or good changes hands, and no promise or expectation of that) copyright infringement.
So maybe it's the people who wanna see things in the false dichotomy of 'copyright good vs copyright bad' that are causing the problem?
Again, I can't speak for other copyright haters, but my position is let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
If you haven't seen it, check out the movie "the lives of others", it's about the stasi in the former east germany.
There's one beautiful scene where the secret police are breaking into a guy's apartment to wire the place. The secret police realize that the neighbor across the hall has been watching them through the peephole.
The commander pounds on the door, and says to the neighbor, "one word of this to anyone, and your daughter loses her place at the university."
It's such a lovely example of how those in power can abuse information that people wouldn't even consider private or personal (is there anybody who wouldn't want their friends/neighbors to know about their daughter's university career?) by keeping a file on basically all citizens.
Yeah, there's tons of 'socialization' skills that home-schooled kids don't learn. There was a girl when I went to high school (over a decade ago) who started public school in grade 10 (hard to get into university otherwise). There was TONS of stuff she didn't know!
For example, she had never learned that girls aren't supposed to be good at math. She didn't realize that when you're in class, and you don't understand something, you're supposed to keep quiet instead of raising your had to ask for clarification!
And worst of all, she didn't know you're supposed to pick on kids who are smaller/weaker/different! I guess they had to work out some remedial classes for her or something...
The statistic I heard (regrettably I can't find/am too lazy to try and source it now) was that in Canada, of every dollar spend on health 8 cents is administrative costs.
Versus 24 cents of every dollar in the US. And we have better overall healthcare outcomes. (Although to be fair, the US has some pockets of spectacular poverty without an equivalent in Canada, except for Vancouver's DTES, so the health care outcomes comparison is probably apples and oranges.)
So why not just, y'know, by an act of congress, make the government the single-payer for anybody who wants it? We basically did the same thing in the 60's when we brought in medicare, the doctors actually went on strike to try and prevent it, but it's a genuine Good Thing to have.
it's stupid for insurance companies to "punish" me for finding this out
Um, yeah, assuming that insurance companies are playing straight. But they're not. There's a million poeople in the US employed full-time to do essentially nothing but find ways to deny the insurance claims of people who have been paying health insurance premiums for years.
Compared to up here in Canada, you guys pay lower taxes, but I'm not ever going to be charged one cent for a medically necessary treatment. (granted we still have some catching up to do with europe on drug coverage...)
So, you can pay X% in taxes and have free medical. Or you can pay some fraction of X in taxes and make up the difference in health insurance, which may or may not cover you when you actually need it when you get cancer or something.
Who was that greek stoic who said "Call no man happy, until he is dead"? It's like that with insurance. Call no man insured, until he is dead.
Nah, it's not about expanding the definition of friend. Though the music industry types like to play dumb in public (what's an MP3? Me dumb exec, me no understand!), I suspect they're smarter than that.
What's really going on is, at some point the record labels figured out that it's easier to control the distribution channels than it is to find, sign, and nurture good artists. Control of the distribution has the side effect of giving you the power to force artists into signing contracts that are more appropriate for the relationship between pimps and prostitutes. In effect, it's a monopsony.
When your game is the only game in town, it doesn't matter if it's crooked.
So the reason they're having histrionics now over private non-commercial copyright infringement where they didn't in the era of home taping/mix tapes is that home taping didn't threaten their control over distribution. But the internet does. They know it, they're scared, and they're right to be scared.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright.
Well, some would say, "Yes, that's exactly what we intend to do", but anyways, moving along...
Where does the value of a copyright come from? Did it fall from the sky? Was it divinely bestowed upon writers/artists/musicians by the creator like the Divine Right of Kings? Or is it a balance of competing interests in society? Those of us who are critical of the status quo are saying that that balance needs to be re-examined.
If nothing else, what about the observation that when copyright law was enacted, private non-commercial copyright infringement was not a concern? I think we can safely say that nobody was thinking about things like file sharing at the time, since, um, computers and the internet didn't exist.
So copyright law, when it was originally conceived, was more of an industrial regulation. If you VOLUNTARILY decided to get into the "book publishing business" (for example), this type of restriction of your freedom was just the cost of doing business. If you didn't like it, go find some other line of work.
But currently copyright law is acting in a way it was never intended to: It is a restriction on the actions of _everyday citizens_.
This is different. This is not how the law originally functioned, or even how it functioned 50 years ago.
Nobody was given a vote on this. This is unintended consequences of a law due to technological changes.
We live in a democracy. If the way a law is going to work is going to change in such a fundamental way, I think that the citizenry of whatever country you reside in ought to have a say on it.
I'll tell you what: if you can get 1 in 20 people to sign a petition stating that they honestly believe that a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars PER INFRINGEMENT for a college kid downloading some songs in a non-commercial context, then not only will I support your thesis that copyright infringement == theft, I'll eat that petition and put it on youtube. So make sure it's a long list.
It's a balance of interests between the benefit to society and the need to create incentives for creators.
Never mind the fact that your analogy on "what if you did work, and your boss didn't pay you" completely falls apart, because in your analogy, you have a contractual agreement with your employer (I hope) to pay you X $$ for Y amount of work.
whereas, if a friend of mine brings a CD over to my house, and I rip the songs to my hard drive, I am the infringer, but I have no freely-agreed-upon contractual relationship with the copyright owner.
And please, let's stop with the "think of the poor starving artists" line. We're not talking about artists getting paid, we're talking about _copyright owners_ getting paid. 99.999% of the time, copyright owners/distributors have the same relationship to artists as a pimp to a prostitute.
That is, parasites, who use various forms of coercion, to insert themselves as a (soon-to-be 100% unnecessary) middleman.
It's funny you mention that... As I was typing, I decided to see what my bank had in terms of limits. And given I've never sent more than a couple hundred bucks via that system (friends family etc) I think maybe I'll have them drop that to $500.
You may notice that the companies having issues with this tend to be cable companies. Shaw (BitTorrent throttling) and Rogers (encrypted traffic throttling) in Canada (two largest cable companies)
I'm on Shaw, and I've been trying to find any evidence that they do bandwith throttling or BitTorrent throttling.
For the record, my bittorrent usage is no different than it was at my last apartment, where I had Telus DSL, and if anything, I notice my downloads/uploads go _faster_ now that I'm with Shaw.
At one point, I was seeing a drop in my download/upload speed, but it turned out to be a function of settings on uTorrent, not anything Shaw was doing. In the process of figuring this out, I had a conversation with a surprisingly helpful Shaw tech support guy, who told me straight out, they don't do anything like that. He also provided me with his employee id/reference number in case I need to reference that conversation.
I suspect that they wouldn't _flat out_ lie if they were doing something shady, but do you have any evidence that shaw's lying about this?
So, um, yes, if somebody manages to get my username/password for my online banking, they can in fact, drain all my money in under 5 minutes. Now, that can only go to another bank account, and it can only be transferred to another bank in Canada, but still.
Last I checked, every attempt at socialism had failed. Egalitarian policies have destroyed public education. Unionised businesses are collapsing left, right and centre. Welfare has turned inner cities into crime ridden Third World hellholes.
That first sentence it true if and only if you feel the words "socialism", "Stalinism", and "Maoism" are basically interchangeable.
"Every attempt at socialism has failed"? Tell that to Sweden or Finland.
Go to a left wing meeting and say you think blacks are genetically less intelligent.
Yeah, um, as much as some people might want to pretend like the jury's still out on that question, that's sort of the equivalent of going into a room full of mechanical engineers and asking them to "keep an open mind" about your perpetual motion machine that you claim to have invented.
FWIW, a friend of mine is a geneticist, and he'll tell you straight out that "race" has essentially no meaning in the context of biology or genetics. It's not much more than a social construct based on some inheritable physical characteristics.
Look, I think of myself as a moderate, and there's many different things you can say lefties aren't exactly open-minded about. (try and tell a 3rd wave feminist that, actually, women in positions of authority behave no better than men in positions of authority, for example) but the example of a genetic (read: nothing you can do about it) difference in intelligence across races really is on the order of perpetual motion machines for junk science.
So it's being too good to their workers that is ruining GM?
I guess then, that Toyota and Honda must be using exclusively 3rd-world slave labor to design, make, ship, and sell their cars, 'cause they don't seem to be having the same sort of problems. It couldn't possibly be the result of lousy management and nonexistent leadership or insanely generous executive compensation, even in years where the company teeters on the brink?
"I'm sorry, but, a manual laborer should not expect $30/hour, and lifetime benefits..."
Really, ok, well then what do you think _is_ fair for a company where senior management earn seven-figure salaries not counting benefits and stock options? $20/hour? $10/hour? In most US cities, anything less than $15-20/hour probably puts you below any measure of 'poverty line' that you like to measure poverty.
The other side of that "I'm sorry, but, a manual laborer should not expect $30/hour," idea seems to suggest that, because somebody's job is low-skilled, therefore they need to resign themselves to a life of grinding poverty.
Are you comfortable with that? What about the macro-economic effects of that? Or maybe, an attitude like Henry Ford's "I want my workers to make more money so they'll buy more of my cars" is better? 'Cause a country made up of people making $10/hour make very poor consumers.
I've got my new rebuttal for people who support status quo copyright laws AND WTO/NAFTA-style trade agreements.
"Oh, I totally support copyright! The creator owns it, for sure. But I only support copyright laws in the sense that Wal-Mart or any other major US company supports US labor laws. So I don't download illegally, not in the US. I hire a guy in the 3rd world to download or me, in a country where downloading is legal."
Shows what I know about the Baha'i faith, I guess. I must confess to basically total ignorance of it aside from the name and how it's pronounced, and that's only 'cause I went to school with a guy who was of that faith. (What the heck do you call the followers of Baha'i, anyway?)
No, actually it does. While I have many issues with the Xians in this nation, they are no where close to having the issues Islam has. Christianity has had it's reformation. The Muslim world is just 500 years behind and counting.
As I said above, I suspect that the differences you see between extremist Christians who hire lawyers to try and silence somebody and extremist muslims from the middle east who try and silence people with violence has to do more with 'what neighborhood' you come from, around the world.
You take a look at the system of government of countries like Saudi or Syria or Iran, you see brutal and despotic regimes that routinely practice torture. Contrast this with the comparatively mellow Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.
I'd even go as far as to conjecture that if the majority of the people in Saudi or Egypt or Syria were _atheists_ instead of Muslims, they'd still be more prone to terrorists, because states that routinely practice torture eventually end up with home-grown terrorists.
This should come as no surprise. While I ABSOLUTELY, 100% don't condone attacking civilians, when a government is repressive enough, there is a point where armed revolt is appropriate.
And the only thing I've said about Islam is that it certainly seems to draw a lot of bloodthirsty nutcases nowadays.
Whenever you have a correlation, you have to ask, Does A cause B, or does B cause A, or does X cause A and B?
I'd suggest that the mid-east/south asia is a violent place, where brutal and despotic regimes that routinely practice torture are common is the "X" in this case.
I think we can safely say that violent repression of the citizenry will cause violent revolt. Now, how those brutal and despotic regimes get into power (and stay there) is a subject ripe for debate, but I'd go as far as to hypothesize that the fact that terrorists from, for example, Saudi Arabia, are Muslim is coincidental. And I suspect that if you had a country like Saudi with it's brutal despotic government, that you'd get terrorists popping up at about the same rate if the country was predominantly Christian or Shinto or Baha'i or atheist.
As a counterpoint, look at Africa. Africa's got TONS of Muslims, and the rule of thumb is, the further south you go, the less militant the Muslims are. What do you have in the northern part of Africa? Countries like Libya and Egypt where torture is basically routine.
Ever hear of a Quaker terrorist? A Mennonite terrorist? A Buddhist terrorist? A Baha'i terrorist?
No, but, to be fair, I don't know of any areas of the world where Mennonites or Buddhists or followers of the Baha'i faith have to live under, for example, the rule of the Saudi Regime. Or had their territory annexed to make a new state for people of a different faith/ethnic background. One thing that is common to many Islamic countries is brutal, violent, repressive governments.
I am not in any way saying that repression by authoritarian regimes justifies violence against civilians, however, there is a certain point where a government is so repressive that the people are justified in taking up arms to overthrow it.
After all, if the term had been in use at the time, I'm sure the English Crown would've referred to Washington, Jefferson, et. al. as "terrorists".
Check what's happening in Africa, you see a lot of infants with HIV through the mother-child route.
I heard the statistic tossed around that given standard western treatment for HIV, you can cut the rate of mother-child infection rate by 95%, but it ain't cheap.
Just like drug companies had no interest in eliminating small pox? There are plenty of diseases to go around, and more of them turn up all the time.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer that lead the charge to eradicate smallpox in India, while the WHO and the UN and other governments didn't care.
Anyway, as I come back from sarcasm land, you seriously don't think that drug companies played any significant role in the eradication of smallpox, do you? It was basically entirely a WHO project. Drug companies, like most in the west, didn't and still don't give a damn about people in the 3rd world dying.
If you're looking for a reason to not trust doctors, try this one on for size - when's the last time you heard of a doctor being fired? If you're like me, that was oh, back in _never_.
It's like that joke about, what do you call a guy who finishes last in his class at med school? Doctor.
One might suggest that this has to do with the very competitive nature of med school admission and med school itself being so demanding that duds just don't make it through. But all you need to do is look at the case of Dr. Charles Smith in Ontario up here in in Canuckistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Charles_Smith)
I don't know of any other field where you never, ever, hear about someone being fired. Any profession will likely have a non-zero number of incompetent individuals (for a variety of reasons) but for doctors, it seems they just keep on practicing no matter what.
Fair point, about how not everbody records all those transactions online to the IRS/whatever agency is in your jurisdiction.
OK, let's fire up another example - Imagine I live in state A, but I commute across the border to state B for my job. Say state A has personal income tax but state B does not. I can't say to the state that I reside in, "well, my job's in another state, so you can't charge me income tax".
Nor should I be able to, by any measure or fairness. If you don't like where you live, well, either get involved in politics and try to change it, or live somewhere else.
This is just a case of "shopping around for a jurisdiction", something that only modern transnational corporations can do. And as long as there's a state government somewhere eager for a few measly jobs, this will continue to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
As somebody who sounds like a copyright moderate, what do you think of the idea of simply de-criminalizing private non-commercial copyright infringement?
Well, I can't speak for other copyright haters, but what I've been advocating for a while is de-criminalizing private (that is, done by a private citizen, rather than a commercial entity) non-commercial (no money or good changes hands, and no promise or expectation of that) copyright infringement.
So maybe it's the people who wanna see things in the false dichotomy of 'copyright good vs copyright bad' that are causing the problem?
Again, I can't speak for other copyright haters, but my position is let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
Here, here.
If you haven't seen it, check out the movie "the lives of others", it's about the stasi in the former east germany.
There's one beautiful scene where the secret police are breaking into a guy's apartment to wire the place. The secret police realize that the neighbor across the hall has been watching them through the peephole.
The commander pounds on the door, and says to the neighbor, "one word of this to anyone, and your daughter loses her place at the university."
It's such a lovely example of how those in power can abuse information that people wouldn't even consider private or personal (is there anybody who wouldn't want their friends/neighbors to know about their daughter's university career?) by keeping a file on basically all citizens.
Yeah, there's tons of 'socialization' skills that home-schooled kids don't learn. There was a girl when I went to high school (over a decade ago) who started public school in grade 10 (hard to get into university otherwise). There was TONS of stuff she didn't know!
For example, she had never learned that girls aren't supposed to be good at math. She didn't realize that when you're in class, and you don't understand something, you're supposed to keep quiet instead of raising your had to ask for clarification!
And worst of all, she didn't know you're supposed to pick on kids who are smaller/weaker/different! I guess they had to work out some remedial classes for her or something...
The statistic I heard (regrettably I can't find/am too lazy to try and source it now) was that in Canada, of every dollar spend on health 8 cents is administrative costs.
Versus 24 cents of every dollar in the US. And we have better overall healthcare outcomes. (Although to be fair, the US has some pockets of spectacular poverty without an equivalent in Canada, except for Vancouver's DTES, so the health care outcomes comparison is probably apples and oranges.)
So why not just, y'know, by an act of congress, make the government the single-payer for anybody who wants it? We basically did the same thing in the 60's when we brought in medicare, the doctors actually went on strike to try and prevent it, but it's a genuine Good Thing to have.
Um, yeah, assuming that insurance companies are playing straight. But they're not. There's a million poeople in the US employed full-time to do essentially nothing but find ways to deny the insurance claims of people who have been paying health insurance premiums for years.
Compared to up here in Canada, you guys pay lower taxes, but I'm not ever going to be charged one cent for a medically necessary treatment. (granted we still have some catching up to do with europe on drug coverage...)
So, you can pay X% in taxes and have free medical. Or you can pay some fraction of X in taxes and make up the difference in health insurance, which may or may not cover you when you actually need it when you get cancer or something.
Who was that greek stoic who said "Call no man happy, until he is dead"? It's like that with insurance. Call no man insured, until he is dead.
Nah, it's not about expanding the definition of friend. Though the music industry types like to play dumb in public (what's an MP3? Me dumb exec, me no understand!), I suspect they're smarter than that.
What's really going on is, at some point the record labels figured out that it's easier to control the distribution channels than it is to find, sign, and nurture good artists. Control of the distribution has the side effect of giving you the power to force artists into signing contracts that are more appropriate for the relationship between pimps and prostitutes. In effect, it's a monopsony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
When your game is the only game in town, it doesn't matter if it's crooked.
So the reason they're having histrionics now over private non-commercial copyright infringement where they didn't in the era of home taping/mix tapes is that home taping didn't threaten their control over distribution. But the internet does. They know it, they're scared, and they're right to be scared.
Well, some would say, "Yes, that's exactly what we intend to do", but anyways, moving along...
Where does the value of a copyright come from? Did it fall from the sky? Was it divinely bestowed upon writers/artists/musicians by the creator like the Divine Right of Kings? Or is it a balance of competing interests in society? Those of us who are critical of the status quo are saying that that balance needs to be re-examined.
If nothing else, what about the observation that when copyright law was enacted, private non-commercial copyright infringement was not a concern? I think we can safely say that nobody was thinking about things like file sharing at the time, since, um, computers and the internet didn't exist.
So copyright law, when it was originally conceived, was more of an industrial regulation. If you VOLUNTARILY decided to get into the "book publishing business" (for example), this type of restriction of your freedom was just the cost of doing business. If you didn't like it, go find some other line of work.
But currently copyright law is acting in a way it was never intended to: It is a restriction on the actions of _everyday citizens_.
This is different. This is not how the law originally functioned, or even how it functioned 50 years ago.
Nobody was given a vote on this. This is unintended consequences of a law due to technological changes.
We live in a democracy. If the way a law is going to work is going to change in such a fundamental way, I think that the citizenry of whatever country you reside in ought to have a say on it.
I'll tell you what: if you can get 1 in 20 people to sign a petition stating that they honestly believe that a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars PER INFRINGEMENT for a college kid downloading some songs in a non-commercial context, then not only will I support your thesis that copyright infringement == theft, I'll eat that petition and put it on youtube. So make sure it's a long list.
Except copyright isn't a human right.
It's a balance of interests between the benefit to society and the need to create incentives for creators.
Never mind the fact that your analogy on "what if you did work, and your boss didn't pay you" completely falls apart, because in your analogy, you have a contractual agreement with your employer (I hope) to pay you X $$ for Y amount of work.
whereas, if a friend of mine brings a CD over to my house, and I rip the songs to my hard drive, I am the infringer, but I have no freely-agreed-upon contractual relationship with the copyright owner.
And please, let's stop with the "think of the poor starving artists" line. We're not talking about artists getting paid, we're talking about _copyright owners_ getting paid. 99.999% of the time, copyright owners/distributors have the same relationship to artists as a pimp to a prostitute.
That is, parasites, who use various forms of coercion, to insert themselves as a (soon-to-be 100% unnecessary) middleman.
Tell that to people who bought CDOs.
It's funny you mention that... As I was typing, I decided to see what my bank had in terms of limits. And given I've never sent more than a couple hundred bucks via that system (friends family etc) I think maybe I'll have them drop that to $500.
I'm on Shaw, and I've been trying to find any evidence that they do bandwith throttling or BitTorrent throttling.
For the record, my bittorrent usage is no different than it was at my last apartment, where I had Telus DSL, and if anything, I notice my downloads/uploads go _faster_ now that I'm with Shaw.
At one point, I was seeing a drop in my download/upload speed, but it turned out to be a function of settings on uTorrent, not anything Shaw was doing. In the process of figuring this out, I had a conversation with a surprisingly helpful Shaw tech support guy, who told me straight out, they don't do anything like that. He also provided me with his employee id/reference number in case I need to reference that conversation.
I suspect that they wouldn't _flat out_ lie if they were doing something shady, but do you have any evidence that shaw's lying about this?
Um, I don't know if there's an equivalent system in the US, but up here in Canada, I can transfer money via the interac e-mail system.
http://www.interac.ca/consumers/productsandservices_ol_emt.php
So, um, yes, if somebody manages to get my username/password for my online banking, they can in fact, drain all my money in under 5 minutes. Now, that can only go to another bank account, and it can only be transferred to another bank in Canada, but still.
That first sentence it true if and only if you feel the words "socialism", "Stalinism", and "Maoism" are basically interchangeable.
"Every attempt at socialism has failed"? Tell that to Sweden or Finland.
Yeah, um, as much as some people might want to pretend like the jury's still out on that question, that's sort of the equivalent of going into a room full of mechanical engineers and asking them to "keep an open mind" about your perpetual motion machine that you claim to have invented.
FWIW, a friend of mine is a geneticist, and he'll tell you straight out that "race" has essentially no meaning in the context of biology or genetics. It's not much more than a social construct based on some inheritable physical characteristics.
Look, I think of myself as a moderate, and there's many different things you can say lefties aren't exactly open-minded about. (try and tell a 3rd wave feminist that, actually, women in positions of authority behave no better than men in positions of authority, for example) but the example of a genetic (read: nothing you can do about it) difference in intelligence across races really is on the order of perpetual motion machines for junk science.
Uh, couldn't I turn that around and say "why does someone in a low-skilled job deserve to be condemned to a life of grinding poverty"?
Never mind the macroeconomic effects. A society made of of increasing numbers of $10/hour workers makes for an economy in the crapper.
I guess then, that Toyota and Honda must be using exclusively 3rd-world slave labor to design, make, ship, and sell their cars, 'cause they don't seem to be having the same sort of problems. It couldn't possibly be the result of lousy management and nonexistent leadership or insanely generous executive compensation, even in years where the company teeters on the brink?
Really, ok, well then what do you think _is_ fair for a company where senior management earn seven-figure salaries not counting benefits and stock options? $20/hour? $10/hour? In most US cities, anything less than $15-20/hour probably puts you below any measure of 'poverty line' that you like to measure poverty.
The other side of that "I'm sorry, but, a manual laborer should not expect $30/hour," idea seems to suggest that, because somebody's job is low-skilled, therefore they need to resign themselves to a life of grinding poverty.
Are you comfortable with that? What about the macro-economic effects of that? Or maybe, an attitude like Henry Ford's "I want my workers to make more money so they'll buy more of my cars" is better? 'Cause a country made up of people making $10/hour make very poor consumers.
I've got my new rebuttal for people who support status quo copyright laws AND WTO/NAFTA-style trade agreements. "Oh, I totally support copyright! The creator owns it, for sure. But I only support copyright laws in the sense that Wal-Mart or any other major US company supports US labor laws. So I don't download illegally, not in the US. I hire a guy in the 3rd world to download or me, in a country where downloading is legal."
Shows what I know about the Baha'i faith, I guess. I must confess to basically total ignorance of it aside from the name and how it's pronounced, and that's only 'cause I went to school with a guy who was of that faith. (What the heck do you call the followers of Baha'i, anyway?)
As I said above, I suspect that the differences you see between extremist Christians who hire lawyers to try and silence somebody and extremist muslims from the middle east who try and silence people with violence has to do more with 'what neighborhood' you come from, around the world.
You take a look at the system of government of countries like Saudi or Syria or Iran, you see brutal and despotic regimes that routinely practice torture. Contrast this with the comparatively mellow Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.
I'd even go as far as to conjecture that if the majority of the people in Saudi or Egypt or Syria were _atheists_ instead of Muslims, they'd still be more prone to terrorists, because states that routinely practice torture eventually end up with home-grown terrorists.
This should come as no surprise. While I ABSOLUTELY, 100% don't condone attacking civilians, when a government is repressive enough, there is a point where armed revolt is appropriate.
Whenever you have a correlation, you have to ask, Does A cause B, or does B cause A, or does X cause A and B?
I'd suggest that the mid-east/south asia is a violent place, where brutal and despotic regimes that routinely practice torture are common is the "X" in this case.
I think we can safely say that violent repression of the citizenry will cause violent revolt. Now, how those brutal and despotic regimes get into power (and stay there) is a subject ripe for debate, but I'd go as far as to hypothesize that the fact that terrorists from, for example, Saudi Arabia, are Muslim is coincidental. And I suspect that if you had a country like Saudi with it's brutal despotic government, that you'd get terrorists popping up at about the same rate if the country was predominantly Christian or Shinto or Baha'i or atheist.
As a counterpoint, look at Africa. Africa's got TONS of Muslims, and the rule of thumb is, the further south you go, the less militant the Muslims are. What do you have in the northern part of Africa? Countries like Libya and Egypt where torture is basically routine.
No, but, to be fair, I don't know of any areas of the world where Mennonites or Buddhists or followers of the Baha'i faith have to live under, for example, the rule of the Saudi Regime. Or had their territory annexed to make a new state for people of a different faith/ethnic background. One thing that is common to many Islamic countries is brutal, violent, repressive governments.
I am not in any way saying that repression by authoritarian regimes justifies violence against civilians, however, there is a certain point where a government is so repressive that the people are justified in taking up arms to overthrow it.
After all, if the term had been in use at the time, I'm sure the English Crown would've referred to Washington, Jefferson, et. al. as "terrorists".
Yeah, sure, in the developed world.
Check what's happening in Africa, you see a lot of infants with HIV through the mother-child route.
I heard the statistic tossed around that given standard western treatment for HIV, you can cut the rate of mother-child infection rate by 95%, but it ain't cheap.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer that lead the charge to eradicate smallpox in India, while the WHO and the UN and other governments didn't care.
Anyway, as I come back from sarcasm land, you seriously don't think that drug companies played any significant role in the eradication of smallpox, do you? It was basically entirely a WHO project. Drug companies, like most in the west, didn't and still don't give a damn about people in the 3rd world dying.
If you're looking for a reason to not trust doctors, try this one on for size - when's the last time you heard of a doctor being fired? If you're like me, that was oh, back in _never_.
It's like that joke about, what do you call a guy who finishes last in his class at med school? Doctor.
One might suggest that this has to do with the very competitive nature of med school admission and med school itself being so demanding that duds just don't make it through. But all you need to do is look at the case of Dr. Charles Smith in Ontario up here in in Canuckistan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Charles_Smith)
I don't know of any other field where you never, ever, hear about someone being fired. Any profession will likely have a non-zero number of incompetent individuals (for a variety of reasons) but for doctors, it seems they just keep on practicing no matter what.
Fair point, about how not everbody records all those transactions online to the IRS/whatever agency is in your jurisdiction.
OK, let's fire up another example - Imagine I live in state A, but I commute across the border to state B for my job. Say state A has personal income tax but state B does not. I can't say to the state that I reside in, "well, my job's in another state, so you can't charge me income tax".
Nor should I be able to, by any measure or fairness. If you don't like where you live, well, either get involved in politics and try to change it, or live somewhere else.
This is just a case of "shopping around for a jurisdiction", something that only modern transnational corporations can do. And as long as there's a state government somewhere eager for a few measly jobs, this will continue to happen.