Do you even know why there is a Senate? The Senate's obstruction is deliberate. The Senate is the chamber where bad bills which would become bad laws are supposed to die. It may seem like it "prevent things from getting done" but that's why it's there, because it is far better than the knee-jerk nonsense of two-year term political hacks who would enact virtually any law just so something "can be seen to be done" before their next election season.
There is a reason that our Republic has 'undemocratic' elements. Pure democracy fails, fails quickly, and terrifyingly transitions through ochlocracy to some form of autocracy. This has been understood and demonstrated since antiquity (see Polybius et al), and it is why our founders were wise enough to establish a more complex, resilient, synthetic system of government.
I wish more people had the depth of your historical perspective. And by the way, Virginia still sees itself that way, try saying "State of Virginia" around a bunch of old natives and you may very well be corrected that "this is the Commonwealth of Virginia, sir."
Have you any idea how many US cities and counties, let alone states, have Native American names already? Alaska (through Russian), Arizona (through Spanish), Hawaii, Idaho (disputed), Illinois (through French), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan (through French), Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are all derived from Native American words in some form or another. That's almost 40% of the states.
The summary seems oblivious to the ODM/OEM relationships that have existed for decades. Dell and HP don't *make* anything, they just rebrand things made by Arima, Compal, Uniwill, Quanta, Clevo, etc. Taiwan designs and manufactures everything, Dell and HP simply slap some stickers on them and retail them with the addition of whatever service/support package.
The whole market has belonged to Asia for a generation, and it's not going to change.
The sig is mainly aimed at leftists who frequently call libertarians conservative in spite of the fact that they want to end the drug war, promote equal protection under the law including marriage equality, end interventionary foreign policy, reform immigration, etc. etc.
There's really nothing conservative about libertarians at all, they hate almost everything about the status quo.
The exception proves the rule. You are not "society" and most people, you know, actual "society", are behaving completely differently. So, you can be as indignant as you want, it won't change the majority of people, e.g. society.
I drop more than enough hints for people to put things together and find me if they really care. Post-privacy doesn't mean preemptive disclosure, it means I have no illusions that anybody can know virtually anything they want with a modicum of effort. I actually live with the expectation that everything I have ever done could be some day traced back to me, and none of it would truly shame me. The only thing that keeps anybody 'safe' anymore is apathy.
My comparison shows a product is negative vs. another product, but that's not illegal? My critique or review shows the inherent negative aspects of a product but that's not illegal? What kind of fucked up ambiguous, selective, and arbitrary system of oppression do you have over there?
Just in case anybody is dumb enough to listen to you, no, that is nonsense. The 'basic' interface is just that, an *interface*, it has no effect on how Google's servers handle your mail, just on how it is displayed to you.
Not that I care, it's a post-privacy society, get over it.
You're attempting to blame me for lacking wisdom while in a state of ignorance. For a child, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to wisely act while also being ignorant, hell, it's hard for a child to wisely act even with knowledge, but at least there is more rational case to be made for culpability/responsibility ("you knew better"). Parents are supposed to help children develop the circumspection and discernment necessary to approach things of which they are ignorant with some baseline of wisdom. What I had at age 10 was insufficient to the task and compounded by the fact that everybody around me was attempting to obstruct and suppress rather than enlighten and explain. It turned the effort into a battle, which is exactly what caused my 'overreach'. This is not a self-sourced catalyst no matter how hard you try to blame me. I, being an ignorant child at the time, did not have a framework in which to say to myself, 'I'm going to find out all the craziest shit' because I didn't even know what that was. My bumblings about were based on a elementary understanding of how to look for things and hearsay. So, your attempt to shift blame upon my child self is demonstrated false.
What I am doing as a parent is nothing like having 'no standards'. The primary difference is that I refuse, under any circumstances, to suppress information when asked a direct and specific question. From there, I certainly am not going to say to a child 'go do whatever'. I routinely proscribe activities I feel my daughter is incapable of doing based on my assessment of her maturity and competence. However, I not only have no illusions that those proscriptions on action are temporary, but as soon as I feel she's up to acting I tell her so. (In fact at such points I usually *mandate* that she start acting.)
Proscription cannot be treated as some kind of fire-and-forget solution to parenting, and I've seen that done both personally and to 3rd parties, frequently to great detriment (but that's the kids' fault, according to you). It further seems to be your attitude, since your hangups and repressions seem to range far afield to all manner of *adult* interactions.
This is exactly why international control of the internet is so dangerous. At least until the US start doing the same bullcrap (and the DOJ domain seizures are the thin edge of that wedge). The internet really needs to be kept as far from government control as possible, but good luck with that in an increasingly statist society.
What disingenuous, arbitrary twaddle. Watch this, you might learn something:
An erotic fictional novel about interspecies intercourse you have said is speech.
Add illustrations. Not photographs, but graphic artists' renderings of actions described in the novel.
Reformat it into a comic book ('graphic novel' for all those pretending to be more dignified than consumers of comic books) such that all action is illustrated and all dialogue is still text.
Use the comic book as a storyboard for an animated movie. Poof, you have a hentai, completely rendered by artists as art, accomplishing all the evil deviancy you disparage, and good luck arguing that isn't speech.
Making the whole thing live action only introduces the ethical question of whether it's ok for the animals. Considering we can raise them in cages without enough room to turn around and then slaughter them by the scores of scores and consider it ethical, I think it would be ludicrous to pretend that copulating with one is as heinous as it is claimed.
I've seen suppression and repression backfire over and over again, including with regard to my own parents' handling of me. When you make something as basic and integral as human sexuality a secret, taboo thing, it drives anybody with initiative and intelligence straight into it. I took it as a personal insult that fundamental knowledge was being hidden from me, so around the age of 10 I started a clandestine campaign to learn everything I could on sexuality. I was reading sexual self-help books in public libraries (this was before the internet was common) before puberty, riding my bike to convenience stores to scope out the smut mags, etc. Not because of peers, or "the sexualized media" or any of the bullshit moralists decry, but because of my parents' own apparent disrespect for me. I wouldn't stand for it, and, as an adult and parent now, I can realize that it was an unhealthy way for me to have explored human sexuality, alone and indignant.
If a child is old enough to ask an honest question, they are old enough for an honest answer. That has been the lesson I learned from my parents' mistakes, and the philosophy I've lived by as a parent myself. The goal of parenthood is to make children as responsible as possible as quickly as they are up to the task. Children must know in order to understand, and understanding is the only way they can build a framework to live in the real world responsibly and safely. Prohibition and proscription DO NOT WORK. Each person, and children *are* people, must develop in themselves informed reasons as to why certain behaviors are not healthy for them. They cannot be made proxies for the mores and tastes of others by rote indoctrination, at least, not for long. Doing that sort of thing is like coiling a spring, and as soon as they break out on their own, all of that is very likely to explode, and some don't actually survive the experience.
H.G. Wells waxing poetic about his interpretation of history isn't very credible as a source. Furthermore when you allude to the history of Anglo-Saxon landholding I assume you're talking about the semi-nebulous concept of folkland. A topic which has been contentious throughout the last century and a half of contemporary historical analysis and historiography. This is not something that will be settled in Slashdot comments, nor is it a topic of my particular expertise (which is primarily pre-Han Chinese history, though not at all exclusive), but I will say I'm not sure I'd want to defer to the Saxons on legal theory. (Yes I know that's a genetic fallacy, I'm trying to be funny and informative here.)
Private ownership of huge swaths of land was so common in the ancient Roman world that they came up with a word for them: latifundium. Remnants and impressions of these units survive up until this day.
Private landholding is basically as old as civilization itself, there is written evidence from the period that it was common in Mesopotamia and all the cultures that sprang from it. In Mycenaean society virtually all land is held by the nobility and the serfs are so disenfranchised as to be explicitly called slaves in the original source documents. (See page 108 of this. The next page of the same work corroborates my allusion to the formation of large private lands in Rome through military service-induced absenses. You know what? Actually, this is probably as good a source as I'm likely to find with the limited time I have online at work, so just read the whole thing. It corroborates over and over historical evidence and patterns for hierarchical landholding in society after society age after age. It might be a little dry, but real professional academic socio-historical analysis isn't meant to be thrilling.)
Commons are a legal *fiction*. Ancient and medieval commons, as I said in a response above, were *logistical* uses of land whose ownership was still with an aristocrat or oligarch. Modern commons are again deliberate logistical considerations, US public lands are property of the government, which only in the most naive principle is property of the taxpayer, since any use outside of the parameters of government policy will result in a police action (this is a particular bone of contention in a lot of places where local law enforcement such as sheriffs thinks the federal enforcement agents are being raging jerks toward the county residents and arresting them for simply 'using' land that is 'theirs' as taxpayers... just look at the videos on constitutionalsheriffs.com).
I'm not sure that any rebuttal by me could have matched your pithiness, my good anonymous sir.
Commons were indeed set up by the titleholders of fiefs as part of the *logistics* of managing inter-serf relations within said fief. To start waxing romantic about their public nature or "rights" (which were primarily vs. other serfs) is to be obtuse to their origin and intent and indeed to buy the metaphorical bill of goods that the the fief lords were selling.
One of the major elements that separates people with passing knowledge of history and actual historians is the cognizance of historiography. You need to understand the sources of your history, why they wrote what they did and for whose benefit.
Which planet's history did you study? Because it sure as hell wasn't this one's. With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'. Farm land throughout the ancient and medieval world was always owned by somebody, whether it was quasi-state aristocracy, wealthy oligarchs, or more modest private farmers (the lattermost being rather rare actually before the modern capitalist world you disparage). Frequently land was awarded to soldiers (*privately* not collectively) after campaigns, Rome was famous for doing this, though it was by no means the only civilization to exercise the practice. Of course the next time those soldiers were deployed, they frequently came home to find their land had been 'reassigned' which underscores the dangers of the state. (Jefferson rightly said that any state powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.)
I could give you a whole lecture on feudalism and how the ages of exploration and enlightenment laid the political theoretical foundations for the sea change in civic life enabled by the industrial revolution. You really need to study history in depth and realize how oppressed humanity was before the development of capitalism created a middle class society to counterbalance previous aristocratic/oligarchic power structures. Power structures that recreate themselves whenever an anti-capitalist ideology seizes control of society, since redistribution of wealth by force crucifies the middle class and puts the bulk of society under the boot of a politically empowered few.
All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.
He should not have published anything until his model matched up in some meaningful way with known facts about climate history. Obviously the lack of accounting for such a massive element is what probably is leading to this ridiculous idea that we're somehow almost too hot to support life, which is why we've had dozens of ice ages, including some which arguably devolved into 'snowball earth' scenarios where the virtually the whole planet was frozen. If your model doesn't fit major facts, it sucks, and it should be completely retooled at a minimum, or even discarded, because models that don't fit facts are nothing but incomplete masturbations.
While this doesn't so much apply here since the intended audience is first and foremost the Persians themselves who are mostly ululating Muslims, but the Quran does say in various forms that you can and should lie to infidels especially if it conceals the weakness of the faithful or allows them to gain advantage over the infidels.
This is patently false on its face. Show me where government spending has decreased. Was it during the bank, automotive, and insurance company bailouts? Was it during stimulus bill after stimulus bill? Was it during the most expansive change in healthcare in decades that's having a horrendous ripple effect across the whole private sector causing price hikes and benefit cuts in company after company? You're conflating the most minor of trimmings in an agency here and there with a decrease in the size of government or its debt that has not happened and will not happen, and that is disingenuous at best, and a flat out lie more likely.
Not since World War I they don't. While some kind of machine gun is usually mounted on or in the turret, the crew limitations prevent the kind of omnidirectional fantasy you have.
Slashdot Mirror
So the Free State Project doesn't exist?
Do you even know why there is a Senate? The Senate's obstruction is deliberate. The Senate is the chamber where bad bills which would become bad laws are supposed to die. It may seem like it "prevent things from getting done" but that's why it's there, because it is far better than the knee-jerk nonsense of two-year term political hacks who would enact virtually any law just so something "can be seen to be done" before their next election season.
There is a reason that our Republic has 'undemocratic' elements. Pure democracy fails, fails quickly, and terrifyingly transitions through ochlocracy to some form of autocracy. This has been understood and demonstrated since antiquity (see Polybius et al), and it is why our founders were wise enough to establish a more complex, resilient, synthetic system of government.
I wish more people had the depth of your historical perspective. And by the way, Virginia still sees itself that way, try saying "State of Virginia" around a bunch of old natives and you may very well be corrected that "this is the Commonwealth of Virginia, sir."
Have you any idea how many US cities and counties, let alone states, have Native American names already? Alaska (through Russian), Arizona (through Spanish), Hawaii, Idaho (disputed), Illinois (through French), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan (through French), Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming are all derived from Native American words in some form or another. That's almost 40% of the states.
The summary seems oblivious to the ODM/OEM relationships that have existed for decades. Dell and HP don't *make* anything, they just rebrand things made by Arima, Compal, Uniwill, Quanta, Clevo, etc. Taiwan designs and manufactures everything, Dell and HP simply slap some stickers on them and retail them with the addition of whatever service/support package.
The whole market has belonged to Asia for a generation, and it's not going to change.
The sig is mainly aimed at leftists who frequently call libertarians conservative in spite of the fact that they want to end the drug war, promote equal protection under the law including marriage equality, end interventionary foreign policy, reform immigration, etc. etc.
There's really nothing conservative about libertarians at all, they hate almost everything about the status quo.
The exception proves the rule. You are not "society" and most people, you know, actual "society", are behaving completely differently. So, you can be as indignant as you want, it won't change the majority of people, e.g. society.
I drop more than enough hints for people to put things together and find me if they really care. Post-privacy doesn't mean preemptive disclosure, it means I have no illusions that anybody can know virtually anything they want with a modicum of effort. I actually live with the expectation that everything I have ever done could be some day traced back to me, and none of it would truly shame me. The only thing that keeps anybody 'safe' anymore is apathy.
My comparison shows a product is negative vs. another product, but that's not illegal? My critique or review shows the inherent negative aspects of a product but that's not illegal? What kind of fucked up ambiguous, selective, and arbitrary system of oppression do you have over there?
Wow... so comparisons, critiques and reviews are illegal? That's pretty pathetic... glad I live somewhere with the marginal freedom I have.
It's illegal for a TV ad to tell you to go to a website? Do you even know to what you are replying?
Just in case anybody is dumb enough to listen to you, no, that is nonsense. The 'basic' interface is just that, an *interface*, it has no effect on how Google's servers handle your mail, just on how it is displayed to you.
Not that I care, it's a post-privacy society, get over it.
You're attempting to blame me for lacking wisdom while in a state of ignorance. For a child, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to wisely act while also being ignorant, hell, it's hard for a child to wisely act even with knowledge, but at least there is more rational case to be made for culpability/responsibility ("you knew better"). Parents are supposed to help children develop the circumspection and discernment necessary to approach things of which they are ignorant with some baseline of wisdom. What I had at age 10 was insufficient to the task and compounded by the fact that everybody around me was attempting to obstruct and suppress rather than enlighten and explain. It turned the effort into a battle, which is exactly what caused my 'overreach'. This is not a self-sourced catalyst no matter how hard you try to blame me. I, being an ignorant child at the time, did not have a framework in which to say to myself, 'I'm going to find out all the craziest shit' because I didn't even know what that was. My bumblings about were based on a elementary understanding of how to look for things and hearsay. So, your attempt to shift blame upon my child self is demonstrated false.
What I am doing as a parent is nothing like having 'no standards'. The primary difference is that I refuse, under any circumstances, to suppress information when asked a direct and specific question. From there, I certainly am not going to say to a child 'go do whatever'. I routinely proscribe activities I feel my daughter is incapable of doing based on my assessment of her maturity and competence. However, I not only have no illusions that those proscriptions on action are temporary, but as soon as I feel she's up to acting I tell her so. (In fact at such points I usually *mandate* that she start acting.)
Proscription cannot be treated as some kind of fire-and-forget solution to parenting, and I've seen that done both personally and to 3rd parties, frequently to great detriment (but that's the kids' fault, according to you). It further seems to be your attitude, since your hangups and repressions seem to range far afield to all manner of *adult* interactions.
This is exactly why international control of the internet is so dangerous. At least until the US start doing the same bullcrap (and the DOJ domain seizures are the thin edge of that wedge). The internet really needs to be kept as far from government control as possible, but good luck with that in an increasingly statist society.
What disingenuous, arbitrary twaddle. Watch this, you might learn something:
An erotic fictional novel about interspecies intercourse you have said is speech.
Add illustrations. Not photographs, but graphic artists' renderings of actions described in the novel.
Reformat it into a comic book ('graphic novel' for all those pretending to be more dignified than consumers of comic books) such that all action is illustrated and all dialogue is still text.
Use the comic book as a storyboard for an animated movie. Poof, you have a hentai, completely rendered by artists as art, accomplishing all the evil deviancy you disparage, and good luck arguing that isn't speech.
Making the whole thing live action only introduces the ethical question of whether it's ok for the animals. Considering we can raise them in cages without enough room to turn around and then slaughter them by the scores of scores and consider it ethical, I think it would be ludicrous to pretend that copulating with one is as heinous as it is claimed.
/signed another parent
I've seen suppression and repression backfire over and over again, including with regard to my own parents' handling of me. When you make something as basic and integral as human sexuality a secret, taboo thing, it drives anybody with initiative and intelligence straight into it. I took it as a personal insult that fundamental knowledge was being hidden from me, so around the age of 10 I started a clandestine campaign to learn everything I could on sexuality. I was reading sexual self-help books in public libraries (this was before the internet was common) before puberty, riding my bike to convenience stores to scope out the smut mags, etc. Not because of peers, or "the sexualized media" or any of the bullshit moralists decry, but because of my parents' own apparent disrespect for me. I wouldn't stand for it, and, as an adult and parent now, I can realize that it was an unhealthy way for me to have explored human sexuality, alone and indignant.
If a child is old enough to ask an honest question, they are old enough for an honest answer. That has been the lesson I learned from my parents' mistakes, and the philosophy I've lived by as a parent myself. The goal of parenthood is to make children as responsible as possible as quickly as they are up to the task. Children must know in order to understand, and understanding is the only way they can build a framework to live in the real world responsibly and safely. Prohibition and proscription DO NOT WORK. Each person, and children *are* people, must develop in themselves informed reasons as to why certain behaviors are not healthy for them. They cannot be made proxies for the mores and tastes of others by rote indoctrination, at least, not for long. Doing that sort of thing is like coiling a spring, and as soon as they break out on their own, all of that is very likely to explode, and some don't actually survive the experience.
H.G. Wells waxing poetic about his interpretation of history isn't very credible as a source. Furthermore when you allude to the history of Anglo-Saxon landholding I assume you're talking about the semi-nebulous concept of folkland. A topic which has been contentious throughout the last century and a half of contemporary historical analysis and historiography. This is not something that will be settled in Slashdot comments, nor is it a topic of my particular expertise (which is primarily pre-Han Chinese history, though not at all exclusive), but I will say I'm not sure I'd want to defer to the Saxons on legal theory. (Yes I know that's a genetic fallacy, I'm trying to be funny and informative here.)
Private ownership of huge swaths of land was so common in the ancient Roman world that they came up with a word for them: latifundium. Remnants and impressions of these units survive up until this day.
Private landholding is basically as old as civilization itself, there is written evidence from the period that it was common in Mesopotamia and all the cultures that sprang from it. In Mycenaean society virtually all land is held by the nobility and the serfs are so disenfranchised as to be explicitly called slaves in the original source documents. (See page 108 of this. The next page of the same work corroborates my allusion to the formation of large private lands in Rome through military service-induced absenses. You know what? Actually, this is probably as good a source as I'm likely to find with the limited time I have online at work, so just read the whole thing. It corroborates over and over historical evidence and patterns for hierarchical landholding in society after society age after age. It might be a little dry, but real professional academic socio-historical analysis isn't meant to be thrilling.)
Commons are a legal *fiction*. Ancient and medieval commons, as I said in a response above, were *logistical* uses of land whose ownership was still with an aristocrat or oligarch. Modern commons are again deliberate logistical considerations, US public lands are property of the government, which only in the most naive principle is property of the taxpayer, since any use outside of the parameters of government policy will result in a police action (this is a particular bone of contention in a lot of places where local law enforcement such as sheriffs thinks the federal enforcement agents are being raging jerks toward the county residents and arresting them for simply 'using' land that is 'theirs' as taxpayers... just look at the videos on constitutionalsheriffs.com).
I'm not sure that any rebuttal by me could have matched your pithiness, my good anonymous sir.
Commons were indeed set up by the titleholders of fiefs as part of the *logistics* of managing inter-serf relations within said fief. To start waxing romantic about their public nature or "rights" (which were primarily vs. other serfs) is to be obtuse to their origin and intent and indeed to buy the metaphorical bill of goods that the the fief lords were selling.
One of the major elements that separates people with passing knowledge of history and actual historians is the cognizance of historiography. You need to understand the sources of your history, why they wrote what they did and for whose benefit.
Which planet's history did you study? Because it sure as hell wasn't this one's. With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'. Farm land throughout the ancient and medieval world was always owned by somebody, whether it was quasi-state aristocracy, wealthy oligarchs, or more modest private farmers (the lattermost being rather rare actually before the modern capitalist world you disparage). Frequently land was awarded to soldiers (*privately* not collectively) after campaigns, Rome was famous for doing this, though it was by no means the only civilization to exercise the practice. Of course the next time those soldiers were deployed, they frequently came home to find their land had been 'reassigned' which underscores the dangers of the state. (Jefferson rightly said that any state powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.)
I could give you a whole lecture on feudalism and how the ages of exploration and enlightenment laid the political theoretical foundations for the sea change in civic life enabled by the industrial revolution. You really need to study history in depth and realize how oppressed humanity was before the development of capitalism created a middle class society to counterbalance previous aristocratic/oligarchic power structures. Power structures that recreate themselves whenever an anti-capitalist ideology seizes control of society, since redistribution of wealth by force crucifies the middle class and puts the bulk of society under the boot of a politically empowered few.
All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.
He should not have published anything until his model matched up in some meaningful way with known facts about climate history. Obviously the lack of accounting for such a massive element is what probably is leading to this ridiculous idea that we're somehow almost too hot to support life, which is why we've had dozens of ice ages, including some which arguably devolved into 'snowball earth' scenarios where the virtually the whole planet was frozen. If your model doesn't fit major facts, it sucks, and it should be completely retooled at a minimum, or even discarded, because models that don't fit facts are nothing but incomplete masturbations.
While this doesn't so much apply here since the intended audience is first and foremost the Persians themselves who are mostly ululating Muslims, but the Quran does say in various forms that you can and should lie to infidels especially if it conceals the weakness of the faithful or allows them to gain advantage over the infidels.
This is patently false on its face. Show me where government spending has decreased. Was it during the bank, automotive, and insurance company bailouts? Was it during stimulus bill after stimulus bill? Was it during the most expansive change in healthcare in decades that's having a horrendous ripple effect across the whole private sector causing price hikes and benefit cuts in company after company? You're conflating the most minor of trimmings in an agency here and there with a decrease in the size of government or its debt that has not happened and will not happen, and that is disingenuous at best, and a flat out lie more likely.
Broseidon, God the Brocean, raises a glass of amBrosia to this.
Not since World War I they don't. While some kind of machine gun is usually mounted on or in the turret, the crew limitations prevent the kind of omnidirectional fantasy you have.