And of course we all know the government never makes false claims against people. (for the record, that was the first one I found that fit my chosen example; since I'm not a professional government whistleblower and don't have access to Lexis Nexis I am not in a position to cite every case ever where the government has admitted to using false evidence)
A society based on totalitarianism, such as that of Saddam Hussein's Baath party doesn't allow for much in the way of moral choice at all.
An obvious strawman, since I don't recall arguing that it did.
Our forefathers SET UP THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT. Had France come over and tried to impose one, I don't think it would have gotten very far.
As for colonialism, there are plenty of people who see your argument as apology for causing the replacement of one totalitarian regime with one that is beholden to the US rather than the Iraqi people. I fail to see us doing much of anything that contradicts that (feel free to offer citations, but quotes from Rummy et. al. don't cut it). We've already proposed "saving" the Iraqis the trouble of running their own oil fields and letting our corporations do the job for them. If we propose to be the key decision makers in their new government, it only extends the colonial appearance.
I was looking for a particular case I'd read about in the mainstream press that was very similar to the one I cited. Unfortunately, not being a subscriber to Lexis-Nexis, I was unable to find it in the 15 minutes I felt was reasonable to spend responding. The fact is, we have had many cases of PEACEFUL protestors being rounded up and arrested, despite there not being any disruptions, blockage of traffic, damage to property, etc. People being disruptive should by all means be arrested for breaking whatever laws they're disrupting.
If "might makes right" then it shouldn't matter what group is exercising that right, right? It's not a matter of gathering popular support, it's an attempt to point out the inherent hypocrisy of arguing that in one arena might makes right, but in another, it doesn't.
USA's human rights record is bad? You should try and visit a few other countries sometimes. I have lived in a country with a bad human rights record, and I know what I am talking about. You don't.
Last time I checked, "two wrongs don't make a right." I don't recall saying there were no places worse than the USA. But I think our history of lynchings and the near-genocide of the natives of the north american continent (just to name two examples) make it clear that "our form of government" is hardly a guarantee that minority rights will be protected.
There is no such thing as objective moral truth. A rational mind can decide that their perception of truth is "the right one" and try to claim that somehow they have reached some objective, disinterested plane of reality where all things have a fixed scale, but that doesn't mean that mind is right. Everyone is biased to see things only from their own perspective, and no amount of pretense of "rationality" can change that. Hell, if science can't even ascertain a fixed frame of reference for facts and numbers, how can you find one for fuzzy concepts like moral judgement? The scale most often used in such arguments usually comes down to "if it agrees with what I've already decided, then it's right, and if it doesn't, it's wrong." If science were done that way, we'd still be searching for the philosopher's stone.
If I may, I will assume that you are a conservative, and very likely a Christian. If I am wrong, I still challenge you to make it clear to me how your position that we should dictate the Iraqi form of government is different from what I'm about to describe. Frequently such people take the position that it is their right to teach their children that God waved his hand and we all came into being, and that evolution, despite decades of science corroborating it, is wrong and moreso SHOULD NOT BE TAUGHT to their children. They rail that the government, in mandating certain standards for education, is trampling their rights.
How precicsely can you reconcile the idea that you should have control over your children and families and communities and prevent the teaching "objectively wrong things" like evolution and acceptance of homosexuality and sex education, but we should be able to dictate to the Iraqis how they should be governed for their own good? It seems clear to me that if moral absolutism was actually viable, everyone who was "rational" would stand up in rank against all three of these things, when the reality is some people reject all three, but other people (who also claim to be moral absolutists) only reject one or two of those three items (with evolution being the most commonly accepted of the three).
But of course I have no real hope of convincing you of anything. Moral Absolutists, as a general rule, have decided that they think right, everyone else thinks wrong, and there is no example of the inherent contradictions in their "absolute" position (which seems to vary from one absolutist to another!) that I've ever found that gets through the wall of "I Am Right".
In that sense, they're very much like Islamic Fundamentalists.
Pardon the inprecision of language. Last time I checked, we weren't trying to argue that "might makes right". If might doesn't make right, then we are not in the position, morally, to dictate the course of the Iraqis' future.
Of course if someone wants to argue that might after all does make right (I've heard some things suspiciously like that come out of Rumsfeld's mouth), then we have a different situation. Of course that means the government is always right, right? As are the RIAA, MPAA, et. al.
Moral relativism? You mean like "it's ok to kill people if it's for their own good, but not if it's for YOUR own good"? To be more clear: it is morally relativist to say that killing for one purpose is ok and for another purpose is not.
It seems to me that we have every right to ENCOURAGE the Iraqis to use the aspects of our government that we believe work better than totalitarian variations, but we do not have any right whatsoever to DEMAND or FORCE a particular form of government. To do so is directly in opposition to our claims that we want them to determine their own fate, and proves that when we say that, we're lying. In fact, doing so will only inflame and encourage those who believe we are being colonialist and those who want to kill americans because we are destroying their ability to make their own moral choices, and so blow up in our faces by making things worse rather than better. Rome already proved you can't go about forcing the rest of the world to your model forever.
If you want to talk philosophy, perhaps you should go read some of the writings about how a forced "moral choice" is no moral choice at all, because choice was not involved. Free will means nothing without the freedom to make the wrong choice.
Luckily, you don't have to live there. And quite honestly, I have to say that the USA's record of "protecting the minorities' rights" is pretty damn abysmal for us to go dictating to other countries how to do it.
Basically you're saying that your moral judgement of what is right matters more than the moral judgement of those who actually have to live there. And that's insane, not to mention arrogant, colonialist, and wrong.
They can sleep well tonight with the knowledge that he flew to China, joined up with five alleged terrorists and attempted to join Al Qaeda and the Telaban in their fight against US soldiers in Afghanistan.
'Cos you know, if the gummint says it's so, it must be so.
Guess what? We are not in a position to tell other countries what form of government to take. If the majority of Iraqis want some form of Islamic government, for us to interfere in that shows what great liars we are when we say we want Iraqis to determine their own fate. This is no surprise to anyone paying attention, but liberation doesn't mean "liberation as long as you do what we tell you to".
The problem with your analogy is that the current "copyright holders" by and large are not the artists themselves, but rather middlemen who have set themselves up to exploit the artists, steal (or nearly steal) their works, and use the copyright law to then leverage as much money out of those copyrights as humanly possible.
So an even more accurate example would have you, as the sole henhouse, signing a moderately low priced exclusive contract with a distributor in return for the distributor having the rights to price your eggs as he will, and then the distributor warping the law to make it possible to sell the eggs for twice as much as he paid you for them and still not get into trouble for price fixing.
If people were stealing your eggs because of the distributors usurious pricing, you'd certainly have a right to be pissed at them, but wouldn't you be MORE pissed at the distributor who was screwing you and them?
And of course this leaves out the fact that eggs are physical objects that can't be copied....
No, he's actually wrong, because I've been going there repeatedly over the last month. Are there warez there? Yes. Are there other things there besides porn? Yes.
Go back and read the previous slashdot article about BitTorrent. I'm using phoenix 0.5 for windows right this minute, and torrents work just great for me without using IE. I bitched about the same issue in the previous article and was bitchslapped back into place.
Hell the cheap thing for a woodshop is a box fan with a furnace filter on the front of it. I hear it works a treat, though I haven't put mine together yet (not a lot of shop work lately).
Whether that'd do much for more generic types of dust, I can't say.
The person I was responding to said law enforcement, so I refuted them. Even in a civil case, it is up to law enforcement, acting on the direction of the court, to ENFORCE the courts subpoena against the party for information. The RIAA doesn't get to directly demand info, it has to ask the court to demand it on their behalf, with the cooperation of law enforcement to ensure they get it even if the party who holds the information doesn't want to give it.
Civil law doesn't require "beyond a reasonable doubt" it requires "a preponderance of the evidence. It would not be a difficult counter to note that if everyone shuts up, either everyone was participating, or those who weren't participating are acting as accessories.
Yes, they are. When administered by law enforcement, through a judge. Not when administered by a corporation, through a clerk, which is what the DMCA has enabled.
What exact "check" does the court clerk represent? They didn't pay the fee to talk to him? As if they'd omit that step? The normal course of events is that a judge is required for a subpoena as a check on the executive and the legislature.
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And of course we all know the government never makes false claims against people. (for the record, that was the first one I found that fit my chosen example; since I'm not a professional government whistleblower and don't have access to Lexis Nexis I am not in a position to cite every case ever where the government has admitted to using false evidence)
An obvious strawman, since I don't recall arguing that it did.
Our forefathers SET UP THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT. Had France come over and tried to impose one, I don't think it would have gotten very far.
As for colonialism, there are plenty of people who see your argument as apology for causing the replacement of one totalitarian regime with one that is beholden to the US rather than the Iraqi people. I fail to see us doing much of anything that contradicts that (feel free to offer citations, but quotes from Rummy et. al. don't cut it). We've already proposed "saving" the Iraqis the trouble of running their own oil fields and letting our corporations do the job for them. If we propose to be the key decision makers in their new government, it only extends the colonial appearance.
I was looking for a particular case I'd read about in the mainstream press that was very similar to the one I cited. Unfortunately, not being a subscriber to Lexis-Nexis, I was unable to find it in the 15 minutes I felt was reasonable to spend responding. The fact is, we have had many cases of PEACEFUL protestors being rounded up and arrested, despite there not being any disruptions, blockage of traffic, damage to property, etc. People being disruptive should by all means be arrested for breaking whatever laws they're disrupting.
If "might makes right" then it shouldn't matter what group is exercising that right, right? It's not a matter of gathering popular support, it's an attempt to point out the inherent hypocrisy of arguing that in one arena might makes right, but in another, it doesn't.
Last time I checked, "two wrongs don't make a right." I don't recall saying there were no places worse than the USA. But I think our history of lynchings and the near-genocide of the natives of the north american continent (just to name two examples) make it clear that "our form of government" is hardly a guarantee that minority rights will be protected.
If I may, I will assume that you are a conservative, and very likely a Christian. If I am wrong, I still challenge you to make it clear to me how your position that we should dictate the Iraqi form of government is different from what I'm about to describe. Frequently such people take the position that it is their right to teach their children that God waved his hand and we all came into being, and that evolution, despite decades of science corroborating it, is wrong and moreso SHOULD NOT BE TAUGHT to their children. They rail that the government, in mandating certain standards for education, is trampling their rights.
How precicsely can you reconcile the idea that you should have control over your children and families and communities and prevent the teaching "objectively wrong things" like evolution and acceptance of homosexuality and sex education, but we should be able to dictate to the Iraqis how they should be governed for their own good? It seems clear to me that if moral absolutism was actually viable, everyone who was "rational" would stand up in rank against all three of these things, when the reality is some people reject all three, but other people (who also claim to be moral absolutists) only reject one or two of those three items (with evolution being the most commonly accepted of the three).
But of course I have no real hope of convincing you of anything. Moral Absolutists, as a general rule, have decided that they think right, everyone else thinks wrong, and there is no example of the inherent contradictions in their "absolute" position (which seems to vary from one absolutist to another!) that I've ever found that gets through the wall of "I Am Right".
In that sense, they're very much like Islamic Fundamentalists.
Of course if someone wants to argue that might after all does make right (I've heard some things suspiciously like that come out of Rumsfeld's mouth), then we have a different situation. Of course that means the government is always right, right? As are the RIAA, MPAA, et. al.
It seems to me that we have every right to ENCOURAGE the Iraqis to use the aspects of our government that we believe work better than totalitarian variations, but we do not have any right whatsoever to DEMAND or FORCE a particular form of government. To do so is directly in opposition to our claims that we want them to determine their own fate, and proves that when we say that, we're lying. In fact, doing so will only inflame and encourage those who believe we are being colonialist and those who want to kill americans because we are destroying their ability to make their own moral choices, and so blow up in our faces by making things worse rather than better. Rome already proved you can't go about forcing the rest of the world to your model forever.
If you want to talk philosophy, perhaps you should go read some of the writings about how a forced "moral choice" is no moral choice at all, because choice was not involved. Free will means nothing without the freedom to make the wrong choice.
Luckily, you don't have to live there. And quite honestly, I have to say that the USA's record of "protecting the minorities' rights" is pretty damn abysmal for us to go dictating to other countries how to do it.
Basically you're saying that your moral judgement of what is right matters more than the moral judgement of those who actually have to live there. And that's insane, not to mention arrogant, colonialist, and wrong.
'Cos you know, if the gummint says it's so, it must be so.
Some of us want to stop it before it gets that bad, rather than waiting until it is accurate.
Too bad it took them 6 weeks to figure out what crime to allege, huh?
As opposed to here in the U.S.A.? Nope, nobody here gets arrested for speaking out. No way. just keep your head in the sand and you'll be safe.....
Guess what? We are not in a position to tell other countries what form of government to take. If the majority of Iraqis want some form of Islamic government, for us to interfere in that shows what great liars we are when we say we want Iraqis to determine their own fate. This is no surprise to anyone paying attention, but liberation doesn't mean "liberation as long as you do what we tell you to".
Because after all, masking the identity of individuals who the Defense Department thinks might be a threat is the WHOLE POINT, right?
So an even more accurate example would have you, as the sole henhouse, signing a moderately low priced exclusive contract with a distributor in return for the distributor having the rights to price your eggs as he will, and then the distributor warping the law to make it possible to sell the eggs for twice as much as he paid you for them and still not get into trouble for price fixing.
If people were stealing your eggs because of the distributors usurious pricing, you'd certainly have a right to be pissed at them, but wouldn't you be MORE pissed at the distributor who was screwing you and them?
And of course this leaves out the fact that eggs are physical objects that can't be copied....
Except for the oil stations in Mozul (for one) where the office sites were looted just as thoroughly as the museum?
No, he's actually wrong, because I've been going there repeatedly over the last month. Are there warez there? Yes. Are there other things there besides porn? Yes.
If you actually went there you'd realize it wasn't just a warez site.
Go back and read the previous slashdot article about BitTorrent. I'm using phoenix 0.5 for windows right this minute, and torrents work just great for me without using IE. I bitched about the same issue in the previous article and was bitchslapped back into place.
Whether that'd do much for more generic types of dust, I can't say.
The person I was responding to said law enforcement, so I refuted them. Even in a civil case, it is up to law enforcement, acting on the direction of the court, to ENFORCE the courts subpoena against the party for information. The RIAA doesn't get to directly demand info, it has to ask the court to demand it on their behalf, with the cooperation of law enforcement to ensure they get it even if the party who holds the information doesn't want to give it.
Civil law doesn't require "beyond a reasonable doubt" it requires "a preponderance of the evidence. It would not be a difficult counter to note that if everyone shuts up, either everyone was participating, or those who weren't participating are acting as accessories.
Yes, they are. When administered by law enforcement, through a judge. Not when administered by a corporation, through a clerk, which is what the DMCA has enabled.
What exact "check" does the court clerk represent? They didn't pay the fee to talk to him? As if they'd omit that step? The normal course of events is that a judge is required for a subpoena as a check on the executive and the legislature.