And he was lying. There are 47% of the population who pay no FEDERAL INCOME TAX. They still pay all the OTHER taxes people pay.
He also ignored that the vast majority of that 47% are NOT welfare recipients or unemployed people. They are the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the retired pensioners who worked hard their entire lives so they could stop working in their old age.
That statement was deceptive at best, blatant lying if you're being fair.
The maker isn't a major issue indeed, contrary to what the fearmongers say. I also run CM and never have I had a problem. There is some backwards compatibility problems, many apps won't run on earlier android versions which is a problem for devices that aren't supported anymore and don't have good current custom ROMS either (though this is rare, most devices even if they no longer have manufacturer support has somebody, somewhere still making ROMS for them - this is how I can run KitKat on my first generation Asus Transformer tablet).
We need more fragmentation. The mobile world would better if I could choose to run Ubuntu-Android, Fedora-Android, Samsung-Android or Google-Android on my phone.
You almost can, Samsung's spin is not like what's on the Nexus and neither is like Cyanogenmod which isn't like most of the other many custom ROMS out there. I agree it would be better if swapping out ROMS were a LOT easier, rooting wasn't needed (because they came with it enabled) and more of the big Linux Distros were building ROMS that could run on Android devices, possibly some of them could even bypass the android interface and libraries and not run dalvik code but COULD run recompiled linux apps.
That would be a pretty cool step forward. I had high hopes that Ubuntuphone would be the first step towards that but sadly it seems to have whithered while losing it's most killer-app feature along the way (the dock your phone and have a desktop one).
Now please eradicate the false dichotomy from your thinking that makes you think "anti-corporation" must equal "pro-government". Then try answering me again and you may actually say something sensible.
Well Facebook's entire business model is to BE intrusive. If they can save a few lives with it it actually makes them, on balance, very slightly LESS evil.
>On the other hand, for a corporation — operating in a reasonably free country — the best way to riches is through providing services and/or making goods, that people are willing to pay for.
This statement is guilty of the begging the question fallacy, in fact it's begging SEVERAL questions. You are making numerous implicit assumptions which don't hold up to scrutiny.
1) You assume that "reasonably free country" is a representative example of the places where corporations operate, but most corporations today are global multinationals operating in all countries, and they love to make use of that by doing in the non-free countries all the evil things that they can't (as easily) do in the free countries.
2) You claim this is the best way for a corporation to get rich, but you offer no evidence to support that claim. That's not rational thought, that's a religious belief without any basis in fact. A mere moment's critical thinking and you'll be able to come up with thousands of ways a corporation can, at any moment, make more money than it could by doing that- and history is filled with examples, EVERY SINGLE DAY. A big news one recently was when Oracle decided the best way to riches was to take the MONEY for providing a service to the taxpayers of Portland without actually providing the service, and giving just a token piece of junk instead. Now when you or I do that, we get charged with fraud and go to jail, Oracle knew they would only face a lawsuit which would take many years to go to trail where it will be heard by a judge who probably won't understand the arguments and even if they lose they'll get a slap on the wrist because folks like you have destroyed the tort system. So the basic claim is clearly not true at all times for all transactions, in fact, for most corporations it's probably only true in a tiny minority of cases. You can try defend them on the basis of fearing government and since the other party here was the government but that's not logical. Logically you should say "if they are prepared to scam EVEN the government I fear so much with impunity, what stops them from scamming any and every other customer in the world ?"
3) You assume that, even when 1 and 2 are both true (which is now a very small number of cases) the people in charge of the corporations will always and without exception be sufficiently competent to KNOW this. That they will never end up doing something that makes less money but is more evil simply because made a bad decision. But corporations make bad decisions all the time, sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes it's a lack of perfect information or both - but you can't assume that even when both conditions hold and this really IS the best option the corporations will never end up doing something else because they didn't make the best CHOICE. Enron made some really bad choices - and the directors ended up deciding the best way to riches was to pay themselves massive bonusses out of the company's debt pool less than a day before they announced the company was bankrupt and over a thousand people were suddenly and surprisingly devoid of an income.
4) But even in the vanishingly small number of cases where all three the above conditions hold you are assuming that the corporation will ONLY do the "best" thing to riches, and not the 2 best things, or the 3 best things or the 20 best things - of which ONLY the first option was one that isn't harming somebody else. PG&E was providing electricity to customers - a services they paid for while at the SAME time improving their bottom line by not paying to clean up toxic waste properly and dumping it in people's drinking water instead.
5) You assume that the way a product or service is provided to one customer cannot harm another. Facebook is the perfect example here - their product is private information for targetted advertising, the users aren't the customers, they are the product that facebook is selling and facebook has had a trackrecord of numerous incredibly evil things done
Identifying him as the owner was surely something he could, potentially, have made a privacy claim about.
If I were to hack slashdot's servers to find the IP of some AC poster and find out his real name and identify him as the poster of something he may get fired for - he'd have a legitimate claim that I violated his privacy. On the other hand, if he turns out to be an elected representative and his AC post was a screed on the need to nail all black people to burning crosses the public interest would outweigh his privacy claim. Generally voters would be correct in thinking they have a right to KNOW if their elected representative is a closet KKK member. Why should other objectionable publications by politicians receive any less scrutiny ?
I agree, it ought to be illegal, but while it isn't everywhere yet, it makes sense to support private citizens who try to act with what we both agree is the most respect for the rights of other people even if those rights are not protected by laws.
It's probably good that it's being made illegal more and more, assuming the laws are well-written, but it's not illegal everywhere just yet.
But from that thought it logically follows that it's probably good if private website owners choose not to provide a platform to facilitate things they obviously do not agree with.
Nobody thinks it's censorship that most churches will not let you put a link to buy the satanic bible from Amazon on their websites. There is nothing illegal about the satanic bible, there are plenty of ways to acquire a copy - including buying it from Amazon. No Christian church is obligated to facilitate the spreading of a message they find objectionable.
>I'm sure it's legal to post your credit card details and bank information. I would very much like you to post that using your freedom of speech.
Actually, you can improve this analogy. For him to be logically consistent with the stupid argument he is making - he would have to agree that if *I* steal his wallet and post his credit card details on reddit and then return the wallet - he would be quite happy to let reddit leave the details there ?
Ironically - that is a much lesser violation of his rights than what he is actually defending. Money is not worth nearly as much as a person's right to ownership of their own bodies.
Tell that to the tabloid who took snaps of Brad Pitt boning that chick from Friends that nobody remembers and published them. Pitt and Aniston sued, and won. The judge ruled (correctly) that freedom of speech and freedom of the press does NOT give you the right to violate somebody else's right to privacy.
This can, on rare occasions, be superceded by public interest. Anthony Weiners dick pics had public interest since HE was a public servant. That clause can never apply to a private citizen however. There is no way anybody will convince a sober judge that Brad's junk is so important for the public interest that his right to privacy should be superceded.
Actually your cawk would still be allowed on reddit (which is probably MORE likely to kill the site than this decision is) - after all, if you upload it yourself (and I find it impossible to contemplate a world where anybody ELSE would want to look at YOUR cawk long enough to take a picture) that is clearly consent for publication.
Free speech has nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion. Your freedom has ALWAYS ended where mine began. Your free speech rights ENDS where it would violate my right to privacy.
Protecting the right to privacy is not censorship. Your freedom ENDS where mine begins. Your right to free speech ENDS where my right to privacy begins.
This has nothing to DO with offense. It has everything to do with the right to privacy, which is no LESS important a right than free speech. And your free speech rights do NOT include the right to do things that violate my right to privacy.
A picture taken for one person, under an agreement of confidentiality (even if it's a verbal one) is NOT your property, and you cannot share it and claim that is "free speech". It's NOT free speech. It's violation of contract, theft and invasion of privacy.
More-over there are a lot of cases (like the fappening) where the sharer was never involved in the "transaction" the image was never GIVEN to them - there wasn't even FIRST level consent- those pictures were stolen by a hacker.
It has nothing to do with prudishness or offernse. I married an art model, there are many, many naked (and very explicit) pictures of her on the internet - but they are there because she CHOSE to let them be taken, she CHOSE to let them be published. There are quite a few pictures from our shoots she didn't want published, because for some reason she wasn't happy with them - and those I have never uploaded anywhere. If somebody were to hack me and steal them and upload them -we'd be pissed.
This is somebody whose entire body, including pussy-close-ups are already on the net, hell there is an artistic erotic picture of her that deliberately includes highly pornographic actions with a vibrator to make a point - that image is on my own website, anybody can see it. But that image she consented to having out there.
It's not about whether nakedness is shameful - it's about who owns somebody's body, and the only RIGHT answer is: they do. THEY have the right to show it or not show it to somebody, and they get to choose whether or not so show it to you. When somebody else takes away their ability to make that choice - they are violating their body-ownership, which is rape pure and simple.
Then you either weren't paying attention or you have a very bad memory. Every attempt by the democrats to act against profiling has been met by vehement opposition from not only Republican politicians but massive outcries from Republican voters and organisations as well.
Not to mention Fox News who, of course, will always be there to remind you that racial profiling is not racist. Somehow.
No, that is your strawman. My argument is that you cannot as a group support profiling when it's done to other people then complain when it gets done to you. I was opposed to the IRS tactics but I actually had a RIGHT to be since I ALSO oppose all OTHER forms of profiling.
If you want to cite a definition of drinking the kool aid it's listing a whole lot of things wrong that NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED. They were all predicted, none of them occurred, and none of the things in the CBO report that Faux News told you were so bad happened either because they deliberately twisted the meanings to make reports of extremely good effects sound bad - by deliberately pretending those words meant exactly the OPPOSITE of what they actually did.
Faux news claimed that the report said that social mobility had been harmed, when it ACTUALLY said that people were now MORE free to change jobs because fear of losing your insurance didn't deter them anymore, which means social mobility was improved. The same goes for every other claim you just cited.
I don't have to be afraid of a scary effect unless it actually HAPPENED.
People who work in businesses are people, businesses are not. They are, after all, legally distinct entities. When your talking about corporations it's even moreso since the owners of the business generally do not even WORK there.
The people IN the business, even the owners, have liberties - but there is no sane reason the business should have those same liberties. It makes perfect sense to let Joe the Plumber put up a blog saying Kellogs Turdflakes gives you curly hair, it's quite another to allow Kellogs to advertise that as a feature on television and defraud potential customers (and ALL advertising that is not 100% scientifically verifiable is fraud in my book). But it gets kind of hard to prosecute false advertising when you allow the companies that commit this fraud to claim they have a right to freedom of speech.
Journalists should have a right to free speech, there is no reason the paper that employs them needs the same right. Publishing the paper doesn't require that at all - only that everybody who wrote for it has that right. That way, you can sanely regulate what's on the advertising pages for example without intruding on freedom of the press.
The same goes for all liberties.
Benjamin Franklin said of property rights that they are not a natural right at all, but one constructed by society for the benefit OF society - and should last only as long as that is true. Private ownership of any particular kind in other words, should be revoked if a point is reached where having private ownership of the resource is harming the rest of society. Laws created property, laws can destroy it. I would be rightfully hesitant about any time that individual property is considered for such a revocation, it's risky and should only be undertaken with extreme diligence - but I would be far less concerned if it affected something only corporations own in the first place. Reducing or removing those rights almost ALWAYS ends up being to the greater benefit of society as a whole. A good example is patents and copyrights (which, while not actually property are essentially used the same way so the same logic applies) massive REDUCING the duration of copyright now will make the individuals in society MUCH more free and only harm a few corporations - who don't have rights in the first place except for what we choose to give them because WE benefit from them having it. The ability to mock Disney with my own Mickey Mouse cartoon is a far more important freedom than their ability to cash in on him and be protected from such critiques by copyright.
Human rights belong to humans, and only humans - not to legal entitities that are divorced from the entire human condition. They can potentially live for ever, can potentially amass wealth forever, and thus amass resources far beyond human ability - and so distort all of society. They aren't human because they are not subject to human weaknesses, ergo they should not have the rights we grant humans.
>I must be getting old when 7-digit UID"s are long time slashdotters This is not my original account. I lost the access to it somehow during a leave I took a few years ago and ended up creating a new one. My original account dated from 1998.
>The reason for that is obvious when you know that 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan-fiction.
>I don't know, what we have *is* working with basic freedoms. I'll take liberty over cheap speeds any day.
There is NO impact on liberty here, in fact, regulation almost NEVER impacts on liberty. Business aren't people and don't HAVE freedoms - you can't take away what isn't there. When government laws are controlling YOU - you get a right to complain.
When they are stopping monopolies from fucking people over, you do not get a right to complain just because fox news told you big corporations are people too.
How do Republicans still manage to keep convincing themselves the ACA was this huge failure ? Do you people read any news EXCEPT Fox ? Because, on the ground, it's been one of the most successfully and all-round good pieces of legislation your country achieved in about 40 years. It wasn't universal single-payer healthcare, that would have been better, but it's way better than what you had - which was a system that literally couldn't be be made worse. Seriously, what you had before was at the point where if hospitals were actually giving people turds instead of medicine it would have been an IMPROVEMENT.
Slashdot Mirror
And he was lying.
There are 47% of the population who pay no FEDERAL INCOME TAX.
They still pay all the OTHER taxes people pay.
He also ignored that the vast majority of that 47% are NOT welfare recipients or unemployed people.
They are the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the retired pensioners who worked hard their entire lives so they could stop working in their old age.
That statement was deceptive at best, blatant lying if you're being fair.
The maker isn't a major issue indeed, contrary to what the fearmongers say. I also run CM and never have I had a problem.
There is some backwards compatibility problems, many apps won't run on earlier android versions which is a problem for devices that aren't supported anymore and don't have good current custom ROMS either (though this is rare, most devices even if they no longer have manufacturer support has somebody, somewhere still making ROMS for them - this is how I can run KitKat on my first generation Asus Transformer tablet).
We need more fragmentation. The mobile world would better if I could choose to run Ubuntu-Android, Fedora-Android, Samsung-Android or Google-Android on my phone.
You almost can, Samsung's spin is not like what's on the Nexus and neither is like Cyanogenmod which isn't like most of the other many custom ROMS out there.
I agree it would be better if swapping out ROMS were a LOT easier, rooting wasn't needed (because they came with it enabled) and more of the big Linux Distros were building ROMS that could run on Android devices, possibly some of them could even bypass the android interface and libraries and not run dalvik code but COULD run recompiled linux apps.
That would be a pretty cool step forward. I had high hopes that Ubuntuphone would be the first step towards that but sadly it seems to have whithered while losing it's most killer-app feature along the way (the dock your phone and have a desktop one).
Now please eradicate the false dichotomy from your thinking that makes you think "anti-corporation" must equal "pro-government".
Then try answering me again and you may actually say something sensible.
Well Facebook's entire business model is to BE intrusive.
If they can save a few lives with it it actually makes them, on balance, very slightly LESS evil.
>On the other hand, for a corporation — operating in a reasonably free country — the best way to riches is through providing services and/or making goods, that people are willing to pay for.
This statement is guilty of the begging the question fallacy, in fact it's begging SEVERAL questions.
You are making numerous implicit assumptions which don't hold up to scrutiny.
1) You assume that "reasonably free country" is a representative example of the places where corporations operate, but most corporations today are global multinationals operating in all countries, and they love to make use of that by doing in the non-free countries all the evil things that they can't (as easily) do in the free countries.
2) You claim this is the best way for a corporation to get rich, but you offer no evidence to support that claim. That's not rational thought, that's a religious belief without any basis in fact. A mere moment's critical thinking and you'll be able to come up with thousands of ways a corporation can, at any moment, make more money than it could by doing that- and history is filled with examples, EVERY SINGLE DAY. A big news one recently was when Oracle decided the best way to riches was to take the MONEY for providing a service to the taxpayers of Portland without actually providing the service, and giving just a token piece of junk instead. Now when you or I do that, we get charged with fraud and go to jail, Oracle knew they would only face a lawsuit which would take many years to go to trail where it will be heard by a judge who probably won't understand the arguments and even if they lose they'll get a slap on the wrist because folks like you have destroyed the tort system. So the basic claim is clearly not true at all times for all transactions, in fact, for most corporations it's probably only true in a tiny minority of cases. You can try defend them on the basis of fearing government and since the other party here was the government but that's not logical. Logically you should say "if they are prepared to scam EVEN the government I fear so much with impunity, what stops them from scamming any and every other customer in the world ?"
3) You assume that, even when 1 and 2 are both true (which is now a very small number of cases) the people in charge of the corporations will always and without exception be sufficiently competent to KNOW this. That they will never end up doing something that makes less money but is more evil simply because made a bad decision. But corporations make bad decisions all the time, sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes it's a lack of perfect information or both - but you can't assume that even when both conditions hold and this really IS the best option the corporations will never end up doing something else because they didn't make the best CHOICE.
Enron made some really bad choices - and the directors ended up deciding the best way to riches was to pay themselves massive bonusses out of the company's debt pool less than a day before they announced the company was bankrupt and over a thousand people were suddenly and surprisingly devoid of an income.
4) But even in the vanishingly small number of cases where all three the above conditions hold you are assuming that the corporation will ONLY do the "best" thing to riches, and not the 2 best things, or the 3 best things or the 20 best things - of which ONLY the first option was one that isn't harming somebody else. PG&E was providing electricity to customers - a services they paid for while at the SAME time improving their bottom line by not paying to clean up toxic waste properly and dumping it in people's drinking water instead.
5) You assume that the way a product or service is provided to one customer cannot harm another.
Facebook is the perfect example here - their product is private information for targetted advertising, the users aren't the customers, they are the product that facebook is selling and facebook has had a trackrecord of numerous incredibly evil things done
Identifying him as the owner was surely something he could, potentially, have made a privacy claim about.
If I were to hack slashdot's servers to find the IP of some AC poster and find out his real name and identify him as the poster of something he may get fired for - he'd have a legitimate claim that I violated his privacy.
On the other hand, if he turns out to be an elected representative and his AC post was a screed on the need to nail all black people to burning crosses the public interest would outweigh his privacy claim.
Generally voters would be correct in thinking they have a right to KNOW if their elected representative is a closet KKK member. Why should other objectionable publications by politicians receive any less scrutiny ?
I agree, it ought to be illegal, but while it isn't everywhere yet, it makes sense to support private citizens who try to act with what we both agree is the most respect for the rights of other people even if those rights are not protected by laws.
It's probably good that it's being made illegal more and more, assuming the laws are well-written, but it's not illegal everywhere just yet.
But from that thought it logically follows that it's probably good if private website owners choose not to provide a platform to facilitate things they obviously do not agree with.
Nobody thinks it's censorship that most churches will not let you put a link to buy the satanic bible from Amazon on their websites.
There is nothing illegal about the satanic bible, there are plenty of ways to acquire a copy - including buying it from Amazon. No Christian church is obligated to facilitate the spreading of a message they find objectionable.
>I'm sure it's legal to post your credit card details and bank information. I would very much like you to post that using your freedom of speech.
Actually, you can improve this analogy. For him to be logically consistent with the stupid argument he is making - he would have to agree that if *I* steal his wallet and post his credit card details on reddit and then return the wallet - he would be quite happy to let reddit leave the details there ?
Ironically - that is a much lesser violation of his rights than what he is actually defending. Money is not worth nearly as much as a person's right to ownership of their own bodies.
Tell that to the tabloid who took snaps of Brad Pitt boning that chick from Friends that nobody remembers and published them.
Pitt and Aniston sued, and won. The judge ruled (correctly) that freedom of speech and freedom of the press does NOT give you the right to violate somebody else's right to privacy.
This can, on rare occasions, be superceded by public interest. Anthony Weiners dick pics had public interest since HE was a public servant. That clause can never apply to a private citizen however.
There is no way anybody will convince a sober judge that Brad's junk is so important for the public interest that his right to privacy should be superceded.
Actually your cawk would still be allowed on reddit (which is probably MORE likely to kill the site than this decision is) - after all, if you upload it yourself (and I find it impossible to contemplate a world where anybody ELSE would want to look at YOUR cawk long enough to take a picture) that is clearly consent for publication.
Free speech has nothing whatsoever to do with the discussion. Your freedom has ALWAYS ended where mine began. Your free speech rights ENDS where it would violate my right to privacy.
Protecting the right to privacy is not censorship. Your freedom ENDS where mine begins. Your right to free speech ENDS where my right to privacy begins.
This has nothing to DO with offense. It has everything to do with the right to privacy, which is no LESS important a right than free speech.
And your free speech rights do NOT include the right to do things that violate my right to privacy.
A picture taken for one person, under an agreement of confidentiality (even if it's a verbal one) is NOT your property, and you cannot share it and claim that is "free speech". It's NOT free speech. It's violation of contract, theft and invasion of privacy.
More-over there are a lot of cases (like the fappening) where the sharer was never involved in the "transaction" the image was never GIVEN to them - there wasn't even FIRST level consent- those pictures were stolen by a hacker.
It has nothing to do with prudishness or offernse. I married an art model, there are many, many naked (and very explicit) pictures of her on the internet - but they are there because she CHOSE to let them be taken, she CHOSE to let them be published.
There are quite a few pictures from our shoots she didn't want published, because for some reason she wasn't happy with them - and those I have never uploaded anywhere.
If somebody were to hack me and steal them and upload them -we'd be pissed.
This is somebody whose entire body, including pussy-close-ups are already on the net, hell there is an artistic erotic picture of her that deliberately includes highly pornographic actions with a vibrator to make a point - that image is on my own website, anybody can see it.
But that image she consented to having out there.
It's not about whether nakedness is shameful - it's about who owns somebody's body, and the only RIGHT answer is: they do. THEY have the right to show it or not show it to somebody, and they get to choose whether or not so show it to you. When somebody else takes away their ability to make that choice - they are violating their body-ownership, which is rape pure and simple.
Then you either weren't paying attention or you have a very bad memory. Every attempt by the democrats to act against profiling has been met by vehement opposition from not only Republican politicians but massive outcries from Republican voters and organisations as well.
Not to mention Fox News who, of course, will always be there to remind you that racial profiling is not racist. Somehow.
No, that is your strawman.
My argument is that you cannot as a group support profiling when it's done to other people then complain when it gets done to you.
I was opposed to the IRS tactics but I actually had a RIGHT to be since I ALSO oppose all OTHER forms of profiling.
You're not wrong.
If you want to cite a definition of drinking the kool aid it's listing a whole lot of things wrong that NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
They were all predicted, none of them occurred, and none of the things in the CBO report that Faux News told you were so bad happened either because they deliberately twisted the meanings to make reports of extremely good effects sound bad - by deliberately pretending those words meant exactly the OPPOSITE of what they actually did.
Faux news claimed that the report said that social mobility had been harmed, when it ACTUALLY said that people were now MORE free to change jobs because fear of losing your insurance didn't deter them anymore, which means social mobility was improved.
The same goes for every other claim you just cited.
I don't have to be afraid of a scary effect unless it actually HAPPENED.
People who work in businesses are people, businesses are not.
They are, after all, legally distinct entities. When your talking about corporations it's even moreso since the owners of the business generally do not even WORK there.
The people IN the business, even the owners, have liberties - but there is no sane reason the business should have those same liberties.
It makes perfect sense to let Joe the Plumber put up a blog saying Kellogs Turdflakes gives you curly hair, it's quite another to allow Kellogs to advertise that as a feature on television and defraud potential customers (and ALL advertising that is not 100% scientifically verifiable is fraud in my book).
But it gets kind of hard to prosecute false advertising when you allow the companies that commit this fraud to claim they have a right to freedom of speech.
Journalists should have a right to free speech, there is no reason the paper that employs them needs the same right. Publishing the paper doesn't require that at all - only that everybody who wrote for it has that right.
That way, you can sanely regulate what's on the advertising pages for example without intruding on freedom of the press.
The same goes for all liberties.
Benjamin Franklin said of property rights that they are not a natural right at all, but one constructed by society for the benefit OF society - and should last only as long as that is true. Private ownership of any particular kind in other words, should be revoked if a point is reached where having private ownership of the resource is harming the rest of society. Laws created property, laws can destroy it.
I would be rightfully hesitant about any time that individual property is considered for such a revocation, it's risky and should only be undertaken with extreme diligence - but I would be far less concerned if it affected something only corporations own in the first place. Reducing or removing those rights almost ALWAYS ends up being to the greater benefit of society as a whole.
A good example is patents and copyrights (which, while not actually property are essentially used the same way so the same logic applies) massive REDUCING the duration of copyright now will make the individuals in society MUCH more free and only harm a few corporations - who don't have rights in the first place except for what we choose to give them because WE benefit from them having it.
The ability to mock Disney with my own Mickey Mouse cartoon is a far more important freedom than their ability to cash in on him and be protected from such critiques by copyright.
Human rights belong to humans, and only humans - not to legal entitities that are divorced from the entire human condition. They can potentially live for ever, can potentially amass wealth forever, and thus amass resources far beyond human ability - and so distort all of society. They aren't human because they are not subject to human weaknesses, ergo they should not have the rights we grant humans.
But you can't defend one and not the other.
Opposing both is logically consistent but the rightwingers have been defending one.
>I must be getting old when 7-digit UID"s are long time slashdotters
This is not my original account. I lost the access to it somehow during a leave I took a few years ago and ended up creating a new one. My original account dated from 1998.
>The reason for that is obvious when you know that 50 Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan-fiction.
That sounds remarkably likely :P
>I don't know, what we have *is* working with basic freedoms. I'll take liberty over cheap speeds any day.
There is NO impact on liberty here, in fact, regulation almost NEVER impacts on liberty. Business aren't people and don't HAVE freedoms - you can't take away what isn't there.
When government laws are controlling YOU - you get a right to complain.
When they are stopping monopolies from fucking people over, you do not get a right to complain just because fox news told you big corporations are people too.
How do Republicans still manage to keep convincing themselves the ACA was this huge failure ?
Do you people read any news EXCEPT Fox ? Because, on the ground, it's been one of the most successfully and all-round good pieces of legislation your country achieved in about 40 years.
It wasn't universal single-payer healthcare, that would have been better, but it's way better than what you had - which was a system that literally couldn't be be made worse. Seriously, what you had before was at the point where if hospitals were actually giving people turds instead of medicine it would have been an IMPROVEMENT.
The competitors should make each other nervous.
The government squatting more regulation on us all should make us all nervous.
That only works if you actually HAVE competitors.
Even then, not always.
The hand isn't invisible, much like every other religion, it was never really there to begin with.