You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
People also want a lot of things I could do without, but so what. Who am i? Who are you? Who is Monsanto to decide we can't know true facts about the things we put in our bodies???
The worst disasters in history haven't been because people had too much information some of which was useless. The worst disasters come about because some small segment of our population thinks it knows what's good for the rest of us and tries to impose it's will on us. So that's shit like Vietnam and all kinds of imperialism generally. People want this- it means something to them. People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them. People want country of origin labeling for meat for GOOD reason- because some nations practice poor CJD defense and some don't. People want dolphin free tuna because it MEANS something to them and their value system. Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
Just. Stop it.
Also, as a matter of fact, you don't know that all present and future GMO products are not unsafe in ways people fear. I know what because I looked into it and decided for myself that the risk it low, but by no means zero. By no means.
If you want thew ability to distinguish GMO from non-GMO in your grocery store then you better act fast because Obama is about to try to ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership which will permit the WTO to ban GMO labeling the way it bans meat country-of -origin labeling and dolphin-safe labels:
Letter excerpt from
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, to United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk,
First, past FTAs incorporate the WTO's sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade rules, which are deeply problematic. These rules set ceilings on signatory countries' domestic food safety standards. As a result, WTO panels have ruled against the U.S. meat country-of-origin labeling requirements and voluntary dolphin-safe tuna labels in challenges brought by other WTO countries. We must learn from the record of WTO implementation and modify the food safety-related rules of U.S. trade pacts to best protect the public health, starting with a TPP FTA.
What is to be gained by informing consumers when they just can't really understand the issues! This is what you're saying and not even in other words- that's just what you're saying. It's disgusting. I can see why you posted AC.
It's called having faith in democracy and the ability of the polity to sort out issues. If that doesn't sound reasonable to you, then why not head off to N. Korea where the leaders think just like you do.
Just remember this- I'm here all night (another Friday night on/. loser!!) , so the more you talk, the more you give me a chance to rebut and further explore this topic.
Stop the TPP- contact your congressperson this weekedn!
Yeah you're wrong. It will ban GMO labeling , country of origin labeling and many other of the same types of consumer information that, people think is important to them (which I actually don't except that other people do want these things and they have the right to know )
Letter form Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, to the United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk:
First, past FTAs incorporate the WTOâ(TM)s sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade rules, which are deeply problematic. These rules set ceilings on signatory countriesâ(TM) domestic food safety standards. As a result, WTO panels have ruled against the U.S. meat country-of-origin labeling requirements and voluntary dolphin-safe tuna labels in challenges brought by other WTO countries. We must learn from the record of WTO implementation and modify the food safety-related rules of U.S. trade pacts to best protect the public health, starting with a TPP FTA.
The FDA has also engaged in extensive harmonization of food safety standards, as required by the WTO SPS rules and our past FTAs. If a TPP FTA is to include food safety harmonization, then it must ensure existing U.S. standards are not weakened. I believe this should include requiring that harmonization may only be conducted on the basis of raising standards toward the best standards of any signatory country and that, with respect to the United States, such international-standard setting should provide the public an opportunity to comment while maintaining an open and transparent process.
In addition, the past FTA model includes the establishment of new SPS committees to speed up implementation of mechanisms to facilitate increased trade volumes, including âoeequivalenceâ determinations. The equivalence rule requires the United States to permit imports of meat, poultry and now possibly seafood products that do not necessarily meet U.S. food safety standards. I firmly believe that all food sold to American consumers must be required to meet U.S. safety standards, and that a TPP FTA should not include equivalence rules as the basis for the United States accepting food imports.
Finally, past FTAs allow for private enforcement of extensive foreign investor rights. Under these rules, foreign food corporations operating within the United States are empowered to demand compensation from the U.S. government in foreign tribunals established under the United Nations and World Bank if U.S. regulatory actions undermine their expected future profits. Even when the United States successfully defends against such attacks, such as in the NAFTA investor-state case brought by the Canadian Cattlemen for Fair Trade over the U.S. ban on imports of live Canadian cattle after the discovery of a case of mad cow disease in Canada, the initial filing of the challenge has a chilling effect on policymaking and the U.S. government must spend millions on a legal defense. Accordingly, I believe a TPP FTA must not include investor-state rules that would allow corporations to weaken U.S. food safety in foreign tribunals thereby unnecessarily placing American consumers at risk.
The food safety issues raised by the TPP FTA negotiations are expansive and in many instances already controversial. Failure to deal with these issues during the negotiations will only create more opposition to a prospective agreement. I therefore urge you to act in the interest of public health and maintain the United Statesâ(TM) strong lea
Fame is a form that males can assume that makes them "better" than other males. This, and you and your engineering buddies aren't "rich", you're just average doing OK relatively speaking
yeah but you forgot the disclaimer that lwg and views WOOFY GOOFY as a longstanding enemy and you go after every pot of mine you can find. Just full disclosure, that's all we're asking for lgw
The TPP will make it illegal to label your food GMO free and no, it won't matter what your nation's legislature had to say on the topic or would like to say later. The TPP will supercede the laws of you nation's legislature:
Let's not get lost here. We need and want the NSA to do it's legitimate job in protecting the nation against terrorists and people to whom the idea of "mass extinction" is just a shorter way to get their god to sort us all into our respective eternal bins.
The whole issue with the NSA eavesdropping is the potential for , as Snowden admirably put it, "turnkey tyranny". That's not nothing, that's not such an unlikely result of this kind of power being applied to the world's population that we don't have to worry about it. We do have to worry about it and we have to turn them back from the path they're on before it becomes more than a hypothetical worry.
But we WANT them to get a quantum computer and every other thing under the sun they can get. Yes, absolutely we do, even as we do the work that needs to be done to make sure our liberties stay intact.
Yeah, WTF are you talking about? Do you even know? I am talking about the UK govt. classifying people like David Miranda and the papers like the Guardian as "terrorists" and you're talking about chemtrails. Then your buddys' are jumping in talking about chemtrails. What is this, a UK sponsored hijacking of my point?
Go fucking fuck your fucking selves. The word "terrorist" can't be used to describe "anyone who pisses us off on matters of national security or business " or it will lose all meaning and take the faith of the population in government with it.
The government has to protect it's reputation and deal with complex situations honestly if it's going to be respected.
Those parts of the security apparatus who think they can rule nations and their people by fear and intimidation instead of representing their legitimate interests are dangerous to any nation that permits them to have access to power.
I disagree. If you read RTFAs that cover this topic, he was clearly very prescient. His Big Mistake was to consider that the people who Run The Show would have any interest in elevating humanity so as to achieve Asimov's own egalitarian vision of universal equality wrt to material well being, leisure time and general wealth. Given when he wrote , this was universally just accepted as The Goal of Society.
We now know better. We now understand that males will attempt to create and sustain as much of a material differential as they possibly can between themselves and other males for the purpose of creating, in the minds of fertile females, a perception of being "better" than other males.
This is, at core, what drives inequality. It's sexual competition where "fitness" is measured, as it is in every other species, as the ability to control resources OVER AND ABOVE the amount of resources the average specimen controls. This is what "being attractive" amounts to, for males, or at least that part of "being attractive" which is under their control so far.
So Asimov's thinking just wasn't well informed on this matter the way it was on technical matters. That's hardly to his discredit.
Re:The American Legal System's Double Standard
on
Losing Aaron
·
· Score: 1
Right. This is what happened with the financial meltdown, exactly. There were few prosecutions and none of the household -name people - Jamie Dimon Lloyd Blankfein, Angelo Mozilo, Richard Fuld, Bear Stearnsâ(TM)s Jimmy Cayne, Merrill Lynchâ(TM)s Stan Oâ(TM)Neal, Citigroupâ(TM)s Chuck Prince all of these people are untouchable even though we lost literally a trillion dollars and more during the meltdown and entire lifetime retirements of people were destroyed . Eric Holder and his justice department looks and looks but golly! just can't find a gosh-darn thing he can charge them with.
It's a joke. A sick sick joke and made me lose a LOT of respect for the whole process of criminal justice. This is not a nation of laws, it's a nation of money and a nation of men when it comes right down to it. Same thing with the Transpacific Partenership- people with money and connections are literally usurping the environmental, labor , patent, copyright and other laws of nations. Laws which were arrived at through the respective societys' democratic process.
This is how empires fail They overreach. They heedless impose the will of mere individuals - or in this case corporations- upon people who disapprove of what they're doing by a ratio, in this nation at least , of 300 million to one.
This is how societies collapse. This is the steady rip rip of the social contract between the government and it's people that is not forgotten but instead goes underground, into people's living memories only later to emerge and play a decisive roll in the dissolution of that society. The government is known by all, in this case left and right and center, to be corrupt, unresponsive, indifferent to its people and serving only the needs of its elite, which are endlessly craven and grasping and greedy. People are cynical, but that's just the outward tell of their inner states.
Then something ecological happens directly owing to the untrammeled greed of the 1% and the society goes down all at once. This is not speculative, it's happened time and time again. To the Anasazi of the U.S. Southwest, to the Classic Lowland Maya, to the inhabitants of Easter Island and some other Polynesian societies, to the Greenland Norse, to the Mycenean Greece, and to the Western Roman Empire.
Hate to present a totalizing narrative which "explains all things" but it's not just my opinion that this is coming; it's the Pentagon's and the NSA's also:
If the Pentagon and the NSA and Obama had any sense at all, they'd prioritize climate legislation and start treating the manufacturers and purveyors of climate change denial like the threat to civilization they literally are.
Then they'd go after the deprivations of the 1% - typical example the contents of the TPP- which are literally tearing the social fabric of this nation apart.
Sorry. Big anglophile here which is to say fascinated by "Engla-land" its history and it's people. Descended therefrom also. Doesn't stop em from seeing that this UK government is a fascist regime. Specifically
They have sought to turn the act of journalism into a "terrorist" (their word not mine) enterprise and consider journalists to BE terrorists. This is such a sad and sick distortion of this word it use itself threatens to undermine the population's faith and credence in legitimate authority and concern with national security.
This is how things are. The only real question is are you going to advocate in some fashion for what you believe. I writ my Congressional representative about once a month. I give some money to independent media outlets I think are worthwhile. I talk to my friends and acquaintances about what's going on. I share my thoughts online. Meh, that's what I have time to do except for the global warming issue, where I am more active .
Exactly. We learned this at age 13 in conservation camp. They showed us a film where they tried to heliocopter drop food to starving deer in the dead of winter (more deer came, there was never enough food, then the wolves picked up their collective scent) as a demonstration that, finally no matter what, there's nothing humanly doable about nature-induced animal suffering and starvation in the wild.
like the outdoors but can't hunt myself because can't bring myself to shoot a living fluffy doe-eyed thing that's never done me a wrong.
It would have been better if the NYTImes had negotiated a joint statement with FoxNews and other news outlets that they ALL consider Snowden a whistleblower. By coming first (yay! we're first! ) they may have enhanced their reputation with a few liberals as defenders of civil liberties but they also invoked the "NYTimes is wrong about everything ! " reflex in a lot of conservatives. In fact, from what I've seen conservatives are just as outraged about the NSA spying scandal as are liberals.
Yeah what PETA doesn't want to understand is all those animals they think they're going to stop hunters from hunting are going to die of starvation or be torn to shreds by predators if they're not hunted by humans.
The fact is , animals in the wild are going to die horrifying deaths, each of them. It's called "over population" and "predator-prey balance" and hunting seasons are just those season where the predator to prey balance has swung strongly in one direction, meaning there's a lot of prey that's just doomed to violent deaths. This is how uncontested nature operates on populations, and it's ugly.
Death by hunter is neither cruel nor unusual by the measure of what else is available. Some kinds of traps are both cruel and unusual and in fact society BANS those traps, so society actually DOES care about the suffering of animals, suffering which in no way effects any member of society personally, why? because absent other forces, we're just humane, that's all.
It's hard to imagine the amount of growing up people in PETA just haven't done. It entails knowing avoiding learning anything about ecology yet thinking that your personal perception of how it can or ought to be practiced should reign over all established science and expertise.
The Authoritarians by Bob Altermeyer. A psychological researcher spends a lifetime following up the thread left by researchers like Stanley Milgram's (Obedience to Authority) and lays out once and for all the who, why and how of the authoritarian personality type. They're always with us, but at this point in time in America, they're clearly at the helm so this is a very relevant - and riveting- book.
If you want to know why people who listen to Limbaugh and Hannity are the way they are and why they're never going to change and why reasoning and evidence is totally irrelevant to the 30% of Americans who fit this profile, then this does more than argue some likely hypothesis; it proves the author's point through the application of the scientific method . Fascinating just for the reveal of his methodology, to see how a scientist even approaches something as amorphous as "authoritarian personality type. This book actually changed my life.
Nothing gives the government the right to have any authority over the people
Yeah, it's not true. We have a functioning government, it's just doing stuff some people don't like. YOUR JOB is to change people's minds about stuff so people vote for people who do what you want. It's not fast, it can indeed go off the tracks and in the end no one is totally happy and everyone is somewhat pissed off. It's called LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE. This is the reality of living with other people.
If you can't convince people you're right, and you still want to force the government to stop doing shit, then can always try civil disobedience ala MLK. That works, eventually. If you just want to force the government to do something because you think it's right then YOU'RE the asshole. That's how democracy works.
Just the way people forget that freedom comes at the price of some insecurity so also people LIKE YOU forget that democracy comes at the price of unsatisfactory outcomes.
There is no other way. There is no wonderful group of people who will do the right thing and leave it at that.
Well here's at least one reason this is happening. Essentially when confronted with a question of the form "should we permit X to do Y upon Z in order to keep us safe ?" the individual answering that question effectively considers whether or not they'll ever be Z. No federal judge is ever going to be stopped at an airport . No federal judge is ever going to have his laptop searched at the border. In fact none of the rulings federal judges make will ever apply to them personally or anyone with the power to pick up a phone and call that judge to complain that X is about to do Y to them.
Essentially the way judges hear the proposition is: "would you like us to increase security for you, sir?" They know if for some ungodly oversight they were ever actually asked to turn over their laptop to a customs agent, one phone call and it all goes away before the agent can boot their Windows 8 (this is who's buying that dog btw ) installation and that agent would soon be manning the un-airconditioned , 3x5 border booth in 105 degree heat watching over some dirt road in Tumbleweed Town, Texas.
So get real. You're asking people To Whom Nothing Adverse Is Permitted To Happen if they would like ditch the Constitution within 100 miles of any border so that he and his can feel in some nighty-night, all-tucked-in way "safer".
I am sure the nation's judicial benches are deep with such people. I am sure that people capable of considering the effects of their decisions on a nation and on its people are few and far between. Last week's judge was citing as supporting evidence the 9-11 commission report even though the 9-11 commission report said, substantively, exactly the opposite of what he claimed in his judgement it said.
I've made my point that Christians have no business banning books owing to their having used the Bible to murder millions, a fact that ought to serve, if we're banning books, in having it banned everywhere.
Of course I am not interested in banning books or persecuting authors of books , denying them access to libraries and readers. Only chirstians are.
No matter how you twist and turn the facts are the facts. Christians are trying to get books banned because they feel those books represent in some faint way some alternative worldview other than christianity. This is what they do. This is what they've done throughout history whether it's the catholic church going after Galileo or the Scopes trials or evolution or the assault of education by local school boards crammed with fundies. Christianity attacks other people who don't believe as they do. It's an aggressive religion which attacks civil society every chance it gets. Christianity attacks everything not in accord with its world view, as we clearly see here and it is no different from fundamental Islam in this regard.
you'll openly mock and incite hate towards christians where the bible may condone though the religion itself condemns, where as you get offended on the muslims behalf if someone speak against them even though they actively do what is written in their religion.
And I did this where exactly? maybe you should actually read threads you participate in. If you bothered to do that you'd see my link to :
Yeah defending banning books IS attacking people defending against censorship. I am not making myself a victim. The victims are the authors and would be readers of the banned books. The victimizers are the fundie and evangelical christians who are using religion and the bible once again to attack civil society.
If your assertion is that Christians have no business attempting to censor what you consider relatively 'benign' books because wars and persecution were fought on the basis of Christian beliefs,
Yeah but that's not my point. It's not that Christians have historically fought wars generally which disqualifies them from attacking just any idea or books, it's that they've done it citing specific passages from their holy book as the REASON and JUSTIFICATION to kill those people. There is a direct connection between their book and the way they used it to deaths of millions. Yet they want these other harmless books banned.
Sorry , that point couldn't be clearer. You don't see it? Really? I mean, really?
Slashdot Mirror
You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
People also want a lot of things I could do without, but so what. Who am i? Who are you? Who is Monsanto to decide we can't know true facts about the things we put in our bodies???
The worst disasters in history haven't been because people had too much information some of which was useless. The worst disasters come about because some small segment of our population thinks it knows what's good for the rest of us and tries to impose it's will on us. So that's shit like Vietnam and all kinds of imperialism generally. People want this- it means something to them. People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them. People want country of origin labeling for meat for GOOD reason- because some nations practice poor CJD defense and some don't. People want dolphin free tuna because it MEANS something to them and their value system. Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
Just. Stop it.
Also, as a matter of fact, you don't know that all present and future GMO products are not unsafe in ways people fear. I know what because I looked into it and decided for myself that the risk it low, but by no means zero. By no means.
If you want thew ability to distinguish GMO from non-GMO in your grocery store then you better act fast because Obama is about to try to ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership which will permit the WTO to ban GMO labeling the way it bans meat country-of -origin labeling and dolphin-safe labels:
Letter excerpt from
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, to United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk,
full letter:
http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:-delauro-food-safety-critical-issue-in-upcoming-trade-talks&catid=7:2011-press-releases&Itemid=23
First, past FTAs incorporate the WTO's sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade rules, which are deeply problematic. These rules set ceilings on signatory countries' domestic food safety standards. As a result, WTO panels have ruled against the U.S. meat country-of-origin labeling requirements and voluntary dolphin-safe tuna labels in challenges brought by other WTO countries. We must learn from the record of WTO implementation and modify the food safety-related rules of U.S. trade pacts to best protect the public health, starting with a TPP FTA.
Contact your Congressperson right NOW! :
http://www.exposethetpp.org/
What is to be gained by informing consumers when they just can't really understand the issues! This is what you're saying and not even in other words- that's just what you're saying. It's disgusting. I can see why you posted AC.
It's called having faith in democracy and the ability of the polity to sort out issues. If that doesn't sound reasonable to you, then why not head off to N. Korea where the leaders think just like you do.
Just remember this- I'm here all night (another Friday night on /. loser!!) , so the more you talk, the more you give me a chance to rebut and further explore this topic.
Stop the TPP- contact your congressperson this weekedn!
https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
TPP > PIPA + SOPA
Yeah you're wrong. It will ban GMO labeling , country of origin labeling and many other of the same types of consumer information that, people think is important to them (which I actually don't except that other people do want these things and they have the right to know )
Letter form Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, to the United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk:
from: http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:-delauro-food-safety-critical-issue-in-upcoming-trade-talks&catid=7:2011-press-releases&Itemid=23
First, past FTAs incorporate the WTOâ(TM)s sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) and technical barriers to trade rules, which are deeply problematic. These rules set ceilings on signatory countriesâ(TM) domestic food safety standards. As a result, WTO panels have ruled against the U.S. meat country-of-origin labeling requirements and voluntary dolphin-safe tuna labels in challenges brought by other WTO countries. We must learn from the record of WTO implementation and modify the food safety-related rules of U.S. trade pacts to best protect the public health, starting with a TPP FTA.
The FDA has also engaged in extensive harmonization of food safety standards, as required by the WTO SPS rules and our past FTAs. If a TPP FTA is to include food safety harmonization, then it must ensure existing U.S. standards are not weakened. I believe this should include requiring that harmonization may only be conducted on the basis of raising standards toward the best standards of any signatory country and that, with respect to the United States, such international-standard setting should provide the public an opportunity to comment while maintaining an open and transparent process.
In addition, the past FTA model includes the establishment of new SPS committees to speed up implementation of mechanisms to facilitate increased trade volumes, including âoeequivalenceâ determinations. The equivalence rule requires the United States to permit imports of meat, poultry and now possibly seafood products that do not necessarily meet U.S. food safety standards. I firmly believe that all food sold to American consumers must be required to meet U.S. safety standards, and that a TPP FTA should not include equivalence rules as the basis for the United States accepting food imports.
Finally, past FTAs allow for private enforcement of extensive foreign investor rights. Under these rules, foreign food corporations operating within the United States are empowered to demand compensation from the U.S. government in foreign tribunals established under the United Nations and World Bank if U.S. regulatory actions undermine their expected future profits. Even when the United States successfully defends against such attacks, such as in the NAFTA investor-state case brought by the Canadian Cattlemen for Fair Trade over the U.S. ban on imports of live Canadian cattle after the discovery of a case of mad cow disease in Canada, the initial filing of the challenge has a chilling effect on policymaking and the U.S. government must spend millions on a legal defense. Accordingly, I believe a TPP FTA must not include investor-state rules that would allow corporations to weaken U.S. food safety in foreign tribunals thereby unnecessarily placing American consumers at risk.
The food safety issues raised by the TPP FTA negotiations are expansive and in many instances already controversial. Failure to deal with these issues during the negotiations will only create more opposition to a prospective agreement. I therefore urge you to act in the interest of public health and maintain the United Statesâ(TM) strong lea
Fame is a form that males can assume that makes them "better" than other males. This, and you and your engineering buddies aren't "rich", you're just average doing OK relatively speaking
yeah but you forgot the disclaimer that lwg and views WOOFY GOOFY as a longstanding enemy and you go after every pot of mine you can find. Just full disclosure, that's all we're asking for lgw
The TPP will make it illegal to label your food GMO free and no, it won't matter what your nation's legislature had to say on the topic or would like to say later. The TPP will supercede the laws of you nation's legislature:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/09/obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4414891.html
http://www.nationofchange.org/trans-pacific-partnership-and-monsanto-1372074730
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_tpp_tafta_monsanto_protection_act_on_steroids/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-r-shaffer/tobacco-symbol-of-corrupt_b_4439416.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/041965_tpp_gmo_labeling_monsanto.html#
Let's not get lost here. We need and want the NSA to do it's legitimate job in protecting the nation against terrorists and people to whom the idea of "mass extinction" is just a shorter way to get their god to sort us all into our respective eternal bins.
The whole issue with the NSA eavesdropping is the potential for , as Snowden admirably put it, "turnkey tyranny". That's not nothing, that's not such an unlikely result of this kind of power being applied to the world's population that we don't have to worry about it. We do have to worry about it and we have to turn them back from the path they're on before it becomes more than a hypothetical worry.
But we WANT them to get a quantum computer and every other thing under the sun they can get. Yes, absolutely we do, even as we do the work that needs to be done to make sure our liberties stay intact.
Yeah, WTF are you talking about? Do you even know? I am talking about the UK govt. classifying people like David Miranda and the papers like the Guardian as "terrorists" and you're talking about chemtrails. Then your buddys' are jumping in talking about chemtrails. What is this, a UK sponsored hijacking of my point?
Go fucking fuck your fucking selves. The word "terrorist" can't be used to describe "anyone who pisses us off on matters of national security or business " or it will lose all meaning and take the faith of the population in government with it.
The government has to protect it's reputation and deal with complex situations honestly if it's going to be respected.
Those parts of the security apparatus who think they can rule nations and their people by fear and intimidation instead of representing their legitimate interests are dangerous to any nation that permits them to have access to power.
I disagree. If you read RTFAs that cover this topic, he was clearly very prescient. His Big Mistake was to consider that the people who Run The Show would have any interest in elevating humanity so as to achieve Asimov's own egalitarian vision of universal equality wrt to material well being, leisure time and general wealth. Given when he wrote , this was universally just accepted as The Goal of Society.
We now know better. We now understand that males will attempt to create and sustain as much of a material differential as they possibly can between themselves and other males for the purpose of creating, in the minds of fertile females, a perception of being "better" than other males.
This is, at core, what drives inequality. It's sexual competition where "fitness" is measured, as it is in every other species, as the ability to control resources OVER AND ABOVE the amount of resources the average specimen controls. This is what "being attractive" amounts to, for males, or at least that part of "being attractive" which is under their control so far.
So Asimov's thinking just wasn't well informed on this matter the way it was on technical matters. That's hardly to his discredit.
Right. This is what happened with the financial meltdown, exactly. There were few prosecutions and none of the household -name people - Jamie Dimon Lloyd Blankfein, Angelo Mozilo, Richard Fuld, Bear Stearnsâ(TM)s Jimmy Cayne, Merrill Lynchâ(TM)s Stan Oâ(TM)Neal, Citigroupâ(TM)s Chuck Prince all of these people are untouchable even though we lost literally a trillion dollars and more during the meltdown and entire lifetime retirements of people were destroyed . Eric Holder and his justice department looks and looks but golly! just can't find a gosh-darn thing he can charge them with.
It's a joke. A sick sick joke and made me lose a LOT of respect for the whole process of criminal justice. This is not a nation of laws, it's a nation of money and a nation of men when it comes right down to it. Same thing with the Transpacific Partenership- people with money and connections are literally usurping the environmental, labor , patent, copyright and other laws of nations. Laws which were arrived at through the respective societys' democratic process.
This is how empires fail They overreach. They heedless impose the will of mere individuals - or in this case corporations- upon people who disapprove of what they're doing by a ratio, in this nation at least , of 300 million to one.
This is how societies collapse. This is the steady rip rip of the social contract between the government and it's people that is not forgotten but instead goes underground, into people's living memories only later to emerge and play a decisive roll in the dissolution of that society. The government is known by all, in this case left and right and center, to be corrupt, unresponsive, indifferent to its people and serving only the needs of its elite, which are endlessly craven and grasping and greedy. People are cynical, but that's just the outward tell of their inner states.
Then something ecological happens directly owing to the untrammeled greed of the 1% and the society goes down all at once. This is not speculative, it's happened time and time again. To the Anasazi of the U.S. Southwest, to the Classic Lowland Maya, to the inhabitants of Easter Island and some other Polynesian societies, to the Greenland Norse, to the Mycenean Greece, and to the Western Roman Empire.
Hate to present a totalizing narrative which "explains all things" but it's not just my opinion that this is coming; it's the Pentagon's and the NSA's also:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
If the Pentagon and the NSA and Obama had any sense at all, they'd prioritize climate legislation and start treating the manufacturers and purveyors of climate change denial like the threat to civilization they literally are.
Then they'd go after the deprivations of the 1% - typical example the contents of the TPP- which are literally tearing the social fabric of this nation apart.
https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
http://www.exposethetpp.org/
https://www.citizen.org/TPP
Environmental disaster as the trigger to societal collapse:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/10/3632.full
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
\http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/07/17/2858655.htm
Sorry. Big anglophile here which is to say fascinated by "Engla-land" its history and it's people. Descended therefrom also. Doesn't stop em from seeing that this UK government is a fascist regime. Specifically
They have sought to turn the act of journalism into a "terrorist" (their word not mine) enterprise and consider journalists to BE terrorists. This is such a sad and sick distortion of this word it use itself threatens to undermine the population's faith and credence in legitimate authority and concern with national security.
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/11/03/332673/outrage/
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/02-2
This is how things are. The only real question is are you going to advocate in some fashion for what you believe. I writ my Congressional representative about once a month. I give some money to independent media outlets I think are worthwhile. I talk to my friends and acquaintances about what's going on. I share my thoughts online. Meh, that's what I have time to do except for the global warming issue, where I am more active .
Exactly. We learned this at age 13 in conservation camp. They showed us a film where they tried to heliocopter drop food to starving deer in the dead of winter (more deer came, there was never enough food, then the wolves picked up their collective scent) as a demonstration that, finally no matter what, there's nothing humanly doable about nature-induced animal suffering and starvation in the wild.
like the outdoors but can't hunt myself because can't bring myself to shoot a living fluffy doe-eyed thing that's never done me a wrong.
Glad everyone's not me.
It would have been better if the NYTImes had negotiated a joint statement with FoxNews and other news outlets that they ALL consider Snowden a whistleblower. By coming first (yay! we're first! ) they may have enhanced their reputation with a few liberals as defenders of civil liberties but they also invoked the "NYTimes is wrong about everything ! " reflex in a lot of conservatives. In fact, from what I've seen conservatives are just as outraged about the NSA spying scandal as are liberals.
Yeah what PETA doesn't want to understand is all those animals they think they're going to stop hunters from hunting are going to die of starvation or be torn to shreds by predators if they're not hunted by humans.
The fact is , animals in the wild are going to die horrifying deaths, each of them. It's called "over population" and "predator-prey balance" and hunting seasons are just those season where the predator to prey balance has swung strongly in one direction, meaning there's a lot of prey that's just doomed to violent deaths. This is how uncontested nature operates on populations, and it's ugly.
Death by hunter is neither cruel nor unusual by the measure of what else is available. Some kinds of traps are both cruel and unusual and in fact society BANS those traps, so society actually DOES care about the suffering of animals, suffering which in no way effects any member of society personally, why? because absent other forces, we're just humane, that's all.
It's hard to imagine the amount of growing up people in PETA just haven't done. It entails knowing avoiding learning anything about ecology yet thinking that your personal perception of how it can or ought to be practiced should reign over all established science and expertise.
Frankly, it's disgusting and immoral.
The Authoritarians by Bob Altermeyer. A psychological researcher spends a lifetime following up the thread left by researchers like Stanley Milgram's (Obedience to Authority) and lays out once and for all the who, why and how of the authoritarian personality type.
They're always with us, but at this point in time in America, they're clearly at the helm so this is a very relevant - and riveting- book.
If you want to know why people who listen to Limbaugh and Hannity are the way they are and why they're never going to change and why reasoning and evidence is totally irrelevant to the 30% of Americans who fit this profile, then this does more than argue some likely hypothesis; it proves the author's point through the application of the scientific method . Fascinating just for the reveal of his methodology, to see how a scientist even approaches something as amorphous as "authoritarian personality type. This book actually changed my life.
And here it is for free:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Excellent points! The crux of these matters is structural. We need to create and utilize structural barriers to abuse, not personality-based ones.
Nothing gives the government the right to have any authority over the people
Yeah, it's not true. We have a functioning government, it's just doing stuff some people don't like. YOUR JOB is to change people's minds about stuff so people vote for people who do what you want. It's not fast, it can indeed go off the tracks and in the end no one is totally happy and everyone is somewhat pissed off. It's called LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE. This is the reality of living with other people.
If you can't convince people you're right, and you still want to force the government to stop doing shit, then can always try civil disobedience ala MLK. That works, eventually. If you just want to force the government to do something because you think it's right then YOU'RE the asshole. That's how democracy works.
Just the way people forget that freedom comes at the price of some insecurity so also people LIKE YOU forget that democracy comes at the price of unsatisfactory outcomes.
There is no other way. There is no wonderful group of people who will do the right thing and leave it at that.
Well here's at least one reason this is happening. Essentially when confronted with a question of the form "should we permit X to do Y upon Z in order to keep us safe ?" the individual answering that question effectively considers whether or not they'll ever be Z. No federal judge is ever going to be stopped at an airport . No federal judge is ever going to have his laptop searched at the border. In fact none of the rulings federal judges make will ever apply to them personally or anyone with the power to pick up a phone and call that judge to complain that X is about to do Y to them.
Essentially the way judges hear the proposition is: "would you like us to increase security for you, sir?" They know if for some ungodly oversight they were ever actually asked to turn over their laptop to a customs agent, one phone call and it all goes away before the agent can boot their Windows 8 (this is who's buying that dog btw ) installation and that agent would soon be manning the un-airconditioned , 3x5 border booth in 105 degree heat watching over some dirt road in Tumbleweed Town, Texas.
So get real. You're asking people To Whom Nothing Adverse Is Permitted To Happen if they would like ditch the Constitution within 100 miles of any border so that he and his can feel in some nighty-night, all-tucked-in way "safer".
I am sure the nation's judicial benches are deep with such people. I am sure that people capable of considering the effects of their decisions on a nation and on its people are few and far between. Last week's judge was citing as supporting evidence the 9-11 commission report even though the 9-11 commission report said, substantively, exactly the opposite of what he claimed in his judgement it said.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131230/11062925713/judge-who-ruled-favor-nsa-relied-911-report-that-doesnt-even-mention-what-he-claims-it-does.shtml
This is what is populating our benches. How bad is it? We're about to find out. .
I've made my point that Christians have no business banning books owing to their having used the Bible to murder millions, a fact that ought to serve, if we're banning books, in having it banned everywhere.
Of course I am not interested in banning books or persecuting authors of books , denying them access to libraries and readers. Only chirstians are.
No matter how you twist and turn the facts are the facts. Christians are trying to get books banned because they feel those books represent in some faint way some alternative worldview other than christianity. This is what they do. This is what they've done throughout history whether it's the catholic church going after Galileo or the Scopes trials or evolution or the assault of education by local school boards crammed with fundies. Christianity attacks other people who don't believe as they do. It's an aggressive religion which attacks civil society every chance it gets. Christianity attacks everything not in accord with its world view, as we clearly see here and it is no different from fundamental Islam in this regard.
you'll openly mock and incite hate towards christians where the bible may condone though the religion itself condemns, where as you get offended on the muslims behalf if someone speak against them even though they actively do what is written in their religion.
And I did this where exactly? maybe you should actually read threads you participate in. If you bothered to do that you'd see my link to :
www.thereligionofpeace.com/âZ
above.
Yeah defending banning books IS attacking people defending against censorship. I am not making myself a victim. The victims are the authors and would be readers of the banned books. The victimizers are the fundie and evangelical christians who are using religion and the bible once again to attack civil society.
If your assertion is that Christians have no business attempting to censor what you consider relatively 'benign' books because wars and persecution were fought on the basis of Christian beliefs,
Yeah but that's not my point. It's not that Christians have historically fought wars generally which disqualifies them from attacking just any idea or books, it's that they've done it citing specific passages from their holy book as the REASON and JUSTIFICATION to kill those people. There is a direct connection between their book and the way they used it to deaths of millions. Yet they want these other harmless books banned.
Sorry , that point couldn't be clearer. You don't see it? Really? I mean, really?