Well, I don't agree that anyone should be forced to be part of an HOA, but if it was in the contract when you bought, then that IS the free market at work. Caveat emptor.
Are you saying the desires of the individual should always outweigh the desires of society? Because I know of some people who would do some pretty heinous things if that were true.
A free market doesn't mean you are free to get anything you want. I can't buy a car for a dollar, no matter how much I want to. Similarly, if the HOA is in the contract, and people are buying anyway, that must be acceptable, or even desireable to them, and who are you to tell them they can't make that kind of agreement?
What bullocks. Owning property inherently gives property owners the right to remove the ability to support life from all non property owners. If we had a system where property ownership was distributed, and it was gauranteed that everyone owned enough property to support themselves, I would agree with you.
You do not own your own life. No one owns it, you can't own a person. The concept is ridiculous. Who gave you life? Who taught you everything you know? Who made you what you are? Society. The humans who came before you. You are renting your life and your planet from the generations that come after.
Answer me this: would the concept of rights even occur to a person alone on the planet? Rights exist because people form societies, they are not inherent. I can create a set of first principles that I can then use to prove I have the right to live forever. Doesn't mean I will. Start from faulty premises, reach a faulty conclusion.
There is a large difference between personal property like clothes or a wallet and real property like natural resources. You have taken the argument down to the most basic level, power, so let's look at that first. No one has the "right" to do anything. A right can't be taken away, otherwise it is a privilege, and everything can be taken away, by nature (or God, if you like) if not by man. This cruel condition is what we as a species were fighting when we got together and started forming civilization.
So if there are no inherent rights, where do rights come from, and what do they mean? The whole concept of rights revolves around society, around other people. If you were alone in the world, you would no more think of rights than a fish thinks of water. Alone without society, your power is your only right. In order to form cooperative societies that benefit all more than any could benefit himself alone, we all have to give up some of our rights. I give up my right to hit you in the face or take your things because you do the same for me.
So all rights are arbitrary, agreed upon by society because they benefit everyone. And all rights involve giving up some kind of freedom as well, so the exchange had better be worth it. In the case of violence, pretty much everyone can agree. The same goes for personal property. However, private property is a harder sell. Too many freedoms are lost by too many people for too little gain by too few.
Most people would agree that the things a person works for should be there own, and this is often used to justify private ownership of natural resources. However, in order to labor on a piece of land and thus call it your own, you need to keep others off it, and this happens before you have the justification for doing so.
So private ownership of resources can not be justified from first principles, only as an arbitrary privilege granted by society. A privilege granted very unfairly, I might add, as most resources are owned and controlled by people who labored very little for the privilege. Therefore, society has all the justification it needs to impose any kinds of limits or qualifiers on the ownership of private property, from having to pay taxes all the way to having to paint your house a certain color. If you don't like it, you con't have to own property.
Well, I agree and disagree. First off, in our system there are some minimal provisions for the less powerful. Anti-SLAPP suits, for instance, or free lawyers for criminal cases.
As for the second point, well, sorry. I got a bit off track. I was trying to point out the inherent injustice of all systems of private ownership of natural resources. The conflict in question may be between property owners, but the system of absolute property rights advocated by libertarians is just so crazy I felt the need to point out some of the flaws and contradictions in the system, and how arbitrary it really is.
Based on pure free market principles, if being part of a homeowner's association is part of the contract when you buy the house, tough. Don't like it? Don't buy that house, buy a different house. If enough people don't want homeonwner's associations, they will go the way of the dodo. If they do, well, that's the free market at work and who are you to tell other people what contracts they can and can't sign?
I don't actually think that you can be forced into a homeowner's association against your will if it wasn't in the contract, but if it was and you don't like it, well, why did you sign the contract? This is the part that bugs me, I guess, and why I felt compelled to bring the issue of non-property holders into the debate.
Come on, you know Al. Everybody knows Al! He doesn't speak the language, he holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, the sound, cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around, he sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity. He says "Amen! Hallelujah!"
In fact, if I can call you Betty, you can even call me Al.
Oh, and the other source is Poetics, by Aristotle, in regards to the essential elements of dramatic tension. Interestingly, these theories apply to media such as painting, sculpture, and music as much as they do to theater, literature, and poetry.
I guess I should have mentioned my sources, yes. The name of the book is The Medium is the Massage, by the way. It was a printer's error, but Marshall McLuhan thought it illustrated his point better than the original title.
They can bankrupt you in court fighting all their lawsuits alleging that you are destroying their property values, though. Unless you have more money to spend than the homeowner's association does.
You are limiting my freedoms by keeping me off your property. Most people in the world don't own property. Why should they respect others telling them "No Trespassing?" What do they have to gain from that?
The kinds of things I am talking about are externalities. You leave trash on your property, the smell impacts mine. You put up a windmill on your property, the noise impacts mine. The person I was responding to seemed to be advocating a libertarian, absolute property rights view. How do you propose to deal equitably with externalities in a system of absolute property rights? The libertarians gloss over this or say, "Let the courts decide." Of course, in their system, if you have no money, you get no justice. Property owners can legally screw you over 'till the cows come home, and without property, money, or resources of your own you can not afford to fight.
I was trying to point out the injustice inherent in a system of absolute property rights. Thank you for helping me make my point.
Then don't buy a home where there is a homeowner's association. Sell your home if one gets voted in. Why should the desires of the one automatically outweigh the desires of the many? Especially when the one can simply refuse to play by selling and moving. That's the beauty of the free market: people are free to set up socialist systems such as homeowner's associations within it and you are free to buy into them or not. But you don't have the right to limit the free market by saying people can't do that. Property rights are a deal mutually enforced by property owners, and if other property owners want to say that you have to jump through a flaming hoop into a pile of dog doo before they will honor you property claims, well, what can you do except defend your property yourself.? You want the privilege of being part of a system that defends your property rights? You play by that systems rules, or leave and make your own system. What's that you say? Every place is already owned and encumbered by rules you didn't agree to? Tell that to the vast majority of humans who own no property at all, I'm sure you'll get a lot of sympathy.
Wow, news flash. Crappy formulaic games aren't as meaningful as ground breaking dramatic television. How much do you want to bet that movie producers said the same thing about TV when it first came out? Video games are about where TV was in the late 50's. At least he's not saying it'll never happen, he's just admitting that he's not talented and/or experienced enough in the medium of video games to pull it off.
Each new media changes society through it's innate characteristics. Books, by putting you in your head, are like a daydream. Movies, with 24 frames per second flashed on screen, are like a regular dream. TV, with it's rapidly scanning raster beam is hypnotic. Video games by their nature are interactive. All of them, however, follow the same rules of drama: you must raise dramatic tension by asking interesting questions and lower it by answering them. But what questions are interesting to an audience is at least somewhat inherent in the media itself. Questions that raise dramatic tension in book form may not do the same thing in TV or movie form, and this holds true for video games as well.
Seeing characters cooking dinner or going to lamaz class may raise dramatic tension while watching the hypnotic medium of television. That does not mean they would (necessarily) do so in the interactive medium of video games.
I was so excited by this fascinating story that I went out and told our cute secretary, "Hey, guess what? There's a dark spot on Uranus and it's large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States!" Somehow, I don't think she knew what I meant...
Over here, people like writers who have no company health plan must spend a fortune on health insurance. Then, if you get really sick, the insurance companies screw you over with huge thousand dollar deductables for every procedure, and every little thing is its own procedure so you end up paying for your own health care anyway, even though you thought you had insurance. It's not uncommon for people who are really sick to burn through $50,000 or more in a year.
I wish I lived in a less barbaric country. Unfortunately, I don't have the cash to move anyplace else and I can't find any companies in other english speaking countries who will say they can't find anyone local with my skillset (Linux, IBM BladeCenter, VMWare sysadmin) So I'm stuck here.
Hope I don't get really sick. Dying destitute in a gutter some place would suck, don't you think?
It's meant to be patronising. It's absolutely flamebait, and I really hope I pissed off WhyAmIHere and raised his blood pressure at least a little bit. The guy offended me with his callous attitude towards someone I've read, met, and deeply respect. You aren't sending money, and I have no problem with that, because you didn't try to justify it in a disgusting social darwinist kind of way. Hell, "I don't feel like it" is more acceptable than the way WhyAmIHere put it. And I doubt someone like that is giving money to anyone but his sad lonely self.
Handing out money is not connecting on a deep and meaningful level. I never said that. I connect more meaningfully with homeless people when I look them in the eye, smile, say "I'm sorry, I really don't have anything to give right now," and move on than when I drop a quarter in their hands without so much as glancing at them. But from what I've seen, social darwinists with an attitude like WhyAmIHere think the world is a cold, hard place where everyone is out to screw everyone else all the time. That's just sad. People like that never have real friends, they have, at best, temporary allies who they feel may turn on them at any moment, and of course that justifies them turning on their allies pre-emptively, too. If I had to live in a world like that, I'd slit my own throat.
No one is forcing you to do anything. We are pressuring you. There's a difference. We are playing on your compassion for other humans. Sick, I know, trying to get you to care about others, what's wrong with us? Don't we understand what America, the free market, personal responsibility and Social Darwinism are all about? This man is sick. Society doesn't value him, he deserves to die.
Okay, enough sarcasm. Here's the deal. We live in a free country. You are free not to help this man. But we are free to call you an asshole to your face. You can't shut us up. You can feel motivated not to help when someone asks for money, and the rest of us will feel motivated to point at you and say, "Look at the poor crippled human, isn't it pathetic, it lacks empathy and compassion and it lives in a hell of its own making because it can not connect with other human beings on a deep and meaningful level. How sad. Glad I'm not like that."
I met Robert Anton Wilson at a conference I was helping give a presentation for in 2000, called Disinfocon. It was put on by disinfo.com, "The yahoo of the weird and unusual." He is a very nice person, very smart, and his books are not garbage. He gave a presentation on the book "Saharasia," by James DeMeo, a student of Wilhelm Reich, which explains the origins of human violence. Very interesting.
You seem to think that because he is poor now, his books must not of sold well. They were on the NY Times best seller list. They are very popular, and every real geek I've ever met has read them. Even if you have not read his books, if you have read any books in the last thirty years chances are you read someone who was deeply influenced by his writings.
I'm truly sad for you. You are obviously missing something which most of the rest of us find to be one of the most important parts of being human. If sharing compassion and empathy were as easy as sharing money, I would give you some of mine.
Interesting. I try not to make my title a part of the body. That's annoying. I have done it on occasion, but usually I then repeat the title in the body. Mostly, that's for jokes, if you can fit the joke (or most of it) in the title and then give the punchline. But if I'm writing a comment or journal entry, I write the title first. I know what I want to say, and how to summarize it before I start. Sometimes, though, the title isn't a summary so much as an attention grabber.
Moo is particularly appropriate for a null subject, although it should more properly be spelled Mu. Unless you are going for a Friends Joey-esque moo, as in a moo point, you know, like a cow's opinion? The point is moo.
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yes, citizen journalism. Citizen journalists should know how to write good headlines. There. Now it's on topic.
Who said anything about the NSA or the CIA being used to influence people? The Bush administration has been caught paying reporters to print stories so many times now, I've lost count.
But Bush ordered the NSA to be used for domestic spying and that's against the law, why not for disinfo, too?
Below, you ask when Bush ordered torture. Are you trying to be disingenous, or or you really that naive? He wouldn't order any particular use of torture personally! But if you think he hasn't ordered torture, you haven't been following the news. Here, I've made a google search for you.
Perception is all that matters to Microsoft. They don't have to fix their product, they just have to fix people's perception of it. If someone rants about their problems on a blog and out of the blue someone from MS makes a conciliatory comment, probably the first damn comment they ever got on their blog, now Windows has gone from "That piece of shit OS written by that greedy callous company" to "that loveable, quirky OS written by that friendly company that cares enough about me to post on my blog!" Problem solved, from Microsoft's point of view, anyway.
"millions of people run it without serious problems or they wouldn't stay with it."
Perhaps these 'millions of people' don't realise they actually have a choice.
Perhaps they don't want to realise they have a choice. They aren't like us, computers aren't "fun" for them, they are just a tool. What OS they use has little meaning to them, but they wouldn't want to have to learn another, even if it were better. Having to choose an OS would only confuse and anger them. Sorry, I love Linux as much as the next rabid slashdotter, but people who care about what OS they use are a tiny minority.
Sigh. I didn't say, nor as far as I know did Chomsky say that switching to ethanol would solve the problems of corporatism. That's a whole other kettle of fish. You got a fix for that? Because I'd love to hear it.
I was responding to your original post about Chomskey being uninteresting. I happent to think he is. I never wanted to get into some whole big thing about ethanol. It could replace oil. So could a lot of other things. Is it gauranteed to work? No, of course not. Will it also fix corporatism, kill terrorists, and cure my grandmother's gout? Not bloody likely. Gramma's dead, no gout cure for her.
How who solves the what now? Ethanol? Was that what you saw on Noam Chomskey's show? Okay, look, ethanol could easily solve the oil crisis, if we can develop the technology to ferment corn stover. Sure, now it takes about the same amount of energy to make it as you get out of it, depending on who's studies you look at, but with a few small improvements, you could get more. Then you could use ethanol to power the tractors and what not used to grow the corn. Sure, you would have to dedicate huge tracts of land to farming, further impacting the environment. Sure you would have to modify almost every car ever made. Sure you would have to develop a whole parallel infrastructure while you were switching but it could be done. So yeah, ethanol could solve the oil crisis.
But that's not the point. Chomsky is a brilliant thinker. He is one of the most important men in the field of linguistics. He helped start the Cognitive Revolution in psychology when he challenged B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theories. So he's an anarcho syndicalist. So what? So am I. Better choice for a style of anarchism than trendy libertarianism, although the libertarians still like to claim him as one of their own. So he's rabidly anti-corporation. These days, who's not?
The man has critics on the right and the left. Lefties claim that even though he's Jewish, he's anti-semitic because he defended a holocaust denier's right to free speach. On the right, David Horowitz calls him "the most treacherous intellect in America." Some anarchists call him too reformist, not radical enough.
I don't know what you saw on FSTV exactly. He doesn't have a series, that I know of. He has been involved with seven films: Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, The Corporation, Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause, Distorted Morality -- America's War On Terror?, Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Last Party 2000, and Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. People have said a lot of things about him, and about his work, but the only people I've ever heard call him uninteresting were people who simply didn't understand what he was saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't agree that anyone should be forced to be part of an HOA, but if it was in the contract when you bought, then that IS the free market at work. Caveat emptor.
Are you saying the desires of the individual should always outweigh the desires of society? Because I know of some people who would do some pretty heinous things if that were true.
A free market doesn't mean you are free to get anything you want. I can't buy a car for a dollar, no matter how much I want to. Similarly, if the HOA is in the contract, and people are buying anyway, that must be acceptable, or even desireable to them, and who are you to tell them they can't make that kind of agreement?
What bullocks. Owning property inherently gives property owners the right to remove the ability to support life from all non property owners. If we had a system where property ownership was distributed, and it was gauranteed that everyone owned enough property to support themselves, I would agree with you.
You do not own your own life. No one owns it, you can't own a person. The concept is ridiculous. Who gave you life? Who taught you everything you know? Who made you what you are? Society. The humans who came before you. You are renting your life and your planet from the generations that come after.
Answer me this: would the concept of rights even occur to a person alone on the planet? Rights exist because people form societies, they are not inherent. I can create a set of first principles that I can then use to prove I have the right to live forever. Doesn't mean I will. Start from faulty premises, reach a faulty conclusion.
There is a large difference between personal property like clothes or a wallet and real property like natural resources. You have taken the argument down to the most basic level, power, so let's look at that first. No one has the "right" to do anything. A right can't be taken away, otherwise it is a privilege, and everything can be taken away, by nature (or God, if you like) if not by man. This cruel condition is what we as a species were fighting when we got together and started forming civilization.
So if there are no inherent rights, where do rights come from, and what do they mean? The whole concept of rights revolves around society, around other people. If you were alone in the world, you would no more think of rights than a fish thinks of water. Alone without society, your power is your only right. In order to form cooperative societies that benefit all more than any could benefit himself alone, we all have to give up some of our rights. I give up my right to hit you in the face or take your things because you do the same for me.
So all rights are arbitrary, agreed upon by society because they benefit everyone. And all rights involve giving up some kind of freedom as well, so the exchange had better be worth it. In the case of violence, pretty much everyone can agree. The same goes for personal property. However, private property is a harder sell. Too many freedoms are lost by too many people for too little gain by too few.
Most people would agree that the things a person works for should be there own, and this is often used to justify private ownership of natural resources. However, in order to labor on a piece of land and thus call it your own, you need to keep others off it, and this happens before you have the justification for doing so.
So private ownership of resources can not be justified from first principles, only as an arbitrary privilege granted by society. A privilege granted very unfairly, I might add, as most resources are owned and controlled by people who labored very little for the privilege. Therefore, society has all the justification it needs to impose any kinds of limits or qualifiers on the ownership of private property, from having to pay taxes all the way to having to paint your house a certain color. If you don't like it, you con't have to own property.
Well, I agree and disagree. First off, in our system there are some minimal provisions for the less powerful. Anti-SLAPP suits, for instance, or free lawyers for criminal cases.
As for the second point, well, sorry. I got a bit off track. I was trying to point out the inherent injustice of all systems of private ownership of natural resources. The conflict in question may be between property owners, but the system of absolute property rights advocated by libertarians is just so crazy I felt the need to point out some of the flaws and contradictions in the system, and how arbitrary it really is.
Based on pure free market principles, if being part of a homeowner's association is part of the contract when you buy the house, tough. Don't like it? Don't buy that house, buy a different house. If enough people don't want homeonwner's associations, they will go the way of the dodo. If they do, well, that's the free market at work and who are you to tell other people what contracts they can and can't sign?
I don't actually think that you can be forced into a homeowner's association against your will if it wasn't in the contract, but if it was and you don't like it, well, why did you sign the contract? This is the part that bugs me, I guess, and why I felt compelled to bring the issue of non-property holders into the debate.
God damn it! I suppose next you're going to tell me it's not "'scuse me while I kiss this guy," or "Take the back right turn," either...
Come on, you know Al. Everybody knows Al! He doesn't speak the language, he holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, the sound, cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around, he sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity. He says "Amen! Hallelujah!"
In fact, if I can call you Betty, you can even call me Al.
Oh, and the other source is Poetics , by Aristotle, in regards to the essential elements of dramatic tension. Interestingly, these theories apply to media such as painting, sculpture, and music as much as they do to theater, literature, and poetry.
I guess I should have mentioned my sources, yes. The name of the book is The Medium is the Massage , by the way. It was a printer's error, but Marshall McLuhan thought it illustrated his point better than the original title.
They can bankrupt you in court fighting all their lawsuits alleging that you are destroying their property values, though. Unless you have more money to spend than the homeowner's association does.
You are limiting my freedoms by keeping me off your property. Most people in the world don't own property. Why should they respect others telling them "No Trespassing?" What do they have to gain from that?
The kinds of things I am talking about are externalities. You leave trash on your property, the smell impacts mine. You put up a windmill on your property, the noise impacts mine. The person I was responding to seemed to be advocating a libertarian, absolute property rights view. How do you propose to deal equitably with externalities in a system of absolute property rights? The libertarians gloss over this or say, "Let the courts decide." Of course, in their system, if you have no money, you get no justice. Property owners can legally screw you over 'till the cows come home, and without property, money, or resources of your own you can not afford to fight.
I was trying to point out the injustice inherent in a system of absolute property rights. Thank you for helping me make my point.
Then don't buy a home where there is a homeowner's association. Sell your home if one gets voted in. Why should the desires of the one automatically outweigh the desires of the many? Especially when the one can simply refuse to play by selling and moving. That's the beauty of the free market: people are free to set up socialist systems such as homeowner's associations within it and you are free to buy into them or not. But you don't have the right to limit the free market by saying people can't do that. Property rights are a deal mutually enforced by property owners, and if other property owners want to say that you have to jump through a flaming hoop into a pile of dog doo before they will honor you property claims, well, what can you do except defend your property yourself.? You want the privilege of being part of a system that defends your property rights? You play by that systems rules, or leave and make your own system. What's that you say? Every place is already owned and encumbered by rules you didn't agree to? Tell that to the vast majority of humans who own no property at all, I'm sure you'll get a lot of sympathy.
Wow, news flash. Crappy formulaic games aren't as meaningful as ground breaking dramatic television. How much do you want to bet that movie producers said the same thing about TV when it first came out? Video games are about where TV was in the late 50's. At least he's not saying it'll never happen, he's just admitting that he's not talented and/or experienced enough in the medium of video games to pull it off.
Each new media changes society through it's innate characteristics. Books, by putting you in your head, are like a daydream. Movies, with 24 frames per second flashed on screen, are like a regular dream. TV, with it's rapidly scanning raster beam is hypnotic. Video games by their nature are interactive. All of them, however, follow the same rules of drama: you must raise dramatic tension by asking interesting questions and lower it by answering them. But what questions are interesting to an audience is at least somewhat inherent in the media itself. Questions that raise dramatic tension in book form may not do the same thing in TV or movie form, and this holds true for video games as well.
Seeing characters cooking dinner or going to lamaz class may raise dramatic tension while watching the hypnotic medium of television. That does not mean they would (necessarily) do so in the interactive medium of video games.
I was so excited by this fascinating story that I went out and told our cute secretary, "Hey, guess what? There's a dark spot on Uranus and it's large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States!" Somehow, I don't think she knew what I meant...
No, no, no. I am not going to look up Uranus to see if it is full of methane gas. I'm not falling for that one again.
Over here, people like writers who have no company health plan must spend a fortune on health insurance. Then, if you get really sick, the insurance companies screw you over with huge thousand dollar deductables for every procedure, and every little thing is its own procedure so you end up paying for your own health care anyway, even though you thought you had insurance. It's not uncommon for people who are really sick to burn through $50,000 or more in a year.
I wish I lived in a less barbaric country. Unfortunately, I don't have the cash to move anyplace else and I can't find any companies in other english speaking countries who will say they can't find anyone local with my skillset (Linux, IBM BladeCenter, VMWare sysadmin) So I'm stuck here.
Hope I don't get really sick. Dying destitute in a gutter some place would suck, don't you think?
It's meant to be patronising. It's absolutely flamebait, and I really hope I pissed off WhyAmIHere and raised his blood pressure at least a little bit. The guy offended me with his callous attitude towards someone I've read, met, and deeply respect. You aren't sending money, and I have no problem with that, because you didn't try to justify it in a disgusting social darwinist kind of way. Hell, "I don't feel like it" is more acceptable than the way WhyAmIHere put it. And I doubt someone like that is giving money to anyone but his sad lonely self.
Handing out money is not connecting on a deep and meaningful level. I never said that. I connect more meaningfully with homeless people when I look them in the eye, smile, say "I'm sorry, I really don't have anything to give right now," and move on than when I drop a quarter in their hands without so much as glancing at them. But from what I've seen, social darwinists with an attitude like WhyAmIHere think the world is a cold, hard place where everyone is out to screw everyone else all the time. That's just sad. People like that never have real friends, they have, at best, temporary allies who they feel may turn on them at any moment, and of course that justifies them turning on their allies pre-emptively, too. If I had to live in a world like that, I'd slit my own throat.
No one is forcing you to do anything. We are pressuring you. There's a difference. We are playing on your compassion for other humans. Sick, I know, trying to get you to care about others, what's wrong with us? Don't we understand what America, the free market, personal responsibility and Social Darwinism are all about? This man is sick. Society doesn't value him, he deserves to die.
Okay, enough sarcasm. Here's the deal. We live in a free country. You are free not to help this man. But we are free to call you an asshole to your face. You can't shut us up. You can feel motivated not to help when someone asks for money, and the rest of us will feel motivated to point at you and say, "Look at the poor crippled human, isn't it pathetic, it lacks empathy and compassion and it lives in a hell of its own making because it can not connect with other human beings on a deep and meaningful level. How sad. Glad I'm not like that."
I met Robert Anton Wilson at a conference I was helping give a presentation for in 2000, called Disinfocon. It was put on by disinfo.com, "The yahoo of the weird and unusual." He is a very nice person, very smart, and his books are not garbage. He gave a presentation on the book "Saharasia," by James DeMeo, a student of Wilhelm Reich, which explains the origins of human violence. Very interesting.
You seem to think that because he is poor now, his books must not of sold well. They were on the NY Times best seller list. They are very popular, and every real geek I've ever met has read them. Even if you have not read his books, if you have read any books in the last thirty years chances are you read someone who was deeply influenced by his writings.
I'm truly sad for you. You are obviously missing something which most of the rest of us find to be one of the most important parts of being human. If sharing compassion and empathy were as easy as sharing money, I would give you some of mine.
Interesting. I try not to make my title a part of the body. That's annoying. I have done it on occasion, but usually I then repeat the title in the body. Mostly, that's for jokes, if you can fit the joke (or most of it) in the title and then give the punchline. But if I'm writing a comment or journal entry, I write the title first. I know what I want to say, and how to summarize it before I start. Sometimes, though, the title isn't a summary so much as an attention grabber.
Moo is particularly appropriate for a null subject, although it should more properly be spelled Mu. Unless you are going for a Friends Joey-esque moo, as in a moo point, you know, like a cow's opinion? The point is moo.
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yes, citizen journalism. Citizen journalists should know how to write good headlines. There. Now it's on topic.
Who said anything about the NSA or the CIA being used to influence people? The Bush administration has been caught paying reporters to print stories so many times now, I've lost count.
But Bush ordered the NSA to be used for domestic spying and that's against the law, why not for disinfo, too?
Below, you ask when Bush ordered torture. Are you trying to be disingenous, or or you really that naive? He wouldn't order any particular use of torture personally! But if you think he hasn't ordered torture, you haven't been following the news. Here, I've made a google search for you.
You know, Chacham, the whole point of the Internet is that no one knows you're a cow. It kind of spoils it if you start every post with "Moo." ;-)
Perception is all that matters to Microsoft. They don't have to fix their product, they just have to fix people's perception of it. If someone rants about their problems on a blog and out of the blue someone from MS makes a conciliatory comment, probably the first damn comment they ever got on their blog, now Windows has gone from "That piece of shit OS written by that greedy callous company" to "that loveable, quirky OS written by that friendly company that cares enough about me to post on my blog!" Problem solved, from Microsoft's point of view, anyway.
Perhaps they don't want to realise they have a choice. They aren't like us, computers aren't "fun" for them, they are just a tool. What OS they use has little meaning to them, but they wouldn't want to have to learn another, even if it were better. Having to choose an OS would only confuse and anger them. Sorry, I love Linux as much as the next rabid slashdotter, but people who care about what OS they use are a tiny minority.
My Xbox slept with my wife, stole my credit cards, and drove my Camaro to Vegas.
Sigh. I didn't say, nor as far as I know did Chomsky say that switching to ethanol would solve the problems of corporatism. That's a whole other kettle of fish. You got a fix for that? Because I'd love to hear it.
I was responding to your original post about Chomskey being uninteresting. I happent to think he is. I never wanted to get into some whole big thing about ethanol. It could replace oil. So could a lot of other things. Is it gauranteed to work? No, of course not. Will it also fix corporatism, kill terrorists, and cure my grandmother's gout? Not bloody likely. Gramma's dead, no gout cure for her.
How who solves the what now? Ethanol? Was that what you saw on Noam Chomskey's show? Okay, look, ethanol could easily solve the oil crisis, if we can develop the technology to ferment corn stover. Sure, now it takes about the same amount of energy to make it as you get out of it, depending on who's studies you look at, but with a few small improvements, you could get more. Then you could use ethanol to power the tractors and what not used to grow the corn. Sure, you would have to dedicate huge tracts of land to farming, further impacting the environment. Sure you would have to modify almost every car ever made. Sure you would have to develop a whole parallel infrastructure while you were switching but it could be done. So yeah, ethanol could solve the oil crisis.
But that's not the point. Chomsky is a brilliant thinker. He is one of the most important men in the field of linguistics. He helped start the Cognitive Revolution in psychology when he challenged B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theories. So he's an anarcho syndicalist. So what? So am I. Better choice for a style of anarchism than trendy libertarianism, although the libertarians still like to claim him as one of their own. So he's rabidly anti-corporation. These days, who's not?
The man has critics on the right and the left. Lefties claim that even though he's Jewish, he's anti-semitic because he defended a holocaust denier's right to free speach. On the right, David Horowitz calls him "the most treacherous intellect in America." Some anarchists call him too reformist, not radical enough.
I don't know what you saw on FSTV exactly. He doesn't have a series, that I know of. He has been involved with seven films: Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, The Corporation, Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause, Distorted Morality -- America's War On Terror?, Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Last Party 2000, and Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. People have said a lot of things about him, and about his work, but the only people I've ever heard call him uninteresting were people who simply didn't understand what he was saying.