You do not understand liberty. Economic regulations PROTECT liberties that the free market does not. All liberty is a trade-off. You trade a freedom you don't care about (like "swinging your fist wherever you like") for a freedom you care about more (like "not getting hit in the face.") We limit certain economic freedoms (like "lying to customers about your product") in order to protect a freedom we desire more (like "not being taken advantage of")
While I agree that we need a good reason for any regulation, I think we have one. We have seen big monopoly telecoms throttle packets to certain endpoints that compete with them. It is happening right now. If we don't act, we are screwed, the open Internet turns into a series of walled off enclaves, and if you have, say, Comcast, you will not be able to watch movies on the Internet that are not provided by Comcast.
Comcast and others will use their monopoly powers and their great wealth to destroy the free market you so love.
Which is what, exactly? Are you saying the FCC will do like they did to the telecoms and make them publish line item bills so you know when they are trying to screw you over? Will they set up some kind of Internet 'do not spam' list and enforce it? I can't remember the last time a telemarketer bothered me. Imagine an Internet without spam!
I think that, being a government agency, the FCC will, in the final analysis, do whatever the citizens demand they do. It is our fault if we don't demand forcefully enough. This is still a democracy.
Corporations are necessarily in the pockets of the rich. The government is only in the pockets of the rich because we let it be. Private companies use force all the time. It is force that protects their property. Without force, the rich could not capture so much wealth without consequences. People would just take that wealth back. Private companies and the rich in general depend on force. If you have no property, then you are at the mercy of those whose property is protected by force. Economic coercion is very real, and will be used as long as people need food, clean water, and shelter to survive. If you want to live, you do whatever the Man with the food says, even if he says drop trou and bend over.
Guess what? property rights, contracts, and torts are all forms of state regulation of economic activity. Now that we agree that SOME state regulation of economic activity is necessary to ensure the free market stays free, I'm sure we can have a much more productive conversation about exactly which regulations are necessary.
Why do you insist on presenting wild speculation as fact? Your bullshit slippery slope fallacy is pure imagination. You have no clue what the FCC would or would not do. You aren't researching shit, because the FCC does not HAVE an exact plan, and they don't get to MAKE the plan. They enforce the laws Congress tells them to. Go back to civics class, please.
Hi. You must be new here. Maxo-Texas is not a democrat, m'kay? He never said word one about democrats. Just because he doesn't like what the folks who CALL themselves republicans are doing these days does not make him a democrat. You are a fool, shutting your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "LALALALA I Can't HEAR you!" will not save you from the wolves.
Who says the little guy can't lobby? How did Obama get elected? It was the little guy. Okay, yes, Obama then proceeded to piss all over the little guy, but we DO have a democracy, and ultimately, the little guys control the government.
You act as if there has not been a problem that net neutrality will fix, that it is hypothetical. But that is not true, there have been several instances of companies throttling speeds to competitor's data. They have been reported right here, and I know you read Slashdot.
The Republicans *do* want to regulate stuff, just different stuff than the Democrats. Republican want to regulate what happens in my bedroom, for example.
Such as? And do you have pics? I'm not sure I can understand your, ahem, position, without pics.
Several different options, or several options that are remarkably similar, almost as if the small handful of monopoly protected telecommunications providers are colluding together?
Why are you scared of the FCC? Do you think that net neutrality will morph into its opposite, with the FCC mandating "equal access?" I'm guessing that is the dog whistle you are blowing here.
Do you understand how monopolies interfere with the free market? Do you know what a natural monopoly is? Even assuming the free market CAN sort all this out for us, why should we have to wait and suffer until it does? We can protect ourselves from exploitation. We can force companies to play fairly through regulations, rather than waiting for them to fail once they piss off enough people. And what are the options, anyway? There are only a handful of telecommunications companies in the US, and they all offer the same shitty deals. The market has yet to provide a better option, what makes you think it ever will?
Republicans love regulation, regulation that moves money into the welfare queen red states.
Oh, I know that. I just didn't feel like muddying the waters of the debate. I was going to go there, thus the title of my post, but thought better of it.
AT&T and Comcast are companies with both natural and government-created monopolies. You are quite naive if you think that they are at the mercy of the free market.
The Republicans want absolutely no regulation of anything. Net neutrality is regulation. Without net neutrality regulations, the 'truly open Internet' becomes beholden to certain corporate interests. I would rather the Internet be beholden to the FCC, which is at theoretically accountable to US citizens, than to a few large media companies.
Regulations are like guns. They are tools. They can be used to protect or to harm. They are neither evil nor good, in and of themselves. We should never seek to get rid of all regulations, only the bad ones. Without 'regulations' the little guy is at the mercy of the rich and powerful. I support the right of the little guys of the world to band together and enact laws to protect themselves from exploitation.
You basically bring up the FCC as a sort of scary specter, "Ooga booga booga! FCC gonna getcha!" without saying what, exactly, you fear the FCC might do.
Net neutrality regulations are necessary to keep the Internet open. It will either be regulated by the FCC, or it will be controlled by a handful of huge media conglomerates. It will not stay the unregulated, anything goes wild west it is today. Either the landlords will move in and Enclose the open Internet, or we, the citizens, decide that we do not want to let them wall off the Internet, and we pass laws to stop them.
Who said anything about closing down Fox? No one. The answer to lies is more truth, not suppression of lies.
Why are conservatives on MSNBC "token" conservatives, but the supposed liberals on Fox are real?
There was never a time before now when there was only one point of view on the air. NOW there is only one point of view, the authoritarian coporatist view.
Fox does not participate in an exchange of ideas. They are not interested in honest debate. They are interested only in framing issues in their own terms and pushing the agenda of the Republican party. Fox is not conservative. They are Republican.
Fox viewers are almost all old white conservative males, according to recent Nielsen reports. Fox ratings are actually much lower than Nielsen reports, because Murdoch bought up the company that supplies Nielsen with monitoring equipment. Murdoch has 'fixed' the numbers so it appears Fox is getting more viewers than they actually are.
I watch Fox News, and I read it online. They are fascist hate-mongers selling fear and anger.
The idea that Fox represents a different point of view than other mainstream media is simply ludicrous on the face of it. All mainstream media is corporate media, and it all serves the interests of the elite owning class.
Libertarians should not be trickle down economics fundamentalists at all. Stimulating the supply side or the demand side is ALL government intervention in the free market.
While I am sure there are some principled and thoughtful libertarians, to me the majority of them seem to adhere to a philosophy that boils down to the childish whine of, "You're not the boss of me!" Adults realize that we are all in this together. We have to live together, there is no other option anymore. We are interdependent. We are all our brother's keepers.
Being in a relationship with even one other human being requires compromise. Living in a society requires a lot of compromise. Libertarians seem unwilling to compromise on anything, out of principle. I've actually had conversations with libertarians where they come out against the very idea of compromise! The particular fellow I am thinking of seemed to want something he called "agreement" rather than compromise. As he made a distinction between agreement and compromise, I can only assume that by "agreement" he meant "You agree with me."
I think that this accurately illustrates the mentality of most libertarians. They believe they are better than others, and that they are being held down by a conspiracy of losers. If only the losers would accept their rightful place and stop trying to band together to form "governments" and make pesky "laws" protecting themselves, the strong (that is to say, the particular libertarian you are talking to at the time.) could rightfully profit off of those losers while feeling good about themselves for providing said loser an opportunity to serve their betters. Losers that can't serve their betters should just go die someplace out of the way.
They couch their arguments in terms of freedom, but most libertarians act like frustrated little authoritarians who think that if government just got out of the way, a "natural" hierarchy would emerge, with them on top, of course.
Maybe it wasn't you I responded too, I had A LOT of responses in that thread. But yeah, Moore's stuff can be considered propaganda. It's also documentary. And it is, none of it, news to me. I think that's important to note here. I've never learned anything from Michael Moore's movies that I did not already know through some other source.
I meant Moore's films were entertainment. Of course, the Daily Show is too. The fact that some people treat them as something else does not change the fact that they are entertainment. Let's say you are budgeting for the month. You want to see a Moore film. And maybe rent some old Colbert Reports (I don't know, work with me here...) What category would you put the expense in? Entertainment.
It seems as though it bothers you that some people treat the Daily Show as a source of news, as well as entertainment. Why is that?
Yes, I knew that. Like Hannity and Colmes. Colmes is a milquetoast who is there only to serve as a laughingstock, and to occasionally say things like, "even I, a LIBERAL, don't agree with this CRAZY thing..."
I thought I agreed with you at the end of our last discussion that Moore's films were propaganda in documentary form? Anyway, one is entertainment, the other purports to be news.
All the other media besides Fox are leftist? You are a mindless ideologue.
I'm not wrapped up in ideology, JournoList didn't actually DO anything. Nobody on that list had any power to force anyone else to do anything. Fox editors DO have that power. But you are too wrapped up in your right wing ideology to understand that.
Quite accurate. Most SNL episodes occur as reruns on other days of the week. Besides The Rachael Maddow Show and Countdown, what MSNBC shows have a liberal bias?
If commodore64_love had raised the issues you do, I wouldn't have excoriated him. Even though the issues you raise are a real stretch to find something, anything, to criticize about the survey, they are still, logically speaking, legitimate points. Rather than call him out for being a hypocritical ad hominem slinging asshole, I would simply have rebutted the points.
You can't figure budget issues based on how you hypothetically think a law will be changed, that is just completely dishonest. You rate a law according to how it is written, you do not rate some fantasy version of the law.
Actually, your last point is utter bullshit, so I probably would have excoriated him for that, too. You raise another hypothetical point, "Well, what IF the questions were misleading?" I don't know, what if your mother was a whore? I have no proof she was, and I'm not saying she was, I'm ASKING, what if your mother were a cum slurping crack addicted gutter whore?
Yeah, what I just did there? That is what you just did, so don't fucking whine about it.
Slashdot Mirror
You do not understand liberty. Economic regulations PROTECT liberties that the free market does not. All liberty is a trade-off. You trade a freedom you don't care about (like "swinging your fist wherever you like") for a freedom you care about more (like "not getting hit in the face.") We limit certain economic freedoms (like "lying to customers about your product") in order to protect a freedom we desire more (like "not being taken advantage of")
While I agree that we need a good reason for any regulation, I think we have one. We have seen big monopoly telecoms throttle packets to certain endpoints that compete with them. It is happening right now. If we don't act, we are screwed, the open Internet turns into a series of walled off enclaves, and if you have, say, Comcast, you will not be able to watch movies on the Internet that are not provided by Comcast.
Comcast and others will use their monopoly powers and their great wealth to destroy the free market you so love.
Which is what, exactly? Are you saying the FCC will do like they did to the telecoms and make them publish line item bills so you know when they are trying to screw you over? Will they set up some kind of Internet 'do not spam' list and enforce it? I can't remember the last time a telemarketer bothered me. Imagine an Internet without spam!
I think that, being a government agency, the FCC will, in the final analysis, do whatever the citizens demand they do. It is our fault if we don't demand forcefully enough. This is still a democracy.
Corporations are necessarily in the pockets of the rich. The government is only in the pockets of the rich because we let it be. Private companies use force all the time. It is force that protects their property. Without force, the rich could not capture so much wealth without consequences. People would just take that wealth back. Private companies and the rich in general depend on force. If you have no property, then you are at the mercy of those whose property is protected by force. Economic coercion is very real, and will be used as long as people need food, clean water, and shelter to survive. If you want to live, you do whatever the Man with the food says, even if he says drop trou and bend over.
Guess what? property rights, contracts, and torts are all forms of state regulation of economic activity. Now that we agree that SOME state regulation of economic activity is necessary to ensure the free market stays free, I'm sure we can have a much more productive conversation about exactly which regulations are necessary.
Why do you insist on presenting wild speculation as fact? Your bullshit slippery slope fallacy is pure imagination. You have no clue what the FCC would or would not do. You aren't researching shit, because the FCC does not HAVE an exact plan, and they don't get to MAKE the plan. They enforce the laws Congress tells them to. Go back to civics class, please.
Hi. You must be new here. Maxo-Texas is not a democrat, m'kay? He never said word one about democrats. Just because he doesn't like what the folks who CALL themselves republicans are doing these days does not make him a democrat. You are a fool, shutting your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "LALALALA I Can't HEAR you!" will not save you from the wolves.
Who says the little guy can't lobby? How did Obama get elected? It was the little guy. Okay, yes, Obama then proceeded to piss all over the little guy, but we DO have a democracy, and ultimately, the little guys control the government.
You act as if there has not been a problem that net neutrality will fix, that it is hypothetical. But that is not true, there have been several instances of companies throttling speeds to competitor's data. They have been reported right here, and I know you read Slashdot.
Good point. I don't think a lot of people realize that Kim Jong-il is in the process of handing off power to his son, Kim Jong-un.
The Republicans *do* want to regulate stuff, just different stuff than the Democrats. Republican want to regulate what happens in my bedroom, for example.
Such as? And do you have pics? I'm not sure I can understand your, ahem, position, without pics.
Several different options, or several options that are remarkably similar, almost as if the small handful of monopoly protected telecommunications providers are colluding together?
Why are you scared of the FCC? Do you think that net neutrality will morph into its opposite, with the FCC mandating "equal access?" I'm guessing that is the dog whistle you are blowing here.
Do you understand how monopolies interfere with the free market? Do you know what a natural monopoly is? Even assuming the free market CAN sort all this out for us, why should we have to wait and suffer until it does? We can protect ourselves from exploitation. We can force companies to play fairly through regulations, rather than waiting for them to fail once they piss off enough people. And what are the options, anyway? There are only a handful of telecommunications companies in the US, and they all offer the same shitty deals. The market has yet to provide a better option, what makes you think it ever will?
Bullshit, ask them about corn subsidies.
Republicans love regulation, regulation that moves money into the welfare queen red states.
Oh, I know that. I just didn't feel like muddying the waters of the debate. I was going to go there, thus the title of my post, but thought better of it.
AT&T and Comcast are companies with both natural and government-created monopolies. You are quite naive if you think that they are at the mercy of the free market.
The Republicans want absolutely no regulation of anything. Net neutrality is regulation. Without net neutrality regulations, the 'truly open Internet' becomes beholden to certain corporate interests. I would rather the Internet be beholden to the FCC, which is at theoretically accountable to US citizens, than to a few large media companies.
Regulations are like guns. They are tools. They can be used to protect or to harm. They are neither evil nor good, in and of themselves. We should never seek to get rid of all regulations, only the bad ones. Without 'regulations' the little guy is at the mercy of the rich and powerful. I support the right of the little guys of the world to band together and enact laws to protect themselves from exploitation.
You basically bring up the FCC as a sort of scary specter, "Ooga booga booga! FCC gonna getcha!" without saying what, exactly, you fear the FCC might do.
Net neutrality regulations are necessary to keep the Internet open. It will either be regulated by the FCC, or it will be controlled by a handful of huge media conglomerates. It will not stay the unregulated, anything goes wild west it is today. Either the landlords will move in and Enclose the open Internet, or we, the citizens, decide that we do not want to let them wall off the Internet, and we pass laws to stop them.
Who said anything about closing down Fox? No one. The answer to lies is more truth, not suppression of lies.
Why are conservatives on MSNBC "token" conservatives, but the supposed liberals on Fox are real?
There was never a time before now when there was only one point of view on the air. NOW there is only one point of view, the authoritarian coporatist view.
Fox does not participate in an exchange of ideas. They are not interested in honest debate. They are interested only in framing issues in their own terms and pushing the agenda of the Republican party. Fox is not conservative. They are Republican.
Fox viewers are almost all old white conservative males, according to recent Nielsen reports. Fox ratings are actually much lower than Nielsen reports, because Murdoch bought up the company that supplies Nielsen with monitoring equipment. Murdoch has 'fixed' the numbers so it appears Fox is getting more viewers than they actually are.
I watch Fox News, and I read it online. They are fascist hate-mongers selling fear and anger.
The idea that Fox represents a different point of view than other mainstream media is simply ludicrous on the face of it. All mainstream media is corporate media, and it all serves the interests of the elite owning class.
Libertarians should not be trickle down economics fundamentalists at all. Stimulating the supply side or the demand side is ALL government intervention in the free market.
While I am sure there are some principled and thoughtful libertarians, to me the majority of them seem to adhere to a philosophy that boils down to the childish whine of, "You're not the boss of me!" Adults realize that we are all in this together. We have to live together, there is no other option anymore. We are interdependent. We are all our brother's keepers.
Being in a relationship with even one other human being requires compromise. Living in a society requires a lot of compromise. Libertarians seem unwilling to compromise on anything, out of principle. I've actually had conversations with libertarians where they come out against the very idea of compromise! The particular fellow I am thinking of seemed to want something he called "agreement" rather than compromise. As he made a distinction between agreement and compromise, I can only assume that by "agreement" he meant "You agree with me."
I think that this accurately illustrates the mentality of most libertarians. They believe they are better than others, and that they are being held down by a conspiracy of losers. If only the losers would accept their rightful place and stop trying to band together to form "governments" and make pesky "laws" protecting themselves, the strong (that is to say, the particular libertarian you are talking to at the time.) could rightfully profit off of those losers while feeling good about themselves for providing said loser an opportunity to serve their betters. Losers that can't serve their betters should just go die someplace out of the way.
They couch their arguments in terms of freedom, but most libertarians act like frustrated little authoritarians who think that if government just got out of the way, a "natural" hierarchy would emerge, with them on top, of course.
Maybe it wasn't you I responded too, I had A LOT of responses in that thread. But yeah, Moore's stuff can be considered propaganda. It's also documentary. And it is, none of it, news to me. I think that's important to note here. I've never learned anything from Michael Moore's movies that I did not already know through some other source.
I meant Moore's films were entertainment. Of course, the Daily Show is too. The fact that some people treat them as something else does not change the fact that they are entertainment. Let's say you are budgeting for the month. You want to see a Moore film. And maybe rent some old Colbert Reports (I don't know, work with me here...) What category would you put the expense in? Entertainment.
It seems as though it bothers you that some people treat the Daily Show as a source of news, as well as entertainment. Why is that?
Yes, I knew that. Like Hannity and Colmes. Colmes is a milquetoast who is there only to serve as a laughingstock, and to occasionally say things like, "even I, a LIBERAL, don't agree with this CRAZY thing..."
I thought I agreed with you at the end of our last discussion that Moore's films were propaganda in documentary form? Anyway, one is entertainment, the other purports to be news.
All the other media besides Fox are leftist? You are a mindless ideologue.
I'm not wrapped up in ideology, JournoList didn't actually DO anything. Nobody on that list had any power to force anyone else to do anything. Fox editors DO have that power. But you are too wrapped up in your right wing ideology to understand that.
I've watched Faux News, and I have not seen anything I would call a liberal. Who do you think is a liberal on Fox?
Quite accurate. Most SNL episodes occur as reruns on other days of the week. Besides The Rachael Maddow Show and Countdown, what MSNBC shows have a liberal bias?
You obviously have no clue where the real world is, so why would I discuss it with you?
If commodore64_love had raised the issues you do, I wouldn't have excoriated him. Even though the issues you raise are a real stretch to find something, anything, to criticize about the survey, they are still, logically speaking, legitimate points. Rather than call him out for being a hypocritical ad hominem slinging asshole, I would simply have rebutted the points.
You can't figure budget issues based on how you hypothetically think a law will be changed, that is just completely dishonest. You rate a law according to how it is written, you do not rate some fantasy version of the law.
Actually, your last point is utter bullshit, so I probably would have excoriated him for that, too. You raise another hypothetical point, "Well, what IF the questions were misleading?" I don't know, what if your mother was a whore? I have no proof she was, and I'm not saying she was, I'm ASKING, what if your mother were a cum slurping crack addicted gutter whore?
Yeah, what I just did there? That is what you just did, so don't fucking whine about it.