Your critique of naive direct democracy - that leaders arise, but are informal and therefore not subject to safeguards - is an excellent one. But it's not enough.
Consider that the United States today suffers under exactly this scenario. Informal unelected elites have captured the levers of power to the point where the U.S. is not looking much like a democracy any more. This was accomplished despite the excellence of the design of the American system the strength of democratic principles among the American people - a citizenry still fairly engaged, and which was formerly also relatively well educated and informed.
Democracy is often present as the mechanism through which individuals, born citizens with their own preferences and interests, express and negotiate those preferences and interests, ideally with an eye to the common good. According to many advocates of direct democracy, this is wrong. We are not born citizens. It is not citizens who create democracy: rather it is the practice of democracy that creates citizens. We do not come to politics as individuals with already developed preferences and interests. It is by engaging with others in public discourse and debate that we learn to be citizens, to reason, to participate in public discourse, and through this process we discover and develop our preferences and interests. Democracy is thus a process of education. One of the great failings of representative democracy is that instead of treating us as active and evolving partners, it relegates us to the role of disengaged consumers who occasionally choose one option over another.
Yet realistically, even if we were to provide the perfect mechanism for people to participate, most of us, lacking interest and starved of time, wouldn't: with results like those you describe. One intriguing alternative draws on the jury system and the elections of ancient Athens. Decisions would be made not by professional politicians, but by randomly-selected groups of citizens with their range of private expertise. Such groups would be charged with investigating a particular issue for a period of time, after which they would disband.
I realize juries (chosen by counsel more for ignorance than independent thought) are typically reported as dysfunctional, and I don't doubt that this is so. Yet it only confirms that we do not know how to be citizens: and when it is demanded of us, we fail. Through failure, though, we can learn, and teach others. Forming a jury today, when virtually no one has substantial experience, amounts to throwing together a bunch of greenhorns and expecting them to spontaneously become experts.
For an idealized view of how a jury can teach its participants to be jurors, I suggest the film 12 Angry Men. I admit am not convinced of the wisdom of such a system. But if I was forced to choose, I would place my fate in the hands of a court rather than a politician. I would trust a random selection of my fellow citizens over a self-selected professional of politics. For with the crises we face today, our common fate is indeed the question.
That aside, if global catastrophe is such a big deal e.g. An asteroid is headed directly for Earth, every person is going to be affected in the same way therefore every person is equally responsible for dealing with it
You are wrong in fact and wrong in logic.
The impact of climate change is not equal. The poor live disproportionately in vulnerable areas. This is true not just for climate change, but for environmental disasters in general. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live on the deforested hillsides that collapse in landslides. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live in flood-prone areas. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who make a living from dry and marginal soils susceptible to droubt. And it is the poor who lack the resources to cope when the water dries up, when food prices rise, when hit by torrential rains or brush fires. Global warming is not like an asteroid. It will not wipe out all life. But it will create great suffering, and that suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. That is your error in fact.
Your error in logic is your claim of equal responsibility. If you and I are in a car crash, are we equally responsible because we both suffer the same loss? Even though I was speeding, talking on my cell phone and weaving in traffic while you were driving predictably and defensively, but were unable to avoid me when I suddenly swerved in front of you? Of course not. Responsibility results from the actions we take and the choices we make. We in the developed countries have produced most of the emissions and reaped most of the benefits. We are far more responsible for climate change than the peasants of India or Mexico or Bangladesh. Responsibility flows from actions, not consequences.
cyberpunk is not a libertarian utopia in the least
Oh, I agree! Utopia is not the only other choice (and I agree that cyberpunk has dystopian tendencies). In many ways it is very much like the world we live in. I'm not sure where your reference to libertarianism comes from. I would expect a libertarian "utopia" to be cruelly controlled by corporate elites - in that way I suppose cyberpunk fits the bill. Perhaps I was wrong to use the word "choice" given its association to rational choice theory and neoclassical economics. Libertarianism was certainly not in my mind. In Marcuse and Benjamin I'm quoting Marxists, after all. I could just as well have talked about action as Hannah Arendt uses the term, as a form of public citizenship through which we reveal and discover our differences.
The massive federation is overall peaceful because times are good and people don't have a reason to stir up shit. They aren't dissenting because their leaders are doing a good job. If you see that as impeding your personally freedom... Dude, you're straying into evil supervillian level ranting.
You have me chuckling pretty hard at the thought of me as a supervillain. Best insult evar. But I guess I'm not being clear. I think that people hold fundamentally different values that are valid but that can never be reconciled. Christian vs atheist, pro-life vs pro-choice, the pursuit of excellence vs the pursuit of equality. These can all be reasoned and honorable positions. Although I prefer the latter of each category, and believe it necessary to pursue such values vigorously through politics, I can respect the integrity and decency of many of those with whom I disagree (while also acknowledging the craven selfishness of many who are of like mind).
A free and democratic society will always have to deal with the tension and conflict between such sources of fundamental disagreement. Dissent is not something to be overcome: it is the condition of a healthy democratic society. A society without dissent is a society without democracy. This is actually the meaning of the word totalitarian. It does not simply mean dictatorship; it refers to a society that is like a unified organism, into which individual people fit like cells or organs, united in thought and purpose. Such a society might be peaceful, happy, wealthy, and well-governed (a possibility I sincerely doubt) - by restricting the ways in which its members could think, it might even have the appearance of democracy. But it could not be truly democratic or free.
To me the real tipping point seems to be as the "corporate dystopia" of which William Gibson and Cyberpunk was part.
At least not in my opinion. In classic dystopias like 1984 or Brave New World, there is virtually no space left for individual freedom and choice. Cyberpunk, however, is all about the spaces in between in which individuals can make choices and possibly change things. Philosopher Andrew Feenberg agrees:
The world Gibson describes is grim but not strictly speaking dystopian. It is true that elites rule it with immensely powerful means, but those means are so complex that they give rise to all sorts of phenomena over which no one really has control. There are many small openings through which a clever hacker can enter the system and commit a variety of unprogrammed deeds. The future is not clear but may yet be altered by human action on the network. (Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, 1995, p. 140)
The happy happy, joy joy world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on the other hand, strikes me as truly static and dystopian. Nearly all cultural expression is centuries old. Every conflict can be solved through reason: there are no genuinely intractable differences of opinion or incompatible values among honest people. Only a totalitarian society could so thoroughly crush dissent and eliminate difference. I think I would go stark raving mad.
I believe a better future is possible and worth fighting for, but compared to ST:NG I'd rather have Gibson's grungy cyberpunk any day. It is dirty, flawed, corrupt - but also iredeemably human. Its diversity and vigor are resistant to the totalitarian disease. The tragedy is that cyberpunk came true: but now we seem to be passing out the other side. A cyberpunk world might be a let-down beside visions of the future we once thought we would enjoy, but compared to many genuine possibilities it's possitively upbeat. Take a look at the world of Paulo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl, for example (which despite its fantastic elements feels right in the same way that Neuromancer once did) - though even he leaves a small space for hope.
While I agree about the worth of utopian visians, I do not agree with the criticism of dystopian science fiction. The scholars of the Frankfurt School struggled to find an alternative to what they saw as a damaged society. When the human imagination limits itself to the realistic limitations of the world we live in, it serves to accept and conceal that world's flaws. Between the horrors of Stalinism and the alienation of capitalism, the Frankfurt scholars could not imagine an plausible alternative. So to find hope, they were deliberately negative. The injustices of the existing order pointed to the possibility of something better. Herbert Marcuse writes:
The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal. At the beginning of the fascist era, Walter Benjamin wrote: It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us. (One Dimensional Man, 1964, p. 257)
So scientific truth is determined by taking a vote. Riight.
You confuse the hammer with the nail. Science is not truth: it is a method of accessing truth. With it, we construct models of reality, not reality itself. Reality is not determined by consensus - but good science is (hence science may be mistaken).
Rationality relies on us categorizing continuous physical phenomena into distinct categories. Such rationalization is never perfect: measurements suffer from error; theory and evidence never match up exactly. The problem remains: what is good evidence? Where exactly do we draw the line between one category and another? These are questions for human judgement. This is not relativism. There are better and worse answers, but no final ones.
Yes, Kuhn might be wrong (and Habermas, who also roots reason in communication) - but the question perfectly illustrates the point. How do we decide? Is there a foolproof scientific experiment that will resolve the question for all time? No: we are left with human reason, deliberation, and consensus. The consensus is that in significant ways he is right. Here is some of what he has to say about what he calls "normal science" (my argument is not concerned with his theory of revolutionary paradigm shifts):
No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification in direct comparison with nature. (p. 77)
anomalous experiences may not be identified with falsifying ones. Indeed, I doubt that the latter exist. . . . no theory ever solves all the puzzles with which it is confronted at a given time; nor are the solutions already achieved often perfect. On the contrary, it is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-theory fit that, at any time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal science. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. On the other hand, if only severe failure to fit justifies theory rejection, then the Popperians will require some criterion of "improbability" or of "degree of falsification". (pp. 146-7).
You accuse me of handing religion a victory against science. But if you credit science with objective access to truth you are only making it into its own religion - a truly grievous blow against science. At the heart of science is an understanding of its limitations. It is precisely by exaggerating science's perfectability and treating its ordinary imperfections as exceptional failures that its opponents discredit it, as has been the case with climate change.
(By the way, I have no interest in slandering religious folk. Though I am an atheist and do not share their faith, I remain a sceptic, and do not see why faith must always conflict with reason.)
science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
This is not true, although many scientists believe it. The idea of falsification was thoroughly debunked by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions half a century ago, now one of the most widely cited scholarly works. Kuhn is the originator of the term "paradigm shift."
Science is consensus based. We imagine that science compares theory with evidence, adjusting the theory to account for evidence that contradicts it. But in the final instance it is not and can never be objective: scientists must agree on what counts as good evidence, and there is no objective or scientific way to do that. It can only be done through communication and consensus. Kuhn writes, "Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all" (p. 210).
the solutions that satisfy him [the scientist] may not be merely personal but must instead be accepted as solutions by many. The group that shares them may not, however, be drawn at random from society as a whole, but is rather the well-defined community of the scientist's professional compeers. One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific. . . . The group's members, as individuals and by virtue of their shared training and experience, must be seen as the sole possessors of the rules of the game or of some equivalent basis for unequivocal judgements. (p. 168)
Thus scientists are notoriously poor at communicating their research to the public - because being a scientist means only respecting the scientific views of other scientists. Some people react emotionally to the tone of science, feeling that scientists talk down to them as ignorant outsiders. Guess what? They do - because we are. I can accept that: as someone with some measure of expertise in a few areas, I can appreciate the years of study and experience required to develop expertise in others.
But where does this leave us? Is science simply a game of popularity and politics? Of course not. Science works, it works very well - and it works by consensus. This does not undermine the claims of climate science: it underlines consensus-based science as the best method we've got. To deny the importance of consensus is to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you reject the consensus of scientists about climate change, your only recourse is to appeal to some other consensus. I'll take the consensus the scientists, thank you very much.
[*] Quotes from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
History is an excellent guide. Plenty of societies have been faced with existential challenges. Some of them died. Others fell under the domination of societies that coped better or did not face the same limitations[1]. A very few survived (you can probably count them on your fingers).
History is written by the survivors. Our history is that of the societies that survived. In North America, that recent history is exceptional: over a hundred years of peace within our borders. If by "history" you mean living memory, you are correct. Though if you back just a little farther and consider history from a native perspective, many societies died or fell under domination here. People adapt - but that's no guarantee that our society will be among the survivors.
Market societies are extremely recent, arising only in late 18th century England, before which point the vast majority of the population lived from subsistence agriculture[2]. Market society was then deliberately constructed through government action. How markets are constructed matters very much: they do fail, particularly when it comes to public goods and the environment.
Nor do markets somehow escape the limitations of nature. The rise of industrial capitalism corresponds to the exploitation of fossil fuels. Markets did not create coal and oil: they only discovered them. Would capitalism have been successful if they were not there to be found? One thing capitalism does extremely well is to replace one resource for another. When a resource grows scarce or expensive, something else is substituted. An efficient capitalist economy may not run out of anything: until it runs out of everything[3]. The problem-solving efficiency of markets can actually make the economy more fragile, not less.
[1] Jared Diamond's Collapse examines numerous examples.
[2] See Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation for a fascinating account of this. For a broader view of capitalism before this point, see Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce (Capitalism & Civilization 15th-18th Century Vol. 2).
[3] Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that a societies develop they realize diminishing marginal returns from adaptation and innovation. When the marginal returns turn negative, they collapse. The only solution he sees is an external energy subsidy - which is where our problem lies.
I would really like to believe what you say. But a brief web search did not turn up any rational explanation. I have mod points to spend, but you won't get one - even if you're right - because I'm left asking for a citation.
What jumps out at me about bluray is not the resolution of the image, which on my 37" TV doesn't seem that significant for most scenes, but rather its stability. Subjectively, it feels much more solid. I think the difference may be the stability of the image due to the interlaced signal recorded on many DVDs. I realize it is deinterlaced for display, but that deinterlacing is not perfect.
That said, given how much DRM bluray is infested with I'm not sure it's worth it.
Political activists use legitimate methods to increase their influence.
And who, pray tell, decides what is legitimate?
Answering that question is what politics is all about. The point of engaging in politics is to determine legitimacy. Look at any political movement and you will see this struggle to define legitimacy. Legitimacy is not the starting point: it is the outcome. You are begging the question.
Which is, of course, because you are trying to propagate your definition of what is legitimate. You are not describing politics: you are engaged in it. You are not a disinterested obsever: you are a participant.
There is truth to what you say, yet I think it's a question of framing, not of whether there are actual sacrifices.
Many people support austerity, even though it means significant sacrifices for the majority (even as it is twinned with tax cuts for the few). You might argue this is because people do not perceive themselves as beneficiaries of government spending (see: Alaska), or because they have an aspirational view of themselves living the American dream and benefiting from tax cuts, because they believe that the pain is necessary in order to grow the economy and create jobs, because they believe current spending is unsustainable so there is no alternative, or because it is linked to their sense of patriotism or identity.
I don't buy any of this, but my point is: people are willing to accept sacrifices. While I don't deny that people are often too much focused on what's in it for them rather than the greater good of the society or the future of their children, if they believe it is necessary, or inevitable, or ultimately for the best they wholeheartedly embrace sacrifice, even making it a point of pride.
What the OP proposes is an agenda with long term benefits, one that is necessary if we are to avoid serious negative consequences. The sorts of arguments made for austerity could easily be made for it or something like it. Such arguments are not being presented by mainstream media - but that is for reasons of power, politics, ideology and institutional rigidity, not because it's not possible to get the American people on side. Therefore, we need to fight on the terrian of politics and communication. We cannot afford to surrender democracy, excusing ourselves because of a belief that the American people are iredeemably selfish.
The passage I quoted is actually from a 1852 document, "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." I think it's representative, but I was wrong to describe it as the declaration of secession and I believe it's important to correct the error.
"The Civil War was really a class war. The 1% who had slaves, wanted the rest of the workers who had to compete with slave labor to say; "Hey, you Northern oppressors -- we want to import cheap goods and not have to buy American, because we can't compete by selling good not made by slave labor."
The Slave Masters wanted everyone in the South to say; "WE are being harmed by the North economically" -- when really, slavery probably reduced wages for MOST Southerners.
Right on the money. I wish I had mod points to give you.
The Lost Cause may seem romantic, but anyone who doubts that the Civil War was really about slavery needs to read the declaration of secession:
We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.
"...where is the government mandated shift..." "Where are the government demands" "The war here is..."
Socio-political bullshit.
If you have a disagreement with the post's claims, make your argument. If you find the language unclear, ask for clarification. If you think there are unreasonable insinuations being made, call them out. That's what I intend to do with your post.
To me, the above complaint doesn't look like a rational problem with the argument: it looks like an ideological problem with where you think it's coming from. Perhaps you think all academics are out-of-touch elites whose expertise should therefore be disregarded. Perhaps you think poli-sci students are liberty-hating "liberals" (according to the warped American definition of the word). If so, foolish caricaturing and stereotyping only looks good if you're preaching to the choir. It has no bearing on the validity of either argument.
Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. I'm just sick of reasoned debate being jettisoned for ideological reasons of tribal identity and taste.
anyone who is so intellectually impoverished that they cannot or will not relearn menus really ought not be using a computer
Your use of the word "intellectual" is new to me. I had not previously seen it defined in terms of rote memorization.
Nearly twenty years ago I recall Linux supporters making the same arguments for the CLI and against the GUI. They wanted to preserve "privilege" for the elect. Not so different from Hollywood.
The first article you point to doesn't seem to say anything one way or the other - which would be unsurprising if this were, as you suggest, a complete misinterpretation. A brief perusal of the Web doesn't provide a lot of evidence beyond the two books I mentioned, which in itself suggests Dyer and Ward may have blown this out of proportion. However, I did find one scientific article by Meyer and Kump on the subject. It suggests:
at times in Earth history, notably the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, and Late Permian, widespread shelf and cratonic-basinal anoxia, and, at least in the latter two cases, photic-zone euxinia, have accompanied mass extinction (Wilde & Berry 1984; Wignall & Hallam 1992; Wang et al. 1993, 1996; Bond et al. 2004). Could sulfide poisoning serve as the kill mechanism in these extinctions?
Biomarker evidence perhaps provides a more compelling link between euxinia and extinction for the Late Devonian and Late Permian (Grice et al. 2005). . . . But why would a collapse of marine productivity trigger terrestrial ecosystem disruption and extinction?
Sulfide release from the oceans serves as a link to terrestrial biotic crisis during the end-Permian. One-dimensional atmospheric modeling by Kump et al. (2005) predicted that toxic levels of H2S could rapidly accumulate in the well-mixed troposphere once reaction of sulfide with atmospheric hydroxyl radical reduced OH to very low levels. The abrupt rise in atmospheric H2S concentrations would be accompanied by rising atmospheric methane levels and destruction of the ozone layer. Not only would terrestrial organisms be unable to escape the toxic effects of H2S, but they also would be subject to high levels of UV radiation following the predicted collapse of the ozone layer.
This does sound very tentative. On the other hand, it corresponds with my tenuous understanding of the claims of Dyer and Ward. Can you shed any light? I don't want to be going around making false claims.
It's called a Canfield Ocean. It involves a loss of oxygen from the oceans, which emit hydrogen sulfide gas. The sea literally turns purple while the air is toxic and green. Scientists have theorized that such a transformation has been responsible for mass extinctions to it the past. Here's what Gwynne Dyer says about it in his book Climate Wars:
The evidence is still unclear on whether we run a substantial chance of triggering a Canfield ocean and a greenhouse extinction if we let global warming get out of hand. As with many aspects of this issue, we would only find out for sure when it was too late to do anything about it. But itâ(TM)s the only outcome of the current climate crisis that might convert a massive dieback of the human population into an actual extinction.
Apparently it's also explained in detail in Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.
To all who said about Apple's lock-down "but the iPhone is not a computer", this was always the end game. The argument was that the iPhone is not a computer (a general-purpose platform), therefore it's OK to restrict what users can do with it. (And besides, they said, we'll still have our PCs.) They confused cause and effect. The iPhone is not a computer because it is locked-down.
With Apple making money hand over fist, it should be no surprise that Microsoft wants in. Will they succeed in their attempt at control? I don't know. But I'm certainly not going to make excuses for them.
Don't give me the any flak about hating Apple. My desktop is a Mac. But my new laptop runs Linux.
Your claim about God and creativity is roughly correct. God was the creator; it was the role of artists to reflect the majesty of God's creation. See M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. The development of the idea of authorship was partly a response to the upheavals of the industrial revolution. I have attempted to explain this in a video about the invention of the author. The video description includes references for further reading.
To address the larger point, audiences are significant contributors to the value and meaning of artistic works, as I explain in a video about audience labor. For something like Star Wars I would even suggest that the audience is the major contributor. However, the artist remains the largest individual contributor to his or her work, and before the audience gets involved they clearly haven't contributed much. It is the hits, not the also-rans, that in a sense belong to the audience.
Taking credit for their works was instituted in pre-modern copyright law. In 17th century England copyright was a censorship regime for licensing publishers, rather than a mechanism for rewarding authors. In order to allow the crown to keep tabs on who wrote what, the law required authors' names to be printed in books. Taking credit for their writing was a response to government monitoring, not the assertion of proprietorship that it later became.
Finally, Lucas is hardly the author of his films. Many, many people worked on them. The habit of giving credit for a film to a single person obscures their essential contributions. The recent copyright suit against one of the guys who made the storm trooper helmets gives a hint at how copyright can unjustly focus all credit in one individual.
This also shows that Apple is more valuable than air. After all, air is free!
Uh, yeah. The idea that price equals value is dangerous ideological mumbo-jumbo. Prices tell what something costs to buy. They do not indicate what it is worth to have. This is why political economists (particularly Marxist ones these days) distinguish between use value and exchange value.
Examples of market prices failing to reflect use values are too numerous to count. Fancy clothes and cars vs basic food, for example, or the most valuable things in life - such as love, meaning in life, and human kindness - that are only available for free.
The BBC also incinerated film copies of the episodes. My understanding is that this was done in order to save space in their archive. (I remember something about a leaking roof.)
When foreign stations licensed the show, they were sent copies of the episodes with instructions to return them or destroy them after broadcast. A number of episodes that survived did so because those stations failed to follow through. They violated the BBC's copyright (presumably unintentionally due to poor license compliance). Ironically, such episodes survived because of copyright infringement.
Beyond the loss of Web material like the Hitchhiker's Guide site, or of software for no longe obtainable platforms, I fear we may face a similar situation in the future due to DRM. The Doctor Who case demonstrates that the copyright holder cannot always be trusted with preservation of significant works[1], and copying is the best insurance against destruction.
[1] I emphasize significant works, by which I particularly mean those that are distributed widely. (Not personal journal articles as mentioned by another poster.) When works are distributed to the public, the public gains an interest in them. This interest is not reflected in law, but it does exist. (Indeed, I would argue that this interest arises because the public, through its activities of interpretation and evangelism, creates much of the value of such works. Think Star Wars or Rocky Horror.)
You are throwing up a whole lot of red herrings and not addressing my point.
You say "I'm sure there's some blanket term of service that allows them to drop wikileaks." Maybe so. But the reason they actually did give was bogus. It is not less bogus because you have a vague idea that they could find something else, and I find it reprehensible that you would give a bad argument a free pass on such flimsy grounds.
Amazon's excuse was a claim that WikiLeaks infringed copyright. This is not true, and it sets a bad precedent for future abuses of copyright. I did not talk about "cyber vandalism," nor about the ability of private businesses to "do anything they want to." Check out my previous comment it that second point is what you're interested in. You'll have to go to my profile page though - I'm not going to link to it. It's not what I'm talking about here.
What, that WikiLeaks did not "own" the documents? Copyright infringement? Under U.S. law, material produced by the government are public domain - it belongs to the public. How is a bogus claim of copyright infringement "valid"?
Private companies have no requirement to respect anyone's freedom of speech or press and have every right to refuse to do business with other individuals or entities.
Sure, just like I have the "right" to cheat on my wife. Just as Swiss banks had the "right" to refuse to release money to the families of Holocaust victims when they were unable to produce death certificates.
Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.
This is a myth. If it were true, the actions of the government would reflect the wishes of the majority. But it isn't true:
it is not in fact true that the idea that groups will act in their self-interest follows logically from the premise of rational and self-interested behavior. It does not follow, because all of the individuals in a group would gain if they achieved their group objective, that they would act to achieve that objective, even if they were all rational and self-interested. Indeed unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
A single actor or small number of actors will always have an advantage if it requires coordination of a large number of people to oppose them. There are a number of reasons for this, among them:
In a large group individuals will attempt to free-ride, not contributing to the collective effort.
While the collective benefit may be very large, the benefit to individuals is very small. They may lack sufficient incentive to act. In other words, transaction costs are high. This is why we have firms - organizations that operate in the market but are not organized like a market internally.
When all or most members of a group are required to cooperate in order to act effectively, each member of the group knows that his or her individual action is unlikely to make the difference between success or failure. The larger the group, the less significant the individual action. So, for example, many people don't vote: they know it is highly unlikely that their vote will make any difference to the outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Your critique of naive direct democracy - that leaders arise, but are informal and therefore not subject to safeguards - is an excellent one. But it's not enough.
Consider that the United States today suffers under exactly this scenario. Informal unelected elites have captured the levers of power to the point where the U.S. is not looking much like a democracy any more. This was accomplished despite the excellence of the design of the American system the strength of democratic principles among the American people - a citizenry still fairly engaged, and which was formerly also relatively well educated and informed.
Democracy is often present as the mechanism through which individuals, born citizens with their own preferences and interests, express and negotiate those preferences and interests, ideally with an eye to the common good. According to many advocates of direct democracy, this is wrong. We are not born citizens. It is not citizens who create democracy: rather it is the practice of democracy that creates citizens. We do not come to politics as individuals with already developed preferences and interests. It is by engaging with others in public discourse and debate that we learn to be citizens, to reason, to participate in public discourse, and through this process we discover and develop our preferences and interests. Democracy is thus a process of education. One of the great failings of representative democracy is that instead of treating us as active and evolving partners, it relegates us to the role of disengaged consumers who occasionally choose one option over another.
Yet realistically, even if we were to provide the perfect mechanism for people to participate, most of us, lacking interest and starved of time, wouldn't: with results like those you describe. One intriguing alternative draws on the jury system and the elections of ancient Athens. Decisions would be made not by professional politicians, but by randomly-selected groups of citizens with their range of private expertise. Such groups would be charged with investigating a particular issue for a period of time, after which they would disband.
I realize juries (chosen by counsel more for ignorance than independent thought) are typically reported as dysfunctional, and I don't doubt that this is so. Yet it only confirms that we do not know how to be citizens: and when it is demanded of us, we fail. Through failure, though, we can learn, and teach others. Forming a jury today, when virtually no one has substantial experience, amounts to throwing together a bunch of greenhorns and expecting them to spontaneously become experts.
For an idealized view of how a jury can teach its participants to be jurors, I suggest the film 12 Angry Men. I admit am not convinced of the wisdom of such a system. But if I was forced to choose, I would place my fate in the hands of a court rather than a politician. I would trust a random selection of my fellow citizens over a self-selected professional of politics. For with the crises we face today, our common fate is indeed the question.
You are wrong in fact and wrong in logic.
The impact of climate change is not equal. The poor live disproportionately in vulnerable areas. This is true not just for climate change, but for environmental disasters in general. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live on the deforested hillsides that collapse in landslides. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who live in flood-prone areas. It is mostly the poor, not the rich, who make a living from dry and marginal soils susceptible to droubt. And it is the poor who lack the resources to cope when the water dries up, when food prices rise, when hit by torrential rains or brush fires. Global warming is not like an asteroid. It will not wipe out all life. But it will create great suffering, and that suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. That is your error in fact.
Your error in logic is your claim of equal responsibility. If you and I are in a car crash, are we equally responsible because we both suffer the same loss? Even though I was speeding, talking on my cell phone and weaving in traffic while you were driving predictably and defensively, but were unable to avoid me when I suddenly swerved in front of you? Of course not. Responsibility results from the actions we take and the choices we make. We in the developed countries have produced most of the emissions and reaped most of the benefits. We are far more responsible for climate change than the peasants of India or Mexico or Bangladesh. Responsibility flows from actions, not consequences.
Oh, I agree! Utopia is not the only other choice (and I agree that cyberpunk has dystopian tendencies). In many ways it is very much like the world we live in. I'm not sure where your reference to libertarianism comes from. I would expect a libertarian "utopia" to be cruelly controlled by corporate elites - in that way I suppose cyberpunk fits the bill. Perhaps I was wrong to use the word "choice" given its association to rational choice theory and neoclassical economics. Libertarianism was certainly not in my mind. In Marcuse and Benjamin I'm quoting Marxists, after all. I could just as well have talked about action as Hannah Arendt uses the term, as a form of public citizenship through which we reveal and discover our differences.
You have me chuckling pretty hard at the thought of me as a supervillain. Best insult evar. But I guess I'm not being clear. I think that people hold fundamentally different values that are valid but that can never be reconciled. Christian vs atheist, pro-life vs pro-choice, the pursuit of excellence vs the pursuit of equality. These can all be reasoned and honorable positions. Although I prefer the latter of each category, and believe it necessary to pursue such values vigorously through politics, I can respect the integrity and decency of many of those with whom I disagree (while also acknowledging the craven selfishness of many who are of like mind).
A free and democratic society will always have to deal with the tension and conflict between such sources of fundamental disagreement. Dissent is not something to be overcome: it is the condition of a healthy democratic society. A society without dissent is a society without democracy. This is actually the meaning of the word totalitarian. It does not simply mean dictatorship; it refers to a society that is like a unified organism, into which individual people fit like cells or organs, united in thought and purpose. Such a society might be peaceful, happy, wealthy, and well-governed (a possibility I sincerely doubt) - by restricting the ways in which its members could think, it might even have the appearance of democracy. But it could not be truly democratic or free.
At least not in my opinion. In classic dystopias like 1984 or Brave New World, there is virtually no space left for individual freedom and choice. Cyberpunk, however, is all about the spaces in between in which individuals can make choices and possibly change things. Philosopher Andrew Feenberg agrees:
The happy happy, joy joy world of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on the other hand, strikes me as truly static and dystopian. Nearly all cultural expression is centuries old. Every conflict can be solved through reason: there are no genuinely intractable differences of opinion or incompatible values among honest people. Only a totalitarian society could so thoroughly crush dissent and eliminate difference. I think I would go stark raving mad.
I believe a better future is possible and worth fighting for, but compared to ST:NG I'd rather have Gibson's grungy cyberpunk any day. It is dirty, flawed, corrupt - but also iredeemably human. Its diversity and vigor are resistant to the totalitarian disease. The tragedy is that cyberpunk came true: but now we seem to be passing out the other side. A cyberpunk world might be a let-down beside visions of the future we once thought we would enjoy, but compared to many genuine possibilities it's possitively upbeat. Take a look at the world of Paulo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl, for example (which despite its fantastic elements feels right in the same way that Neuromancer once did) - though even he leaves a small space for hope.
While I agree about the worth of utopian visians, I do not agree with the criticism of dystopian science fiction. The scholars of the Frankfurt School struggled to find an alternative to what they saw as a damaged society. When the human imagination limits itself to the realistic limitations of the world we live in, it serves to accept and conceal that world's flaws. Between the horrors of Stalinism and the alienation of capitalism, the Frankfurt scholars could not imagine an plausible alternative. So to find hope, they were deliberately negative. The injustices of the existing order pointed to the possibility of something better. Herbert Marcuse writes:
You confuse the hammer with the nail. Science is not truth: it is a method of accessing truth. With it, we construct models of reality, not reality itself. Reality is not determined by consensus - but good science is (hence science may be mistaken).
Rationality relies on us categorizing continuous physical phenomena into distinct categories. Such rationalization is never perfect: measurements suffer from error; theory and evidence never match up exactly. The problem remains: what is good evidence? Where exactly do we draw the line between one category and another? These are questions for human judgement. This is not relativism. There are better and worse answers, but no final ones.
Yes, Kuhn might be wrong (and Habermas, who also roots reason in communication) - but the question perfectly illustrates the point. How do we decide? Is there a foolproof scientific experiment that will resolve the question for all time? No: we are left with human reason, deliberation, and consensus. The consensus is that in significant ways he is right. Here is some of what he has to say about what he calls "normal science" (my argument is not concerned with his theory of revolutionary paradigm shifts):
You accuse me of handing religion a victory against science. But if you credit science with objective access to truth you are only making it into its own religion - a truly grievous blow against science. At the heart of science is an understanding of its limitations. It is precisely by exaggerating science's perfectability and treating its ordinary imperfections as exceptional failures that its opponents discredit it, as has been the case with climate change.
(By the way, I have no interest in slandering religious folk. Though I am an atheist and do not share their faith, I remain a sceptic, and do not see why faith must always conflict with reason.)
This is not true, although many scientists believe it. The idea of falsification was thoroughly debunked by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions half a century ago, now one of the most widely cited scholarly works. Kuhn is the originator of the term "paradigm shift."
Science is consensus based. We imagine that science compares theory with evidence, adjusting the theory to account for evidence that contradicts it. But in the final instance it is not and can never be objective: scientists must agree on what counts as good evidence, and there is no objective or scientific way to do that. It can only be done through communication and consensus. Kuhn writes, "Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all" (p. 210).
Thus scientists are notoriously poor at communicating their research to the public - because being a scientist means only respecting the scientific views of other scientists. Some people react emotionally to the tone of science, feeling that scientists talk down to them as ignorant outsiders. Guess what? They do - because we are. I can accept that: as someone with some measure of expertise in a few areas, I can appreciate the years of study and experience required to develop expertise in others.
But where does this leave us? Is science simply a game of popularity and politics? Of course not. Science works, it works very well - and it works by consensus. This does not undermine the claims of climate science: it underlines consensus-based science as the best method we've got. To deny the importance of consensus is to throw the baby out with the bath water. If you reject the consensus of scientists about climate change, your only recourse is to appeal to some other consensus. I'll take the consensus the scientists, thank you very much.
[*] Quotes from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2nd ed, University of Chicago Press, 1970.
History is an excellent guide. Plenty of societies have been faced with existential challenges. Some of them died. Others fell under the domination of societies that coped better or did not face the same limitations[1]. A very few survived (you can probably count them on your fingers).
History is written by the survivors. Our history is that of the societies that survived. In North America, that recent history is exceptional: over a hundred years of peace within our borders. If by "history" you mean living memory, you are correct. Though if you back just a little farther and consider history from a native perspective, many societies died or fell under domination here. People adapt - but that's no guarantee that our society will be among the survivors.
Market societies are extremely recent, arising only in late 18th century England, before which point the vast majority of the population lived from subsistence agriculture[2]. Market society was then deliberately constructed through government action. How markets are constructed matters very much: they do fail, particularly when it comes to public goods and the environment.
Nor do markets somehow escape the limitations of nature. The rise of industrial capitalism corresponds to the exploitation of fossil fuels. Markets did not create coal and oil: they only discovered them. Would capitalism have been successful if they were not there to be found? One thing capitalism does extremely well is to replace one resource for another. When a resource grows scarce or expensive, something else is substituted. An efficient capitalist economy may not run out of anything: until it runs out of everything[3]. The problem-solving efficiency of markets can actually make the economy more fragile, not less.
[1] Jared Diamond's Collapse examines numerous examples.
[2] See Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation for a fascinating account of this. For a broader view of capitalism before this point, see Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce (Capitalism & Civilization 15th-18th Century Vol. 2).
[3] Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies argues that a societies develop they realize diminishing marginal returns from adaptation and innovation. When the marginal returns turn negative, they collapse. The only solution he sees is an external energy subsidy - which is where our problem lies.
I would really like to believe what you say. But a brief web search did not turn up any rational explanation. I have mod points to spend, but you won't get one - even if you're right - because I'm left asking for a citation.
What jumps out at me about bluray is not the resolution of the image, which on my 37" TV doesn't seem that significant for most scenes, but rather its stability. Subjectively, it feels much more solid. I think the difference may be the stability of the image due to the interlaced signal recorded on many DVDs. I realize it is deinterlaced for display, but that deinterlacing is not perfect.
That said, given how much DRM bluray is infested with I'm not sure it's worth it.
And who, pray tell, decides what is legitimate?
Answering that question is what politics is all about. The point of engaging in politics is to determine legitimacy. Look at any political movement and you will see this struggle to define legitimacy. Legitimacy is not the starting point: it is the outcome. You are begging the question.
Which is, of course, because you are trying to propagate your definition of what is legitimate. You are not describing politics: you are engaged in it. You are not a disinterested obsever: you are a participant.
There is truth to what you say, yet I think it's a question of framing, not of whether there are actual sacrifices.
Many people support austerity, even though it means significant sacrifices for the majority (even as it is twinned with tax cuts for the few). You might argue this is because people do not perceive themselves as beneficiaries of government spending (see: Alaska), or because they have an aspirational view of themselves living the American dream and benefiting from tax cuts, because they believe that the pain is necessary in order to grow the economy and create jobs, because they believe current spending is unsustainable so there is no alternative, or because it is linked to their sense of patriotism or identity.
I don't buy any of this, but my point is: people are willing to accept sacrifices. While I don't deny that people are often too much focused on what's in it for them rather than the greater good of the society or the future of their children, if they believe it is necessary, or inevitable, or ultimately for the best they wholeheartedly embrace sacrifice, even making it a point of pride.
What the OP proposes is an agenda with long term benefits, one that is necessary if we are to avoid serious negative consequences. The sorts of arguments made for austerity could easily be made for it or something like it. Such arguments are not being presented by mainstream media - but that is for reasons of power, politics, ideology and institutional rigidity, not because it's not possible to get the American people on side. Therefore, we need to fight on the terrian of politics and communication. We cannot afford to surrender democracy, excusing ourselves because of a belief that the American people are iredeemably selfish.
The passage I quoted is actually from a 1852 document, "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." I think it's representative, but I was wrong to describe it as the declaration of secession and I believe it's important to correct the error.
Right on the money. I wish I had mod points to give you.
The Lost Cause may seem romantic, but anyone who doubts that the Civil War was really about slavery needs to read the declaration of secession:
If you have a disagreement with the post's claims, make your argument. If you find the language unclear, ask for clarification. If you think there are unreasonable insinuations being made, call them out. That's what I intend to do with your post.
To me, the above complaint doesn't look like a rational problem with the argument: it looks like an ideological problem with where you think it's coming from. Perhaps you think all academics are out-of-touch elites whose expertise should therefore be disregarded. Perhaps you think poli-sci students are liberty-hating "liberals" (according to the warped American definition of the word). If so, foolish caricaturing and stereotyping only looks good if you're preaching to the choir. It has no bearing on the validity of either argument.
Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. I'm just sick of reasoned debate being jettisoned for ideological reasons of tribal identity and taste.
Your use of the word "intellectual" is new to me. I had not previously seen it defined in terms of rote memorization.
Nearly twenty years ago I recall Linux supporters making the same arguments for the CLI and against the GUI. They wanted to preserve "privilege" for the elect. Not so different from Hollywood.
Nice username.
This does sound very tentative. On the other hand, it corresponds with my tenuous understanding of the claims of Dyer and Ward. Can you shed any light? I don't want to be going around making false claims.
Apparently it's also explained in detail in Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.
To all who said about Apple's lock-down "but the iPhone is not a computer", this was always the end game. The argument was that the iPhone is not a computer (a general-purpose platform), therefore it's OK to restrict what users can do with it. (And besides, they said, we'll still have our PCs.) They confused cause and effect. The iPhone is not a computer because it is locked-down.
With Apple making money hand over fist, it should be no surprise that Microsoft wants in. Will they succeed in their attempt at control? I don't know. But I'm certainly not going to make excuses for them.
Don't give me the any flak about hating Apple. My desktop is a Mac. But my new laptop runs Linux.
Your claim about God and creativity is roughly correct. God was the creator; it was the role of artists to reflect the majesty of God's creation. See M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. The development of the idea of authorship was partly a response to the upheavals of the industrial revolution. I have attempted to explain this in a video about the invention of the author. The video description includes references for further reading.
To address the larger point, audiences are significant contributors to the value and meaning of artistic works, as I explain in a video about audience labor. For something like Star Wars I would even suggest that the audience is the major contributor. However, the artist remains the largest individual contributor to his or her work, and before the audience gets involved they clearly haven't contributed much. It is the hits, not the also-rans, that in a sense belong to the audience.
Taking credit for their works was instituted in pre-modern copyright law. In 17th century England copyright was a censorship regime for licensing publishers, rather than a mechanism for rewarding authors. In order to allow the crown to keep tabs on who wrote what, the law required authors' names to be printed in books. Taking credit for their writing was a response to government monitoring, not the assertion of proprietorship that it later became.
Finally, Lucas is hardly the author of his films. Many, many people worked on them. The habit of giving credit for a film to a single person obscures their essential contributions. The recent copyright suit against one of the guys who made the storm trooper helmets gives a hint at how copyright can unjustly focus all credit in one individual.
This also shows that Apple is more valuable than air. After all, air is free!
Uh, yeah. The idea that price equals value is dangerous ideological mumbo-jumbo. Prices tell what something costs to buy. They do not indicate what it is worth to have. This is why political economists (particularly Marxist ones these days) distinguish between use value and exchange value.
Examples of market prices failing to reflect use values are too numerous to count. Fancy clothes and cars vs basic food, for example, or the most valuable things in life - such as love, meaning in life, and human kindness - that are only available for free.
The BBC also incinerated film copies of the episodes. My understanding is that this was done in order to save space in their archive. (I remember something about a leaking roof.)
When foreign stations licensed the show, they were sent copies of the episodes with instructions to return them or destroy them after broadcast. A number of episodes that survived did so because those stations failed to follow through. They violated the BBC's copyright (presumably unintentionally due to poor license compliance). Ironically, such episodes survived because of copyright infringement.
Beyond the loss of Web material like the Hitchhiker's Guide site, or of software for no longe obtainable platforms, I fear we may face a similar situation in the future due to DRM. The Doctor Who case demonstrates that the copyright holder cannot always be trusted with preservation of significant works[1], and copying is the best insurance against destruction.
[1] I emphasize significant works, by which I particularly mean those that are distributed widely. (Not personal journal articles as mentioned by another poster.) When works are distributed to the public, the public gains an interest in them. This interest is not reflected in law, but it does exist. (Indeed, I would argue that this interest arises because the public, through its activities of interpretation and evangelism, creates much of the value of such works. Think Star Wars or Rocky Horror.)
You are throwing up a whole lot of red herrings and not addressing my point.
You say "I'm sure there's some blanket term of service that allows them to drop wikileaks." Maybe so. But the reason they actually did give was bogus. It is not less bogus because you have a vague idea that they could find something else, and I find it reprehensible that you would give a bad argument a free pass on such flimsy grounds.
Amazon's excuse was a claim that WikiLeaks infringed copyright. This is not true, and it sets a bad precedent for future abuses of copyright. I did not talk about "cyber vandalism," nor about the ability of private businesses to "do anything they want to." Check out my previous comment it that second point is what you're interested in. You'll have to go to my profile page though - I'm not going to link to it. It's not what I'm talking about here.
What, that WikiLeaks did not "own" the documents? Copyright infringement? Under U.S. law, material produced by the government are public domain - it belongs to the public. How is a bogus claim of copyright infringement "valid"?
Sure, just like I have the "right" to cheat on my wife. Just as Swiss banks had the "right" to refuse to release money to the families of Holocaust victims when they were unable to produce death certificates.
You are confusing legality with ethics.
This is a myth. If it were true, the actions of the government would reflect the wishes of the majority. But it isn't true:
A single actor or small number of actors will always have an advantage if it requires coordination of a large number of people to oppose them. There are a number of reasons for this, among them: