I think your debate is skewed to the right. You didn't leave room on your spectrum for organisations like WSW. They are way left of NPR. I am also including extremists, there are those that are much more extreme than WSW. There are also plenty of right wingers that are far to the right of fox. My point is that from another perspective CNN are fairly right wing and NPR is centrist or slighly left. Fox is still batshit-crazy conservative though. I don't even claim that conservatives are wrong, fox isn't wrong because they are too far right, they are wrong because they are incoherent and idiotic.
I am genuinely looking for information, but I know about protests and dodgy looking election results. I wanted information on the killing and imprisonment of journalists. Like I said above, read the part I quoted. Also read above where I found the links I was asking for myself, after getting tired of rude/ignorant people telling me I should not think for myself. With respect to your articles, thanks for the links but all of those things happen in the US as well(47th in press freedom) and are therefore poor examples. Student protests are brutalised, people are kicked out of both the dems and the reps(? whats the short form) for publicly going against party policy. Censorship is a bit different in the US, far more subtle and mostly achieved by money rather than violence (which is better, but still not good). Chavez is a politician. He is not better or worse than bush or blair or merkel, he may be cruder, poorer and less sophisticated but I nothing but contempt for all of them. I also have nothing but contempt for people that post wild allegations without offering supporting documentation.
It says he was imprisoned on charges that include firearms charges and property damage, so no not really. You would have been better off going for this article which is about journalists being charged for something they actually printed. The actual tabloid article they were arrested for showed pictures of female members of the judiciary as prostitutes (using their faces on a stock photo). If anyone can find the text of this article I would be interested. So I have found your citation for you, proving that I am in fact impartial and genuinely want to be informed. I disagree with the charges and believe that journalists should be able to say what they want, I think the Chavez administration has overstepped its authority in this case. Now should I spend hours on the internet searching for documents proving that Chavez also kills journalists or do you want to admit you are full of shit?
Oh wait, I have found some totally unsubstantiated allegations of extra-judicial killing of journalists in Venezuela too. Some journalists were killed but no one knows exactly who killed them and speculate that it may have been politically motivated. It is not proof but it is still a cause for concern.
So now I am actually concerned about state repression of the media in Venezuela. Thanks to... oh wait. No thanks to some people who couldn't find a reliable source for their own backside. I hope you are embarrassed. I was asking a reasonable question, when I state something I find citations for it on request. I resent being called an asshole for not swallowing your opinion whole without thinking for myself. I also resent having my internet search skills insulted by someone who fails basic reading comprehension. Don't make me search for your citations next time, that is your job.
I read a bit further on the emergency powers issue. One one hand Chavez voluntarily reduced the term of his emergency powers from 18 months to 6, to disprove the criticism that he is a dictator, on the other hand he did quickly sign a whole bunch of laws on the last days of those powers. The news media didn't see fit to furnish me with details of those laws though, so it is difficult to judge the level of oppressiveness. There is a reason I said 'as leaders go', I don't think he is a saint or anything, I personally think he has been in power far too long and power corrupts. The Venezuelan people seriously need to vote for someone else in the next election. I was just saying that the demonizing 'oppressive fascist dictator' FUD is more garbage propaganda from right wing US news organisation and anyone who takes it seriously should seriously consider critical thinking, education and/or being silent. I think he was a good leader and did a lot of good for his country and its people, but he has passed his use-by date and needs to go now.
Maybe you should have spent a few more seconds reading my post, specifically the part quoted from its parent.
You articles show that he asked for emergency powers after a disaster, that he implemented gun control laws and that he closed some private media corporations (since when is CNN liberal?!). The first two are opinions about possible future dictatoryness. Note the words 'critics warn' and 'said[...]a U.S. government office'. This is not evidence, it is opinion. The last one is the only one that even relates to my question. It is also contextless and only the headline and an opinion by the journalist actually offer any 'evidence' that it is repression and not simply normal governance. Chavez accuses them of supporting the coup against him, if true this gives him 'some' justification for closing them, especially as the junta were some pretty dodgy people. But I don't want to get too bogged down in the details of that event, as it is still only peripheral to my question. The parent of my post claimed that he was killing journalists and/or sending them to prison. This is a VERY serious allegation and I don't think I am out of line to ask for substantiation. Do you have any links for that?
tl:dr Citation still needed for killing/imprisoning journalists
PS. Seriously? Gun control = dictatorship? I am sorry but I grew up in New Zealand where we have had very strong gun control laws for a long time, that shit is not going to fly with me.
Chavez, who kill their journalist opponents or, if they're lucky, just get railroaded into jail. Chavez just completed the dictator trifecta -- hassled opponents and journalists, silencing them.
I frequently hear people badmouthing Chavez on slashdot, but when I ask for citations they come up with nothing or with some op-ed from a fox news anchorperson. Please be the exception to the rule or I will have to spend the rest of my life in with the obviously wrongheaded belief that he is actually an ok guy as leaders go and is only demonized in the US media because he refused to toe the line and be ousted by the cia for privatising big industry.
Why are you even arguing such an absurdly framed debate? You are saying corporations aren't people therefore taxing corporations is not the same as taxing people therefore taxing corporations is ok. Taxing people is ok too, so the whole discussion is pointless. I agree with you but that is the trouble with the US political climate at the moment, too many wrongly framed debates and even their opponents perpetuate them without question. Taxes are not bad, taxing people is not bad, taxing corporations is not bad. Yes it is also true that corporations are not people and that money is not the same as free speech but those have been ruled on the in the supreme court so you are going to have to suck it up until you can get the rulings overturned.
The guy you are arguing against has 'socialism is slavery' as a sig ffs, shouldn't that have tipped you off that you are getting into an unwinnable quagmire argument? He is either trolling or unable to use dictionaries, either way I am sure you have better things to do.
Why do I keep hearing this? The desk top has been around since recorded history, and it's use has only increased - drastically - in modern times. Oh you were talking about computers that you put on a desk? I put mine under the desk, and I put my mobile device on desks sometimes. Oh you were talking about square box non-portable personal computers? Well I think there will always be a market for a computer that can fit under an office desk and not in your pocket, for those that need a bit of extra data storage or more processing power than the average pocket can contain. Oh wait you were talking about... what exactly? People who say X is dead should be tied up and tortured until they reveal exactly what dead means in this context. Bill Gates stopped short of saying the desktop pc is dead because he is less of an idiot than the writer of the slashdot summary. Seems the average person is.
In other news lot's of people drink soft drinks, is this a sign that water is dead or dying?
Only 35 years? That is such a small amount of time on an astronomical timescale that it barely even has an existence. The odds of seti finding anything in 35 years is about the same as getting hit by lightning 150 times in 5 minutes on a cloudless day, and this has been known by the scientists involved for quite some time. You are wildly impatient. If we develop faster than light interstellar travel and it still hasn't found us any potential destinations I will concede that it was a failure. So talk to me in 200+ years.
The question is not will all alien species use radio, neither is it a question about the relative benefits of going to the stars vs listening to them, the cost of going to the stars is currently around infinity, which means if we could afford to go to the stars we could afford to finance the seti project and still have enough money go to the stars.
The question is this: is it worthwhile spending 2 million per year listening for radio signals from other stars. I think it is, as 2 million is such an insignificant amount of money in terms of humanity's resources. We probably spend that each day on cocktail umbrellas.
You don't seem to remember much from history... The first "Big dog" in piracy was Napster, and they flourished at a time when the vast majority of the public had 56k connections at best.
For those of us who are really old, there was audiogalaxy before napster. I don't know if anyone else here remembers that, it was not even peer to peer in any sense it was simply a site that served every song known to man. I found stuff on there that was super rare and hard to come by, even with the massive modern archives we have access to. It had a great search function and all songs were guaranteed to be what they were labelled as and a good recording. I still miss it. I used to dare people to come up with a song so obscure I couldn't find it there, some people succeeded but most were surprised.
Except that when 3rd world countries don't do what they are told, they are hit with economic sanctions, their leaders are demonised in the world media, and in extreme cases they are invaded, bombed or both. The poverty in the third world is manufactured, not in the sense that it wasn't there before and someone created it, but in the sense that it would have naturally faded away by now if powerful rich nations weren't working their asses of to perpetuate it. Cuba is a nice example, they got the sanctions for having strong welfare, education and medical policies designed to bring them up to first world status. First they got crippling sanctions, and although these succeeded in keeping them poor, it didn't make them give up their system. Then they got the invasions.
Popular culture is culture, and US popular culture has changed and is changing the world. I am not saying this is a good thing or that you should be proud of it, but your argument that nothing exists to be proud of is false.
I realise you are being sarcastic, but some other people probably think this is true. I would like to state for the record that the US has been convicted in international court of supporting terrorists and ordered to pay reparations, which are still unpaid to date. In addition the US and Israel were the only two countries to vote against a UN resolution to combat terrorism in the 80s when the whole war on terror thing was getting started.
The US is resolutely pro terrorism in policy and has been for a long time, they are only anti terrorism in their PR and propaganda branches.
What does that even mean? The internet is more of an 'everybody wins environment', if one can even make any general statements about the internet at all. Any elements of winner takes all in the internet is a result of our economic and financial systems, and also patent and copyright law. There are some exceptions for services like social networking where you need to be on the same service as everyone else to get the benefits of the system, but even that is partly a result of a competitive corporate system. If for example social networking sites used an industry standard data format which you could download from your current social networking site and migrate seamlessly to another one, then the current monopolistic system would likely cease to be a problem. To make such a statement about the internet as if it is an intrinsic property of a distributed self routing information network is just absurd.
"a nuclear bomb hidden in a suitcase detonated in Washington could leave a headless government. "
Oh shut the fuck up no one cares about your FUD mindless fear mongering doomsday scenarios. Extra bodyguards on mindless government drone #10 wouldn't prevent that anyway.
Just a suggestion though, if you are going to base your population control on the Machiavellian ideals of fear and an iron fist, biological attacks are far more likely, realistic and effective. They are virtually impossible to prevent or control (FUD++) and could do a lot more damage than just killing off your useless overfed government. If you are going to make up bullshit to keep folks in line at least have some imagination ffs.
The problem is with our current economic and financial systems, which are outdated and unwieldy. We have enough resources for everyone, and the work required to produce all the things we need is a tiny fraction of the work available. But our system is still based on ancient feudal/aristocratic systems that funnel all the wealth to a privileged few. Such systems are becoming less and less sustainable and a robotics revolution will make this even worse.
The primary sign of the flaws in our system are the common responses given when the point is made that we have enough for everyone: 'who will pay for it?'. The correct answer is 'no one', money is imaginary and we simply need to devise a new system of distribution in which money is no longer an obstacle.
Modern humans have been working tirelessly to reduce the amount of man hours of work required to provide the necessities to each person, since the industrial revolution. High unemployment figures are a sign of our great success. We should celebrate every extra unemployed person and anticipate with excitement the day when all humans can be unemployed. We should also start sorting out our regulatory systems to cope with that state so that when it comes we don't have to watch everything collapse under the strain.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, there's 10 citations for you. Begin your spin, denouncements, deflections, justifications, and outright lies.....
No, those are good. Thankyou.
How did I become the bad guy for asking for citations?
I think your debate is skewed to the right. You didn't leave room on your spectrum for organisations like WSW. They are way left of NPR. I am also including extremists, there are those that are much more extreme than WSW. There are also plenty of right wingers that are far to the right of fox. My point is that from another perspective CNN are fairly right wing and NPR is centrist or slighly left. Fox is still batshit-crazy conservative though. I don't even claim that conservatives are wrong, fox isn't wrong because they are too far right, they are wrong because they are incoherent and idiotic.
I doubt Germany would extradite over this. The UK is the US' lapdog, Germany less so. I am not saying they couldn't be persuaded, but it is unlikely.
I am genuinely looking for information, but I know about protests and dodgy looking election results. I wanted information on the killing and imprisonment of journalists. Like I said above, read the part I quoted. Also read above where I found the links I was asking for myself, after getting tired of rude/ignorant people telling me I should not think for myself. With respect to your articles, thanks for the links but all of those things happen in the US as well(47th in press freedom) and are therefore poor examples. Student protests are brutalised, people are kicked out of both the dems and the reps(? whats the short form) for publicly going against party policy. Censorship is a bit different in the US, far more subtle and mostly achieved by money rather than violence (which is better, but still not good). Chavez is a politician. He is not better or worse than bush or blair or merkel, he may be cruder, poorer and less sophisticated but I nothing but contempt for all of them. I also have nothing but contempt for people that post wild allegations without offering supporting documentation.
Apparently by the Chavez side. According to statistical analysis.
It says he was imprisoned on charges that include firearms charges and property damage, so no not really. You would have been better off going for this article which is about journalists being charged for something they actually printed. The actual tabloid article they were arrested for showed pictures of female members of the judiciary as prostitutes (using their faces on a stock photo). If anyone can find the text of this article I would be interested. So I have found your citation for you, proving that I am in fact impartial and genuinely want to be informed. I disagree with the charges and believe that journalists should be able to say what they want, I think the Chavez administration has overstepped its authority in this case. Now should I spend hours on the internet searching for documents proving that Chavez also kills journalists or do you want to admit you are full of shit?
Oh wait, I have found some totally unsubstantiated allegations of extra-judicial killing of journalists in Venezuela too. Some journalists were killed but no one knows exactly who killed them and speculate that it may have been politically motivated. It is not proof but it is still a cause for concern.
So now I am actually concerned about state repression of the media in Venezuela. Thanks to... oh wait. No thanks to some people who couldn't find a reliable source for their own backside. I hope you are embarrassed. I was asking a reasonable question, when I state something I find citations for it on request. I resent being called an asshole for not swallowing your opinion whole without thinking for myself. I also resent having my internet search skills insulted by someone who fails basic reading comprehension. Don't make me search for your citations next time, that is your job.
Anyone who rules by decree is a dictator. It doesn't matter where are they are from, or what they do.
In fact, you'd think we'd know a dictator when we see one, given our vast experience.
You would hope so, but to be honest I don't have a lot of faith in your judgement. Sorry.
I read a bit further on the emergency powers issue. One one hand Chavez voluntarily reduced the term of his emergency powers from 18 months to 6, to disprove the criticism that he is a dictator, on the other hand he did quickly sign a whole bunch of laws on the last days of those powers. The news media didn't see fit to furnish me with details of those laws though, so it is difficult to judge the level of oppressiveness. There is a reason I said 'as leaders go', I don't think he is a saint or anything, I personally think he has been in power far too long and power corrupts. The Venezuelan people seriously need to vote for someone else in the next election. I was just saying that the demonizing 'oppressive fascist dictator' FUD is more garbage propaganda from right wing US news organisation and anyone who takes it seriously should seriously consider critical thinking, education and/or being silent. I think he was a good leader and did a lot of good for his country and its people, but he has passed his use-by date and needs to go now.
Maybe you should have spent a few more seconds reading my post, specifically the part quoted from its parent.
You articles show that he asked for emergency powers after a disaster, that he implemented gun control laws and that he closed some private media corporations (since when is CNN liberal?!). The first two are opinions about possible future dictatoryness. Note the words 'critics warn' and 'said[...]a U.S. government office'. This is not evidence, it is opinion. The last one is the only one that even relates to my question. It is also contextless and only the headline and an opinion by the journalist actually offer any 'evidence' that it is repression and not simply normal governance. Chavez accuses them of supporting the coup against him, if true this gives him 'some' justification for closing them, especially as the junta were some pretty dodgy people. But I don't want to get too bogged down in the details of that event, as it is still only peripheral to my question. The parent of my post claimed that he was killing journalists and/or sending them to prison. This is a VERY serious allegation and I don't think I am out of line to ask for substantiation. Do you have any links for that?
tl:dr Citation still needed for killing/imprisoning journalists
PS. Seriously? Gun control = dictatorship? I am sorry but I grew up in New Zealand where we have had very strong gun control laws for a long time, that shit is not going to fly with me.
Chavez, who kill their journalist opponents or, if they're lucky, just get railroaded into jail. Chavez just completed the dictator trifecta -- hassled opponents and journalists, silencing them.
I frequently hear people badmouthing Chavez on slashdot, but when I ask for citations they come up with nothing or with some op-ed from a fox news anchorperson. Please be the exception to the rule or I will have to spend the rest of my life in with the obviously wrongheaded belief that he is actually an ok guy as leaders go and is only demonized in the US media because he refused to toe the line and be ousted by the cia for privatising big industry.
tl:dr
Citation needed
Europe is once again reborn as a democracy, of the people, for the people.
Now all we have to deal with is the ESM and we are home free....
Sigh
Why are you even arguing such an absurdly framed debate? You are saying corporations aren't people therefore taxing corporations is not the same as taxing people therefore taxing corporations is ok. Taxing people is ok too, so the whole discussion is pointless. I agree with you but that is the trouble with the US political climate at the moment, too many wrongly framed debates and even their opponents perpetuate them without question. Taxes are not bad, taxing people is not bad, taxing corporations is not bad. Yes it is also true that corporations are not people and that money is not the same as free speech but those have been ruled on the in the supreme court so you are going to have to suck it up until you can get the rulings overturned.
The guy you are arguing against has 'socialism is slavery' as a sig ffs, shouldn't that have tipped you off that you are getting into an unwinnable quagmire argument? He is either trolling or unable to use dictionaries, either way I am sure you have better things to do.
Is the a sign the desktop is dead or dying?[sic]
Why do I keep hearing this? The desk top has been around since recorded history, and it's use has only increased - drastically - in modern times. Oh you were talking about computers that you put on a desk? I put mine under the desk, and I put my mobile device on desks sometimes. Oh you were talking about square box non-portable personal computers? Well I think there will always be a market for a computer that can fit under an office desk and not in your pocket, for those that need a bit of extra data storage or more processing power than the average pocket can contain. Oh wait you were talking about... what exactly? People who say X is dead should be tied up and tortured until they reveal exactly what dead means in this context. Bill Gates stopped short of saying the desktop pc is dead because he is less of an idiot than the writer of the slashdot summary. Seems the average person is.
In other news lot's of people drink soft drinks, is this a sign that water is dead or dying?
In the bank?
Only 35 years? That is such a small amount of time on an astronomical timescale that it barely even has an existence. The odds of seti finding anything in 35 years is about the same as getting hit by lightning 150 times in 5 minutes on a cloudless day, and this has been known by the scientists involved for quite some time. You are wildly impatient. If we develop faster than light interstellar travel and it still hasn't found us any potential destinations I will concede that it was a failure. So talk to me in 200+ years.
The question is not will all alien species use radio, neither is it a question about the relative benefits of going to the stars vs listening to them, the cost of going to the stars is currently around infinity, which means if we could afford to go to the stars we could afford to finance the seti project and still have enough money go to the stars.
The question is this: is it worthwhile spending 2 million per year listening for radio signals from other stars. I think it is, as 2 million is such an insignificant amount of money in terms of humanity's resources. We probably spend that each day on cocktail umbrellas.
You don't seem to remember much from history... The first "Big dog" in piracy was Napster, and they flourished at a time when the vast majority of the public had 56k connections at best.
For those of us who are really old, there was audiogalaxy before napster. I don't know if anyone else here remembers that, it was not even peer to peer in any sense it was simply a site that served every song known to man. I found stuff on there that was super rare and hard to come by, even with the massive modern archives we have access to. It had a great search function and all songs were guaranteed to be what they were labelled as and a good recording. I still miss it. I used to dare people to come up with a song so obscure I couldn't find it there, some people succeeded but most were surprised.
Except that when 3rd world countries don't do what they are told, they are hit with economic sanctions, their leaders are demonised in the world media, and in extreme cases they are invaded, bombed or both. The poverty in the third world is manufactured, not in the sense that it wasn't there before and someone created it, but in the sense that it would have naturally faded away by now if powerful rich nations weren't working their asses of to perpetuate it. Cuba is a nice example, they got the sanctions for having strong welfare, education and medical policies designed to bring them up to first world status. First they got crippling sanctions, and although these succeeded in keeping them poor, it didn't make them give up their system. Then they got the invasions.
Popular culture is culture, and US popular culture has changed and is changing the world. I am not saying this is a good thing or that you should be proud of it, but your argument that nothing exists to be proud of is false.
So the damage is done to file hosting industry.
Tell that to mediafire, which is where all illegal download links started sending me about a week after megaupload went down.
US government is against terrorism.
I realise you are being sarcastic, but some other people probably think this is true. I would like to state for the record that the US has been convicted in international court of supporting terrorists and ordered to pay reparations, which are still unpaid to date. In addition the US and Israel were the only two countries to vote against a UN resolution to combat terrorism in the 80s when the whole war on terror thing was getting started.
The US is resolutely pro terrorism in policy and has been for a long time, they are only anti terrorism in their PR and propaganda branches.
"the winner-take-all Internet environment"
What does that even mean? The internet is more of an 'everybody wins environment', if one can even make any general statements about the internet at all. Any elements of winner takes all in the internet is a result of our economic and financial systems, and also patent and copyright law. There are some exceptions for services like social networking where you need to be on the same service as everyone else to get the benefits of the system, but even that is partly a result of a competitive corporate system. If for example social networking sites used an industry standard data format which you could download from your current social networking site and migrate seamlessly to another one, then the current monopolistic system would likely cease to be a problem. To make such a statement about the internet as if it is an intrinsic property of a distributed self routing information network is just absurd.
I mostly use mine for games
"a nuclear bomb hidden in a suitcase detonated in Washington could leave a headless government. "
Oh shut the fuck up no one cares about your FUD mindless fear mongering doomsday scenarios. Extra bodyguards on mindless government drone #10 wouldn't prevent that anyway.
Just a suggestion though, if you are going to base your population control on the Machiavellian ideals of fear and an iron fist, biological attacks are far more likely, realistic and effective. They are virtually impossible to prevent or control (FUD++) and could do a lot more damage than just killing off your useless overfed government. If you are going to make up bullshit to keep folks in line at least have some imagination ffs.
The problem is with our current economic and financial systems, which are outdated and unwieldy. We have enough resources for everyone, and the work required to produce all the things we need is a tiny fraction of the work available. But our system is still based on ancient feudal/aristocratic systems that funnel all the wealth to a privileged few. Such systems are becoming less and less sustainable and a robotics revolution will make this even worse.
The primary sign of the flaws in our system are the common responses given when the point is made that we have enough for everyone: 'who will pay for it?'. The correct answer is 'no one', money is imaginary and we simply need to devise a new system of distribution in which money is no longer an obstacle.
Modern humans have been working tirelessly to reduce the amount of man hours of work required to provide the necessities to each person, since the industrial revolution. High unemployment figures are a sign of our great success. We should celebrate every extra unemployed person and anticipate with excitement the day when all humans can be unemployed. We should also start sorting out our regulatory systems to cope with that state so that when it comes we don't have to watch everything collapse under the strain.