No actually it's not, although I'm not quite sure why. I found boisterous teens shouting and goofing off loudly somehow much less annoying than a guy having a loud invisible conversation with the air. The guy conducting the invisible symphony doesn't annoy me at all.
I have no clue why the cell phone makes it more irritating. Maybe the fact that in some sense it's technology rather than people causing the problem?
Yeah, as both corporations and government are run by people the chance of incompetency is high. Also you could pretty easily do s/government/large corporation/g on your post and have it hold true. I just prefer the fact that the government has some safe guards in place to let us figure out when things go wrong.
Not to answer the broader question, but your question specifically. The difference is that the federal government is (at least somewhat) accountable to the people and has tools like the courts and freedom of information acts to get information out.
I also scan the headlines of the local newsrag in the newspaper machine before going into a restaurant. Haven't paid for one of those in the past decade either.
>>Good music doesn't need marketeers, that leads to crap like spears and cirus.
That's a recursive statement. Of course good music needs marketing. Please explain how you are finding good un-marketed music. Do mp3s just magically appear on your hard drive? Because I personally have to find out about bands via websites, tv shows, live gigs and magazines. Those websites, tv shows, promoters and magazines found out about the band because someone notified them. That someone is a marketer. Even if they happen to be the singer of the band, or a position paid millions of dollars. Still marketing.
>> Travel and Booking Why will you give me accounting, but not travel and booking? Neither's too hard for people to learn, but they both are tedious and take away a lot of time from creative pursuits.
Or it could be that the number of people who lobby in favor of copyright reform is much smaller than the number who lobby against it. Having a defeatist attitude and whining doesn't get problems fixed.
I highly recommend the movie Anvil before you make these kind of ridiculous claims again. The problem with these claims is they assume that bands have the time and skills to be marketeers, travel and booking agents, and accountants. Oddly enough it's possible the musicians might NOT be good at one or more of these thing.
What would be nice would be an IDE that could deal with proportional fonts. Keep my tab stops, spaces, and braces in alignment, but render the text in proportional font. I understand the value of being able to read the language part of my code as language, and read the structural part of my code as structure. The best of both worlds would be nice.
What would really be cool would be that they could bring back Ronald Regan and actually make him a good actor. Although probably we'd be more entertained if they used the tech to bring back Bonzo.
I think you've missed that I'm for severe restrictions on copyright. That said:
"While your idea of innovation might be The Matrix or Avatar"
Um, no. Those are fun and all, but they're derivative movies that are mainly about marketing based upon special effects. I was talking more about something like Clerks that showed there was an entirely new market for movies with lots of dialog and inexpensive production values.
"Another good example of how the current system is screwed up, really your last two paragraphs have quite nicely supported my case by showing how bad things are currently. You don't tell me how lack of copyright would make these situations worse."
My point was that low barrier to entry does not necessarily equal good product. And if your idea of innovative movies are "The Matrix" or "Avatar" then you definitely would want to preserve copyright. There's no way you could recoup investment on a movie like that without the kind of financial shell game that depends on an extremely solid way to make money in perpetuity. No banked would loan you $300 million dollars to make a movie, no matter what you think the market will bear.
"Spending more money on art and entertainment than there is genuine demand is akin to hedonism. If I could eat an infinite amount of chocolate I would probably still decide it wasn't worth it."
Spending more money on entertainment than there is genuine demand for is hedonism. Art should have some transcendent value to our culture. And thus should negate your chocolate argument. If we're talking purely about entertainment here, sure. Let's abolish copyright today. The problem is that there's very rarely pure-art or pure-entertainment.
I'm not arguing against taking copyright back to something like 10 years. I am against people deciding they have the right to do whatever they want because they feel a law has been hijacked.
"Stealing music" I realize it's loaded. But what would the correct term be then if I invited a plumber to my house to fix a leak, then didn't pay him (and I realize we have entire legal ideas of implied contracts, but I think they're codifying this exact problem)? There are expectations of payment and expectations of having to pay. It is not perhaps "stealing" in the traditional sense, but I am circumventing the expected transaction. If the artists puts a file online to be freely downloaded I am not circumventing this transaction. The implied transaction exists in both cases.
"If there really is a demand for million dollar movies, rather than just a desire, then economics says that demand will be met." Except this isn't really true. The captialist system is very good at finding existing demand and filling it to the point where demand is effectively eliminated or static. The system is actually very bad at finding new markets. We are not good at putting capital into developing new markets. If what you were saying is true, we'd see thousands of hollywood movies trying to create new forms in hopes of creating a new market. Instead we get very few of those and lots of movies trying to exploit tried and true formulas (many failing expensively because the market is saturated). Our system is very good at filling demand for incremental and conservative change. It is horrible at creating innovation. Innovation is really only something that happens because the market is so good at oversaturating itself. And unfortunately most of the time the big players in a saturated market figure out ways to lock out new players, thus insuring no new markets will be created.
"Artists are in a unique position to take advantage of the phenomenon of the truly competitive market due to near zero costs for distribution. In the current system your success is likely as likely to hinge on some sort of lucky break as it is the amount of talent you have or work you do. In a truly competitive market your success hinges more on demand for your talent and the amount of work you do."
I wish this was true, but it's patently false. Your success is still a mix of your ability to market yourself and your product. The cost of marketing is huge. That's why even though people keep talking about the move away from albums to singles the market has actually just moved to EPs. You simply can't justify the cost of marketing individual songs. This is one thing that we've been talking about in my community (theater) a lot. Now that we have this decentralized system that is so good at getting people started, how do we get the marketing efficiencies of scale that these large organizations have, and can we do so through some sort of coop even though the members of the coop are effectively competing against each other. It's a real puzzle. I generally spend at least double the time marketing plays for my production company that I do writing them. And so far I'm just holding steady. We've got a fairly steady audience base, and that 2:1 ratio just keeps us at current audience levels. Expanding my market would probably require an exponential investment.
One of the easiest places to look when trying to decide if this is actually true is movie production. Contrast independent movies now with independent movies in the early 1990s. The cost of making a movie has been driven to effectively zero. Yet when you look at today vs. the 1990s there are far fewer independent films in theaters. The difference is that marketing makes a huge difference. And even though you can make a movie for $100 it doesn't mean that you can spin up the marketing to convince even 10 people to see it at $10/ticket. During the early 90s you had a group of experts who were actively taking these movies and marketing them (think John Pierson). I think that's what makes the difference.
"I have to wholeheartedly disagree with the notion of 'socialised' or government controlled art." Many people do, but it provides a function. There are amazing things that can only be done with
I'm honestly just trying to point out that people need to stop thinking of stealing music as ok, regardless of justification. I'm not simplifying this into saying all music downloaded online is stealing. I think that listening to an album before buying is fine. But if that album goes into permanent rotation in your music collection you're stealing. It's important to buy music and support artists you like. Whether that's through buying mp3s, cds, t-shirts, or attending concerts. Not supporting artists is stealing and does make you an asshole.
That said, I think the current model is probably very efficient. It's exactly how all other branches of the arts now work. You have large producers who do things that are intellectually unexciting (or who get large government grants to do intellectually exciting risky works). You have medium sized producers who provide a marketing outlet for individual artists to utilize economies of scale, and you have individual artists selling directly to fans. The only real flaw to market based art is that conservative(not political, artistically) work is going to bubble up to the top. That's really the one thing that record companies had going for them. They have taste-makers who could see potential and could nurture bands until they became more skilled. That's the one thing that's been lost in most of the other arts. It's difficult to dedicated yourself to your art and work on developing your skill and so the aggregate quality goes down somewhat.
As a playwright with a day job, I'm averaging 3 short plays a year, and 1 full length every 2 years. If I were paid to dedicate my time to it I might be able to up my throughput substantially and my technical skills would improve thus improving the overall quality of finished product. As it is, I'll probably get there, but in 30 years, rather than 5. Most people drop out before that.
The other side lies in grants and a somewhat socialized art, but I think while that can lead to aesthetically beautiful art it tends to get neutered by the need to continue to receive funding. The federal government is a very conservative audience.
Yes, I understand. I am absolutely for copyright reform.
I was pointing out that the solution isn't to fuck over today's artists because you're pissed that Porgy and Bess is still under copyright. Most of the people being ripped off are people actively making music today. The number of "Beatles" is very small and the number of "Spoon"s are very high.
I'm a playwright. I'm acutely aware of making art for reasons other than financial gain.
That said, "morally right" is pretty easy to ascertain outside the realm of copyright law. We don't even have to look at copyright law. Let's do this:
1) Has the artist decided upon a channel for distributing their music? 2) Is the artist currently making music?
If both are true than I don't think you can make a compelling argument that you should be allowed to set up your own distribution channels for their music.
And the 80 years argument is silly. I think copyright law is as broken as the next guy, but no one's looking for torrents of George Gershwin and Laurence Welk. They're predominantly downloading music from living artists made in the last year. It's theft.
It's time to draw a line between people who buy music and were against DRM because it kept them from doing what they legitimately wanted to with music (play in car, on stereo, and on computer), and people who were against DRM because it kept them from being effective thieves.
While this is true, let's remember that it's the artist's decision whether or not a given song should be available for free on a file trading service. Not yours. If you're uploading it, you're just a thief no matter how good your intentions.
You are aware that the major studios are already obsolete, right? That doesn't mean you are absolved of paying for music. You can now go to pretty much any artist directly and buy unencumbered mp3s from them.
The problem is that people by and large don't pay for music anymore. They've decided they have the right to have it for free. I know people who make 6 figures who buy CDs from record stores, rip them, and return them. I know people who rip itunes daap stations and pull down every song even if they have no interest in the music. That's just outright theft. That's not the same thing as not buying the new U2 album because you don't want to support the major labels. That's not "borrowing" a friend's mp3s of an album to see if you like them. That's just theft.
So buy some music. It's morally the right thing to do. You can get it without DRM. If you don't you're just another asshole stealing from the little guy. 90% of musicians make less than $75k/year. Most are hovering around the poverty line or have other jobs.
Because the majority of the people who make that content depend on it for their livelihoods and don't make much money. So while your argument might make sense when talking about a Disney movie from the 1920s, it makes almost no sense when referring to anything made within the last decade, which I have a hunch is the time period most people are pirating. I don't hear a lot of calls to go after people pirating Gershwin tunes.
I think child porn is a bad comparison, since that's basically what they're doing. The problem is that the whole point of the anti-child porn campaigns is destroying the market. Best thing to do is work on shutting down distribution and leaving the end users alone. The key should be to make it worth their time to spend $.99 rather than download.
Then start a public relations campaign to make stealing from artists seem uncool. Rather than using the 20 biggest artists in the world, use hard working artists who are having trouble getting by. Like Ian Mcdougall of the River Boat gamblers, who made about $12k/year before getting hit by a car and being left with thousands of dollars in medical bills. It's much harder to justify stealing from someone like that.
We've gotten what we've wanted. You can buy pretty much any music you want in an open format. We won. I've read your slashdot posts. You said you'd start buying music again once that condition was met. So do it.
Don't worry too much. It's defnitely something we should push for, but it'll go the way of Apple's DRM. The content providers don't want a single book store, so there will be competing DRM formats. The inevitable cheap hardware clones won't want to pay for the DRM licenses. The DRM will go away and we'll be back to an open format.
PHP and Java both have great class libraries that let you stitch together a program pretty quickly without having to re-invent the wheel or master something like CPAN (I know you people think they're easy and I agree, but it's a barrier to getting up and running quickly, and barriers are bad).
And I think learning to program for the web is a great starting place since it's easy to get results. I didn't really get into programming as a teenager because it was so hard to get impressive results with C++ quickly.
And javascript programming is great for kids. It's pretty trivial to be able to do simple animations, wire buttons, etc.
But there are already how many PS3 owners who now have a 3D Blu-Ray player? This is the easiest introduction of a new format ever. It's like the PS2 and DVDs. That was a massive trojan horse to getting people onto the DVD format.
I'm excited that I'll be getting 3D. My wife and I are thinking about upgrading our TV in the next two years to take advantage.
So I guess some of us are excited, yes. My wife hates people in movie theater and BluRay really gives you something very close to the big screen experience without the people.
That said, I haven't bought a single BluRay movie. We have Netflix. And probably 90% of what we watch is BluRay from them. I know 3 people who have BluRay players, all of them have Netflix. I think Netflix is actually killing their sales numbers.
While I can't understand your statement due to the lack of subjects, verbs, and agreement, it appears to be tea party rhetoric which is not based upon the news.
Slashdot Mirror
No actually it's not, although I'm not quite sure why. I found boisterous teens shouting and goofing off loudly somehow much less annoying than a guy having a loud invisible conversation with the air. The guy conducting the invisible symphony doesn't annoy me at all.
I have no clue why the cell phone makes it more irritating. Maybe the fact that in some sense it's technology rather than people causing the problem?
Yeah, as both corporations and government are run by people the chance of incompetency is high. Also you could pretty easily do s/government/large corporation/g on your post and have it hold true. I just prefer the fact that the government has some safe guards in place to let us figure out when things go wrong.
Not to answer the broader question, but your question specifically. The difference is that the federal government is (at least somewhat) accountable to the people and has tools like the courts and freedom of information acts to get information out.
Private corporations not so much.
I also scan the headlines of the local newsrag in the newspaper machine before going into a restaurant. Haven't paid for one of those in the past decade either.
>>Good music doesn't need marketeers, that leads to crap like spears and cirus.
That's a recursive statement. Of course good music needs marketing. Please explain how you are finding good un-marketed music. Do mp3s just magically appear on your hard drive? Because I personally have to find out about bands via websites, tv shows, live gigs and magazines. Those websites, tv shows, promoters and magazines found out about the band because someone notified them. That someone is a marketer. Even if they happen to be the singer of the band, or a position paid millions of dollars. Still marketing.
>> Travel and Booking
Why will you give me accounting, but not travel and booking? Neither's too hard for people to learn, but they both are tedious and take away a lot of time from creative pursuits.
Or it could be that the number of people who lobby in favor of copyright reform is much smaller than the number who lobby against it. Having a defeatist attitude and whining doesn't get problems fixed.
I highly recommend the movie Anvil before you make these kind of ridiculous claims again. The problem with these claims is they assume that bands have the time and skills to be marketeers, travel and booking agents, and accountants. Oddly enough it's possible the musicians might NOT be good at one or more of these thing.
What would be nice would be an IDE that could deal with proportional fonts. Keep my tab stops, spaces, and braces in alignment, but render the text in proportional font. I understand the value of being able to read the language part of my code as language, and read the structural part of my code as structure. The best of both worlds would be nice.
What would really be cool would be that they could bring back Ronald Regan and actually make him a good actor. Although probably we'd be more entertained if they used the tech to bring back Bonzo.
I think you've missed that I'm for severe restrictions on copyright. That said:
"While your idea of innovation might be The Matrix or Avatar"
Um, no. Those are fun and all, but they're derivative movies that are mainly about marketing based upon special effects. I was talking more about something like Clerks that showed there was an entirely new market for movies with lots of dialog and inexpensive production values.
"Another good example of how the current system is screwed up, really your last two paragraphs have quite nicely supported my case by showing how bad things are currently. You don't tell me how lack of copyright would make these situations worse."
My point was that low barrier to entry does not necessarily equal good product. And if your idea of innovative movies are "The Matrix" or "Avatar" then you definitely would want to preserve copyright. There's no way you could recoup investment on a movie like that without the kind of financial shell game that depends on an extremely solid way to make money in perpetuity. No banked would loan you $300 million dollars to make a movie, no matter what you think the market will bear.
"Spending more money on art and entertainment than there is genuine demand is akin to hedonism. If I could eat an infinite amount of chocolate I would probably still decide it wasn't worth it."
Spending more money on entertainment than there is genuine demand for is hedonism. Art should have some transcendent value to our culture. And thus should negate your chocolate argument. If we're talking purely about entertainment here, sure. Let's abolish copyright today. The problem is that there's very rarely pure-art or pure-entertainment.
I'm not arguing against taking copyright back to something like 10 years. I am against people deciding they have the right to do whatever they want because they feel a law has been hijacked.
"Stealing music"
I realize it's loaded. But what would the correct term be then if I invited a plumber to my house to fix a leak, then didn't pay him (and I realize we have entire legal ideas of implied contracts, but I think they're codifying this exact problem)? There are expectations of payment and expectations of having to pay. It is not perhaps "stealing" in the traditional sense, but I am circumventing the expected transaction. If the artists puts a file online to be freely downloaded I am not circumventing this transaction. The implied transaction exists in both cases.
"If there really is a demand for million dollar movies, rather than just a desire, then economics says that demand will be met."
Except this isn't really true. The captialist system is very good at finding existing demand and filling it to the point where demand is effectively eliminated or static. The system is actually very bad at finding new markets. We are not good at putting capital into developing new markets. If what you were saying is true, we'd see thousands of hollywood movies trying to create new forms in hopes of creating a new market. Instead we get very few of those and lots of movies trying to exploit tried and true formulas (many failing expensively because the market is saturated). Our system is very good at filling demand for incremental and conservative change. It is horrible at creating innovation. Innovation is really only something that happens because the market is so good at oversaturating itself. And unfortunately most of the time the big players in a saturated market figure out ways to lock out new players, thus insuring no new markets will be created.
"Artists are in a unique position to take advantage of the phenomenon of the truly competitive market due to near zero costs for distribution. In the current system your success is likely as likely to hinge on some sort of lucky break as it is the amount of talent you have or work you do. In a truly competitive market your success hinges more on demand for your talent and the amount of work you do."
I wish this was true, but it's patently false. Your success is still a mix of your ability to market yourself and your product. The cost of marketing is huge. That's why even though people keep talking about the move away from albums to singles the market has actually just moved to EPs. You simply can't justify the cost of marketing individual songs. This is one thing that we've been talking about in my community (theater) a lot. Now that we have this decentralized system that is so good at getting people started, how do we get the marketing efficiencies of scale that these large organizations have, and can we do so through some sort of coop even though the members of the coop are effectively competing against each other. It's a real puzzle. I generally spend at least double the time marketing plays for my production company that I do writing them. And so far I'm just holding steady. We've got a fairly steady audience base, and that 2:1 ratio just keeps us at current audience levels. Expanding my market would probably require an exponential investment.
One of the easiest places to look when trying to decide if this is actually true is movie production. Contrast independent movies now with independent movies in the early 1990s. The cost of making a movie has been driven to effectively zero. Yet when you look at today vs. the 1990s there are far fewer independent films in theaters. The difference is that marketing makes a huge difference. And even though you can make a movie for $100 it doesn't mean that you can spin up the marketing to convince even 10 people to see it at $10/ticket. During the early 90s you had a group of experts who were actively taking these movies and marketing them (think John Pierson). I think that's what makes the difference.
"I have to wholeheartedly disagree with the notion of 'socialised' or government controlled art."
Many people do, but it provides a function. There are amazing things that can only be done with
I'm honestly just trying to point out that people need to stop thinking of stealing music as ok, regardless of justification. I'm not simplifying this into saying all music downloaded online is stealing. I think that listening to an album before buying is fine. But if that album goes into permanent rotation in your music collection you're stealing. It's important to buy music and support artists you like. Whether that's through buying mp3s, cds, t-shirts, or attending concerts. Not supporting artists is stealing and does make you an asshole.
That said, I think the current model is probably very efficient. It's exactly how all other branches of the arts now work. You have large producers who do things that are intellectually unexciting (or who get large government grants to do intellectually exciting risky works). You have medium sized producers who provide a marketing outlet for individual artists to utilize economies of scale, and you have individual artists selling directly to fans. The only real flaw to market based art is that conservative(not political, artistically) work is going to bubble up to the top. That's really the one thing that record companies had going for them. They have taste-makers who could see potential and could nurture bands until they became more skilled. That's the one thing that's been lost in most of the other arts. It's difficult to dedicated yourself to your art and work on developing your skill and so the aggregate quality goes down somewhat.
As a playwright with a day job, I'm averaging 3 short plays a year, and 1 full length every 2 years. If I were paid to dedicate my time to it I might be able to up my throughput substantially and my technical skills would improve thus improving the overall quality of finished product. As it is, I'll probably get there, but in 30 years, rather than 5. Most people drop out before that.
The other side lies in grants and a somewhat socialized art, but I think while that can lead to aesthetically beautiful art it tends to get neutered by the need to continue to receive funding. The federal government is a very conservative audience.
Yes, I understand. I am absolutely for copyright reform.
I was pointing out that the solution isn't to fuck over today's artists because you're pissed that Porgy and Bess is still under copyright. Most of the people being ripped off are people actively making music today. The number of "Beatles" is very small and the number of "Spoon"s are very high.
I'm a playwright. I'm acutely aware of making art for reasons other than financial gain.
That said, "morally right" is pretty easy to ascertain outside the realm of copyright law. We don't even have to look at copyright law. Let's do this:
1) Has the artist decided upon a channel for distributing their music?
2) Is the artist currently making music?
If both are true than I don't think you can make a compelling argument that you should be allowed to set up your own distribution channels for their music.
And the 80 years argument is silly. I think copyright law is as broken as the next guy, but no one's looking for torrents of George Gershwin and Laurence Welk. They're predominantly downloading music from living artists made in the last year. It's theft.
It's time to draw a line between people who buy music and were against DRM because it kept them from doing what they legitimately wanted to with music (play in car, on stereo, and on computer), and people who were against DRM because it kept them from being effective thieves.
While this is true, let's remember that it's the artist's decision whether or not a given song should be available for free on a file trading service. Not yours. If you're uploading it, you're just a thief no matter how good your intentions.
You are aware that the major studios are already obsolete, right? That doesn't mean you are absolved of paying for music. You can now go to pretty much any artist directly and buy unencumbered mp3s from them.
The problem is that people by and large don't pay for music anymore. They've decided they have the right to have it for free. I know people who make 6 figures who buy CDs from record stores, rip them, and return them. I know people who rip itunes daap stations and pull down every song even if they have no interest in the music. That's just outright theft. That's not the same thing as not buying the new U2 album because you don't want to support the major labels. That's not "borrowing" a friend's mp3s of an album to see if you like them. That's just theft.
So buy some music. It's morally the right thing to do. You can get it without DRM. If you don't you're just another asshole stealing from the little guy. 90% of musicians make less than $75k/year. Most are hovering around the poverty line or have other jobs.
Because the majority of the people who make that content depend on it for their livelihoods and don't make much money. So while your argument might make sense when talking about a Disney movie from the 1920s, it makes almost no sense when referring to anything made within the last decade, which I have a hunch is the time period most people are pirating.
I don't hear a lot of calls to go after people pirating Gershwin tunes.
I think child porn is a bad comparison, since that's basically what they're doing. The problem is that the whole point of the anti-child porn campaigns is destroying the market. Best thing to do is work on shutting down distribution and leaving the end users alone. The key should be to make it worth their time to spend $.99 rather than download.
Then start a public relations campaign to make stealing from artists seem uncool. Rather than using the 20 biggest artists in the world, use hard working artists who are having trouble getting by. Like Ian Mcdougall of the River Boat gamblers, who made about $12k/year before getting hit by a car and being left with thousands of dollars in medical bills. It's much harder to justify stealing from someone like that.
We've gotten what we've wanted. You can buy pretty much any music you want in an open format. We won. I've read your slashdot posts. You said you'd start buying music again once that condition was met. So do it.
Don't worry too much. It's defnitely something we should push for, but it'll go the way of Apple's DRM. The content providers don't want a single book store, so there will be competing DRM formats. The inevitable cheap hardware clones won't want to pay for the DRM licenses. The DRM will go away and we'll be back to an open format.
PHP and Java both have great class libraries that let you stitch together a program pretty quickly without having to re-invent the wheel or master something like CPAN (I know you people think they're easy and I agree, but it's a barrier to getting up and running quickly, and barriers are bad).
And I think learning to program for the web is a great starting place since it's easy to get results. I didn't really get into programming as a teenager because it was so hard to get impressive results with C++ quickly.
And javascript programming is great for kids. It's pretty trivial to be able to do simple animations, wire buttons, etc.
"witnessing the birth of a new hybrid stack -- open source underneath, and proprietary on top"
I believe we already have this stack and call it the internet.
But there are already how many PS3 owners who now have a 3D Blu-Ray player? This is the easiest introduction of a new format ever. It's like the PS2 and DVDs. That was a massive trojan horse to getting people onto the DVD format.
I'm excited that I'll be getting 3D. My wife and I are thinking about upgrading our TV in the next two years to take advantage.
So I guess some of us are excited, yes. My wife hates people in movie theater and BluRay really gives you something very close to the big screen experience without the people.
That said, I haven't bought a single BluRay movie. We have Netflix. And probably 90% of what we watch is BluRay from them. I know 3 people who have BluRay players, all of them have Netflix. I think Netflix is actually killing their sales numbers.
As you say. Capitalism doesn't work. Communism doesn't work. Probably should try socialism like the other top 8 countries in the world.
Except that the #2 economy in the world is a communist state.
While I can't understand your statement due to the lack of subjects, verbs, and agreement, it appears to be tea party rhetoric which is not based upon the news.