Obviously, to judge by moderation, you have the opinion of the majority. Your ignorance is thus doubly unfortunate.
I find it mind-bogling that you manage to give a description of Capitalism that doesn't say a word about capital. One would think that Capitalism must have something to do with capital.
Then you define Capitalism as an ideal system that doesn't exist today. And your only historical reference is the Wild West.
You are dreaming badly.
Whatever system you dream of isn't capitalism. Capitalism is a political economy in which capital is king. THAT is the world we live in. And trying to understand it without speaking of capital, la bor and government in the present, and without reference to its real historical origins in Europe, is ridiculous.
The wild west wasn't capitalist because of the simple reason that it lacked capital. Capitalism came to America during reconstruction. Your description of the wild west is based on people who sell stuff they made themselves. Capitalism is a system in which capitalists sell stuff they paid other people to make.
Commerce and barter exist in all human societies. It is the usual trick of ideologists to claim that whatever they believe in is "the natural order". The moral majority wants you to think that the nuclear familly is natural. And Friedman want you to believe capitalism is natural.
This is advanced houdinism. The prophets of the system point out that there was a market in the cities of ancient mesopotamia. We have markets too. We are capitalists. So ancient Mesopotamia must have been capitalist.
If you buy this argument, I would like to sell you a 10% stake in the Brooklyn Bridge.
That is a warped view. Capitalism, at it's heart, is free commerce.
No this is an attempt to define the world we live in based on its actual history. I don't give two cents for "the heart of capitalism". I don't know even if capitalism has a heart and neither do you. The only way the "heart" metaphor functions in your argument is to avoid dealing with reality and move the discussion to some etheral level in which everything can be said because nothing can be proved.
My point is, the libertarians are the only group who are honest about their dislike of government.
Really? Do you also not want the government to protect your property? What about the government jailing murderers and rapists? Would you rather send your complaints to a dot.cop?
Capitalist economies do spring up automatically. It is in our nature to get what we want at the best price. The interworking of this with more than a single person will be inherently capitalist. Look at kids trading baseball cards: each gets what they want for what they want to pay.
That is a confusion between Capitalism, and commerce. Capitalism depend on two things: capital, and free labor. The first condition of Capitalism is availability of people who lack the tools to produce on their own and thus must sell their labor. The second is a government that sanctions and enforces contracts and property rights, without which capital can neither accumulate nor contract with labor.
(historically, the government kickstarts capitalism by producing free labor itself (for example, by driving peasants away from their lands, as the IMF is now busy doing all over the third world.)
There isn't any historical reference to capitalism absent these two conditions. Buying and selling isn't capitalism, it's commerce. Capitalism is buying and selling other people's work.
A pacifist is somebody who denies that force is ever permissible.
Some do, but not al all. Consider this parable.
A doctor tell Mr. Smith, who is recovering from a heart attack, "If you want to live, you have to stop smoking, and stay away from fatty food. Mr Smith ignores the doctor, smokes., eats three McDonalds a day, and after five years return in total collapse. The doctor examines him and says "sorry, Mr. Smith, but there is nothing more I can do". To which Mr. Smith answers bitterly, "then what kind of a doctor are you anyway?"
There is something similar in the relation between pacificism and US foreign policy. After September 11, everybody started attacking pacifism: "see, don't you think that this justifies violence!".
Of course it would, (if the violence were used wisely, which happens not be the case). But that is because pacifism cannot cure you when your disease is at this advanced stage. If the US had not been such a srcew-everyone kind of nation, she wouldn't find herself so often in situations where violence cannot be avoided.
And by the way, as the US clears Afgahnistan from evil-doers ( some at least), the ground is prepared for the next US war, that will happen in Tajikistan in about a decade. When it will happen, you will say "can't you see we have no choice but to fight against evil." But the evil is seeded today by US polices that are chosen deliberately, not because there is no choice, by shortsighted and ethically challenged politicians.
Blameworthy in what sense and by whom? Is this always true? What about a surgeon cutting open a patient to treat them? Surely they are causing harm to the patient in the short term, but I don't believe anyone would blame them for doing so. What about a policeman who shoots a man in the act of killing children? Normally shooting a person is very bad thing. Should the policeman be blamed in this case? Just as much as the killer?
Note that in both these cases the surgeon and the policeman are causing harm to someone, but arguably for the 'greater good'. Who's going
to blame them for what they did - their family, their ancestors, society, a big man in the sky?
I don't think that relativism is as relevant here as you make it sound. If you think about it, there is an essential link between the concept of blame and the concept of harm. You cannot use the word blame unless harm is done. And if someone says "X has caused me harm", that is immediately understood, and I don't think you can find exceptions, as an accusation, i.e. an ascription of blame made by the victim.
Relativism comes into the game when we discuss what constitute harm, and when we consider exceptions, mainly of two kinds, cicumstances and targets. Different cultures tend to excuse certain groups from among those to whom harm can be done (totally or partially). Likewise, different cultures excuse harm done under certain cicumstances, such as without intention, in self-defense, with informed consent, under royal prerogative or as ritual sacrifice, etc.
Of course I am advancing my own moral idea. And this idea is that there are no exceptions, only mitigating cicumstances. First, I completely reject the idea that harm done to members of certain groups should be excused. I think this idea should have no place in our world and I invite you and everyone else to make that happen.
Second, and admittedly more problematically, I claim that excuses are just that, merely excuses. By this I mean that we ( our culture, the culture of the future,) must seek to minimize the scope of acceptable excuses. We want never again to hear those ugly and said words heard in a courtroom: "I merely followed orders".
We must recognized that the ability to cause other people harm is so great and so diffused as a result of technology and burocracy that it is simply too easy for people to cause great harm to others whitout even being aware of it. Just as example , consider that modern pilots are playing an elaborate arcade game. It is easy for an eighteen year old guy flying a bomber to feel like his sixteen and playing on his gameboy. And war is not the only example: clercks, accountants, lawyers, politicians, policemen, executives, all have a power to inflict harm that dwarfs what existed in earlier generations.
You mentionned surgeons and that is a good example. In most societies, the fact that medical help often consists in doing harm resulted in the sacralization of the proffession. Isn't it the reason that the hypocratic oath says "first, do no harm"? The physician has a partuicular duty of care for the other because he or she breaches regurarly the normal interpersonal boundaries.
Because we live in a world in which harm is so easily done across such great distance, we must extend that hyppocratic insight to the rest of society. "First, do no harm" should be part of the oath taken by the political office holder, by the policeman, by judges, soldiers, etc. And we (as a culture) must find fault in causing harm even in cases when we recognize that legal punishment is inapropriate. One way to acheive it is to clearly separate affirmative defense from exculpation.
In the early middle ages, Christian soldiers had to do penance for each enemy they killed. They weren't tried for murder, but they weren't completely excused either. When William the Conqueror returned victorious from the Battle of Hastings, he spent a few weeks on a diet of bread and butter. The society of the time wasn't very peaceful, and yet in doing penance for legitimate killing these "barbarians" recognized the value of human life in a way we have lost.
If you happen to kill someone, a proof of self-defense should save you from a life in jail, but would not a month of communinty service be a resonant affirmation of the value of life? I know that if I happened to kill someone, even under circumstances that are beyond reproach, I will feel much better if I was somehow asked to make ammends than if I were told that everything is OK.
So, the next time you enjoy your freedom to live in this country, or any other democratically ruled country, you can turn and thank a soldier, sailor or airman who keeps it that way.
The last time American soldiers fought for American freedom was the Civil War, in which other Americans fought for American unfreedom. Then there was WWI, which nobody knew why it was fought, and WWII, which was fought for freedom, though mostly of Europeans. The people who fought that war are now octagenerians, and I thank them a lot.
Since then, American soldiers mostly fought for the right to screw other people and get secure and cheap access to their resources. If they want me to thank them, they've got another thing coming.
Or, you can just drag your fat, lazy, thankless ass back to the couch and have another beer while you watch the game.
And it's not their place to do so, nor of their generals. That's the domain of elected politicians. If you don't like the policy, blame the politicians - not the soldiers whose job it is to carry it out.
Not so fast.
People who do things that result in harm to other people are blameworthy. In some cases--war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.--the harm is so great and so evident that soldiers should be made to pay for their actions, even if they acted on orders from above.
When the harm doesn't go that far there are no legal recourse. However, the lack of legal remedy does not exculpate. When judged as a matter of ethics, ignorance, young age, peer pressure, and the constant brainwashing to which these kids have been subjected (including the film under discussion) can be taken as mitigating circustances. In some cases the effect of these circumstances is so great that the only justified demand is to go on and live with a guilty conscience.
Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong and
morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task whatever it may be. One hundred percent and then some.
I am sure that the pledge of joining the Waffen SS was just as heroic. And I am sure that Mohammad Atta also considered himself "morally straight". It is unfortunately quite possible to be "morally straight", honest, and loyal to one's friends while serving the interests of the dishonest, greedy, and evil.
most of the kids who join these operations do not have the tools to tell right from wrong in international politics. And they are trained to ignore the humanity of their "targets". An exclusive diet of duplicitous films for teenagers is Holywood's contribution to the moral corruption that awaits US soldiers in the future.
"Black Hawk Down" Should come with a sticker: The Surgeon General Warns: Watching this movie is dangerous to your constitution
I went to a war last night, and for two and half hour had my adrenaline pumped and my patriotic heart strings tugged by U.S. soldiers in battle, bravely tracking down and trying to capture the enemy. No it wasn't Osama, because the movie which felt like it might have taken place in the rubble of Kabul was actually a replay of the battle of Mogadishu in l993.
The film is Black Hawk Down, an account of elite ranger and Delta force soldiers fighting the good fight. Their mission, the publicity flyer tells us, "to capture several top lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the civil war and famine that is ravaging that country." The action is non-stop only the outcome is disasterous. Nineteen Americans were killed along with l,000 Somalis before U.S. forces were withdrawn in an intervention that started nobly and ended in one of the bloodiest messes you can imagine.
The movie showed what the TV news of the current war has not: actual combat, and the feelings of those engaged in it. You see soldiers fighting with great courage, but they are not motivated by a cause or an ideology; they fight to protect each other, for personal survival. Obvious is that U.S. forces have a clear advantage in terms of helicopters, communications, etc. But in the end they are defeated by the determination of a far less organized urban guerilla force that sees itself defending its hometown against a foreign intervention. And like the TV news accounts of Afghanistan, the movie comes to us context-free, with a twisted and distorted perspective that simplifies that conflict beyond recognition.
Black Hawk Down also seems part of a propaganda strategy aimed at Americans, not people overseas, where it is unlikely to win many hearts and minds. Notes Larry Chin in the Online Journal: "True to its post-9/11 government-sanctioned ro le as U.S. war propaganda headquarters, Hollywood has released Black Hawk Down, a fictionalized account of the tragic 1993 U.S. raid in Somalia. The Pentagon assisted with the production, pleased for an opportunity to 'set the record straight.' The film is a lie that compounds the original lie that was the operation itself."Forget the revelations that one of the story's big heroes, in real life, later gets convicted as a rapist. Forget the dramatization formulas. Just think about the impression left with the audience, and how that perception has little to do with reality. After watching the film, which made me uncomfortable because it showed how senseless the U.S. policy was as well as how ineffective, I also realized how little it conveyed what really happened in that tortured land.
The film starts with signposts -- literally, writing on the screen, a few short paragraphs, to
remind us what happened. The problem is the information is false. It implies, for example, that U.S. troops were sent to Somalia to feed the hungry. Not true. Later, I turned to David Halberstam's new book, War in a Time of Peace, which recounts the Somalian mishap in some depth.
Halberstam's book mentions, but does not detail, the bloody background: The massive crimes of the Somali dictator Siad Barre, who the U.S. backed and who Somali warlord Mohammad Farrah Aidid ejected. It also does not fully explain how the stage was set for a confrontation, and how the U.S. provoked he fiasco that followed.
Halberstam does describe, however, the Washington debate and incompetence at a time when a policy launched by one administration was handed off to another. He tells us that the defense secretary told an associate, "We?re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them." The Rangers were indeed sent with great fanfare, to hunt and capture Aidid. Their mission failed.
Halberstam also describes the American hatred for Somalis, expressed in the much-bandied phrase, "The only good Somali is a dead Somali." Is it any wonder Somalis fought back? (In the movie, the battle looks like a racial war, with virtually all-white U.S. forces going mano-a-mano with an all black city.) Halberstam reveals how these forces made arrogant assumptions in Somalia, underestimating the resistance, and how the urban "battlefield became a horror... a major league CNN-era disaster..."
You can read Halberstam's book, and many others, if you want to know more. But the point is that the romaticization of our modern warriors all too often misses the underlying political dimension of a conflict. On Jan. 7 it was reported that Green Beret Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman, who was just killed in Afghanistan, may have been set up by so-called Anti-Taliban allies. In Somalia, we intervened in the domestic affairs and conflicts of another society. What started as war on hunger became a war on Aidid. We became warlords ourselves. In Afghanistan a war against terror became a war against the government, and may have put in power people who are as ruthless as the ones that were displaced.
Black Hawk Down is an action movie that tries to turn a U.S. defeat into a victory by encouraging you to identify with the men who fought their way out of an urban conflagration not of their making. But with Somalia looming as a possible next target in the war against terror, Black Hawk Down may turn into a recruiting film for revenge. While Al Qaeda was not visible in the film, there is evidence that they, too, were involved in the background of the events in l993, stirring up the violence and training the warlord militias. The deaths of journalists there, including Dan Eldon, the son of a colleague, was not mentioned.
Rambo-like films like Black Hawk Down, which seem realistic, can also accelerate the death of journalism itself, because high production values makes the dramatization of a political event far more memorable than actual news coverage. My advice: Miss it!
I'd say the most important way
you can effectively sell Open Software is as a cost saving measure.
reduced cost of licencing
reduced cost of licence compliance
reduced cost of dealing with security
reduced waste in government offices (open software tends to have less feature-creep, which means less time doing stuff that shouldn't be done at all (like writing your memos in three columns).
Issues of freedom come second. The problem is they are more abstract, difficult to grasp, and non-local. And you are not running for President so your voters might not care about your opinions about copyright and copyleft.
Of course if you were running in Berkeley, things might be different;-) but you aren't.
Rumor has it the the code for the sixth dimension has a dangerous bug. An attempt to observe a cosmic ray entering this dimension can cause an illegal cast from a neutrino to a photon.
The problem is that
"The result of casting elementary particles outside the inheritence hierarchy is undefined."
Gee, why don't we send a cartload of these vehicles to Afgahnistan. They sure need off-road SUVs, especially after we bombed the last two paved roads they had. Plus, they are much closer to the oil fields, so filling the tank won't be a problem.
I suggest only a few modifications:
A converter to allow running on crude.
A grenade launcher instead of the left miror (nobody gonna overtake you anyway).
A mine protection belly shield.
A waterproof illustrated retractable Koran instead of the "entertainment center".
Oh, and if we there are no more buyers in Afgahnistan, no problem! Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, manhole-in-the-desert-stan, plenty of places that will appreciate the next level in guerrilla transportation.
I'm sorry, but the article referenced seems to imply that it would be legal and ethical to pass laws restricting or eliminating proprietary software licenses. This is totally and absolutely wrong. The copyright owner is the sole person able to determine the conditions of use of the work. To remove this principle eliminates the foundation for the free software movement.
There are principles, misconceptions and damned misconceptions
At stake is not what individuals are permitted to do with the code their write (anything), but what they can justifiably claim that we, as the state via the court system, are obliged to do to protect their desires.
morally, it should be obvious that the answer is nothing: there is no moral right to use public goods to make money, and the court system is a public good?
"We", since "we" apply the principle of enlightened self interest, decided that certain laws shall be passed that give copyright rights to creators, for our benefit. And, from the same reason, we are ready to enforce certain licences that you may want to use, because such enforcement is good for society, not because you have any right.
The article is striking the right tone. We must find what system of laws governing copyright and licence enforcement promotes the social good of having the maximum amount of value available to everyone. That requires some balance between rewarding creativity without stifling future innovation and without giving creators excessive control (which comes at everyone's expense).
How to achieve that is a practical question. If RMS wants to make the case that compulsory licencing of software will contribute to this goal, let him make the case. There are other cases of compulsory licences in the law, but each new case must be judged on the merit.
So why not reduce the cant about "rights". Copyright and licencing are not human rights, they are legal tools designed to promote the common good.
Ok. Here is an explanation of what I see as a "marxist" (decidededly neo-neo ) take on the GPL. This isn't connected to anything recognizably "communist" in common stereotypes.
Writing software is labor. And hence, written software is the product of labor. It is also a tool that can be used to do other types of labor, such as writing new software or even writing a letter. In that respect software is a mean of production. All tools (means of productions) are the result of prior labor.
Capital is created by the private appropriation of the means of productions (prior labor). The result of capital accumulation is that would be producers (workers) cannot produce on their own. They must contract with an owner of capital. The result of this contract is that the value created by production is shared between labor and capital, in a ratio determined by their relative power.
In communism, Marxs said, the means of productions will be owned collectively by the producers. Thus, they will not need to negotiate with capital owners the right to use them in production. As a result, they will enjoy a better share of the value they produce through they labor.
This is essentially what the GPL does. It creates both directly (to the GPLed work) and indirectly (to derivatives,) a public ownership of prior labor (means of production)
Marx wanted to do away with capitalists altogether. Whether it is possible, or even desirable, is not relevant here (I am rather agnostic). The GPL certainly does not destroy Capitalism. However, in harmony with the model, you can think of the GPL as creating public means of production, that you can use without having to negotiate. That strenghtens the negotiating power of labor vs. capital owners.
Compare two models of a deal.
In the first one, A, who owns rights to software tools, hires B to write, using those tools, a new tool, which A sells to others.
In the second one, A hires B to use public tools to write some new tool (most likely public), with the intention of selling
B's labor as consultancy to the future users of the new tool.
You don't have to be a genius to realize that A will have to pay B a larger share of the value produced in the second case, because in the second model, A's contribution is smaller.
Now that is sweet ( if you are living off work, naturally.)
Again, this is not the kind of communism that will make Stalin smile (on the contrary). But it falls within Marx's model nonetheless.
When the producer is working on his own, the whole issue is moot, safe that public software makes it indeed easier for people to work on their own. That is the whole point. There is nothing wrong in making money. The only problem is workers without bargaining power.
If I own a small company, start selling software for linux (closed source I might add), and I start making hundreds of thousands of dollars, would I still be be considered a "flesh and blood producer"?.
I really don't know what you are after. The GPL would prohibits you from certain usages of open source software in your closed source shop. As long as you comply with the GPL, go get rich to your heart's content. I wish you all the best, really.
So far, everyone who tried it (and lots of people honestly tried to make it work) failed miserably.
Nope, first, most dot coms never tried to make a buck by selling any product to consumers. Their real business plan was to sell a two-bucks business plan to shrewed bankers who then went and unloaded it in the 401k plans of idiots. New linux dot coms were part of the bubble. Most of them "failed" like everything else, nothing particular about linux here. If you want to understand how this works, go see "The Producers".
Quite a few succeded to survive, including Red Hat and other linux based shops. Obviously, the company that initiated this thread is doing fine.
Besides, the point of free software is not to empower big capitalist firms but flesh and blood producers, i.e. software writers, consultants, sysadmins, etc. People who use software to produce, not people who sell software other people produce. Just because some business idea failed does nothing to undermine the success of free software.
Got a love it. Next time I go to Paris, I am going to wrap up a nice Debian CD in flowers and put it on old Marx's grave. Ha ha ha!
Insofar as communism means "industrialized dictatorship enhanced with crackpot economic theory", linux is not communist. I don't think RMS has a picture of Stalin in his office and I don't think Linus receives coded orders from Fidel Castro.
However, Karl Marx never defined communism as a political system, but as a relation of production in which the producers have control over the tools necessary for production. That is IMHO exactly what free software does. It prevents the accumulation of software as capital (dead labor) thus guaranteeing access to written software to those who need it in order to write new software. Yep, that's communism. What part of it you don't like?
s a Swede I find it extremely curious that if I buy software from the US that shows human anatomy, it can be shown without genitals. It seems this is intended for children. As if children could somehow be unaware that they have genitals.
Have you noticed that the brain in this US anatomy software for children is shown as already lobotomized?
Don't worry, you may think you're in Sweden, but soone' or late' we gonna come knockin' on yo' door.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
Trust the science, verify the corporations.
In theory this is brilliant. In practice, in the US legal climate, "verifying" corporations is all but impossible. Chances are we won't know the about the problem before the damage is done. The news about Monsenato are a case in point.
Second, more and more of research is funded by corporations either directly or through partnership with Unviversities. So I am not so sure there is a clearly defined "public" science that one can trust.
Under these circumstances a blanket civic refusal is the only safe option. Putting one faith in an oversight that is structurally incompetent is like giving a gun to five year old boy on condition he only plays with it while supervised by his tweltfh year old sister.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil
things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that
since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else.
Not exactly. The main line of pro-GM arguments is that we can trust the science and the corporations. First, we are supposed to trust GM producers to do safety tests for the product and publish immediately any health issue that comes up. Second, we are supposed to trust the GM industry as a whole with essentially taking over the management of agricultural bio-diversity and become the unofficial management of the planet's supply of food.
Most critics of GM focus on the first problem (health) because it is more concrete and easy to explain ( and to scare with). But the second problem is by far the most dramatic. The possibility of a disaster that will make the Irish famine look like small potatoes should scare the bejesus out of everyone.
The science is an unknown, as research and commercial deployment go in lockstep. It isn't 2+2=4. Furthermore, the most important aspect of GM is management of food supplies (practical ad hoc decisions), not theoretical scientific questions. So it all boils down to an issue of trust. Can we entrust the future of the food supply of the planet to entities whose time is measured by wall-street ticks?
The new information simply reinforces the feeling that the only sane answer is NO.
How do you leap from protected speech as a form of communicating, to ENTITLEMENT?
Seems I touched a raw libertarian nerve? Funny how certain words make people jump out of their skin.
So, here are some notes from Common Sense 101.
Rights are promises. The right to live is a promise that other people will not kill me. The promise is not made directly by other people. It is the promise of the law, speaking in the name of the community, organized as a state with a legal system.
Promises are nice, but the point about having a right is that you can organize your life based on the expectation that the promise embodied in it will be kept. The ability to predict outcomes is what makes civilized life more convenient than the jungle. That is why the state spends a lot of money on police, prosecutors, courts and prisons, in order to convince people that they'd better not kill me. This is an entitlement. I don't have to lift a finger to deter people from killing me. If it weren't so, I could not organize my life based on the assumption that I am not likely to be killed by other people. The constitution might say that I have a right to live, but those would be empty words.
Hence rights create entitlements, unless they end up as dead letter, like the promise of good health in the South African constitutiont.
The first ammendment, if it is a real right, creates an entitlement, an entitlement to have one's speech protected. The question is not whether there is an entitlement, but what the scope of it.
I understand the first ammendment as fundamentally about the right to associate with others (poltical association). Speech is protected not because it is important by itself (is it worth the trouble to spend federal money on protecting the right of people to talk to themselves in the street? I doubt it, and I am sure Jefferson doubted it too).
Speech is protected because it is the basic and most important tool for political association. Political freedom, the freedom to associate, cannot exist without freedom of speech. And political freedom is the overarching right, and entitlement, the constitution sets out to create.
Hence, there is an etitlement to have one's attempt to associate with others through speech protected from attempts to supress it. The first Ammendment promises that the law will use its proverbial long arms to squash those who try to prevent me from communicating and associating with other people.
There are tthough some fundamental problems mith the first ammendment.
First, it says "government shall make no law". One way to read it is that, in fact, there is no entitlement because there is no positive right. There is no right to associate or speak. There simply is a limitation on government power. This is an odd interpretation. Either the framers did not mean to create a right, (odd that we call it the bill of rights!) or we simply don't care what they meant: since they did not explicitly created a right, there is none. This interpretation ends up treating the first ammendment as if it were a technical protocol, like the driving on a particular side of the road, that most be followed mithout necessarily meaning anything.
The less odd option is to say that the first ammendment has a purpose of guaranteeing political freedom by creating a right of free speech and free association.
If that is so, the real question is this. Should the government prevent private parties who have the necessary might from effectively silencing speech? That is not mandated by the letter of the constitution, so one can argue either that the constitution must be ammended, because it was on oversight of the framers ( who couldn't imagine Disney and AOL Time Warner ), or that it is a matter of interpretation. Those mho say that things are fine by sticking to the letter are simply gutting the right to free speech (and political freedom). Because there is no right without the promise to protect it.
Luckily, the case of network TV is far simpler. Network TV is licensing the spectrum from the government ( from us). If the networks use their control of the spectrum to prevent unpopular opinions from effectively reaching others (communicating), they effectively collaborate with the government to suppress political association.
That fails the letter of the law.
The fact that they can get away with it is a simple matter of a rotten political system and supreme court.
Some of the issues mentionned are alarming. Most aren't.
I am not a bit troubled that Buffy the Vampire fans cannot have their website. To use Buffy's metaphors, if you go to sleep with vampires, you wake up with bruises on your neck. And if you insist on creating your identity out of corporate material, your identity is going to be at the mercy of the executives who made that material. If think that this is an educational experience.
Now, if you had a satire on Buffy, that would deserve first ammendment protection, and will be a completely different game.
Likewise, I am not bothered that some portal does not give a link to alternet. Alternet is there, and people who feel the need for it can find it. Part of the value of alternative networks is that they spread by alternative means.
It is wrong to judge alternative media by eyeballs. For an ad driven network, eyballs are everything. But the impact of an alternative source of information can be far greater than the number of people who actually use it directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh or not huh. I have forgotten more political theory than you have probably read. As it stands, all I see you can do is name calling.
I find it mind-bogling that you manage to give a description of Capitalism that doesn't say a word about capital. One would think that Capitalism must have something to do with capital.
Then you define Capitalism as an ideal system that doesn't exist today. And your only historical reference is the Wild West.
You are dreaming badly.
Whatever system you dream of isn't capitalism. Capitalism is a political economy in which capital is king. THAT is the world we live in. And trying to understand it without speaking of capital, la bor and government in the present, and without reference to its real historical origins in Europe, is ridiculous.
The wild west wasn't capitalist because of the simple reason that it lacked capital. Capitalism came to America during reconstruction. Your description of the wild west is based on people who sell stuff they made themselves. Capitalism is a system in which capitalists sell stuff they paid other people to make.
Commerce and barter exist in all human societies. It is the usual trick of ideologists to claim that whatever they believe in is "the natural order". The moral majority wants you to think that the nuclear familly is natural. And Friedman want you to believe capitalism is natural.
This is advanced houdinism. The prophets of the system point out that there was a market in the cities of ancient mesopotamia. We have markets too. We are capitalists. So ancient Mesopotamia must have been capitalist.
If you buy this argument, I would like to sell you a 10% stake in the Brooklyn Bridge.
That is a warped view. Capitalism, at it's heart, is free commerce.
No this is an attempt to define the world we live in based on its actual history. I don't give two cents for "the heart of capitalism". I don't know even if capitalism has a heart and neither do you. The only way the "heart" metaphor functions in your argument is to avoid dealing with reality and move the discussion to some etheral level in which everything can be said because nothing can be proved.
Really? Do you also not want the government to protect your property? What about the government jailing murderers and rapists? Would you rather send your complaints to a dot.cop?
That is a confusion between Capitalism, and commerce. Capitalism depend on two things: capital, and free labor. The first condition of Capitalism is availability of people who lack the tools to produce on their own and thus must sell their labor. The second is a government that sanctions and enforces contracts and property rights, without which capital can neither accumulate nor contract with labor.
(historically, the government kickstarts capitalism by producing free labor itself (for example, by driving peasants away from their lands, as the IMF is now busy doing all over the third world.)
There isn't any historical reference to capitalism absent these two conditions. Buying and selling isn't capitalism, it's commerce. Capitalism is buying and selling other people's work.
Some do, but not al all. Consider this parable.
A doctor tell Mr. Smith, who is recovering from a heart attack, "If you want to live, you have to stop smoking, and stay away from fatty food. Mr Smith ignores the doctor, smokes., eats three McDonalds a day, and after five years return in total collapse. The doctor examines him and says "sorry, Mr. Smith, but there is nothing more I can do". To which Mr. Smith answers bitterly, "then what kind of a doctor are you anyway?"
There is something similar in the relation between pacificism and US foreign policy. After September 11, everybody started attacking pacifism: "see, don't you think that this justifies violence!".
Of course it would, (if the violence were used wisely, which happens not be the case). But that is because pacifism cannot cure you when your disease is at this advanced stage. If the US had not been such a srcew-everyone kind of nation, she wouldn't find herself so often in situations where violence cannot be avoided.
And by the way, as the US clears Afgahnistan from evil-doers ( some at least), the ground is prepared for the next US war, that will happen in Tajikistan in about a decade. When it will happen, you will say "can't you see we have no choice but to fight against evil." But the evil is seeded today by US polices that are chosen deliberately, not because there is no choice, by shortsighted and ethically challenged politicians.
I don't think that relativism is as relevant here as you make it sound. If you think about it, there is an essential link between the concept of blame and the concept of harm. You cannot use the word blame unless harm is done. And if someone says "X has caused me harm", that is immediately understood, and I don't think you can find exceptions, as an accusation, i.e. an ascription of blame made by the victim.
Relativism comes into the game when we discuss what constitute harm, and when we consider exceptions, mainly of two kinds, cicumstances and targets. Different cultures tend to excuse certain groups from among those to whom harm can be done (totally or partially). Likewise, different cultures excuse harm done under certain cicumstances, such as without intention, in self-defense, with informed consent, under royal prerogative or as ritual sacrifice, etc.
Of course I am advancing my own moral idea. And this idea is that there are no exceptions, only mitigating cicumstances. First, I completely reject the idea that harm done to members of certain groups should be excused. I think this idea should have no place in our world and I invite you and everyone else to make that happen.
Second, and admittedly more problematically, I claim that excuses are just that, merely excuses. By this I mean that we ( our culture, the culture of the future,) must seek to minimize the scope of acceptable excuses. We want never again to hear those ugly and said words heard in a courtroom: "I merely followed orders".
We must recognized that the ability to cause other people harm is so great and so diffused as a result of technology and burocracy that it is simply too easy for people to cause great harm to others whitout even being aware of it. Just as example , consider that modern pilots are playing an elaborate arcade game. It is easy for an eighteen year old guy flying a bomber to feel like his sixteen and playing on his gameboy. And war is not the only example: clercks, accountants, lawyers, politicians, policemen, executives, all have a power to inflict harm that dwarfs what existed in earlier generations.
You mentionned surgeons and that is a good example. In most societies, the fact that medical help often consists in doing harm resulted in the sacralization of the proffession. Isn't it the reason that the hypocratic oath says "first, do no harm"? The physician has a partuicular duty of care for the other because he or she breaches regurarly the normal interpersonal boundaries.
Because we live in a world in which harm is so easily done across such great distance, we must extend that hyppocratic insight to the rest of society. "First, do no harm" should be part of the oath taken by the political office holder, by the policeman, by judges, soldiers, etc. And we (as a culture) must find fault in causing harm even in cases when we recognize that legal punishment is inapropriate. One way to acheive it is to clearly separate affirmative defense from exculpation.
In the early middle ages, Christian soldiers had to do penance for each enemy they killed. They weren't tried for murder, but they weren't completely excused either. When William the Conqueror returned victorious from the Battle of Hastings, he spent a few weeks on a diet of bread and butter. The society of the time wasn't very peaceful, and yet in doing penance for legitimate killing these "barbarians" recognized the value of human life in a way we have lost.
If you happen to kill someone, a proof of self-defense should save you from a life in jail, but would not a month of communinty service be a resonant affirmation of the value of life? I know that if I happened to kill someone, even under circumstances that are beyond reproach, I will feel much better if I was somehow asked to make ammends than if I were told that everything is OK.
Since then, American soldiers mostly fought for the right to screw other people and get secure and cheap access to their resources. If they want me to thank them, they've got another thing coming.
Or, you can just drag your fat, lazy, thankless ass back to the couch and have another beer while you watch the game.
Why do assume I resemble you?
Not so fast.
People who do things that result in harm to other people are blameworthy. In some cases--war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.--the harm is so great and so evident that soldiers should be made to pay for their actions, even if they acted on orders from above.
When the harm doesn't go that far there are no legal recourse. However, the lack of legal remedy does not exculpate. When judged as a matter of ethics, ignorance, young age, peer pressure, and the constant brainwashing to which these kids have been subjected (including the film under discussion) can be taken as mitigating circustances. In some cases the effect of these circumstances is so great that the only justified demand is to go on and live with a guilty conscience.
But the blame is still there.
I am sure that the pledge of joining the Waffen SS was just as heroic. And I am sure that Mohammad Atta also considered himself "morally straight". It is unfortunately quite possible to be "morally straight", honest, and loyal to one's friends while serving the interests of the dishonest, greedy, and evil.
most of the kids who join these operations do not have the tools to tell right from wrong in international politics. And they are trained to ignore the humanity of their "targets". An exclusive diet of duplicitous films for teenagers is Holywood's contribution to the moral corruption that awaits US soldiers in the future.
"Black Hawk Down" Should come with a sticker:
The Surgeon General Warns: Watching this movie is dangerous to your constitution
Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org
January 8, 2002
On Alternet
I went to a war last night, and for two and half hour had my adrenaline pumped and my patriotic heart strings tugged by U.S. soldiers in battle, bravely tracking down and trying to capture the enemy. No it wasn't Osama, because the movie which felt like it might have taken place in the rubble of Kabul was actually a replay of the battle of Mogadishu in l993.
The film is Black Hawk Down, an account of elite ranger and Delta force soldiers fighting the good fight. Their mission, the publicity flyer tells us, "to capture several top lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the civil war and famine that is ravaging that country." The action is non-stop only the outcome is disasterous. Nineteen Americans were killed along with l,000 Somalis before U.S. forces were withdrawn in an intervention that started nobly and ended in one of the bloodiest messes you can imagine.
The movie showed what the TV news of the current war has not: actual combat, and the feelings of those engaged in it. You see soldiers fighting with great courage, but they are not motivated by a cause or an ideology; they fight to protect each other, for personal survival. Obvious is that U.S. forces have a clear advantage in terms of helicopters, communications, etc. But in the end they are defeated by the determination of a far less organized urban guerilla force that sees itself defending its hometown against a foreign intervention. And like the TV news accounts of Afghanistan, the movie comes to us context-free, with a twisted and distorted perspective that simplifies that conflict beyond recognition.
Black Hawk Down also seems part of a propaganda strategy aimed at Americans, not people overseas, where it is unlikely to win many hearts and minds. Notes Larry Chin in the Online Journal: "True to its post-9/11 government-sanctioned ro le as U.S. war propaganda headquarters, Hollywood has released Black Hawk Down, a fictionalized account of the tragic 1993 U.S. raid in Somalia. The Pentagon assisted with the production, pleased for an opportunity to 'set the record straight.' The film is a lie that compounds the original lie that was the operation itself."Forget the revelations that one of the story's big heroes, in real life, later gets convicted as a rapist. Forget the dramatization formulas. Just think about the impression left with the audience, and how that perception has little to do with reality. After watching the film, which made me uncomfortable because it showed how senseless the U.S. policy was as well as how ineffective, I also realized how little it conveyed what really happened in that tortured land.
The film starts with signposts -- literally, writing on the screen, a few short paragraphs, to remind us what happened. The problem is the information is false. It implies, for example, that U.S. troops were sent to Somalia to feed the hungry. Not true. Later, I turned to David Halberstam's new book, War in a Time of Peace, which recounts the Somalian mishap in some depth.
Halberstam's book mentions, but does not detail, the bloody background: The massive crimes of the Somali dictator Siad Barre, who the U.S. backed and who Somali warlord Mohammad Farrah Aidid ejected. It also does not fully explain how the stage was set for a confrontation, and how the U.S. provoked he fiasco that followed.
Halberstam does describe, however, the Washington debate and incompetence at a time when a policy launched by one administration was handed off to another. He tells us that the defense secretary told an associate, "We?re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them." The Rangers were indeed sent with great fanfare, to hunt and capture Aidid. Their mission failed.
Halberstam also describes the American hatred for Somalis, expressed in the much-bandied phrase, "The only good Somali is a dead Somali." Is it any wonder Somalis fought back? (In the movie, the battle looks like a racial war, with virtually all-white U.S. forces going mano-a-mano with an all black city.) Halberstam reveals how these forces made arrogant assumptions in Somalia, underestimating the resistance, and how the urban "battlefield became a horror ... a major league CNN-era disaster..."
You can read Halberstam's book, and many others, if you want to know more. But the point is that the romaticization of our modern warriors all too often misses the underlying political dimension of a conflict. On Jan. 7 it was reported that Green Beret Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman, who was just killed in Afghanistan, may have been set up by so-called Anti-Taliban allies. In Somalia, we intervened in the domestic affairs and conflicts of another society. What started as war on hunger became a war on Aidid. We became warlords ourselves. In Afghanistan a war against terror became a war against the government, and may have put in power people who are as ruthless as the ones that were displaced.
Black Hawk Down is an action movie that tries to turn a U.S. defeat into a victory by encouraging you to identify with the men who fought their way out of an urban conflagration not of their making. But with Somalia looming as a possible next target in the war against terror, Black Hawk Down may turn into a recruiting film for revenge. While Al Qaeda was not visible in the film, there is evidence that they, too, were involved in the background of the events in l993, stirring up the violence and training the warlord militias. The deaths of journalists there, including Dan Eldon, the son of a colleague, was not mentioned.
Rambo-like films like Black Hawk Down, which seem realistic, can also accelerate the death of journalism itself, because high production values makes the dramatization of a political event far more memorable than actual news coverage. My advice: Miss it!
If you cannot stand up and make unproven points, you have no business being a politician!
- reduced cost of licencing
- reduced cost of licence compliance
- reduced cost of dealing with security
- reduced waste in government offices (open software tends to have less feature-creep, which means less time doing stuff that shouldn't be done at all (like writing your memos in three columns).
Issues of freedom come second. The problem is they are more abstract, difficult to grasp, and non-local. And you are not running for President so your voters might not care about your opinions about copyright and copyleft.Of course if you were running in Berkeley, things might be different ;-) but you aren't.
The problem is that
"The result of casting elementary particles outside the inheritence hierarchy is undefined."
The Manual 4.1, chapter 7 cited in Universe(3)
Finally, someone who can read my mind!
I suggest only a few modifications:
Oh, and if we there are no more buyers in Afgahnistan, no problem! Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, manhole-in-the-desert-stan, plenty of places that will appreciate the next level in guerrilla transportation.
There are principles, misconceptions and damned misconceptions
Writing software is labor. And hence, written software is the product of labor. It is also a tool that can be used to do other types of labor, such as writing new software or even writing a letter. In that respect software is a mean of production. All tools (means of productions) are the result of prior labor.
Capital is created by the private appropriation of the means of productions (prior labor). The result of capital accumulation is that would be producers (workers) cannot produce on their own. They must contract with an owner of capital. The result of this contract is that the value created by production is shared between labor and capital, in a ratio determined by their relative power.
In communism, Marxs said, the means of productions will be owned collectively by the producers. Thus, they will not need to negotiate with capital owners the right to use them in production. As a result, they will enjoy a better share of the value they produce through they labor.
This is essentially what the GPL does. It creates both directly (to the GPLed work) and indirectly (to derivatives,) a public ownership of prior labor (means of production)
Marx wanted to do away with capitalists altogether. Whether it is possible, or even desirable, is not relevant here (I am rather agnostic). The GPL certainly does not destroy Capitalism. However, in harmony with the model, you can think of the GPL as creating public means of production, that you can use without having to negotiate. That strenghtens the negotiating power of labor vs. capital owners.
Compare two models of a deal.
In the first one, A, who owns rights to software tools, hires B to write, using those tools, a new tool, which A sells to others.
In the second one, A hires B to use public tools to write some new tool (most likely public), with the intention of selling B's labor as consultancy to the future users of the new tool.
You don't have to be a genius to realize that A will have to pay B a larger share of the value produced in the second case, because in the second model, A's contribution is smaller.
Now that is sweet ( if you are living off work, naturally.)
Again, this is not the kind of communism that will make Stalin smile (on the contrary). But it falls within Marx's model nonetheless.
When the producer is working on his own, the whole issue is moot, safe that public software makes it indeed easier for people to work on their own. That is the whole point. There is nothing wrong in making money. The only problem is workers without bargaining power.
I hope that discussion made sense to you.
I really don't know what you are after. The GPL would prohibits you from certain usages of open source software in your closed source shop. As long as you comply with the GPL, go get rich to your heart's content. I wish you all the best, really.
Nope, first, most dot coms never tried to make a buck by selling any product to consumers. Their real business plan was to sell a two-bucks business plan to shrewed bankers who then went and unloaded it in the 401k plans of idiots. New linux dot coms were part of the bubble. Most of them "failed" like everything else, nothing particular about linux here. If you want to understand how this works, go see "The Producers".
Quite a few succeded to survive, including Red Hat and other linux based shops. Obviously, the company that initiated this thread is doing fine.
Besides, the point of free software is not to empower big capitalist firms but flesh and blood producers, i.e. software writers, consultants, sysadmins, etc. People who use software to produce, not people who sell software other people produce. Just because some business idea failed does nothing to undermine the success of free software.
Got a love it. Next time I go to Paris, I am going to wrap up a nice Debian CD in flowers and put it on old Marx's grave. Ha ha ha!
However, Karl Marx never defined communism as a political system, but as a relation of production in which the producers have control over the tools necessary for production. That is IMHO exactly what free software does. It prevents the accumulation of software as capital (dead labor) thus guaranteeing access to written software to those who need it in order to write new software. Yep, that's communism. What part of it you don't like?
Have you noticed that the brain in this US anatomy software for children is shown as already lobotomized?
Don't worry, you may think you're in Sweden, but soone' or late' we gonna come knockin' on yo' door.
In theory this is brilliant. In practice, in the US legal climate, "verifying" corporations is all but impossible. Chances are we won't know the about the problem before the damage is done. The news about Monsenato are a case in point.
Second, more and more of research is funded by corporations either directly or through partnership with Unviversities. So I am not so sure there is a clearly defined "public" science that one can trust.
Under these circumstances a blanket civic refusal is the only safe option. Putting one faith in an oversight that is structurally incompetent is like giving a gun to five year old boy on condition he only plays with it while supervised by his tweltfh year old sister.
Not exactly. The main line of pro-GM arguments is that we can trust the science and the corporations. First, we are supposed to trust GM producers to do safety tests for the product and publish immediately any health issue that comes up. Second, we are supposed to trust the GM industry as a whole with essentially taking over the management of agricultural bio-diversity and become the unofficial management of the planet's supply of food.
Most critics of GM focus on the first problem (health) because it is more concrete and easy to explain ( and to scare with). But the second problem is by far the most dramatic. The possibility of a disaster that will make the Irish famine look like small potatoes should scare the bejesus out of everyone.
The science is an unknown, as research and commercial deployment go in lockstep. It isn't 2+2=4. Furthermore, the most important aspect of GM is management of food supplies (practical ad hoc decisions), not theoretical scientific questions. So it all boils down to an issue of trust. Can we entrust the future of the food supply of the planet to entities whose time is measured by wall-street ticks?
The new information simply reinforces the feeling that the only sane answer is NO.
Seems I touched a raw libertarian nerve? Funny how certain words make people jump out of their skin.
So, here are some notes from Common Sense 101. Rights are promises. The right to live is a promise that other people will not kill me. The promise is not made directly by other people. It is the promise of the law, speaking in the name of the community, organized as a state with a legal system.
Promises are nice, but the point about having a right is that you can organize your life based on the expectation that the promise embodied in it will be kept. The ability to predict outcomes is what makes civilized life more convenient than the jungle. That is why the state spends a lot of money on police, prosecutors, courts and prisons, in order to convince people that they'd better not kill me. This is an entitlement. I don't have to lift a finger to deter people from killing me. If it weren't so, I could not organize my life based on the assumption that I am not likely to be killed by other people. The constitution might say that I have a right to live, but those would be empty words.
Hence rights create entitlements, unless they end up as dead letter, like the promise of good health in the South African constitutiont.
The first ammendment, if it is a real right, creates an entitlement, an entitlement to have one's speech protected. The question is not whether there is an entitlement, but what the scope of it.
I understand the first ammendment as fundamentally about the right to associate with others (poltical association). Speech is protected not because it is important by itself (is it worth the trouble to spend federal money on protecting the right of people to talk to themselves in the street? I doubt it, and I am sure Jefferson doubted it too).
Speech is protected because it is the basic and most important tool for political association. Political freedom, the freedom to associate, cannot exist without freedom of speech. And political freedom is the overarching right, and entitlement, the constitution sets out to create.
Hence, there is an etitlement to have one's attempt to associate with others through speech protected from attempts to supress it. The first Ammendment promises that the law will use its proverbial long arms to squash those who try to prevent me from communicating and associating with other people.
There are tthough some fundamental problems mith the first ammendment.
First, it says "government shall make no law". One way to read it is that, in fact, there is no entitlement because there is no positive right. There is no right to associate or speak. There simply is a limitation on government power. This is an odd interpretation. Either the framers did not mean to create a right, (odd that we call it the bill of rights!) or we simply don't care what they meant: since they did not explicitly created a right, there is none. This interpretation ends up treating the first ammendment as if it were a technical protocol, like the driving on a particular side of the road, that most be followed mithout necessarily meaning anything.
The less odd option is to say that the first ammendment has a purpose of guaranteeing political freedom by creating a right of free speech and free association.
If that is so, the real question is this. Should the government prevent private parties who have the necessary might from effectively silencing speech? That is not mandated by the letter of the constitution, so one can argue either that the constitution must be ammended, because it was on oversight of the framers ( who couldn't imagine Disney and AOL Time Warner ), or that it is a matter of interpretation. Those mho say that things are fine by sticking to the letter are simply gutting the right to free speech (and political freedom). Because there is no right without the promise to protect it.
Luckily, the case of network TV is far simpler. Network TV is licensing the spectrum from the government ( from us). If the networks use their control of the spectrum to prevent unpopular opinions from effectively reaching others (communicating), they effectively collaborate with the government to suppress political association. That fails the letter of the law.
The fact that they can get away with it is a simple matter of a rotten political system and supreme court.
I am not a bit troubled that Buffy the Vampire fans cannot have their website. To use Buffy's metaphors, if you go to sleep with vampires, you wake up with bruises on your neck. And if you insist on creating your identity out of corporate material, your identity is going to be at the mercy of the executives who made that material. If think that this is an educational experience. Now, if you had a satire on Buffy, that would deserve first ammendment protection, and will be a completely different game.
Likewise, I am not bothered that some portal does not give a link to alternet. Alternet is there, and people who feel the need for it can find it. Part of the value of alternative networks is that they spread by alternative means.
It is wrong to judge alternative media by eyeballs. For an ad driven network, eyballs are everything. But the impact of an alternative source of information can be far greater than the number of people who actually use it directly.