I didn't say he was communist. However, the reason communism fails is the same reason why censoring some political speech to "create a level playing field" is a bad idea. Chopping down overachievers with the goal of propping up underachievers sounds great until you try it in real life, at which point it becomes a gateway drug to despotism. The best idea is to just leave political speech alone and never use government to censor it. If you want to do something different, then repeal the First Amendment.
The employees do not own the business, and properly do not have a voice in saying what the position of the business should be. The owners of the business are the only people who can say what the business should spend its money on. Of course, such responsibility is frequently delegated to employees including high level executives (who are still employees). Ultimately, though, the business will spend its money on whatever the owners want it to, or somebody is likely to be fired. A business is the property of its owners and can be used as a tool to express their freedom of speech, just like any of their other property can be used to exercise their freedom of speech.
I agree that it's incorrect and inappropriate to say that the decision of business owners/executives speaks for the political views of their (maybe thousands) of employees. But that is irrelevant, as the business owners/executives still have freedom of speech. Unfortunately when unions give political donations that's often a similar situation -- many of the union members detest that their dues are going to political causes they don't support. That's another can of worms, but it's really the same kind of situation in terms of freedom of speech -- to be consistent, you would have to disallow unions from engaging in political discourse, whereas I would say that all people (no matter where they're perched at the moment) can freely engage in political speech without anyone telling them to go somewhere else, or speak more quietly, or refrain from political speech.
There are lots of people who can't vote, but still have freedom of speech. The general rule of thumb is: "Never curtail or censor freedom of speech, unless you have a darn good reason".
There's nothing about people joining together that should cause them to lose their freedom of speech. People joining together to form a political party should still have freedom of speech. People joining together to form ownership of a business should still have freedom of speech. Two people should be able to put up a political yard sign -- nowhere is it written that people should put up yard signs as individuals, because maybe they have an "unfair advantage" when they work together. I agree with you that rich people and company owners often pursue political goals that are disagreeable to me. But I don't want the government to tell them to shut up, because that's not the kind of country I want to live in.
The bottom line is that you will have to repeal the First Amendment before you can censor rich people from using their wealth to get the message out about their political opinions. I do not wish you well in that, because I am pretty fond of the First Amendment.
No, my dear AC, you have the whole concept of democracy wrong. If two people join together for any reason they like, they may still engage in free speech. If they join together to start a political party, they may engage in political speech. If they join together to form a business, they may engage in political speech.
It's really disappointing to see how many people are out here defending government censorship of political speech. Keep in mind, this discussion is about (among other things) whether a company can publish a documentary about a political topic. Some people here want the government to censor such things, which really astonishes me. Are you so ignorant?
How is that different from a candidate continuing to receive funds from the general public donating as individuals, as long as he goes their way? Either it's an illegal bribe or it isn't an illegal bribe. Are you saying that bribes should be OK for individuals but not for corporations? I think you're confusing two different concepts here.
No, honey. Censorship is not just stopping all speech, but also includes includes curtailing free speech. When you say that some people are not allowed to speak on political issues because they happen to be a group of people who banded together for business purposes, you are... (wait for it)... censoring their free speech.
What I want is not censorship of their voice ( they should be able to voice their opinion, as individuals, not as a company )
So you do want to censor them as a company. One person putting up a political sign in his yard is OK, but two people working together to do it, and you will demand that they stop. Honey, I'm afraid that would be censorship.
what I want is to eliminate the censorship of *my* voice.
What would be really nice is if some people would stop whining that others have more money than they do.
I want their opinion and mine to be able to be evaluated on the opinion's merits, not on the contents of their wallet versus my wallet. When my voice is drowned out by theirs, how can you argue we have democracy?
Because democracy doesn't mean that everybody has the same reach and visibility of their communications. You're just whining because you want to censor some other peoples' political speech. I have no sympathy with you whatsoever in pursuing that objective, and I consider your goal fundamentally inimical to a free democratic republic. Fortunately, the Supreme Court agrees with me, at least for the present.
Bribery of politicians (making a deal that if I give you $100K, then you pass this law in my favor) is certainly illegal and must remain so, but that's a separate issue from corporations spending money on political advocacy. Putting up yard signs and making documentary movies should never be illegal for anybody (at least, I can't think offhand of when such government censorship would be good).
The word "opposing" can simply mean that you don't like something and you are not in favor of it. It doesn't have to mean voting, it can be just expressing an opinion. For example, I like net neutrality, but if Comcast wants to tell their customers that net neutrality is bad and they "oppose" it, I don't want to censor their free speech.
My apologies for being a spelling Nazi; I would say that your English is excellent.
You use the word "amplification" as if it's a privilege the government should wisely withhold from the rich. But in fact the "amplification" you speak of is not a privilege under the control or ownership of the government at all -- it is just the fact that some people have more money than other people. At root, your complaint is that rich people can do more than poor people can, and you want to fix that. So your way of fixing that is by censoring the political speech of rich people or groups of people.
You are arguing for government censorship of the expression of political opinions. That's it, short and sweet.
You are wrong on several items in your post; let's pick a few.
1. If by "buying favour" you just mean spending money to communicate a message, then it shouldn't be censored. Speech should never be censored without a really good reason.
2. Here in the USA we spell it "favor".
3. The idea that corporations are people is not disastrous, it is simply true. Corporations are neither owned nor run by robots. You seem to be trying to make corporations be run and de-facto owned by the government, which is more worthy of Cuba or Venezuela than the USA.
4. Mr. Goodlatte is not an IBM executive, he is actually a member of Congress....A-a-a-and you have egg on your face.
5. What's wrong with opposing bills even when you're not a member of Congress? Are we not supposed to have opinions? Are we supposed to shut up about our opinions? Seriously, what in the world were you thinking in saying that only Congress may oppose bills?
"Waaah, there are rich people who have more money than me. Make them stop putting up yard signs and making political movies, since I don't have enough money to do the same."
"So what if rich companies can communicate more widely than you?"
The "so what" is that they have a darned good whack at drowning out all voices but their own. Inherently undemocratic.
You can't make every YouTube video a viral hit. You can't make every citizen equally wealthy and influential. All you will do is undermine democracy by censoring some people. Communism causes more problems than it solves, news at 11.
Agreement is not the issue, their message is not better than anyone else's, and does not deserve amplification.
The cool thing about a free democracy is that neither you nor the government gets to decide who "deserves amplification". If the speaker spends his own money to get his message out, then only he gets to decide whether it's a worthwhile exercise or not. Isn't freedom great?
For me, liberalism is caring more about people than institutions ( corporations, powerful people's , states, etc ).
Your error is that you forgot that corporations are people, and are not owned by the government or the country at large. Of course corporations are not individual people, but they are owned by people, run by people, responsible to people, generate profits for people. It's people all the way down! And once again, you don't get to decide that those people don't get a political voice.
You're responding to someone criticizing a ruling of the SCOTUS, which has force of law and therefore by definition mandatory. Your point?
The SCOTUS ruling in question was a rarity in that it actually limited the power of government to tell people what they could or couldn't communicate. It was a win for freedom, and I cheer it. Any time the government says "we forbid the forbidding of freedom of speech" I'm OK with that being mandatory. Now back to you, sir -- your point?
If money is equal to speech then guess who as more speech than you.
That's a nice little oversimplification of the issue. The Supreme Court has ruled that you can't censor rich people from communicating via media campaigns, films, etc. Freedom is not supposed to guarantee equality of outcomes, just a lack of arbitrary restrictions. So what if rich companies can communicate more widely than you? I have a suspicion that you want to see some rich people or corporations censored because you disagree with their message. That is not OK.
The definition of a liberal is someone who doesn't care what the law is, as long as it is mandatory. Nanny states, government censors and controls. Ew, yuck.
"Yeah, it was six months and fifteen days since we were in the same location at that restaurant. Would you like to see reviews on Yelp?"
"Dad, the family has been losing our shirts financially since you disappeared."
"Hey, that was a really cool picture you gmailed two days ago to to Susie Hopkins titled 'me without a shirt'. Do you still enjoy photography?"
Are you saying that the pervs (I agree with the term if they are really users of C.P., which I don't know) were offering use of their p2p sharing resources for all purposes, including for law enforcement access? Because the way hacking laws are applied, the judge pays attention to the intent of the "maker-available" and not just to the question of whether it was published on the internet.
AT&T made their list available, the pervs made their media available. AT&T didn't want Weev to access (other people's) records. The pervs didn't want law enforcement to access their media.
So when AT&T made their iPhone subscriber list "available for public download" that implicitly gave people on the internet permission to access this private information? Oh wait, they sentenced Weev to jail time for that. I'm so confused.
And no, I'm not defending child porn users. Well, I guess I sort of am. But not... Darn it, you guys know what I mean.
I actually enjoy the pedantic arguments, being a terrible person.
See, I lean toward disagreeing with both parts of that. I don't think you could truly enjoy it, and I question how terrible you really could be, based on your civil contributions to this thread.
Undoubtedly. And when someone uses the phrase "the average intelligence of Canadians" the implied frame of reference would include IQ test takers in other countries.
So you're claiming that the average intelligence of Canadians is identical to the average intelligence of all people in the world? That seems unlikely.
We have seen some major public figures admitting that they voted for him primarily because he is black, and there is a really distressing chorus of "racism!" lobbied by cynical liberals at those who merely oppose his policies (e.g. the Tea Party). I admire President Obama for mostly avoiding stirring up racial trouble from his "bully pulpit" (with a few exceptions, like the Trayvon Martin case), but he's done very little to shut up many of his nasty, race baiting liberal allies.
Not really sure what you're trying to say, and not sure that you are either. But just for your info, Bush got congressional approval for his foreign wars. Many people have forgotten that Senators like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards -- at the time standard bearers of the Democratic Party, supported the Iraq War, which was a bipartisan effort. Not saying it was a good idea, as maybe both sides were idiots for doing so, just saying that constitutional protocol was followed. Whereas Obama only reaches for the Constitution when he's out of Charmin(tm) rolls.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say he was communist. However, the reason communism fails is the same reason why censoring some political speech to "create a level playing field" is a bad idea. Chopping down overachievers with the goal of propping up underachievers sounds great until you try it in real life, at which point it becomes a gateway drug to despotism. The best idea is to just leave political speech alone and never use government to censor it. If you want to do something different, then repeal the First Amendment.
The employees do not own the business, and properly do not have a voice in saying what the position of the business should be. The owners of the business are the only people who can say what the business should spend its money on. Of course, such responsibility is frequently delegated to employees including high level executives (who are still employees). Ultimately, though, the business will spend its money on whatever the owners want it to, or somebody is likely to be fired. A business is the property of its owners and can be used as a tool to express their freedom of speech, just like any of their other property can be used to exercise their freedom of speech.
I agree that it's incorrect and inappropriate to say that the decision of business owners/executives speaks for the political views of their (maybe thousands) of employees. But that is irrelevant, as the business owners/executives still have freedom of speech. Unfortunately when unions give political donations that's often a similar situation -- many of the union members detest that their dues are going to political causes they don't support. That's another can of worms, but it's really the same kind of situation in terms of freedom of speech -- to be consistent, you would have to disallow unions from engaging in political discourse, whereas I would say that all people (no matter where they're perched at the moment) can freely engage in political speech without anyone telling them to go somewhere else, or speak more quietly, or refrain from political speech.
There are lots of people who can't vote, but still have freedom of speech. The general rule of thumb is: "Never curtail or censor freedom of speech, unless you have a darn good reason".
There's nothing about people joining together that should cause them to lose their freedom of speech. People joining together to form a political party should still have freedom of speech. People joining together to form ownership of a business should still have freedom of speech. Two people should be able to put up a political yard sign -- nowhere is it written that people should put up yard signs as individuals, because maybe they have an "unfair advantage" when they work together. I agree with you that rich people and company owners often pursue political goals that are disagreeable to me. But I don't want the government to tell them to shut up, because that's not the kind of country I want to live in.
The bottom line is that you will have to repeal the First Amendment before you can censor rich people from using their wealth to get the message out about their political opinions. I do not wish you well in that, because I am pretty fond of the First Amendment.
No, my dear AC, you have the whole concept of democracy wrong. If two people join together for any reason they like, they may still engage in free speech. If they join together to start a political party, they may engage in political speech. If they join together to form a business, they may engage in political speech.
It's really disappointing to see how many people are out here defending government censorship of political speech. Keep in mind, this discussion is about (among other things) whether a company can publish a documentary about a political topic. Some people here want the government to censor such things, which really astonishes me. Are you so ignorant?
How is that different from a candidate continuing to receive funds from the general public donating as individuals, as long as he goes their way? Either it's an illegal bribe or it isn't an illegal bribe. Are you saying that bribes should be OK for individuals but not for corporations? I think you're confusing two different concepts here.
No, honey. Censorship is not just stopping all speech, but also includes includes curtailing free speech. When you say that some people are not allowed to speak on political issues because they happen to be a group of people who banded together for business purposes, you are... (wait for it)... censoring their free speech.
And shame on you for that.
What I want is not censorship of their voice ( they should be able to voice their opinion, as individuals, not as a company )
So you do want to censor them as a company. One person putting up a political sign in his yard is OK, but two people working together to do it, and you will demand that they stop. Honey, I'm afraid that would be censorship.
what I want is to eliminate the censorship of *my* voice.
What would be really nice is if some people would stop whining that others have more money than they do.
I want their opinion and mine to be able to be evaluated on the opinion's merits, not on the contents of their wallet versus my wallet. When my voice is drowned out by theirs, how can you argue we have democracy?
Because democracy doesn't mean that everybody has the same reach and visibility of their communications. You're just whining because you want to censor some other peoples' political speech. I have no sympathy with you whatsoever in pursuing that objective, and I consider your goal fundamentally inimical to a free democratic republic. Fortunately, the Supreme Court agrees with me, at least for the present.
Bribery of politicians (making a deal that if I give you $100K, then you pass this law in my favor) is certainly illegal and must remain so, but that's a separate issue from corporations spending money on political advocacy. Putting up yard signs and making documentary movies should never be illegal for anybody (at least, I can't think offhand of when such government censorship would be good).
The word "opposing" can simply mean that you don't like something and you are not in favor of it. It doesn't have to mean voting, it can be just expressing an opinion. For example, I like net neutrality, but if Comcast wants to tell their customers that net neutrality is bad and they "oppose" it, I don't want to censor their free speech.
My apologies for being a spelling Nazi; I would say that your English is excellent.
You use the word "amplification" as if it's a privilege the government should wisely withhold from the rich. But in fact the "amplification" you speak of is not a privilege under the control or ownership of the government at all -- it is just the fact that some people have more money than other people. At root, your complaint is that rich people can do more than poor people can, and you want to fix that. So your way of fixing that is by censoring the political speech of rich people or groups of people.
You are arguing for government censorship of the expression of political opinions. That's it, short and sweet.
Forgot to mention -- liberals also lack a sense of humor. There, now my definition is complete.
You are wrong on several items in your post; let's pick a few.
...A-a-a-and you have egg on your face.
1. If by "buying favour" you just mean spending money to communicate a message, then it shouldn't be censored. Speech should never be censored without a really good reason.
2. Here in the USA we spell it "favor".
3. The idea that corporations are people is not disastrous, it is simply true. Corporations are neither owned nor run by robots. You seem to be trying to make corporations be run and de-facto owned by the government, which is more worthy of Cuba or Venezuela than the USA.
4. Mr. Goodlatte is not an IBM executive, he is actually a member of Congress.
5. What's wrong with opposing bills even when you're not a member of Congress? Are we not supposed to have opinions? Are we supposed to shut up about our opinions? Seriously, what in the world were you thinking in saying that only Congress may oppose bills?
"Waaah, there are rich people who have more money than me. Make them stop putting up yard signs and making political movies, since I don't have enough money to do the same."
"So what if rich companies can communicate more widely than you?"
The "so what" is that they have a darned good whack at drowning out all voices but their own. Inherently undemocratic.
You can't make every YouTube video a viral hit. You can't make every citizen equally wealthy and influential. All you will do is undermine democracy by censoring some people. Communism causes more problems than it solves, news at 11.
Agreement is not the issue, their message is not better than anyone else's, and does not deserve amplification.
The cool thing about a free democracy is that neither you nor the government gets to decide who "deserves amplification". If the speaker spends his own money to get his message out, then only he gets to decide whether it's a worthwhile exercise or not. Isn't freedom great?
For me, liberalism is caring more about people than institutions ( corporations, powerful people's , states, etc ).
Your error is that you forgot that corporations are people, and are not owned by the government or the country at large. Of course corporations are not individual people, but they are owned by people, run by people, responsible to people, generate profits for people. It's people all the way down! And once again, you don't get to decide that those people don't get a political voice.
You're responding to someone criticizing a ruling of the SCOTUS, which has force of law and therefore by definition mandatory. Your point?
The SCOTUS ruling in question was a rarity in that it actually limited the power of government to tell people what they could or couldn't communicate. It was a win for freedom, and I cheer it. Any time the government says "we forbid the forbidding of freedom of speech" I'm OK with that being mandatory. Now back to you, sir -- your point?
If money is equal to speech then guess who as more speech than you.
That's a nice little oversimplification of the issue. The Supreme Court has ruled that you can't censor rich people from communicating via media campaigns, films, etc. Freedom is not supposed to guarantee equality of outcomes, just a lack of arbitrary restrictions. So what if rich companies can communicate more widely than you? I have a suspicion that you want to see some rich people or corporations censored because you disagree with their message. That is not OK.
The definition of a liberal is someone who doesn't care what the law is, as long as it is mandatory. Nanny states, government censors and controls. Ew, yuck.
"Yeah, it was six months and fifteen days since we were in the same location at that restaurant. Would you like to see reviews on Yelp?"
"Dad, the family has been losing our shirts financially since you disappeared."
"Hey, that was a really cool picture you gmailed two days ago to to Susie Hopkins titled 'me without a shirt'. Do you still enjoy photography?"
buuuyyyyyy....buuuuuuyyyyyyyyyyyy .....buuyyyyyyyyy....(*say "buy" like a sheep ...wail or whatever. Instead of "Bahhhhh" - it's "buyyyyy")
Please step away from your weed slowly. Been hitting that stuff kinda hard, huh?
Are you saying that the pervs (I agree with the term if they are really users of C.P., which I don't know) were offering use of their p2p sharing resources for all purposes, including for law enforcement access? Because the way hacking laws are applied, the judge pays attention to the intent of the "maker-available" and not just to the question of whether it was published on the internet.
AT&T made their list available, the pervs made their media available. AT&T didn't want Weev to access (other people's) records. The pervs didn't want law enforcement to access their media.
It's not so different.
So when AT&T made their iPhone subscriber list "available for public download" that implicitly gave people on the internet permission to access this private information? Oh wait, they sentenced Weev to jail time for that. I'm so confused.
And no, I'm not defending child porn users. Well, I guess I sort of am. But not... Darn it, you guys know what I mean.
I actually enjoy the pedantic arguments, being a terrible person.
See, I lean toward disagreeing with both parts of that. I don't think you could truly enjoy it, and I question how terrible you really could be, based on your civil contributions to this thread.
Undoubtedly. And when someone uses the phrase "the average intelligence of Canadians" the implied frame of reference would include IQ test takers in other countries.
(Let's argue about this for hours.)
So you're claiming that the average intelligence of Canadians is identical to the average intelligence of all people in the world? That seems unlikely.
We have seen some major public figures admitting that they voted for him primarily because he is black, and there is a really distressing chorus of "racism!" lobbied by cynical liberals at those who merely oppose his policies (e.g. the Tea Party). I admire President Obama for mostly avoiding stirring up racial trouble from his "bully pulpit" (with a few exceptions, like the Trayvon Martin case), but he's done very little to shut up many of his nasty, race baiting liberal allies.
Not really sure what you're trying to say, and not sure that you are either. But just for your info, Bush got congressional approval for his foreign wars. Many people have forgotten that Senators like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards -- at the time standard bearers of the Democratic Party, supported the Iraq War, which was a bipartisan effort. Not saying it was a good idea, as maybe both sides were idiots for doing so, just saying that constitutional protocol was followed. Whereas Obama only reaches for the Constitution when he's out of Charmin(tm) rolls.