The Pirate Party (PP) and the Pirate Bay (TPB) are different entities. TPB was (at the time TFA refers to) a privately run torrent tracker and search engine, with servers in Sweden. PP is political party. I assume the letters you are referring to is the correspondence published on TPB. Most of that is to lawyers, not creators. But I don't suppose that makes a difference to you.
I'm not clear what it is exactly you're advocating. Do you support the interventionist policies of the US government? For something as trivial as intellectual property, no less. And in a well-functioning, friendly country (we're not talking about Sudan here). That's a pretty extreme point of view. I don't suppose you have a problem with foreign governments pressing US DA's to prosecute this or that? Or perhaps China or the EU having an opinion of which political party they like better, the Republicans or the Democrats? Or are you just hypocritical?
Oh, and equating IP infringement to stealing is a tired line and no one but you is buying it. Either you must be new here or you actually work for the RIAA/MPAA. Sharing is caring.
In Sweden schooling is not only free but you also get around $800 each month while you study.
Except it's not free. It's subsidized, so you're paying for it by paying taxes. As far as "giving everyone a chance", I suppose that might mean different things to different people. Sure, no tuition means that poor people can go to college. Except they don't. By a large margin, college students have parents who also went to college, and so on. I'm not sure why this is, maybe working class parents instill a different set of values in their children, one that might not prioritize getting a degree.
While tuition-less college might mean that it's easier go from poor to middle class, the taxation levels also mean that it's more difficult going from middle class to rich. It's also frequently claimed (at least by Norberg, et al) that the US has a higher social mobility than Sweden, meaning that while it's certainly possible to go from working class to rich, it happens less frequently than it does in the US.
We want the best not the richest
Do you really believe that the best are studying at Uppsala or Lund, and not at Harvard and Oxford? What I mean to say is, the best can usually get a scholarship. If your objective is to maximize human capital, my guess the US is doing a better job of it.
From summary: For pirates, the message is clear: there is more money to be made slinking around cinema car parks looking for laptop bags.
What? Sigh. Once again, all together now: Piracy is not stealing.
So that advice is for thieves, not pirates. But wait, there's one more oddity in the same sentence: "more money" - which assumes that money is made at all by piracy. It's sad that even among the IT elite (/.), such myths are propagated.
I agree, to an extent. It's still useful to be able to construct proper sentences, but spelling isn't really that useful in my opinion (and incorrect spelling is a pet peeve of mine). Handwriting is even less useful, and if it doesn't come naturally - forget about it. Spend your time learning a more useful skill. I think it's a bit like saying stop using pen and paper, or a computer, to remember things, it'll deteriorate your memory. In fact, true, but irrelevant. The cognitive unit of pen plus human is much more effective than human alone. So unless you plan to live without pen and paper (and computers, and spelling-correction software), nevermind.
It simply means that if you, through no fault of your own (they usually require you to do some debugging, i.e. switching rj45, bypassing your router, and so forth), cannot reach the guaranteed speed when measured to a reference server, they'll fix it. (Oh, and it probably has to happen with some regularity - I don't think they'll send a technician if you got 47 Mbps just the once.) I actually don't know what happens if they can't, I've never seen that happen. You'd probably be able get a refund, at a minimum. Now, while they do oversell bandwidth, it's my understanding that this mainly applies access outside each providers' own net. I.e. you should be able to max out your bandwidth to the reference servers (commonly the ones reached through bredbandskollen.se). Don't quote me on this though, I'm sure there are other slashdotters with better knowledge of this.
If all their customers was always maximizing their bandwidth, my guess is that the policy would change, or rates would spike. There are no caps in place on regular broadband right now, that I know of. Though, if memory serves, the mobile broadband providers have caps.
I seriously doubt this is true, for at least two reasons. (1) All broadband providers have a minimum bandwidth guarantee (and I'm talking about normal consumers here). As far as I understand, it's mandated by law. In fact, they don't market it as "100 Mbps", they market it as "50 - 100 Mbps" or similar. E.g., Telia has a 50+ Mbps guarantee and Bredbandsbolaget has a 60+ Mbps guarantee. (2) As a previous employee of one of the larger ISP I have first hand knowledge of at least that company's delivered speeds. While a few customers do in fact receive the download speeds you mention, it's usually end-point related (meaning if you switch rj45 or remove your router, it's no longer an issue). Most customers are located at the higher end of the spectrum, 70+ or 80+ Mbps.
One group of customers which actually do have a large variation in bandwidth are DSL customers, where the bandwidth is very dependent on the length and quality of the copper lines. Another piece of evidence, anecdotal as it may be: I currently have a 100 Mbps subscription. When wired, and even through a somewhat crappy router, I usually reach about 90 Mbps.
Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.
This is partly correct and partly bullshit. Swedes usually do have a positive view on turning authority over to the state, that part seems to be true. The reasons for why this is true are very much debatable. Some, like historian Peter Englund, point to the fact that the King often stood with the peasantry against the nobility (in contrast to how it was in the rest Europe, where the monarch was the enemy). The monarch being on the side of 'the people' is especially true for relatively modern times (pre-WW1).
Another explanation might be something sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has noted: the working class is much more positively predisposed to authority than upper classes. And Sweden has a large group of people who self-identify as working class.
Of course, there's probably not one isolated reason for why we trust the state as much as we do. But it is certainly not because "it has served us well in the past". We've been royally screwed by them several times in the past. IB-affären, comes to mind, as does the non-existance of civil liberties during WW2.
This one is almost certain to pass, a majority of parliament have already professed their coming yes-votes.
Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.
You're right about governments all over the world doing this. But they're unfortunately not very slow. As a consequence of an EU directive, all member states are required to pass data retention laws. Six months is, iirc, the minimum mandatory time to retain the data. In Sweden, a recently published inquiry on the matter suggested that data be retained twelve months.
Perhaps most insidiously of all, the inquiry also suggested the directive be implemented in the form of an ordinance (instead of a law), which has the effect that prime minister and cabinet can change the details of regulation at will, thus bypassing parliament. To be even more alarmist for a second: this means that they can change the minimum retention time to several years and start retaining the content of traffic, as well.
It's also wildly ineffective as a means of tracking email traffic, since it only applies to Swedish-based email providers. If you're using hotmail or gmail, you're safe. Paired with the recommendation for ordinance, this may lead some to believe (but not me, surely) it's not about organized crime and terrorism at all, but rather a particularly evil way to pass anti-piracy measures.
I've seen it happen, certainly. But mostly among teenagers, where hormones flare and the issue of boundaries is a gray area. However, as you point out, it might be a cultural or class issue (I don't belong to the working class, and where I grew up, violence wasn't used as a means of persuading people to see your point of view). I still tend to view it as something of a fringe phenomenon - working class or not.
As for self-regulation - I do agree that society regulates itself, by people responding in different ways to different types of behavior. Using violence as a regulator is the alien part. For instance: a person being rude to a stranger is not very uncommon. This is usually regulated by that person being shunned in the immediate social context. I think it would be a far worse social offense to hit that person, for two reasons. One, the punishment outweighs the crime. Two, it's illegal - the police has monopoly on usage of violence in non-self defense situations.
And a final point: just because this is how the world works (in some places), doesn't make it right.
My take is that law already takes this into account.
It certainly does, and with good reason. The law also states that you cannot punch people for being rude. I was merely following the OP's train of thought, where every person was self-regulating in that respect.
Keep in mind that the other poster claims that he didn't initiate most of these fights and that the social norms in question should have been obvious.
I agree, and the OP's behavior in the scenes he (or she) describes is not wrong - it might even be considered admirable. The OP does however state that "that kind of talk earns you a broken nose" and "it's a regulating force which every person has the power to exercise". That is the reasoning I have a problem with. To me, it sounds juvenile, and if becomes a mainstream policy of adults, society has a problem.
People are polite because of the potential repercussions of not.
A cynic's perspective, and probably true of some people. Others are nice because it's the right thing to do.
But, sometimes, people are rude or racist to complete strangers. This not acceptable behavior and it is not something the police should have to deal with.
Racism is not acceptable behavior, and it certainly should have social repercussions. And illegalizing rudeness is certainly an absurd notion. But that's also pretty much where the line should be drawn (imho, of course - prejudiced speech is illegal in some places). A large part of the problem is your notion of self-regulating - that everyone can deem what is acceptable or not by any kind of precision. We accept the judgement of the courts because of the social contract. Why should a person accept the judgement of a complete stranger?
Now if you want to pretend there's some kind of slippery slope here and that this isn't the way the world has worked for all time, go right ahead.
I don't think this is simply a question of a slippery slope - it's wrong in and of itself. I was simply pointing out what I think would happen if a majority of the people followed your social code. I also do not think you put this policy into practice with any kind of regularity, or you're posting from prison.
...I think there's a place for violence in our society.. it's a regulating force which every person has the power to exercise.
Basically everyone should act like a miniature version of judge, jury and executioner? So what happens if you hit someone that feels they've been unjustly targeted and they decide to stab you? What happens if people that have a very low tolerance for nuisances decide to use your 'justice system'? It seems quite easy for this to escalate, something which I think would be troublesome. It also seems to be difficult to judge who was actually morally correct in the situation - the effect seems to be simply this: might is right - reason be damned.
Just look at how impolite some forums without violence can be.
You're implying that impoliteness is worse than violence? It's worse to shout profanities at someone than it is to hit them? Or is it that simply that you think everyone should be forced to politeness, no matter the cost? In that case, perhaps a little bit of torture is quite acceptable if forces someone to smile and nod to people on the street?
I do not feel you're antisocial - you seem to be rational rather than impulsive, and you motive for violence seem to be forcing others to follow societal norms (rather than breaking them). I do, however, think that you're very misguided.
This is not necessarily true. According to Wilhelm Agrell (Sweden foremost expert in military history), it's quite possible that FRA has been doing a lot of semi-illegal shit (I'm paraphrasing) - including what Olofsson commented on, and this new law is a move to legalize something quite common.
This is not in reference to wiretaps, which the police may use with a warrant, but an all pervasive monitoring of all traffic passing Sweden's national borders (talk about archaic perspectives). The surveillance in question is not performed by the police, but by FRA; military intelligence.
The European Court of Human Rights might be able to overturn laws that are incompatible with ECHR. Articles 9 and 10 comes to mind (freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of expression, respectively). They seem to have a history of somewhat sensible rulings.
You're right about Big Crunch being out of date (at least according to wikipedia). But, from TFA: With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
This seems to indicate that a bang might occur by some other means than a crunch.
Well, yes, of course. However, as they don't have to worry about being re-elected, they can say what they think and vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering to lobbyists and campaign contributors.
This is quite possibly one of the most scarily anti-democratic sentiments I've seen expressed on the web, ever (granted, I've probably missed most of them). Without accountability representative government merely denegrades into tyranny. While the tagline ("vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering") may sound appealing, it goes against all sound reasoning to call this a durable system. In fact, that justification sounds more rhetorical than morally legitimate. If one feels that lobbying is undesirable, there are other ways of dealing with this.
The fact that socialism is touted as an "ennemy [sic] of freedom" is the biggest political lie westerners are spoonfed by the bourgeois. Extensive social programs, such as chidren day care, universal medical insurance and unemployment insurance go a very long way in protecting the economic freedom of the little guys.
A welfare state, nanny state, or whatever you want to call it, is not per definition socialist. Socialism is a political ideology which is includes some sort of democratic power base (as oppose to Communism), but which does have a very extensive public economic sector. The role of private property rights is somewhat unclear, and your mileage may vary on this point.
However, if the right to private property is not included, I would very much call a socialist movement "enemies of freedom". Ownership of self, and some basic property rights is the basis for freedom. This is included in the definition of the pretty much all non-marxist, western political philosophers.
Although, as stated; how much socialism is an enemy of freedom is really dependent on how close to communism it is defined as.
in a country that has typically been considered socialist
I'm not sure who exactly considers Sweden socialist outside McCarthyesque circles, but this has never been the case. Although, I suppose that the strong social-democratic traditions might give that impression to some, prima facie.
how many rights they still retain that we gave up in the US a long, long time ago
Drug use, prostitution, bearing arms, bypassing non-trivial copy protection and hate speech are illegal in Sweden. I'm not sure what those amazing rights we retain are. It'd be nice to hear about them though - to get some perspective on my own bleak vision of the future of this country. I guess that the existence of TPB is a good sign, but it hardly has much weight, considering that they're going to go after the individuals pretty soon. Data retention is on the way, and recently (early March) a directive was introduced by the executive branch, instructing the police to target copyright infringement on the Internet, at both large and small scale. The latter, despite the Minister of Justice's insistence that this was NOT the objective of the bill, which was passed just last July. Hello, 1984.
I don't think they ever were the super heroes they're portrayed as in the movies. As far as I can tell using public information, they've had some successful missions, and some very unsuccessful. And they've probably always been chatting away on unsecured telephones and using government issued credit cards. The difference is the global informational infrastructure, which is available to the general public. My guess is that a decent 'social engineer' probably could've gotten this information even before the Internet.
don't the people create the law in these societies?
"The people" do not create laws; elected officials do. The discrepancy between what the elected officials do and what the people want can sometimes be very great.
Sometimes a law is created as a response to public demand. This is usually defined either by general debate in the media - in which case public opinion usually represents a small elite - or by polling, in which case public opinion is a reflection of how the question was asked (and who wanted the answers).
Sometimes a law is created as a response to demand from special interests, otherwise known as lobbying. Draconic copyright laws are the epitome example.
Sometimes a law is created to oppose the public view, to steer the public "the right way". E.g., if a certain type of harmful behaviour increases in a society, harsher laws may be implemented as a deterrent.
And sometimes, I suspect, laws are created because the elected officials have nothing better to do. Public choice theory, and all that.
Before this completely goes OT, and to answer your question: no, not necessarily.
Good point. I wonder, though, if those experiences are comparable to this situation. My query is this; when I grew up, I could watch cable late at night to see the occasional 'hardcore' porn flick (full view of genitals and such). I would guess this started to get interesting somewhere between ages 10 and 15. Is that the same thing as someone younger, say a 7-8 year old, stumbling upon run-of-the-mill Internet porn, which is pretty fucked up by my standards.
This is not in support of censorship, or a 'war on porn' or anything of the kind. I just sometimes wonder if it kids and the Internet today is not breaking new ground, porn-wise.
TFA mentions several reasons as to why one would want to use this service, viz. tracking your employees or your children. Oh, whatever did we do before this technology came to save us? It seems to me that while some technology I would deem harmful (such as most surveillance tech) does have its uses - if criminals communicate via email, then the police should be able to read their email (with a warrant). However, this is one area where this does not apply. Giving your child a cell phone does not make them harder to keep track of, thus warranting use of this technology. On the contrary; just call the kid.
I think potential for abuse, in this case, outweighs whatever good may come from this. Please, kill this market by not using their service. Please.
Slashdot Mirror
The Pirate Party (PP) and the Pirate Bay (TPB) are different entities. TPB was (at the time TFA refers to) a privately run torrent tracker and search engine, with servers in Sweden. PP is political party. I assume the letters you are referring to is the correspondence published on TPB. Most of that is to lawyers, not creators. But I don't suppose that makes a difference to you.
I'm not clear what it is exactly you're advocating. Do you support the interventionist policies of the US government? For something as trivial as intellectual property, no less. And in a well-functioning, friendly country (we're not talking about Sudan here). That's a pretty extreme point of view. I don't suppose you have a problem with foreign governments pressing US DA's to prosecute this or that? Or perhaps China or the EU having an opinion of which political party they like better, the Republicans or the Democrats? Or are you just hypocritical?
Oh, and equating IP infringement to stealing is a tired line and no one but you is buying it. Either you must be new here or you actually work for the RIAA/MPAA. Sharing is caring.
In Sweden schooling is not only free but you also get around $800 each month while you study.
Except it's not free. It's subsidized, so you're paying for it by paying taxes. As far as "giving everyone a chance", I suppose that might mean different things to different people. Sure, no tuition means that poor people can go to college. Except they don't. By a large margin, college students have parents who also went to college, and so on. I'm not sure why this is, maybe working class parents instill a different set of values in their children, one that might not prioritize getting a degree.
While tuition-less college might mean that it's easier go from poor to middle class, the taxation levels also mean that it's more difficult going from middle class to rich. It's also frequently claimed (at least by Norberg, et al) that the US has a higher social mobility than Sweden, meaning that while it's certainly possible to go from working class to rich, it happens less frequently than it does in the US.
We want the best not the richest
Do you really believe that the best are studying at Uppsala or Lund, and not at Harvard and Oxford? What I mean to say is, the best can usually get a scholarship. If your objective is to maximize human capital, my guess the US is doing a better job of it.
From summary: For pirates, the message is clear: there is more money to be made slinking around cinema car parks looking for laptop bags.
What? Sigh. Once again, all together now: Piracy is not stealing.
So that advice is for thieves, not pirates. But wait, there's one more oddity in the same sentence: "more money" - which assumes that money is made at all by piracy. It's sad that even among the IT elite (/.), such myths are propagated.
The answer? Stop using that stuff ...
I agree, to an extent. It's still useful to be able to construct proper sentences, but spelling isn't really that useful in my opinion (and incorrect spelling is a pet peeve of mine). Handwriting is even less useful, and if it doesn't come naturally - forget about it. Spend your time learning a more useful skill. I think it's a bit like saying stop using pen and paper, or a computer, to remember things, it'll deteriorate your memory. In fact, true, but irrelevant. The cognitive unit of pen plus human is much more effective than human alone. So unless you plan to live without pen and paper (and computers, and spelling-correction software), nevermind.
My two cents.
It simply means that if you, through no fault of your own (they usually require you to do some debugging, i.e. switching rj45, bypassing your router, and so forth), cannot reach the guaranteed speed when measured to a reference server, they'll fix it. (Oh, and it probably has to happen with some regularity - I don't think they'll send a technician if you got 47 Mbps just the once.) I actually don't know what happens if they can't, I've never seen that happen. You'd probably be able get a refund, at a minimum. Now, while they do oversell bandwidth, it's my understanding that this mainly applies access outside each providers' own net. I.e. you should be able to max out your bandwidth to the reference servers (commonly the ones reached through bredbandskollen.se). Don't quote me on this though, I'm sure there are other slashdotters with better knowledge of this.
If all their customers was always maximizing their bandwidth, my guess is that the policy would change, or rates would spike. There are no caps in place on regular broadband right now, that I know of. Though, if memory serves, the mobile broadband providers have caps.
They order 100mbit and its usually 4-6MB/s.
I seriously doubt this is true, for at least two reasons.
(1) All broadband providers have a minimum bandwidth guarantee (and I'm talking about normal consumers here). As far as I understand, it's mandated by law. In fact, they don't market it as "100 Mbps", they market it as "50 - 100 Mbps" or similar. E.g., Telia has a 50+ Mbps guarantee and Bredbandsbolaget has a 60+ Mbps guarantee.
(2) As a previous employee of one of the larger ISP I have first hand knowledge of at least that company's delivered speeds. While a few customers do in fact receive the download speeds you mention, it's usually end-point related (meaning if you switch rj45 or remove your router, it's no longer an issue). Most customers are located at the higher end of the spectrum, 70+ or 80+ Mbps.
One group of customers which actually do have a large variation in bandwidth are DSL customers, where the bandwidth is very dependent on the length and quality of the copper lines. Another piece of evidence, anecdotal as it may be: I currently have a 100 Mbps subscription. When wired, and even through a somewhat crappy router, I usually reach about 90 Mbps.
Well, there's this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919
Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.
This is partly correct and partly bullshit. Swedes usually do have a positive view on turning authority over to the state, that part seems to be true. The reasons for why this is true are very much debatable. Some, like historian Peter Englund, point to the fact that the King often stood with the peasantry against the nobility (in contrast to how it was in the rest Europe, where the monarch was the enemy). The monarch being on the side of 'the people' is especially true for relatively modern times (pre-WW1).
Another explanation might be something sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has noted: the working class is much more positively predisposed to authority than upper classes. And Sweden has a large group of people who self-identify as working class.
Of course, there's probably not one isolated reason for why we trust the state as much as we do. But it is certainly not because "it has served us well in the past". We've been royally screwed by them several times in the past. IB-affären, comes to mind, as does the non-existance of civil liberties during WW2.
About IB-affären in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsbyran
This one is almost certain to pass, a majority of parliament have already professed their coming yes-votes.
Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.
You're right about governments all over the world doing this. But they're unfortunately not very slow. As a consequence of an EU directive, all member states are required to pass data retention laws. Six months is, iirc, the minimum mandatory time to retain the data. In Sweden, a recently published inquiry on the matter suggested that data be retained twelve months.
Perhaps most insidiously of all, the inquiry also suggested the directive be implemented in the form of an ordinance (instead of a law), which has the effect that prime minister and cabinet can change the details of regulation at will, thus bypassing parliament. To be even more alarmist for a second: this means that they can change the minimum retention time to several years and start retaining the content of traffic, as well.
It's also wildly ineffective as a means of tracking email traffic, since it only applies to Swedish-based email providers. If you're using hotmail or gmail, you're safe. Paired with the recommendation for ordinance, this may lead some to believe (but not me, surely) it's not about organized crime and terrorism at all, but rather a particularly evil way to pass anti-piracy measures.
I've seen it happen, certainly. But mostly among teenagers, where hormones flare and the issue of boundaries is a gray area. However, as you point out, it might be a cultural or class issue (I don't belong to the working class, and where I grew up, violence wasn't used as a means of persuading people to see your point of view). I still tend to view it as something of a fringe phenomenon - working class or not.
As for self-regulation - I do agree that society regulates itself, by people responding in different ways to different types of behavior. Using violence as a regulator is the alien part. For instance: a person being rude to a stranger is not very uncommon. This is usually regulated by that person being shunned in the immediate social context. I think it would be a far worse social offense to hit that person, for two reasons. One, the punishment outweighs the crime. Two, it's illegal - the police has monopoly on usage of violence in non-self defense situations.
And a final point: just because this is how the world works (in some places), doesn't make it right.
My take is that law already takes this into account.
It certainly does, and with good reason. The law also states that you cannot punch people for being rude. I was merely following the OP's train of thought, where every person was self-regulating in that respect.
Keep in mind that the other poster claims that he didn't initiate most of these fights and that the social norms in question should have been obvious.
I agree, and the OP's behavior in the scenes he (or she) describes is not wrong - it might even be considered admirable. The OP does however state that "that kind of talk earns you a broken nose" and "it's a regulating force which every person has the power to exercise". That is the reasoning I have a problem with. To me, it sounds juvenile, and if becomes a mainstream policy of adults, society has a problem.
People are polite because of the potential repercussions of not.
A cynic's perspective, and probably true of some people. Others are nice because it's the right thing to do.
But, sometimes, people are rude or racist to complete strangers. This not acceptable behavior and it is not something the police should have to deal with.
Racism is not acceptable behavior, and it certainly should have social repercussions. And illegalizing rudeness is certainly an absurd notion. But that's also pretty much where the line should be drawn (imho, of course - prejudiced speech is illegal in some places). A large part of the problem is your notion of self-regulating - that everyone can deem what is acceptable or not by any kind of precision. We accept the judgement of the courts because of the social contract. Why should a person accept the judgement of a complete stranger?
Now if you want to pretend there's some kind of slippery slope here and that this isn't the way the world has worked for all time, go right ahead.
I don't think this is simply a question of a slippery slope - it's wrong in and of itself. I was simply pointing out what I think would happen if a majority of the people followed your social code. I also do not think you put this policy into practice with any kind of regularity, or you're posting from prison.
...I think there's a place for violence in our society.. it's a regulating force which every person has the power to exercise.
Basically everyone should act like a miniature version of judge, jury and executioner? So what happens if you hit someone that feels they've been unjustly targeted and they decide to stab you? What happens if people that have a very low tolerance for nuisances decide to use your 'justice system'? It seems quite easy for this to escalate, something which I think would be troublesome. It also seems to be difficult to judge who was actually morally correct in the situation - the effect seems to be simply this: might is right - reason be damned.
Just look at how impolite some forums without violence can be.
You're implying that impoliteness is worse than violence? It's worse to shout profanities at someone than it is to hit them? Or is it that simply that you think everyone should be forced to politeness, no matter the cost? In that case, perhaps a little bit of torture is quite acceptable if forces someone to smile and nod to people on the street?
I do not feel you're antisocial - you seem to be rational rather than impulsive, and you motive for violence seem to be forcing others to follow societal norms (rather than breaking them). I do, however, think that you're very misguided.
This is not necessarily true. According to Wilhelm Agrell (Sweden foremost expert in military history), it's quite possible that FRA has been doing a lot of semi-illegal shit (I'm paraphrasing) - including what Olofsson commented on, and this new law is a move to legalize something quite common.
This is not in reference to wiretaps, which the police may use with a warrant, but an all pervasive monitoring of all traffic passing Sweden's national borders (talk about archaic perspectives). The surveillance in question is not performed by the police, but by FRA; military intelligence.
The European Court of Human Rights might be able to overturn laws that are incompatible with ECHR. Articles 9 and 10 comes to mind (freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of expression, respectively). They seem to have a history of somewhat sensible rulings.
You're right about Big Crunch being out of date (at least according to wikipedia). But, from TFA: With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it.
This seems to indicate that a bang might occur by some other means than a crunch.
Well, yes, of course. However, as they don't have to worry about being re-elected, they can say what they think and vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering to lobbyists and campaign contributors.
This is quite possibly one of the most scarily anti-democratic sentiments I've seen expressed on the web, ever (granted, I've probably missed most of them). Without accountability representative government merely denegrades into tyranny. While the tagline ("vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering") may sound appealing, it goes against all sound reasoning to call this a durable system. In fact, that justification sounds more rhetorical than morally legitimate. If one feels that lobbying is undesirable, there are other ways of dealing with this.
The fact that socialism is touted as an "ennemy [sic] of freedom" is the biggest political lie westerners are spoonfed by the bourgeois. Extensive social programs, such as chidren day care, universal medical insurance and unemployment insurance go a very long way in protecting the economic freedom of the little guys.
A welfare state, nanny state, or whatever you want to call it, is not per definition socialist. Socialism is a political ideology which is includes some sort of democratic power base (as oppose to Communism), but which does have a very extensive public economic sector. The role of private property rights is somewhat unclear, and your mileage may vary on this point.
However, if the right to private property is not included, I would very much call a socialist movement "enemies of freedom". Ownership of self, and some basic property rights is the basis for freedom. This is included in the definition of the pretty much all non-marxist, western political philosophers.
Although, as stated; how much socialism is an enemy of freedom is really dependent on how close to communism it is defined as.
in a country that has typically been considered socialist
I'm not sure who exactly considers Sweden socialist outside McCarthyesque circles, but this has never been the case. Although, I suppose that the strong social-democratic traditions might give that impression to some, prima facie.
how many rights they still retain that we gave up in the US a long, long time ago
Drug use, prostitution, bearing arms, bypassing non-trivial copy protection and hate speech are illegal in Sweden. I'm not sure what those amazing rights we retain are. It'd be nice to hear about them though - to get some perspective on my own bleak vision of the future of this country. I guess that the existence of TPB is a good sign, but it hardly has much weight, considering that they're going to go after the individuals pretty soon. Data retention is on the way, and recently (early March) a directive was introduced by the executive branch, instructing the police to target copyright infringement on the Internet, at both large and small scale. The latter, despite the Minister of Justice's insistence that this was NOT the objective of the bill, which was passed just last July. Hello, 1984.
I don't think they ever were the super heroes they're portrayed as in the movies. As far as I can tell using public information, they've had some successful missions, and some very unsuccessful. And they've probably always been chatting away on unsecured telephones and using government issued credit cards. The difference is the global informational infrastructure, which is available to the general public. My guess is that a decent 'social engineer' probably could've gotten this information even before the Internet.
don't the people create the law in these societies?
"The people" do not create laws; elected officials do. The discrepancy between what the elected officials do and what the people want can sometimes be very great.
Sometimes a law is created as a response to public demand. This is usually defined either by general debate in the media - in which case public opinion usually represents a small elite - or by polling, in which case public opinion is a reflection of how the question was asked (and who wanted the answers).
Sometimes a law is created as a response to demand from special interests, otherwise known as lobbying. Draconic copyright laws are the epitome example.
Sometimes a law is created to oppose the public view, to steer the public "the right way". E.g., if a certain type of harmful behaviour increases in a society, harsher laws may be implemented as a deterrent.
And sometimes, I suspect, laws are created because the elected officials have nothing better to do. Public choice theory, and all that.
Before this completely goes OT, and to answer your question: no, not necessarily.
Good point. I wonder, though, if those experiences are comparable to this situation. My query is this; when I grew up, I could watch cable late at night to see the occasional 'hardcore' porn flick (full view of genitals and such). I would guess this started to get interesting somewhere between ages 10 and 15. Is that the same thing as someone younger, say a 7-8 year old, stumbling upon run-of-the-mill Internet porn, which is pretty fucked up by my standards.
This is not in support of censorship, or a 'war on porn' or anything of the kind. I just sometimes wonder if it kids and the Internet today is not breaking new ground, porn-wise.
TFA mentions several reasons as to why one would want to use this service, viz. tracking your employees or your children. Oh, whatever did we do before this technology came to save us? It seems to me that while some technology I would deem harmful (such as most surveillance tech) does have its uses - if criminals communicate via email, then the police should be able to read their email (with a warrant). However, this is one area where this does not apply. Giving your child a cell phone does not make them harder to keep track of, thus warranting use of this technology. On the contrary; just call the kid.
I think potential for abuse, in this case, outweighs whatever good may come from this. Please, kill this market by not using their service. Please.