99% of people are idiots... so you would be in the 1%, I guess?
I guess I'm a bit more hopeful, because most of the people I know, even ones whose judgement I would never trust, aren't idiots - they are stressed, overworked, bombarded with propaganda (political and commercial) and their educations have been structured (not necessarily intentionally, though it certainly benefits the powerful) to produce obedient workers and "consumers", not free-thinking, critically-minded citizens.
Moreover, aside from those people who are driven to make politics or activism the central part of their lives (which, given work and stress, etc., simply isn't possible for many even if the desire is theere) for most people the sole opportunity to engage directly in politics comes one day every couple years. And the lead up to that day rarely includes much open-ended discussion; rather its shaped by intense propoganda carpet bombing.
There are lots of other factors; I think that one is automobile-oriented culture, which for all its possible benefits, has hurt democracy as well. For most people, casual daily contact with strangers is non-existent; when "community" becomes an abstract concept rather than a lived-in, concrete reality, how realistic is it to expect the average person to feel, at a deep level, a need to think or care about things outside their family, friends and job? Television, aside from its propaganda uses, produces similar effects (interfacing with reality and the community through media rather than concrete, face-to-face experiences).
The bottom line is that "most people" are perfectly capable of making informed and intelligent decisions about important issues, if they have time to think about them, the opportunity to discuss them, and have receieved (formally or just through life experience) an education that includes some real critical thinking skills
OK, rant off.
One final thing - the parent says "Representative to cast votes: congressman." in response to the previous post's suggestion of designated representatives in a direct democracy system. I read that suggestion very differently:
In place of (or in addition to) officials elected to a congress, one could have people you knew and trusted (your very politically knowledgeable friend, for example) act as proxies in a direct democracy system. For example, most of my friends don't really care about copyright law (except to the degree that they think RIAA lawsuits are total BS), but they know I'm interested and reasonably knowledgeable about it. If direct democracy meant people voted on every issue, you could conceive a system where my friends could grant me proxy power on copyright issues, subject to their review of my decisions.
I can see some dangers (e.g., an abusive husband demanding his wife's vote), although these dangers would probably be the same as in any absentee voting system. This seems like a pretty interesting idea.
The parent nailed the real issue with Wikipedia: it's changeable - and that means the student can change it too.
I love Wikipedia - I can spend (waste) hours there. But when I was teaching Public Speaking and Argument These are classes where students needed to provide evidence, but which didn't necessarily demand intense, formal academic research into whatever subject they'd picked to speak or write about. While an encyclopedia might have been sufficient (sometimes) as a source, I never let my students cite it (although invariably many did and I had to mark them down).
There are really two very distinct goals in researching and citing others' works. One is to develop your knowledge, so that what you say is more informed. Wikipedia is great for this, as are other encyclopedias, so long as you don't need to become too specialized an expert.
The second is buttress your opinion and credibility. Citations do this by demonstrating that what you are claiming has been claimed by some credible third party.
When it comes down to the line, in a class setting, it can never be a final citation in and of itself. This is not simply because it is changeable; more significantly, the student him/herself could have changed it to reflect what they want to say. There is simply no way for the teacher to be able to determine this.
Hell, old school Mafia protection rackets also serve the purpose of "deterring" people. Deterring them from living their lives in peace without paying money to the Mafia.
"Such a nice shop you've got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it, you know what I mean?"
And since the RIAA lawsuit's boil down to:
"Such a nice house you've got there. Be a shame if you were to lose it in, say, a lawsuit by a multinational cartel against your family. Now, how about an out of court settlement for a few thousand, and you never talk to anyone about this, capische?"
Marx never said there were only two classes. He said that society was moving toward there being only two basic classes, but he identified multiple classes.
For example, among the bourgeois (from the same root as "burg" - meaning townsperson, person engaged in commerce there are at least the "haute bourgeois" and the "petty bourgois." The difference lies in their relationship to the act of working. The haute bourgeois own things (factories, corporations, etc.) and employ others; the petty bourgeois includes small business owners, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and other professionals. They either own a business that they work at, often alongside the employees, or they are employed by others and, while they may make more money and have nicer things, they are dependent for their living on employers. This makes the petty bourgeois potential allies of working class people because while they are better off, they actually work hard for a living and are at the mercy of the more powerful class.
Even the proletariat (labor class) is divided into skilled (better paid, more secure) and unskilled labor.
Then there's the lumpen-proletariat - drifters, criminals, homeless people, etc. that have no class power at all and exist "invisible" to the eyes of most people.
One of Marx's points was that industrial capitalism has a tendency of driving people, inevitably but gradually, towards unification into haute bourgeoius and proletariat. That doesn't happen overnight, and substantial steps were taken (e.g., New Deal, unions-corporate truce that defined the WW2-1970s era) to avoid class conflict. But overseas outsourcing even of professional jobs, Walmart-style big boxes, etc. are examples of how, even recently, petty bourgeois (professionals and shopkeepers, respectively) are being driven into proletariat status.
You're missing the author's point. You know, the whole thesis of her article.
Namely, that both MySpace and Facebook are popular in the military (as in other parts of society). MySpace is popular among enlisted, who tend to be lower economic class, less likely to be college educated, etc. (note the use of a qualifer - "tend" - which tells you that it's not a hard and fast rule, but deals with likelihood/probability). Officers, who tend to be college educated and/or of higher socioeconomic class, tend to prefer Facebook. Some people may use both, or neither, but among those who use one, she's arguing that the choice of which one correlates with class.
From the article:
A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there's a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace.The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military.
Discussion of Walmart, etc. is completely on topic for issues of socioeconomics/class structure.
Given the state of what I see in all sorts of neighborhoods [e.g., impact of the war on lower-class families with soldiers in them, loss of working class jobs including due to Walmart killing off a wide range of small businesses that non-college educated people could make a living at], I'm amazed at how well teens are coping and I think that technology has a lot to do with that. Teens are using social network sites to build community and connect with their peers. They are creating publics for socialization. And through it, they are showcasing all of the good, bad, and ugly of today's teen life. Much of it isn't pretty, but it ain't pretty offline either. Still, it makes my heart warm when I see something creative or engaged or reflective. There is good out there too.
It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the technology. I shouldn't be surprised - when orkut grew popular in India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users. But there's something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions.
Her research seems to be along the lines of my own (master's thesis for me, she's way ahead of me); I'm looking at how issues of perceived "authenticity" and identity affect rhetorical ethos in blogs. That is, why do people like to blog, and why do they read blogs, most of all, why do some people trust (some) bloggers. What it comes down to is perceived personal connection - that you're reading or speaking as a "real" person and not a talking head on television, for example. She's focusing on how these personal relationship play out over networks and have the same class elements as offline relationships.
To the parent: "If you're like me and you aren't, the article is just as worthless as the SNSs themselves." Then why are you so riled up about it?
"In both Russia and China they took feudalism and wrote "communism" across it. "
That's what I was getting at, though I mostly talked around it. I'm not sure if you're agreeing, disagreeing, or just adding to what I was saying, but that's part of what I was getting at when I mentioned that Lenin had altered Marx's theory by saying you could jump over capitalism directly to socialism from feudalism.
There's plenty of room to criticize the idea's of socialism and communism, and of capitalism for that matter. Lots of serious and not so serious people have done this since Marx. But looking at the atrocities that happened under regimes that called themselves communist says nothing about Marx's analysis, because, as you point out, no society that actually fits his predictions has happened or, it should be noted, could have happened yet. By his own analysis, the historical process is still in the capitalist stage.
The main reason I posted in the first place is because, as someone who studies politics and political theory (my undergrad was in political science, and my grad work is politics and rhetoric) it drives me crazy when people dismiss "socialism" and "communism" as intrinsically negative. Horrible regimes have called themselves socialist and communist, but they can't legitimately be considered test cases for Marxist or any related type of political/economic theory. Treating them as though they are examples of communism means that you close yourself off to a whole range of potential theory and possible solutions to problems.
Mod me down for defending Marx, but I feel like he's pretty misunderstood, and far more insightful than people give him credit for, and his views relate directly to the topic.
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs: 1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves. 2) Develop/enlarge new markets by: A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
You're half right, but insanity does have everything to do with it.
Insanity has nothing to do with it. We are stuck with a significant portion of the population, Red states, that when given this choice: 1) Bring universal health care up to the levels other developed countries in the world enjoy 2) Leave the US health care system in the mess it currently is and not have to admit the free market is a failure in the area of health care Will eagerly go for option 2) If someone's grandmother needs to die in order to avoid admitting something so fundamental to right wing dogma in the US is broken, so be it.
What you're describing (and it's not just "red states", it's everywhere, and not just health care, but drug policy, foreign policy, labor policy, etc.) is people not being willing to look at reality honestly, not being willing to accept that mistakes have been made, including by themselves. They would rather blame others, whatever the "Other" is depending on where they stand (and sometimes, others are to blame - but if you are participating in the system, blaming and attacking others is not ENOUGH to change things - you have to accept your responsibility, and more than that, you have to move beyond blame and recognize that if others aren't waking up, or are benefitting, you simply need to move beyond them).
Jung (famous psychologist) said that mental illness is fundamentally a symptom of being unwilling (at a subconsious level) to experience neccessary pain and suffering. American society is, psychologically, a society of children - viewing the world in black and white, and more often the not, unwilling to experience the pain and suffering that come with facing yourself honestly and accepting the need to grow.
Only we're the most materially and militarily powerful group on Earth. The nukes are in the hands of children - the insane are running the asylum, and the sane feel powerless, and start questioning their own sanity because the insane control the PA system and keep telling them, day and night, that their sanity is insanity.
I can't explain why slashdot loves analogies so much, except that humans in general tend to understand things by relating them to other things that they have more extensive experience with. That's obvious, right?
But the law itself (note, IANAL) develops in no small part through analogies - it's what you do when you're citing precedents. Essentially, when lawyers rattle off a dozen past cases, the implicit argument works something like this:
1) The law should treat similar situations similarly. This creates at least a degree of stability and predictability in life. While change is a constant, and even desirable, this principle allows us to deal with change in a moderated way, limiting potentially undesirable effects of change. 2) Every situation that comes before a court is unique, but it will have certain traits that are similar to past situations. 3) Here is a past case which has some similarity to the current case; if your (the court's) decision in the current case follows the same reasoning as the past case, you should rule in favor of my client. 4) Of course, the opposing attorney will say "No, that past case is not analogous (for reasons A, B and C)! Here is a different past case, which is a closer, more accurate analogy to the current situation." Curiously, if you follow the line of reasoning in the analogous offered by the second attorney, you should rule in favor of his client.
The law may have settled on fairly clear rules about problems and situations that have existed for a long time - there's been time to work out many of the kinks and find a consistent (not necessarily ideal) set of rules. But new situations don't fit precisely, so lawyers (and slashdotters) engage in the analogy process to understand the situation. Obviously, parties with varied goals will advance different analogies.
In this case, it's probably clear that leaving a CD on the table and having someone copy it surreptitiously doesn't count as copyright infringement. On the other hand, leaving a CD on a table with a sign saying "Hey, come engage in copyright infringement, general public!" probably (again, IANAL, I don't really know) count as copyright infringement from the court's perspective. So, is leaving files in an unsecured, publicly accessible folder more like the first or the second case?
Or, to advance my own analogy: is it more like leaving a pie to cool on the window, and having someone come by and eat it? What if someone comes by, smells it, and discerns the secret ingredient, thus allowing them to bake identical pies? Does it matter if the pie isn't very tasty to being with? These may be silly - or are they?!? Everyone should talk about copyright infringement in terms of pie from now on. EndIt.
Just a warning about the above link. The WfI site is loaded with spyware, Firefox only folks.
For some reason this triggered a bizarre visual.
Bad guys, operating from a secret base, have shut down freedom-loving LiveJournal. A team of hero-geeks infiltrates Warriors for Innocence.
Hero-Geek, crouching in the darkness, scans the base, and flips down a high-tech visored helmet: "It's loaded with spyware. We'd better go Firefox only."
I actually agree with your analysis. Almost completely. But you're missing a key aspect by focusing on Osama bin Laden. ObL is a leader, and this may describe his position - but it doesn't describe the position of the suicide bombers, the foot soldiers, the 9/11 hijackers themselves. In other words, why does anyone listen to ObL (or any similar person - why does anyone listen to Bush for that matter?).
The simple fact is that life for the lower classes in most of the world varies from difficult to an insane hell. This includes presumably advanced nations like the U.S. where it may be merely difficult compared to Saudi Arabia, but its still not something people would choose on its own merits. People have been looking for solutions for a long time, and some of those solutions have had mitigating effects on poverty and oppression, but certainly have not eliminated the deep problems that come with being on the bottom. The worse life on the bottom of the food chain becomes, the more desparate people get, and the more they want to lash out - moreover, the worse things get, the less they have to lose.
There's a passage in the movie Syriana that sums up what I think is going on for a lot of lower and middle class youths in the most oppressive nations - I'm just paraphrasing because I have a horrible memory for detailed quotations:
Communism has failed, capitalism and liberalism have failed. None of the ideologies have lived up to their promises that they would make a better life for us and our families. Things continue to get worse. We must understand we have always had the solution - the Koran tells us what to do, how to live in such a way as to make life better. But we have abandoned our faith. Only by going back to the old ways, the ways of faith, will things improve.
This is (again paraphrased) spoken by a terrorist recruiter roping in teenage boys. ObL, Bush or any other leader can scream all they want, and no one will go fight if the people themselves are convinced that the external threat is threatening them or keeping them from a better life in some way. Most of the terrorist/insurgent/what have you foot soldiers, I suspect, are not engaged in high-level thought about caliphates and theocratic political models. What they are is pissed off that they and their friends are oppressed and dying because of the local tyrant or his foreign allies, and someone has offered them an answer. When the U.S. comes along (whatever the leaders intentions) and bombs the hell out of their town, or soldiers kick their doors in an treat them like criminals, that answer starts to look increasingly correct - at least, its an option that gives them something they can do.
IANAL, but I don't believe RICO is anything like a "three-strikes" law. RICO deals with organizations that exhibit patterns of criminal activity. That was the problem prosecutors faced with the mafia; any single crime committed by a mafioso might not be particularly serious, and even if it was, they could only get the people who committed it or who they had clear evidence conspired to commit it. But it was pretty obvious to all observers that there was a larger organization behind the individual crimes, but removed from their commission. RICO in effect criminalized the organization itself, if it was linked to a pattern of criminal activity. The crimes themselves don't need to be big ones (though I think they do need to occur in at least two states); and the crimes need not be prosecuted before the RICO charge. The federal prosecutor might bring charges of fraud by an employee of a company in one state, money laundering by another employee in another state, and argue that these constitute a pattern of activity centered on the company they work for, thus justifying RICO charges. At this point they can effectively seize all the companies assets for the trial, and dismantle the organization. All of which makes it well suited for the RIAA, which is basically the Mafia without the cool fedoras.
And trust is the central issue for academic journals. The prestige of being published, the usefulness of subscribing to a journal - both are based on the assumption of trust that a given journal will be publishing credible articles. But that trust is simply based on peer-review. That is, a journal's trust is nothing but trust in the peer-review process. And peer-reviewers, like the authors and (on small journals) the editors themselves, are unpaid to begin with.
Academic journals are: 1) filled with information researched and written by authors who receive no payment from the journal 2) gain their trust from reviewers who are not paid by the journal 3) [in the case of most journals, which are very small] staffed by editors who are not paid by the journal (e.g. professors who donate their time coordinating things) 4) filled with information that is formatted and copy-edited by the authors (see point 1) 5) exist to fill the functions of: allowing authors to be read - giving them recognition; ensuring that quality research is published - advancing knowledge; being read by other researchers - disseminating knowledge and allowing it to be built on by others.
Exactly what in either the goals of a journal, or the process that defines it, relates to making a profit? Exactly makes anyone think that limiting access to journal articles in any manner whatsoever serves any of the parties - researchers, authors, or the general public seeking to educate itself? Any party, that is, other than the journal publishing companies which neither write nor review articles?
Charging anything beyond what is necessary to cover costs makes no sense in light of the goal of academic journals, and in the Internet age those costs should be negligible - enough that a few hundred dollars from each university should be able to support all journals - basically paying only to support servers, some people to run them, and internet access. Public access should be unlimited.
From the article:which means that businesses like bars and banks that require ID would be capable of scanning and recording customers' home addresses.
Because reading it off the front isn't good enough? Why would they need to scan my address unless they wanted to send me junk mail or make a database of my drinking habits? This is security theater at best.
More than just security theater - potentially very lucrative security theater. The bar itself - or the convenience store where you buy cigarettes and junk food, or whatever - might not have goals much beyond sending you junk mail. But whoever is running the database can make plenty of extra cash through a variety of means. For example, insurance companies would love to have a database that can identify whether your purchases are "healthy" or "risky". They can get this easily enough by buying the databases from bars, stores, etc, once everything about you is tied to a single machine readable ID number. Ready to live the life of an ascetic, or go without anything but exorbitantly expensive insurance?
Free trade is all about lowering restrictions and barriers to the movement of goods and capital across national borders. This has worked out well for the owners of capital. In a place like China, where the average income is not much more than $1/day, you can buy cheap labor; the produced goods flow back to the First World, where you can sell at a much higher price, but lower than the cost of the good if it was produced using First World labor.
What the RIAA and similar organizations absolutely can not allow is for consumers to employ the same principles. When you buy a song from AllofMP3.com, you pay about US$0.05 - but adjusted for purchasing power parity, that works about to about a US dollar in terms of what you can buy in Russia (roughly, it's been a while since I looked this up). In other words, to a Russian, AllofMP3.com sells songs (although unencumbered by DRM) for about the same real price as an American pays for a song at iTunes.
Thanks to the Internet, there is no real (i.e. technical or physical) reason why the American can't buy a song "in Russia" at "Russian prices" - so of course the American will, for the same reason that many retirees may choose to move to a lower-price economy to live off their pensions at a higher standard of living, or companies may buy their labor in Third World nations. AllofMP3.com is simply one of many situations where ordinary people, as opposed to corporations, make direct benefit off free trade. All of these examples, you might note, are of wealthier people benefiting from access to lower price markets.
For the RIAA (and similar orgs like the MPAA), this would be the collapse of the price-fixing system they have carefully constructed. The reason that a Asian-region DVD won't play in the US is because if it did play, there would be no reason to buy higher-priced US-region DVDs. "To every market, the highest possible price that particular market can support," is the cartel mantra. AllofMP3.com was selling to a "universal market", at prices that made it a profit in local (Russian) terms, and that was the real threat to the RIAA's control> and ability to price-fix. Even if AllofMP3.com paid most of its profits to the RIAA, it would still be eroding that control and needed to be destroyed or rendered irrelevant.
I was recently watching a BBC documentary called "The Power of Nightmares," and I was struck by the similarity between the neoconservative/extreme Christian right alliance and the Party of Orwell's "1984".
This seems like another interesting similarity between "1984" and reality; I don't have my copy with me, so I will have to paraphrase.
The O'Brien character says something to the effect of:
We have already eliminated love and strong relationships. Soon there will be no love between people. We have only to eliminate the pleasure of the orgasm; do you think we can't? We have doctors working on it right now! Soon, there will be nothing between people, only love of people for the State. Your only pleasure will be the rapture of love for Big Brother.
It just seems like Orwell was right, it's just taking longer (we're only at the first stages), and it's a radical religious (not really in any way related to the actual peaceful/tolerant teachings of Christ) and neoconservative Party instead; Oligarchical Religous Privitization, rather than Oligarchical Collectivism as in the book.
I don't want to knock your plan, but I had a comment regarding your view of class action lawsuits.
The real function of a class action suit in our society is less to get specific remedies or compensation for the class of people wronged, than it is to increase the cost of harming people for the company.
In other words, yes, the lawyers will be the biggest winner out of the trial itself. But the overall cost to Microsoft will be very large - that is, legal fees, bad publicity, and the cost of whatever the punishment (assuming they lose). Since they have to bear a big cost, they will be less likely to engage in similar practices in the future (theoretically), and thus consumers overall will be better off (even though you, specifically, may not be fully compensated).
I know it's popular to bash attorneys (I am not a lawyer, nor a law student, nor employed in the legal field), and they will make out like bandits - but overall, they will increase the cost of treating customers badly, thus serving the public in the long run.
You are linking to an "official page" at that is sited at http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.h tml? It seems odd that an "official page" is hosted on what appears to be a free commercial hosting site http://ivillage.com/. Additionally, this "official page" has a Lycos People Search ad banner - I didn't realize that the State of Ohio was running ads on its official sites.
Perhaps most interesting: the "official page" is the creation of "Americans for America" (a name that seems designed to be possibly the most bland and unobjectionable label that an advocacy group could possibly concieve of) - and at the bottom of the page you linked to they state:
"All links and information herein contained have been provided through online research by a group of concerned citizens of the USA and other countries."
While this may simply be carelessness on the parent's post, the page linked to is very clearly unofficial and loaded with a particular group's advocacy. To represent it as official results is dishonest on the part of the group itself, and either incompetent or dishonest on the part of the parent.
There's a lot of truth in this. One way to explain it is to look at something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow was a psychologist who argued that people all have basic needs:
1) physiological needs (food, air), 2) safety needs (shelter, protection), 3) social needs (love, status), 4) esteem needs (self-esteem and the respect of others), and 5) "self-actualization needs" (developing yourself into a more full person)
He argued that you can only start to recognize and focus on meeting the higher needs when the lower ones have bee satisfied - for example, you don't care about shelter or love if you are suffocating, you only care about getting air. Once you get air, you can pay attention to other things.
Applied to the parent's comments, freedom (as generally discussed), is really a pretty high level need. Probably somewhere in self-actualization (i.e. freedom is good because I need to be free to pursue my goals whatever they are). Security and stability are safety needs, much more basic.
Who cares if you can theoretically run for office or speak against the government if you might get blown up tomorrow?
An additional point: most political rhetoric can be seen as appealing to one of these needs if you look underneath (health care, social security, jobs, etc are all appeals to the demand for safety)
An even more additional point: The lower level needs are more powerful (however self-actualized you are, take away air and you become desparate for oxygen very quickly) and people are more desparate to meet them.
It is thus in the interest of the powerful to keep people at the lower levels (e.g. on the edge of achieving safety, but never quite fully achieved) because they will be desparate and willing to do whatever is necessary to get it.
While I agree with your idea, and in fact I'd prefer a parliamentary system to our seperated branches of government (in practice, rather than in theory, it seems to offer more of a check on government abuse, while ironically also allowing a more efficient government), I wonder how effective a question hour would be in our system.
The Prime Minister is (typically) the leader of the dominant party in the House of Commons (similar to Tom DeLay, Majority Party Leader in Congress). He is also, by virtue of that, the head of government (the head of state - the ceremonial and theoretical source of executive power - is the Queen). Put simply, he is a legislator that has been "granted" executive power on the Queen's behalf because he can command the support of a majority of Parliament.
Under that system, it's necessary for him to remain accountable to the legislature, because if he gets too abusive with his power, the legislature can simply demand he resign (vote of no confidence) or stop supporting his actions, completely hamstringing his government. So he has to answer questions and appeal to them (which coincidentally, demands far better speaking and rhetorical skills, since he must constantly defend his positions).
In our system, the President is elected separately - he is not merely a member of Congress picked to run the executive branch. So he is in no way accountable to Congress - if they fail to support him, he keeps his job. Also (and this is particularly important), the President is both head of government (like Blair) and head of state (like the Queen). The later position requires a certain dignitas, a remaining above the fray of politics, while the former requires being in the political fight.
Uniting these positions was one of the mistakes made in the Constitution, I think, because the President gets the mystique of being a head of state and the power of head of government. In a parliamentary system, no one ever stops to say "he's the prime minister, so I'll stay behind him", as many do about the president - that sort of feeling is more focused on the Queen, who has no real power now.
In other words, A) The president wouldn't have any reason to refuse to answer a question because Congress (short of impeachment for criminal matters) can't just say "you're out of the executive", and B) many (in Congress and the public) would be unhappy with harsh criticism of the President that would never be the case with a distinct head of government (the way more people in Britain would check their criticism of the Queen, or moderate it, but feel fine ripping on Blair).
Curiously, the particular industries that it would most negatively impact are the same industries that our president and vice-president and their families made their personal fortunes in; and the same industries that they drew executives from to put together the White House's energy advisory council.
Slashdot Mirror
Chill, thanks! Invite worked perfectly, looking forward to playing around with anything non-facebook.
Hi chill, if you're still willing and able, I'd love an invite. Thanks in advance!
jbarbur (gmail)
99% of people are idiots... so you would be in the 1%, I guess?
I guess I'm a bit more hopeful, because most of the people I know, even ones whose judgement I would never trust, aren't idiots - they are stressed, overworked, bombarded with propaganda (political and commercial) and their educations have been structured (not necessarily intentionally, though it certainly benefits the powerful) to produce obedient workers and "consumers", not free-thinking, critically-minded citizens.
Moreover, aside from those people who are driven to make politics or activism the central part of their lives (which, given work and stress, etc., simply isn't possible for many even if the desire is theere) for most people the sole opportunity to engage directly in politics comes one day every couple years. And the lead up to that day rarely includes much open-ended discussion; rather its shaped by intense propoganda carpet bombing.
There are lots of other factors; I think that one is automobile-oriented culture, which for all its possible benefits, has hurt democracy as well. For most people, casual daily contact with strangers is non-existent; when "community" becomes an abstract concept rather than a lived-in, concrete reality, how realistic is it to expect the average person to feel, at a deep level, a need to think or care about things outside their family, friends and job? Television, aside from its propaganda uses, produces similar effects (interfacing with reality and the community through media rather than concrete, face-to-face experiences).
The bottom line is that "most people" are perfectly capable of making informed and intelligent decisions about important issues, if they have time to think about them, the opportunity to discuss them, and have receieved (formally or just through life experience) an education that includes some real critical thinking skills
OK, rant off.
One final thing - the parent says "Representative to cast votes: congressman." in response to the previous post's suggestion of designated representatives in a direct democracy system. I read that suggestion very differently:
In place of (or in addition to) officials elected to a congress, one could have people you knew and trusted (your very politically knowledgeable friend, for example) act as proxies in a direct democracy system. For example, most of my friends don't really care about copyright law (except to the degree that they think RIAA lawsuits are total BS), but they know I'm interested and reasonably knowledgeable about it. If direct democracy meant people voted on every issue, you could conceive a system where my friends could grant me proxy power on copyright issues, subject to their review of my decisions.
I can see some dangers (e.g., an abusive husband demanding his wife's vote), although these dangers would probably be the same as in any absentee voting system. This seems like a pretty interesting idea.
The parent nailed the real issue with Wikipedia: it's changeable - and that means the student can change it too.
I love Wikipedia - I can spend (waste) hours there. But when I was teaching Public Speaking and Argument These are classes where students needed to provide evidence, but which didn't necessarily demand intense, formal academic research into whatever subject they'd picked to speak or write about. While an encyclopedia might have been sufficient (sometimes) as a source, I never let my students cite it (although invariably many did and I had to mark them down).
There are really two very distinct goals in researching and citing others' works. One is to develop your knowledge, so that what you say is more informed. Wikipedia is great for this, as are other encyclopedias, so long as you don't need to become too specialized an expert.
The second is buttress your opinion and credibility. Citations do this by demonstrating that what you are claiming has been claimed by some credible third party.
When it comes down to the line, in a class setting, it can never be a final citation in and of itself. This is not simply because it is changeable; more significantly, the student him/herself could have changed it to reflect what they want to say. There is simply no way for the teacher to be able to determine this.
For a while now I have gotten the feeling that the united states is less of a democracy of the masses and more democracy of the rich.
I think the word you're looking for is oligarchy, or more specifically plutocracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy]
Hell, old school Mafia protection rackets also serve the purpose of "deterring" people. Deterring them from living their lives in peace without paying money to the Mafia.
"Such a nice shop you've got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it, you know what I mean?"
And since the RIAA lawsuit's boil down to:
"Such a nice house you've got there. Be a shame if you were to lose it in, say, a lawsuit by a multinational cartel against your family. Now, how about an out of court settlement for a few thousand, and you never talk to anyone about this, capische?"
it's basically the same thing.
Marx never said there were only two classes. He said that society was moving toward there being only two basic classes, but he identified multiple classes.
For example, among the bourgeois (from the same root as "burg" - meaning townsperson, person engaged in commerce there are at least the "haute bourgeois" and the "petty bourgois." The difference lies in their relationship to the act of working. The haute bourgeois own things (factories, corporations, etc.) and employ others; the petty bourgeois includes small business owners, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and other professionals. They either own a business that they work at, often alongside the employees, or they are employed by others and, while they may make more money and have nicer things, they are dependent for their living on employers. This makes the petty bourgeois potential allies of working class people because while they are better off, they actually work hard for a living and are at the mercy of the more powerful class.
Even the proletariat (labor class) is divided into skilled (better paid, more secure) and unskilled labor.
Then there's the lumpen-proletariat - drifters, criminals, homeless people, etc. that have no class power at all and exist "invisible" to the eyes of most people.
One of Marx's points was that industrial capitalism has a tendency of driving people, inevitably but gradually, towards unification into haute bourgeoius and proletariat. That doesn't happen overnight, and substantial steps were taken (e.g., New Deal, unions-corporate truce that defined the WW2-1970s era) to avoid class conflict. But overseas outsourcing even of professional jobs, Walmart-style big boxes, etc. are examples of how, even recently, petty bourgeois (professionals and shopkeepers, respectively) are being driven into proletariat status.
Namely, that both MySpace and Facebook are popular in the military (as in other parts of society). MySpace is popular among enlisted, who tend to be lower economic class, less likely to be college educated, etc. (note the use of a qualifer - "tend" - which tells you that it's not a hard and fast rule, but deals with likelihood/probability). Officers, who tend to be college educated and/or of higher socioeconomic class, tend to prefer Facebook. Some people may use both, or neither, but among those who use one, she's arguing that the choice of which one correlates with class.
From the article:
Discussion of Walmart, etc. is completely on topic for issues of socioeconomics/class structure.
Her research seems to be along the lines of my own (master's thesis for me, she's way ahead of me); I'm looking at how issues of perceived "authenticity" and identity affect rhetorical ethos in blogs. That is, why do people like to blog, and why do they read blogs, most of all, why do some people trust (some) bloggers. What it comes down to is perceived personal connection - that you're reading or speaking as a "real" person and not a talking head on television, for example. She's focusing on how these personal relationship play out over networks and have the same class elements as offline relationships.
To the parent:
"If you're like me and you aren't, the article is just as worthless as the SNSs themselves." Then why are you so riled up about it?
"In both Russia and China they took feudalism and wrote "communism" across it. "
That's what I was getting at, though I mostly talked around it. I'm not sure if you're agreeing, disagreeing, or just adding to what I was saying, but that's part of what I was getting at when I mentioned that Lenin had altered Marx's theory by saying you could jump over capitalism directly to socialism from feudalism.
There's plenty of room to criticize the idea's of socialism and communism, and of capitalism for that matter. Lots of serious and not so serious people have done this since Marx. But looking at the atrocities that happened under regimes that called themselves communist says nothing about Marx's analysis, because, as you point out, no society that actually fits his predictions has happened or, it should be noted, could have happened yet. By his own analysis, the historical process is still in the capitalist stage.
The main reason I posted in the first place is because, as someone who studies politics and political theory (my undergrad was in political science, and my grad work is politics and rhetoric) it drives me crazy when people dismiss "socialism" and "communism" as intrinsically negative. Horrible regimes have called themselves socialist and communist, but they can't legitimately be considered test cases for Marxist or any related type of political/economic theory. Treating them as though they are examples of communism means that you close yourself off to a whole range of potential theory and possible solutions to problems.
Mod me down for defending Marx, but I feel like he's pretty misunderstood, and far more insightful than people give him credit for, and his views relate directly to the topic.
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive
causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs:
1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves.
2) Develop/enlarge new markets by:
A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
What you're describing (and it's not just "red states", it's everywhere, and not just health care, but drug policy, foreign policy, labor policy, etc.) is people not being willing to look at reality honestly, not being willing to accept that mistakes have been made, including by themselves. They would rather blame others, whatever the "Other" is depending on where they stand (and sometimes, others are to blame - but if you are participating in the system, blaming and attacking others is not ENOUGH to change things - you have to accept your responsibility, and more than that, you have to move beyond blame and recognize that if others aren't waking up, or are benefitting, you simply need to move beyond them).
Jung (famous psychologist) said that mental illness is fundamentally a symptom of being unwilling (at a subconsious level) to experience neccessary pain and suffering. American society is, psychologically, a society of children - viewing the world in black and white, and more often the not, unwilling to experience the pain and suffering that come with facing yourself honestly and accepting the need to grow.
Only we're the most materially and militarily powerful group on Earth. The nukes are in the hands of children - the insane are running the asylum, and the sane feel powerless, and start questioning their own sanity because the insane control the PA system and keep telling them, day and night, that their sanity is insanity.
I can't explain why slashdot loves analogies so much, except that humans in general tend to understand things by relating them to other things that they have more extensive experience with. That's obvious, right?
But the law itself (note, IANAL) develops in no small part through analogies - it's what you do when you're citing precedents. Essentially, when lawyers rattle off a dozen past cases, the implicit argument works something like this:
1) The law should treat similar situations similarly. This creates at least a degree of stability and predictability in life. While change is a constant, and even desirable, this principle allows us to deal with change in a moderated way, limiting potentially undesirable effects of change.
2) Every situation that comes before a court is unique, but it will have certain traits that are similar to past situations.
3) Here is a past case which has some similarity to the current case; if your (the court's) decision in the current case follows the same reasoning as the past case, you should rule in favor of my client.
4) Of course, the opposing attorney will say "No, that past case is not analogous (for reasons A, B and C)! Here is a different past case, which is a closer, more accurate analogy to the current situation." Curiously, if you follow the line of reasoning in the analogous offered by the second attorney, you should rule in favor of his client.
The law may have settled on fairly clear rules about problems and situations that have existed for a long time - there's been time to work out many of the kinks and find a consistent (not necessarily ideal) set of rules. But new situations don't fit precisely, so lawyers (and slashdotters) engage in the analogy process to understand the situation. Obviously, parties with varied goals will advance different analogies.
In this case, it's probably clear that leaving a CD on the table and having someone copy it surreptitiously doesn't count as copyright infringement. On the other hand, leaving a CD on a table with a sign saying "Hey, come engage in copyright infringement, general public!" probably (again, IANAL, I don't really know) count as copyright infringement from the court's perspective. So, is leaving files in an unsecured, publicly accessible folder more like the first or the second case?
Or, to advance my own analogy: is it more like leaving a pie to cool on the window, and having someone come by and eat it? What if someone comes by, smells it, and discerns the secret ingredient, thus allowing them to bake identical pies? Does it matter if the pie isn't very tasty to being with? These may be silly - or are they?!? Everyone should talk about copyright infringement in terms of pie from now on. EndIt.
For some reason this triggered a bizarre visual.
Bad guys, operating from a secret base, have shut down freedom-loving LiveJournal. A team of hero-geeks infiltrates Warriors for Innocence.
Hero-Geek, crouching in the darkness, scans the base, and flips down a high-tech visored helmet: "It's loaded with spyware. We'd better go Firefox only."
I've got to stop reading Neal Stephenson...
I actually agree with your analysis. Almost completely. But you're missing a key aspect by focusing on Osama bin Laden. ObL is a leader, and this may describe his position - but it doesn't describe the position of the suicide bombers, the foot soldiers, the 9/11 hijackers themselves. In other words, why does anyone listen to ObL (or any similar person - why does anyone listen to Bush for that matter?).
The simple fact is that life for the lower classes in most of the world varies from difficult to an insane hell. This includes presumably advanced nations like the U.S. where it may be merely difficult compared to Saudi Arabia, but its still not something people would choose on its own merits. People have been looking for solutions for a long time, and some of those solutions have had mitigating effects on poverty and oppression, but certainly have not eliminated the deep problems that come with being on the bottom. The worse life on the bottom of the food chain becomes, the more desparate people get, and the more they want to lash out - moreover, the worse things get, the less they have to lose.
There's a passage in the movie Syriana that sums up what I think is going on for a lot of lower and middle class youths in the most oppressive nations - I'm just paraphrasing because I have a horrible memory for detailed quotations:
Communism has failed, capitalism and liberalism have failed. None of the ideologies have lived up to their promises that they would make a better life for us and our families. Things continue to get worse. We must understand we have always had the solution - the Koran tells us what to do, how to live in such a way as to make life better. But we have abandoned our faith. Only by going back to the old ways, the ways of faith, will things improve.
This is (again paraphrased) spoken by a terrorist recruiter roping in teenage boys. ObL, Bush or any other leader can scream all they want, and no one will go fight if the people themselves are convinced that the external threat is threatening them or keeping them from a better life in some way. Most of the terrorist/insurgent/what have you foot soldiers, I suspect, are not engaged in high-level thought about caliphates and theocratic political models. What they are is pissed off that they and their friends are oppressed and dying because of the local tyrant or his foreign allies, and someone has offered them an answer. When the U.S. comes along (whatever the leaders intentions) and bombs the hell out of their town, or soldiers kick their doors in an treat them like criminals, that answer starts to look increasingly correct - at least, its an option that gives them something they can do.
IANAL, but I don't believe RICO is anything like a "three-strikes" law. RICO deals with organizations that exhibit patterns of criminal activity. That was the problem prosecutors faced with the mafia; any single crime committed by a mafioso might not be particularly serious, and even if it was, they could only get the people who committed it or who they had clear evidence conspired to commit it. But it was pretty obvious to all observers that there was a larger organization behind the individual crimes, but removed from their commission. RICO in effect criminalized the organization itself, if it was linked to a pattern of criminal activity. The crimes themselves don't need to be big ones (though I think they do need to occur in at least two states); and the crimes need not be prosecuted before the RICO charge. The federal prosecutor might bring charges of fraud by an employee of a company in one state, money laundering by another employee in another state, and argue that these constitute a pattern of activity centered on the company they work for, thus justifying RICO charges. At this point they can effectively seize all the companies assets for the trial, and dismantle the organization. All of which makes it well suited for the RIAA, which is basically the Mafia without the cool fedoras.
And trust is the central issue for academic journals. The prestige of being published, the usefulness of subscribing to a journal - both are based on the assumption of trust that a given journal will be publishing credible articles. But that trust is simply based on peer-review. That is, a journal's trust is nothing but trust in the peer-review process. And peer-reviewers, like the authors and (on small journals) the editors themselves, are unpaid to begin with.
Academic journals are:
1) filled with information researched and written by authors who receive no payment from the journal
2) gain their trust from reviewers who are not paid by the journal
3) [in the case of most journals, which are very small] staffed by editors who are not paid by the journal (e.g. professors who donate their time coordinating things)
4) filled with information that is formatted and copy-edited by the authors (see point 1)
5) exist to fill the functions of: allowing authors to be read - giving them recognition; ensuring that quality research is published - advancing knowledge; being read by other researchers - disseminating knowledge and allowing it to be built on by others.
Exactly what in either the goals of a journal, or the process that defines it, relates to making a profit? Exactly makes anyone think that limiting access to journal articles in any manner whatsoever serves any of the parties - researchers, authors, or the general public seeking to educate itself? Any party, that is, other than the journal publishing companies which neither write nor review articles?
Charging anything beyond what is necessary to cover costs makes no sense in light of the goal of academic journals, and in the Internet age those costs should be negligible - enough that a few hundred dollars from each university should be able to support all journals - basically paying only to support servers, some people to run them, and internet access. Public access should be unlimited.
Free trade is all about lowering restrictions and barriers to the movement of goods and capital across national borders. This has worked out well for the owners of capital. In a place like China, where the average income is not much more than $1/day, you can buy cheap labor; the produced goods flow back to the First World, where you can sell at a much higher price, but lower than the cost of the good if it was produced using First World labor.
What the RIAA and similar organizations absolutely can not allow is for consumers to employ the same principles. When you buy a song from AllofMP3.com, you pay about US$0.05 - but adjusted for purchasing power parity, that works about to about a US dollar in terms of what you can buy in Russia (roughly, it's been a while since I looked this up). In other words, to a Russian, AllofMP3.com sells songs (although unencumbered by DRM) for about the same real price as an American pays for a song at iTunes.
Thanks to the Internet, there is no real (i.e. technical or physical) reason why the American can't buy a song "in Russia" at "Russian prices" - so of course the American will, for the same reason that many retirees may choose to move to a lower-price economy to live off their pensions at a higher standard of living, or companies may buy their labor in Third World nations. AllofMP3.com is simply one of many situations where ordinary people, as opposed to corporations, make direct benefit off free trade. All of these examples, you might note, are of wealthier people benefiting from access to lower price markets.
For the RIAA (and similar orgs like the MPAA), this would be the collapse of the price-fixing system they have carefully constructed. The reason that a Asian-region DVD won't play in the US is because if it did play, there would be no reason to buy higher-priced US-region DVDs. "To every market, the highest possible price that particular market can support," is the cartel mantra. AllofMP3.com was selling to a "universal market", at prices that made it a profit in local (Russian) terms, and that was the real threat to the RIAA's control> and ability to price-fix. Even if AllofMP3.com paid most of its profits to the RIAA, it would still be eroding that control and needed to be destroyed or rendered irrelevant.
Not just overseas... Some people here may have a similar interest.
I was recently watching a BBC documentary called "The Power of Nightmares," and I was struck by the similarity between the neoconservative/extreme Christian right alliance and the Party of Orwell's "1984".
This seems like another interesting similarity between "1984" and reality; I don't have my copy with me, so I will have to paraphrase.
The O'Brien character says something to the effect of:
We have already eliminated love and strong relationships. Soon there will be no love between people. We have only to eliminate the pleasure of the orgasm; do you think we can't? We have doctors working on it right now! Soon, there will be nothing between people, only love of people for the State. Your only pleasure will be the rapture of love for Big Brother.
It just seems like Orwell was right, it's just taking longer (we're only at the first stages), and it's a radical religious (not really in any way related to the actual peaceful/tolerant teachings of Christ) and neoconservative Party instead; Oligarchical Religous Privitization, rather than Oligarchical Collectivism as in the book.
I don't want to knock your plan, but I had a comment regarding your view of class action lawsuits.
The real function of a class action suit in our society is less to get specific remedies or compensation for the class of people wronged, than it is to increase the cost of harming people for the company.
In other words, yes, the lawyers will be the biggest winner out of the trial itself. But the overall cost to Microsoft will be very large - that is, legal fees, bad publicity, and the cost of whatever the punishment (assuming they lose). Since they have to bear a big cost, they will be less likely to engage in similar practices in the future (theoretically), and thus consumers overall will be better off (even though you, specifically, may not be fully compensated).
I know it's popular to bash attorneys (I am not a lawyer, nor a law student, nor employed in the legal field), and they will make out like bandits - but overall, they will increase the cost of treating customers badly, thus serving the public in the long run.
You are linking to an "official page" at that is sited at http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.h tml? It seems odd that an "official page" is hosted on what appears to be a free commercial hosting site http://ivillage.com/. Additionally, this "official page" has a Lycos People Search ad banner - I didn't realize that the State of Ohio was running ads on its official sites.
Perhaps most interesting: the "official page" is the creation of "Americans for America" (a name that seems designed to be possibly the most bland and unobjectionable label that an advocacy group could possibly concieve of) - and at the bottom of the page you linked to they state:
"All links and information herein contained have been provided through online research by a group of concerned citizens of the USA and other countries."
While this may simply be carelessness on the parent's post, the page linked to is very clearly unofficial and loaded with a particular group's advocacy. To represent it as official results is dishonest on the part of the group itself, and either incompetent or dishonest on the part of the parent.
There's a lot of truth in this. One way to explain it is to look at something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow was a psychologist who argued that people all have basic needs:
1) physiological needs (food, air),
2) safety needs (shelter, protection),
3) social needs (love, status),
4) esteem needs (self-esteem and the respect of others), and
5) "self-actualization needs" (developing yourself into a more full person)
He argued that you can only start to recognize and focus on meeting the higher needs when the lower ones have bee satisfied - for example, you don't care about shelter or love if you are suffocating, you only care about getting air. Once you get air, you can pay attention to other things.
Applied to the parent's comments, freedom (as generally discussed), is really a pretty high level need. Probably somewhere in self-actualization (i.e. freedom is good because I need to be free to pursue my goals whatever they are). Security and stability are safety needs, much more basic.
Who cares if you can theoretically run for office or speak against the government if you might get blown up tomorrow?
An additional point: most political rhetoric can be seen as appealing to one of these needs if you look underneath (health care, social security, jobs, etc are all appeals to the demand for safety)
An even more additional point: The lower level needs are more powerful (however self-actualized you are, take away air and you become desparate for oxygen very quickly) and people are more desparate to meet them.
It is thus in the interest of the powerful to keep people at the lower levels (e.g. on the edge of achieving safety, but never quite fully achieved) because they will be desparate and willing to do whatever is necessary to get it.
While I agree with your idea, and in fact I'd prefer a parliamentary system to our seperated branches of government (in practice, rather than in theory, it seems to offer more of a check on government abuse, while ironically also allowing a more efficient government), I wonder how effective a question hour would be in our system.
The Prime Minister is (typically) the leader of the dominant party in the House of Commons (similar to Tom DeLay, Majority Party Leader in Congress). He is also, by virtue of that, the head of government (the head of state - the ceremonial and theoretical source of executive power - is the Queen). Put simply, he is a legislator that has been "granted" executive power on the Queen's behalf because he can command the support of a majority of Parliament.
Under that system, it's necessary for him to remain accountable to the legislature, because if he gets too abusive with his power, the legislature can simply demand he resign (vote of no confidence) or stop supporting his actions, completely hamstringing his government. So he has to answer questions and appeal to them (which coincidentally, demands far better speaking and rhetorical skills, since he must constantly defend his positions).
In our system, the President is elected separately - he is not merely a member of Congress picked to run the executive branch. So he is in no way accountable to Congress - if they fail to support him, he keeps his job. Also (and this is particularly important), the President is both head of government (like Blair) and head of state (like the Queen). The later position requires a certain dignitas, a remaining above the fray of politics, while the former requires being in the political fight.
Uniting these positions was one of the mistakes made in the Constitution, I think, because the President gets the mystique of being a head of state and the power of head of government. In a parliamentary system, no one ever stops to say "he's the prime minister, so I'll stay behind him", as many do about the president - that sort of feeling is more focused on the Queen, who has no real power now.
In other words, A) The president wouldn't have any reason to refuse to answer a question because Congress (short of impeachment for criminal matters) can't just say "you're out of the executive", and B) many (in Congress and the public) would be unhappy with harsh criticism of the President that would never be the case with a distinct head of government (the way more people in Britain would check their criticism of the Queen, or moderate it, but feel fine ripping on Blair).
Curiously, the particular industries that it would most negatively impact are the same industries that our president and vice-president and their families made their personal fortunes in; and the same industries that they drew executives from to put together the White House's energy advisory council.
Hmm....