One of the main objections I hear against nullification (beyond a guilt by association with racist bastards) is that it would be an inefficient and disorderly way to run a government. Imagine the chaos, it is said, if states could just up and declare this or that federal law null and void with their borders. My reply is that the freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, the protection against unlawful search and seizure, arrest without charge, and self-incrimination, the guarantee of trial by a jury of peers, and above all the franchise itself are all quite inefficient and disorderly ways to run a government. But there are higher goods than order and efficiency, and these things are fitting not so much for running a government as for a self-governing people.
I don't think I'd use the term viable with regards to nullification, since the current political climate makes it a practical impossibility. But it'd be a better means of securing self-government than allowing the Federal government to be the final judge of its own laws.
I'll not complain that my truck has no unlocked bootloader since it doesn't boot. But I wouldn't buy a truck that had only proprietary, locked bolts that no standard set sockets could turn.
While my truck does not boot, it does start up and I can change the starter motor or anything else as I please. I can swap out the engine entirely, convert it biodiesel or electric, or take it apart and sell its components as spares. That's how I know I own it: however it may have come, I can make it as different as I want.
Indeed, the Interstate Commerce Clause is one of the most abused sections of the Constitution. If something is grown and consumed locally, you and I might deny it has much to do with interstate commerce. Indeed, it would seem to be the very definition of intrastate commerce. But the sophists, er... sorry, the Constitutional lawyers will argue that growing drugs locally rather than buying them from other states will affect the markets in those other states. Since the activity has interstate effects it will be counted as interstate commerce.
So it's not just that an air molecule might cross the state border. It's also that by having air within the state borders, we have no vacuum within the state. Our lack of a vacuum in the state means that we will not draw on other state's supply of air, so affecting the air market in those states. We're in charge now...
In United States v. Wrightwood Dairy Co. (1942) the Court upheld federal price regulation of intrastate milk commerce, stating:
The commerce power is not confined in its exercise to the regulation of commerce among the states. It extends to those activities intrastate which so affect interstate commerce, or the exertion of the power of Congress over it, as to make regulation of them appropriate means to the attainment of a legitimate end, the effective execution of the granted power to regulate interstate commerce. [...] The power of Congress over interstate commerce is plenary and complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution. [... ] It follows that no form of state activity can constitutionally thwart the regulatory power granted by the commerce clause to Congress. Hence, the reach of that power extends to those intrastate activities which in a substantial way interfere with or obstruct the exercise of the granted power.[13]
In Wickard v. Filburn (1942) the Court upheld the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which sought to stabilize wide fluctuations in the market price for wheat. The Court found that Congress could apply national quotas to wheat grown on one's own land, for one's own consumption, because the total of such local production and consumption could potentially be sufficiently large as to impact the overall national goal of stabilizing prices. The Court cited its recent Wrightwood decision and decided that "[w]hether the subject of the regulation in question was "production," "consumption," or "marketing" is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us."
Notice the "henceforth". Passing an ex post facto law is contrary to the Constitution and to good sense. This doesn't mean, however, that we cannot change the law with regard to the future. Those responsible for the mortgage crisis may be moral failures, but you're right to say that in at least some cases they didn't violate the law. What I mean by "henceforth" is that I would want jail time for those who engage in shenanigans in the future. I have in mind cases like the 2010 settlement Goldman Sachs managed to get with the SEC. The guys were committing fraud and when the SEC went after them they agreed to pay $300 million to Treasury and half that to investors. Even setting aside the paltry sum involved, this kind of settlement doesn't make sense because the individuals who made such decisions did not and will not suffer personally for the damage they caused. It neither punishes the wrongdoers nor deters those who would emulate their example.
As for the other bill, I would argue that agencies like the DEA and NSA have in at least one sense violated the law, though they break no statute with any penalty attached. Again, it would be contrary to Constitutional principles to pass a law now that would throw decision-makers at the DEA and NSA in jail for things they've done in the past. But agents and policy makers should, in the future, face some personal penalty for exceeding their authority.
Let me put it this way. If in the course of an investigation a cop enters your home without permission or a warrant, whatever he might find could well be thrown out in court as inadmissible and rightly so. Personally, I think he ought also to be charged with breaking and entering but that's another conversation. But suppose his boss put fourth barging into people's houses or random search and seizure as a policy. If we're lucky, whatever is found as a result might be thrown out in court. If we really lucky, there'll soon be someone new in charge of the department. But those who create policies requiring agents to act in excess of their legal authority and contrary to Constitutional law will not be charged for doing so. Even if the courts decide that the DEA cannot snoop through your medical records without a warrant, those who ordered them to will not suffer for doing so. Even if we're so lucky to have a court which sees the NSA's violation of the Fourth Amendment, the most we'll have out of a James Clapper, Keith Alexander, or a Janet Napolitano will be a begrudging, "oops." This must change. Unless we wish agencies to claim ever more authority, those in charge of the agencies must have more to worry about than evidence being excluded in someone else's trial.
[C]itizens whose [...] records are handed over to a [lawyer] — or any other third-party — have 'no expectation of privacy' for that information.
Or perhaps:
[C]itizens whose [thoughts] are [recorded by] a [psychologist] — or any other third-party — have 'no expectation of privacy' for that information.
And if we can work our way around the Fourth and Fifth amendments, let's have at the First as well.
[C]itizens whose [confessions] are [given] to a [priest] — or any other third-party — have 'no expectation of privacy' for that information.
This is foolish and hopefully the laws will overturn it. If I could support only two bills this year, one would be a bill that would henceforth hold accountable corporate heads who engage in the sort of shenanigans that led to the recession. It would require jail-time. But if I could only support one bill, it would require jail-time for the heads of alphabet soup agencies whose policy decisions are found to violate the Constitution. A judge might yet throw this out, but if the people who make such decisions do not suffer they'll just try again in a different way. If he wishes to sit on the throne, let Damocles sit under the sword.
Regrettably, you're correct. There really isn't a left-wing in this country when it comes to economics and an exceptionally few principled libertarians are the only real right-wing. Sure, the tea-party has made right-wing rhetoric more popular, but with the exception of those few libertarians most in the GOP are all for the corrupt corporatist 'partnership' between government and business that was the great economic project of neo-conservative "compassionate conservatism". Sure, the rule of the democratic party since 2008 which managed to pass a health-care reform might make one think the left had risen again. But when one actually looks at the bill he realizes, contrary to establishment Republican rhetoric, the ACA is another business/government partnership which was itself created by Republican think-tanks. There hasn't been a real economic left in this country since before Clinton (incidentally, the notion that Clinton was himself on the left, popular during the Bush years among Republicans, is laughable but indicative; they regard a president as leftist who supported welfare reform and further deregulated the credit market).
What we have in the politics of this country is a broad consensus. Republicans get elected campaigning for smaller government, but their campaign is financed by a corporation which expects to receive a return on its investment. Democrats get electing campaigning for tighter regulation on business, but their campaign is financed by businesses which hope for regulations that will benefit them and harm competition. Both campaign on social issues which people care deeply about--and rightly so--but neither means to do anything significant about them unless forced. Both exploit divisions in Congress they create to ensure angry voters will come to the polls.
The center is the problem. I'm pretty far on the right, having great sympathy with the agrarians and distributists and reckoning modern industrial capitalism as destructive toward traditional values, but I'd sooner have more real socialists elected by the Democratic party with this lot. Compromise is possible between two people who are principled. The socialist may wish to raise the minimum wage and reduce working hours to increase employment and justice toward the workers. I might agree, if he can show his proposal doesn't lead to excess inflation, since such a proposal would be good for strengthening family life. I would ask in return that we increase tax credits for homeowners (single-homeowners only, of course, and for homes valued under a certain threshold) since this would at once decrease taxes and increase the independence and stability of the family. The socialist might agree, for in spite of shrinking the tax base slightly, such a proposal would help move us toward a more progressive tax policy--something which was once an ideal for the left in this country but has eroded for many reasons. Yet the socialist and I will never agree on the importance of private property. That is alright. We won't agree on everything, but we can find common ground precisely because we are both principled. Thus I wish there were a real left and a real right in this country, that we might find compromise. But the centrist D's and R's can never compromise and never agree, precisely because they stand for nothing other than victory for their tribe and the corporate sponsorship that comes with it.
Utter, 100% loyalty to orders is something that needs to be shown and taught as horrendously dangerous. We do this with the history of WW2 and elsewhere.
Certainly, I couldn't agree more. But that's not what I was talking about.
The ethics of Trek may lead people in positions like Snowden to say- "To Hell With The Law. An unjust law is no law at all.". And that is a good thing. It is the final check and balance on society, more fundamental than even the concept of democracy.
Certainly, I couldn't agree more. But that's not what I was talking about.
Context here is important. We're not talking about the underling who refuses the unjust order. We're not talking about the outside contractor who goes whistle-blower on his former employer. We're not dealing with the valiant Starfleet captain refusing to accept the judgment of a corrupt admiral. We're talking about the guy giving the underling the unjust order; the employer whose patriotic employees must flee the country after speaking out for its sake; the admiral whose worst corruption is that he breaks the law while thinking himself the valiant captain. We can hope that the underling, the whistleblower, or the captain might stand up to such a man, but this is only a scarce hope. The normal means, indeed the preferred means, of preventing such things is to bind such a man with law and transparency. But an organization such as the NSA denies in word and deed that it should be subject to transparency; it is your Section 31. And we know because of the whistleblower how regularly it flouts the fundamental laws meant to bind it.
This is why I call this man's decision to model himself on Star Trek captains disturbing. It's the context. An NSA Chief will not fancy himself the corrupt admiral whose unjust orders Kirk, Picard, or Sisko refuse since they answer to the higher law of their conscience. He will sit in the captain's chair and, hearing Fourth Amendment like Prime Directive, will regard himself as the valiant rogue captain, out to save the Federation against its own lesser judgment. This is, after all, usually the case with corrupt admirals. Thus I agree with Lewis when he says:
I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber barron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.
In short, I do not say this because I think all laws ought always to be obeyed. Rather I say this because I think some laws ought to be obeyed. Especially by those in charge, whose lust for power, whose self-righteousness presumption, and above all whose assumption that they know what's best, the laws themselves were meant to contain.
The money's bad but I don't find it the most disturbing part of this. The place doesn't look that much more expensive than any office the senior management of a large organization would work in.
It's the mindset that would want such an Information Dominance Center that is disturbing. It bespeaks a person willing to use his position to live out a fantasy. In this fantasy, the fate of the galaxy country rests in his singular hands. Far from being a functionary who answers to civilian authorities, he's the protagonist in some grand drama.
And as much as I love Star Trek, a Star Trek fantasy is the last one I'd see in such a man. Star Trek captains righteously flout all the rules. When superiors order them to stand down, when their fundamental laws (the Prime Directive) deny them the power, when the lives of entire worlds are at stake, they do what they think best, damn the torpedoes, warp 9, engage. A man with such delusions of grandeur ought not be put in charge of HUD, much less a secretive organization known for its willingness to spy on citizens.
I, too, agree that the men were involved in fraud but I think we're missing the point by talking about the guilt or innocence of these two individuals. If the article only said that two jerks were selling bad copies of The Vampire Diaries, then it'd hardly be worth mentioning.
The revealing thing about the article is the way that a new police unit, funded with £2.56 million over two years, is justified. Of course the first people they arrested were engaged in fraud, for who can complain about arresting such people? But the hyperbolic claims made about piracy here would, in fact, make the girl who downloads a One Direction album partly responsible for the destruction of one of the world's largest economies. And this unit is, as parent recognizes, charged with prosecuting "illegal downloads" as well. £51bn per month, to triple by 2015? Just think about that claim for a moment. That's larger than the British economy! If you take these people at there word then you could blame illegal downloading on the world-wide recession. You needn't bother with accusing innocent financiers and speculators who, after all, are just trying to make a better life for their families and provide a public service.
Such hyperbole is reported as fact, except on alternative, online news sources. And it is little wonder. Is MSNBC or FoxNews apt to disagree with the figures given by major media conglomerates? It would be rather shocking if Comcast and Rupert Murdoch allowed anything but the inflation of such figures.
Such hyperbole is also a matter of course when those in power seek to shape public opinion and have new policies accepted. To give a parallel, look at the rhetoric of hawks in the U.S. They constantly inflate the size and significance of every possible threat in order to drum up support for their cause. Hussein was a Hitler-like madman bent on world domination. Never mind that in reality he lacked the capacity and further invasion was not in his interests. Iran will start WWIII by blowing up Israel since they're religious zealots who think to welcome the 12th imam thereby. Never mind that intelligence show Iran is not building a weapon and the religious authorities in Iran have declared the deployment of nuclear weapons haram. Not one year ago, I heard John McCain declare the world a more dangerous place than he had ever seen it. This from a man who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But without the fear, the hyperbole, the little bin Ladins around every corner, the wars will not go on and without the constant wars the apparent need for an ever growing state security apparatus might falter. Then we might devolve to a pre-9/11 world where our lack of war threatens the peace.
Whenever someone in power indulges in hyperbole, threat inflation, and encourages an exaggerated fear know that they're trying to manipulate the public into accepted a policy which, examined with a clear head and a calm heart, any decent person would reject.
To find out just how strong it is, follow their claims to the end. 51bn * 3 * 12 = £1.836 trillion per annum. Now, just for the fun of it, take the IMF's number for the nominal GDP of the UK, and covert it into pounds. You'll come up with about £1.5 trillion. In other words, the industry is claiming that by 2015 losses due to piracy will exceed the value of all sectors of the UK economy in 2012.
You are still consuming a product not meant for you.
When I consume a sandwich in a restaurant, the restaurant has that much less meat, bread, cheese, and alfalfa. That and the labor used to make sandwich are direct losses to the restaurant. Furthermore, no one else can have that sandwich once I have, so the restaurant will have to make new ones before they can sell more. There is nothing about this that is directly analogous to what's called piracy.
Which brings up another point. I know the pirate community has embraced the term piracy (case in point, TPB). It's probably too late to change this, but I think the term inappropriate. A pirate takes things from other people (violently at that) and once the thing is taken its original owners no longer have access to it or control over it. The making and distributing of digital reproductions we term piracy is nothing like this. A better term than piracy, I would suggest is smuggling. A smuggler takes goods from one place to another for distribution, in contravention to bans, embargoes, and government enforced monopolies.
There may, for example, be a royal monopoly on tea. The pirate steals the royal tea ships, representing a theft and a direct loss of royal property. The smuggler sneaks tea from other sources into port, never personally laying a finger on the royal tea. The exchequer will claim, and this is admittedly true, that the royal monopoly on tea is challenged by this act and it is hard for the market to bear the monopolist's high prices when there are cheaper alternatives. He is mistaken, however, when he calls it theft or even when he claims that each purchase of the smuggler's tea is a purchase which otherwise would have supported the revenue, for even tea has an elasticity of demand and there may be many who will buy from the smuggler who could never afford the monopolist's prices.
In my opinion it would make more sense if we saw more of these compromises [...]
I think you're right. Someone above characterizes OP as being unwilling to use his imagination and I think this quite unfair. When we're reading sci-fi, we want to believe what we're reading and we want to be absorbed in it. We want to achieve that suspension of disbelief. But the more confused looking a name is, the more we're broken out of the experience. I can use my imagination to figure out how to pronounce Xchryxchub. But the effort in doing this will break the spell of the fiction. And as you point out, humans would really just say Krikoob anyway. The less 'realistic' a word look, the more realistic it feels.
I don't think humanity would have a problem coming up with exonyms for alien races.
Indeed I think this more plausible than using names intended to look alien. Sure, if aliens have a physiology similar to ours and call themselves Vulcan, we'll likely do so as well. Though they be as culturally sensitive as a Starfleet cadet in TNG, humans will always find something else to call a people whose name can only be transcribed as Hxach'caaskhh'aik'ak'a. We might just call them Gelfs. If they're tall and hairy, they'll have to get used to being called Wookies.
One note on Allemagne: at its roots it wasn't really an exonym. The term was an endonym referring to a confederation of tribes called the Allemanni (all the men, i.e. the tribes taken together). These tribes lived in what is today Alsace and Switzerland and gave Marcus Aurelius endless grief. They were at last defeated by Clovis and thus their name would be applied to Germany more broadly by the Franks. It's kind of like a synecdoche. This fact leaves me wondering about the roots of the term Germani, given its like ending. The OED has the roots of Germani as an exonym, borrowing from the Celts (gair=neighbor). I personally suspect that the term applied to a single tribe engaged in trade and warfare with Celts and Latins and that it was subsequently projected onto the whole. By the time it came into literature, its roots must have been lost.
Every time I see contrived names from Sci-Fi stories, I can't help but think of a quote from an O.S. Card book.
Nothing is more tacky than to have a bunch of foreign-sounding words thrown into a story for no better reason than to have something that sounds foreign. James Blish called such needlessly coined words “shmeerps.” If it looks like a rabbit and acts like a rabbit, calling it a shmeerp doesn’t make it alien.
If mugubasala means “bread” then say bread! Only use the made-up stuff when it used for a concept for which there is no English word. If your viewpoint character thinks that mugubasala is nothing but bread, then later discovers that it is prepared through a special process that releases a drug from the native grain, and that drug turns out to be the source of the telepathic power that the natives are suspected of having, then you are fully justified in calling the bread mugubasala. It really is different, and deserves the added importance that a foreign name bestows.
That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
But this always carries a touch of the absurd. Our orthography, indeed our alphabet, was developed for our lips, throat, larynx, etc. Attempts to transcribe the sounds of other species from our own planet always look a little silly (I've never in my life heard a sheep say "baa" or a cow "moo", though like everyone else I accept these things without a thought by force of convention). For that matter, trying to transcribe sounds made by body parts accurately for which there isn't a fixed convention (like the sounds of diarrhea or sex which, on account of sensitivities, lack a fixed convention in contrast to something like chewing, munch munch, or another onomatopoetic standard like "burp" or "sniff") always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
I fear, therefore, that the illusion must always be broken when new words are introduced and the more alien the words are--even if the context demands something very alien--the more we cannot suspend disbelief. Perhaps it's just a limitation of the human mind, and therefore of sci-fi which is conditioned by its imaginative source, that cannot be overcome. Perhaps alien words some made up must always look like someone just made them up.
The word I want is hydrophobia. Clearly you have in mind the term hydrophobia as a chemist might use it, and that is well. But the term also has a long pedigree of being used to describe the fear of bodies of water. Read any details about the life of the emperor Heraclius, for example, as you'll find it used to describe the condition he suffered after thoroughly defeating the Persians in the 7th century. When he got back to Constantinople, he is said to have a bridge of ships constructed over the Bosphorus so he could cross, with potted trees lining the whole so he could pretend he was on land. When the early Muslim conquests began, part of their stunning and speedy success may be attributed to the failure of this emperor to respond to the crisis. He refused to leave the city and cross into Asia for fear of leaving land.
That is simply false. If it were true, economic exchanges would never occur.
In a zero sum game, the total cost of the participants gains and losses in utility--for one perhaps increasing and the other decreasing--add up to zero. One side may win, the other may lose, but both sides cannot win.
Let's say you've developed hydrophobia want to sell your used canoe on Craigslist. Let's say that I want to buy a canoe to go camping on an island in the middle of a lake. Your asking price is $300 and I think it's a good deal. I give you the $300; you give me the canoe. You're looking at this and saying, "Well, I'm less one canoe but I've gained $300 and he's less $300 but he's gained a canoe. So, it's break even." Or worse, you might be thinking, "Ha, that sucker. I had no use for that canoe so it was clearly worthless. But I can now by a sweet raincoat with my $300."
What you're missing here is a very basic economic reality: value is subjectively determined. Because of your hydrophobia, the canoe has no utility for you. You'd rather spend $300 on rain coats. So the exchange is a gain in utility for you. I, on the other hand, cannot make a paper boat out of three Benjamins and expect to get to my campsite. Money's use is that it can be exchange for something useful. I decide that I'll get more utility out of the canoe than $300 in the bank, so I buy it from you and from my perspective I've also gained in utility. It is, in other words, a win-win.
Where there is no force, compulsion, coercion, rent-seeking, or other machinations involved, free economic exchanges can always be win-win scenarios. People simply wouldn't trade, buy, or sell if they didn't value what they gained more than what they gave away.
But herpes and herpetology are etymologically related. The Greek verb herpyzo means to creep or crawl (apologies for using Latin letters, I've tried Greek on/. before and it isn't pretty). So a herpeton is a creeping thing: i.e. snakes, lizards, salamanders, etc. Thus we end up with the study of creeping things or herpetology.
Herpes became the Greek word for shingles (herpes zoster in the medical books) because it was a creeping (or lurking) disease. It would seem to be gone but would lurk about only to resurface again. It was only natural, therefore, to apply it to what we commonly call herpes now (herpes simplex).
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One of the main objections I hear against nullification (beyond a guilt by association with racist bastards) is that it would be an inefficient and disorderly way to run a government. Imagine the chaos, it is said, if states could just up and declare this or that federal law null and void with their borders. My reply is that the freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, the protection against unlawful search and seizure, arrest without charge, and self-incrimination, the guarantee of trial by a jury of peers, and above all the franchise itself are all quite inefficient and disorderly ways to run a government. But there are higher goods than order and efficiency, and these things are fitting not so much for running a government as for a self-governing people.
I don't think I'd use the term viable with regards to nullification, since the current political climate makes it a practical impossibility. But it'd be a better means of securing self-government than allowing the Federal government to be the final judge of its own laws.
I'll not complain that my truck has no unlocked bootloader since it doesn't boot. But I wouldn't buy a truck that had only proprietary, locked bolts that no standard set sockets could turn.
While my truck does not boot, it does start up and I can change the starter motor or anything else as I please. I can swap out the engine entirely, convert it biodiesel or electric, or take it apart and sell its components as spares. That's how I know I own it: however it may have come, I can make it as different as I want.
Indeed, the Interstate Commerce Clause is one of the most abused sections of the Constitution. If something is grown and consumed locally, you and I might deny it has much to do with interstate commerce. Indeed, it would seem to be the very definition of intrastate commerce. But the sophists, er... sorry, the Constitutional lawyers will argue that growing drugs locally rather than buying them from other states will affect the markets in those other states. Since the activity has interstate effects it will be counted as interstate commerce.
So it's not just that an air molecule might cross the state border. It's also that by having air within the state borders, we have no vacuum within the state. Our lack of a vacuum in the state means that we will not draw on other state's supply of air, so affecting the air market in those states. We're in charge now...
Lest what I say seem to absurd, consider this from the font of all knowledge:
Notice the "henceforth". Passing an ex post facto law is contrary to the Constitution and to good sense. This doesn't mean, however, that we cannot change the law with regard to the future. Those responsible for the mortgage crisis may be moral failures, but you're right to say that in at least some cases they didn't violate the law. What I mean by "henceforth" is that I would want jail time for those who engage in shenanigans in the future. I have in mind cases like the 2010 settlement Goldman Sachs managed to get with the SEC. The guys were committing fraud and when the SEC went after them they agreed to pay $300 million to Treasury and half that to investors. Even setting aside the paltry sum involved, this kind of settlement doesn't make sense because the individuals who made such decisions did not and will not suffer personally for the damage they caused. It neither punishes the wrongdoers nor deters those who would emulate their example.
As for the other bill, I would argue that agencies like the DEA and NSA have in at least one sense violated the law, though they break no statute with any penalty attached. Again, it would be contrary to Constitutional principles to pass a law now that would throw decision-makers at the DEA and NSA in jail for things they've done in the past. But agents and policy makers should, in the future, face some personal penalty for exceeding their authority.
Let me put it this way. If in the course of an investigation a cop enters your home without permission or a warrant, whatever he might find could well be thrown out in court as inadmissible and rightly so. Personally, I think he ought also to be charged with breaking and entering but that's another conversation. But suppose his boss put fourth barging into people's houses or random search and seizure as a policy. If we're lucky, whatever is found as a result might be thrown out in court. If we really lucky, there'll soon be someone new in charge of the department. But those who create policies requiring agents to act in excess of their legal authority and contrary to Constitutional law will not be charged for doing so. Even if the courts decide that the DEA cannot snoop through your medical records without a warrant, those who ordered them to will not suffer for doing so. Even if we're so lucky to have a court which sees the NSA's violation of the Fourth Amendment, the most we'll have out of a James Clapper, Keith Alexander, or a Janet Napolitano will be a begrudging, "oops." This must change. Unless we wish agencies to claim ever more authority, those in charge of the agencies must have more to worry about than evidence being excluded in someone else's trial.
Or perhaps:
And if we can work our way around the Fourth and Fifth amendments, let's have at the First as well.
This is foolish and hopefully the laws will overturn it. If I could support only two bills this year, one would be a bill that would henceforth hold accountable corporate heads who engage in the sort of shenanigans that led to the recession. It would require jail-time. But if I could only support one bill, it would require jail-time for the heads of alphabet soup agencies whose policy decisions are found to violate the Constitution. A judge might yet throw this out, but if the people who make such decisions do not suffer they'll just try again in a different way. If he wishes to sit on the throne, let Damocles sit under the sword.
When living in Austria, I was introduced to a more accurate term for the beer gut: Backhendlfriedhof, i.e. fried-chicken graveyard.
The NPR article noted it occurring after taking antibiotics.
Funnel this.
Regrettably, you're correct. There really isn't a left-wing in this country when it comes to economics and an exceptionally few principled libertarians are the only real right-wing. Sure, the tea-party has made right-wing rhetoric more popular, but with the exception of those few libertarians most in the GOP are all for the corrupt corporatist 'partnership' between government and business that was the great economic project of neo-conservative "compassionate conservatism". Sure, the rule of the democratic party since 2008 which managed to pass a health-care reform might make one think the left had risen again. But when one actually looks at the bill he realizes, contrary to establishment Republican rhetoric, the ACA is another business/government partnership which was itself created by Republican think-tanks. There hasn't been a real economic left in this country since before Clinton (incidentally, the notion that Clinton was himself on the left, popular during the Bush years among Republicans, is laughable but indicative; they regard a president as leftist who supported welfare reform and further deregulated the credit market).
What we have in the politics of this country is a broad consensus. Republicans get elected campaigning for smaller government, but their campaign is financed by a corporation which expects to receive a return on its investment. Democrats get electing campaigning for tighter regulation on business, but their campaign is financed by businesses which hope for regulations that will benefit them and harm competition. Both campaign on social issues which people care deeply about--and rightly so--but neither means to do anything significant about them unless forced. Both exploit divisions in Congress they create to ensure angry voters will come to the polls.
The center is the problem. I'm pretty far on the right, having great sympathy with the agrarians and distributists and reckoning modern industrial capitalism as destructive toward traditional values, but I'd sooner have more real socialists elected by the Democratic party with this lot. Compromise is possible between two people who are principled. The socialist may wish to raise the minimum wage and reduce working hours to increase employment and justice toward the workers. I might agree, if he can show his proposal doesn't lead to excess inflation, since such a proposal would be good for strengthening family life. I would ask in return that we increase tax credits for homeowners (single-homeowners only, of course, and for homes valued under a certain threshold) since this would at once decrease taxes and increase the independence and stability of the family. The socialist might agree, for in spite of shrinking the tax base slightly, such a proposal would help move us toward a more progressive tax policy--something which was once an ideal for the left in this country but has eroded for many reasons. Yet the socialist and I will never agree on the importance of private property. That is alright. We won't agree on everything, but we can find common ground precisely because we are both principled. Thus I wish there were a real left and a real right in this country, that we might find compromise. But the centrist D's and R's can never compromise and never agree, precisely because they stand for nothing other than victory for their tribe and the corporate sponsorship that comes with it.
That's just what they want you to think.
Certainly, I couldn't agree more. But that's not what I was talking about.
Certainly, I couldn't agree more. But that's not what I was talking about.
Context here is important. We're not talking about the underling who refuses the unjust order. We're not talking about the outside contractor who goes whistle-blower on his former employer. We're not dealing with the valiant Starfleet captain refusing to accept the judgment of a corrupt admiral. We're talking about the guy giving the underling the unjust order; the employer whose patriotic employees must flee the country after speaking out for its sake; the admiral whose worst corruption is that he breaks the law while thinking himself the valiant captain. We can hope that the underling, the whistleblower, or the captain might stand up to such a man, but this is only a scarce hope. The normal means, indeed the preferred means, of preventing such things is to bind such a man with law and transparency. But an organization such as the NSA denies in word and deed that it should be subject to transparency; it is your Section 31. And we know because of the whistleblower how regularly it flouts the fundamental laws meant to bind it.
This is why I call this man's decision to model himself on Star Trek captains disturbing. It's the context. An NSA Chief will not fancy himself the corrupt admiral whose unjust orders Kirk, Picard, or Sisko refuse since they answer to the higher law of their conscience. He will sit in the captain's chair and, hearing Fourth Amendment like Prime Directive, will regard himself as the valiant rogue captain, out to save the Federation against its own lesser judgment. This is, after all, usually the case with corrupt admirals. Thus I agree with Lewis when he says:
In short, I do not say this because I think all laws ought always to be obeyed. Rather I say this because I think some laws ought to be obeyed. Especially by those in charge, whose lust for power, whose self-righteousness presumption, and above all whose assumption that they know what's best, the laws themselves were meant to contain.
I can't decide whether these guys are more Tal Shiar or Obsidian Order.
The money's bad but I don't find it the most disturbing part of this. The place doesn't look that much more expensive than any office the senior management of a large organization would work in.
It's the mindset that would want such an Information Dominance Center that is disturbing. It bespeaks a person willing to use his position to live out a fantasy. In this fantasy, the fate of the galaxy country rests in his singular hands. Far from being a functionary who answers to civilian authorities, he's the protagonist in some grand drama.
And as much as I love Star Trek, a Star Trek fantasy is the last one I'd see in such a man. Star Trek captains righteously flout all the rules. When superiors order them to stand down, when their fundamental laws (the Prime Directive) deny them the power, when the lives of entire worlds are at stake, they do what they think best, damn the torpedoes, warp 9, engage. A man with such delusions of grandeur ought not be put in charge of HUD, much less a secretive organization known for its willingness to spy on citizens.
I, too, agree that the men were involved in fraud but I think we're missing the point by talking about the guilt or innocence of these two individuals. If the article only said that two jerks were selling bad copies of The Vampire Diaries, then it'd hardly be worth mentioning.
The revealing thing about the article is the way that a new police unit, funded with £2.56 million over two years, is justified. Of course the first people they arrested were engaged in fraud, for who can complain about arresting such people? But the hyperbolic claims made about piracy here would, in fact, make the girl who downloads a One Direction album partly responsible for the destruction of one of the world's largest economies. And this unit is, as parent recognizes, charged with prosecuting "illegal downloads" as well. £51bn per month, to triple by 2015? Just think about that claim for a moment. That's larger than the British economy! If you take these people at there word then you could blame illegal downloading on the world-wide recession. You needn't bother with accusing innocent financiers and speculators who, after all, are just trying to make a better life for their families and provide a public service.
Such hyperbole is reported as fact, except on alternative, online news sources. And it is little wonder. Is MSNBC or FoxNews apt to disagree with the figures given by major media conglomerates? It would be rather shocking if Comcast and Rupert Murdoch allowed anything but the inflation of such figures.
Such hyperbole is also a matter of course when those in power seek to shape public opinion and have new policies accepted. To give a parallel, look at the rhetoric of hawks in the U.S. They constantly inflate the size and significance of every possible threat in order to drum up support for their cause. Hussein was a Hitler-like madman bent on world domination. Never mind that in reality he lacked the capacity and further invasion was not in his interests. Iran will start WWIII by blowing up Israel since they're religious zealots who think to welcome the 12th imam thereby. Never mind that intelligence show Iran is not building a weapon and the religious authorities in Iran have declared the deployment of nuclear weapons haram. Not one year ago, I heard John McCain declare the world a more dangerous place than he had ever seen it. This from a man who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But without the fear, the hyperbole, the little bin Ladins around every corner, the wars will not go on and without the constant wars the apparent need for an ever growing state security apparatus might falter. Then we might devolve to a pre-9/11 world where our lack of war threatens the peace.
Whenever someone in power indulges in hyperbole, threat inflation, and encourages an exaggerated fear know that they're trying to manipulate the public into accepted a policy which, examined with a clear head and a calm heart, any decent person would reject.
To find out just how strong it is, follow their claims to the end. 51bn * 3 * 12 = £1.836 trillion per annum. Now, just for the fun of it, take the IMF's number for the nominal GDP of the UK, and covert it into pounds. You'll come up with about £1.5 trillion. In other words, the industry is claiming that by 2015 losses due to piracy will exceed the value of all sectors of the UK economy in 2012.
When I consume a sandwich in a restaurant, the restaurant has that much less meat, bread, cheese, and alfalfa. That and the labor used to make sandwich are direct losses to the restaurant. Furthermore, no one else can have that sandwich once I have, so the restaurant will have to make new ones before they can sell more. There is nothing about this that is directly analogous to what's called piracy.
Which brings up another point. I know the pirate community has embraced the term piracy (case in point, TPB). It's probably too late to change this, but I think the term inappropriate. A pirate takes things from other people (violently at that) and once the thing is taken its original owners no longer have access to it or control over it. The making and distributing of digital reproductions we term piracy is nothing like this. A better term than piracy, I would suggest is smuggling. A smuggler takes goods from one place to another for distribution, in contravention to bans, embargoes, and government enforced monopolies.
There may, for example, be a royal monopoly on tea. The pirate steals the royal tea ships, representing a theft and a direct loss of royal property. The smuggler sneaks tea from other sources into port, never personally laying a finger on the royal tea. The exchequer will claim, and this is admittedly true, that the royal monopoly on tea is challenged by this act and it is hard for the market to bear the monopolist's high prices when there are cheaper alternatives. He is mistaken, however, when he calls it theft or even when he claims that each purchase of the smuggler's tea is a purchase which otherwise would have supported the revenue, for even tea has an elasticity of demand and there may be many who will buy from the smuggler who could never afford the monopolist's prices.
But I can hold a spatula with a single digit, even if it's just my index finger.
I think you're right. Someone above characterizes OP as being unwilling to use his imagination and I think this quite unfair. When we're reading sci-fi, we want to believe what we're reading and we want to be absorbed in it. We want to achieve that suspension of disbelief. But the more confused looking a name is, the more we're broken out of the experience. I can use my imagination to figure out how to pronounce Xchryxchub. But the effort in doing this will break the spell of the fiction. And as you point out, humans would really just say Krikoob anyway. The less 'realistic' a word look, the more realistic it feels.
Indeed I think this more plausible than using names intended to look alien. Sure, if aliens have a physiology similar to ours and call themselves Vulcan, we'll likely do so as well. Though they be as culturally sensitive as a Starfleet cadet in TNG, humans will always find something else to call a people whose name can only be transcribed as Hxach'caaskhh'aik'ak'a. We might just call them Gelfs. If they're tall and hairy, they'll have to get used to being called Wookies.
One note on Allemagne: at its roots it wasn't really an exonym. The term was an endonym referring to a confederation of tribes called the Allemanni (all the men, i.e. the tribes taken together). These tribes lived in what is today Alsace and Switzerland and gave Marcus Aurelius endless grief. They were at last defeated by Clovis and thus their name would be applied to Germany more broadly by the Franks. It's kind of like a synecdoche. This fact leaves me wondering about the roots of the term Germani, given its like ending. The OED has the roots of Germani as an exonym, borrowing from the Celts (gair=neighbor). I personally suspect that the term applied to a single tribe engaged in trade and warfare with Celts and Latins and that it was subsequently projected onto the whole. By the time it came into literature, its roots must have been lost.
Every time I see contrived names from Sci-Fi stories, I can't help but think of a quote from an O.S. Card book.
That being said, even if we applied this rule consistently, wouldn't we still have to come up with strange, seemingly unpronounceable names for aliens? We've no real word in English to describe some alien from Betelgeuse Seven, though we might opt to say Betelgeusian. Calling them Betelgeusian might seem satisfactory, but in many sci-fi contexts it would be like, just to pick a random example, applying our name for people from the subcontinent to people from a newly found continent on the opposite side of the planet because we wanted to get a grant proposal accepted by the Spanish royal family. So one must, in some situations, try to use a truly alien name to describe an alien people.
But this always carries a touch of the absurd. Our orthography, indeed our alphabet, was developed for our lips, throat, larynx, etc. Attempts to transcribe the sounds of other species from our own planet always look a little silly (I've never in my life heard a sheep say "baa" or a cow "moo", though like everyone else I accept these things without a thought by force of convention). For that matter, trying to transcribe sounds made by body parts accurately for which there isn't a fixed convention (like the sounds of diarrhea or sex which, on account of sensitivities, lack a fixed convention in contrast to something like chewing, munch munch, or another onomatopoetic standard like "burp" or "sniff") always takes the reader away from absorption in the text to think, at least briefly, "Wow, those are weird letters on the page."
I fear, therefore, that the illusion must always be broken when new words are introduced and the more alien the words are--even if the context demands something very alien--the more we cannot suspend disbelief. Perhaps it's just a limitation of the human mind, and therefore of sci-fi which is conditioned by its imaginative source, that cannot be overcome. Perhaps alien words some made up must always look like someone just made them up.
It happens in the presence of Khan Noonien Singh. Clearly the extra energy required to vaporize is derived from the presence of Ricardo Montalban.
The word I want is hydrophobia. Clearly you have in mind the term hydrophobia as a chemist might use it, and that is well. But the term also has a long pedigree of being used to describe the fear of bodies of water. Read any details about the life of the emperor Heraclius, for example, as you'll find it used to describe the condition he suffered after thoroughly defeating the Persians in the 7th century. When he got back to Constantinople, he is said to have a bridge of ships constructed over the Bosphorus so he could cross, with potted trees lining the whole so he could pretend he was on land. When the early Muslim conquests began, part of their stunning and speedy success may be attributed to the failure of this emperor to respond to the crisis. He refused to leave the city and cross into Asia for fear of leaving land.
That is simply false. If it were true, economic exchanges would never occur.
In a zero sum game, the total cost of the participants gains and losses in utility--for one perhaps increasing and the other decreasing--add up to zero. One side may win, the other may lose, but both sides cannot win.
Let's say you've developed hydrophobia want to sell your used canoe on Craigslist. Let's say that I want to buy a canoe to go camping on an island in the middle of a lake. Your asking price is $300 and I think it's a good deal. I give you the $300; you give me the canoe. You're looking at this and saying, "Well, I'm less one canoe but I've gained $300 and he's less $300 but he's gained a canoe. So, it's break even." Or worse, you might be thinking, "Ha, that sucker. I had no use for that canoe so it was clearly worthless. But I can now by a sweet raincoat with my $300."
What you're missing here is a very basic economic reality: value is subjectively determined. Because of your hydrophobia, the canoe has no utility for you. You'd rather spend $300 on rain coats. So the exchange is a gain in utility for you. I, on the other hand, cannot make a paper boat out of three Benjamins and expect to get to my campsite. Money's use is that it can be exchange for something useful. I decide that I'll get more utility out of the canoe than $300 in the bank, so I buy it from you and from my perspective I've also gained in utility. It is, in other words, a win-win.
Where there is no force, compulsion, coercion, rent-seeking, or other machinations involved, free economic exchanges can always be win-win scenarios. People simply wouldn't trade, buy, or sell if they didn't value what they gained more than what they gave away.
Your friend's name wasn't Augustus Fink-Nottle perchance?
But herpes and herpetology are etymologically related. The Greek verb herpyzo means to creep or crawl (apologies for using Latin letters, I've tried Greek on /. before and it isn't pretty). So a herpeton is a creeping thing: i.e. snakes, lizards, salamanders, etc. Thus we end up with the study of creeping things or herpetology.
Herpes became the Greek word for shingles (herpes zoster in the medical books) because it was a creeping (or lurking) disease. It would seem to be gone but would lurk about only to resurface again. It was only natural, therefore, to apply it to what we commonly call herpes now (herpes simplex).