Personally, I think that if more people watched the news, we'd all be a little better off. Part of the reason why some news shows tend to be a little 'over hyped' (if you will) is that they need to pull in viewers, while (at least often) trying to maintain the 'hard news' aspects of the show.
If people choose to remain ignorant, there's not much that can be done to educate them. The "news" has always presented a much darker picture of the world at large than most people encounter in their everyday lives. Take crime for example. If one watches the news, one would assume that murderers rapists, and thieves are running rampant in the streets. The vast majority of people have never been the victims of a violent crime, yet they live in constant fear of it.
Another thing, your post seems to me to be the manifesto of an aspiring Dictator; uninformed people are easier to control.
And that would be different from now in what way? Newsweek recently conducted a poll that shows that 42% of people still believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. How is this representative of an informed people?
Bush is largely a dictator now anyway in that he has shown utter disregard for the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the Freedom of Information Act, and has close ties to private companies who control the voting machines in many important precincts in the upcoming election. The people of this country don't seem to mind too much as long as they can watch Survivor.
I think I'd rather live in a TV-controlled society than a church-controlled one.
And how exactly is any church going to control the world? If people weren't subject to all the hysteria they see on the news, people would be much more content in their day-to-day lives. I'd much rather live in a society of content, uninformed people than hysterical, uninformed people.
I'm curious how many people who make TV you've actually met. None of the ones I know seem terribly concerned about controlling anyone
We're not talking mind-control, we're talking about conditioning over years and years of seeing the aberrant behaviors of make-believe people. When you see beautiful people on every channel all the time, you begin to want to look like that too. When you see people driving the best cars and having the best things, you want those thing too. When you see people engaging in self-destructive behaviors that have no consequences in T.V. land, you think you can do those things too.
Not to mention that politicians use the mass media to jusitfy their existance. If people aren't aware of all the bad people out there waiting to kill them, how can politicians justify power grabs at the expense of the people's freedom. If people aren't aware of the latest "crisis", how can politicians hope to extract more money from the tax serfs to pay for their pet project?
T.V. is an insidious disease that poisons your mind over time. Just say no!
All hell would break loose as MegaCorp Inc. takes over the world like some bad 80's SF movie.
Garbage. MegaCorps exist because of government intervention. If corporations weren't allowed to hide behind limited liability clauses and taxpayer subsidies, they wouldn't have the power they currently do. If the people who run a corporation were held personally resonsible for fraud or theft they perpetrate, fraud and theft would virtually disappear. Corporations would be very different entities in a truly libertarian world.
How about we just not mandate that the signals go all digital?
How about we don't? How about we allow the free market to determine what customers want instead of forcing providers to deliver content in the format that the government deems acceptable?
Having said that, I agree with you that this is an absurd abuse of taxpayer funds. It's incredible that Congressmen are now advocating subsidizing T.V. viewing for the "needy". Actually, it's not so surprising. We can't have the public turn away from the most effective propaganda tool ever conceived, can we? How would politicians justify their existance without poisoning the minds of the public?
So Bush's "seven minutes" is no more odd to me than the people who watched the TV in silence for hours.
So you don't think it's strange that the Secret Service didn't remove the President from a known location - the school trip was on his public itinerary from weeks ahead of time, and anyone who wanted to know where he would be that day could find out - when planes started crashing into buildings on 9/11 and no one knew exactly how many planes had been hijacked?
Unfortunately, people are more likely to vote in a presidential election than they are for their city council or their school board. They get caught up in the hype of a presidential race and can't help themselves.
Politicians rarely keep their campaign promises, either from a lack of commitment to them, because they need to repay the special interests who put them in office, or because they are unable to push their agenda through when they attain power. I've seen very few exceptions to this.
The point is that people simply accept it as a fact of life that someone should rule over them instead of them being able to live free from oppression. If everyone stayed home on election day, the power that Washingtom holds over their lives would wither away: sort of a bloodless revolution. The governement needs people to get out and vote to legitimize its existance.
I don't begrudge you your right to vote. If you think it's important, go ahead and vote.
What I do begrudge is the endless arguments - many in this very story - about how people who don't vote don't have any right to complain, one which you implied yourself. Those of us who feel that voting for a tyrant - which is what the office of the President has largely become - is immoral should not have to justify that fact to you or anyone else.
No, but you do get the right to complain when an elected official mucks something up.
Why, because you say he has the right? Luckily for all of us, the First Amendment says everyone gets that right - even if they don't vote.
People who don't vote but are able to, should stop complaining when they didn't have the 20 minutes to go down and vote one day.
Maybe they simply understand better than you do that voting is largely a waste of time. But go ahead and vote! Feel good about doing you civic duty! Wear the "I Voted Today" sticker with pride!
Voting for president is a completely irrelevant exercise. You get 1/1,000,000 of the say about who gets to take away your rights for the next four years. Congratulations!
Seriously, if your guy wins and blows up the planet, you were partially responsible for putting him in power. That argument carries far more weight than saying I don't have any right to complain about which Skull-N-Bonezer gets to put his finger on the button if I didn't pick one of them.
Ridiculous. If I don't vote for a candidate, I'm not responsible for the shenanigans he commits while in office. If you voted for him, then you are.
By arguing that I don't have a right to complain about the decisions made by someone for whom I didn't vote, you are assuming that the government has some a priori power to rule over me, and my dissenting opinion to that position is wrong. No thanks. I'll side with Thoreau in saying that "the government which governs best, governs not at all."
And your statement that 500 votes put W in power is completely false. A Supreme Court decision put W in power. That simply shows the irrelevance of your vote. If the election is a blowout, your vote is irrelevant. If the election is close, the decision is taken out of the hands of the electorate. Wow! Ain't democracy great?!?
Democracy is simply another form of socialism. The majority gets to decide what is best for everyone else. To quote Thoreau again: "... any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." I don't need the mob to make decisions for me.
This simply illustrates the lunacy of accepting pieces of paper as money just because the government says they're money. If this guy can create bills that look like government notes and are accepted by everyone the same as government notes, why is his "money" of any less value than the government's "money"?
You can argue that counterfeit money devalues a currency due to the fact that more money is introduced into the marketplace which drives down the value of that currency, but the government does this all the time whenever they fire up the printing presses - and to a much more significant degree than any counterfeiter.
Depends on what you mean by action. I could claim that trees act. From an objective viewpoint men and trees both just minimize their free energy, an action by a tree is not fundamentally different from an action by a man. Therefore anything you derive from this action axiom must also hold for trees.
I don't have time to get into a long discussion about Human Action. The work is simply too dense and voluminous to discuss on a bulletin board. However, Mises addresses almost all your arguments. In particular, what distinguishes human action from non-human action is the ability of man to override his impulses and logically deduce what is more important to him than something else.
From Human Action:
But is different with man. Man is not a being who cannot help yielding to the impulse that most urgently asks for satisfaction. Man is a being capable of subduing his instincts, emotions, and impulses; he can rationalize his behavior. He renounces the satisfaction of a burning impulse in order to satisfy other desires. He is not a puppet of his appetites. A man does not ravish every female that stirs his senses; he does not devour every piece of food that entices him; he does not knock down every fellow he would like to kill. He arranges [p. 17] his wishes and desires into a scale, he chooses; in short, he acts. What distinguishes man from beasts is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberatively. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires, that has the power to suppress instinctive desires and impulses.
Go here for more detail on the subject. Be warned, however, Human Action will change your life!
Sooner or later, someone will make a choice that relieves you of a choice-- robbery, rape, murder, etc.
Exactly as happens in the current authoritarian government in which we live. So what's the difference? When the police actually do make an arrest, it's always after the crime has been committed. No crime has been prevented.
My cousin is a police officer. Just last week I was dicsussing a case with him where a police officer named Dan Lovelace was acquitted of fatally shooting a woman who passed a forged prescription for some painkillers here in Arizona. By all accounts, that officer should have been sentenced to twenty years in prison, but the jury was afraid to convict a cop. My cousin's response was, and I quote: "She didn't deserve to die, I guess, but I'll never second-guess a cop for an on-duty shooting." This sentence tells you all you need to know about cops; they are more concerned with protecting their fraternity than making sure justice is done. How the hell is shooting a woman passing a bad prescription justified? Cops don't make us safer.
Anarcho-capitalists (libertarian anarchists) still believe in rule of law, mainly to protect property. They just don't believe the State has any business in enforcing the law.
Relax, doesn't mean you're going to throw a brick through a Starbucks windows. Real anarchists don't do such destructive acts.
Some anarchists do, some don't.
Libertarian anarchists, or anarcho-capitalists, most certainly do not. Above all, rights are about the protection of private property. As such, there is still a rule of law, but it is not in the hands of the State. Each person or entity is responsible for providing for his own protection or defense of property, which is one reason why libertarians are strong advocates of the 2nd Amendment.
No one denies that most Iraqis are happy Saddam is gone, but how many dead U.S. soldiers are worth the cost?
The vast majority of Iraqis now see us as occupiers, not liberators. The majority want us out right now, but we're not going anywhere. To do so would defeat our real purposes there: to establish American and Israeli hegemony over the Middle East, and to attempt to provide a stabilizing influence to insure a steady supply of affordable oil.
No one mentioned anything about fighting for Iraqi democracy until every other excuse for this war had been proven to be an utter fallacy. Now that we have demonstrated we're not really interested in an Iraq that isn't under our thumb, this excuse is living on borrowed time as well. Wonder what they'll come up with next?
Sorry, but I don't buy the argument that the military is protecting my liberties by killing people in a foreign country. If my freedom is truly in danger from some foreign threat, I'll grab a gun and defend myself or die trying, thank you very much!
This fallacy that you are serving your country by joining the military needs to stop right now. You're not serving your country; you're serving politicians who use you as their pawn to advance their agendas.
Dedicated means whatever you and your employer agree upon. If your employer makes certain demands of you that you are unwilling to abide by, then walk. Someone else probably will agree to those same demands, though.
A job is an agreement between employer and employee. The employer agrees to pay you a certain amount in return for certain demands. If you are unwilling to do the work for a given amount of pay, find another job.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed the "not" in your post. Looks like we're on exactly the same page here.
Personally, I think that if more people watched the news, we'd all be a little better off. Part of the reason why some news shows tend to be a little 'over hyped' (if you will) is that they need to pull in viewers, while (at least often) trying to maintain the 'hard news' aspects of the show.
If people choose to remain ignorant, there's not much that can be done to educate them. The "news" has always presented a much darker picture of the world at large than most people encounter in their everyday lives. Take crime for example. If one watches the news, one would assume that murderers rapists, and thieves are running rampant in the streets. The vast majority of people have never been the victims of a violent crime, yet they live in constant fear of it.
Another thing, your post seems to me to be the manifesto of an aspiring Dictator; uninformed people are easier to control.
And that would be different from now in what way? Newsweek recently conducted a poll that shows that 42% of people still believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. How is this representative of an informed people?
Bush is largely a dictator now anyway in that he has shown utter disregard for the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the Freedom of Information Act, and has close ties to private companies who control the voting machines in many important precincts in the upcoming election. The people of this country don't seem to mind too much as long as they can watch Survivor.
I think I'd rather live in a TV-controlled society than a church-controlled one.
And how exactly is any church going to control the world? If people weren't subject to all the hysteria they see on the news, people would be much more content in their day-to-day lives. I'd much rather live in a society of content, uninformed people than hysterical, uninformed people.
I'm curious how many people who make TV you've actually met. None of the ones I know seem terribly concerned about controlling anyone
We're not talking mind-control, we're talking about conditioning over years and years of seeing the aberrant behaviors of make-believe people. When you see beautiful people on every channel all the time, you begin to want to look like that too. When you see people driving the best cars and having the best things, you want those thing too. When you see people engaging in self-destructive behaviors that have no consequences in T.V. land, you think you can do those things too.
Not to mention that politicians use the mass media to jusitfy their existance. If people aren't aware of all the bad people out there waiting to kill them, how can politicians justify power grabs at the expense of the people's freedom. If people aren't aware of the latest "crisis", how can politicians hope to extract more money from the tax serfs to pay for their pet project?
T.V. is an insidious disease that poisons your mind over time. Just say no!
I see this similar to the transition from leaded to unleaded gas.
Right, because analog TV will give your kids brain damage just like lead will.
Oh wait..
All hell would break loose as MegaCorp Inc. takes over the world like some bad 80's SF movie.
Garbage. MegaCorps exist because of government intervention. If corporations weren't allowed to hide behind limited liability clauses and taxpayer subsidies, they wouldn't have the power they currently do. If the people who run a corporation were held personally resonsible for fraud or theft they perpetrate, fraud and theft would virtually disappear. Corporations would be very different entities in a truly libertarian world.
How about we just not mandate that the signals go all digital?
How about we don't? How about we allow the free market to determine what customers want instead of forcing providers to deliver content in the format that the government deems acceptable?
Having said that, I agree with you that this is an absurd abuse of taxpayer funds. It's incredible that Congressmen are now advocating subsidizing T.V. viewing for the "needy". Actually, it's not so surprising. We can't have the public turn away from the most effective propaganda tool ever conceived, can we? How would politicians justify their existance without poisoning the minds of the public?
To keep abreast of liberty, I read the following:
Mises Blog
Lew Rockwell's Blog
To find out what the enemies of liberty are up to, I also read:
Daily Kos
Atrios
InstaPundit
Andrew Sullivan
Read this book and decide for yourself.
So Bush's "seven minutes" is no more odd to me than the people who watched the TV in silence for hours.
So you don't think it's strange that the Secret Service didn't remove the President from a known location - the school trip was on his public itinerary from weeks ahead of time, and anyone who wanted to know where he would be that day could find out - when planes started crashing into buildings on 9/11 and no one knew exactly how many planes had been hijacked?
I think you need to rethink your position.
Unfortunately, people are more likely to vote in a presidential election than they are for their city council or their school board. They get caught up in the hype of a presidential race and can't help themselves.
Politicians rarely keep their campaign promises, either from a lack of commitment to them, because they need to repay the special interests who put them in office, or because they are unable to push their agenda through when they attain power. I've seen very few exceptions to this.
The point is that people simply accept it as a fact of life that someone should rule over them instead of them being able to live free from oppression. If everyone stayed home on election day, the power that Washingtom holds over their lives would wither away: sort of a bloodless revolution. The governement needs people to get out and vote to legitimize its existance.
I don't begrudge you your right to vote. If you think it's important, go ahead and vote.
What I do begrudge is the endless arguments - many in this very story - about how people who don't vote don't have any right to complain, one which you implied yourself. Those of us who feel that voting for a tyrant - which is what the office of the President has largely become - is immoral should not have to justify that fact to you or anyone else.
(A) How do you recall the President? (B) What makes you think the next guy will be any different?
No, but you do get the right to complain when an elected official mucks something up.
Why, because you say he has the right? Luckily for all of us, the First Amendment says everyone gets that right - even if they don't vote.
People who don't vote but are able to, should stop complaining when they didn't have the 20 minutes to go down and vote one day.
Maybe they simply understand better than you do that voting is largely a waste of time. But go ahead and vote! Feel good about doing you civic duty! Wear the "I Voted Today" sticker with pride!
Voting for president is a completely irrelevant exercise. You get 1/1,000,000 of the say about who gets to take away your rights for the next four years. Congratulations!
Seriously, if your guy wins and blows up the planet, you were partially responsible for putting him in power. That argument carries far more weight than saying I don't have any right to complain about which Skull-N-Bonezer gets to put his finger on the button if I didn't pick one of them.
If 15% of the presidential vote went to people outside the two parties, they'd sit up and take notice.
And if 95% of the electorate stayed home on election day, it would send an even stronger message.
What good is being an informed voter if the winner of an election is under no obligation to do anything he said he would do when he was campaigning?
Ridiculous. If I don't vote for a candidate, I'm not responsible for the shenanigans he commits while in office. If you voted for him, then you are.
By arguing that I don't have a right to complain about the decisions made by someone for whom I didn't vote, you are assuming that the government has some a priori power to rule over me, and my dissenting opinion to that position is wrong. No thanks. I'll side with Thoreau in saying that "the government which governs best, governs not at all."
And your statement that 500 votes put W in power is completely false. A Supreme Court decision put W in power. That simply shows the irrelevance of your vote. If the election is a blowout, your vote is irrelevant. If the election is close, the decision is taken out of the hands of the electorate. Wow! Ain't democracy great?!?
Democracy is simply another form of socialism. The majority gets to decide what is best for everyone else. To quote Thoreau again: "... any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already." I don't need the mob to make decisions for me.
This simply illustrates the lunacy of accepting pieces of paper as money just because the government says they're money. If this guy can create bills that look like government notes and are accepted by everyone the same as government notes, why is his "money" of any less value than the government's "money"?
You can argue that counterfeit money devalues a currency due to the fact that more money is introduced into the marketplace which drives down the value of that currency, but the government does this all the time whenever they fire up the printing presses - and to a much more significant degree than any counterfeiter.
Depends on what you mean by action. I could claim that trees act. From an objective viewpoint men and trees both just minimize their free energy, an action by a tree is not fundamentally different from an action by a man. Therefore anything you derive from this action axiom must also hold for trees.
I don't have time to get into a long discussion about Human Action. The work is simply too dense and voluminous to discuss on a bulletin board. However, Mises addresses almost all your arguments. In particular, what distinguishes human action from non-human action is the ability of man to override his impulses and logically deduce what is more important to him than something else.
From Human Action:
But is different with man. Man is not a being who cannot help yielding to the impulse that most urgently asks for satisfaction. Man is a being capable of subduing his instincts, emotions, and impulses; he can rationalize his behavior. He renounces the satisfaction of a burning impulse in order to satisfy other desires. He is not a puppet of his appetites. A man does not ravish every female that stirs his senses; he does not devour every piece of food that entices him; he does not knock down every fellow he would like to kill. He arranges [p. 17] his wishes and desires into a scale, he chooses; in short, he acts. What distinguishes man from beasts is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberatively. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires, that has the power to suppress instinctive desires and impulses.
Go here for more detail on the subject. Be warned, however, Human Action will change your life!
Sooner or later, someone will make a choice that relieves you of a choice-- robbery, rape, murder, etc.
Exactly as happens in the current authoritarian government in which we live. So what's the difference? When the police actually do make an arrest, it's always after the crime has been committed. No crime has been prevented.
My cousin is a police officer. Just last week I was dicsussing a case with him where a police officer named Dan Lovelace was acquitted of fatally shooting a woman who passed a forged prescription for some painkillers here in Arizona. By all accounts, that officer should have been sentenced to twenty years in prison, but the jury was afraid to convict a cop. My cousin's response was, and I quote: "She didn't deserve to die, I guess, but I'll never second-guess a cop for an on-duty shooting." This sentence tells you all you need to know about cops; they are more concerned with protecting their fraternity than making sure justice is done. How the hell is shooting a woman passing a bad prescription justified? Cops don't make us safer.
Anarcho-capitalists (libertarian anarchists) still believe in rule of law, mainly to protect property. They just don't believe the State has any business in enforcing the law.
Relax, doesn't mean you're going to throw a brick through a Starbucks windows. Real anarchists don't do such destructive acts.
Some anarchists do, some don't.
Libertarian anarchists, or anarcho-capitalists, most certainly do not. Above all, rights are about the protection of private property. As such, there is still a rule of law, but it is not in the hands of the State. Each person or entity is responsible for providing for his own protection or defense of property, which is one reason why libertarians are strong advocates of the 2nd Amendment.
The best introduction to anarcho-capitalism is Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.
No one denies that most Iraqis are happy Saddam is gone, but how many dead U.S. soldiers are worth the cost?
The vast majority of Iraqis now see us as occupiers, not liberators. The majority want us out right now, but we're not going anywhere. To do so would defeat our real purposes there: to establish American and Israeli hegemony over the Middle East, and to attempt to provide a stabilizing influence to insure a steady supply of affordable oil.
No one mentioned anything about fighting for Iraqi democracy until every other excuse for this war had been proven to be an utter fallacy. Now that we have demonstrated we're not really interested in an Iraq that isn't under our thumb, this excuse is living on borrowed time as well. Wonder what they'll come up with next?
Sorry, but I don't buy the argument that the military is protecting my liberties by killing people in a foreign country. If my freedom is truly in danger from some foreign threat, I'll grab a gun and defend myself or die trying, thank you very much!
This fallacy that you are serving your country by joining the military needs to stop right now. You're not serving your country; you're serving politicians who use you as their pawn to advance their agendas.
Dedicated means whatever you and your employer agree upon. If your employer makes certain demands of you that you are unwilling to abide by, then walk. Someone else probably will agree to those same demands, though.
A job is an agreement between employer and employee. The employer agrees to pay you a certain amount in return for certain demands. If you are unwilling to do the work for a given amount of pay, find another job.
To get a good espresso, you need an excellent burr grinder. Do you have any suggestions?
What about those that give up both freedom and security?
They tend to vote Republican.