For what it's worth, I'm very sympathetic to your position - I don't think people should ever be forced to live against their wishes, and I think it's unfortunate that medical ethics and law that's attached to it has come to another conclusion on that topic.
Part of living in society means that we don't get to choose all the nuances of our surroundings, and that can sometimes be really frustrating, depending on the topic.
I indeed would, as I hold that it's the duty of people who have more than enough to get by to help those who do not. This burden/privilege is on all of society.
Force is not the only harm worth considering in society - starvation, bankruptcy, financial ruin, these are all real too, and ruin lives in a much more concrete way than someone being asked to pay taxes. There's a world of difference between random brutality and someone saying "give your share to help people".
I might just as well frame this by talking about preventing people from starving on the street, and say that if your moral principles don't prevent that, then you're no better than the worst of aristocrats. I could put myself on the same kind of pedistal of "high moral ground" as he does, but it's not a helpful way to understand the disagreement.
I don't think, when faced between the idea of property being inviolate and taking care of those whose basic needs are not being reasonably met, that calling people who choose the latter over the former thugs is particularly reasonable, especially when any government or society that has ever existed in practice has engaged in what you object to - at least to me it seems a bit like those who toss about the term "fascist" in such a loose way that no government on earth has ever not been fascist by their terms.
Deciding someone else is wrong is part of these discussions - you think I'm wrong, I think you're wrong, and we both are proposing the other live in the system we describe. To you, I'm imposing on you by telling you to bear the costs of society taking care of all its members, and to me, you're imposing on me by saying I must accept that the benefits from such a system will not be had. There is no moral high road here, just a disagreement on how things are managed and whether peoples fiscal autonomy is more important than public health (plus a completely independent question over whether socialised health care is better or worse for society, and for what parts of society).
Government is based on taxes, and hopefully it provides good value to its society for the taxes it collects. Where it fails, I want it to do better. It cannot function without a source of funds though, and that usually means taxes. If taxes to you are theft, then I am advocating that form of theft in order to benefit society. I don't think of it as theft, but if you do, then the phrasing is an accurate description for what I think can lead to good things for society from our government.
Not everyone would choose as you do, nor use the terms in those ways. Others might say "you can be the crazy old coot out in the woods who's afraid of society, but we recognise that humanity is a family - we take care of each other and recognise that we're interdependent".
Most Canadians and Europeans, for what it's worth, both highly value their nationalised health care systems and honour those who founded them.
The decision makes sense, but to the extent that MySQL depends on geek mindshare, it will suffer. MySQL's interests and those of the open source community may not be precisely the same, and the community has no assurances that whatever closeness there is between our interests and those of MySQL AB will remain.
You will be dazzled and wowed by the suggestion that, get this, submitters should learn style (and how!) and those who approve stories should edit them for style! Get this! Yeah!
Customer-friendliness and vendor-friendliness are not the same thing. It may be fine to complain about this (details about "why?" and "what effects will it have" are open questions), but saying that it violates their stated goal to be customer-friendly is, at least, underjustified.
In my framework, the artificial scarcity, "stock software", is artificially scarce. An IP-rule-based-economy ignores the marginal cost of distribution being zero and tries to keep there being a market for stock software that resembles physical objects, which is unnecessary and which the open source movement aims to undermine. At the very least, when the distribution/unit production cost is zero, it makes sense to consider it a highly nontraditional "market", perhaps having development costs supported by public grants or off of margins from the market that I do think will always exist on some level (the consulting/customising market). If the open source movement can continue after the traditional software market collapses, that would be great too.
The "software-in-a-box" market is based on artificial scarcity, and we don't need it. We will probably always need folk like sysadmins (which companies tend to hire directly) and consultants (sometimes direct, sometimes using big companies like IBM) to fine-tune things to our needs, but the traditional software company will hopefully die within the next 20 years.
Of course, there are many ways to conceptualise these markets, and the difference between our conceptualisations is where the difference sits.
So long as they're not making it proprietary, what's the problem? We can both destroy markets and help the world by opening our source, and that's pretty awesome. If someone happens to make some money (maybe consulting, whatever), so be it.
I don't think it's likely that many people, rare intellectuals aside, will be able to grasp the entire context law is to be interpreted in - just like with the sciences, it's easy for a layperson to think they understand something, but often if they were to "confront" a professor they'd find their understanding is broken. This would not always happen, but I've sometimes seen yahoo philosopher types go up to psychology professors and try to say something definite... sometimes it's funny to watch even as we cringe inside.
If this becomes more common, I especially worry about formalist fetishists who don't understand the "reasonable person standard" and other necessarily fuzzy (from a math point of view) concepts that are essential to how law works. I might point at a much younger, naïve, libertarian (but I repeat myself, haha) version of myself who once dreamed of law being administered by machines, and thinking that if it could be made sufficiently formal we'd have real justice. I now shudder to imaginee what a system that would have been.
That would be interesting, although there may be a cost - just as Wikipedia is presumably injuring traditional encyclopedia efforts, such a summary "by the masses" may injure LN and Westlaw - not that these companies are good in themselves, but the possibility of unqualified opinion and wikiculture impacting law may be an unpleasant risk. LN and Westlaw have a huge impact on the practice of law today (even as they are largely invisible to those outside the field). Wiki technology is great, and given an appropriate cultural setting and controls it can produce wonderful results (MediaWiki, for example, is widely deployed in various businesses as a tool for knowledge retention/content creation). If there were a way to get qualified people to lead content creation as you suggest and produce quality at least as high as LN or Westlaw, that would be positive, but given that it would be open, anything created (good or bad) would likely kill the commercial industry when it got big enough. If the same cultural struggles present on Wikipedia (particularly the anti-elitism) were to take place on what eventually is to be the primary source of legal interpretation (and fact) for most law in the United States, the US legal system will have a time of troubles. If it were to do better than Wikipedia (and LN and Westlaw) to enough of an extent, it would be fantastic.
Probably never Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw are mainly used for the additional value they provide beyond the plain content of each case. Until and unless he determines a way to provide something similar and duplicate the effort of all the people working for LN and Westlaw that do that work, there's not a lot of real competition.
Your answers assume privacy, as the examples you use by analogy assume property. Assuming privacy is what I'm calling into question - I might as easily take the counterpart position and say "If you are complaining that other people don't necessarily respect your notions of privacy, then I say you would do yourself a favour by losing this entitlement mentality. You are not entitled to privacy that requires a special respect from me any more than you're entitled to steal my money or..." and so on. Same argument. Either you accept privacy or you don't. We can describe either the with-privacy or the without-privacy option in a world-outlook as impinging on those who hold the other outlook. Perspectives like these go into our formulation of what we owe to each other - phrases like "I will not voluntarily give you something that I do not owe to you" are meaningless outside a particular formulation of these obligations, just like saying "I believe in justice" without talking about which conception of justice and what set of nuances apply.
One way or another, there will be a legal regime and societal expectations pointing one way or the other, and people will be living in a system that doesn't suit their tastes. If we take the protect-privacy route, antiprivacy folk are forced to alter their behaviour to accept a notion foreign to them, and if the take the antiprivacy route, private people routinely feel violated. If going one way or the other is arrogant, there is no way to avoid being cast as arrogant. I don't have anything against privacy to the extent that it makes no demands on me to respect it - if someone doesn't want to tell me something, I won't make them talk, but if they ask me to close my eyes, or if they want legal protections beyond those that flow smoothly from those protecting land and physical property, we're back to that same struggle of concepts that defines politics. They may have a consistent view, but so do I, and just as openness might not be their thing, accepting privacy (beyond those inherent in limited property rights) isn't mine. We could talk of respect, but if I respect that they want privacy and they respect that I don't want obligations to protect their notions, where does that leave us?
I'm thinking primarily of the strong privacy rights in France and Germany, actually. The right to be excluded from databases, prohibitions of many kinds of data collection, and (both in Europe and the US) restrictions on personally identifiable data... I believe the benefits to stem from greater autonomy as well as various unseen benefits coming from a less constrained flow/availability of information (although I am uninterested in benefits to the public sector).
I have largely similar views to you, FWIW, on the role of government - to enact/enforce the will of the people (although I think an idealised will of the people - a notion of the "public good", is perhaps better than the actual will).
With regards to the "my space" thing - I feel that existing property protections (e.g. the right to bar photographers from one's home, limited ability to set policy on one's property, etc) and possibly contract law (although I'd like to see contract law be accepted by the public as being more alterable when the public good is at stake, perhaps a bit further yet than Professor Llewellyn in the American Legal system) are adequate to the task of providing the minimal conception of privacy that I'd like - if someone snuck into my place and setup webcams to watch me do things, we might consider that treyf, but not because of privacy but rather the unauthorised entry and violation of policy.
In general, yes, I think society should be conducted largely in the open (especially businesses), so people can readily compare the public good to what actually happens, so less misunderstanding would (ideally) happen, and to generally provide more material for people to consider the whole of society.
I actually don't misunderstand you, as I've had conversations with private folk before - I do use terms based on my own conceptions, of course, but I've spoken with people who share your perspective in the past. I'm glad to see you laying out the perspective in a clear manner here though - it's well-phrased. I suspect that your perspective does differ from the original poster's.
I am, as you note, on the "other side", and I personally hope to see privacy rights beyond that which flows naturally from a limited form of "this is my space" (not privacy as such but fills some of the same ends) abolished, but it's always nice to see various perspectives conveyed clearly.
I believe the original poster was asking how to convince his associates to become very private people. I'm suggesting that there are many of us who are pleased not to be private people in the way he's envisioning.
It's interesting, btw, when you have circles of friends who include some private folk and some exhibitionist folk - I've occasionally run into issues with my blog wrt mentioning the private folk, as for me events I attend and everyone there are part of my life and possibly worth mentioning, while for them it's not fun to be named as being somewhere. The privacy folk tend to be proprietary with the information and regard it as property (as your "yours" language suggests), while for many of the rest of us, information cannot be owned and independent of our easing its flow we don't believe rights can be asserted regarding other people's use of it.
Being a unix geek who doesn't watch TV, I do have some of the best technology out there to keep advertisements and spam out (from firefox extensions to sophisticated mail filters), and cellphone laws protect me from a lot of the marketing by that venue. I feel bad for those who don't have such measures though...
Sometimes it's not even "for the sake of convenience" - many of us, especially prolific bloggers, enjoy sharing our ideas, identity, and intimate details of our lives as a form of self-expression. Not only are we not trying to obscure information, we're broadcasting things to the world that would cause previous generations to blush, and are eager to continue to push those boundaries. The type of strong privacy some people advocate is an alien concept to us.
Knowing where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing, what I think about that, etc. is something that I don't mind the general public knowing most of the time. Being contactable for all that time via IM/phone/whatever is generally kosher too (although of course I'd rather not be contacted by marketers for any of this - would like advertisements and marketing banned).
I realise that not everyone is part of this new "open subculture", and that the deep privacy advocates certainly exist in fair numbers, but I'm not alone.
Oh I suddenly have seen the light thanks to your stylishly rude message, and realise that I indeed have no clue what I'm talking about. Thanks for insulting me. Otherwise, we might've had a conversation and I wouldn't have seen how awfully wrong I was. Perhaps Ron Paul should hire you to write his television adverts - it could just say something like "Hey jerk! You suck. This message brought to you by Ron Paul for President". I'm sure it'll be as effective as your note here, by that I mean absolutely amazing!
There are many services that are administered by individual states that are nontheless subject to federal legislation (and/or threats to withdraw funding for various institutions if they don't go with what various federal bodies want). Some of these fall under interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, some use other legal justifications.
As I understand, while states do have a lot of regulatory discretion for how marriage is defined/conducted/etc, they are obligated to recognise existing marriages performed by other states, whether those would be underage, homosexual, or otherwise not permitted in their state.
On marriage, I recall him saying in the past that he saw it as an issue for states rather than the federal government. If he now sees it as a religious matter, that's not as objectionable to me (provided that the civil effects of marriage are available to couples of various composition). I would prefer to consider it a "cultural" matter than a religious one - I have plenty of atheist friends who are married...
The DoE forced them to push for it being taught alongside rather than as a replacement for proper biology, as it is required to teach proper biology. The DoE may have eventually acted if people had not been voted out of office first. Likewise, the other historical matters I mentioned are required to be taught by the federal government - that standardised curriculum ensures there are a lot of eyes across the entire nation on abuses against science and history.
On Hillary versus BushJr, I dislike Hillary (largely because I believe her not to be liberal enough and because I think she isn't sufficiently devoted to reform of the political system), but I trust her more than BushJr on matters of civil liberty (perhaps I'd trust McCain yet more - I dislike McCain's politics but believe he has integrity)
For your hypothetical, if I thought it would be effective, I'd try to swing control in the direction of localism as a tactic while Washington is less progressive, but I wouldn't consider it to be by any means a principled "states rights" thing, just tactics. I generally prefer a very strong federal government, moderately strong city/town government, and weak states, although when it's needed to advance the ends I see as important, tactics may suggest a temporary deviation from that.
Ron Paul will never be president - amusing to see you embellishing his name as such. As for the bit about rules, when someone decides on the rules, it's not particularly interesting to me to see them following them. "The rules" have to be worthwhile, and I believe the libertarian concept of government is harmful and broken - a focus on "the rules" is more of a way for people who believe those rules to be good to give each other high-fives than a way to convince others of virtue.
Note that many of these particular issues are concerns that wide parts of the American political spectrum has - you can't claim them as being unique to Ron Paul's camp. BushJr's handling of the balance of powers has been an issue for everyone, as has wiretapping, abuse of habeus corpous, the secret prisons, etc. Very few of our presidents have so openly grabbed power. I believe most people running, from McCain to Obama, would reverse many of the particularly contentious changes in the last 8 years.
Personally, I'm not worried about pardoning non-violent drug users, especially those using marijuana (which seems more benign than alcohol, used in moderation). I'm not uncomfortable banning recreational drugs that are much harder, but such bans should be based on health and larger societal matters, not prudishness.
Perhaps he should be thinking more like a doctor - that there are problems in our system is undeniable, but that's no excuse to dismantle things. "You have a treatable but otherwise fatal disease, what type of coffin do you want?"
I understand Ron Paul's positions fairly well, because I've been arguing against people naïve enough to support him locally for quite some time. Explaining them again to me probably won't be particularly enlightening. His entire approach to problems seems to be either "shut it down" or "dodge the issue - avoid taking a possibly contentious stance by referring it back to states" - the first is incredibly harmful to society by denying it institutions it needs to be humane and civilised, the second is both a cop-out and politically regressive, by eliminating the way federal power prevents regressive states from creating societal rot. Consider, for example, gay marriage and education. On the first, Ron Paul suggests, reluctantly I understand, that states should handle marriage themselves. If this were to happen, not only would it close the door on gay marriage throughout most of the US (and create regimes where states don't recognise each other's marriages), it would also reopen the door for conservative states to ban interracial marriage, something that was illegal in times past in the US. This is a civil rights accomplishment that the nation strove for and achieved in the past that he would open the door for reveral. On DoE, conservatives have long been lobbying for various subjects, like history and biology, to be rewritten to do cultural shaping promoting conservative values, removing reference to american involvement in various historical atrocities, removing natural selection (or accompanying it with creationist bullshit - hey, teach it as sociology as in "this is what some people believe", fine, teaching it as science is ignorant and regressive), and otherwise doing cultural shaping - there are some topics, like treatment of Amerindians, Japanese in WW2, etc, that must be covered to prevent history from sounding like jingoist PR, and this is one of the roles of the DoE - local standards threaten that foundation, given the context of well-organised conservative forces intending to control education. (mind you, if liberal forces were doing the same, e.g. whitewashing Stalin's actions, I would be equally worried about that). This focus on two issues is not meant to imply that they're the only 2 issues I care about where I think RP would do great harm, of course - there are only a few policy areas where I like his stance (and those are fairly nuanced).
Politics is complex, but a lot of good has come out of federal power. No political system is perfect, and killing the system because of a few faults that everyone knew about anyway and that we've been struggling with for some time is shortsighted and destructive. I would sooner elect a theocratic Republican than Ron Paul.
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For what it's worth, I'm very sympathetic to your position - I don't think people should ever be forced to live against their wishes, and I think it's unfortunate that medical ethics and law that's attached to it has come to another conclusion on that topic.
Part of living in society means that we don't get to choose all the nuances of our surroundings, and that can sometimes be really frustrating, depending on the topic.
I indeed would, as I hold that it's the duty of people who have more than enough to get by to help those who do not. This burden/privilege is on all of society.
Force is not the only harm worth considering in society - starvation, bankruptcy, financial ruin, these are all real too, and ruin lives in a much more concrete way than someone being asked to pay taxes. There's a world of difference between random brutality and someone saying "give your share to help people".
I might just as well frame this by talking about preventing people from starving on the street, and say that if your moral principles don't prevent that, then you're no better than the worst of aristocrats. I could put myself on the same kind of pedistal of "high moral ground" as he does, but it's not a helpful way to understand the disagreement.
I don't think, when faced between the idea of property being inviolate and taking care of those whose basic needs are not being reasonably met, that calling people who choose the latter over the former thugs is particularly reasonable, especially when any government or society that has ever existed in practice has engaged in what you object to - at least to me it seems a bit like those who toss about the term "fascist" in such a loose way that no government on earth has ever not been fascist by their terms.
Deciding someone else is wrong is part of these discussions - you think I'm wrong, I think you're wrong, and we both are proposing the other live in the system we describe. To you, I'm imposing on you by telling you to bear the costs of society taking care of all its members, and to me, you're imposing on me by saying I must accept that the benefits from such a system will not be had. There is no moral high road here, just a disagreement on how things are managed and whether peoples fiscal autonomy is more important than public health (plus a completely independent question over whether socialised health care is better or worse for society, and for what parts of society).
Government is based on taxes, and hopefully it provides good value to its society for the taxes it collects. Where it fails, I want it to do better. It cannot function without a source of funds though, and that usually means taxes. If taxes to you are theft, then I am advocating that form of theft in order to benefit society. I don't think of it as theft, but if you do, then the phrasing is an accurate description for what I think can lead to good things for society from our government.
Not everyone would choose as you do, nor use the terms in those ways. Others might say "you can be the crazy old coot out in the woods who's afraid of society, but we recognise that humanity is a family - we take care of each other and recognise that we're interdependent".
Most Canadians and Europeans, for what it's worth, both highly value their nationalised health care systems and honour those who founded them.
The decision makes sense, but to the extent that MySQL depends on geek mindshare, it will suffer. MySQL's interests and those of the open source community may not be precisely the same, and the community has no assurances that whatever closeness there is between our interests and those of MySQL AB will remain.
You will be dazzled and wowed by the suggestion that, get this, submitters should learn style (and how!) and those who approve stories should edit them for style! Get this! Yeah!
Customer-friendliness and vendor-friendliness are not the same thing. It may be fine to complain about this (details about "why?" and "what effects will it have" are open questions), but saying that it violates their stated goal to be customer-friendly is, at least, underjustified.
In my framework, the artificial scarcity, "stock software", is artificially scarce. An IP-rule-based-economy ignores the marginal cost of distribution being zero and tries to keep there being a market for stock software that resembles physical objects, which is unnecessary and which the open source movement aims to undermine. At the very least, when the distribution/unit production cost is zero, it makes sense to consider it a highly nontraditional "market", perhaps having development costs supported by public grants or off of margins from the market that I do think will always exist on some level (the consulting/customising market). If the open source movement can continue after the traditional software market collapses, that would be great too.
The "software-in-a-box" market is based on artificial scarcity, and we don't need it. We will probably always need folk like sysadmins (which companies tend to hire directly) and consultants (sometimes direct, sometimes using big companies like IBM) to fine-tune things to our needs, but the traditional software company will hopefully die within the next 20 years.
Of course, there are many ways to conceptualise these markets, and the difference between our conceptualisations is where the difference sits.
So long as they're not making it proprietary, what's the problem? We can both destroy markets and help the world by opening our source, and that's pretty awesome. If someone happens to make some money (maybe consulting, whatever), so be it.
I don't think it's likely that many people, rare intellectuals aside, will be able to grasp the entire context law is to be interpreted in - just like with the sciences, it's easy for a layperson to think they understand something, but often if they were to "confront" a professor they'd find their understanding is broken. This would not always happen, but I've sometimes seen yahoo philosopher types go up to psychology professors and try to say something definite... sometimes it's funny to watch even as we cringe inside.
If this becomes more common, I especially worry about formalist fetishists who don't understand the "reasonable person standard" and other necessarily fuzzy (from a math point of view) concepts that are essential to how law works. I might point at a much younger, naïve, libertarian (but I repeat myself, haha) version of myself who once dreamed of law being administered by machines, and thinking that if it could be made sufficiently formal we'd have real justice. I now shudder to imaginee what a system that would have been.
That would be interesting, although there may be a cost - just as Wikipedia is presumably injuring traditional encyclopedia efforts, such a summary "by the masses" may injure LN and Westlaw - not that these companies are good in themselves, but the possibility of unqualified opinion and wikiculture impacting law may be an unpleasant risk. LN and Westlaw have a huge impact on the practice of law today (even as they are largely invisible to those outside the field). Wiki technology is great, and given an appropriate cultural setting and controls it can produce wonderful results (MediaWiki, for example, is widely deployed in various businesses as a tool for knowledge retention/content creation). If there were a way to get qualified people to lead content creation as you suggest and produce quality at least as high as LN or Westlaw, that would be positive, but given that it would be open, anything created (good or bad) would likely kill the commercial industry when it got big enough. If the same cultural struggles present on Wikipedia (particularly the anti-elitism) were to take place on what eventually is to be the primary source of legal interpretation (and fact) for most law in the United States, the US legal system will have a time of troubles. If it were to do better than Wikipedia (and LN and Westlaw) to enough of an extent, it would be fantastic.
Probably never Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw are mainly used for the additional value they provide beyond the plain content of each case. Until and unless he determines a way to provide something similar and duplicate the effort of all the people working for LN and Westlaw that do that work, there's not a lot of real competition.
Your answers assume privacy, as the examples you use by analogy assume property. Assuming privacy is what I'm calling into question - I might as easily take the counterpart position and say "If you are complaining that other people don't necessarily respect your notions of privacy, then I say you would do yourself a favour by losing this entitlement mentality. You are not entitled to privacy that requires a special respect from me any more than you're entitled to steal my money or ..." and so on. Same argument. Either you accept privacy or you don't. We can describe either the with-privacy or the without-privacy option in a world-outlook as impinging on those who hold the other outlook. Perspectives like these go into our formulation of what we owe to each other - phrases like "I will not voluntarily give you something that I do not owe to you" are meaningless outside a particular formulation of these obligations, just like saying "I believe in justice" without talking about which conception of justice and what set of nuances apply.
One way or another, there will be a legal regime and societal expectations pointing one way or the other, and people will be living in a system that doesn't suit their tastes. If we take the protect-privacy route, antiprivacy folk are forced to alter their behaviour to accept a notion foreign to them, and if the take the antiprivacy route, private people routinely feel violated. If going one way or the other is arrogant, there is no way to avoid being cast as arrogant. I don't have anything against privacy to the extent that it makes no demands on me to respect it - if someone doesn't want to tell me something, I won't make them talk, but if they ask me to close my eyes, or if they want legal protections beyond those that flow smoothly from those protecting land and physical property, we're back to that same struggle of concepts that defines politics. They may have a consistent view, but so do I, and just as openness might not be their thing, accepting privacy (beyond those inherent in limited property rights) isn't mine. We could talk of respect, but if I respect that they want privacy and they respect that I don't want obligations to protect their notions, where does that leave us?
I'm thinking primarily of the strong privacy rights in France and Germany, actually. The right to be excluded from databases, prohibitions of many kinds of data collection, and (both in Europe and the US) restrictions on personally identifiable data... I believe the benefits to stem from greater autonomy as well as various unseen benefits coming from a less constrained flow /availability of information (although I am uninterested in benefits to the public sector).
I have largely similar views to you, FWIW, on the role of government - to enact/enforce the will of the people (although I think an idealised will of the people - a notion of the "public good", is perhaps better than the actual will).
With regards to the "my space" thing - I feel that existing property protections (e.g. the right to bar photographers from one's home, limited ability to set policy on one's property, etc) and possibly contract law (although I'd like to see contract law be accepted by the public as being more alterable when the public good is at stake, perhaps a bit further yet than Professor Llewellyn in the American Legal system) are adequate to the task of providing the minimal conception of privacy that I'd like - if someone snuck into my place and setup webcams to watch me do things, we might consider that treyf, but not because of privacy but rather the unauthorised entry and violation of policy.
In general, yes, I think society should be conducted largely in the open (especially businesses), so people can readily compare the public good to what actually happens, so less misunderstanding would (ideally) happen, and to generally provide more material for people to consider the whole of society.
I actually don't misunderstand you, as I've had conversations with private folk before - I do use terms based on my own conceptions, of course, but I've spoken with people who share your perspective in the past. I'm glad to see you laying out the perspective in a clear manner here though - it's well-phrased. I suspect that your perspective does differ from the original poster's.
I am, as you note, on the "other side", and I personally hope to see privacy rights beyond that which flows naturally from a limited form of "this is my space" (not privacy as such but fills some of the same ends) abolished, but it's always nice to see various perspectives conveyed clearly.
I believe the original poster was asking how to convince his associates to become very private people. I'm suggesting that there are many of us who are pleased not to be private people in the way he's envisioning.
It's interesting, btw, when you have circles of friends who include some private folk and some exhibitionist folk - I've occasionally run into issues with my blog wrt mentioning the private folk, as for me events I attend and everyone there are part of my life and possibly worth mentioning, while for them it's not fun to be named as being somewhere. The privacy folk tend to be proprietary with the information and regard it as property (as your "yours" language suggests), while for many of the rest of us, information cannot be owned and independent of our easing its flow we don't believe rights can be asserted regarding other people's use of it.
Being a unix geek who doesn't watch TV, I do have some of the best technology out there to keep advertisements and spam out (from firefox extensions to sophisticated mail filters), and cellphone laws protect me from a lot of the marketing by that venue. I feel bad for those who don't have such measures though...
Sometimes it's not even "for the sake of convenience" - many of us, especially prolific bloggers, enjoy sharing our ideas, identity, and intimate details of our lives as a form of self-expression. Not only are we not trying to obscure information, we're broadcasting things to the world that would cause previous generations to blush, and are eager to continue to push those boundaries. The type of strong privacy some people advocate is an alien concept to us.
Knowing where I am, who I'm with, what I'm doing, what I think about that, etc. is something that I don't mind the general public knowing most of the time. Being contactable for all that time via IM/phone/whatever is generally kosher too (although of course I'd rather not be contacted by marketers for any of this - would like advertisements and marketing banned).
I realise that not everyone is part of this new "open subculture", and that the deep privacy advocates certainly exist in fair numbers, but I'm not alone.
Oh I suddenly have seen the light thanks to your stylishly rude message, and realise that I indeed have no clue what I'm talking about. Thanks for insulting me. Otherwise, we might've had a conversation and I wouldn't have seen how awfully wrong I was. Perhaps Ron Paul should hire you to write his television adverts - it could just say something like "Hey jerk! You suck. This message brought to you by Ron Paul for President". I'm sure it'll be as effective as your note here, by that I mean absolutely amazing!
There are many services that are administered by individual states that are nontheless subject to federal legislation (and/or threats to withdraw funding for various institutions if they don't go with what various federal bodies want). Some of these fall under interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, some use other legal justifications.
As I understand, while states do have a lot of regulatory discretion for how marriage is defined/conducted/etc, they are obligated to recognise existing marriages performed by other states, whether those would be underage, homosexual, or otherwise not permitted in their state.
On marriage, I recall him saying in the past that he saw it as an issue for states rather than the federal government. If he now sees it as a religious matter, that's not as objectionable to me (provided that the civil effects of marriage are available to couples of various composition). I would prefer to consider it a "cultural" matter than a religious one - I have plenty of atheist friends who are married...
The DoE forced them to push for it being taught alongside rather than as a replacement for proper biology, as it is required to teach proper biology. The DoE may have eventually acted if people had not been voted out of office first. Likewise, the other historical matters I mentioned are required to be taught by the federal government - that standardised curriculum ensures there are a lot of eyes across the entire nation on abuses against science and history.
On Hillary versus BushJr, I dislike Hillary (largely because I believe her not to be liberal enough and because I think she isn't sufficiently devoted to reform of the political system), but I trust her more than BushJr on matters of civil liberty (perhaps I'd trust McCain yet more - I dislike McCain's politics but believe he has integrity)
For your hypothetical, if I thought it would be effective, I'd try to swing control in the direction of localism as a tactic while Washington is less progressive, but I wouldn't consider it to be by any means a principled "states rights" thing, just tactics. I generally prefer a very strong federal government, moderately strong city/town government, and weak states, although when it's needed to advance the ends I see as important, tactics may suggest a temporary deviation from that.
Ron Paul will never be president - amusing to see you embellishing his name as such. As for the bit about rules, when someone decides on the rules, it's not particularly interesting to me to see them following them. "The rules" have to be worthwhile, and I believe the libertarian concept of government is harmful and broken - a focus on "the rules" is more of a way for people who believe those rules to be good to give each other high-fives than a way to convince others of virtue.
Note that many of these particular issues are concerns that wide parts of the American political spectrum has - you can't claim them as being unique to
Ron Paul's camp. BushJr's handling of the balance of powers has been an issue for everyone, as has wiretapping, abuse of habeus corpous, the secret prisons, etc. Very few of our presidents have so openly grabbed power. I believe most people running, from McCain to Obama, would reverse many of the particularly contentious changes in the last 8 years.
Personally, I'm not worried about pardoning non-violent drug users, especially those using marijuana (which seems more benign than alcohol, used in moderation). I'm not uncomfortable banning recreational drugs that are much harder, but such bans should be based on health and larger societal matters, not prudishness.
Perhaps he should be thinking more like a doctor - that there are problems in our system is undeniable, but that's no excuse to dismantle things. "You have a treatable but otherwise fatal disease, what type of coffin do you want?"
I understand Ron Paul's positions fairly well, because I've been arguing against people naïve enough to support him locally for quite some time. Explaining them again to me probably won't be particularly enlightening. His entire approach to problems seems to be either "shut it down" or "dodge the issue - avoid taking a possibly contentious stance by referring it back to states" - the first is incredibly harmful to society by denying it institutions it needs to be humane and civilised, the second is both a cop-out and politically regressive, by eliminating the way federal power prevents regressive states from creating societal rot. Consider, for example, gay marriage and education. On the first, Ron Paul suggests, reluctantly I understand, that states should handle marriage themselves. If this were to happen, not only would it close the door on gay marriage throughout most of the US (and create regimes where states don't recognise each other's marriages), it would also reopen the door for conservative states to ban interracial marriage, something that was illegal in times past in the US. This is a civil rights accomplishment that the nation strove for and achieved in the past that he would open the door for reveral. On DoE, conservatives have long been lobbying for various subjects, like history and biology, to be rewritten to do cultural shaping promoting conservative values, removing reference to american involvement in various historical atrocities, removing natural selection (or accompanying it with creationist bullshit - hey, teach it as sociology as in "this is what some people believe", fine, teaching it as science is ignorant and regressive), and otherwise doing cultural shaping - there are some topics, like treatment of Amerindians, Japanese in WW2, etc, that must be covered to prevent history from sounding like jingoist PR, and this is one of the roles of the DoE - local standards threaten that foundation, given the context of well-organised conservative forces intending to control education. (mind you, if liberal forces were doing the same, e.g. whitewashing Stalin's actions, I would be equally worried about that). This focus on two issues is not meant to imply that they're the only 2 issues I care about where I think RP would do great harm, of course - there are only a few policy areas where I like his stance (and those are fairly nuanced).
Politics is complex, but a lot of good has come out of federal power. No political system is perfect, and killing the system because of a few faults that everyone knew about anyway and that we've been struggling with for some time is shortsighted and destructive. I would sooner elect a theocratic Republican than Ron Paul.