You are correct that nowadays is a lot better than 1800, but that does not mean it is by any means "good" or even the best it has been relatively speaking. Looking at the history of freedom of speech in the U.S., the high point was probably in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. This was the short era after the courts started striking down virtually all infringements upon political speech, and had just started coming around on topics like obscenity, but before they started implementing new bans on speech and moving backwards again.
In the early 1970s, the government got away with banning "child pornography," justifying the ban by saying that if we attack the supply side, it would diminish demand for such material and in turn protect children against abuse. (This "supply-side" attack, incidentally, has been proven an abject failure time and time again, most notably in the War on Drugs, but that's another topic entirely.) Banning child porn was, however, the "camel's nose under the tent" that in due time justified more and more restrictions on free speech. The same justification has since been used to ban animal abuse videos, leaked crime scene photographs, and more and more as time goes on. The justification that "banning _____ will protect the direct victim depicted in the image" has been broadened to "banning _____ will protect indirect victims who might ultimately be harmed by someone looking at this _____," and has led to things like banning simulated or drawn child porn, and (not yet in the U.S., but in the U.K.) the banning of bondage/S&M images.
And now, "in this post-9/11 era," with a couple generations of people thoroughly inculcated to the necessity of banning speech that might cause or depict harm, the government has started once again attacking political speech using this as a justification.
Whether or not it be a logical fallacy to automatically conclude that X leads us down a slippery slope to Y, the so-called slippery slope is a damned accurate depiction of reality.
"Democrats"? Implying that the Republicans are much better? It's not the Democrats who are trying to ban gays marrying, assisted suicide, evolution and sex ed being taught in schools, public funding* of stem cell research and reproductive health,...
* Not that I support public funding---for anything. But since we're talking about government bans as social engineering, it's a pertinent example.
It became a right when people forgot what the word right means.
Naturally speaking, rights are something you intrinsically have without the action of others. A right can only be taken away by the positive, proactive action of others. That is, all alone and without interference from other human beings, we automatically have freedom of speech, thought, belief, ownership, &c.. In an allegedly "free" society, it's the government's responsibility to guarantee these rights by not interfering with them. They're supposed to merely protect these rights.
Entitlements or privileges are the opposite: They're something we can only have with the positive, proactive action of others. These things include education, welfare, employment, healthcare, and anything else that some might call a "right" but that they can't have without someone providing it to them. Some people distinguish these things by calling them "positive rights" as opposed to the "negative rights" in the previous paragraph, although I think this terminology is part of the problem---it's easy enough to drop the word "positive" and now we can easily conflate the two concepts.
And that's exactly what has happened. Over the past century, we've seen more and more entitlements gradually moved into the "rights" column by people who want to lend legitimacy to the idea that these things ought to be guaranteed and provided to us by the government. After all, the government "provides" us with freedom of speech, they say, so shouldn't they "provide" us with the freedom from worry about healthcare, unemployment, and so on?
Anyway, I don't dispute the findings of the researchers, merely the morality of attacking speech.
A very salient point that a lot of people miss in disputes over scientific research like this. Just because science says X is bad, doesn't mean that a policy has to be implemented to regulate or ban X (nor the converse, that we should subsidize X when science says X is good).
To automatically jump to that conclusion is to tacitly accept the philosophies of Utilitarianism and/or Technocracy. Neither of these philosophies are what our system of government is supposed to be based on.
It's not just an American thing. More of an Anglo cultural or legal mindset thing, I've noticed: Countries like the U.K. and Australia are much farther along with this kind of nanny-statism than the U.S. is. I often keep an eye on what these two countries do because it usually shows up in the U.S. 5-10 years later.
Of course, this is far from the first example. It's just the next step down the slippery slope that true-free-speech advocates have been warning about for years.
The government can solve that problem by just banning junk foods.
The government can solve all our societal problems by just passing new laws banning things. Remember when they outlawed harmful substances like cocaine and heroin, and now there are no more drug addicts? And how when they ban guns and knives and sharp sticks, people just miraculously stopped committing violence against each other?
So, to that end, we should probably just ban anything that anyone thinks is even indirectly responsible for causing harm to others. Maybe we should just pre-emptively ban everything since anything can, in the wrong hands, certainly harm someone.
It's always bothered me that people consider universal healthcare more important than universal food, clothing, and shelter.
If the insurance cartels sold food, clothing, or shelter coverage,...people would. Food, clothing, and shelter would cost ten times what it already does, the companies you pay to deliver it would actively seek ways of denying it to you, and if you actually got it, it would take weeks or months to be delivered and it would be crap when you finally received it.
People would then be clamoring for the government to nationalize the food/clothing/shelter markets as a "solution," and the very same insurance cartels that caused all the problems would be right there to buy laws that compel people to buy food, clothing, and shelter through them. Curiously, people would celebrate this as a victory over the insurance companies.
Yes. Well, governments do. Governments shooting people leads to massive negative PR---and if they do it enough, uprisings and revolutions.
So over the past few decades, governments have developed all sorts of "non-lethal" technologies to control and oppress their subjects. Tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, the "Active Denial System," and now this. People just don't get as upset over this kind of non-lethal violence, and so governments can get away with oppressing people pretty much indefinitely.
1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.
Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.
Maybe you should do some research before you make spurious comparisons.
I do not believe seatbelts were first introduced as something only required to be used by people convicted of some sort of reckless driving offense, like these things are.
Currently, the companies that sell ignition interlock devices charge a fee for their installation, and a monthly usage fee while they're installed. DUI laws in many states require that these things be installed, at driver expense, for second/subsequent DUI convictions. And their lobbyists appear at State House hearings that would alter DUI laws in a way that would affect these companies' products' use.
Classic example of rent-seeking.
None of this applies to seatbelts. They're not third-party equipment, they don't cost hundreds of dollars, and they're not and never were only imposed upon people convicted of driving offenses.
What, the rent-seeking corporations that sell ignition interlocks aren't making enough money off of DUIs, so they need to expand their racket to every single motorist?
That if an officious bureaucrat is looking to go after these stations for some reason, he could use their similarity in prices as a starting point for an investigation into "price fixing." Months of headache and thousands of dollars of legal bills later, they'd probably be exonerated if evidence of actual collusion didn't turn up---if the stations didn't get put out of business or coerced into a "plea" deal just to make the charges go away before a trial and verdict. Of course, the way laws are so broadly written, if the owners of any of these stations ever had even a friendly chat about each other's businesses, that's probably enough for the government to say there was evidence of a "conspiracy to commit" collusion.
That's the problem with laws like this, and many other laws. There are literally so many laws on the books nowadays that most people are committing numerous "crimes" each day---acts for which, if they were to be caught, would result in years of jailtime, huge fines, the "felony" label, or the like. There is a good book on this topic, and how the government uses these laws for harassment. Basically, if they don't like you, they can find something to go after you for.
What I pointed out in the OP is just a particularly good example of these kinds of laws, because of the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" nature of it.
You are confused about what "inflation" means. If there are more goods and services to purchase, then without more money with which to purchase them, prices fall. That is deflation. By the same token, if only the right amount of new money is introduced, then prices stay the same. No inflation, no deflation, and yet more money was printed.
This is true, yet doesn't contradict what I stated. The government still prints money faster than new wealth is created. Thus there are now more dollars per "unit" of wealth, therefore prices rise.
And as I said, governments siphon off people's wealth using this trick nowadays, because they get to spend the full face value of the new money purchasing resources and services, before the new money enters the market and depresses the value of everyone else's dollars. Some call this a "hidden tax". These governments do exactly what North Korea is doing: They print money, they spend it, and everyone else suffers as a result. The only reason it's deemed illegitimate is because it's someone else printing the money, not the government itself. The harm is the same.
Of course, this is exactly what the U.S. Government itself does: Print new money that doesn't actually represent any extant wealth and then "pocket" the full face value of the new currency. But then once these new bills makes their way into the market, the rest of us get to suffer inflation as a result.
The article also advocates a move to all-digital payment/transfers by pointing out both forms are only representations of value and noting it would cripple criminal operations such as drug cartels, human traffickers, and so forth.
It would do no such thing. More and more people are switching to simple barter mechanisms, precious metals as an intermediate, things like Bitcoin, and "alternative" currencies (example). If the government ever eliminates cash, this will only make such things thrive.
But the fact that North Korea is making a few million a year off of counterfeiting serves as a wonderful pretext for forcing everyone into privacy-less currency, doesn't it?
So when is someone going to acquire a copy and leak it to Wikileaks or similar? Once it's out it's out, and this now-months-long saga of trying to justify censorship will become moot.
In Saudi Arabia, 99% of the time no one dares criticize the Prophet Muhammad... and so nothing happens. So I guess it's a free country and people have the freedom to say whatever they want, right?
...and I'll say it again: Why do these centralized, single-point-of-failure websites even exist? I thought people learned from Napster back in the early 2000s that decentralized, peer-to-peer was a lot more resilient? And as p2p networks have been disrupted by the cartels and governments, people have further moved to encrypted p2p networks and the so-called "dark web."
What you're seeing here is someone losing a battle because they went up against a modern military... using a longbow. Or maybe even just a sharpened stick. It's 2012, censorship tools and techniques have evolved significantly, as have anti-censorship countermeasures. These guys were stuck in 2001.
Hopefully all the copies of the content that library.nu and ifile.it amassed haven't been seized, and they or someone else can upload all this stuff to a safer place.:)
I don't know of a single sport where if you don't follow the rules, men with guns force you to (or haul you off to jail if you still refuse). That's what the state does to people who won't follow their regulations or pay their taxes.
And don't say people can just "opt not to play" the free market "sport" like they can with baseball or football if they don't like the rules. Unlike such sports, this free market "sport" provides things that both the "players" can't do without---their livelihood---and the "spectators" can't do without---things you probably buy like food, medicine, shelter, &c..
And if you do say people who don't like the rules ought to just opt out, then I hope you cheer every time some corporation moves their entire operation overseas and lays off a bunch of American workers: That's exactly what they're doing. They're sick of crushing regulations and confiscatory taxation, and they're voting with their feet and getting out.
There's a clear line between the hitman example and laissez-faire economics: The latter, which is what I'm talking about, permits companies to engage in any kind of consensual transaction that they wish to. If companies want to charge any price they choose, fine; if customers don't like it, they won't pay. If companies want to conspire together to lock out a third competitor, fine; that's just two entities mutually consenting to an agreement. Hiring a hitman or poisoning competitors' employees moves into the realm of committing acts of violence---using actual force and aggression (the kind of things governments are good at).
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct that nowadays is a lot better than 1800, but that does not mean it is by any means "good" or even the best it has been relatively speaking. Looking at the history of freedom of speech in the U.S., the high point was probably in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. This was the short era after the courts started striking down virtually all infringements upon political speech, and had just started coming around on topics like obscenity, but before they started implementing new bans on speech and moving backwards again.
In the early 1970s, the government got away with banning "child pornography," justifying the ban by saying that if we attack the supply side, it would diminish demand for such material and in turn protect children against abuse. (This "supply-side" attack, incidentally, has been proven an abject failure time and time again, most notably in the War on Drugs, but that's another topic entirely.) Banning child porn was, however, the "camel's nose under the tent" that in due time justified more and more restrictions on free speech. The same justification has since been used to ban animal abuse videos, leaked crime scene photographs, and more and more as time goes on. The justification that "banning _____ will protect the direct victim depicted in the image" has been broadened to "banning _____ will protect indirect victims who might ultimately be harmed by someone looking at this _____," and has led to things like banning simulated or drawn child porn, and (not yet in the U.S., but in the U.K.) the banning of bondage/S&M images.
And now, "in this post-9/11 era," with a couple generations of people thoroughly inculcated to the necessity of banning speech that might cause or depict harm, the government has started once again attacking political speech using this as a justification.
Whether or not it be a logical fallacy to automatically conclude that X leads us down a slippery slope to Y, the so-called slippery slope is a damned accurate depiction of reality.
"Democrats"? Implying that the Republicans are much better? It's not the Democrats who are trying to ban gays marrying, assisted suicide, evolution and sex ed being taught in schools, public funding* of stem cell research and reproductive health, ...
* Not that I support public funding---for anything. But since we're talking about government bans as social engineering, it's a pertinent example.
You mean try to persuade people to be responsible?
What country do you live in? :)
In other words, we're already sliding down that slippery slope at breakneck pace, so why not speed up a little?
It became a right when people forgot what the word right means.
Naturally speaking, rights are something you intrinsically have without the action of others. A right can only be taken away by the positive, proactive action of others. That is, all alone and without interference from other human beings, we automatically have freedom of speech, thought, belief, ownership, &c.. In an allegedly "free" society, it's the government's responsibility to guarantee these rights by not interfering with them. They're supposed to merely protect these rights.
Entitlements or privileges are the opposite: They're something we can only have with the positive, proactive action of others. These things include education, welfare, employment, healthcare, and anything else that some might call a "right" but that they can't have without someone providing it to them. Some people distinguish these things by calling them "positive rights" as opposed to the "negative rights" in the previous paragraph, although I think this terminology is part of the problem---it's easy enough to drop the word "positive" and now we can easily conflate the two concepts.
And that's exactly what has happened. Over the past century, we've seen more and more entitlements gradually moved into the "rights" column by people who want to lend legitimacy to the idea that these things ought to be guaranteed and provided to us by the government. After all, the government "provides" us with freedom of speech, they say, so shouldn't they "provide" us with the freedom from worry about healthcare, unemployment, and so on?
A very salient point that a lot of people miss in disputes over scientific research like this. Just because science says X is bad, doesn't mean that a policy has to be implemented to regulate or ban X (nor the converse, that we should subsidize X when science says X is good).
To automatically jump to that conclusion is to tacitly accept the philosophies of Utilitarianism and/or Technocracy. Neither of these philosophies are what our system of government is supposed to be based on.
It's not just an American thing. More of an Anglo cultural or legal mindset thing, I've noticed: Countries like the U.K. and Australia are much farther along with this kind of nanny-statism than the U.S. is. I often keep an eye on what these two countries do because it usually shows up in the U.S. 5-10 years later.
Of course, this is far from the first example. It's just the next step down the slippery slope that true-free-speech advocates have been warning about for years.
Nope.
The government can solve that problem by just banning junk foods.
The government can solve all our societal problems by just passing new laws banning things. Remember when they outlawed harmful substances like cocaine and heroin, and now there are no more drug addicts? And how when they ban guns and knives and sharp sticks, people just miraculously stopped committing violence against each other?
So, to that end, we should probably just ban anything that anyone thinks is even indirectly responsible for causing harm to others. Maybe we should just pre-emptively ban everything since anything can, in the wrong hands, certainly harm someone.
What country do you live in again?
If the insurance cartels sold food, clothing, or shelter coverage, ...people would. Food, clothing, and shelter would cost ten times what it already does, the companies you pay to deliver it would actively seek ways of denying it to you, and if you actually got it, it would take weeks or months to be delivered and it would be crap when you finally received it.
People would then be clamoring for the government to nationalize the food/clothing/shelter markets as a "solution," and the very same insurance cartels that caused all the problems would be right there to buy laws that compel people to buy food, clothing, and shelter through them. Curiously, people would celebrate this as a victory over the insurance companies.
Yes. Well, governments do. Governments shooting people leads to massive negative PR---and if they do it enough, uprisings and revolutions.
So over the past few decades, governments have developed all sorts of "non-lethal" technologies to control and oppress their subjects. Tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, the "Active Denial System," and now this. People just don't get as upset over this kind of non-lethal violence, and so governments can get away with oppressing people pretty much indefinitely.
From here:
...is Interpol's website down yet?
Maybe you should do some research before you make spurious comparisons.
I do not believe seatbelts were first introduced as something only required to be used by people convicted of some sort of reckless driving offense, like these things are.
Currently, the companies that sell ignition interlock devices charge a fee for their installation, and a monthly usage fee while they're installed. DUI laws in many states require that these things be installed, at driver expense, for second/subsequent DUI convictions. And their lobbyists appear at State House hearings that would alter DUI laws in a way that would affect these companies' products' use.
Classic example of rent-seeking.
None of this applies to seatbelts. They're not third-party equipment, they don't cost hundreds of dollars, and they're not and never were only imposed upon people convicted of driving offenses.
What, the rent-seeking corporations that sell ignition interlocks aren't making enough money off of DUIs, so they need to expand their racket to every single motorist?
That if an officious bureaucrat is looking to go after these stations for some reason, he could use their similarity in prices as a starting point for an investigation into "price fixing." Months of headache and thousands of dollars of legal bills later, they'd probably be exonerated if evidence of actual collusion didn't turn up---if the stations didn't get put out of business or coerced into a "plea" deal just to make the charges go away before a trial and verdict. Of course, the way laws are so broadly written, if the owners of any of these stations ever had even a friendly chat about each other's businesses, that's probably enough for the government to say there was evidence of a "conspiracy to commit" collusion.
That's the problem with laws like this, and many other laws. There are literally so many laws on the books nowadays that most people are committing numerous "crimes" each day---acts for which, if they were to be caught, would result in years of jailtime, huge fines, the "felony" label, or the like. There is a good book on this topic, and how the government uses these laws for harassment. Basically, if they don't like you, they can find something to go after you for.
What I pointed out in the OP is just a particularly good example of these kinds of laws, because of the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" nature of it.
This is true, yet doesn't contradict what I stated. The government still prints money faster than new wealth is created. Thus there are now more dollars per "unit" of wealth, therefore prices rise.
And as I said, governments siphon off people's wealth using this trick nowadays, because they get to spend the full face value of the new money purchasing resources and services, before the new money enters the market and depresses the value of everyone else's dollars. Some call this a "hidden tax". These governments do exactly what North Korea is doing: They print money, they spend it, and everyone else suffers as a result. The only reason it's deemed illegitimate is because it's someone else printing the money, not the government itself. The harm is the same.
Of course, this is exactly what the U.S. Government itself does: Print new money that doesn't actually represent any extant wealth and then "pocket" the full face value of the new currency. But then once these new bills makes their way into the market, the rest of us get to suffer inflation as a result.
It would do no such thing. More and more people are switching to simple barter mechanisms, precious metals as an intermediate, things like Bitcoin, and "alternative" currencies (example). If the government ever eliminates cash, this will only make such things thrive.
But the fact that North Korea is making a few million a year off of counterfeiting serves as a wonderful pretext for forcing everyone into privacy-less currency, doesn't it?
Nope.
So when is someone going to acquire a copy and leak it to Wikileaks or similar? Once it's out it's out, and this now-months-long saga of trying to justify censorship will become moot.
In Saudi Arabia, 99% of the time no one dares criticize the Prophet Muhammad... and so nothing happens. So I guess it's a free country and people have the freedom to say whatever they want, right?
You still haven't explained what's "wrong" with this.
...and I'll say it again: Why do these centralized, single-point-of-failure websites even exist? I thought people learned from Napster back in the early 2000s that decentralized, peer-to-peer was a lot more resilient? And as p2p networks have been disrupted by the cartels and governments, people have further moved to encrypted p2p networks and the so-called "dark web."
What you're seeing here is someone losing a battle because they went up against a modern military... using a longbow. Or maybe even just a sharpened stick. It's 2012, censorship tools and techniques have evolved significantly, as have anti-censorship countermeasures. These guys were stuck in 2001.
Hopefully all the copies of the content that library.nu and ifile.it amassed haven't been seized, and they or someone else can upload all this stuff to a safer place. :)
I don't know of a single sport where if you don't follow the rules, men with guns force you to (or haul you off to jail if you still refuse). That's what the state does to people who won't follow their regulations or pay their taxes.
And don't say people can just "opt not to play" the free market "sport" like they can with baseball or football if they don't like the rules. Unlike such sports, this free market "sport" provides things that both the "players" can't do without---their livelihood---and the "spectators" can't do without---things you probably buy like food, medicine, shelter, &c..
And if you do say people who don't like the rules ought to just opt out, then I hope you cheer every time some corporation moves their entire operation overseas and lays off a bunch of American workers: That's exactly what they're doing. They're sick of crushing regulations and confiscatory taxation, and they're voting with their feet and getting out.
There's a clear line between the hitman example and laissez-faire economics: The latter, which is what I'm talking about, permits companies to engage in any kind of consensual transaction that they wish to. If companies want to charge any price they choose, fine; if customers don't like it, they won't pay. If companies want to conspire together to lock out a third competitor, fine; that's just two entities mutually consenting to an agreement. Hiring a hitman or poisoning competitors' employees moves into the realm of committing acts of violence---using actual force and aggression (the kind of things governments are good at).