#1. Absolute freedom of (written) speech, at least for the most part, to a degree that I am not aware of existing anywhere in the civilized world.
It's true that the U.S. has the broadest free-speech laws in the world, but I'd hardly say it's "absolute" (and you even immediately contradicted this with "at least for the most part").
As another comment pointed out, there's libel and slander.
Then, apropos to the article here, there's hate speech, where if the government can claim that it was an immediate exhortation to violence, they can prosecute it. This is an expansion of the old court precedent against "fighting words."
And then there's so-called "child pornography," laws which started out meaning actual pornographic images of children, but which have been broadened to mean anyone under 18 and/or depictions of children that aren't in any way "pornographic" but might be considered somewhat sexual in nature to someone, such as fully-clothed child models. The rationales for these laws have been used to create ever more laws proscribing "harmful" imagery such as so-called "animal crush videos" and other depictions of animal cruelty, gory accident and crime scene photos and videos, and the like. And on the reverse side, despite the fact that these laws were rationalized as not prohibiting speech but intending to prohibit actual harm (to the children, animals, &c., in the photos), the government has also attempted---but so far failed, but only after lengthy court battles---to expand child-porn laws to cover cartoon/CGI imagery in which no real children were actually depicted let alone harmed.
There are also still plenty of old-fashioned obscenity laws on the books, and the government regularly uses these against more extreme kinds of pornography. Bush II's attorney general John Ashcroft launched several major prosecutions, and state governments do it all the time.
Then there are laws against making threatening statements. These laws may have started out meaning things like making direct "I'm going to kill you"-style threats, but nowadays anyone claiming to feel "threatened" by someone else's speech can get someone in trouble. There are both general "criminal threatening" laws in most jurisdictions and special laws protecting our privileged classes such as the president, judges, politicians, and so on.
The Federal Government still has a law on the books from 1918 that directly prohibits political speech if it calls for the overthrow of the government itself. Many states have copies of this law from the same era. There are laws against espionage that can be used to go after political speech, too. Look at what happened to Edward Snowden and what would probably happen to Julian Assange if they got their hands on him.
And of course there's the government's massive and ever-expanding war on "piracy." Try distributing someone else's "copyrighted" speech without their permission and see what happens.
There are also many, many laws prohibiting publishing "advice" without the requisite government permission. Try giving investment or medical advice without a license, or legal advice without being a lawyer, and see what happens. The IRS also regularly goes after people publishing books on how to get around taxes, books that claim the income tax scheme is illegal, unconstitutional, and so on.
There's no freedom of speech when "commerce" is involved (or the government can claim it is). Advertising, packaging, labeling, and so on, are highly regulated. Companies are prohibited from including a multitude of claims on labels, prohibited from using certain terms, required to use others, and in certain fields like alcohol and tobacco, there are even more stringent regulations, such as advertising that seems to appeal to minors. I know a microbrewer who was told by the ATF that he could not include an American flag on his label.
There's no freedom of speech on network television or radio. They censor anything the FCC considers "harmful t
They've been prohibiting Nazi-type groups since WWII. And as the article said, they're still a major problem in Germany. So yeah, it is working out about as well as the drug war. But hey, it lets the politicians say they're "doing something" and lets the cops get all sorts of new toys (and ever more tax dollars to buy more cool toys), so it's all good, right?
Just like everything else involving the State, they have their own legal redefinition of the words "right" and "wrong", in order to make sure things like morality or logic don't get in the way of convicting people. M'Naghten rules.
Considering the supply of neither is fixed (ever heard of mining? Both gold, and bitcoin...), your entire argument is built upon a straw man.
And the government doesn't "regulate the currency's value." They destroy it with inflation. That your dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power in the past century is a good thing to you? Maybe if the government kept the value of the dollar fixed, kept the money supply in sync with the size of the economy, rather than printing more and more and more dollars, you'd have a point. But instead what your "regulators" have done over the past century is proven that they are the last people who should be trusted to dictate the value of the currency.
You take your chances with government-backed currency, too. Many, many government currencies have gone down the drain, have fallen victim to hyperinflation, were "demonetized" by their governments, and so on. Stability is just a matter of degree and probabilities.
Bitcoin's value is backed up by the thousands (millions?) of people using it. No one can just up and choose to make it worthless overnight, unlike what a central bank could do to your government-backed currency tomorrow.
They will try to do everything within their power. And they'll be about as successful as they have been in stamping out the cash-based black market. (Remember when they had a "war on drugs" and now no one does drugs anymore? Right.)
Actually, they'll be less successful with bitcoin, because bitcoin was designed by people trying to route around government meddling, whereas the utility of cash for anonymity and black marketry is just coincidental. Cash will always be what it is right now, but bitcoin, just like P2P filesharing and other technologies the government keeps trying to reign in, will be modified to route around the latest government attack. It'll be an endless whack-a-mole where the government will waste billions of taxpayer dollars and accomplish exactly nothing.
'Part of the interest in virtual currencies like bitcoin is that their anonymity can provide a convenient cloak for criminal activity. Part is technological â" this is a cool idea. And part is speculative â" gamblers bet that bitcoin's value will increase,' concludes Hadas. 'Truly private money is an inferior alternative to the money that comes with the backing of a political authority. After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government, and no private power can raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses.'
Everything described here is what makes bitcoin a superior form of money, not inferior.
And New Hampshire, one of the few states in the nation to not have a seatbelt law (I and this organization helped scuttle their last attempt to pass one), has one of the highest seatbelt-usage statistics, and has some of the safest roads in the country.
But don't let that stop you from passing off a simple correlation-causation coincidence as justification for your nanny-statist laws. In the same time period, cars with those annoying seatbelt alarms that don't shut off until you put the seatbelt on were introduced, and society became more safety-conscious in general.
No, it will be made up with increased fine revenue. That's how this kind of "public safety" bullshit typically "pays for itself." The cops get to steal your money to pay for their new toys to further steal your money.
And as usual, this will have the unintended consequence of making people try to conceal their texting more so than before. So now someone tucks their phone between their legs while trying to use it, or holds it under the steering column, or halfway down to the pedals, thereby looking further downward from the road and further increasing their chances of not seeing something ahead of them.
But hey, the politicians get to look like they're "doing something" passing these laws, the government gets to expand its power and revenue stream more, and the cops even get cool new toys, so it's all good.
I predict that this will be about as successful as all other attempts to censor information has been. But don't let that stop you. At least you look like you're "doing something" just like the fool politicians in the other story, right?
Well, that's good to know. So not only does SourceForge deserve to be boycotted because they even offer this shit to their developers, but if it's actually in a package you download, the dev wilfully put it there, so they deserve to join the boycott list.
Slashdot Mirror
Whining by buggy whip salesmen. That's all.
And post a dupe of URL three days later.
The parallels to certain historical incidents in the same country are rather interesting, aren't they?
Seems nearly every population needs a hated underclass to dump on. Let's them avoid dealing with whatever their true problems are.
It's true that the U.S. has the broadest free-speech laws in the world, but I'd hardly say it's "absolute" (and you even immediately contradicted this with "at least for the most part").
As another comment pointed out, there's libel and slander.
Then, apropos to the article here, there's hate speech, where if the government can claim that it was an immediate exhortation to violence, they can prosecute it. This is an expansion of the old court precedent against "fighting words."
And then there's so-called "child pornography," laws which started out meaning actual pornographic images of children, but which have been broadened to mean anyone under 18 and/or depictions of children that aren't in any way "pornographic" but might be considered somewhat sexual in nature to someone, such as fully-clothed child models. The rationales for these laws have been used to create ever more laws proscribing "harmful" imagery such as so-called "animal crush videos" and other depictions of animal cruelty, gory accident and crime scene photos and videos, and the like. And on the reverse side, despite the fact that these laws were rationalized as not prohibiting speech but intending to prohibit actual harm (to the children, animals, &c., in the photos), the government has also attempted---but so far failed, but only after lengthy court battles---to expand child-porn laws to cover cartoon/CGI imagery in which no real children were actually depicted let alone harmed.
There are also still plenty of old-fashioned obscenity laws on the books, and the government regularly uses these against more extreme kinds of pornography. Bush II's attorney general John Ashcroft launched several major prosecutions, and state governments do it all the time.
Then there are laws against making threatening statements. These laws may have started out meaning things like making direct "I'm going to kill you"-style threats, but nowadays anyone claiming to feel "threatened" by someone else's speech can get someone in trouble. There are both general "criminal threatening" laws in most jurisdictions and special laws protecting our privileged classes such as the president, judges, politicians, and so on.
The Federal Government still has a law on the books from 1918 that directly prohibits political speech if it calls for the overthrow of the government itself. Many states have copies of this law from the same era. There are laws against espionage that can be used to go after political speech, too. Look at what happened to Edward Snowden and what would probably happen to Julian Assange if they got their hands on him.
And of course there's the government's massive and ever-expanding war on "piracy." Try distributing someone else's "copyrighted" speech without their permission and see what happens.
There are also many, many laws prohibiting publishing "advice" without the requisite government permission. Try giving investment or medical advice without a license, or legal advice without being a lawyer, and see what happens. The IRS also regularly goes after people publishing books on how to get around taxes, books that claim the income tax scheme is illegal, unconstitutional, and so on.
There's no freedom of speech when "commerce" is involved (or the government can claim it is). Advertising, packaging, labeling, and so on, are highly regulated. Companies are prohibited from including a multitude of claims on labels, prohibited from using certain terms, required to use others, and in certain fields like alcohol and tobacco, there are even more stringent regulations, such as advertising that seems to appeal to minors. I know a microbrewer who was told by the ATF that he could not include an American flag on his label.
There's no freedom of speech on network television or radio. They censor anything the FCC considers "harmful t
They've been prohibiting Nazi-type groups since WWII. And as the article said, they're still a major problem in Germany. So yeah, it is working out about as well as the drug war. But hey, it lets the politicians say they're "doing something" and lets the cops get all sorts of new toys (and ever more tax dollars to buy more cool toys), so it's all good, right?
You forgot the part where they link _____ to global warming.
I was wondering how long it would take for people to try to shift the blame from the incompetent government to "evil corporations."
For those wondering what this is.
Just like everything else involving the State, they have their own legal redefinition of the words "right" and "wrong", in order to make sure things like morality or logic don't get in the way of convicting people. M'Naghten rules.
Let’s see if this works for “smart” quotation marks, too.
Considering the supply of neither is fixed (ever heard of mining? Both gold, and bitcoin...), your entire argument is built upon a straw man.
And the government doesn't "regulate the currency's value." They destroy it with inflation. That your dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power in the past century is a good thing to you? Maybe if the government kept the value of the dollar fixed, kept the money supply in sync with the size of the economy, rather than printing more and more and more dollars, you'd have a point. But instead what your "regulators" have done over the past century is proven that they are the last people who should be trusted to dictate the value of the currency.
You take your chances with government-backed currency, too. Many, many government currencies have gone down the drain, have fallen victim to hyperinflation, were "demonetized" by their governments, and so on. Stability is just a matter of degree and probabilities.
Bitcoin's value is backed up by the thousands (millions?) of people using it. No one can just up and choose to make it worthless overnight, unlike what a central bank could do to your government-backed currency tomorrow.
They will try to do everything within their power. And they'll be about as successful as they have been in stamping out the cash-based black market. (Remember when they had a "war on drugs" and now no one does drugs anymore? Right.)
Actually, they'll be less successful with bitcoin, because bitcoin was designed by people trying to route around government meddling, whereas the utility of cash for anonymity and black marketry is just coincidental. Cash will always be what it is right now, but bitcoin, just like P2P filesharing and other technologies the government keeps trying to reign in, will be modified to route around the latest government attack. It'll be an endless whack-a-mole where the government will waste billions of taxpayer dollars and accomplish exactly nothing.
Everything described here is what makes bitcoin a superior form of money, not inferior.
Because bigger, taller, more imposing-looking cars fit in with the ongoing militarization of law enforcement, not cameras mounted on sticks.
And New Hampshire, one of the few states in the nation to not have a seatbelt law (I and this organization helped scuttle their last attempt to pass one), has one of the highest seatbelt-usage statistics, and has some of the safest roads in the country.
But don't let that stop you from passing off a simple correlation-causation coincidence as justification for your nanny-statist laws. In the same time period, cars with those annoying seatbelt alarms that don't shut off until you put the seatbelt on were introduced, and society became more safety-conscious in general.
Heh, someone upthread posted an article that demonstrates this unintended consequence is already happening.
No, it will be made up with increased fine revenue. That's how this kind of "public safety" bullshit typically "pays for itself." The cops get to steal your money to pay for their new toys to further steal your money.
The cameras are already there. That's just a software update away.
Silly. The law doesn't apply to cops, so why would you think the laws of physics do?
And as usual, this will have the unintended consequence of making people try to conceal their texting more so than before. So now someone tucks their phone between their legs while trying to use it, or holds it under the steering column, or halfway down to the pedals, thereby looking further downward from the road and further increasing their chances of not seeing something ahead of them.
But hey, the politicians get to look like they're "doing something" passing these laws, the government gets to expand its power and revenue stream more, and the cops even get cool new toys, so it's all good.
Wow, two for two today, eh?
I predict that this will be about as successful as all other attempts to censor information has been. But don't let that stop you. At least you look like you're "doing something" just like the fool politicians in the other story, right?
I predict that this will be about a successful as all other attempts to ban information has been. But don't let that stop you. And just to help out, here's a link to DefDist's DefCAD Mega Pack v4.2 (Saito) again, the file I mirrored when the DOD tried to suppress it.
Wait, you don't mean someone has figured out how to use this technology for their own benefit, do you!? The horror! The humanity of it all!!
Well, that's good to know. So not only does SourceForge deserve to be boycotted because they even offer this shit to their developers, but if it's actually in a package you download, the dev wilfully put it there, so they deserve to join the boycott list.