If one looks at the superb criminology study "Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force" by Skolnick and Fyfe, one appreciates that our endangerment from police goes much deeper than their technology. Science invents, but the culture polices. There are enormous social and political forces bearing down upon law enforcement that produce violence against citizens -- from race, class and public and expectations to cops' own vigilantism -- that are far more relevant to discussions of things like masers than any abstract "intention" for the use of the weapon.
Masers in the hands of the LAPD, roasting Rodney King alive?
A couple of grumpy observations, because it's only Tuesday and the Man seems to require another four days of our spirits before we're released for the weekend parole:
1) Competition is drying up here in the midwest, the Ma & Pa's a thing of the past and the utilities grabbing the lion's share of business. Not surprisingly, service (through Qwest, anyway) gets suckier all the time -- service outtages, unknowledgable undertrained underpaid tech support, and an ever more unctious corporate-speak about how good it's all supposed to be. Yes, good for the nascent monopolies.
2) The Net is truly a test of democracy, as any number of cases and legislation in recent years can attest. One of the key tenets of democratic society is that one must co-exist peaceably with those one can't stand, and the extent to which one does this successfully is a measure of that individual's suitability for citizenship (on one extreme is the criminal, having failed to get along, and on the other is the politician taking graft from everybody, having succeeded in a kind of polymorphously perverse ideal of tolerance). Ok, that said, screw tolerance. I hate the idea that a bunch of #$@%! suburbanites sitting around on their fat asses trading Britney Spears songs via P2P will increase my bill and bog down the Net. Bloody sheep! Television was invented to keep you busy, back to your idiot boxes.;)
"Standard of living" is hardly a form of moral measurement, and the argument you're addressing is a moral one. Point off.
Even if you were to argue the moral point, you'd be stuck holding up the lifestyles and creature comforts of corporate employees as some sort of defense against their employer's behavior. Not a tenable position. Point off there, too.
You want to argue that the U.S. must be a moral state since people are trying hard to get into it. But since people try hard to get into many things, from bank vaults to discos to prostitutes, the best we can say about evidence of effort is that it is evidence of effort. Point off.
Are they "literally" killing themselves to try, or "figuratively" killing themselves? If you mean people who die in illegal immigration attempts, then at best you can say "dying to get in." People aren't exactly shooting themselves in the head and saying, as they expire, "Perhaps....THIS...will get me into the United St-- uggggggh." Point off.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying member of the open source movement.
But I can give you lots of names, Senator Gates!;)
Heartbreaking, sophisticated
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 4
The film is devestating, its vision of humanity as bleak as anything in thirty years.
Aesthetically, it's very compelling -- highly nuanced performances by Jack Nicholson and Robin Wright Penn being its strongest points.
The tension is managed perfectly. I found it, at times, nearly unbearable.
In terms of the script, which, as you might expect from a film directed by Penn, is literate beyond reproach, I think it's worth noting that this novel adaptation is strikingly different from much recent Hollywood fare not only because it's terribly dark. It's also a portrait of psychological repression -- a theme that informed much of the best mid-century American and British cinema (think Hitchcock, Kazan, Preminger, et. al) as well as film noir, but which became passé the further Hollywood in the 70s and 80s moved from examining character and instead toward embracing sensation (for which you can thank Messrs. Spielberg, Lucas, etc.). This would be of limited interest were not the entire story dependent upon what Nicholson's character hiding the truth from himself...
There is another enormously powerful subject here, too: the effect of police work upon the police. What happens when you see too much evil? With our cinema too much given over to the triumphalism and cartoonish representations of cops in Drug War America, this is a subject begging to be explored.
The final shots of the film may leave you in agony. Beware, casual moviegoers! This isn't the spookhouse make-believe of "Hannibal." Real monsters are much scarier.
Wow. It's not enough to have been humbled by a machine and a younger player: now he's being pushed around by a soft drink company. So much for the glowering champeen!
In the age of Caller I.d. and blocking, people are less likely to misuse their telephone. When the call isn't traceable, however, things could get interesting. The disposable could be the heavy breather's best friend.
Look for regulation to follow swiftly, along with new "options" for which consumers will be bilked by the ever helpful telcos (ability to block incoming calls from disposable phones, etc.).
There's something to this. By capturing signals in your own airspace, you may be helping to return honesty to the meaning of the word "public."
In this area, hypocrisy reigns over our definitions. The "public" airwaves, of which we hear so much about, are practically given away to the wealthy by politicans. Furthermore, it suits politicians to demand that content and taste standards in broadcasting are infantilized in the name of the "public." But try using the bandwidth for broadcasting some time: if caught, you'll soon appreciate that all members of the public are equal, but some are more equal than others....
True, up to a point. Kubrick accepted a deal from Warner Brothers: shoot a film with Cruise and Kidman first, and the money for AI would follow. AI's projected budget was very high, and Kubrick had not made money for anyone in some time...
The choice of Traumnovelle was not accidental --he'd considered adapting it since the 1970s -- but he didn't merely "decide to adapt Traumnovelle first" and then do AI. We take a girl out for dinner before getting laid, but that doesn't mean we like eating first.;)
It's interesting that Kubrick saw in Spielberg something better than what many harsher critics have seen: an artless craftsman dependent on syrup.
Personally, I greatly respect Spielberg's gifts in narrative, even if I suspect his view of human nature (and tendency to yolk every story into a happy ending).
Yet now there is something new to consider. Much is made of Spielberg and Kubricks' independence, their safe remove from the Hollywood system. And yet with AI, Spielberg has cast that off, and chosen to labor under that most grueling of all masters -- not the money men, but the memory, work, and inspiration of one of film's true masters. What a burden and what an honor to have the late, great Stanley looking over your shoulder from Olympus as you bring his final project to fruition!
Next thing you know, the Shit Corporation will insist that we stop saying, "Oh, shit!" That usage tends to sully and dilute the quality of authentic Shit, whose market value is only as good as its name. Even if you are merely refering to shit and not to Shit(tm), the mere casual invocation of a trademark is itself troublesome: the Shit Corporation would like it to be understood that talking Shit is hardly a casual endeavor for its 1,253 employees worldwide. Shit, you might say, signs their paychecks. And so it has been since the early 1880s when Silus Shit founded the company on no more than an intestinal rumble and a dream. The proud Shit tradition -- summed up in the company slogan, "Shit and Business, Hand-in-Hand, Forever" -- demands no less. Think twice before dropping Shit in conversation unless you really mean it.
It's obvious what Nintendo wants: complete control over the lucrative "strategy guide" market. I don't have exact figures in front of me, but paperpack strategy guides (at upwards of $10 a pop) routinely sell in the high tens of thousands of copies. Some do much better. And with relatively low production costs -- cheap freelance writers, tiny fuzzy color reproductions -- they're pure profit.
But that's Nintendo's right -- to make derivative works, like its official guide, from its original IP. No one else has that right. Fair use permits a tiny portion of a work to be quoted, but that amount must not dilute the market for the original work. How did Imagine Media, er, imagine that it could take screenshots from essentially every part of the game and call that fair use? You might as well try to publish, say, the "Unofficial Guide to Watching Star Wars," and print hundreds of scene-by-scene photographs. It would not be long before you'd hear from the Empire's attorneys.;)
Katz says people don't care. He's right, but why don't they care? Do they misunderstand the risks? Is the scope of the theft too grand for the imagination? Have they been swimming too long in the stream of media images that reassure us that corporations are benign, friendly -- big brothers, sure, but never Big Brother?
For a brief period in the 60s and 70s, cultural assumptions about corporate power shifted merely enough to allow such impertinent questions to be asked in the mainstream media -- and for fledgling regulation to emerge in legislatures. Not only was such regulation inadequate to the job of preventing the eventual corporate state, but in areas ranging across environmental, labor, fiscal, and energy controls, we've seen it eviscerated since the 1980s.
Here we are twenty years on. Corporate power is ever ascendant, with politicians from both parties its handmaidens. In this era, how would we save privacy? How can we hope to do that when we can't even stop corporations from polluting? From laying off workforces and merging like mad DNA to boost stock values? From annointing its own as our political leaders? The loss of privacy is of a piece with these other losses: it, too, has been sacrificed for the golden virtue of business efficiency -- for the faster track to profit.
Privacy, as Brandeis recognized, is a bulwark against power. You cannot discuss privacy absent an equation which also measures the power that threatens it; or put another way, any bulletproof vest is pointless without taking into account what kind of bullets might be fired at it. The executives have the best guns. And the vest-makers all work for the executives. Bad time to dress for battle! What are we going to wear?
It may be true that some police are people who "every day risk their lives to make sure you can rant safely," but I'd love to see you quantify that claim.
Unfortunately for your argument, the numbers show that federal prisons are swollen with drug war cases -- felons locked up for nonviolent, victimless crimes that have little or nothing to do with anyone's freedom to rant. I'm not sure how any of those inmates being locked up ensures my right to rant, but I do know for certain that police departments have a strong incentive -- federal subsidies -- to keep locking up more.
No, one can make the case that the cops are out of control. For instance, you may have noticed this past week news about a number of class action lawsuits accusing police of unconstitutional strip searches (New York City has just settled to the tune of $50 million). Or you may have followed high-profile cases involving police mistreatment, not to mention the lethal shooting of, immigrants in New York. One can go on.
As for ranting itself, you have a novel view of the police helping it! Historically, police are the enemy of that right; it's not by accident that the very first right enumerated in the Bill of Rights is freedom of speech. Still, you may have noticed last year the trend of increased spying and heavy-handed policing of speech on the Internet, embodied in such policies as the FBI's use of Carnivore to rifle through e-mail or a recent library appropriations bill requiring public libraries to install cyber-nanny censoring software. Again, one can go on.
Granted, we don't have enough facts at our disposal in the New Hampshire case. But we are not being critical in a vacuum. The habits of skepticism that you see on display here at slashdot are rational tools for seeing the world a bit more clearly.
These arrogant domain name threats ought to be seen for what they are: corporate attempts to colonize the Net.
I don't mean metaphorically only -- as in having draconian laws enacted, encroaching on freedoms, and spying. There's a real sense, too, which is part of the colonial tradition of renaming lands in the conqueror's own tongue...
I reject your premises about watching TV, and I despise your conclusions about value and meaning.
First, it's weak to blast TV watching for not being "productive." All aesthetic appreciation, whether performed in front of a TV or with a book, painting, or recording, is essentially about not being productive. If you bring your work ethic to the arts, you'll end up with little better than a paint-by-number understanding of what it can offer you.
Second, you mistake watching TV for a passive activity. Sure, you allow that there might be exceptions -- "a university course on a special cable channel or somesuch." This premise is shown to be wrong every time anyone critically watches television, an act that can occur whether you're watching the PBS News Hour or the satire "Action." It should be occuring even when you're watching a commercial. Don't mistake your own lazy relationship with media for a general rule that also applies to people with more demanding consciousness.
Third, I briefly have to sneer at your insistence that we evaluate our time based on how much we earn per hour. If money is your measurement, then of course watching TV can't live up to it. But to show you how false a yardstick you are using, suppose I offered you a deal: I'll pay you twice what you earn on the job....just to have you sit and watch TV! Quick, take my offer; it's your own value system I'm dangling out before you....
Fourth, we come to your list of what is more valuable than TV watching, and again we find you arguing from your proclivities to a general rule. Time with family, friends, volunteer work, hobbies, and climbing mountains are all more important to you than TV watching, so you insist they are better for everyone. Let us see. Of all those activities, only one is not purely selfish: "volunteering on community projects" could, potentially, help others, unless of course it's just tidying up the block inside a gaited community, in which case it's nothing noble. But let's grant you the benefit of the doubt, and say that your list is worthwhile. In fact, let us suppose that one already has sufficient time with family, friends, volunteerism, and hobbies -- plus an ongoing enrichment from the arts that is partly facilitated by TV. Aren't you, then, the poorer? We have it all, plus TV.
About mountain climbing, just to give you some food for thought: even with all its faults and lousy programming, TV has done much more for culture than climbing mountains ever did or will. That is because TV is communication between human beings, while mountain climbing is just physical self-gratification. Given a choice between obliterating piles of rock and preserving TV, any sensible culture would choose the tube.
Whatever the merits of the National Review (and I confess they are invisible to me), Kopel's piece is a good, straightforward look at the dangers in the bill.
As for the comparison to Salon, I think it's rather silly to claim that Salon is "less biased." Like NR, it's an opinion journal. You expect bias in these places. That is why you read them.:)
Will they shoot something like this down? They should, and I hope they will. Then again, with more conservative (read: law and order, damnit) Justices on the bench, who knows?
One would hope, but the hope would be misplaced.
For fifteen years, the Rehnquist Court has been dismantling the Fourth Amendment. Expanding searches and seizures, removing traditional safeguards, and increasing police and prosecutorial power until it is now virtually unchecked, this Supreme Court has been the enemy of our ancient freedoms.
If this bill becomes law, it will face an inevitable court challenge. But defeating it has no guarantee, nor even a good likelihood, of success.
So to those who would say "just a bill, don't worry," I say: yes, it's just a bill. Worry. And take action by calling or writing your senator now.
Not to rain on your parade, but we have been one of the most religiously intolerant nations in modern history.
To say that we have gone past the recriminations of the colonies, or the prosecutions of Salem, or riots between Protestants and Catholics, or the exclusion of Jews by both from private and public institutions, and arrived at the point where we now mainly specialize in the imposition upon schools of diluted textbooks or the removal of banned books from their libraries....is only to say that we have become slighly more modest in our religious savagery.
It was precisely over fear of the awful repression practiced by religious authorities that the First Amendment -- the first, mind you -- insisted upon Congress staying out of law-making with respect to religion. It was a warning as well as a command. It still needs heeding.
"All this free content isn't going to continue to be free unless users pay for it somehow, and the payment is advertising," Mr. Tchong said.
But ad man Tchong's premise is wrong. What if we don't want "all this free content"?
As a subscriber to numerous print magazines and two newspapers, I couldn't care less if the commercial media stopped the flow of its content onto the web. That wouldn't affect me at all. Shut it all down now, if you like; in fact, please shut it down quickly so that we don't have to listen to lackies lecture us about the need for bigger and better ads.
What I want from the net is precisely what the Tchongs of this world don't get: I want stuff that didn't come out of the commercial mills. Stuff that people produce because they are driven to do so, nearly always at their own expense of time or love, or because they were pissed off or just burdened with an idea. That is the beauty of this medium -- and not its ability to become Fox News' ad-regurgitation trough.
The sentimental ending proves that it is the journey, not the destination, that matters in Tolkien.
It's awfully fun escaping the Shire, sitting in on the Council at Elrond, going through Moria, destroying Isengard, and fighting at the siege of Gondor. Those are the narrative highpoints for me.
Yet after the sundering of the Fellowship, things change for the worse. The interesting racial friction between the members of the Fellowship is, naturally, gone, and in its place there is quite a bit of flabby, slow-moving stuff -- on a recent rereading of the trilogy, I found myself skimming pages that held me spellbound twenty years ago, but really don't cut it today.
Some specific grumbles... Sam's endless solicitations of Frodo -- Tolkien's tiresome patrician paean to the servant-master relationship -- make the Mordor scenes almost unbearable. Gandalf, Tolkien's best creation, is never around enough. The verse is mainly bad (wisely, Jackson is cutting nearly all of it from the films).
That said, the story is still a wonder. Its themes of power corrupting and hope in renouncing corrupt power are as vital today as they were when Tolkien wrote them in the wreckage of WWII. I'm grateful for the books.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said, Bonker.
If one looks at the superb criminology study "Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force" by Skolnick and Fyfe, one appreciates that our endangerment from police goes much deeper than their technology. Science invents, but the culture polices. There are enormous social and political forces bearing down upon law enforcement that produce violence against citizens -- from race, class and public and expectations to cops' own vigilantism -- that are far more relevant to discussions of things like masers than any abstract "intention" for the use of the weapon.
Masers in the hands of the LAPD, roasting Rodney King alive?
That's an NRA fantasy if ever there was one.
Here's reality: you're likely to burn you or your wife very badly in a fit of rage or sheer stupidity, or your kid is likely to burn his eye out.
Go get 'em. Go get those "thieves," tiger!
Exactly. Well said.
;)
A couple of grumpy observations, because it's only Tuesday and the Man seems to require another four days of our spirits before we're released for the weekend parole:
1) Competition is drying up here in the midwest, the Ma & Pa's a thing of the past and the utilities grabbing the lion's share of business. Not surprisingly, service (through Qwest, anyway) gets suckier all the time -- service outtages, unknowledgable undertrained underpaid tech support, and an ever more unctious corporate-speak about how good it's all supposed to be. Yes, good for the nascent monopolies.
2) The Net is truly a test of democracy, as any number of cases and legislation in recent years can attest. One of the key tenets of democratic society is that one must co-exist peaceably with those one can't stand, and the extent to which one does this successfully is a measure of that individual's suitability for citizenship (on one extreme is the criminal, having failed to get along, and on the other is the politician taking graft from everybody, having succeeded in a kind of polymorphously perverse ideal of tolerance). Ok, that said, screw tolerance. I hate the idea that a bunch of #$@%! suburbanites sitting around on their fat asses trading Britney Spears songs via P2P will increase my bill and bog down the Net. Bloody sheep! Television was invented to keep you busy, back to your idiot boxes.
$99 membership fee?
;)
Webpage, heal thyself.
Odd choice of post to label "insightful"!
Let's re-score this one, shall we?
"Standard of living" is hardly a form of moral measurement, and the argument you're addressing is a moral one. Point off.
Even if you were to argue the moral point, you'd be stuck holding up the lifestyles and creature comforts of corporate employees as some sort of defense against their employer's behavior. Not a tenable position. Point off there, too.
You want to argue that the U.S. must be a moral state since people are trying hard to get into it. But since people try hard to get into many things, from bank vaults to discos to prostitutes, the best we can say about evidence of effort is that it is evidence of effort. Point off.
Are they "literally" killing themselves to try, or "figuratively" killing themselves? If you mean people who die in illegal immigration attempts, then at best you can say "dying to get in." People aren't exactly shooting themselves in the head and saying, as they expire, "Perhaps....THIS...will get me into the United St-- uggggggh." Point off.
By my count, you're clocking in at -4.
Moderators, try harder.
Oh, no -- the angry oppressed white male Anonymous Coward lobby is heard from!
Poor guy. Good luck with your "speach" impediment.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying member of the open source movement.
;)
But I can give you lots of names, Senator Gates!
The film is devestating, its vision of humanity as bleak as anything in thirty years.
Aesthetically, it's very compelling -- highly nuanced performances by Jack Nicholson and Robin Wright Penn being its strongest points.
The tension is managed perfectly. I found it, at times, nearly unbearable.
In terms of the script, which, as you might expect from a film directed by Penn, is literate beyond reproach, I think it's worth noting that this novel adaptation is strikingly different from much recent Hollywood fare not only because it's terribly dark. It's also a portrait of psychological repression -- a theme that informed much of the best mid-century American and British cinema (think Hitchcock, Kazan, Preminger, et. al) as well as film noir, but which became passé the further Hollywood in the 70s and 80s moved from examining character and instead toward embracing sensation (for which you can thank Messrs. Spielberg, Lucas, etc.). This would be of limited interest were not the entire story dependent upon what Nicholson's character hiding the truth from himself...
There is another enormously powerful subject here, too: the effect of police work upon the police. What happens when you see too much evil? With our cinema too much given over to the triumphalism and cartoonish representations of cops in Drug War America, this is a subject begging to be explored.
The final shots of the film may leave you in agony. Beware, casual moviegoers! This isn't the spookhouse make-believe of "Hannibal." Real monsters are much scarier.
Wow. It's not enough to have been humbled by a machine and a younger player: now he's being pushed around by a soft drink company. So much for the glowering champeen!
In the age of Caller I.d. and blocking, people are less likely to misuse their telephone. When the call isn't traceable, however, things could get interesting. The disposable could be the heavy breather's best friend.
Look for regulation to follow swiftly, along with new "options" for which consumers will be bilked by the ever helpful telcos (ability to block incoming calls from disposable phones, etc.).
There's something to this. By capturing signals in your own airspace, you may be helping to return honesty to the meaning of the word "public."
In this area, hypocrisy reigns over our definitions. The "public" airwaves, of which we hear so much about, are practically given away to the wealthy by politicans. Furthermore, it suits politicians to demand that content and taste standards in broadcasting are infantilized in the name of the "public." But try using the bandwidth for broadcasting some time: if caught, you'll soon appreciate that all members of the public are equal, but some are more equal than others....
True, up to a point. Kubrick accepted a deal from Warner Brothers: shoot a film with Cruise and Kidman first, and the money for AI would follow. AI's projected budget was very high, and Kubrick had not made money for anyone in some time...
;)
The choice of Traumnovelle was not accidental --he'd considered adapting it since the 1970s -- but he didn't merely "decide to adapt Traumnovelle first" and then do AI. We take a girl out for dinner before getting laid, but that doesn't mean we like eating first.
Well said, Chorder.
It's interesting that Kubrick saw in Spielberg something better than what many harsher critics have seen: an artless craftsman dependent on syrup.
Personally, I greatly respect Spielberg's gifts in narrative, even if I suspect his view of human nature (and tendency to yolk every story into a happy ending).
Yet now there is something new to consider. Much is made of Spielberg and Kubricks' independence, their safe remove from the Hollywood system. And yet with AI, Spielberg has cast that off, and chosen to labor under that most grueling of all masters -- not the money men, but the memory, work, and inspiration of one of film's true masters. What a burden and what an honor to have the late, great Stanley looking over your shoulder from Olympus as you bring his final project to fruition!
If that does not change an artist, nothing will.
Next thing you know, the Shit Corporation will insist that we stop saying, "Oh, shit!" That usage tends to sully and dilute the quality of authentic Shit, whose market value is only as good as its name. Even if you are merely refering to shit and not to Shit(tm), the mere casual invocation of a trademark is itself troublesome: the Shit Corporation would like it to be understood that talking Shit is hardly a casual endeavor for its 1,253 employees worldwide. Shit, you might say, signs their paychecks. And so it has been since the early 1880s when Silus Shit founded the company on no more than an intestinal rumble and a dream. The proud Shit tradition -- summed up in the company slogan, "Shit and Business, Hand-in-Hand, Forever" -- demands no less. Think twice before dropping Shit in conversation unless you really mean it.
K'splaaaaht!
Sound of Klingon-speaking Trekkie dropped from bridge, head first.
- k'splt -
Klingon phrasebook following.
It's obvious what Nintendo wants: complete control over the lucrative "strategy guide" market. I don't have exact figures in front of me, but paperpack strategy guides (at upwards of $10 a pop) routinely sell in the high tens of thousands of copies. Some do much better. And with relatively low production costs -- cheap freelance writers, tiny fuzzy color reproductions -- they're pure profit.
;)
But that's Nintendo's right -- to make derivative works, like its official guide, from its original IP. No one else has that right. Fair use permits a tiny portion of a work to be quoted, but that amount must not dilute the market for the original work. How did Imagine Media, er, imagine that it could take screenshots from essentially every part of the game and call that fair use? You might as well try to publish, say, the "Unofficial Guide to Watching Star Wars," and print hundreds of scene-by-scene photographs. It would not be long before you'd hear from the Empire's attorneys.
Katz says people don't care. He's right, but why don't they care? Do they misunderstand the risks? Is the scope of the theft too grand for the imagination? Have they been swimming too long in the stream of media images that reassure us that corporations are benign, friendly -- big brothers, sure, but never Big Brother?
For a brief period in the 60s and 70s, cultural assumptions about corporate power shifted merely enough to allow such impertinent questions to be asked in the mainstream media -- and for fledgling regulation to emerge in legislatures. Not only was such regulation inadequate to the job of preventing the eventual corporate state, but in areas ranging across environmental, labor, fiscal, and energy controls, we've seen it eviscerated since the 1980s.
Here we are twenty years on. Corporate power is ever ascendant, with politicians from both parties its handmaidens. In this era, how would we save privacy? How can we hope to do that when we can't even stop corporations from polluting? From laying off workforces and merging like mad DNA to boost stock values? From annointing its own as our political leaders? The loss of privacy is of a piece with these other losses: it, too, has been sacrificed for the golden virtue of business efficiency -- for the faster track to profit.
Privacy, as Brandeis recognized, is a bulwark against power. You cannot discuss privacy absent an equation which also measures the power that threatens it; or put another way, any bulletproof vest is pointless without taking into account what kind of bullets might be fired at it. The executives have the best guns. And the vest-makers all work for the executives. Bad time to dress for battle! What are we going to wear?
Oh, is it?
It may be true that some police are people who "every day risk their lives to make sure you can rant safely," but I'd love to see you quantify that claim.
Unfortunately for your argument, the numbers show that federal prisons are swollen with drug war cases -- felons locked up for nonviolent, victimless crimes that have little or nothing to do with anyone's freedom to rant. I'm not sure how any of those inmates being locked up ensures my right to rant, but I do know for certain that police departments have a strong incentive -- federal subsidies -- to keep locking up more.
No, one can make the case that the cops are out of control. For instance, you may have noticed this past week news about a number of class action lawsuits accusing police of unconstitutional strip searches (New York City has just settled to the tune of $50 million). Or you may have followed high-profile cases involving police mistreatment, not to mention the lethal shooting of, immigrants in New York. One can go on.
As for ranting itself, you have a novel view of the police helping it! Historically, police are the enemy of that right; it's not by accident that the very first right enumerated in the Bill of Rights is freedom of speech. Still, you may have noticed last year the trend of increased spying and heavy-handed policing of speech on the Internet, embodied in such policies as the FBI's use of Carnivore to rifle through e-mail or a recent library appropriations bill requiring public libraries to install cyber-nanny censoring software. Again, one can go on.
Granted, we don't have enough facts at our disposal in the New Hampshire case. But we are not being critical in a vacuum. The habits of skepticism that you see on display here at slashdot are rational tools for seeing the world a bit more clearly.
These arrogant domain name threats ought to be seen for what they are: corporate attempts to colonize the Net.
I don't mean metaphorically only -- as in having draconian laws enacted, encroaching on freedoms, and spying. There's a real sense, too, which is part of the colonial tradition of renaming lands in the conqueror's own tongue...
I reject your premises about watching TV, and I despise your conclusions about value and meaning.
First, it's weak to blast TV watching for not being "productive." All aesthetic appreciation, whether performed in front of a TV or with a book, painting, or recording, is essentially about not being productive. If you bring your work ethic to the arts, you'll end up with little better than a paint-by-number understanding of what it can offer you.
Second, you mistake watching TV for a passive activity. Sure, you allow that there might be exceptions -- "a university course on a special cable channel or somesuch." This premise is shown to be wrong every time anyone critically watches television, an act that can occur whether you're watching the PBS News Hour or the satire "Action." It should be occuring even when you're watching a commercial. Don't mistake your own lazy relationship with media for a general rule that also applies to people with more demanding consciousness.
Third, I briefly have to sneer at your insistence that we evaluate our time based on how much we earn per hour. If money is your measurement, then of course watching TV can't live up to it. But to show you how false a yardstick you are using, suppose I offered you a deal: I'll pay you twice what you earn on the job....just to have you sit and watch TV! Quick, take my offer; it's your own value system I'm dangling out before you....
Fourth, we come to your list of what is more valuable than TV watching, and again we find you arguing from your proclivities to a general rule. Time with family, friends, volunteer work, hobbies, and climbing mountains are all more important to you than TV watching, so you insist they are better for everyone. Let us see. Of all those activities, only one is not purely selfish: "volunteering on community projects" could, potentially, help others, unless of course it's just tidying up the block inside a gaited community, in which case it's nothing noble. But let's grant you the benefit of the doubt, and say that your list is worthwhile. In fact, let us suppose that one already has sufficient time with family, friends, volunteerism, and hobbies -- plus an ongoing enrichment from the arts that is partly facilitated by TV. Aren't you, then, the poorer? We have it all, plus TV.
About mountain climbing, just to give you some food for thought: even with all its faults and lousy programming, TV has done much more for culture than climbing mountains ever did or will. That is because TV is communication between human beings, while mountain climbing is just physical self-gratification. Given a choice between obliterating piles of rock and preserving TV, any sensible culture would choose the tube.
Whatever the merits of the National Review (and I confess they are invisible to me), Kopel's piece is a good, straightforward look at the dangers in the bill.
:)
As for the comparison to Salon, I think it's rather silly to claim that Salon is "less biased." Like NR, it's an opinion journal. You expect bias in these places. That is why you read them.
Will they shoot something like this down? They should, and I hope they will. Then again, with more conservative (read: law and order, damnit) Justices on the bench, who knows?
One would hope, but the hope would be misplaced.
For fifteen years, the Rehnquist Court has been dismantling the Fourth Amendment. Expanding searches and seizures, removing traditional safeguards, and increasing police and prosecutorial power until it is now virtually unchecked, this Supreme Court has been the enemy of our ancient freedoms.
If this bill becomes law, it will face an inevitable court challenge. But defeating it has no guarantee, nor even a good likelihood, of success.
So to those who would say "just a bill, don't worry," I say: yes, it's just a bill. Worry. And take action by calling or writing your senator now.
Not to rain on your parade, but we have been one of the most religiously intolerant nations in modern history.
To say that we have gone past the recriminations of the colonies, or the prosecutions of Salem, or riots between Protestants and Catholics, or the exclusion of Jews by both from private and public institutions, and arrived at the point where we now mainly specialize in the imposition upon schools of diluted textbooks or the removal of banned books from their libraries....is only to say that we have become slighly more modest in our religious savagery.
It was precisely over fear of the awful repression practiced by religious authorities that the First Amendment -- the first, mind you -- insisted upon Congress staying out of law-making with respect to religion. It was a warning as well as a command. It still needs heeding.
"All this free content isn't going to continue to be free unless users pay for it somehow, and the payment is advertising," Mr. Tchong said.
But ad man Tchong's premise is wrong. What if we don't want "all this free content"?
As a subscriber to numerous print magazines and two newspapers, I couldn't care less if the commercial media stopped the flow of its content onto the web. That wouldn't affect me at all. Shut it all down now, if you like; in fact, please shut it down quickly so that we don't have to listen to lackies lecture us about the need for bigger and better ads.
What I want from the net is precisely what the Tchongs of this world don't get: I want stuff that didn't come out of the commercial mills. Stuff that people produce because they are driven to do so, nearly always at their own expense of time or love, or because they were pissed off or just burdened with an idea. That is the beauty of this medium -- and not its ability to become Fox News' ad-regurgitation trough.
The sentimental ending proves that it is the journey, not the destination, that matters in Tolkien.
It's awfully fun escaping the Shire, sitting in on the Council at Elrond, going through Moria, destroying Isengard, and fighting at the siege of Gondor. Those are the narrative highpoints for me.
Yet after the sundering of the Fellowship, things change for the worse. The interesting racial friction between the members of the Fellowship is, naturally, gone, and in its place there is quite a bit of flabby, slow-moving stuff -- on a recent rereading of the trilogy, I found myself skimming pages that held me spellbound twenty years ago, but really don't cut it today.
Some specific grumbles... Sam's endless solicitations of Frodo -- Tolkien's tiresome patrician paean to the servant-master relationship -- make the Mordor scenes almost unbearable. Gandalf, Tolkien's best creation, is never around enough. The verse is mainly bad (wisely, Jackson is cutting nearly all of it from the films).
That said, the story is still a wonder. Its themes of power corrupting and hope in renouncing corrupt power are as vital today as they were when Tolkien wrote them in the wreckage of WWII. I'm grateful for the books.