Quite the contrary, there is a bit of controversy surrounding an "unofficial" response from Vatican officials to the question of Kerry being guilty of heresy:
This headline is slightly skewed. US Web Servers were never shut down by the Italian police - only content was disabled.
Also, this article is about much more than what the Italian police did. Five sentences mention the Italian police incident, and over twenty times that content in the article are either not specific to the Italian police incident, or are about different incidents.
Presenting the situation in this manner is dishonest. If Slashdot wants to revive the Italian police censoring incident, then make the headline adjust accordingly. Don't grandstand five sentences with the same force as if the New York Times did a page one expose on the event. Mainstream media is bad enough with their slant, I was hoping we could avoid it here.
Mary was/is a virgin because she never had relations with a man. That she gave birth to Jesus is debatable as to whether that violates her viriginity.
As for other children, the other poster has identified the situation correctly - the original text is ambiguous on the terms used to describe Jesus's relatives. It is impossible to determine from the text with certainty whether they were siblings or cousins. When such ambiguity exists, an argument is resolved by appealing to Church Tradition, and that reports to us that she remained a virgin.
As for sinless, the Bible does not confirm her as having committed any sin whatsoever. Once again, Church Tradition resolves the situation by reporting that she was sinless.
As for reading the Bible... where exactly do you think the Bible comes from? The canonicity of both the New and Old Testament was decided in a series of Church councils over a hundred years after the last apostle died. If Church Tradition is good enough for you to dictate what books the Bible is composed of, why is not good enough for other truths?
The Italian's censorship was of VERY graphic blashemy, not just offensiveness. We're talking about a website whose title is "Porking Mary" and whose content depicts women masturbating theirselves with crucifixes and shots of women dressed as nuns taking it in the backdoor. All this, in a country who is predominantly Catholic and home to the Vatican.
I fail to see the "social good" in allowing this site to exist. The disadvantages far outweigh the advantage (if any) of this site existing. This site is about a very twisted marriage of religion and porn, and not about mere opposition to the Catholic faith.
Your statements on Catholic censorship are misinformed. Catholic leaders never tried to stop Copernicus, and in fact there is record of cardinals begging him to publish his works.
Galileo was censured/censored for mounting a very loud and public attack on theological doctrine with an unproven scientific theory whose design had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with astronomy.
As for the sites being blasphemous, they are, in fact, blasphemous. They've bannered a very graphic porn site with a Catholic icon who embodies purity, virginity, and sinlessness. They have screenshots of women masturbating theirselves with crucifixes as well as other hardcore penetration shots with women dressed as nuns.
Also, I don't see how anybody's right to make up their own mind has been restricted. I'm quite certain other porn sites exist in Italy and are allowed to exist, and that there is no law against "thinking" about blasphemy.
All personal liberties have limits, even in the Unites States, even the right to speech or expression. The only difference here is that Italians are almost entirely Catholic and believe that liberty ends when you begin using it to graphically slander the very religious truth that holds together their community. Note that I said "slander", not "oppose."
Actually, the U.S. began down the path of socialism before FDR came along, although FDR increased the acceleration. Established before FDR were particular departures from freedom and liberty - antitrust, business regulation, the federal reserve system, and "international" welfare through the first Roosevelt's brand of Cuban protectionism/expansionism and Wilson's goading for intervention in the Great War.
In fact, true capitalism was probably never practiced in the U.S. Even before the trustbusting era, there were monopoly-granting tariffs on imported goods and engagement in true criminal business practices that went unaddressed.
This is a very intriguing argument, because it a mirrors a belief that the only sustainable monopolies are those that are government granted.
However, I'm not sure that I agree with your concern about patents. First, because a solution to the problem would probably cause more harm than good (increased regulation of patent granting, and potential arbitrary patent revocation that is based on shifting political winds). Second, because the same patent "abuse" can be employed by competitors.
The use of patents you have detailed is almost a necessary evil of the system. The initial explanation for patent granting is the protection of intellectual property, as private ownership is crucial to accurate price assessment, which leads to efficency in the market. Is the government grant of such mini-monopolies worse than any alternative system? That could lead to another discussion.
No, sorry, thanks for playing. The "whole point" is being top dog by attracting customers, usually done by offering a better product. Is the point of a 100 meter race to beat your opponents mercilessly about the knees with a lead pipe so they can't run as well as you? No (unless you're Tonya Harding), the point is to run faster than they do.
Having a better product incorporates many things, one of which is offering better services for your product. Microsoft excels in this arena by making their products extremely accessable to the users of their product through their, albeit, questionable business practices. Practices that can also ultimately be used by their competitors - something which is hardly ever mentioned, but is very relevant.
Ethics aside, Microsoft has not inherently coerced anybody to do anything. At least, not that has been shown. Remember, only the state has the power to do that.
> "It's not as if they did anything criminal, after all."
Yes, they did. Whether or not you think it's fair, there are laws, and MS broke them.
The only laws they broke are the very laws we are debating. My argument here is not the fairness of the laws, though there may be some merit there, but of the contradictory nature of having a set of rules and restrictions (in the form of antitrust and business regulation) that are at odds with the very nature of the system they regulate.
Regulators and "trustbusters" are a peculiar bunch, anyway. If a company is charging a price that is too high, they claim "monopoly abuse." If companies charge the same price, they claim "collusion." If a company charges a price that is too low, they claim "predatory pricing." Does anything satisfy these people? Or do they just hold a general grudge that somebody, somewhere, is making money?
Funny you should mention IBM. OS/2, anyone?
OS/2's failure could indicate that Microsoft is merely doing everything right and that the profit margins in the bundled desktop OS/application market are very small. IBM could have tried much, much harder if they really cared about making a difference in that market. Perhaps they were afraid they would be targeted by regulators themselves for such actions.
I guess I don't understand the system. Under capitalism, being the top dog and driving your competitors out of business is the whole point... right? Isn't it contradictory to then punish somebody for merely "playing by the rules"? It's not as if they did anything criminal, after all.
Besides, couldn't you find a monopoly anywhere you looked, if you just narrowed the scope enough? It seems that if Microsoft were really pawning off below-market quality at market (or above) prices, competitors would come around looking to make some cash with offerings closer to market levels. No, I'm not talking about startups, but the real companies who can make a difference - the IBMs of the world.
To be fair, shouldn't we be equally suspicious of people who complain to regulators about "unfair business practices" and "monopoly abuse"? After all, it is easier to lobby and manipulate the coercive powers of the state than it is to actually get off your arse and compete.
There is more than enough organization and technology in place to prevent mass abuse of spam without government intervention.
Then why does it remain such a large problem?
I don't think spam is a large problem. Realistically, for most people, it's little more than aggravation at having to spend three seconds identifying a mail as spam and subsequently deleting. If spam were a large enough problem so as to seriously sap resources, ISPs, backbones, etc. would probably have their own traffic concerns and do something about it. You would see ISPs requiring mail server configurations to be examined, spam-reporting systems, traffic detection, and who knows what else - all in the name of saving money.
Unlikely? Not when 10% of your backbone traffic goes to spam. But the problem obviously isn't that bad, because they don't care.
It should not be possible for someone to sign you up to a mailing list without you having to return a confirmation e-mail.
But doesn't that already exist? Mailing list maintainers have mostly taken a step to fix that loophole by having confirmation messages. I shudder to think it could be a criminal act for me to not send a confirmation message to somebody who subscribes to a mailing list on my server. Besides, we could even go greyer - what about a university auto-subscribing you to relevant class mailing lists, general notice lists, and the like? Your job subscribing you to trade mailing lists relevant to your field of work?
The point is, some of these things are obviously beneficial. While a law coercing a mailing list maintainer to send confirmation messages sounds nice, is it such a huge problem that it's necessary? Should all of those organizations be coerced into asking their members if they want to be subscribed?
What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value?
What is of "immense informative value" to you might be radical nut-speak to me. I don't want Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Falwell deciding that I need to receive their e-mail because of its "immense informative value."
To quote somebody else, the Tiannanmen Square incident? Matt Drudge mass-mailing about a Watergate break-in? All of these would be prohibited under a spam law, and what's worse, the government would get to decide who to prosecute and who to let slide.
What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options?
I hope that you are kidding with this one. Are you telling me that every company that releases an office suite to compete with Microsoft Office has a moral right to spam the net?
They don't have a moral right, but a legal right. Microsoft is already well known - they don't have to use such tools. But with an anti-spam or spam regulatory law, any company that wanted to compete just lost the ability to inform people about their product. Why prevent them from doing so if the backbone companies don't really care and the ISPs aren't getting enough complaints from users to really care?
I would much sooner entrust this control to democratically elected representatives than to trust in the judgement of the greedy, unethical people who now bombard us with spam.
A democratically elected representative can be just as greedy and unethical as the people who now send the spam. And besides - I'm not asking you to put your trust in the hands of the spammer, but the hands of people between you and the spammer. If you don't like your ISPs slack policy of dealing with spammers, choose another. If none exist, then the problem must not be that bad.
On the other hand, a regulatory spam law brings all the baggage along with it. An arm of the government has to be constructed to deal with regulating businesses in antispam practices. The national police force (read FBI) now has to add spam investigations and policing to their workload. So not only are my individual liberties at risk from an empowered police force, my purse is at risk from bureaucratic waste and higher taxes. Small businesses and startups now have it even harder, as they have to put up with the regulations as an added business cost.
Has spam really gotten that bad?
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
That's the whole reason spam works. If a spammer steals one penny from each of 1 million people to pay his advertising costs, he will have stolen $10,000, but no one person has suffered enough of a loss to take legal action.
This sort of thing hasn't happened before? That's what class-action lawsuits are for. It only takes a few successful class-action lawsuits to spook people from using spam on a mass scale.
And besides - aren't you defeating your own claim that spam is a large problem? Is one penny's worth of a person's time a large problem? If that's a large problem, I'm sure legitimate ad agencies would love to hear your view on regulatory laws for TV commercials and banner ads.
There is more than enough organization and technology in place to prevent mass abuse of spam without government intervention. The grey areas are places we probably don't want a government arbitrating. What if a friend signs you up to a mailing list? What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value? What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options? Do we really want to vest this kind of regulatory control in a government that could potentially abuse it?
If there were no feasible way for the private sector to regulate itself, regulation might be worth considering. However, that is not the case. Upstream providers can filter mail, refuse to route packets from offending domains, use tools such as ORBS to block mail, etc. That's not even getting into personal efforts to deal with spam.
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
Getting the government involved is usually a bad idea, because once they have the authority, they never let go. Everybody should take seriously Thomas Jefferson's admonition that government governs best which governs least.
The point is, regardless of Harry Browne's personal stance on abortion, the federal government has no authority to legislate this matter one way or the other. Letting the states decide how to handle abortion is not an official stance one way or the other.
The Constitution is very clear on what crimes the fed has jurisdiction over - high crimes such as treason, counterfeit, and piracy. The common crimes are to be left up to the states.
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> Large corporations lobby the government to extend the period of time an artist's work is copyrighted. (A power of the government explicitly stated in the constitution.) As a result, despite there being no benefit to the person who actually created the work, I have to pay for the right to have a copy of a song written by someone who has been dead for years.
This is very true, and I am loathe to argue about it as I think it has more to do with the problems of intellectual property than it does the potential "evils" of a Libertarian ideology. Unlike physical property, intellectual property can be exactly copied and/or dually owned, and I believe the constitution fails to adequately address this situation, as it more or less treats it the same way as physical property.
> Some things are better if they are privately owned. Some things are better if they are publicly owned. Some can go either way. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out which are which.
The Libertarian ideology adopts the common law view of property ownership in that property is privately owned unless seized by eminent domain. And that should be used sparingly and only for a truly public use - one that is broadly enjoyed by the public, and not by some narrow part of the public. In the case of the fed, it means only for a constitutionally authorized use.
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> The whole point of getting the public to fund research is to broaden public knowledge and to research things that may or may not have an immediate payoff but might be good things to know anyway.
But the public funds research through charity endowments if the pursuit has no clear monetary reward. The US public did just fine funding research before the government came along and mucked things about. Besides - putting the government in a position to influence research is a bad idea. What happens if a political party or individual with a tyrannical bent comes to power?
> how free am I when the businessmen are in control?
You are free, because YOU are in control. If you don't like the way a company does business, don't do business with them. As long as they are not infringing upon your freedom to life and property, they're in the clear. If not, take the matter up in a civil court.
> How free am when I can't make a copy of some music some dead guy made?
Oh please. How would less government cause this to happen?
> How free am I if someone else owns everything, from the water I drink, to the air I breathe?
You imply that public ownership is preferrable to private ownership. Communism?
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On welfare:
> This sounds like turning people out on the street to me.
It sounds to me like people getting tax money back with which to donate to charities and removing a system that encourages dependence on the state. Clinton's welfare reform helped, but really only scratched the surface - while the number of caseloads have dropped, money going to welfare has increased.
Elimination of the welfare system will put money back into the hands of the people, and they will put it into charity. Every time taxes have been cut in recent memory, charitable spending has increased.
If you want to help the poor, where would you rather put your money? In a charity of your choice, or a government welfare system? Who would do a better job at managing it?
Besides, the constitution does not give the fed any authority to even create a welfare system like it has. It's too bad the Supreme Court has been stacked to not see it this way.
On Families:
> It seems to me that people will work long and hard for more money anyway. Greed is deep-rooted in the American psyche and I can't see how repealing the income tax has anything to do with people spending more time with their families.
It's simple. By removing the 15% tax I pay (not to say the social security and higher tax brackets), I'm bringing home more money. More money means less of a chance that mom will need to get a job to help support the family. Or maybe she can just get a part time job.
On Military Service:
Browne> "I spent three years in the Army, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to be in the Army."
> From the man who would like to become our commander in chief.
He's making the point that the primary purpose of the army is to ward off attack, and serving that purpose will probably put you in harm's way. Why would anybody want to put theirselves in harm's way if they don't have to? Our army is so hopelessly advanced, any justification of further spending, expansion, or duties would hard to come by.
On Selling off the Environment:
> I am assuming this includes National Forest lands, BLM lands, perhapes even National Wilderness Areas. This is almost as bad as Bush wanting to drill in the ANWR. Selling these lands in auction essentially to the highest corporate bidder could possibly close many of them to public use.
This has nothing to do with Bush wanting to drill in the ANWR. You assume that the government is doing a good job of maintaing its land now and that any purchaser will seek to destroy it or not let anybody onto it. Should I point out the horrible wildlife management that occurs in many national forests, or the lack of land management in the government's wilderness areas that exacerbated the recent wildires that consumed vast stretches of land in the west? How about the large quantities of land the government leases out to ranchers who subsequently trash it because it's not their own. Who takes better care of land? Renters or owners? Most of the surface polution in the US occurs on govnerment owned property. And you think that private owners would do worse? Please explain.
On closing down federal programs:
> Say goodbye to federal loans for education, research grants for science, national forests and parks, etc. Say hello to corporate control of the environment, massive unchecked monopolies, and an increase in federal crime becuase without federal law enforcement, who will enforce the laws of the US constitiution?
Somebody else responded to the loans and grants, and I've already responded to the parks and corporate control of environment. Massive unchecked monopolies are only bad if they harm the consumer. If a company achieves true monopoly status it will only retain it if it out-competes its competitors. Otherwise, competitors will slowly begin to chip away at it until it does not have monopoly status any more.
As far as federal crime goes, how relevant is that now? States have more than enough power to rid crime from theirselves and can easily share databases of crime information. Federal law enforcement does hardly anything while consuming vast amounts of taxpayer money and threatening our civil liberties. The only reason for federal law enforcement is to keep local corruption in check, and that is only there because of the stupid drug war.
People keep claiming that a Libertarian way of life will result in people dying in the streets, and I challenge anybody to prove it. At the same time, I challenge them to show a single government program that has succeeded in its purpose.
Having a company collect trivial marketing information should be of no concern to anybody. There are laws in place to prevent abuse of information gathered in this way. It's just like a doctor or lawyer knowing the goods on you - yeah, they know, but if they abuse the info, they're going to jail.
Besides, if it means that I might be exposed to products and/or information that is more specifically targetted to my needs and desires, then so be it.
It's a shame this response was actually moderated up to a score of 3, as it is full of the typical anti-religious braying, cites very little "real" truth and is really uninformative in regards to the news item it is in response to. Unfortunately, since it somehow got moderated up, I have to read it and subsequently respond.
> If you state that such changes are "only a theory", you are lying through the skin of your teeth.
This is an utter falsehood. The entire "theory" of evolution is based on evidentialist findings and cannot be proven solely by deductive or logical methods. It might be actually correct, but until it is proven logically, it is not "fact". At the very best, it is "plausible" or a "strong possibility" that evolution is in fact the means by which creatures have become they way they are. But because Darwin has some good ideas, and there is a fossil record, that does not make evolution a universal truth, and it should not be considered one.
Secondly, citing those few people's highly debated arguments was in poor form. cje admitted that "a few creationists" believe this and that, and then proceeded to pass some sort of judgement on the entirety of creationists. I might as well use the same tactic on those naturalists who have extremely controversial beliefs.
The remark of cje is typical of the naturalist objection to creationism. The typical naturalist will use "science" to say that evolution is the only "proveable" method by which all of use has gotten here today. The truth of the matter is, science (the gathering and analyzation of empirical data) has shown nothing decisive on the matter, but at most "a possibility" or "plausibility". Challenging creationists to state a common theory and saying they haven't done so by showing some differences that a few of them have is just plain silly. There are common beliefs held among all of those who believe in creationism, and because cje has not bothered to do his homework and discover those beliefs, his arguments and challenges appear weak at best.
And, to prove that I'm not just braying and citing unfounded opinion, I now leave a reference to a highly respected creationist philosopher's views on Darwinian naturalism : Darwin, Mind, and Meaning by Alvin Plantina.
Is it just me or is reliability a silent issue when NT supporters critically review Linux? Hardly ever do I see any mention of reliability when Linux is criticized and/or slammed. To me, that's a topic of great concern. I'd much rather spend a little more time setting up and configuring a Linux system (that cost me a few G's less than the roughly equivalent NT counterpart) and have it be highly reliable than not. NT just doesn't seem to have these success stories. I hardly ever hear anybody bragging about their NT uptimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Pope John Paul II never "endorsed" evolution. I think you all read too much into his statement from around ten years ago.
True, evolution is more than a hypothesis: It's a theory.
I'm not sure where you obtained that bit of information from, but the Vatican did nothing of sort:
Bush-Kerry: For the Vatican, the Odds Are Even
Quite the contrary, there is a bit of controversy surrounding an "unofficial" response from Vatican officials to the question of Kerry being guilty of heresy:
About that Kerry Excommunication Thing
- pel
This headline is slightly skewed. US Web Servers were never shut down by the Italian police - only content was disabled.
Also, this article is about much more than what the Italian police did. Five sentences mention the Italian police incident, and over twenty times that content in the article are either not specific to the Italian police incident, or are about different incidents.
Presenting the situation in this manner is dishonest. If Slashdot wants to revive the Italian police censoring incident, then make the headline adjust accordingly. Don't grandstand five sentences with the same force as if the New York Times did a page one expose on the event. Mainstream media is bad enough with their slant, I was hoping we could avoid it here.
Tradition and Living Magisterium
Mary was/is a virgin because she never had relations with a man. That she gave birth to Jesus is debatable as to whether that violates her viriginity.
As for other children, the other poster has identified the situation correctly - the original text is ambiguous on the terms used to describe Jesus's relatives. It is impossible to determine from the text with certainty whether they were siblings or cousins. When such ambiguity exists, an argument is resolved by appealing to Church Tradition, and that reports to us that she remained a virgin.
As for sinless, the Bible does not confirm her as having committed any sin whatsoever. Once again, Church Tradition resolves the situation by reporting that she was sinless.
As for reading the Bible... where exactly do you think the Bible comes from? The canonicity of both the New and Old Testament was decided in a series of Church councils over a hundred years after the last apostle died. If Church Tradition is good enough for you to dictate what books the Bible is composed of, why is not good enough for other truths?
The Italian's censorship was of VERY graphic blashemy, not just offensiveness. We're talking about a website whose title is "Porking Mary" and whose content depicts women masturbating theirselves with crucifixes and shots of women dressed as nuns taking it in the backdoor. All this, in a country who is predominantly Catholic and home to the Vatican.
I fail to see the "social good" in allowing this site to exist. The disadvantages far outweigh the advantage (if any) of this site existing. This site is about a very twisted marriage of religion and porn, and not about mere opposition to the Catholic faith.
Your statements on Catholic censorship are misinformed. Catholic leaders never tried to stop Copernicus, and in fact there is record of cardinals begging him to publish his works.
Galileo was censured/censored for mounting a very loud and public attack on theological doctrine with an unproven scientific theory whose design had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with astronomy.
As for the sites being blasphemous, they are, in fact, blasphemous. They've bannered a very graphic porn site with a Catholic icon who embodies purity, virginity, and sinlessness. They have screenshots of women masturbating theirselves with crucifixes as well as other hardcore penetration shots with women dressed as nuns.
Also, I don't see how anybody's right to make up their own mind has been restricted. I'm quite certain other porn sites exist in Italy and are allowed to exist, and that there is no law against "thinking" about blasphemy.
All personal liberties have limits, even in the Unites States, even the right to speech or expression. The only difference here is that Italians are almost entirely Catholic and believe that liberty ends when you begin using it to graphically slander the very religious truth that holds together their community. Note that I said "slander", not "oppose."
In fact, true capitalism was probably never practiced in the U.S. Even before the trustbusting era, there were monopoly-granting tariffs on imported goods and engagement in true criminal business practices that went unaddressed.
However, I'm not sure that I agree with your concern about patents. First, because a solution to the problem would probably cause more harm than good (increased regulation of patent granting, and potential arbitrary patent revocation that is based on shifting political winds). Second, because the same patent "abuse" can be employed by competitors.
The use of patents you have detailed is almost a necessary evil of the system. The initial explanation for patent granting is the protection of intellectual property, as private ownership is crucial to accurate price assessment, which leads to efficency in the market. Is the government grant of such mini-monopolies worse than any alternative system? That could lead to another discussion.
Having a better product incorporates many things, one of which is offering better services for your product. Microsoft excels in this arena by making their products extremely accessable to the users of their product through their, albeit, questionable business practices. Practices that can also ultimately be used by their competitors - something which is hardly ever mentioned, but is very relevant.
Ethics aside, Microsoft has not inherently coerced anybody to do anything. At least, not that has been shown. Remember, only the state has the power to do that.
The only laws they broke are the very laws we are debating. My argument here is not the fairness of the laws, though there may be some merit there, but of the contradictory nature of having a set of rules and restrictions (in the form of antitrust and business regulation) that are at odds with the very nature of the system they regulate.
Regulators and "trustbusters" are a peculiar bunch, anyway. If a company is charging a price that is too high, they claim "monopoly abuse." If companies charge the same price, they claim "collusion." If a company charges a price that is too low, they claim "predatory pricing." Does anything satisfy these people? Or do they just hold a general grudge that somebody, somewhere, is making money?
OS/2's failure could indicate that Microsoft is merely doing everything right and that the profit margins in the bundled desktop OS/application market are very small. IBM could have tried much, much harder if they really cared about making a difference in that market. Perhaps they were afraid they would be targeted by regulators themselves for such actions.
Besides, couldn't you find a monopoly anywhere you looked, if you just narrowed the scope enough? It seems that if Microsoft were really pawning off below-market quality at market (or above) prices, competitors would come around looking to make some cash with offerings closer to market levels. No, I'm not talking about startups, but the real companies who can make a difference - the IBMs of the world.
To be fair, shouldn't we be equally suspicious of people who complain to regulators about "unfair business practices" and "monopoly abuse"? After all, it is easier to lobby and manipulate the coercive powers of the state than it is to actually get off your arse and compete.
I don't think spam is a large problem. Realistically, for most people, it's little more than aggravation at having to spend three seconds identifying a mail as spam and subsequently deleting. If spam were a large enough problem so as to seriously sap resources, ISPs, backbones, etc. would probably have their own traffic concerns and do something about it. You would see ISPs requiring mail server configurations to be examined, spam-reporting systems, traffic detection, and who knows what else - all in the name of saving money.
Unlikely? Not when 10% of your backbone traffic goes to spam. But the problem obviously isn't that bad, because they don't care.
It should not be possible for someone to sign you up to a mailing list without you having to return a confirmation e-mail.
But doesn't that already exist? Mailing list maintainers have mostly taken a step to fix that loophole by having confirmation messages. I shudder to think it could be a criminal act for me to not send a confirmation message to somebody who subscribes to a mailing list on my server. Besides, we could even go greyer - what about a university auto-subscribing you to relevant class mailing lists, general notice lists, and the like? Your job subscribing you to trade mailing lists relevant to your field of work?
The point is, some of these things are obviously beneficial. While a law coercing a mailing list maintainer to send confirmation messages sounds nice, is it such a huge problem that it's necessary? Should all of those organizations be coerced into asking their members if they want to be subscribed?
What is of "immense informative value" to you might be radical nut-speak to me. I don't want Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Falwell deciding that I need to receive their e-mail because of its "immense informative value."To quote somebody else, the Tiannanmen Square incident? Matt Drudge mass-mailing about a Watergate break-in? All of these would be prohibited under a spam law, and what's worse, the government would get to decide who to prosecute and who to let slide.
I hope that you are kidding with this one. Are you telling me that every company that releases an office suite to compete with Microsoft Office has a moral right to spam the net?They don't have a moral right, but a legal right. Microsoft is already well known - they don't have to use such tools. But with an anti-spam or spam regulatory law, any company that wanted to compete just lost the ability to inform people about their product. Why prevent them from doing so if the backbone companies don't really care and the ISPs aren't getting enough complaints from users to really care?
I would much sooner entrust this control to democratically elected representatives than to trust in the judgement of the greedy, unethical people who now bombard us with spam.
A democratically elected representative can be just as greedy and unethical as the people who now send the spam. And besides - I'm not asking you to put your trust in the hands of the spammer, but the hands of people between you and the spammer. If you don't like your ISPs slack policy of dealing with spammers, choose another. If none exist, then the problem must not be that bad.
On the other hand, a regulatory spam law brings all the baggage along with it. An arm of the government has to be constructed to deal with regulating businesses in antispam practices. The national police force (read FBI) now has to add spam investigations and policing to their workload. So not only are my individual liberties at risk from an empowered police force, my purse is at risk from bureaucratic waste and higher taxes. Small businesses and startups now have it even harder, as they have to put up with the regulations as an added business cost.
Has spam really gotten that bad?
That's the whole reason spam works. If a spammer steals one penny from each of 1 million people to pay his advertising costs, he will have stolen $10,000, but no one person has suffered enough of a loss to take legal action.This sort of thing hasn't happened before? That's what class-action lawsuits are for. It only takes a few successful class-action lawsuits to spook people from using spam on a mass scale.
And besides - aren't you defeating your own claim that spam is a large problem? Is one penny's worth of a person's time a large problem? If that's a large problem, I'm sure legitimate ad agencies would love to hear your view on regulatory laws for TV commercials and banner ads.
There is more than enough organization and technology in place to prevent mass abuse of spam without government intervention. The grey areas are places we probably don't want a government arbitrating. What if a friend signs you up to a mailing list? What about mass political mailings that are of immense informative value? What if a company is limited in their competitve tools to fight entrenched near-monopolistic companies and mass, unsolicited email messages is one of their only options? Do we really want to vest this kind of regulatory control in a government that could potentially abuse it?
If there were no feasible way for the private sector to regulate itself, regulation might be worth considering. However, that is not the case. Upstream providers can filter mail, refuse to route packets from offending domains, use tools such as ORBS to block mail, etc. That's not even getting into personal efforts to deal with spam.
And, if all this fails, a person can use the civil courts as a last resort to arbitrate particularly offending cases.
Getting the government involved is usually a bad idea, because once they have the authority, they never let go. Everybody should take seriously Thomas Jefferson's admonition that government governs best which governs least.
The point is, regardless of Harry Browne's personal stance on abortion, the federal government has no authority to legislate this matter one way or the other. Letting the states decide how to handle abortion is not an official stance one way or the other.
The Constitution is very clear on what crimes the fed has jurisdiction over - high crimes such as treason, counterfeit, and piracy. The common crimes are to be left up to the states.
> Large corporations lobby the government to extend the period of time an artist's work is copyrighted. (A power of the government explicitly stated in the constitution.) As a result, despite there being no benefit to the person who actually created the work, I have to pay for the right to have a copy of a song written by someone who has been dead for years.
This is very true, and I am loathe to argue about it as I think it has more to do with the problems of intellectual property than it does the potential "evils" of a Libertarian ideology. Unlike physical property, intellectual property can be exactly copied and/or dually owned, and I believe the constitution fails to adequately address this situation, as it more or less treats it the same way as physical property.
> Some things are better if they are privately owned. Some things are better if they are publicly owned. Some can go either way. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out which are which.
The Libertarian ideology adopts the common law view of property ownership in that property is privately owned unless seized by eminent domain. And that should be used sparingly and only for a truly public use - one that is broadly enjoyed by the public, and not by some narrow part of the public. In the case of the fed, it means only for a constitutionally authorized use.
> The whole point of getting the public to fund research is to broaden public knowledge and to research things that may or may not have an immediate payoff but might be good things to know anyway.
But the public funds research through charity endowments if the pursuit has no clear monetary reward. The US public did just fine funding research before the government came along and mucked things about. Besides - putting the government in a position to influence research is a bad idea. What happens if a political party or individual with a tyrannical bent comes to power?
> how free am I when the businessmen are in control?
You are free, because YOU are in control. If you don't like the way a company does business, don't do business with them. As long as they are not infringing upon your freedom to life and property, they're in the clear. If not, take the matter up in a civil court.
> How free am when I can't make a copy of some music some dead guy made?
Oh please. How would less government cause this to happen?
> How free am I if someone else owns everything, from the water I drink, to the air I breathe?
You imply that public ownership is preferrable to private ownership. Communism?
On welfare:
> This sounds like turning people out on the street to me.
It sounds to me like people getting tax money back with which to donate to charities and removing a system that encourages dependence on the state. Clinton's welfare reform helped, but really only scratched the surface - while the number of caseloads have dropped, money going to welfare has increased.
Elimination of the welfare system will put money back into the hands of the people, and they will put it into charity. Every time taxes have been cut in recent memory, charitable spending has increased.
If you want to help the poor, where would you rather put your money? In a charity of your choice, or a government welfare system? Who would do a better job at managing it?
Besides, the constitution does not give the fed any authority to even create a welfare system like it has. It's too bad the Supreme Court has been stacked to not see it this way.
On Families:
> It seems to me that people will work long and hard for more money anyway. Greed is deep-rooted in the American psyche and I can't see how repealing the income tax has anything to do with people spending more time with their families.
It's simple. By removing the 15% tax I pay (not to say the social security and higher tax brackets), I'm bringing home more money. More money means less of a chance that mom will need to get a job to help support the family. Or maybe she can just get a part time job.
On Military Service:
Browne> "I spent three years in the Army, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to be in the Army."
> From the man who would like to become our commander in chief.
He's making the point that the primary purpose of the army is to ward off attack, and serving that purpose will probably put you in harm's way. Why would anybody want to put theirselves in harm's way if they don't have to? Our army is so hopelessly advanced, any justification of further spending, expansion, or duties would hard to come by.
On Selling off the Environment:
> I am assuming this includes National Forest lands, BLM lands, perhapes even National Wilderness Areas. This is almost as bad as Bush wanting to drill in the ANWR. Selling these lands in auction essentially to the highest corporate bidder could possibly close many of them to public use.
This has nothing to do with Bush wanting to drill in the ANWR. You assume that the government is doing a good job of maintaing its land now and that any purchaser will seek to destroy it or not let anybody onto it. Should I point out the horrible wildlife management that occurs in many national forests, or the lack of land management in the government's wilderness areas that exacerbated the recent wildires that consumed vast stretches of land in the west? How about the large quantities of land the government leases out to ranchers who subsequently trash it because it's not their own. Who takes better care of land? Renters or owners? Most of the surface polution in the US occurs on govnerment owned property. And you think that private owners would do worse? Please explain.
On closing down federal programs:
> Say goodbye to federal loans for education, research grants for science, national forests and parks, etc. Say hello to corporate control of the environment, massive unchecked monopolies, and an increase in federal crime becuase without federal law enforcement, who will enforce the laws of the US constitiution?
Somebody else responded to the loans and grants, and I've already responded to the parks and corporate control of environment. Massive unchecked monopolies are only bad if they harm the consumer. If a company achieves true monopoly status it will only retain it if it out-competes its competitors. Otherwise, competitors will slowly begin to chip away at it until it does not have monopoly status any more.
As far as federal crime goes, how relevant is that now? States have more than enough power to rid crime from theirselves and can easily share databases of crime information. Federal law enforcement does hardly anything while consuming vast amounts of taxpayer money and threatening our civil liberties. The only reason for federal law enforcement is to keep local corruption in check, and that is only there because of the stupid drug war.
People keep claiming that a Libertarian way of life will result in people dying in the streets, and I challenge anybody to prove it. At the same time, I challenge them to show a single government program that has succeeded in its purpose.
Having a company collect trivial marketing information should be of no concern to anybody. There are laws in place to prevent abuse of information gathered in this way. It's just like a doctor or lawyer knowing the goods on you - yeah, they know, but if they abuse the info, they're going to jail.
Besides, if it means that I might be exposed to products and/or information that is more specifically targetted to my needs and desires, then so be it.
> If you state that such changes are "only a theory", you are lying through the skin of your teeth.
This is an utter falsehood. The entire "theory" of evolution is based on evidentialist findings and cannot be proven solely by deductive or logical methods. It might be actually correct, but until it is proven logically, it is not "fact". At the very best, it is "plausible" or a "strong possibility" that evolution is in fact the means by which creatures have become they way they are. But because Darwin has some good ideas, and there is a fossil record, that does not make evolution a universal truth, and it should not be considered one.
Secondly, citing those few people's highly debated arguments was in poor form. cje admitted that "a few creationists" believe this and that, and then proceeded to pass some sort of judgement on the entirety of creationists. I might as well use the same tactic on those naturalists who have extremely controversial beliefs.
The remark of cje is typical of the naturalist objection to creationism. The typical naturalist will use "science" to say that evolution is the only "proveable" method by which all of use has gotten here today. The truth of the matter is, science (the gathering and analyzation of empirical data) has shown nothing decisive on the matter, but at most "a possibility" or "plausibility". Challenging creationists to state a common theory and saying they haven't done so by showing some differences that a few of them have is just plain silly. There are common beliefs held among all of those who believe in creationism, and because cje has not bothered to do his homework and discover those beliefs, his arguments and challenges appear weak at best.
And, to prove that I'm not just braying and citing unfounded opinion, I now leave a reference to a highly respected creationist philosopher's views on Darwinian naturalism : Darwin, Mind, and Meaning by Alvin Plantina.
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Paul Lange
pel@spaceship.com