Does the fact that it's wrong for the government to force Wal*Mart to stop controlling the content what it sells mean that Wal*Mart is right to control that content? Does it mean, as you appear to imply, that anyone advocating not shopping at Wal*Mart because of its alleged repressive policies is wrong, and if so, are you, by your own argument, forcing people to buy at Wal*Mart?
I didn't read anyone advocating government intervention here. I read people saying that Wal*Mart engages in repressive sales policies which impact on what types of content people can easily access, and that those policies justified avoiding Wal*Mart and supporting alternative outlets. So I don't quite see the reason for the knee-jerk anti-government response.
The fact that the government doesn't ban the repression of content, and arguably doesn't have the moral right to do so, doesn't make repressing content right. And it certainly doesn't mean we have to encourage them.
Exactly. What Wal*Mart needs to do is just sell one PC. It can be a Dell Laptop, with 256M of RAM and a 15G HD, and a Celeron.
That'll keep the punters coming in. One PC, nice and simple. No choices that might "confuse" someone, like differing amounts of memory or disk space or processors. Sure, there may be no configuration that's actually appropriate for >30% of users, but, in the cause of making things user friendly, should that matter?
Likewise, what's the deal with all the different model cars out there? Ford sells both SUVs AND Minivans AND boat-cars and normal cars. And, get this, some of them are available in diesel and gasoline versions, not to mention totally confusing potential consumers with "automatic" vs "manual" transmissions, and, unbelievably, different colors.
Ford would get more customers if it stuck with just the one model, say, a boat car with a 5L engine and an automatic transmission. Blue. Yep, blue would be good. That way, when a customer walks into a Ford dealer, they wouldn't be confused by a dazzling array of choices when all they want is a way to drive from A to B. They could just nip in, point at the Crown Vic they want, pay the money and leave.
And restaurants. Geez, is there anything worse than looking at some multipage menu with choices galore? What's wrong with a burger? A good, old fashioned, American burger. With cheese. Everyone likes cheese on their burgers. It's damned unamerican not to want cheese. I've been in restaurants and I've walked out, yes, walked out, because they expect me to spend hours and hours wading through some list of "choices" when all I want is something to eat. Burgers are userfriendly, efficient to make, and they feed just about anybody. Everyone knows what they are. The Outback Steakhouse needs to throw away their current huge three or four page "menus" and stick to burgers, a simple single design everyone can understand: A sesame seed bun, a 1/4lb beef burger, a sheet of American cheese, a simple lettuce leaf, a slice of tomato, a slice of pickle, and some ketchup and mayo. If anyone wants something other than that, surely they know enough about food to build their own damned burgers.
That's the problem with America today. Too many choices. When my grandmother can go into a fancy restaurant and understand the menu, that's when America will be ready for the desktop.
FWIW handguns were not outlawed in Britain due to gun crime, but fear of abuse by licenced holders, after one licenced gun owner, Thomas Hamilton, went bezerk in a school in Scotland.
Before the handgun ban, relatively few were in circulation, and it's fair to say that the law itself cannot have made a blind bit of difference one way or another as far as gun related crime goes for that reason. The usual arguments that widespread gun-ownership deters crime cannot apply in a country where widespread gun-ownership did not exist.
(Interestingly, gun related crime has increased in Britain since then, but for an entirely unexpected reason: Britain became the center for the illegal gun trade outside of the US. Bizarre.)
I write this for the purposes of explanation. I've yet to make my mind up on issues related to banning guns, having gun-toting friends but also having lived in Britain and being thankful for an environment where having a confrontation with the police doesn't run any danger of having a lethal weapon pointed at you...
Well, that's kind of true, but I'm pretty sure that nobody will ever forget that Bill Gates invented the microcomputer, or that Marc Andreesson invented the World Wide Web...
There's quite a good debunking that puts the entire thing in context - essentially a second reading of this list of horrors actually shows it's mostly innuendo and cheap showmanship.
There strikes me as being two processes involved here, duplication and destruction. The argument seems to be that the two together has the same affect as moving a person to another location, and that if both are done the second entity is the same as the first.
That doesn't make sense, because nobody in their right mind would suggest the second entity is the same as the first if both exist at once. Destroying the first cannot possibly change that, that's an attempt to remove the evidence, not an attempt to move the position of sentience.
Apparently Lindows is based on BSD Linux. Major misprint or what people have been asking for for a while (BSD/Linux would be BSD userland + Linux kernel, as opposed to GNU/Linux which is GNU OS + Linux kernel)?
It does answer the licencing questions - I recall Apple saying that the reason why BASH wasn't shipped as the Mac OS X shell was because it would then become a major component of the operating system and arguably the GPL licence would then apply to the entire distribution.
Well, every other month we get a story on Slashdot about how Hollywood are using clusters of Linux machines to render the latest-greatest special effects/animations/etc, inbetween suing the hell out of free-software/open source programmers for daring create software to allow them to watch the movies they paid for and worked on the code to help create.
Hollywood's strategy is pretty clear: Take what's offered, never give back.
No, it isn't, and more to the point this isn't unusual. I had a DVD player for six months, hooked up to my TV through the VCR, before I had to get a modulator because I bought something with Macrovision on it. Before then, I'd thought that the consensus that DVDs were unusuable without a direct TV hookup or a modulator meant that my VCR was funky - it never occured to me that Macrovision might not actually cover 90% of discs. This includes blockbusters like The Fifth Element, Reservoir Dogs, Groundhog Day, etc.
If something is protected with Macrovision, it'll generally have the Macrovision logo on the back together with the Dolby Digital and Region stuff. Those who think it's compulsory might want to flick through their DVD collection and look.
Now this article is newsworthy if it's suggesting that Harry Potter is Region Free and CSS Free too. But there's nothing to hint at that in the write up. Harry Potter is macrovision free because it doesn't actually help, it's expensive (DVD content makers have to pay a per-disc * per-crippled-frame royalty for using the system), and it's a load of crap.
betamax was far superior in quality over VHS, and now all those betamax owners are stuck w/ useless players...
No it wasn't, it was marginally better perhaps but there are enough people around who claim, honest to god, that they couldn't perceive a difference for us to treat the whole BetaMax was massively superior arguement as flawed.
Besides which, even market share is not a complete measure of success. Apple have been floating around the 5% mark now for fifteen years, are healthy, profitable, producing a product that is well supported both by themselves and third parties, that is easily obtained, and easily maintained. But they have a 5% market share. If Sirius caters to a particular type of consumer, it could do very well without ever entering more than 1% of the overall digital satellite market. The key is that it has to be profitable, and potential buyers have to feel they wont be left in the cold. *sigh* I shouldn't respond to my own trolls, but just this once...
Oh bullshit. Where do you think legislation like the CBDTPA (formerly the SSSCA), DMCA, CDA (Communications Decency Act), et al. come from? Hint - it aint the Republicans, it's Hollywood (or as it's known as in Washington - the Democratic Party).
You do know that, until last year, the Republicans have had a majority in both houses since 1994.
None of the above bills, those that were put to a vote, could have been passed without the complete support of the Repubs.
Just saying.
What's chilling about the Republicans is not what they do when they're in someone's back pocket, as Hollings is, but what they do when they are not.
Actually, no, it is exactly a use of the privilege of the employer to choose who to hire. The employer is being allowed to fire "officials and agents who do not observe the duties and responsibilities implicit in the performance of their tasks."
...which is exactly what you'd expect. There is NOTHING whatsoever in that ruling that allows people to be sued, imprisoned, or in any other way challenged using the legal system for criticising the EU. Nothing.
Indeed, the Supreme Court (or was it the Court of Appeals, I'll have to look it up) recently held that the Nuremberg Files website, which similarly promoted hate against doctors that perform abortions, was unconstitutional.
...was constitutional to censor, not was unconstitutional.
OK, so if the government states that certain opinions are not legal, and anyone who states those opinions is to be punished, that doesn't strike you as a violation of free speech?
Really?
It's a fine line, and one which has to be ruled carefully, but whipping up hatred against groups of people based on arbitrary attributes which are not inherently anti-social does strike me as being as legimate to punish as, say, slander and libel which are merely more specific examples of the same laws. The US has laws governing the latter, and they've always been held to be constitutional. Indeed, the Supreme Court (or was it the Court of Appeals, I'll have to look it up) recently held that the Nuremberg Files website, which similarly promoted hate against doctors that perform abortions, was unconstitutional.
Whipping up hatred against specific groups can put those groups in physical danger, and can create an atmosphere in which members of those groups are unable to exercise their freedoms knowing that the very real threat of violence exists if they do so.
I'm not arguing that rules against hate speech should be carte-blanch. But the existance of rules against hate speech should not be seen as, by itself, a massive invasion of human rights unless those rules are disproportionate and used to silence speech which is clearly not inciteful.
All of which said, we currently do not have articles before us that explain exactly what these politicians, and indeed our homophobic priest, actually said, and who fined the former, so it's hard to comment on the specific examples.
But that's not what the court ruled -- the court ruled, as the article clearly states, that the citizens of the EU have a `human right' not to hear their government disparaged
And I'm telling you that the article is not a legimate interpretation of what the court ruled. You're reading a hysterical interpretation of what the EJC ruled, that conflicts with what it actually said. The fact that it confuses the ECHR with the ECJ by itself should be ringing alarm bells. In any case, the ECJ can rule what it wants, the ECHR trumps it in those countries that have signed up. Even if the ECJ had ruled that European citizens have the "right" to be denied access to conflicting opinions, the ECHR would never allow such a thing in the countries the ECHR covers.
Incidentally, I do read (or at least regularly skim online) the Independent and the Times, as well as the Telegraph (where that article originates), and the Spectator. I will freely admit that I can't stomach the Guardian, so it's not on my list.:-)
A reasonable selection, though I avoid the Telegraph at the moment because its quality of news has deteriorated lately. As a liberal, I'm a Guardian reader, but I quite understand your dislike of it.
Generally speaking, the British Press runs to a different standard to the American Press, and that's putting it mildly. For all of its faults, the latter will generally not run anything unless it knows the facts to be true. The Press in Britain will put a spin on anything, and willingly distort news to reflect its editors particular viewpoint. And the supreme irony in this is that it's the British press that has the more obnoxious libel laws to put up with (guilty until proven innocent.)
Far from breaching the will of the ECHR, these fines are mandated by the ECHR
Citation please. There are anti-hate-speech laws throughout Europe, but few if any would cover simple criticism of immigration policies. And that's despite the fact that immigration policies are a hot potato in Europe - we don't easily forget. If simple demands for tighter immigration coupled with latent racism were illegal, you wouldn't be able to sell British newspapers anywhere but Britain. The Daily Mail, in particular, routinely runs blatently racist campaigns against immigrants.
For a similar case, see here [freerepublic.com]
No... that's not a similar case to anything you described, and it's not even substantiated. And it is about someone actually pushing hate speech, rather than someone criticising government policy.
And I'd like to see a real report, preferably Reuters or AP please, but a real newspaper will do, backing up your original allegation that politicians were fined by the legal system merely for criticising immigration policy. I suspect what we either have here are blatent, nasty, attacks on immigrants designed to whip up hatred, that a supporter has tried (successfully, sadly) to stir support from the American right wing by attempting to invoke the spectre of censorship.
Even more worrying, the ECHR has recently ruled that Europeans also have a `human right' not to hear criticism of government, and thus member states and EU insititutions may act against those who criticize EU actions and policies -- see this article [freerepublic.com] from the Telegraph for more.
No, the ECHR has done nothing of the sort. The ECJ has ruled that the EU is entitled to fire staff members who publicly criticise its policies. Not that that happens in America. There is mucho confusion in that Telegraph article, which isn't surprising because the Telegraph is one of a gaggle of British newspapers running an anti-EU campaign at the moment, and the British press have never been ones to let the facts get in the way of a good story, even if they look sillier for it.
The European Court of Justice is a constitutional part of the European Union, as you could have seen by glancing at that link I gave you. The ECHR, OTOH, is an entirely independent body. It has nothing to do with the EU, and countries answerable to it are not necessarily EU members and vice versa. Read between the (hysterical) lines that follow in the Telegraph article and you find essentially a rather bizarre spin being put on a perfectly natural conclusion - that the EU doesn't have to employ anyone who actually is working against it.
It would certainly be interesting to see what actually happened in the case of the "fined politicians", your "similar" case, if similar, doesn't exactly paint them as sweet innocents who unfairly fell on the sword of political correctness, but of hatemongers. You do need a better source of news than Free Republic, and I wish I could point you at anything specific, but reading both The Independent and The Times should give you a slightly more balanced picture than you're used to.
And personally, given the choice between a country that has minor penalties for obvious hate speech, that doesn't feel that the use of drugs implies that you should be the target of rapists and thugs, and a country that thinks the opposite (except that the KKK does have restrictions, which ironically the oh-so-PC-and-bane-of-freepers-everywhere ACLU is regularly challenging) - well, no contest there.
If you can come up with a link, I'll address the Netherlands example, for good or bad. A politician being "fined" can mean anything, depending on who was doing the fining and what exactly it was they did or said. In general, I'd say the Netherlands routinely proves that it is a more free country than the US, as its policies on what people do with their own bodies, be it drugs or prostitution or euthanasia constantly demonstrate.
The US currently has a million of its citizens in prison for non-violent drugs-related offenses. Those prisons are some of the worst in the western world. You're currently whining about a vague "fine" which, if actually done by a government under force of law will have breached the European Declaration on Human Rights anyway, and be remediable by the ECHR.
In many ways, several of the aformentioned could be said to offer MORE freedom to their citizens than the US does. Not to mention that MOST of the above have a legal system that make it possible for a poor person to protect his/her own rights in court.
ie the countries he quoted have more rights, he didn't suggest they're utopias.
And you really didn't address The Netherlands, unless you're suggesting that Fortuyn was murdered by a government death squad. Are you suggesting that? That's a pretty serious allegation...
the EU members (most of whom would not be required to reduce emissions at all by the treaty) have now agreed to ratify the treaty. It's not clear to me that this addresses any of the problems with the document, though, such as the crippling harm it would do to the US economy while not placing any restriction on those nations responsible for the most emissions...
*sigh*
The EU, as a whole, will have to reduce its emissions by comparison with the US by 8% compared with 1990 levels, one percentage point more than the 7% figure the US promised it would (and then went back on.)
And the US is responsible for 20% of CO2 emissions. Wiggle all you like, but that's higher, per country and per person, than any other country in the world. No, it's not "per-capita", but then gold bars, dollar bills, and pound notes don't generate CO2, so the per-capita argument is a load of tosh. You might just as well argue that people across the US are starving and food is plentiful in Somalia because, per capita, they eat less food anywhere else in the world!
Double bonus: maybe the gov't will listen to him and switch to Linux?!?
Sure. Just like if Al Gore wrote to Katherine Harris about changes to Floridian environmental policy, he'd be listened to too.
And I'm quite sure that Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh would both be heavily persuaded by suggestions on how to improve their respective shows by Hillary Clinton. Jack Valenti would be most persuaded by Dave Touretzky on the future of DVD copy prevention. Jon Katz is always interested in what people who post as Anonymous Coward have to suggest concerning his movie reviews. Philip Morris is, apparently, considering hiring Truth as consultants on how to improve their business practices. And apparently Bill Gates has been helping Linus Torvalds with his programming, teaching him the basics of closed source economics.
So, you see, it's a big happy helpful listening world we live in!
Furthermore, its not "agreed to", but "did not agreed to".
It's agreed to and then promptly backed out of.
That's an important distinction. If the US had gone to Kyoto, been asked to sign up for a 7% cut, and said "Screw you guys, I'm going home, and it's 20% emissions increases all round just to really piss you off", that would have been one thing. Hell, however undiplomatic it was, it might even have been seen as honest, fair, dealing, by the US.
But the US publically announced, promised to its partners, that it was going to do a 7% cut. All the other governments took that in good faith, and adjusted their demands and compromises to suit. They signed up for schemes that were less adequate than they should be, just to keep the US happy.
And the US took all those promises, that compromise, and then turned around and gave the rest of the world the finger.
That's one of the reasons why the US is seen around the world as a unilateralist loose cannon. It's why the various trade agreements that the US signed up for aren't likely to last much longer. It's why companies like Ford and GM are going to find it tougher to do business in markets other than the US. It's why the economy of the US is likely to take a major turn for the worst.
Ditch Bush. Ditch him while you still have the chance. Don't vote for him in two years, and for god's sake put politicians in power that'll keep him in line for the time until then into the legislature.
The US did agree to a 7% cut. They then reneged on the deal, with both the legislature and the following HoS (Bush) overturning the original decision they'd negotiated.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the fact that it's wrong for the government to force Wal*Mart to stop controlling the content what it sells mean that Wal*Mart is right to control that content? Does it mean, as you appear to imply, that anyone advocating not shopping at Wal*Mart because of its alleged repressive policies is wrong, and if so, are you, by your own argument, forcing people to buy at Wal*Mart?
I didn't read anyone advocating government intervention here. I read people saying that Wal*Mart engages in repressive sales policies which impact on what types of content people can easily access, and that those policies justified avoiding Wal*Mart and supporting alternative outlets. So I don't quite see the reason for the knee-jerk anti-government response.
The fact that the government doesn't ban the repression of content, and arguably doesn't have the moral right to do so, doesn't make repressing content right. And it certainly doesn't mean we have to encourage them.
Exactly. What Wal*Mart needs to do is just sell one PC. It can be a Dell Laptop, with 256M of RAM and a 15G HD, and a Celeron.
That'll keep the punters coming in. One PC, nice and simple. No choices that might "confuse" someone, like differing amounts of memory or disk space or processors. Sure, there may be no configuration that's actually appropriate for >30% of users, but, in the cause of making things user friendly, should that matter?
Likewise, what's the deal with all the different model cars out there? Ford sells both SUVs AND Minivans AND boat-cars and normal cars. And, get this, some of them are available in diesel and gasoline versions, not to mention totally confusing potential consumers with "automatic" vs "manual" transmissions, and, unbelievably, different colors.
Ford would get more customers if it stuck with just the one model, say, a boat car with a 5L engine and an automatic transmission. Blue. Yep, blue would be good. That way, when a customer walks into a Ford dealer, they wouldn't be confused by a dazzling array of choices when all they want is a way to drive from A to B. They could just nip in, point at the Crown Vic they want, pay the money and leave.
And restaurants. Geez, is there anything worse than looking at some multipage menu with choices galore? What's wrong with a burger? A good, old fashioned, American burger. With cheese. Everyone likes cheese on their burgers. It's damned unamerican not to want cheese. I've been in restaurants and I've walked out, yes, walked out, because they expect me to spend hours and hours wading through some list of "choices" when all I want is something to eat. Burgers are userfriendly, efficient to make, and they feed just about anybody. Everyone knows what they are. The Outback Steakhouse needs to throw away their current huge three or four page "menus" and stick to burgers, a simple single design everyone can understand: A sesame seed bun, a 1/4lb beef burger, a sheet of American cheese, a simple lettuce leaf, a slice of tomato, a slice of pickle, and some ketchup and mayo. If anyone wants something other than that, surely they know enough about food to build their own damned burgers.
That's the problem with America today. Too many choices. When my grandmother can go into a fancy restaurant and understand the menu, that's when America will be ready for the desktop.
It isn't here. The text is as Newsforge ("read the page source, Luke! Read the source!" - the link that Slashdot's mangled is http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/06/18/1344258.sh tml?tid=23 ) claims it to be.
FWIW handguns were not outlawed in Britain due to gun crime, but fear of abuse by licenced holders, after one licenced gun owner, Thomas Hamilton, went bezerk in a school in Scotland.
Before the handgun ban, relatively few were in circulation, and it's fair to say that the law itself cannot have made a blind bit of difference one way or another as far as gun related crime goes for that reason. The usual arguments that widespread gun-ownership deters crime cannot apply in a country where widespread gun-ownership did not exist.
(Interestingly, gun related crime has increased in Britain since then, but for an entirely unexpected reason: Britain became the center for the illegal gun trade outside of the US. Bizarre.)
I write this for the purposes of explanation. I've yet to make my mind up on issues related to banning guns, having gun-toting friends but also having lived in Britain and being thankful for an environment where having a confrontation with the police doesn't run any danger of having a lethal weapon pointed at you...
He is but he didn't invent the toilet.
Well, that's kind of true, but I'm pretty sure that nobody will ever forget that Bill Gates invented the microcomputer, or that Marc Andreesson invented the World Wide Web...
There's quite a good debunking that puts the entire thing in context - essentially a second reading of this list of horrors actually shows it's mostly innuendo and cheap showmanship.
So what happens if the original is not destroyed?
There strikes me as being two processes involved here, duplication and destruction. The argument seems to be that the two together has the same affect as moving a person to another location, and that if both are done the second entity is the same as the first.
That doesn't make sense, because nobody in their right mind would suggest the second entity is the same as the first if both exist at once. Destroying the first cannot possibly change that, that's an attempt to remove the evidence, not an attempt to move the position of sentience.
Soul or no soul.
Apparently Lindows is based on BSD Linux. Major misprint or what people have been asking for for a while (BSD/Linux would be BSD userland + Linux kernel, as opposed to GNU/Linux which is GNU OS + Linux kernel)?
It does answer the licencing questions - I recall Apple saying that the reason why BASH wasn't shipped as the Mac OS X shell was because it would then become a major component of the operating system and arguably the GPL licence would then apply to the entire distribution.
OTOH, it could be a typo.
Well, every other month we get a story on Slashdot about how Hollywood are using clusters of Linux machines to render the latest-greatest special effects/animations/etc, inbetween suing the hell out of free-software/open source programmers for daring create software to allow them to watch the movies they paid for and worked on the code to help create.
Hollywood's strategy is pretty clear: Take what's offered, never give back.
If something is protected with Macrovision, it'll generally have the Macrovision logo on the back together with the Dolby Digital and Region stuff. Those who think it's compulsory might want to flick through their DVD collection and look.
Now this article is newsworthy if it's suggesting that Harry Potter is Region Free and CSS Free too. But there's nothing to hint at that in the write up. Harry Potter is macrovision free because it doesn't actually help, it's expensive (DVD content makers have to pay a per-disc * per-crippled-frame royalty for using the system), and it's a load of crap.
No it wasn't, it was marginally better perhaps but there are enough people around who claim, honest to god, that they couldn't perceive a difference for us to treat the whole BetaMax was massively superior arguement as flawed.
Besides which, even market share is not a complete measure of success. Apple have been floating around the 5% mark now for fifteen years, are healthy, profitable, producing a product that is well supported both by themselves and third parties, that is easily obtained, and easily maintained. But they have a 5% market share.
If Sirius caters to a particular type of consumer, it could do very well without ever entering more than 1% of the overall digital satellite market. The key is that it has to be profitable, and potential buyers have to feel they wont be left in the cold.
*sigh* I shouldn't respond to my own trolls, but just this once...
It'll probably be tacked on to a Farming Subsidies bill, together with a few new draconian copyright laws and a top tier tax cut.
You do know that, until last year, the Republicans have had a majority in both houses since 1994.
None of the above bills, those that were put to a vote, could have been passed without the complete support of the Repubs.
Just saying.
What's chilling about the Republicans is not what they do when they're in someone's back pocket, as Hollings is, but what they do when they are not.
And Cosmoe seems to be working and coming along quite nicely too.
Actually, no, it is exactly a use of the privilege of the employer to choose who to hire. The employer is being allowed to fire "officials and agents who do not observe the duties and responsibilities implicit in the performance of their tasks."
...which is exactly what you'd expect. There is NOTHING whatsoever in that ruling that allows people to be sued, imprisoned, or in any other way challenged using the legal system for criticising the EU. Nothing.
It's a fine line, and one which has to be ruled carefully, but whipping up hatred against groups of people based on arbitrary attributes which are not inherently anti-social does strike me as being as legimate to punish as, say, slander and libel which are merely more specific examples of the same laws. The US has laws governing the latter, and they've always been held to be constitutional. Indeed, the Supreme Court (or was it the Court of Appeals, I'll have to look it up) recently held that the Nuremberg Files website, which similarly promoted hate against doctors that perform abortions, was unconstitutional.
Whipping up hatred against specific groups can put those groups in physical danger, and can create an atmosphere in which members of those groups are unable to exercise their freedoms knowing that the very real threat of violence exists if they do so.
I'm not arguing that rules against hate speech should be carte-blanch. But the existance of rules against hate speech should not be seen as, by itself, a massive invasion of human rights unless those rules are disproportionate and used to silence speech which is clearly not inciteful.
All of which said, we currently do not have articles before us that explain exactly what these politicians, and indeed our homophobic priest, actually said, and who fined the former, so it's hard to comment on the specific examples.
And I'm telling you that the article is not a legimate interpretation of what the court ruled. You're reading a hysterical interpretation of what the EJC ruled, that conflicts with what it actually said. The fact that it confuses the ECHR with the ECJ by itself should be ringing alarm bells. In any case, the ECJ can rule what it wants, the ECHR trumps it in those countries that have signed up. Even if the ECJ had ruled that European citizens have the "right" to be denied access to conflicting opinions, the ECHR would never allow such a thing in the countries the ECHR covers.
A reasonable selection, though I avoid the Telegraph at the moment because its quality of news has deteriorated lately. As a liberal, I'm a Guardian reader, but I quite understand your dislike of it.
Generally speaking, the British Press runs to a different standard to the American Press, and that's putting it mildly. For all of its faults, the latter will generally not run anything unless it knows the facts to be true. The Press in Britain will put a spin on anything, and willingly distort news to reflect its editors particular viewpoint. And the supreme irony in this is that it's the British press that has the more obnoxious libel laws to put up with (guilty until proven innocent.)
And I'd like to see a real report, preferably Reuters or AP please, but a real newspaper will do, backing up your original allegation that politicians were fined by the legal system merely for criticising immigration policy. I suspect what we either have here are blatent, nasty, attacks on immigrants designed to whip up hatred, that a supporter has tried (successfully, sadly) to stir support from the American right wing by attempting to invoke the spectre of censorship.
No, the ECHR has done nothing of the sort. The ECJ has ruled that the EU is entitled to fire staff members who publicly criticise its policies. Not that that happens in America. There is mucho confusion in that Telegraph article, which isn't surprising because the Telegraph is one of a gaggle of British newspapers running an anti-EU campaign at the moment, and the British press have never been ones to let the facts get in the way of a good story, even if they look sillier for it.The European Court of Justice is a constitutional part of the European Union, as you could have seen by glancing at that link I gave you. The ECHR, OTOH, is an entirely independent body. It has nothing to do with the EU, and countries answerable to it are not necessarily EU members and vice versa. Read between the (hysterical) lines that follow in the Telegraph article and you find essentially a rather bizarre spin being put on a perfectly natural conclusion - that the EU doesn't have to employ anyone who actually is working against it.
It would certainly be interesting to see what actually happened in the case of the "fined politicians", your "similar" case, if similar, doesn't exactly paint them as sweet innocents who unfairly fell on the sword of political correctness, but of hatemongers. You do need a better source of news than Free Republic, and I wish I could point you at anything specific, but reading both The Independent and The Times should give you a slightly more balanced picture than you're used to.
And personally, given the choice between a country that has minor penalties for obvious hate speech, that doesn't feel that the use of drugs implies that you should be the target of rapists and thugs, and a country that thinks the opposite (except that the KKK does have restrictions, which ironically the oh-so-PC-and-bane-of-freepers-everywhere ACLU is regularly challenging) - well, no contest there.
If you can come up with a link, I'll address the Netherlands example, for good or bad. A politician being "fined" can mean anything, depending on who was doing the fining and what exactly it was they did or said. In general, I'd say the Netherlands routinely proves that it is a more free country than the US, as its policies on what people do with their own bodies, be it drugs or prostitution or euthanasia constantly demonstrate.
The US currently has a million of its citizens in prison for non-violent drugs-related offenses. Those prisons are some of the worst in the western world. You're currently whining about a vague "fine" which, if actually done by a government under force of law will have breached the European Declaration on Human Rights anyway, and be remediable by the ECHR.
ie the countries he quoted have more rights, he didn't suggest they're utopias.
And you really didn't address The Netherlands, unless you're suggesting that Fortuyn was murdered by a government death squad. Are you suggesting that? That's a pretty serious allegation...
*sigh*
The EU, as a whole, will have to reduce its emissions by comparison with the US by 8% compared with 1990 levels, one percentage point more than the 7% figure the US promised it would (and then went back on.)
And the US is responsible for 20% of CO2 emissions. Wiggle all you like, but that's higher, per country and per person, than any other country in the world. No, it's not "per-capita", but then gold bars, dollar bills, and pound notes don't generate CO2, so the per-capita argument is a load of tosh. You might just as well argue that people across the US are starving and food is plentiful in Somalia because, per capita, they eat less food anywhere else in the world!
Sure. Just like if Al Gore wrote to Katherine Harris about changes to Floridian environmental policy, he'd be listened to too.
And I'm quite sure that Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh would both be heavily persuaded by suggestions on how to improve their respective shows by Hillary Clinton. Jack Valenti would be most persuaded by Dave Touretzky on the future of DVD copy prevention. Jon Katz is always interested in what people who post as Anonymous Coward have to suggest concerning his movie reviews. Philip Morris is, apparently, considering hiring Truth as consultants on how to improve their business practices. And apparently Bill Gates has been helping Linus Torvalds with his programming, teaching him the basics of closed source economics.
So, you see, it's a big happy helpful listening world we live in!
It's agreed to and then promptly backed out of.
That's an important distinction. If the US had gone to Kyoto, been asked to sign up for a 7% cut, and said "Screw you guys, I'm going home, and it's 20% emissions increases all round just to really piss you off", that would have been one thing. Hell, however undiplomatic it was, it might even have been seen as honest, fair, dealing, by the US.
But the US publically announced, promised to its partners, that it was going to do a 7% cut. All the other governments took that in good faith, and adjusted their demands and compromises to suit. They signed up for schemes that were less adequate than they should be, just to keep the US happy.
And the US took all those promises, that compromise, and then turned around and gave the rest of the world the finger.
That's one of the reasons why the US is seen around the world as a unilateralist loose cannon. It's why the various trade agreements that the US signed up for aren't likely to last much longer. It's why companies like Ford and GM are going to find it tougher to do business in markets other than the US. It's why the economy of the US is likely to take a major turn for the worst.
Ditch Bush. Ditch him while you still have the chance. Don't vote for him in two years, and for god's sake put politicians in power that'll keep him in line for the time until then into the legislature.
My submission was edited, as I explain here.
The US did agree to a 7% cut. They then reneged on the deal, with both the legislature and the following HoS (Bush) overturning the original decision they'd negotiated.