I generally think DRM and standardized DRM is not a good idea. But hell would freeze over before I would support any group called "Ethics in Tech", no matter what their position may be.
People who use terminology like that are saying clearly that they are unwilling to engage in open, honest debate with other people, and instead want to verbally beat up anybody they disagree with.
Note that a group of "developers, thinkers, artists, and digital citizens" calling themselves "Ethics in Tech" might well come down on either side of the DRM debate, since many "creative people" believe that copying their works without their permission is "unethical".
As you can see, both dogs and humans can detect some chemicals at below one part per billion. So, it's hard to say conclusively that dogs have "more sensitive noses" than humans. Humans and dogs are probably just sensitive to different compounds because we use smell differently. So, humans can't track prey by smell, but humans may be better at detecting dangerous chemical compounds and pathogens, something dogs often seem oblivious to.
You missed something in your first link. "Total expenditure includes both public and private expenditures." The US does indeed spend more (which I knew already) but it most certainly is not all government money by a long shot
You need to look at the graph, in particular the blue bars, which compare public and compulsory expenses. US per capita public healthcare spending is the same or greater than that of almost all other countries, even countries that cover all of their citizens with a public single payer system.
Therefore, the problem with the US isn't in the pink portion of the graph (the private spending), the problem in the US is that Medicare/Medicaid take in enough taxes to cover all Americans European-style, but only manage to cover less than 40% of Americans. That problem doesn't get fixed by forcing even more people to switch to our broken public system, that problem needs to get fixed by fixing Medicare/Medicaid.
As for your politifact link, mortality rates and quality of health care are not the same thing.
I completely agree. That's why I pointed to the Politifact page. But life expectancy and child expectancy are the statistics usually cited when extolling the virtues of Cuba's health care system.
Also, here's countries ranked by their medical systems in a number of different catagories by the WHO
Look at some of the criteria used in that report. For example, In sum, the way health care is financed is perfectly fair if the ratio of total health contribution to total non-food spending is identical for all households, independently of their income, their health status or their use of the health system. This indicator expresses the trenchant view of Aneurin Bevan, that “The essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not advantaged.” That is not a measure related to the quality of healthcare at all, it's something that measures conformance to socialist ideology. It's not surprising that Cuba scores highly on such measures while the US scores poorly, but that is irrelevant to the quality of the healthcare system.
And from experiencing socialist healthcare first hand, I can also guarantee you that people like "Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland" will not be "treated alike"; people like her get special, high quality treatment, just like the political elites in Cuba. I think she is an utterly deplorable person.
Anyway, leaving the ideological b.s. of the WHO aside, by what objective criteria do you think Cuba's health care system is doing a good job? It is as expensive as South Korea's. Ask yourself: would you rather be treated in Cuba or in South Korea?
Fission is not cost effective and only works with massive amounts of taxpayers money.
Fission is quite cost effective per se. What makes it so costly and what has caused the past accidents is overregulation. It's because of overregulation that the early generations of nuclear plants never got replaced with safer, cleaner modern technology.
The electric bills for private end customers are indeed high. But the spot and long term market prices for large customers (industry etc) have fallen to record low levels.
Translation: the German government takes vast amounts of money from private consumers in order to subsidize big corporations, while driving up overall prices with an inefficient energy policy that buys large parts of its energy abroad.
I was not happy with the ACA, but lack of Republican votes speaks more to the dysfunctional Republicans and their Obama hatred (for whatever reason).
You can believe that if it makes you happy. But you can't claim that the ACA's problems are due to a "compromise" with the Republicans when no Republican actually voted for it.
The ACA was the best thing to happen for one and only one reason. It made something happen in healthcare. It made changes that could be evaluated and fixed.
What the ACA did was to harm an already ailing private insurance market further, with the pretty transparent aim of leaving single-payer as the only option. It's easy to destroy private markets with government regulation, and it takes a long time to build them up. It's easy to nationalize industries, it's very hard to privatize them again and usually takes decades. So, what you're really saying is that they wanted single payer, and they were going to sabotage the private insurance market more and more to make that happen, with predictable outcomes.
The actual problems with the US healthcare system are actually quite simple: the government-run healthcare system that we have is spending more per American than the public systems in the UK or France, yet covering less than 40% of Americans, and that's because American politicians are spineless wimps that cave in to corporate lobbying and campaign contributions. And that kind of corporate and lobbying power is only going to increase if you feed even more trillions into the public system through Medicare expansion or universal single payer. And our private system is hamstrung by the fact that tax breaks are tied to employers and insurance isn't portable; this is at the root of the problem of preexisting conditions.
We don't need to "evaluate" what the ACA does. The issue isn't whether ACA caused health care cost growth to go down from 6% to 3%, the issue is that pre-ACA and post-ACA, healthcare in the US costs twice as much as it should, because corporations can basically charge whatever they want to, unconstrained by both government and markets.
These problems are fairly easy to fix, but that would entail going up against very powerful and rich lobbies, so neither party is willing to do it. But the Democrats weren't content with the crony capitalist status quo, they actually want us to move to a completely monopolistic system of healthcare, in which consumers are forced, under penalty of law, to buy whatever overpriced crap big corporations and special interests lobby the government to pay for at whatever massively inflated price they want. That is, Democrats moved us into the direction of making our health care system even more corrupt and dysfunctional than it already was. And that is what you call "the best thing to happen to health care".
My point (and the point of the past few posts of our conversation) was that her doing that shouldnt cause confusion in regards to her actual political beliefs because it's commonly done.
And where did she actually demonstrate that she has "actual political beliefs"? As far as I can tell, she has no "actual political beliefs" at all, all she has is an insatiable desire for power for its own sake.
In fact, Hillary told us herself that she will say whatever people want to hear, on several occasions: (1) in her explanation on her change of position on gay marriage, (2) in her/your explanation that she just told Sanders voters what they wanted to hear, and (3) in her "public/private position" statement to Wall St, (4) in her meeting with Warren. Her opportunism and lack of character was also evident in how she dealt with her husband's repeated infidelity.
Unlike the US, European countries cut social expenditures in order to meet their budget objectives.
Close but I think the laws in place against hate speach and the like (not a fan but they're there) push Europe ahead in this catagory.
Restrictions on free speech are a favorite of both the left and the right; in Europe, they largely came out of right-wing restrictions against criticizing church and state, and the restrictions aren't intended to help socially weak groups, but instead avoid conflict.
Their socialised medicine alone puts them beyond us. The dems Obamacare doesnt even come close.
Socialized medicine in Europe originated with right-wing governments, not left-wing governments, as a way to control workers. Many European nations have two-tiered systems, in which the bottom 90% are stuck with an inconvenient public system, and the top 10% enjoy a high quality private system. In addition, people have to pay for their coverage, either explicitly (Germany, Switzerland, etc.) or implicitly (other countries).
Note also that the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than almost all other OECD governments (the problem is that the US government is spending the money so poorly):
So, I don't understand in what way you think that Europe's health care systems (and they are all different) are more "left wing" than the US healthcare system.
So in summary, I think you're wrong as our Democrats are to the right on most of the points you list, particularly the most significant ones.
I could go on with the other points... but I think I made my point.
I think the source of your confusion and the confusion of many other Americans is that you view the political spectrum as one-dimensional. In fact, there is a left-right axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis. European parties are overwhelmingly authoritarian and differ along the left-right axis. US parties are first of all much more heterogeneous than European parties, but to the degree that they differ, they differ along the authoritarian-libertarian axis, with Democrats leaning strongly towards authoritarianism. That is what makes US Democrats similar to Europeans. But European authoritarianism is frequently Christian conservative, not socialist.
This topic is tangentially relevant because the massive centralized collection of medical records has been made possible under Obama, and it is a serous threat to our privacy. It's another reason not to have a single payer system. The federal government should not have health care records on most Americans.
The ACA scheme was a poor compromise mostly lifted from conservatives.
Not a single Republican voted for the ACA, so it wasn't a "compromise".
The fact that some time somewhere some conservative penned something that was similar to the ACA in some respect doesn't mean all Republicans are bound to think it's a good idea in perpetuity.
It's not what "the Dems" want, it's what they had the political capital to pass.
Of course, it's not what they want. What they thought they could do is pass a flawed piece of legislation that would take us inevitably down the path of what they really want, which is some scheme that looks like single payer to Americans, but has lacks major cost controls and limits that make other single payer systems work. In different words, what the Democrats wanted was massive crony capitalist handouts to their donors while at the same time giving people the impression they were getting something for free. And by the time the thing collapses, the Democrats that created this shitty system would be long out of office.
Thiel's problem is that he contributed a large amount of money to the government's ability to pick winners and losers, which doesn't sound libertarian to me.
Can you turn that into a coherent sentence and argument?
Repeating “crooked Hillary” ad nauseam is not publishing truth.
Well, we'll just have to disagree on that. I consider her one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians in a long time, based on the facts. I think you're in denial.
As for “espionage, propaganda, and publishing derogatory information”, propaganda is usually understood as...
Whatever it is, it is something all major nations, including the US, engage in, consider legitimate, and defend.
How about specifically one of the things Trudeau talked about, Cuba's medical system. They have an amazing medical system that's ranked in the same ball park as the US but yet they spend a tiny fraction of what we spend ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ). What we could do with that with first world funding would be amazing.
Let's assume that were true. Look at the health expenditure per capita graph. Notice how US per capita public spending is the same as, or higher than, all other OECD countries except Norway? What that means is that the US government has the money to institute, not just a Cuban-style, but a Canadian/UK/...-style single payer system any day they want to, simply by reforming Medicare/Medicaid and extending it to everybody.
The problem with US public health care is exceptionally poor management and a powerful medical lobby, both of which make it extremely inefficient. Extending the broken US single-payer system to the entire nation would cause medical costs to skyrocket and services to get much worse. Sander's plan he simply says "let's raise taxes on the rich"; in fact, there is nothing in his plan that addresses the core of the problem, namely the gross inefficiencies in Medicare relative to other single payer systems. All Sanders' plan is is a big handout to pharmaceutical companies and medical providers.
It's questionable whether Cuba really is as good as official statistics say, and, in any case, Cuba spends about as much per capita as South Korea now, so it's not all that cheap anymore. But even if it were true, it is wrong to attribute longer life expectancy or lower child mortality to a better medical system: authoritarian governments can do a lot to extend life expectancy, like telling people what to eat, what hobbies to engage in, aborting at-risk fetuses, mandating exercise, etc. Heck, Cuba dealt with the AIDS crisis first by locking up HIV-positive patients, then by forcing them into annual eight-week re-education camps. So, yeah, authoritarian shitholes can make people healthy and live longer, and because they need workers, they do just that; believe me, based on first-hand experience with real socialism: you don't want to live like that. That's also what makes Trudeau's comment so offensive to people who actually know real socialism.
You need a better measuring stick, the democrats are right of center by first world standards.
Nope, sorry, not true. Democrats resemble European parties (both conservatives and liberals) on the authoritarian-liberty dimension (Democrats are statists and authoritarian); but along the left-right dimension (inequality, social justice, race, spending, taxes, gay rights, abortion), they are pretty far to the left.
As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy.
In fact, the exact opposite is true: there has been a massive increase in free news sites, and people are picking those up. Companies like Google and Facebook (so far) haven't been gatekeepers. Taplin's CV reads like a who's-who of big, evil old media and financial corporations. What actually bothers him is that their monopolies are being eroded.
And what takes the cake is that Taplin blames "antidemocratic, monopoly-oriented, radical libertarianism values of the titans of technology". Most Silicon Valley tech CEOs are in bed with the Democrats and supported Obama and Hillary. Anybody who espouses libertarian values in the Valley has the Silicon Valley techie mobs and the federal government come down on them like a ton of bricks; just look at what happened to Thiel.
Taplin argues not for democracy, but for the old, crony-capitalist system that made him rich and powerful, nothing more.
But for the record, I agree that characterising Trump as the second coming of Mussolini
Probably not. Mussolini was the darling of the US intellectual and progressive elite in the 1930's. It was only with the war with Germany and the genocide that fascism nominally (though not ideologically) fell out of favor with US elites. These days, Sanders and Clinton are a lot closer to Mussolini than Trump.
He is probably closer to the second coming of Berlusconi.
Doesn't sound like Trump to me:Forza Italia was a centre-right party, formed mainly by ex-Christian Democrats, ex-Liberals and ex-Socialists. The ideology of the party ranged from libertarianism to social democracy (often referred to as "liberal socialism" in Italy), including elements of the Catholic social teaching and the social market economy.
For example, Kant considered lying a grave breach of ethical behaviour.
You're confusing ethics with politics.
Just look at the Nazi propaganda against Jews which gave justification to the crimes against humanity.
So publishing the truth about Hillary now is the same as advocating genocide?
As for “espionage, propaganda, and publishing derogatory information”, all three of those are umbrella terms that range from “ethically dubious” to “outright criminal”.
No, they are well-defined terms with well-defined meaning. Go look them up. Oh, and by the way, none of them amount to "lying".
Most european countries have a decent and relatively cheap health(care) system. The USA have not. (Most certainly it is still not 'cheap' or 'affordable')
I would think that spending or $9500/year in Norway or $5400/year in Germany on healthcare isn't particularly "cheap".
So, care to explain in what way the Norwegian or German systems are "cheap"?
Congratulations! You get the participation prize on whataboutism!
I'm sorry but you missed the point. I'm saying that espionage, propaganda, and publishing derogatory information on foreign governments are completely normal and acceptable.
They don't suddenly become unacceptable because Hillary couldn't emotionally deal with her election defeat and created the "Russia cost me the election" meme.
Only a fascist would fire the head of the FBI to protect himself from an ongoing investigation.
Obviously, you don't know much about what fascists actually do to political opponents.
Only an idiot wouldn't be able to see that while picking out every 3rd word to take offense at my lack of political correctness.
Oh, please, you are exactly on message for leftists, progressives, and European intellectuals. And I don't take "offense" at it, I just point out what a bunch of lunatics you are.
What this tell us is that Macron's cybersecurity team was less incompetent than Hillary's. Good for the French to have elected someone who understands technology a bit better than Hillary. Other than that, I don't see what relevance this has to the US election or Hillary's poor performance.
You also have to be a "real 'tard" to deny that the French, Americans, Germans and Chinese are "a bunch of hacking thieves", because they all hack and they all use the information they can get their hands on to their own advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally think DRM and standardized DRM is not a good idea. But hell would freeze over before I would support any group called "Ethics in Tech", no matter what their position may be.
People who use terminology like that are saying clearly that they are unwilling to engage in open, honest debate with other people, and instead want to verbally beat up anybody they disagree with.
Note that a group of "developers, thinkers, artists, and digital citizens" calling themselves "Ethics in Tech" might well come down on either side of the DRM debate, since many "creative people" believe that copying their works without their permission is "unethical".
The "sensitivity of the nose" is measured by odor detection thresholds.
Here are some values for humans:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
And here are some values for dogs:
http://www.barksar.org/K-9_Det...
As you can see, both dogs and humans can detect some chemicals at below one part per billion. So, it's hard to say conclusively that dogs have "more sensitive noses" than humans. Humans and dogs are probably just sensitive to different compounds because we use smell differently. So, humans can't track prey by smell, but humans may be better at detecting dangerous chemical compounds and pathogens, something dogs often seem oblivious to.
You need to look at the graph, in particular the blue bars, which compare public and compulsory expenses. US per capita public healthcare spending is the same or greater than that of almost all other countries, even countries that cover all of their citizens with a public single payer system.
Therefore, the problem with the US isn't in the pink portion of the graph (the private spending), the problem in the US is that Medicare/Medicaid take in enough taxes to cover all Americans European-style, but only manage to cover less than 40% of Americans. That problem doesn't get fixed by forcing even more people to switch to our broken public system, that problem needs to get fixed by fixing Medicare/Medicaid.
I completely agree. That's why I pointed to the Politifact page. But life expectancy and child expectancy are the statistics usually cited when extolling the virtues of Cuba's health care system.
Look at some of the criteria used in that report. For example, In sum, the way health care is financed is perfectly fair if the ratio of total health contribution to total non-food spending is identical for all households, independently of their income, their health status or their use of the health system. This indicator expresses the trenchant view of Aneurin Bevan, that “The essence of a satisfactory health service is that the rich and the poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not advantaged.” That is not a measure related to the quality of healthcare at all, it's something that measures conformance to socialist ideology. It's not surprising that Cuba scores highly on such measures while the US scores poorly, but that is irrelevant to the quality of the healthcare system.
And from experiencing socialist healthcare first hand, I can also guarantee you that people like "Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland" will not be "treated alike"; people like her get special, high quality treatment, just like the political elites in Cuba. I think she is an utterly deplorable person.
Anyway, leaving the ideological b.s. of the WHO aside, by what objective criteria do you think Cuba's health care system is doing a good job? It is as expensive as South Korea's. Ask yourself: would you rather be treated in Cuba or in South Korea?
Fission is quite cost effective per se. What makes it so costly and what has caused the past accidents is overregulation. It's because of overregulation that the early generations of nuclear plants never got replaced with safer, cleaner modern technology.
Translation: the German government takes vast amounts of money from private consumers in order to subsidize big corporations, while driving up overall prices with an inefficient energy policy that buys large parts of its energy abroad.
I don't see anything positive in this.
You can believe that if it makes you happy. But you can't claim that the ACA's problems are due to a "compromise" with the Republicans when no Republican actually voted for it.
What the ACA did was to harm an already ailing private insurance market further, with the pretty transparent aim of leaving single-payer as the only option. It's easy to destroy private markets with government regulation, and it takes a long time to build them up. It's easy to nationalize industries, it's very hard to privatize them again and usually takes decades. So, what you're really saying is that they wanted single payer, and they were going to sabotage the private insurance market more and more to make that happen, with predictable outcomes.
The actual problems with the US healthcare system are actually quite simple: the government-run healthcare system that we have is spending more per American than the public systems in the UK or France, yet covering less than 40% of Americans, and that's because American politicians are spineless wimps that cave in to corporate lobbying and campaign contributions. And that kind of corporate and lobbying power is only going to increase if you feed even more trillions into the public system through Medicare expansion or universal single payer. And our private system is hamstrung by the fact that tax breaks are tied to employers and insurance isn't portable; this is at the root of the problem of preexisting conditions.
We don't need to "evaluate" what the ACA does. The issue isn't whether ACA caused health care cost growth to go down from 6% to 3%, the issue is that pre-ACA and post-ACA, healthcare in the US costs twice as much as it should, because corporations can basically charge whatever they want to, unconstrained by both government and markets.
These problems are fairly easy to fix, but that would entail going up against very powerful and rich lobbies, so neither party is willing to do it. But the Democrats weren't content with the crony capitalist status quo, they actually want us to move to a completely monopolistic system of healthcare, in which consumers are forced, under penalty of law, to buy whatever overpriced crap big corporations and special interests lobby the government to pay for at whatever massively inflated price they want. That is, Democrats moved us into the direction of making our health care system even more corrupt and dysfunctional than it already was. And that is what you call "the best thing to happen to health care".
And where did she actually demonstrate that she has "actual political beliefs"? As far as I can tell, she has no "actual political beliefs" at all, all she has is an insatiable desire for power for its own sake.
In fact, Hillary told us herself that she will say whatever people want to hear, on several occasions: (1) in her explanation on her change of position on gay marriage, (2) in her/your explanation that she just told Sanders voters what they wanted to hear, and (3) in her "public/private position" statement to Wall St, (4) in her meeting with Warren. Her opportunism and lack of character was also evident in how she dealt with her husband's repeated infidelity.
US government social spending in the US is above OECD average and higher than, say, the UK.
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/s...
In fact, the US has the highest tax progressivity among OECD nations.
https://www.mercatus.org/publi...
That's on top of a large, regressive VAT tax in Europe.
In fact, European budgets are nearly balanced and debts capped as a requirement of EU membership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Unlike the US, European countries cut social expenditures in order to meet their budget objectives.
Restrictions on free speech are a favorite of both the left and the right; in Europe, they largely came out of right-wing restrictions against criticizing church and state, and the restrictions aren't intended to help socially weak groups, but instead avoid conflict.
Socialized medicine in Europe originated with right-wing governments, not left-wing governments, as a way to control workers. Many European nations have two-tiered systems, in which the bottom 90% are stuck with an inconvenient public system, and the top 10% enjoy a high quality private system. In addition, people have to pay for their coverage, either explicitly (Germany, Switzerland, etc.) or implicitly (other countries).
Note also that the US government already spends more per capita on healthcare than almost all other OECD governments (the problem is that the US government is spending the money so poorly):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, I don't understand in what way you think that Europe's health care systems (and they are all different) are more "left wing" than the US healthcare system.
I could go on with the other points... but I think I made my point.
I think the source of your confusion and the confusion of many other Americans is that you view the political spectrum as one-dimensional. In fact, there is a left-right axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis. European parties are overwhelmingly authoritarian and differ along the left-right axis. US parties are first of all much more heterogeneous than European parties, but to the degree that they differ, they differ along the authoritarian-libertarian axis, with Democrats leaning strongly towards authoritarianism. That is what makes US Democrats similar to Europeans. But European authoritarianism is frequently Christian conservative, not socialist.
No, this thread has simply changed topics.
This topic is tangentially relevant because the massive centralized collection of medical records has been made possible under Obama, and it is a serous threat to our privacy. It's another reason not to have a single payer system. The federal government should not have health care records on most Americans.
Not a single Republican voted for the ACA, so it wasn't a "compromise".
The fact that some time somewhere some conservative penned something that was similar to the ACA in some respect doesn't mean all Republicans are bound to think it's a good idea in perpetuity.
Of course, it's not what they want. What they thought they could do is pass a flawed piece of legislation that would take us inevitably down the path of what they really want, which is some scheme that looks like single payer to Americans, but has lacks major cost controls and limits that make other single payer systems work. In different words, what the Democrats wanted was massive crony capitalist handouts to their donors while at the same time giving people the impression they were getting something for free. And by the time the thing collapses, the Democrats that created this shitty system would be long out of office.
Can you turn that into a coherent sentence and argument?
Well, we'll just have to disagree on that. I consider her one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians in a long time, based on the facts. I think you're in denial.
Whatever it is, it is something all major nations, including the US, engage in, consider legitimate, and defend.
Let's assume that were true. Look at the health expenditure per capita graph. Notice how US per capita public spending is the same as, or higher than, all other OECD countries except Norway? What that means is that the US government has the money to institute, not just a Cuban-style, but a Canadian/UK/...-style single payer system any day they want to, simply by reforming Medicare/Medicaid and extending it to everybody.
The problem with US public health care is exceptionally poor management and a powerful medical lobby, both of which make it extremely inefficient. Extending the broken US single-payer system to the entire nation would cause medical costs to skyrocket and services to get much worse. Sander's plan he simply says "let's raise taxes on the rich"; in fact, there is nothing in his plan that addresses the core of the problem, namely the gross inefficiencies in Medicare relative to other single payer systems. All Sanders' plan is is a big handout to pharmaceutical companies and medical providers.
It's questionable whether Cuba really is as good as official statistics say, and, in any case, Cuba spends about as much per capita as South Korea now, so it's not all that cheap anymore. But even if it were true, it is wrong to attribute longer life expectancy or lower child mortality to a better medical system: authoritarian governments can do a lot to extend life expectancy, like telling people what to eat, what hobbies to engage in, aborting at-risk fetuses, mandating exercise, etc. Heck, Cuba dealt with the AIDS crisis first by locking up HIV-positive patients, then by forcing them into annual eight-week re-education camps. So, yeah, authoritarian shitholes can make people healthy and live longer, and because they need workers, they do just that; believe me, based on first-hand experience with real socialism: you don't want to live like that. That's also what makes Trudeau's comment so offensive to people who actually know real socialism.
Nope, sorry, not true. Democrats resemble European parties (both conservatives and liberals) on the authoritarian-liberty dimension (Democrats are statists and authoritarian); but along the left-right dimension (inequality, social justice, race, spending, taxes, gay rights, abortion), they are pretty far to the left.
You disagree with the fact that I simply don't know if she holds any coherent political beliefs at all.?
Which would mean... that she was lying about her political positions in order to get votes.
In fact, the exact opposite is true: there has been a massive increase in free news sites, and people are picking those up. Companies like Google and Facebook (so far) haven't been gatekeepers. Taplin's CV reads like a who's-who of big, evil old media and financial corporations. What actually bothers him is that their monopolies are being eroded.
And what takes the cake is that Taplin blames "antidemocratic, monopoly-oriented, radical libertarianism values of the titans of technology". Most Silicon Valley tech CEOs are in bed with the Democrats and supported Obama and Hillary. Anybody who espouses libertarian values in the Valley has the Silicon Valley techie mobs and the federal government come down on them like a ton of bricks; just look at what happened to Thiel.
Taplin argues not for democracy, but for the old, crony-capitalist system that made him rich and powerful, nothing more.
Probably not. Mussolini was the darling of the US intellectual and progressive elite in the 1930's. It was only with the war with Germany and the genocide that fascism nominally (though not ideologically) fell out of favor with US elites. These days, Sanders and Clinton are a lot closer to Mussolini than Trump.
Doesn't sound like Trump to me: Forza Italia was a centre-right party, formed mainly by ex-Christian Democrats, ex-Liberals and ex-Socialists. The ideology of the party ranged from libertarianism to social democracy (often referred to as "liberal socialism" in Italy), including elements of the Catholic social teaching and the social market economy.
You're confusing ethics with politics.
So publishing the truth about Hillary now is the same as advocating genocide?
No, they are well-defined terms with well-defined meaning. Go look them up. Oh, and by the way, none of them amount to "lying".
Well, yours is obviously busted.
I would think that spending or $9500/year in Norway or $5400/year in Germany on healthcare isn't particularly "cheap".
So, care to explain in what way the Norwegian or German systems are "cheap"?
I'm sorry but you missed the point. I'm saying that espionage, propaganda, and publishing derogatory information on foreign governments are completely normal and acceptable.
They don't suddenly become unacceptable because Hillary couldn't emotionally deal with her election defeat and created the "Russia cost me the election" meme.
Obviously, you don't know much about what fascists actually do to political opponents.
Oh, please, you are exactly on message for leftists, progressives, and European intellectuals. And I don't take "offense" at it, I just point out what a bunch of lunatics you are.
Wow, straight of the playbook of 20th century European fascists.
What this tell us is that Macron's cybersecurity team was less incompetent than Hillary's. Good for the French to have elected someone who understands technology a bit better than Hillary. Other than that, I don't see what relevance this has to the US election or Hillary's poor performance.
You also have to be a "real 'tard" to deny that the French, Americans, Germans and Chinese are "a bunch of hacking thieves", because they all hack and they all use the information they can get their hands on to their own advantage.
Well, obviously, you're as dishonest and deluded as the Democrats.