those restrictions differ slightly from country to country but personal attacks on individuals has always been excluded
Listen, you sniveling gob of snot, you festering boil on the ass of a syphylitic moron, you sub-moronic fascist: personal attacks on individuals are completely within the realm of free speech. And if you weren't the misbegotten spawn of a retarded chimpanzee and a three-dollar whore, you'd know that.
Err, no offense.:-) But of course personal attacks on individuals are within the realm of free speech, and any nation where statements such as the above was punishable by criminal sanction would be a dire enemy of freedom. Personal attacks are part of the great American tradition, dating back to when the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans started newspapers to have a medium in which to savage the other party.
Why would you want to live in a place where someone could stand outside your door and hurl abuse day and night for weeks on end without any consequences?
If they stand outside my door, they're trespassing; no censorship laws required to deal with the situation.
If they're standing on their own property, or on public property in a way that does not interfere with the rights of others, let them hurl all the abuse they like. The consequence is dire: they're wasting their time and energy hurling abuse, while I'm off enjoying life.
Should that abuse cross the line into slander or libel, I reserve the right to press a civil suit. Not a criminal action. And threats, of course, are a different matter: free speech does not trump the right of self-defense.
This is why we need Libertarians to control Congress and the White House so they will get rid of government (especially Federal government) supporting this kind of theft, and promote a fully Free Enterprise system where anyone can invent whatever they want and not worry about the government stealing it.
Big-L Libertarians -- as in the Libertarian Party -- want to shrink or eliminate entirely the regulatory functions of government, not the wealth-concentrating ones. Their 2008 VP candidate was a patent troll. These right-wing propertarians have little interest in patent reform: patents are just another form of property, and in their view the state exists to create and enforce the "property rights" of the owning classes. (Still, I'll take the Libertarians over the GOP any day, at least they're not trying to bring the state into my bedroom.)
Actual libertarians -- libertarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists, from whom the right-wingers stole the appellation "libertarian" -- want to eliminate the wealth-concentrating functions of government.
You "pull the cord"? Please tell me that was a figure of speech...
Eh? One pulls on a cord running horizontally the length of the bus to signal the driver, "please stop at the next bus stop." Otherwise, if there are no passengers waiting to board at that stop, the bus will skip it.
If you and your destination are both near Metro stations then public transportation is convenient here. But if not, it really isn't.
On the other hand, given the difficulty of parking and the insane traffic patterns in D.C., if either public transportation or walking isn't convenient for your destination, then nothing is.
I look around at the Fortune 100 company where I work, and I note that every single executive is carrying an iPad.
Yes, but this thread was about people doing work. Not about people who parleyed social connections into dead-wood positions where they rake in large salaries to get in the way of the people who actually get shit done. (Or am I being cynical?)
We don't make money by having a little walled garden network which isn't any good
No, but your company loses money, and maybe go out of business, if you have a security breach and disclose vital data.
You've lost an understanding of what your job is: You job is to help ME bring in money.
An admin's job is also to help prevent YOU from doing something boneheaded that loses money or even kills the company. (And the more someone spouts this sort of big ego bullshit, the more I'd suggest to admins to keep a close eye on what they're doing.)
We need to focus on the source of the problem, but given how widespread it surely is (or why would there apparently be taskforces breaking down doors)
Um, you are joking, right?
Stormtroopers break down doors because it's fun and dramatic. They get their rocks off and politicians get to blather about being "tough on crime." It has nothing to do with how widespread any actual problem is.
So you're suggesting that law enforcement officers executing a search warrant are fair game to be shot?
If they use excessive force and threaten the lives of citizens in executing that warrant? Absolutely.
If cops knock on my door and show me a warrant, they'll get my cooperation. But if armed men burst through my door, I have to assume a home invasion. It doesn't matter if they're wearing uniforms and yelling "Police!", this is a known criminal tactic (And in fact real cops have used blitzkrieg tactics to stage home invasion robberies.) Against armed criminal invaders, lethal force is justified in self-defense.
Has anyone tried to sue (this is the US after all) for excessive use of force?
Sure. Does fuck-all good, though.
Consider what happened to the mayor of Berwyn Heights, a small town in Maryland. (It's near the main campus of the University of Maryland -- I use to live there where I was a student.)
Over a package of cannabis addressed to his house (he was not involved at all, the smugglers planned to remove the package from shipping channels before delivery), a county SWAT team burst in to the mayor's home, killed his dogs, and held the mayor and his mother-in-law handcuffed at gunpoint for hours.
An internal investigation concluded the conduct of the deputies was a-ok. No criminal charges were ever filed against the violent fuckwits responsible, and the evil fuckwit in charge, Sheriff Michael A. Jackson, ran for County Executive, saying "We've apologized for the incident, but we will never apologize for taking drugs off our streets....Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight." (He was, thank the gods, soundly defeated.) A lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount and some minor reforms in how SWAT teams operate.
If that's how far the mayor of a small town can get, you can imagine how much success Joe Average is going to have working within the system.
A curious statement. Unless you've been in a situation where you've had all intellectual impediments to killing removed and seen that you were in fact able and willing to kill, I'm not sure how you can assert this. Have you killed a human being?
judging from the amount of people that view/play violent entertainment,
"Viewing" and "playing" are completely different. Viewing does not train a behavior, playing does.
if at all (if it happens, there's no real evidence for it)
Remarkable how the/. groupthink simply disregards the existence of evidence on this issue. One can certainly argue that the evidence is not conclusive, but to say that it's nonexistent demonstrates either gross ignorance or a strong unwillingness to step beyond one's personal biases and look at the matter scientifically. It takes only a few minutes of Google-fu to turn up studies like these:
Is the evidence conclusive? Maybe not. Does any amount of evidence that games cause an increase in aggression potential justify censorship? No. Censorship is real violence.
They might desensitize people to some forms of violence (though I doubt many people would still be able to react normally in the face of such if it happened to them in real life). But what does it matter?
It matters because human being have two levels of inhibition against killing. The first is intellectual, the conscious decision somewhere up in the forebrain that "I'm not going to kill anyone." The second is the instinctive inhibition against killing one's one species, deeper in the brain and common with most mammals. Both have to be turned off to make a killer.
Desensitizing people to killing -- a deliberate goal of military training, and a possible outcome of some sorts of violent video games -- does not affect the intellectual, conscious decision to not kill, but it does affect the instinctive one.
If a person's intellectual inhibition then falls because they become extremely agitated to the point of irrationality, or because they are socialized to regard some group of people as not fully human (commonly used in times of war), then they will be capable of killing.
Actually it's rather severely limited by the fact that there's no roaming. I suppose if you never leave a large city it might work, but as far as I'm concerned the fact that Virgin's plans only allow you access to the Sprint network (unlike my Sprint plan, which lets me roam on Verizon when needed) makes them a sad joke.
At some point the US will start to realize police don't need that kind of force in most part of the civilized world - and realize that this ties with your liberal gun laws.
The U.S. has had the Second Amendment and high rates of private firearms ownership since the start; yet the militarization of policing, and our high rate of violent crime, is a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, it is in areas where gun control laws are strongest that violent crime tends to be highest. I live just outside Baltimore, the city "celebrated" in the TV series Homicide and The Wire, and we have some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation here. They don't help.
If you eliminate all firearms deaths, we still have a higher murder rate than most developed nations -- about three times that of Denmark. Meanwhile, Switzerland has hundreds of thousands of homes with assault rifles, and has a low crime rate. Canada has a firearms ownership rate that's just 10% lower than ours, but about half our murder rate.
Our problem is not our guns. It's our endemic poverty, our lack of socio-economic mobility, our racism, our prison-industrial complex, and our "War on Drugs".
The times where citizens could rise up against a tyrant in the civilized world is long gone
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Deacons for Defense played key roles in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Armed citizens helped defend Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament during the Soviet coup attempt in 1991.
As with any security, it's not necessary to have a perfect defense, just to raise the price of an attack.
could you sustain an army of thousands of rebellions to fight off your evil government?
You mistake the nature of modern urban warfare. If real tyranny requiring sustained armed resistance came to the U.S., that resistance would not be a straight-up fight, any more than the current resistance movements in Iraq or Afghanistan are. Resistance fighters wouldn't be out hunting in the back country, they'd be in the cities being supplies by sympathetic non-combatants, or stealing food.
Call me a bleeding liberal if you will, but the police are more afraid of lawsuits than they are of armed individual resistance.
No, they aren't. This sort of shit has been standard procedure for decades, and lawsuits have not done a damn thing to stop it.
It will take the public debate that will occur when some law-abiding citizen kills an invading cop in legitimate self-defense and the militarization of policing becomes the lead story for a few weeks in all major media before there's change. I don't like that fact, but that's how it is.
As for me, as I'm not engaged in any violent illegal activity, I have to assume that any armed people breaking into my house are not cops, but violent home invaders. Doesn't matter if they're wearing badges and yelling "police!", this is a known tactic for such criminals. How I'd respond to home invaders depends on where am in the house and what's to hand, but I believe in and am prepared to exercise the right of self-defense, including the use of lethal force if necessary.
An assault rifle is a rifle capable of selective operation in either an automatic or semi-automatic firing mode and using a lighter cartridge -- the AK47 or the M16 being the familiar examples; standard issue for infantry forces and for stormtrooper cops. Not to be confused with "assault weapon", a political/legal term meaning "extra-scary gun".
I was always under the assumption that a uniformed officer knocks on your door and hands you a slip of paper to escort you "downtown."
Not anymore. Blitzkrieg raids have become SOP for anything more severe than unpaid parking tickets, and will probably remain that way until more citizens start greeting these home invasions with kinetic resistance.
A private business doesn't have the special right to employ coercion (meaning physical force) as a business model.
Of course it does. A private business requires property, and property is force: the right to call upon government force to control someone else's access to or use of space or resources or even information. (Or, if you like a more rough-and-tumble model, the right to be immune to government prosecution after initiating one's own use of force to control someone else's access.)
In a sane, functioning democracy, that force is used only to protect and promote the fulfillment of human needs, the "natural rights". In a plutocracy, it is used to protect the privilege of the ruling class.
Where government exists, that force exists. The only question is whether that force is directed for the mutual good, or towards the privilege of a few.
(If you want to talk about anarchy, fine, but we have to start with the understanding that all property, as the concept currently exists, is rooted in government -- "anarcho-capitalism" or right-Libertarianism is an inherent contradiction. In an anarchy, there is neither government power nor private power.)
When they are ready to act like adults by getting jobs, we'll treat them like adults.
When you are ready to act like an adult by acknowledging that most unemployment is a result of deliberate public policies meant to keep wages low and profits high, and not of some immaturity on the part of the unemployed, we'll treat you like an adult. Until then, go away, the big people are talking now.
Sorry, but saying that life expectancy hasn't advanced much if you ignore all the people who didn't die young doesn't really seem to be much of a statement at all.
It's a very strong statement, if one is considering how much longer an adult might continue to live. To put it bluntly, reductions in infant mortality don't help *me* live any longer, since I'm not an infant.
Its very telling that manufacturing, in general, rarely if ever had to rely on prison labor or slavery, unlike, say, agriculture.
...because land policies drove desperate peopl into the cities looking for any work. Read up on land enclosure and the history of the Industrial Revolution.
Yes, a skilled machinist has a pretty decent jobs, and yes, the bias against manufacturing work is a bad thing. But there are some unpleasant fact at the root of the bias.
You think MickeyD's bitches about having to pay minimum wage now, which frankly in America one can't live on and actually keep from going under, what do you think they will do when they can replace the ENTIRE workforce with machines?
In a sensible economic system, if all the work could be done by machines, we'd live in abundance. Alan Watts had an interesting idea about how each citizen ought to get a share in the wealth created the machines.
Good lord, son, stop drinking the right-wing Kool-Aid that presents the Founding Fathers as divinely inspired men of impeccable virtue. Many of them claimed to own other human beings on the basis that those human beings were racial minorities. Among them were Charles Pinckney, who wrote "...I say, that, at the time I drew that constitution, I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could have ever existed in it;" and James Madison, who though that slaves couldn't be freed unless "they are permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted to a white population."
As for your ridiculous claim that the founders understood women to be included in the "all men" who are created equal, the fact that one state allowed women to vote in elections (though not if they were poor) does not alter the position of the founders of the federal government. John Adams was explictly against giviing the vote to women or to men who didn't own land.
Let us be grateful that we can leave the opinions and intentions of the Founders in the dustbin of history.
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Listen, you sniveling gob of snot, you festering boil on the ass of a syphylitic moron, you sub-moronic fascist: personal attacks on individuals are completely within the realm of free speech. And if you weren't the misbegotten spawn of a retarded chimpanzee and a three-dollar whore, you'd know that.
Err, no offense. :-) But of course personal attacks on individuals are within the realm of free speech, and any nation where statements such as the above was punishable by criminal sanction would be a dire enemy of freedom. Personal attacks are part of the great American tradition, dating back to when the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans started newspapers to have a medium in which to savage the other party.
If they stand outside my door, they're trespassing; no censorship laws required to deal with the situation.
If they're standing on their own property, or on public property in a way that does not interfere with the rights of others, let them hurl all the abuse they like. The consequence is dire: they're wasting their time and energy hurling abuse, while I'm off enjoying life.
Should that abuse cross the line into slander or libel, I reserve the right to press a civil suit. Not a criminal action. And threats, of course, are a different matter: free speech does not trump the right of self-defense.
Big-L Libertarians -- as in the Libertarian Party -- want to shrink or eliminate entirely the regulatory functions of government, not the wealth-concentrating ones. Their 2008 VP candidate was a patent troll. These right-wing propertarians have little interest in patent reform: patents are just another form of property, and in their view the state exists to create and enforce the "property rights" of the owning classes. (Still, I'll take the Libertarians over the GOP any day, at least they're not trying to bring the state into my bedroom.)
Actual libertarians -- libertarian socialists, a.k.a. anarchists, from whom the right-wingers stole the appellation "libertarian" -- want to eliminate the wealth-concentrating functions of government.
(As for Ron Paul, specifically, he's a grade A loon who is disconnected from consensual reality on abortion, evolution, and the separation of church and state, and is a liar who is either a racist or is incompetent to run a 'zine. Please, folks, get over the crush on him.)
Patents are not relevant here. If there were a patent issue, they couldn't use it at all, closing the source has no effect.
Eh? One pulls on a cord running horizontally the length of the bus to signal the driver, "please stop at the next bus stop." Otherwise, if there are no passengers waiting to board at that stop, the bus will skip it.
This is a common method used by buses in the U.S. Perhaps a different method is used where you are; I've been on buses that had some sort of touch sensor, but this is apparently much more expensive.
On the other hand, given the difficulty of parking and the insane traffic patterns in D.C., if either public transportation or walking isn't convenient for your destination, then nothing is.
Yes, but this thread was about people doing work. Not about people who parleyed social connections into dead-wood positions where they rake in large salaries to get in the way of the people who actually get shit done. (Or am I being cynical?)
No, but your company loses money, and maybe go out of business, if you have a security breach and disclose vital data.
An admin's job is also to help prevent YOU from doing something boneheaded that loses money or even kills the company. (And the more someone spouts this sort of big ego bullshit, the more I'd suggest to admins to keep a close eye on what they're doing.)
Um, you are joking, right?
Stormtroopers break down doors because it's fun and dramatic. They get their rocks off and politicians get to blather about being "tough on crime." It has nothing to do with how widespread any actual problem is.
If they use excessive force and threaten the lives of citizens in executing that warrant? Absolutely.
If cops knock on my door and show me a warrant, they'll get my cooperation. But if armed men burst through my door, I have to assume a home invasion. It doesn't matter if they're wearing uniforms and yelling "Police!", this is a known criminal tactic (And in fact real cops have used blitzkrieg tactics to stage home invasion robberies.) Against armed criminal invaders, lethal force is justified in self-defense.
Sure. Does fuck-all good, though.
Consider what happened to the mayor of Berwyn Heights, a small town in Maryland. (It's near the main campus of the University of Maryland -- I use to live there where I was a student.)
Over a package of cannabis addressed to his house (he was not involved at all, the smugglers planned to remove the package from shipping channels before delivery), a county SWAT team burst in to the mayor's home, killed his dogs, and held the mayor and his mother-in-law handcuffed at gunpoint for hours.
An internal investigation concluded the conduct of the deputies was a-ok. No criminal charges were ever filed against the violent fuckwits responsible, and the evil fuckwit in charge, Sheriff Michael A. Jackson, ran for County Executive, saying "We've apologized for the incident, but we will never apologize for taking drugs off our streets....Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight." (He was, thank the gods, soundly defeated.) A lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount and some minor reforms in how SWAT teams operate.
If that's how far the mayor of a small town can get, you can imagine how much success Joe Average is going to have working within the system.
A curious statement. Unless you've been in a situation where you've had all intellectual impediments to killing removed and seen that you were in fact able and willing to kill, I'm not sure how you can assert this. Have you killed a human being?
"Viewing" and "playing" are completely different. Viewing does not train a behavior, playing does.
Remarkable how the /. groupthink simply disregards the existence of evidence on this issue. One can certainly argue that the evidence is not conclusive, but to say that it's nonexistent demonstrates either gross ignorance or a strong unwillingness to step beyond one's personal biases and look at the matter scientifically. It takes only a few minutes of Google-fu to turn up studies like these:
Is the evidence conclusive? Maybe not. Does any amount of evidence that games cause an increase in aggression potential justify censorship? No. Censorship is real violence.
It matters because human being have two levels of inhibition against killing. The first is intellectual, the conscious decision somewhere up in the forebrain that "I'm not going to kill anyone." The second is the instinctive inhibition against killing one's one species, deeper in the brain and common with most mammals. Both have to be turned off to make a killer.
Desensitizing people to killing -- a deliberate goal of military training, and a possible outcome of some sorts of violent video games -- does not affect the intellectual, conscious decision to not kill, but it does affect the instinctive one.
If a person's intellectual inhibition then falls because they become extremely agitated to the point of irrationality, or because they are socialized to regard some group of people as not fully human (commonly used in times of war), then they will be capable of killing.
Actually it's rather severely limited by the fact that there's no roaming. I suppose if you never leave a large city it might work, but as far as I'm concerned the fact that Virgin's plans only allow you access to the Sprint network (unlike my Sprint plan, which lets me roam on Verizon when needed) makes them a sad joke.
The U.S. has had the Second Amendment and high rates of private firearms ownership since the start; yet the militarization of policing, and our high rate of violent crime, is a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, it is in areas where gun control laws are strongest that violent crime tends to be highest. I live just outside Baltimore, the city "celebrated" in the TV series Homicide and The Wire, and we have some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation here. They don't help.
If you eliminate all firearms deaths, we still have a higher murder rate than most developed nations -- about three times that of Denmark. Meanwhile, Switzerland has hundreds of thousands of homes with assault rifles, and has a low crime rate. Canada has a firearms ownership rate that's just 10% lower than ours, but about half our murder rate.
Our problem is not our guns. It's our endemic poverty, our lack of socio-economic mobility, our racism, our prison-industrial complex, and our "War on Drugs".
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Deacons for Defense played key roles in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Armed citizens helped defend Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament during the Soviet coup attempt in 1991.
As with any security, it's not necessary to have a perfect defense, just to raise the price of an attack.
You mistake the nature of modern urban warfare. If real tyranny requiring sustained armed resistance came to the U.S., that resistance would not be a straight-up fight, any more than the current resistance movements in Iraq or Afghanistan are. Resistance fighters wouldn't be out hunting in the back country, they'd be in the cities being supplies by sympathetic non-combatants, or stealing food.
No, they aren't. This sort of shit has been standard procedure for decades, and lawsuits have not done a damn thing to stop it.
It will take the public debate that will occur when some law-abiding citizen kills an invading cop in legitimate self-defense and the militarization of policing becomes the lead story for a few weeks in all major media before there's change. I don't like that fact, but that's how it is.
As for me, as I'm not engaged in any violent illegal activity, I have to assume that any armed people breaking into my house are not cops, but violent home invaders. Doesn't matter if they're wearing badges and yelling "police!", this is a known tactic for such criminals. How I'd respond to home invaders depends on where am in the house and what's to hand, but I believe in and am prepared to exercise the right of self-defense, including the use of lethal force if necessary.
An assault rifle is a rifle capable of selective operation in either an automatic or semi-automatic firing mode and using a lighter cartridge -- the AK47 or the M16 being the familiar examples; standard issue for infantry forces and for stormtrooper cops. Not to be confused with "assault weapon", a political/legal term meaning "extra-scary gun".
Not anymore. Blitzkrieg raids have become SOP for anything more severe than unpaid parking tickets, and will probably remain that way until more citizens start greeting these home invasions with kinetic resistance.
I've seen billboards for Maker's.
Of course it does. A private business requires property, and property is force: the right to call upon government force to control someone else's access to or use of space or resources or even information. (Or, if you like a more rough-and-tumble model, the right to be immune to government prosecution after initiating one's own use of force to control someone else's access.)
In a sane, functioning democracy, that force is used only to protect and promote the fulfillment of human needs, the "natural rights". In a plutocracy, it is used to protect the privilege of the ruling class.
Where government exists, that force exists. The only question is whether that force is directed for the mutual good, or towards the privilege of a few.
(If you want to talk about anarchy, fine, but we have to start with the understanding that all property, as the concept currently exists, is rooted in government -- "anarcho-capitalism" or right-Libertarianism is an inherent contradiction. In an anarchy, there is neither government power nor private power.)
When you are ready to act like an adult by acknowledging that most unemployment is a result of deliberate public policies meant to keep wages low and profits high, and not of some immaturity on the part of the unemployed, we'll treat you like an adult. Until then, go away, the big people are talking now.
It's a very strong statement, if one is considering how much longer an adult might continue to live. To put it bluntly, reductions in infant mortality don't help *me* live any longer, since I'm not an infant.
...because land policies drove desperate peopl into the cities looking for any work. Read up on land enclosure and the history of the Industrial Revolution.
And China, the modern manufacturing powerhouse, makes use of prison labor.
Yes, a skilled machinist has a pretty decent jobs, and yes, the bias against manufacturing work is a bad thing. But there are some unpleasant fact at the root of the bias.
In a sensible economic system, if all the work could be done by machines, we'd live in abundance. Alan Watts had an interesting idea about how each citizen ought to get a share in the wealth created the machines.
Good lord, son, stop drinking the right-wing Kool-Aid that presents the Founding Fathers as divinely inspired men of impeccable virtue. Many of them claimed to own other human beings on the basis that those human beings were racial minorities. Among them were Charles Pinckney, who wrote "...I say, that, at the time I drew that constitution, I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could have ever existed in it;" and James Madison, who though that slaves couldn't be freed unless "they are permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted to a white population."
As for your ridiculous claim that the founders understood women to be included in the "all men" who are created equal, the fact that one state allowed women to vote in elections (though not if they were poor) does not alter the position of the founders of the federal government. John Adams was explictly against giviing the vote to women or to men who didn't own land.
Let us be grateful that we can leave the opinions and intentions of the Founders in the dustbin of history.