In the case of the U.S. that means voting for people who want to cut the budget because the less money the government has, they less power they wield.
Yeah. Less power to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, rebuild flooded cities, feed the hungry, find and lock up murderers, care for the sick and injured...and, most importantly to the investment-class parasites who most strongly promote this "cut the budget!" meme, less power to put any regulation on big business.
Actual totalitarianism can be run on the cheap, clubs and jackboots are not very expensive. The size of the budget has little to do with how much freedom people have -- low government spending doesn't correlate with increased freedom. (Read the whole linked page, not just the table, especially the note about the U.S.'s rank -- the U.S. already spends less (by GDP) on government than any other large, prosperous country.)
Now, as a Zenarchist, I'd love -- and look forward to -- a society where we don't need government to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, etcetera. But before we get government out of those things, we need to get it out of creating and enforcing the capitalist "property rights" that create economic injustice, that have us living in the L-curve. First tear up all those government-issued land deeds held by landlords, the government-issued corporate charters that make stock in companies meaningful, all those government-issued copyrights and patents. Then we can talk.
In Europe they talk about States Rights without any of the baggage. Basically - they argue France, Germany, Poland, and so on reign supreme over the central government, and they have the right to nullify any act the EU passes which whose power was not granted by the Lisbon treaty. The same thinking should apply in the US too.
No, it shouldn't, because the EU is a group of sovereign nations in a loose union, whereas we have a Constitution under which the states gave up most of their sovereignty.
We tried something like what you're suggesting. It was called the Articles of Confederation, and was an abject failure. So a bunch of guys -- the Federalists -- came up with a plan for a strong central government. How strong? According to leading Federalist James Madison:
As to the remark that the States ought to be under the controul of the Genl. Govt. at least as much as they formerly were under the King & B. parliament, it amounts as it stands when taken in its presumable meaning, to nothing more than what actually makes a part of the Constitution; the powers of Congs. being much greater, especially on the great points of taxation & trade than the B. Legislature were ever permitted to exercise.........it cannot be unknown that they represented the strong prejudices in N. Y. agst. the object of the Convention which was among other things to take from that State the important power over its commerce and that they manifested, untill they withdrew from the Convention, the strongest feelings of dissatisfaction agst. the contemplated change in the federal system
That's right -- the "original intent" of James Madison was that the federal government would have more power over commerce and taxation than the British Parliament had had, and would take such power away from the states.
Bet you won't hear any of the Ee'd Plebnistaers who like to talk about the Founding Fathers quoting him on that.
All the people whining at the time did not bother to think of the implications of the Executive Branch deciding on its own to invade (sorry - assist with keeping order) a state. While it may have been a good idea at the time, the precedent it would have set would have been terrible
When the Arabs violated the Partition of Palestine and decided to throw the Zionists into the sea in '48, the Zionists had the audacity to stand up for their land...
"Their" land? How ahistorical. Or once I steal your wallet, do you believe that I'm admirable if I stand up to your attempts to reclaim it?
I'm not sure what that has to do with Rand Paul. If you want to learn about unions and violence, this would be a more useful link. Here is a good historical overview. For the motive behind the FUD about "union violence", see this and this.
Of course, we can't really blame the conservative half the country on the acts of a single member.
Of course. Conservatives may be, by and large, mistaken in their views, but I certainly do not wish to suggest that they all are directly responsible for the reprehensible acts of a few -- any more than everyone on the left is directly responsible for the reprehensible acts of a few.
But that's not the proposition you put forth. Your claim was that you has not seen evidence that anyone on the right was in favor of forceful censorship. That can only be true if you are living in near-isolation from the world, or if you were -- consciously or unconsciously -- closing your mind to highly visible evidence. And you specifically named Palin; a few minutes with Google could have saved you from looking pretty ignorant there.
the Chinese Room is certainly one of his most misunderstood ideas
Since Searle himself clearly doesn't understand it, this is certainly a true statement. "Causal powers", indeed. The "Chinese Room" is gibberish, one of those arguments that's not even wrong.
It's not like there are not opportunities, or that there is anything that is structurally preventing it.
That's the question: are there opportunities? Is there something structurally preventing it?
In the case of baseball, it may (I do not say that it is, I only speculate) be the case that youth baseball programs are less available to black kids. If so it would be entirely appropriate for MLB to say, "hey, let's support inner city Little League teams." Or if it was found that there was (again, just speculating) some unconscious bias in college baseball, it would be reasonable to correct that.
On the other hand, if fewer African Americans are going into pro sports because they have better opportunities in the professional and business worlds, then let's not worry about it. Basketball used to be dominated by Jewish players, but nobody thinks that decline is due to anti-Semitism, rather the opposite.
This may be a shock to you, but men and women view knowledge differently. Women find written knowledge and "facts" to be intimidating, sometimes offensive, and some have even gone so far as to compare knowledge to rape.
Ah, the stench of misogyny.
I suspect that it may rather be the case that women you know (probably only a handful) find your opinions and attitudes to be intimidating, offensive, and comparable to rape, and that you have confused your confused opinion with "facts".
Because you didn't do anything creative. The photographer is the one that's responsible for pretty much all of the creative work with regards to a photo.
My life is an ongoing creative work. Any photograph of me is a derivative of that work.
Understanding this is not not the same as being opposed to vaccinations against more deadly diseases. I never get a flu shot; but I got my Tdap booster a few months ago. And even though it made me feel like crap for a day or two, for serious diseases like tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis it's worth the risk of a reaction.
He basically is of the position that the whole campaign to inoculate people against H1N1 is in and of itself a conspiracy.
The WHO actually changed the definition of a pandemic in May 2009 so that H1N1 would qualify, removing the qualification that an outbreak must cause "enormous numbers of deaths and illness". And it estimated that 2 billion H1N1 cases were likely -- 1 out of 3 human beings on the whole planet -- even after the winter season in Australia and New Zealand showed that only about one to two out of 1000 people were infected.
There is definitely questionable behavior, conflict of interest, and lack of transparency here. Business as usual for Big Pharma.
You certainly ought to get kids vaccinated again polio, MMR, and other real threats for which effective vaccines are available. Influenza, however does not appear to fit into that category.
But nowhere have I seen any evidence whatsoever that Sarah Palin, or anyone else on the right wants to use force to "quell speech that she doesn't like".
It's amazing what you can manage to not see when you keep your eyes shut, isn't it?
Also, "Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so." -- Anchorage Daily News
People who have opted to send information to microsoft...
Did they? I'll bet that most of those people have no idea that MS is spying on their browsing behavior, they just clicked through yet another questionable "I agree" contract of adhesion.
Why do you care if he jokes about Cairo to announce a new line of shoes? How does it affect your life, and who is he hurting by it?
Neurotypical human beings -- and the fact you're asking this question suggests you're not one of them, no offense -- have a distress response to both the pain of others, and to people displaying callousness toward the pain of others. Using a situation that has already killed many people and that still has the potential to lead to the deaths of many more to sell overpriced footwear is first-rank callousness.
In other words, no man is an island. Assholery directed towards any man diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
the very first question that should be asked of people proposing legal changes of this kind is, "Where are the data to show that this new and harsher law will result in a reduction in the penalized behaviour sufficient to justify the change?"
You assume that reducing the behavior in question is the goal of the criminal justice system. More and more, I doubt this is the case.
For the prison-industrial complex, it's all about money; there's money to be had building and running prisons, and prison guard groups like CCPOA have clout and want to keep their members employed. For the masses, it's all about satisfying an irrational, almost ritual, need for revenge -- right up to the ritual human sacrifice that is capital punishment. (Just look at how many comments here are calling for tougher treatment of prisoners, without any rational argument involved.) For politicians, it's about pandering to all these groups with "tough on crime" rhetoric.
Actually reducing violent or fraudulent behavior is a pretty low priority.
Don't you mean "And more government is more left."
Since government is a vector, possessed of both magnitude and direction, and "left" is a direction, assuming that "left" implies "more government" is like assuming that "east" implies "more speed".
the US Government is considering legislation that will give the President 'kill switch' powers over the internet as well.
No. In point of the fact, the proposal in question would limit a power that the President has had for decades. Under a 1934 law, the President can (under certain circumstances) basically shut off any or all wireless or wired communications.
Please stop the FUD about this. One might argue that the bill should go further in restricting this power, or that the power should never have been granted in the first place, but calling it a new power is either ignorant or a lie.
the pleasurable end results are, if anything, largely due to inherent flaws of vacuum tube
If the results are pleasurable, the characteristics in question are not flaws.
The fact that a screwdriver makes a lousy hammer is not a flaw in the screwdriver, it's an error on the part of the person using the wrong tool. The fact that a diffraction grating, or a lighting gel, changes the light coming through it, is not a flaw, it's an error on the part of the person who does not understand their proper use. Likewise, the fact that a tube amp introduces certain distortions/filtering into an audio signal is not a flaw.
Noise is undesired signal. Music is controlled signal. A musician who can control the signal generated by a tube amp is not making noise but is producing music.
If the matter within the universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something.
Says who?
An expansion is an increase in volume. When our cosmos expands, it's not expanding into some pre-existing bit of volume and taking it over, it's creating volume that didn't exist before.
Does this make sense to our brains? Not much. Why should it? Our monkey brains were programmed by selection to find food and mates and to not get eaten; the fact that we can make any sense at all out of the cosmos beyond that is a happy accident. Don't expect the Universe to behave according to our monkey-brained prejudices, though.
That's stupid. We introduced the idea of "country" to them. Nomadic tribes don't generally hold land, and non-nomadic tribes hold very small pieces of land.
That's stupid and ahistorical. Please go read about the Iroquois and the role they played in shaping our nation.
Microsoft Exchange I find can be really demanding with just ten users when there is loads of e-mails stored, Zimbra can be an issue with just it's MySQL and Java components, Novell Groupwise can be a real pain in the ass at times on slower hardware, making you wait and this is all with a minimal amount of users.
The real issue? Execs can't be bothered to RTFL (refer to the fine law) and such. They will listen to (and take for good money) bullshit made up by various advisors and consultants who only have their own interests in mind.
Plus, they get to talk about how Big Government is loading business down with over-regulation, a popular meme with the business community. "Network Neutrality? Why, that's just another example of over-reaching government regulation, like Sarbanes-Oxley, look at how much SOX has cost us!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Less power to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, rebuild flooded cities, feed the hungry, find and lock up murderers, care for the sick and injured...and, most importantly to the investment-class parasites who most strongly promote this "cut the budget!" meme, less power to put any regulation on big business.
Actual totalitarianism can be run on the cheap, clubs and jackboots are not very expensive. The size of the budget has little to do with how much freedom people have -- low government spending doesn't correlate with increased freedom. (Read the whole linked page, not just the table, especially the note about the U.S.'s rank -- the U.S. already spends less (by GDP) on government than any other large, prosperous country.)
Now, as a Zenarchist, I'd love -- and look forward to -- a society where we don't need government to maintain the roads, fight fires, teach kids, etcetera. But before we get government out of those things, we need to get it out of creating and enforcing the capitalist "property rights" that create economic injustice, that have us living in the L-curve. First tear up all those government-issued land deeds held by landlords, the government-issued corporate charters that make stock in companies meaningful, all those government-issued copyrights and patents. Then we can talk.
No, it shouldn't, because the EU is a group of sovereign nations in a loose union, whereas we have a Constitution under which the states gave up most of their sovereignty.
We tried something like what you're suggesting. It was called the Articles of Confederation, and was an abject failure. So a bunch of guys -- the Federalists -- came up with a plan for a strong central government. How strong? According to leading Federalist James Madison:
That's right -- the "original intent" of James Madison was that the federal government would have more power over commerce and taxation than the British Parliament had had, and would take such power away from the states.
Bet you won't hear any of the Ee'd Plebnistaers who like to talk about the Founding Fathers quoting him on that.
Right. Like, if, say, there was a problem in some state -- say, a tax revolt in Pennsylvania -- only a horrible despot like George Washington would go in with federal troops.
C'mon. Even GOP Congresscritters slammed the dismal federal response for Katrina.
"Their" land? How ahistorical. Or once I steal your wallet, do you believe that I'm admirable if I stand up to your attempts to reclaim it?
So you agree that providing false testimony, editing videotape evidence, or spying of dissident groups would not be under the police's lawful duties?
I'm not sure what that has to do with Rand Paul. If you want to learn about unions and violence, this would be a more useful link. Here is a good historical overview. For the motive behind the FUD about "union violence", see this and this.
Of course. Conservatives may be, by and large, mistaken in their views, but I certainly do not wish to suggest that they all are directly responsible for the reprehensible acts of a few -- any more than everyone on the left is directly responsible for the reprehensible acts of a few.
But that's not the proposition you put forth. Your claim was that you has not seen evidence that anyone on the right was in favor of forceful censorship. That can only be true if you are living in near-isolation from the world, or if you were -- consciously or unconsciously -- closing your mind to highly visible evidence. And you specifically named Palin; a few minutes with Google could have saved you from looking pretty ignorant there.
Since Searle himself clearly doesn't understand it, this is certainly a true statement. "Causal powers", indeed. The "Chinese Room" is gibberish, one of those arguments that's not even wrong.
That's the question: are there opportunities? Is there something structurally preventing it?
In the case of baseball, it may (I do not say that it is, I only speculate) be the case that youth baseball programs are less available to black kids. If so it would be entirely appropriate for MLB to say, "hey, let's support inner city Little League teams." Or if it was found that there was (again, just speculating) some unconscious bias in college baseball, it would be reasonable to correct that.
On the other hand, if fewer African Americans are going into pro sports because they have better opportunities in the professional and business worlds, then let's not worry about it. Basketball used to be dominated by Jewish players, but nobody thinks that decline is due to anti-Semitism, rather the opposite.
Ah, the stench of misogyny.
I suspect that it may rather be the case that women you know (probably only a handful) find your opinions and attitudes to be intimidating, offensive, and comparable to rape, and that you have confused your confused opinion with "facts".
My life is an ongoing creative work. Any photograph of me is a derivative of that work.
The threat from influenza is overstated,and according to the available evidence flu vacccines are not useful for the general population or for the elderly. (There may be a benefit for the immune-compromised.) That makes widespread flu vaccination at best a waste of resources, at worst an exposure to risk of various side-effects without gain.
Understanding this is not not the same as being opposed to vaccinations against more deadly diseases. I never get a flu shot; but I got my Tdap booster a few months ago. And even though it made me feel like crap for a day or two, for serious diseases like tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis it's worth the risk of a reaction.
The WHO actually changed the definition of a pandemic in May 2009 so that H1N1 would qualify, removing the qualification that an outbreak must cause "enormous numbers of deaths and illness". And it estimated that 2 billion H1N1 cases were likely -- 1 out of 3 human beings on the whole planet -- even after the winter season in Australia and New Zealand showed that only about one to two out of 1000 people were infected.
It did this while taking advice from people with financial and research ties with Big Pharma companies that produced antivirals and vaccines; one researcher who wrote key guidelines had been paid by Roche and GlaxoSmithKline.
There is definitely questionable behavior, conflict of interest, and lack of transparency here. Business as usual for Big Pharma.
You certainly ought to get kids vaccinated again polio, MMR, and other real threats for which effective vaccines are available. Influenza, however does not appear to fit into that category.
It's amazing what you can manage to not see when you keep your eyes shut, isn't it?
Palin has suggested violence against Julian Assange, saying "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?". Several others pundits -- mostly on the right, though I wouldn't be surprised if hear the same nonsense were to come from one or two people on the left -- has made similar calls for violence against Assange, but Palin's is particularly delicious because she then went on to make use of the leaked data to criticize the Obama administration's policy towards Iran.
Also, "Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so." -- Anchorage Daily News
And when you broaden it to "anyone else on the right", it would be pretty amazing if you hadn't heard about the mass arrests at the 2004 Republican convention. Or about Rand Paul supporters stomping a protester's head.
Did they? I'll bet that most of those people have no idea that MS is spying on their browsing behavior, they just clicked through yet another questionable "I agree" contract of adhesion.
Neurotypical human beings -- and the fact you're asking this question suggests you're not one of them, no offense -- have a distress response to both the pain of others, and to people displaying callousness toward the pain of others. Using a situation that has already killed many people and that still has the potential to lead to the deaths of many more to sell overpriced footwear is first-rank callousness.
In other words, no man is an island. Assholery directed towards any man diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
You assume that reducing the behavior in question is the goal of the criminal justice system. More and more, I doubt this is the case.
For the prison-industrial complex, it's all about money; there's money to be had building and running prisons, and prison guard groups like CCPOA have clout and want to keep their members employed. For the masses, it's all about satisfying an irrational, almost ritual, need for revenge -- right up to the ritual human sacrifice that is capital punishment. (Just look at how many comments here are calling for tougher treatment of prisoners, without any rational argument involved.) For politicians, it's about pandering to all these groups with "tough on crime" rhetoric.
Actually reducing violent or fraudulent behavior is a pretty low priority.
Since government is a vector, possessed of both magnitude and direction, and "left" is a direction, assuming that "left" implies "more government" is like assuming that "east" implies "more speed".
No. In point of the fact, the proposal in question would limit a power that the President has had for decades. Under a 1934 law, the President can (under certain circumstances) basically shut off any or all wireless or wired communications.
Please stop the FUD about this. One might argue that the bill should go further in restricting this power, or that the power should never have been granted in the first place, but calling it a new power is either ignorant or a lie.
The persistence of FUD over this is amazing. The proposal in question would limit a power that the President has had since 1934. The "OMG Obama wants an internet kill switch!" meme is a lie.
If the results are pleasurable, the characteristics in question are not flaws.
The fact that a screwdriver makes a lousy hammer is not a flaw in the screwdriver, it's an error on the part of the person using the wrong tool. The fact that a diffraction grating, or a lighting gel, changes the light coming through it, is not a flaw, it's an error on the part of the person who does not understand their proper use. Likewise, the fact that a tube amp introduces certain distortions/filtering into an audio signal is not a flaw.
Noise is undesired signal. Music is controlled signal. A musician who can control the signal generated by a tube amp is not making noise but is producing music.
So: YDKWYTA. STFU. HTH. HAND.
Dude, you could not have picked a worse example.The popularity of the vinyl LP is one the rise. Perhaps a hipster fad, perhaps not -- if Monster Cables and Brilliant Pebbles can find places in home audio, I think the LP can find a niche.
Says who?
An expansion is an increase in volume. When our cosmos expands, it's not expanding into some pre-existing bit of volume and taking it over, it's creating volume that didn't exist before.
Does this make sense to our brains? Not much. Why should it? Our monkey brains were programmed by selection to find food and mates and to not get eaten; the fact that we can make any sense at all out of the cosmos beyond that is a happy accident. Don't expect the Universe to behave according to our monkey-brained prejudices, though.
That's stupid and ahistorical. Please go read about the Iroquois and the role they played in shaping our nation.
The problem, of course, is that determining what is "simplest" is often far from clear.
So don't run bloated bits of crapware.
Plus, they get to talk about how Big Government is loading business down with over-regulation, a popular meme with the business community. "Network Neutrality? Why, that's just another example of over-reaching government regulation, like Sarbanes-Oxley, look at how much SOX has cost us!"