The test for copyright infringement is not how much effort you put into your derivative work.
I expect Bluehole's suit to fail, just as Valve's suit against Blizzard would fail, but this is not because the one game isn't copying the other. They are clearly copying their predecessors. It's just that game mechanics aren't copyrightable. (Yet...::sigh::)
I will once again quote the relevant part of your nonsense:
We're discussing the left-right distinction between ideologies. The definition we are using is
If we had been discussing this and using that definition, you would have mentioned this definition at some point earlier in the conversation, with your reference. You're clearly attempting some kind of revisionism, where you are always right and clever and have a good response to every criticism. More importantly though, this tells me that you're not listening to, or even paying attention to, anything that I'm saying.
I know I said that people should fight against extremism, but that doesn't mean I enjoy doing this.
We're discussing the left-right distinction between ideologies. The definition we are using is "The Left seeks social justice through redistributive social and economic policies, while the Right defends private property and capitalism."
Ha ha ha ha... Okay. I'm sorry, I couldn't even make it through the rest of your post. We're done here.
the political system within which they want to accomplish that is socialism.
The economic system with which they want to accomplish that is socialism. Elimination of both class and state is a political goal, cooperative control (not necessarily state control) of the means of production is an economic... goal. I guess. Goal isn't the right word there, but that's not important. It's not unreasonable to say that communism incorporates socialism. It is completely unreasonable to say that socialism, an economic system, is actually about politics.
You've given several examples showing that it's possible to support different alternatives, while being consistently in opposition to one. But the issue is not that Italy and Germany were consistently anti-Capitalist, while perusing different alternatives. The issue is that they were inconsistent. Italy was initially very laissez-faire, then turned protectionist (at the behest of business owners), then started to seize companies, then the war happened. That is not definitively for or against capitalism, it's inconsistent. That's the point. Germany is likewise, though Hitler seems to have fallen a little further on the pro-property rights side.
You really seem to be a little obsessed with the economic angle here, bending over backwards to try and turn apathy into opposition. Tell me then: why is socialism the right word? Why are you so focused on claiming that it's economics which equates these two, even though it's politics which sets them so directly in opposition to one another?
UBI is another form of welfare, so that's not a distinction. However the article doesn't call this "universal," the article calls this "guaranteed basic income." So I guess you can direct your ire at 'an anonymous reader.'
I have said nothing about how I view politics, I have many views on politics which have nothing to do with the left-right scale. In fact, your suggestion that my views on politics could be characterized by my views on only this one specific thing is detrimentally stereotyping. I have also said nothing about who the left represents. I will again repeat myself, since you seem be really struggling with the things that I have said: "The left-right scale is about power and where it resides - at the top or at the bottom.... It's about who you fear more: the tyrant at the top, or the mob at the bottom." If your claim is that you have some example of "the left" which defies this trend, then... that's not the left.
I don't know what to say there, even if you've got some true-blue hippy who who fits every stereotype about what people think "the left" represents - he can be sitting around a tie-dye shirt, listening to the Grateful Dead and smoking a joint - if he says that strong leadership is what's really important so we need a monarch to protect us, then he's not on the left. The rest of that crap doesn't matter. The left-right scale doesn't cover economics, or environmentalism, or tie-dye shirts. It only covers this one specific thing.
Yes, other people do that stereotyping like you did above. You're not alone there, tribalism has a long tradition: "I associate with one side of the scale, and I equate my side with all that I like, and the other side with all that is objectively evil." This is the same extremism that I was talking about before. I'm not sure that I agree that I need to accept every modern abuse of well-established terms, but even if I did then as you stressed above: we are talking about the historical left-right distinction.
You want to claim that socialism and fascism are both anti-capitalist? Even though fascism has no consistent economic policy? Uh huh. Okay I will drop a few quotes from the article that I linked, since your reading comprehension seems to be lacking:
Hitler and the Nazis held a very strong idealist conception of history, which held that human events are guided by small numbers of exceptional individuals following a higher ideal. They believed that all economic concerns, being purely material, were unworthy of their consideration.
Hitler called his political party "National Socialist", but he was clear to point out that his interpretation of socialism "has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism", saying that "Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not".
At another point, Hitler said in private that "I absolutely insist on protecting private property... we must encourage private initiative".[97] On yet another occasion, he qualified that statement by saying that the government should have the power to regulate the use of private property for the good of the nation.[98] In spite of this, he later asserted: "It is my firm conviction that property rights... must be unconditionally respected. Any tampering with them would eliminate one of the most vital incentives to human activity and would jeopardize future endeavor".[99] Hitler clearly believed that the lack of a precise economic programme was one of the Nazi Party's strengths, saying: "The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all".
As for Italy: the fascists started out laissez-faire and then became more protectionist. Then the Great Depression happened and Mussolini decided that free trade was to blame, or at least he blamed it on free trade, and the Italian government started taking over failing companies. Then the war happened and everyone had war economies, in which the government controls most things. (This includes the United States / Britain / other non-fascist countries.) Here is the wikipedia article about corporatism.
You would also do better to keep your claims about communism rather than socialism. They still wouldn't be true, but at least communism has a political aspect. Socialism is really just about economics, and economics are not a big part of fascism.
... Well, if that's the line you want to draw then what isn't dead to you? Is your son using Seamonkey now?
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
The noscirpt dev had plenty of time to get his shit together before the update, it's not like Mozilla didn't tell people about this. At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
So I absolutely hate the quote-and-response thing, but you've said so many things here that need responding. My question about why social justice was impossible to achieve was rhetorical - I was illustrating that you can always find a deeper reason for something if you look for it. The point was that working against extremism is a good approach in combating tyranny. I would challenge your assertion that inequality stems from differences in abilities and culture, but I don't care.
You should also probably stop talking about "things that neo-maxists believe" - neo-marxism is an extremely broad catch-all term. Neo-marxists believe lots of different and conflicting things, this is true for just about any group with the neo- label.
I don't need to look up the historic left-right distinction, I know it very well. It was absolutely about power. You may be thinking of the sans-culottes, who mostly didn't care about power, they just wanted cheap food and stable employment. But though the sans-culottes provided most of the drive behind the left, they themselves were neither left nor right. The term comes from the assembly, and they were all about arguing over where the power should be. If anything, the historic left-right distinction was more about power than it is today, where we no longer have big arguments over whether and how many people should be able to vote, or how much influence the king should have, and instead argue about conservative vs progressive social and economic issues and we use "left" and "right" as very lose indicators of where people fall on those issues. The distinction is poorly suited to this purpose.
Also, I made no claim about what "fascists state." I mentioned one case, by one man, specifically. I will repeat myself, so you don't miss it this time: 'Mussolini did denounce "supercapitalism" at one point, but this was mostly about seizing more power.' Wikipedia points out that fascism doesn't really have a consistent economic policy, so... okay. Italy's policy is usually described as "corporatism" though, and it involved a significant portion of the country's economy run by private enterprise. All in service to the war effort, of course.
You can play the "I know the real reason!" game all day. For some reason you've chosen to go only one layer deeper than extremism, but why is social justice impossible to achieve? And what causes that? And the next thing? Extremism is a good place to stop, because extremism is actionable - you can fight against extremism internally, recognizing that positions and opinions other than your own do have merit, and fight against it externally, calling out extremists when they try to sway others to their cause.
Speaking of which, your continued denunciation of "the left" is part of the problem.
The left-right scale is about power and where it resides - at the top or at the bottom. It's not about progressive vs. conservative, it's not about revolutionaries vs reactionaries (which is basically just another way of saying progressive vs conservative). It's about who you fear more: the tyrant at the top, or the mob at the bottom. Fascism, at the extreme right, puts the power solely in the hands of the tyrant (not necessarily a single person). Anarchism, at the extreme left, puts the power solely in the hands of the mob.
Those other things that you talk about often correlate with power - the tyrant is more likely to protect property rights, for example (this is the classic reason why the aristocracy supported the monarchy, and also why they were aristocrats in the first place), while the mob is more likely to start a revolution - but those other things you're talking about do not describe governmental bodies. Monarchy is to the right of democracy, but is a monarchy more or less reactionary than a democracy? There's no answer to that, those words don't go together.
Also, fascism is not anti-capitalistic. I don't know where you got the idea that it was... Mussolini did denounce "supercapitalism" at one point, but this was mostly about seizing more power. Economically, fascism functioned as a public-private partnership.
Ah, well that explains why you might equate the two then. Most countries which try communism have wound up like Germany above - retaining the language of communism, while running a government which is very different. I will assume that's the case for you.
This is why it's been argued that the left-right scale should really be more of a circle: even though the extreme right (fascism) and the extreme left (anarchy) are very different in terms of ideals and how those ideals are pursued, they seem to result in the same thing (slavery, totalitarianism, or something similar) whenever people try to actually implement them. In other words: it's extremism that's the problem, rather than the left or the right, per se.
Communism is explicitly anti-authoritarian, the ideal of communism is a classless, stateless, egalitarian society. This runs into a couple of problems though: one is noncompliance, how do you enforce the law without a state? Another problem is a power vacuum, what's to stop some warlord or demagogue from claiming power if there's no state to oppose him?
So... my guess is that some people like the parent get the idea that communism is actually authoritarian (even though it's just shy of anarchy) for another couple of reasons: first, because the idea of property rights is so ingrained in our culture at this point that people think of the concept of property as inherent, rather than something created and enforced by the state. And so a state which does not recognize private property seems like it's violating a fundamental right, and this can come off as authoritarian. And the second reason is because countries which pursue a communist system frequently end up ruled by authoritarian dictators.
[Fascists / Marxists] believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for [armed conflict / class struggle] and to respond effectively to economic difficulties
See how close they are?
You shocked me for a second there, when I thought you were actually quoting. But I guess you've proven me wrong - it's Marxism, not Fascism, which you know nothing about.
Also, where did you get the idea that we were talking about where fascism ought to be placed on the left/right spectrum? We weren't talking about that, no one has said anything like that other than you. This is coming completely out of the blue. It kind of sounds like you're trying to backpedal by just making things up.
This is silly. You're silly. The term "corporate" isn't necessary to make Nazis right-wing. The term "fascist" is sufficient.
This comes up a lot, the problem seems to be that no one really knows what fascist means. Fascism is at the extreme right of the left-right political spectrum. No really, it is.Yes I'm serious.
The rest of what you said is also silly, but I'll let someone else answer that.
Look, I don't blame you for not wanting to go back and read through the thread in order to figure out what we're really talking about here. All that reading is for nerds, right? That's not you, you're too good for that. Let me help you out:
The person who started this thread, the one who you apparently really want to talk to even though it was me to whom you responded, that person made a claim that customer unhappiness was linked to governmental action on the grounds that the current administration had been acting to remove any consequences to bad behavior.
I responded to that, saying that the current administration can't be held solely responsible for those actions because this has now become a generalized GOP goal. And then I gave the example of the net neutrality vote in the senate to show that removing these barriers to bad behaviour had broad GOP support.
Then you came along and said that because there hadn't been any well-publicized net neutrality violations in the last month, at least not sufficiently publicized that you had heard of them, this meant that net neutrality couldn't possibly have anything to do with customer dissatisfaction. In fact, later on you referred to this as "proof beyond any doubt."
... Which tells me that you have an absurdly low barrier for what constitutes "proof," but anyway: in order to demonstrate just one of the faults in this logic I gave another example that it wasn't necessary for ISPs to violate net neutrality rules at all, whether those violations were well-publicized or not, in order for legislation on this to make people unhappy.
Note that at this point we have two given possibilities for why people are unhappy with ISPs. The first given by the parent at the start of this thread, in which the ISPs are emboldened by the actions of "the administration" (really the GOP) and so feel that they don't need to respect their customers. And the second given by me as a counter-example to your claim that people can only be unhappy about the state of net neutrality if they are responding to an event that you have heard of.
Of course, at no point did I claim that this second example was the real reason why people in general are unhappy with the ISPs. Though it is certainly the reason why I am unhappy with the ISPs.
Now we have you declaring that I am an authoritarian and the you are a libertarian (implying that those are distinct groups) and stating that no one outside of those groups cares about net neutrality even though, as I said above, net neutrality has wide bipartisan support among voters. At least this time you give something to back up your claim, though your assertion is that Verizon in particular must bear the brunt of peoples' ire over network neutrality because, I guess, everyone who wants a neutral internet will necessarily make the leap of blaming this on Ajit Pai (instead of "the administration," as above, or the GOP), and then these people will all know that his former employer was Verizon, and then these people will all blame his former employer, and then this blame will manifest as dissatisfaction. And because people are unhappy with Verizon, but not as unhappy as they are with some other ISPs, this then means that people don't care about net neutrality.
You know what? As ridiculous as that is, I don't care. That was never the point, it never mattered. It was just a counter example to a stupid bit of faulty logic. You can have that if you want.
They can be, but it wouldn't be reflect in their opinion of their ISP until the ISP has done something violating the abolished rule.
What? Why? It's no secret that the ISPs are behind the change, even though it's the GOP who are actually implementing it. I say once again: the change is fully sufficient to make me unhappy with the ISPs.
Also, to repeat myself, when I mentioned the GOP it was in response to the parent who specifically blamed "the administration." If you want to claim that I was off-topic, you're going to have to address that somehow. Your insistence that quality of customer service has nothing to do with network neutrality is... a thing, but you've done nothing at all to support your claim. Given that it contradicts what the parent said, and what I was replying to, you can't skip this step.
Really, this isn't difficult. I don't know why you keep dodging this and making your little unsupported declarations instead. The parent's claim was pretty tenuous, it wouldn't be a hard argument to make. But instead you keep insisting that my comment, which was a direct response to the claim that the parent made, was off-topic.
My suspicion is that when you came into this thread you didn't want to bother figuring out what people were actually talking about. Instead, you decided to respond to my comment as though it were in a vacuum and ever since then you've just been doubling down on that mistake.
The fact that this was political protesting does not mean that it isn't a crime. Lots of protesting is criminal in nature, that's part of the process. This was certainly a minor crime, and their punishment should be measured, but it was definitely still a crime and should be a crime.
I'm guessing that you're coming at this with an American perspective, where extreme over-prosecution of computer crimes is the norm. If these two were in the United States, they could be looking at 10-15 years in prison. Plus whatever other punitive crap the judge decided to dump on them. We can agree that this is wrong. Hopefully, that's not how it is in France.
Why can't the customers be unhappy with the rule change? I'm unhappy with the rule change. I'm a customer, and polls say that net neutrality has wide bipartisan support among voters (i.e.: customers like me).
Also, the parent was claiming that these actions have emboldened the ISPs into believing that they can get away with worse customer support, which would lead to consumer dissatisfaction. All I said was that these actions can't be blamed solely on the administration.
If you had bothered to read my very short comment: "what they have done is dropped any plans that they had for maintaining network neutrality."
I gather you are claiming that when someone has a history of bad behavior, and then we get rid of any rules against bad behavior, we should assume that this person will now behave well? Now that they have no incentive to do so, and every incentive to keep doing as they did before?
Each of these violations happened under different rules, which they thought they could get away with (and mostly did) because the former rules were so lax. Your claim that no "ISP has yet done anything differently" is ridiculous - what they have done is dropped any plans that they had for maintaining network neutrality, because those plans are now unnecessary. Now they go back to what they were doing before, only this time with no consequences.
You can't blame this just on the administration (i.e.: the executive branch), this has become a generalized Republican platform goal. You can look at the recent vote in the senate - only three Republicans voted to preserve network neutrality.
As has been said many many times: each president is required to appoint at least two FCC members from the opposition party. The opposition members are almost always mainline candidates who agree with their party's positions, in order to ease confirmations of the same-party candidates who have the majority of votes. Since the opposition party candidates have very little power, this is a compromise that the president can make easily.
If you have participated in even one of the FCC threads before, you have heard this already. Parroting this same line about Obama appointing Pai is deceptive.
The parent mentions at-will employment - this is a legal term which basically says: no. No laws against unjustified dismissal. There are some exceptions to at-will employment, on a state-by-state basis, but Montana is the only state which actually has a real law which lays out grounds for suing a former employer for this reason.
It's not always about winning, sometimes it's about not losing. Corps can lose big from class actions, so they try to avoid them. One way to avoid them is by lobbying to make them illegal, as above. Another way to avoid them, but more expensive, is to not treat people like shit in the first place. One solution is preferable to the other.
Otherwise, you'd have to go to a RedBox (are those still a thing?), or gods-forbid an actual movie theater.
There are still video rental places out there. No really, it's true. You just just need to look for them. A lot of rural towns will have one or two, because internet connections are spotty in places, and big cities will still have some, because big cities have a niche for everything.
I guess if you live in the suburbs you might be screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
The test for copyright infringement is not how much effort you put into your derivative work.
::sigh::)
I expect Bluehole's suit to fail, just as Valve's suit against Blizzard would fail, but this is not because the one game isn't copying the other. They are clearly copying their predecessors. It's just that game mechanics aren't copyrightable. (Yet...
The point is that a contract doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means, if you don't have the background to interpret this kind of thing.
We're discussing the left-right distinction between ideologies. The definition we are using is
If we had been discussing this and using that definition, you would have mentioned this definition at some point earlier in the conversation, with your reference. You're clearly attempting some kind of revisionism, where you are always right and clever and have a good response to every criticism. More importantly though, this tells me that you're not listening to, or even paying attention to, anything that I'm saying.
I know I said that people should fight against extremism, but that doesn't mean I enjoy doing this.
We're discussing the left-right distinction between ideologies. The definition we are using is "The Left seeks social justice through redistributive social and economic policies, while the Right defends private property and capitalism."
Ha ha ha ha... Okay. I'm sorry, I couldn't even make it through the rest of your post. We're done here.
the political system within which they want to accomplish that is socialism.
The economic system with which they want to accomplish that is socialism. Elimination of both class and state is a political goal, cooperative control (not necessarily state control) of the means of production is an economic... goal. I guess. Goal isn't the right word there, but that's not important. It's not unreasonable to say that communism incorporates socialism. It is completely unreasonable to say that socialism, an economic system, is actually about politics.
You've given several examples showing that it's possible to support different alternatives, while being consistently in opposition to one. But the issue is not that Italy and Germany were consistently anti-Capitalist, while perusing different alternatives. The issue is that they were inconsistent. Italy was initially very laissez-faire, then turned protectionist (at the behest of business owners), then started to seize companies, then the war happened. That is not definitively for or against capitalism, it's inconsistent. That's the point. Germany is likewise, though Hitler seems to have fallen a little further on the pro-property rights side.
You really seem to be a little obsessed with the economic angle here, bending over backwards to try and turn apathy into opposition. Tell me then: why is socialism the right word? Why are you so focused on claiming that it's economics which equates these two, even though it's politics which sets them so directly in opposition to one another?
UBI is another form of welfare, so that's not a distinction. However the article doesn't call this "universal," the article calls this "guaranteed basic income." So I guess you can direct your ire at 'an anonymous reader.'
I don't know what to say there, even if you've got some true-blue hippy who who fits every stereotype about what people think "the left" represents - he can be sitting around a tie-dye shirt, listening to the Grateful Dead and smoking a joint - if he says that strong leadership is what's really important so we need a monarch to protect us, then he's not on the left. The rest of that crap doesn't matter. The left-right scale doesn't cover economics, or environmentalism, or tie-dye shirts. It only covers this one specific thing.
Yes, other people do that stereotyping like you did above. You're not alone there, tribalism has a long tradition: "I associate with one side of the scale, and I equate my side with all that I like, and the other side with all that is objectively evil." This is the same extremism that I was talking about before. I'm not sure that I agree that I need to accept every modern abuse of well-established terms, but even if I did then as you stressed above: we are talking about the historical left-right distinction.
You want to claim that socialism and fascism are both anti-capitalist? Even though fascism has no consistent economic policy? Uh huh. Okay I will drop a few quotes from the article that I linked, since your reading comprehension seems to be lacking:
Hitler and the Nazis held a very strong idealist conception of history, which held that human events are guided by small numbers of exceptional individuals following a higher ideal. They believed that all economic concerns, being purely material, were unworthy of their consideration.
Hitler called his political party "National Socialist", but he was clear to point out that his interpretation of socialism "has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism", saying that "Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not".
At another point, Hitler said in private that "I absolutely insist on protecting private property... we must encourage private initiative".[97] On yet another occasion, he qualified that statement by saying that the government should have the power to regulate the use of private property for the good of the nation.[98] In spite of this, he later asserted: "It is my firm conviction that property rights... must be unconditionally respected. Any tampering with them would eliminate one of the most vital incentives to human activity and would jeopardize future endeavor".[99] Hitler clearly believed that the lack of a precise economic programme was one of the Nazi Party's strengths, saying: "The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all".
As for Italy: the fascists started out laissez-faire and then became more protectionist. Then the Great Depression happened and Mussolini decided that free trade was to blame, or at least he blamed it on free trade, and the Italian government started taking over failing companies. Then the war happened and everyone had war economies, in which the government controls most things. (This includes the United States / Britain / other non-fascist countries.) Here is the wikipedia article about corporatism.
You would also do better to keep your claims about communism rather than socialism. They still wouldn't be true, but at least communism has a political aspect. Socialism is really just about economics, and economics are not a big part of fascism.
Mozilla is dead to me.
... Well, if that's the line you want to draw then what isn't dead to you? Is your son using Seamonkey now?
You use noscript and think that it's important, I use noscript and think that it's important, but I don't think that's true for most people. Even in this thread, the parent doesn't use noscript - you can tell because he talks about AdBlock Plus as though it were doing the same thing.
The noscirpt dev had plenty of time to get his shit together before the update, it's not like Mozilla didn't tell people about this. At some point, automatically updating the browser has to include updating to the new version. I think you're being a little too hard on Mozilla in this case.
So I absolutely hate the quote-and-response thing, but you've said so many things here that need responding. My question about why social justice was impossible to achieve was rhetorical - I was illustrating that you can always find a deeper reason for something if you look for it. The point was that working against extremism is a good approach in combating tyranny. I would challenge your assertion that inequality stems from differences in abilities and culture, but I don't care.
You should also probably stop talking about "things that neo-maxists believe" - neo-marxism is an extremely broad catch-all term. Neo-marxists believe lots of different and conflicting things, this is true for just about any group with the neo- label.
I don't need to look up the historic left-right distinction, I know it very well. It was absolutely about power. You may be thinking of the sans-culottes, who mostly didn't care about power, they just wanted cheap food and stable employment. But though the sans-culottes provided most of the drive behind the left, they themselves were neither left nor right. The term comes from the assembly, and they were all about arguing over where the power should be. If anything, the historic left-right distinction was more about power than it is today, where we no longer have big arguments over whether and how many people should be able to vote, or how much influence the king should have, and instead argue about conservative vs progressive social and economic issues and we use "left" and "right" as very lose indicators of where people fall on those issues. The distinction is poorly suited to this purpose.
Also, I made no claim about what "fascists state." I mentioned one case, by one man, specifically. I will repeat myself, so you don't miss it this time: 'Mussolini did denounce "supercapitalism" at one point, but this was mostly about seizing more power.' Wikipedia points out that fascism doesn't really have a consistent economic policy, so... okay. Italy's policy is usually described as "corporatism" though, and it involved a significant portion of the country's economy run by private enterprise. All in service to the war effort, of course.
You can play the "I know the real reason!" game all day. For some reason you've chosen to go only one layer deeper than extremism, but why is social justice impossible to achieve? And what causes that? And the next thing? Extremism is a good place to stop, because extremism is actionable - you can fight against extremism internally, recognizing that positions and opinions other than your own do have merit, and fight against it externally, calling out extremists when they try to sway others to their cause.
Speaking of which, your continued denunciation of "the left" is part of the problem.
The left-right scale is about power and where it resides - at the top or at the bottom. It's not about progressive vs. conservative, it's not about revolutionaries vs reactionaries (which is basically just another way of saying progressive vs conservative). It's about who you fear more: the tyrant at the top, or the mob at the bottom. Fascism, at the extreme right, puts the power solely in the hands of the tyrant (not necessarily a single person). Anarchism, at the extreme left, puts the power solely in the hands of the mob.
Those other things that you talk about often correlate with power - the tyrant is more likely to protect property rights, for example (this is the classic reason why the aristocracy supported the monarchy, and also why they were aristocrats in the first place), while the mob is more likely to start a revolution - but those other things you're talking about do not describe governmental bodies. Monarchy is to the right of democracy, but is a monarchy more or less reactionary than a democracy? There's no answer to that, those words don't go together.
Also, fascism is not anti-capitalistic. I don't know where you got the idea that it was... Mussolini did denounce "supercapitalism" at one point, but this was mostly about seizing more power. Economically, fascism functioned as a public-private partnership.
Ah, well that explains why you might equate the two then. Most countries which try communism have wound up like Germany above - retaining the language of communism, while running a government which is very different. I will assume that's the case for you.
This is why it's been argued that the left-right scale should really be more of a circle: even though the extreme right (fascism) and the extreme left (anarchy) are very different in terms of ideals and how those ideals are pursued, they seem to result in the same thing (slavery, totalitarianism, or something similar) whenever people try to actually implement them. In other words: it's extremism that's the problem, rather than the left or the right, per se.
Communism is explicitly anti-authoritarian, the ideal of communism is a classless, stateless, egalitarian society. This runs into a couple of problems though: one is noncompliance, how do you enforce the law without a state? Another problem is a power vacuum, what's to stop some warlord or demagogue from claiming power if there's no state to oppose him?
So... my guess is that some people like the parent get the idea that communism is actually authoritarian (even though it's just shy of anarchy) for another couple of reasons: first, because the idea of property rights is so ingrained in our culture at this point that people think of the concept of property as inherent, rather than something created and enforced by the state. And so a state which does not recognize private property seems like it's violating a fundamental right, and this can come off as authoritarian. And the second reason is because countries which pursue a communist system frequently end up ruled by authoritarian dictators.
[Fascists / Marxists] believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for [armed conflict / class struggle] and to respond effectively to economic difficulties
See how close they are?
You shocked me for a second there, when I thought you were actually quoting. But I guess you've proven me wrong - it's Marxism, not Fascism, which you know nothing about.
Also, where did you get the idea that we were talking about where fascism ought to be placed on the left/right spectrum? We weren't talking about that, no one has said anything like that other than you. This is coming completely out of the blue. It kind of sounds like you're trying to backpedal by just making things up.
This is silly. You're silly. The term "corporate" isn't necessary to make Nazis right-wing. The term "fascist" is sufficient.
This comes up a lot, the problem seems to be that no one really knows what fascist means. Fascism is at the extreme right of the left-right political spectrum. No really, it is. Yes I'm serious.
The rest of what you said is also silly, but I'll let someone else answer that.
Look, I don't blame you for not wanting to go back and read through the thread in order to figure out what we're really talking about here. All that reading is for nerds, right? That's not you, you're too good for that. Let me help you out:
... Which tells me that you have an absurdly low barrier for what constitutes "proof," but anyway: in order to demonstrate just one of the faults in this logic I gave another example that it wasn't necessary for ISPs to violate net neutrality rules at all, whether those violations were well-publicized or not, in order for legislation on this to make people unhappy.
The person who started this thread, the one who you apparently really want to talk to even though it was me to whom you responded, that person made a claim that customer unhappiness was linked to governmental action on the grounds that the current administration had been acting to remove any consequences to bad behavior.
I responded to that, saying that the current administration can't be held solely responsible for those actions because this has now become a generalized GOP goal. And then I gave the example of the net neutrality vote in the senate to show that removing these barriers to bad behaviour had broad GOP support.
Then you came along and said that because there hadn't been any well-publicized net neutrality violations in the last month, at least not sufficiently publicized that you had heard of them, this meant that net neutrality couldn't possibly have anything to do with customer dissatisfaction. In fact, later on you referred to this as "proof beyond any doubt."
Note that at this point we have two given possibilities for why people are unhappy with ISPs. The first given by the parent at the start of this thread, in which the ISPs are emboldened by the actions of "the administration" (really the GOP) and so feel that they don't need to respect their customers. And the second given by me as a counter-example to your claim that people can only be unhappy about the state of net neutrality if they are responding to an event that you have heard of.
Of course, at no point did I claim that this second example was the real reason why people in general are unhappy with the ISPs. Though it is certainly the reason why I am unhappy with the ISPs.
Now we have you declaring that I am an authoritarian and the you are a libertarian (implying that those are distinct groups) and stating that no one outside of those groups cares about net neutrality even though, as I said above, net neutrality has wide bipartisan support among voters. At least this time you give something to back up your claim, though your assertion is that Verizon in particular must bear the brunt of peoples' ire over network neutrality because, I guess, everyone who wants a neutral internet will necessarily make the leap of blaming this on Ajit Pai (instead of "the administration," as above, or the GOP), and then these people will all know that his former employer was Verizon, and then these people will all blame his former employer, and then this blame will manifest as dissatisfaction. And because people are unhappy with Verizon, but not as unhappy as they are with some other ISPs, this then means that people don't care about net neutrality.
You know what? As ridiculous as that is, I don't care. That was never the point, it never mattered. It was just a counter example to a stupid bit of faulty logic. You can have that if you want.
They can be, but it wouldn't be reflect in their opinion of their ISP until the ISP has done something violating the abolished rule.
What? Why? It's no secret that the ISPs are behind the change, even though it's the GOP who are actually implementing it. I say once again: the change is fully sufficient to make me unhappy with the ISPs.
Also, to repeat myself, when I mentioned the GOP it was in response to the parent who specifically blamed "the administration." If you want to claim that I was off-topic, you're going to have to address that somehow. Your insistence that quality of customer service has nothing to do with network neutrality is... a thing, but you've done nothing at all to support your claim. Given that it contradicts what the parent said, and what I was replying to, you can't skip this step.
Really, this isn't difficult. I don't know why you keep dodging this and making your little unsupported declarations instead. The parent's claim was pretty tenuous, it wouldn't be a hard argument to make. But instead you keep insisting that my comment, which was a direct response to the claim that the parent made, was off-topic.
My suspicion is that when you came into this thread you didn't want to bother figuring out what people were actually talking about. Instead, you decided to respond to my comment as though it were in a vacuum and ever since then you've just been doubling down on that mistake.
The fact that this was political protesting does not mean that it isn't a crime. Lots of protesting is criminal in nature, that's part of the process. This was certainly a minor crime, and their punishment should be measured, but it was definitely still a crime and should be a crime.
I'm guessing that you're coming at this with an American perspective, where extreme over-prosecution of computer crimes is the norm. If these two were in the United States, they could be looking at 10-15 years in prison. Plus whatever other punitive crap the judge decided to dump on them. We can agree that this is wrong. Hopefully, that's not how it is in France.
Why can't the customers be unhappy with the rule change? I'm unhappy with the rule change. I'm a customer, and polls say that net neutrality has wide bipartisan support among voters (i.e.: customers like me).
Also, the parent was claiming that these actions have emboldened the ISPs into believing that they can get away with worse customer support, which would lead to consumer dissatisfaction. All I said was that these actions can't be blamed solely on the administration.
If you had bothered to read my very short comment: "what they have done is dropped any plans that they had for maintaining network neutrality."
I gather you are claiming that when someone has a history of bad behavior, and then we get rid of any rules against bad behavior, we should assume that this person will now behave well? Now that they have no incentive to do so, and every incentive to keep doing as they did before?
Verizon was fined for violating network nuetrality in 2012 when they blocked people from tethering, again in 2016 for supercookies, and they were throttling video just last year. This is a non-exhaustive list.
Each of these violations happened under different rules, which they thought they could get away with (and mostly did) because the former rules were so lax. Your claim that no "ISP has yet done anything differently" is ridiculous - what they have done is dropped any plans that they had for maintaining network neutrality, because those plans are now unnecessary. Now they go back to what they were doing before, only this time with no consequences.
You can't blame this just on the administration (i.e.: the executive branch), this has become a generalized Republican platform goal. You can look at the recent vote in the senate - only three Republicans voted to preserve network neutrality.
As has been said many many times: each president is required to appoint at least two FCC members from the opposition party. The opposition members are almost always mainline candidates who agree with their party's positions, in order to ease confirmations of the same-party candidates who have the majority of votes. Since the opposition party candidates have very little power, this is a compromise that the president can make easily.
If you have participated in even one of the FCC threads before, you have heard this already. Parroting this same line about Obama appointing Pai is deceptive.
The parent mentions at-will employment - this is a legal term which basically says: no. No laws against unjustified dismissal. There are some exceptions to at-will employment, on a state-by-state basis, but Montana is the only state which actually has a real law which lays out grounds for suing a former employer for this reason.
It's not always about winning, sometimes it's about not losing. Corps can lose big from class actions, so they try to avoid them. One way to avoid them is by lobbying to make them illegal, as above. Another way to avoid them, but more expensive, is to not treat people like shit in the first place. One solution is preferable to the other.
Otherwise, you'd have to go to a RedBox (are those still a thing?), or gods-forbid an actual movie theater.
There are still video rental places out there. No really, it's true. You just just need to look for them. A lot of rural towns will have one or two, because internet connections are spotty in places, and big cities will still have some, because big cities have a niche for everything.
I guess if you live in the suburbs you might be screwed.