'Appropriate' does, however, in fact mean to take possession of something in an exclusive fashion (exclusive property being the privileged form of property in current thought), so if you take 'steal' to be in either of the two senses above in which it is defined in terms of appropriation, then you could certainly argue that the poster to whom you responded was justified in holding that (unauthorized) duplication of a copyrighted work does not constitute stealing in that it does not involve appropriation (taking of exlusive ownership) but rather the opposite of appropriation.
[http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=appropriate& db =%2A]
I submit that A) journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, and B) the concept of liberalism today is so dilute that it's practically fucking meaningless,
You went to college for six years to get an education. This is something that is valuable independently of how many dollars per hour you are able to rent it out for.
Both your post and Palmer's article struck me as basically thinly veiled ad hominems posing as rebuttals. Palmer's 'point' seemed to me to be, not that there were fundamental flaws in Bollier's arguments, but that he and Bollier were thinking from different assumptions and definitions. He then condemned Bollier for this, basically deliberately mis-reading Bollier's article so that he could then reject it on the basis that it didn't make sense when mis-read in such a manner.
Communism isn't referred to as Stalinism, except by the ignorant and media types acting in bad faith. Distinguishing between Nazism and 'Hitlerism' would be a waste of time, since there has only really been one important Nazi movement in history, and that was under Hitler. Communism, however, is a heading that contains a large number of (often extremely antagonistic) philosophical and political schools, one of those being Stalinism. Since most 'Western' governments have a vested interest in discrediting political philosophies that are anti-capitalistic, Stalinism (undeniably the ugliest, most incredibly, tragically ill-conceived form of communism ever to exist) is usually said to be or implied to be synonymous with communism in the media and the general political rhetoric - hence your mistake. This is also why you often see the term 'communism' (the philosophy of communism) used when what should really be printed is 'Communism' (the Communist Party). Non-Stalinist communist philosophies include Fourierism, Marxism (and dozens of subsets), Maoism, and so on.
I'd like, basically, to second this post, and add this: if you create a piece of art, and, in doing so, you spend all your time and money, and it sells no copies but is a true, personal, free creation nonetheless, then you have profited. Creating a real work of art (and not just a commodity) is an absurdly difficult and fulfilling experience, an experience that has been almost completely devalued as a thing in itselt in popular opinion (as far as I can tell), probably owing to the fact that the great majority of cultural objects that one commonly encounters today exist simply as commodities, results of alienated, end-oriented production. Discussing the possibilities of compensation for artistic production is not wholly meaningless, but to my thinking it is at least a good deal beside the point - a person who genuinely cares about art for its own sake (and I wouldn't hesitate to generalize and say that this type of person is responsible for the majority of the best artistic productions) will produce art, as Schoenberg said (of himself), like a tree bearing fruit, naturally. Of course, a society can encourage or discourage this kind of artistic production, and this is where most persons in favor of copyright laws would say that copyright is necessary to encourage art, but hopefully I've already made it reasonably clear that copyright largely encourages profitable 'art' commodities and largely is irrelevant to anyone producing art that is valuable as art and not as a mere brand name. It's a tragedy that today culture is seen as necessarily coming with a price tag attached, and the notion that art and culture should grow out of the real life and feeling of people in a time and society is seen as old-fashioned and hopelessly idealistic. Much longer than I had originally intended.
Just to clarify, idiot, the above poster (1lus10n) did not in any way compare or invite a comparison between the United States and China on the points mentioned; he or she did not say 'China has a more fair judicial system than the US' or 'China has a less corrupt government than the US' - nothing of the sort. What was stated was that the United States does not have a fair judicial system, a government free of corruption, or freedom of expression - statements having no bearing on your undoubtedly true but completely irrelevant point about China's own (egregious) violations of human rights &c. I hope this is helpful, and urge you, in the future, to always keep in mind the following advice: do not post while stupid.
"If you surrender the idea of an external, universal, and objective moral criteria, you lose all grounds to ever consider any action to be better than another."
I do not believe this to be true: without the notion of universal, Platonic moral criteria one is left with the the same ground for making moral judgements as one always had, namely one's own (subjective) belief, conviction, or what-have-you based on one's own specific existence as a being. When a group (such as the Arabs in your example that believe in their 'right' to oppress women) commits an act that I consider to be morally wrong, I can still legitimately oppose them on moral grounds without calling upon an absolute morality - but in doing so I have to admit that it is really me opposing them, that I am objecting on moral grounds that I have come to believe in of my own free will, not because god planted a burning bush in front of me and revealed the secrets of the universe, not because I discovered a 'universal bill of rights' inscribed in an as-yet-unstudied portion of the human genome, etc. There is no extra-subjective viewpoint from which one can tally up positions and come to an objectively 'true' conclusion on the moral status of anything; human existence and subjective consciousness are essentially synonymous. One of the main points of issues like freedom of speech, as I see it, is that gurantees of freedom of speech allow individuals to stand beside their own beliefs and viewpoints without being thereby sacrificed to 'higher,' extra-individual powers (such as the state or the consensus) that are proclaimed by the individuals within them as having the objective basis to rule on morality.
1: The highest bidder is the bidder with the most money to spend on bidding - this has nothing to do with relative strength of desire to speak. Taxpayers (if they had had any say in the matter) most likely would have received the 'maximum possible return' by retaining some kind of control over the medium, and not by selling out to capital. 2: Canada is a capitalist society with (like all capitalist societies but the most barbarous) socialist elements. The Canadian government is indeed 'flexing their muscle' and depriving their citizens of radio use, not in contrast to what might happen in the USA, but just as in fact occurred in America when capital bought the radio spectrum as referenced in (1) above. 3: This underscores a crucial point of socialism: its purpose is to maintain popular control over the means of production, directly contrary to the characterization in the parent post. The basic premise of capitalism, on the other hand, is that the resources necessary for individuals to be productive members of society can be taken from them by anti-social political and economic power systems. Both Canada and the USA are already well on the way to becoming police states, the difference being that the police in the USA are (to generalize grossly) indirectly controlled by US capital, whereas in Canada (theoretically) they are controlled by the government (but realistically indirectly controlled by US capital once again). The first step in finding a solution is popular organization and protest, which I suspect is just the sort of thing the radio frequency blocking in the current article is designed to inconvenience.
"If things like this continue to happen, Digital Rights Management will soon be the way of the world, and there will be no such thing as property."
On the contrary, if there was no such thing as property, digital rights management would be impossible/irrelevant, since it represents just another amplification of the power of owners to own. The continuous expansion of the sphere of property rights of owners at the expense of non-owners (you and I, for instance - to generalize) is precisely the paradoxical movement characteristic of an irrational capitalist society, in which the right to own something becomes the very condition by which you are deprived of that thing.
The German National Socialist Worker's Party has exactly as much to do with socialism as the Soviet Communist party has to do with communism and the US Democratic party has to do with democracy - that is, not a thing.
1984 is hardly only about the USSR, as people always seem to be so comfortable in believing - Orwell had already written a book dealing exclusively with the USSR and its betrayal of socialist principles in favor of continued exploitation in a new form (Animal Farm). A betrayal that Orwell was acutely aware of (remember that Orwell was a socialist and fought for the POUM [independent Marxists] in the Spanish Civil War), but by no means blinded him to the faults of capitalist society, many held in common with society in the USSR. 1984 is not just the 'fairy story' of Animal Farm elaborated, but a much richer, more universally relevant novel that encapsulates a large number of Orwell's theories of history, authority, his fears about the future of society, and to dismiss the novel lightly as being 'merely about the USSR' is to trivialize it and assign to it a datedness that it doesn't merit, especially in the present context.
Two points I think are worth adding to the general discussion:
First, violating copyright may get one 'shut down,' but not necessarily 'quite rightfully'; copyright is not a natural law, but a (quite recent) human one, and it should be remembered that the position that copyright laws are illegitimate is not, in the natural order of things, unthinkable. A lot of the discussion thus far seems to be from one of two standpoints, those being: 1) Napster can be used to violate copyright laws, and this is wrong, but it has other uses not in conflict with the laws that [I, the poster] personally endorse, and 2) Napster can be used to violate copyright laws and is in fact used in this way by [me, the poster], but this lesser evil is committed by me in protest to the greater evils committed by the RIAA (ripping off artists, charging too much for CDs, etc.). It seems to me that both of these positions are self-contradictory, the first one weakly, the second more strongly. The third position, however, that the notion of copyright is illegitimate and anti-social, seems to be seldom argued or thought about, though it is thinkable and defensible. Secondly, this: "[I]t's their property, they can do whatever they want with it." Maybe it's their property (although it's arguable that, if what the record industry currently holds should be property of anyone, it should be property of the persons that made it, musicians mainly), but to say that they can do whatever they want with it as a result of that seems a little overstated to me. If what the record companies do with their property is socially harmful (likely), then it's arguable, and it should be argued, that they should be prevented from doing those things, just as a chemical company dumping toxic waste near public water supplies (or any analogous situation) should be prevented....Just some things I wanted to bring up, not really in direct response to TWR, but because his post contained in miniature the basic questions I wanted to add to or amplify in the discussion.
"No use-value ever exists without an exchange-value" - note that this condition is the defining one for capitalist production-relations. Needless to say, those who would seek to liberate themselves from the Jack Valentis of the world would serve themselves well to see to the liberation of the use-value from the exchange-value.
We're looking at the galaxy as it really is 'now' when we pick up light from 125,000 etc light-years out because, due to the speed-of-light limitation, events that occur 125,000 years ago in the subjective time-space of an area of the galaxy 125,000 light-years away from us happen 'now' in the subjective time-space that we occupy. If the speed of light was lower than the absolute limit on information transfer speed, then this might not be so, and light-information could give pictures of distant events that were no longer accurate judged by a different standard of simultaneity, but since the speed of light is the standard of simultaneity (see Einstein), it isn't meaningful to talk about a picture of the galaxy 'now' that is different than the one we're already able to see.
You could change 'Surrealism' so it says 'two burning giraffes' and 'flaming tuba lessons'; by doing so you would include clever [?] references to the work of two actual surrealist painters without substantially altering your basic statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Go fuck yourself, lameness filter random words to get by worthless slashcode censorship feature
They have stated that there will be NO coop!
Then WHERE WILL I keep my CHICKENS!
'Appropriate' does, however, in fact mean to take possession of something in an exclusive fashion (exclusive property being the privileged form of property in current thought), so if you take 'steal' to be in either of the two senses above in which it is defined in terms of appropriation, then you could certainly argue that the poster to whom you responded was justified in holding that (unauthorized) duplication of a copyrighted work does not constitute stealing in that it does not involve appropriation (taking of exlusive ownership) but rather the opposite of appropriation.
& db =%2A]
[http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=appropriate
I submit that A) journalists are overwhelmingly liberal, and B) the concept of liberalism today is so dilute that it's practically fucking meaningless,
This has to be one of the best posts I have ever seen. My hat is off to you!
You went to college for six years to get an education. This is something that is valuable independently of how many dollars per hour you are able to rent it out for.
Both your post and Palmer's article struck me as basically thinly veiled ad hominems posing as rebuttals. Palmer's 'point' seemed to me to be, not that there were fundamental flaws in Bollier's arguments, but that he and Bollier were thinking from different assumptions and definitions. He then condemned Bollier for this, basically deliberately mis-reading Bollier's article so that he could then reject it on the basis that it didn't make sense when mis-read in such a manner.
- Nietzche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
Even if you're just spamming, attribute the quotation to its author!
How did this happen? What's the whole story? Inquiring trolls want to know!
Communism isn't referred to as Stalinism, except by the ignorant and media types acting in bad faith. Distinguishing between Nazism and 'Hitlerism' would be a waste of time, since there has only really been one important Nazi movement in history, and that was under Hitler. Communism, however, is a heading that contains a large number of (often extremely antagonistic) philosophical and political schools, one of those being Stalinism.
Since most 'Western' governments have a vested interest in discrediting political philosophies that are anti-capitalistic, Stalinism (undeniably the ugliest, most incredibly, tragically ill-conceived form of communism ever to exist) is usually said to be or implied to be synonymous with communism in the media and the general political rhetoric - hence your mistake. This is also why you often see the term 'communism' (the philosophy of communism) used when what should really be printed is 'Communism' (the Communist Party).
Non-Stalinist communist philosophies include Fourierism, Marxism (and dozens of subsets), Maoism, and so on.
I'd like, basically, to second this post, and add this: if you create a piece of art, and, in doing so, you spend all your time and money, and it sells no copies but is a true, personal, free creation nonetheless, then you have profited. Creating a real work of art (and not just a commodity) is an absurdly difficult and fulfilling experience, an experience that has been almost completely devalued as a thing in itselt in popular opinion (as far as I can tell), probably owing to the fact that the great majority of cultural objects that one commonly encounters today exist simply as commodities, results of alienated, end-oriented production. Discussing the possibilities of compensation for artistic production is not wholly meaningless, but to my thinking it is at least a good deal beside the point - a person who genuinely cares about art for its own sake (and I wouldn't hesitate to generalize and say that this type of person is responsible for the majority of the best artistic productions) will produce art, as Schoenberg said (of himself), like a tree bearing fruit, naturally. Of course, a society can encourage or discourage this kind of artistic production, and this is where most persons in favor of copyright laws would say that copyright is necessary to encourage art, but hopefully I've already made it reasonably clear that copyright largely encourages profitable 'art' commodities and largely is irrelevant to anyone producing art that is valuable as art and not as a mere brand name. It's a tragedy that today culture is seen as necessarily coming with a price tag attached, and the notion that art and culture should grow out of the real life and feeling of people in a time and society is seen as old-fashioned and hopelessly idealistic. Much longer than I had originally intended.
Just to clarify, idiot, the above poster (1lus10n) did not in any way compare or invite a comparison between the United States and China on the points mentioned; he or she did not say 'China has a more fair judicial system than the US' or 'China has a less corrupt government than the US' - nothing of the sort. What was stated was that the United States does not have a fair judicial system, a government free of corruption, or freedom of expression - statements having no bearing on your undoubtedly true but completely irrelevant point about China's own (egregious) violations of human rights &c. I hope this is helpful, and urge you, in the future, to always keep in mind the following advice: do not post while stupid.
This is correct - the population problem is a problem of distribution of resources specific to capitalism, not a problem of overpopulation per se.
"If you surrender the idea of an external, universal, and objective moral criteria, you lose all grounds to ever consider any action to be better than another."
I do not believe this to be true: without the notion of universal, Platonic moral criteria one is left with the the same ground for making moral judgements as one always had, namely one's own (subjective) belief, conviction, or what-have-you based on one's own specific existence as a being. When a group (such as the Arabs in your example that believe in their 'right' to oppress women) commits an act that I consider to be morally wrong, I can still legitimately oppose them on moral grounds without calling upon an absolute morality - but in doing so I have to admit that it is really me opposing them, that I am objecting on moral grounds that I have come to believe in of my own free will, not because god planted a burning bush in front of me and revealed the secrets of the universe, not because I discovered a 'universal bill of rights' inscribed in an as-yet-unstudied portion of the human genome, etc. There is no extra-subjective viewpoint from which one can tally up positions and come to an objectively 'true' conclusion on the moral status of anything; human existence and subjective consciousness are essentially synonymous. One of the main points of issues like freedom of speech, as I see it, is that gurantees of freedom of speech allow individuals to stand beside their own beliefs and viewpoints without being thereby sacrificed to 'higher,' extra-individual powers (such as the state or the consensus) that are proclaimed by the individuals within them as having the objective basis to rule on morality.
1: The highest bidder is the bidder with the most money to spend on bidding - this has nothing to do with relative strength of desire to speak. Taxpayers (if they had had any say in the matter) most likely would have received the 'maximum possible return' by retaining some kind of control over the medium, and not by selling out to capital.
2: Canada is a capitalist society with (like all capitalist societies but the most barbarous) socialist elements. The Canadian government is indeed 'flexing their muscle' and depriving their citizens of radio use, not in contrast to what might happen in the USA, but just as in fact occurred in America when capital bought the radio spectrum as referenced in (1) above.
3: This underscores a crucial point of socialism: its purpose is to maintain popular control over the means of production, directly contrary to the characterization in the parent post. The basic premise of capitalism, on the other hand, is that the resources necessary for individuals to be productive members of society can be taken from them by anti-social political and economic power systems. Both Canada and the USA are already well on the way to becoming police states, the difference being that the police in the USA are (to generalize grossly) indirectly controlled by US capital, whereas in Canada (theoretically) they are controlled by the government (but realistically indirectly controlled by US capital once again). The first step in finding a solution is popular organization and protest, which I suspect is just the sort of thing the radio frequency blocking in the current article is designed to inconvenience.
"If things like this continue to happen, Digital Rights Management will soon be the way of the world, and there will be no such thing as property."
On the contrary, if there was no such thing as property, digital rights management would be impossible/irrelevant, since it represents just another amplification of the power of owners to own. The continuous expansion of the sphere of property rights of owners at the expense of non-owners (you and I, for instance - to generalize) is precisely the paradoxical movement characteristic of an irrational capitalist society, in which the right to own something becomes the very condition by which you are deprived of that thing.
The German National Socialist Worker's Party has exactly as much to do with socialism as the Soviet Communist party has to do with communism and the US Democratic party has to do with democracy - that is, not a thing.
Composer of the 20th Century: Arnold Schoenberg.
1984 is hardly only about the USSR, as people always seem to be so comfortable in believing - Orwell had already written a book dealing exclusively with the USSR and its betrayal of socialist principles in favor of continued exploitation in a new form (Animal Farm). A betrayal that Orwell was acutely aware of (remember that Orwell was a socialist and fought for the POUM [independent Marxists] in the Spanish Civil War), but by no means blinded him to the faults of capitalist society, many held in common with society in the USSR. 1984 is not just the 'fairy story' of Animal Farm elaborated, but a much richer, more universally relevant novel that encapsulates a large number of Orwell's theories of history, authority, his fears about the future of society, and to dismiss the novel lightly as being 'merely about the USSR' is to trivialize it and assign to it a datedness that it doesn't merit, especially in the present context.
Two points I think are worth adding to the general discussion:
...Just some things I wanted to bring up, not really in direct response to TWR, but because his post contained in miniature the basic questions I wanted to add to or amplify in the discussion.
First, violating copyright may get one 'shut down,' but not necessarily 'quite rightfully'; copyright is not a natural law, but a (quite recent) human one, and it should be remembered that the position that copyright laws are illegitimate is not, in the natural order of things, unthinkable. A lot of the discussion thus far seems to be from one of two standpoints, those being: 1) Napster can be used to violate copyright laws, and this is wrong, but it has other uses not in conflict with the laws that [I, the poster] personally endorse, and 2) Napster can be used to violate copyright laws and is in fact used in this way by [me, the poster], but this lesser evil is committed by me in protest to the greater evils committed by the RIAA (ripping off artists, charging too much for CDs, etc.). It seems to me that both of these positions are self-contradictory, the first one weakly, the second more strongly. The third position, however, that the notion of copyright is illegitimate and anti-social, seems to be seldom argued or thought about, though it is thinkable and defensible. Secondly, this:
"[I]t's their property, they can do whatever they want with it."
Maybe it's their property (although it's arguable that, if what the record industry currently holds should be property of anyone, it should be property of the persons that made it, musicians mainly), but to say that they can do whatever they want with it as a result of that seems a little overstated to me. If what the record companies do with their property is socially harmful (likely), then it's arguable, and it should be argued, that they should be prevented from doing those things, just as a chemical company dumping toxic waste near public water supplies (or any analogous situation) should be prevented.
"No use-value ever exists without an exchange-value" - note that this condition is the defining one for capitalist production-relations. Needless to say, those who would seek to liberate themselves from the Jack Valentis of the world would serve themselves well to see to the liberation of the use-value from the exchange-value.
Good point, deserves 'insightful.' This is my "me too" post; it needs no apology.
We're looking at the galaxy as it really is 'now' when we pick up light from 125,000 etc light-years out because, due to the speed-of-light limitation, events that occur 125,000 years ago in the subjective time-space of an area of the galaxy 125,000 light-years away from us happen 'now' in the subjective time-space that we occupy. If the speed of light was lower than the absolute limit on information transfer speed, then this might not be so, and light-information could give pictures of distant events that were no longer accurate judged by a different standard of simultaneity, but since the speed of light is the standard of simultaneity (see Einstein), it isn't meaningful to talk about a picture of the galaxy 'now' that is different than the one we're already able to see.
You could change 'Surrealism' so it says 'two burning giraffes' and 'flaming tuba lessons'; by doing so you would include clever [?] references to the work of two actual surrealist painters without substantially altering your basic statement.
Why do you own so many shitty movies on DVD? Why do you want another one?