If you read the federalist papers, the second amendment really isn't about overthrowing the government. Though some of the founders talked about the necessity of violent revolution to create or maintain liberty, they didn't write in any official mechanism that specifically said that the people should violently overthrow the government if their liberties are curtailed.
The second amendment was basically a compromise, which tells us why it isn't really explicit about what it's trying to do. Jefferson wanted no standing peacetime army. Instead he favored a mandatory citizen army of all able-bodied men, 18 to 45 years old, who were required to keep a firearm in the house. Others disagreed; they wanted a voluntary army. So they had to compromise in order to get the amendment passed.
Anyways, I may not have the nuances of the debate correct, but the bottom line is that there was disagreement, the second amendment was a compromise, and now we have to somehow make sense and system out of an ambiguous and perhaps contradictory statement. A lot of Americans think that the bill of rights are a systematic, mutually supporting, internally consistent set of rights that will protect individual liberty. If you study the history, you will find that they are an ambiguous, messy, contradictory result of political compromise and expediency.
I think the fed has a policy never to recall currency. That's made the dollar one of the most stable currencies in the world, current fiscal policy notwithstanding.
"On May 22, 2006, it was reported by Seymour Hersh and Wired News that under this authority, the NSA had installed monitoring and interception supercomputers within the routing hubs of almost all major US telecoms companies capable of intercepting and monitoring a large proportion of all domestic and international telephone and Internet connections, and had used this to perform mass eavesdropping and order police investigations of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans without judicial warrants." [Emphasis mine]
Here is the link to the Hersh article, and here is the link to the Wired article.
No, I picked it up from the leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard.
If you don't want these types of stereotypes about you and your group, pick better leaders to represent yourselves. Nobody has the time to go around and meet every nice, average, evangelical Christian. They are only going to see the image they put forth in the media. And that image of one of lunacy, intolerance, and religious zealotry. And you know what? A lot of the Evangelical Christian I have met are just the same.
This is not hard to figure out. I am not being overly dramatic here, and I ask you to look at the sources I am citing and consider what I am saying seriously.
These people basically have a centralized, facist mindset. They don't really believe in freedom; they think that the masses people need to be managed and controlled. They believe that there should be a class of ruling elites who run the show, and then the common folk, who have no real power or influence. They view society as a corporation, with a few owners, some managers, and a bunch of peon workers who just take orders. They want to be the CEO sitting in the control chair, watching a real-time dashboard of everything that everyone is doing.
All of this tracking and surveillance they are doing has nothing to do with watching Al Qaida and terrorists. What they want to do is what all totalitarian governments -- be they communist or fascist -- want to do: track everybody. That way you can have control over everybody. Knowledge is power. Check out "IBM and the Holocaust". The Nazis were using then state-of-the-art information processing technology to keep track of Jews, opposition groups, everybody. Everybody had a number, everybody had a file. The same thing happened in communist Russia and in Iraq under Hussein. It's the calling card of totalitarianism.
The smoking gun is the Total Information Awareness program which was introduced shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a conglomerate database of all electronic information that exists about everybody in the US -- all your bank, medical, school, work records -- even the purchases you make with your shopping club card. Due to public outcry, the program was ostensibly canceled, but in actuality all of the seperate features were just broken up into smaller programs. Check out the wikipedia article linked above.
9/11 was the excuse for all of these fascistic plans to come out of the woodwork and be given a go. Yes, we do need to be protected from Al Qaida and other terrorists, but not at the expense of the constitution.
Things are not bad yet, but they could go bad. Pieces are being moved into place that would give a dictator all of the tools that he would need to exercise incredible power. We are already seeing the media bullied, silenced, and propagandized. I guess the next sign of things getting worse would probably be disappearances and prominent people flee^H^H^H^Hleaving the country.
"Yeah, I suppose being a pessimist on slashdot is a much more effective way of dealing with them."
I don't think I am being pessimist. I think I am accurately assessing the situation for the average person who would be sued by the RIAA. You have emotional, knowledge, and financial resources that most people don't have available to them. Apparently you could sail through such a suit, but for most people, this would have a serious negative impact on their lift.
If you say it's not that big of a deal for most, either emotionally or financially, then there is nothing wrong with what the RIAA is doing. And they will continue to ruin people's lives because you haven't accurately assessed the impact on people's lives. Perhaps you think the RIAA is in the right in what they are doing. I don't know.
Tell me, if the RIAA aren't intending this to be a terror campaign, what is their master strategy behind this all? Sure, you can make your way through it, but the average person can't.
That's probably true for those Neocons who are in the government, but my claim is that their Fox-News-watching Neocon base is almost totally ignorant of the bill of rights.
Why do we need to frame the Bill of Rights in this bogus tough-guy language? It's strong and dignified enough to stand on its own. Do you think you are going to change the minds of any of these Fox News Neo-cons by rehashing the Bill of Rights in Bill O'Reilly language?
I am not concerned with being a tough guy. That is a dream I grew out of at age 15. Tough guys and bullies are cowards at heart. The Bill of Rights is not a "tough guy manifesto". It is a binding contract between the we, the people, and those we elect to govern us. It is the basis of a civil, free society, not an escapist, tough-guy fantasy.
" However, if you are on the receiving end of a lawsuit, it is extremely stressful and a huge financial burden.
Only if you allow to be."
OK, two things here.
1. "It's extremely stressful, but only if you allow it to be."
Perhaps you are an enlightened Zen master and nothing ever gets you down, but for most average people, being sued is a huge emotional drain and and ruin health, livelihood, and relationships. I think it's naive and frankly insulting to say to people who are undergoing the stress of a lawsuit to tell them that they are just 'allowing' it to get to them. Step into the real world.
2. "It's a huge financial burden, but only if you allow it to be."
Demonstrably false. If you choose not do defend yourself, the judge will find in favor of the RIAA, and you will owe them tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps you are a millionaire, and this would not be a huge financial burden. For most people, this means a kid not going to college. If you do choose to defend yourself, lawyer fees could easily several thousand dollars, even over ten-thousand dollars. For most people, this is a huge financial burden. Maybe not for you, but for most individuals, this would be 1/3rd to 1/2 of their yearly income.
"Given the community outrage and the back that major groups (the EFF for one) are backing the people being sued, it doesn't seem to have worked real well does it?"
I would say it's been extremely successful. How many people have they sued and eventually gotten to settle out of court? I'd bet most if not all. What community outrage are you talking about? Hostile postings on slashdot? Has that had any impact on the RIAA? Are they changing their tactics? Nope. What 'major groups' are backing those people being sued? I have news for you: the EFF is three people. It's not a 'major group' in any sense.
I don't see any of your supposed community outrage or major group backing as having had any impact whatsoever on the RIAA and their campaign.
The people who think that we need to sacrifice our civil liberties to fight terrorism really don't understand our liberties, nor do they really understand what the founding fathers were trying to create. They basically have a tribal/warmongering view of society of 'us vs. them'. In their world-view, different groups of people will wipe each other out if given the slightest chance. The only way to survive is to be a tough guy yourself. There is no right or wrong or rule of law in the abstract sense; instead, if it benefits us and hurts them, it is good; if is benefits them and hurts us, it is bad. That's why it's okay for us to torture -- we need it to get information from terrorists who are going to blow up our children. However, when they do it to us, it is wrong, because it hurts us.
They have never really thought of the United States as a politically free people; the US is simply our team, and we will do whatever we need to in order to win. They are sadistic, and get off on the idea of torture, war, etc. They've never served, but they have adolescent fantasies of blowing shit up and killing bad guys.
Gary, instead of using defensive maneuvers, hoping that the RIAA will eventually drop their strategy, what do you think of trying to mount an offense against the RIAA? Maybe something like a racketeering lawsuit, or a class-action suit? Am I correct in thinking that a racketeering suit would need to be driven by government prosecutors?
You are missing the point that this is a *terror* campaign. No, the RIAA have absolutely nothing to gain from suing a 20 year old with no assets. However, if you are on the receiving end of a lawsuit, it is extremely stressful and a huge financial burden.
What they are doing is trying to send a message. That message is "We are going no holds barred, suing 20 year olds, dead men's children, poor bedridden grandmothers, so the rest of you had better watch your ass and stop downloading, or you are going to get a big load of what these poor saps got."
It's your basic tough-guy, mafia, bully routine. Beat the hell out of the skinny nerd who can't fight back to show that you are willing to be violent, and hope that that scares the other people into falling in line.
I totally agree with you, but your sig prompted me to think: What are some of those dangerous ideas, that sound good but actually aren't? I couldn't think of any offhand.
I'm not talking about "stop giving vaccinations to children to save energy"; I mean proposals that have a chance at getting somewhere.
"Anyway, once we've invented AI that can do our jobs, the whole human race is pretty much redundant. "
Unless that AI can self-replicate, our new jobs will be building and maintaining that AI.
We are now in the situation you describe, except with machines and labor. It used to be that we toiled in the field with sticks and rakes, smacking oxen on the back to keep them moving. Now, we ride in air-conditioned cabs of giant combines, listening to satellite radio and resting our buttocks on a leather seat, watching our progress on GPS screens. We also build, maintain, and finance those combines. Some of us work in the satellite, GPS, and technology fields.
"You might want to pick up Litvinenko's book: Blowing up Russia : Terror from Within"
If you are taking LItvinenko's words at face value, note that the in last things he said, he laid blame at Putin. What would it benefit a dying man to blame someone other than his murderer? Who knows his enemies better than himself?
There is never proof in a murder case. There is only evidence.
Yes. Now that Peter Jackson has gotten the taste for budgets in the hundreds of millions, and the artistic vision of 3-hour epics, it's only possible that he can create hits. There's no more chance of risk there. It's money in the bank.
"2) "Let's be really nice to him so he'll keep making these financially successful films for us.""
It's not that simple. There's no guarantee that he can continue to make successful films. If you look at the career of any "great" director (except for a few luminaries), you will find hit, flop, flop, hit, hit, flop, flop, hit, etc. Even if they made what is considered a classic film, it may have lost money or not been very successful at the box office.
So yes, continuing to work with Peter Jackson is still a big risk. Case in point: King Kong.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up!
If you read the federalist papers, the second amendment really isn't about overthrowing the government. Though some of the founders talked about the necessity of violent revolution to create or maintain liberty, they didn't write in any official mechanism that specifically said that the people should violently overthrow the government if their liberties are curtailed.
The second amendment was basically a compromise, which tells us why it isn't really explicit about what it's trying to do. Jefferson wanted no standing peacetime army. Instead he favored a mandatory citizen army of all able-bodied men, 18 to 45 years old, who were required to keep a firearm in the house. Others disagreed; they wanted a voluntary army. So they had to compromise in order to get the amendment passed.
Anyways, I may not have the nuances of the debate correct, but the bottom line is that there was disagreement, the second amendment was a compromise, and now we have to somehow make sense and system out of an ambiguous and perhaps contradictory statement. A lot of Americans think that the bill of rights are a systematic, mutually supporting, internally consistent set of rights that will protect individual liberty. If you study the history, you will find that they are an ambiguous, messy, contradictory result of political compromise and expediency.
You eat hundred-dollar leather? Ew.
I think the fed has a policy never to recall currency. That's made the dollar one of the most stable currencies in the world, current fiscal policy notwithstanding.
It has publicly come out that they are wiretapping domestic calls.
From the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy article article at wikipedia:
"On May 22, 2006, it was reported by Seymour Hersh and Wired News that under this authority, the NSA had installed monitoring and interception supercomputers within the routing hubs of almost all major US telecoms companies capable of intercepting and monitoring a large proportion of all domestic and international telephone and Internet connections, and had used this to perform mass eavesdropping and order police investigations of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans without judicial warrants. " [Emphasis mine]
Here is the link to the Hersh article, and here is the link to the Wired article.
Please, wake up.
No, I picked it up from the leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard.
If you don't want these types of stereotypes about you and your group, pick better leaders to represent yourselves. Nobody has the time to go around and meet every nice, average, evangelical Christian. They are only going to see the image they put forth in the media. And that image of one of lunacy, intolerance, and religious zealotry. And you know what? A lot of the Evangelical Christian I have met are just the same.
This is not hard to figure out. I am not being overly dramatic here, and I ask you to look at the sources I am citing and consider what I am saying seriously.
These people basically have a centralized, facist mindset. They don't really believe in freedom; they think that the masses people need to be managed and controlled. They believe that there should be a class of ruling elites who run the show, and then the common folk, who have no real power or influence. They view society as a corporation, with a few owners, some managers, and a bunch of peon workers who just take orders. They want to be the CEO sitting in the control chair, watching a real-time dashboard of everything that everyone is doing.
All of this tracking and surveillance they are doing has nothing to do with watching Al Qaida and terrorists. What they want to do is what all totalitarian governments -- be they communist or fascist -- want to do: track everybody. That way you can have control over everybody. Knowledge is power. Check out "IBM and the Holocaust". The Nazis were using then state-of-the-art information processing technology to keep track of Jews, opposition groups, everybody. Everybody had a number, everybody had a file. The same thing happened in communist Russia and in Iraq under Hussein. It's the calling card of totalitarianism.
The smoking gun is the Total Information Awareness program which was introduced shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a conglomerate database of all electronic information that exists about everybody in the US -- all your bank, medical, school, work records -- even the purchases you make with your shopping club card. Due to public outcry, the program was ostensibly canceled, but in actuality all of the seperate features were just broken up into smaller programs. Check out the wikipedia article linked above.
9/11 was the excuse for all of these fascistic plans to come out of the woodwork and be given a go. Yes, we do need to be protected from Al Qaida and other terrorists, but not at the expense of the constitution.
Things are not bad yet, but they could go bad. Pieces are being moved into place that would give a dictator all of the tools that he would need to exercise incredible power. We are already seeing the media bullied, silenced, and propagandized. I guess the next sign of things getting worse would probably be disappearances and prominent people flee^H^H^H^Hleaving the country.
Sorry, I meant Ray ;)
"Yeah, I suppose being a pessimist on slashdot is a much more effective way of dealing with them."
I don't think I am being pessimist. I think I am accurately assessing the situation for the average person who would be sued by the RIAA. You have emotional, knowledge, and financial resources that most people don't have available to them. Apparently you could sail through such a suit, but for most people, this would have a serious negative impact on their lift.
If you say it's not that big of a deal for most, either emotionally or financially, then there is nothing wrong with what the RIAA is doing. And they will continue to ruin people's lives because you haven't accurately assessed the impact on people's lives. Perhaps you think the RIAA is in the right in what they are doing. I don't know.
Tell me, if the RIAA aren't intending this to be a terror campaign, what is their master strategy behind this all? Sure, you can make your way through it, but the average person can't.
That's probably true for those Neocons who are in the government, but my claim is that their Fox-News-watching Neocon base is almost totally ignorant of the bill of rights.
Damn. I wish I had a low number! ;)
On this, sir, we are agreed! :)
Why do we need to frame the Bill of Rights in this bogus tough-guy language? It's strong and dignified enough to stand on its own. Do you think you are going to change the minds of any of these Fox News Neo-cons by rehashing the Bill of Rights in Bill O'Reilly language?
I am not concerned with being a tough guy. That is a dream I grew out of at age 15. Tough guys and bullies are cowards at heart. The Bill of Rights is not a "tough guy manifesto". It is a binding contract between the we, the people, and those we elect to govern us. It is the basis of a civil, free society, not an escapist, tough-guy fantasy.
" However, if you are on the receiving end of a lawsuit, it is extremely stressful and a huge financial burden.
Only if you allow to be."
OK, two things here.
1. "It's extremely stressful, but only if you allow it to be."
Perhaps you are an enlightened Zen master and nothing ever gets you down, but for most average people, being sued is a huge emotional drain and and ruin health, livelihood, and relationships. I think it's naive and frankly insulting to say to people who are undergoing the stress of a lawsuit to tell them that they are just 'allowing' it to get to them. Step into the real world.
2. "It's a huge financial burden, but only if you allow it to be."
Demonstrably false. If you choose not do defend yourself, the judge will find in favor of the RIAA, and you will owe them tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps you are a millionaire, and this would not be a huge financial burden. For most people, this means a kid not going to college. If you do choose to defend yourself, lawyer fees could easily several thousand dollars, even over ten-thousand dollars. For most people, this is a huge financial burden. Maybe not for you, but for most individuals, this would be 1/3rd to 1/2 of their yearly income.
"Given the community outrage and the back that major groups (the EFF for one) are backing the people being sued, it doesn't seem to have worked real well does it?"
I would say it's been extremely successful. How many people have they sued and eventually gotten to settle out of court? I'd bet most if not all. What community outrage are you talking about? Hostile postings on slashdot? Has that had any impact on the RIAA? Are they changing their tactics? Nope. What 'major groups' are backing those people being sued? I have news for you: the EFF is three people. It's not a 'major group' in any sense.
I don't see any of your supposed community outrage or major group backing as having had any impact whatsoever on the RIAA and their campaign.
The people who think that we need to sacrifice our civil liberties to fight terrorism really don't understand our liberties, nor do they really understand what the founding fathers were trying to create. They basically have a tribal/warmongering view of society of 'us vs. them'. In their world-view, different groups of people will wipe each other out if given the slightest chance. The only way to survive is to be a tough guy yourself. There is no right or wrong or rule of law in the abstract sense; instead, if it benefits us and hurts them, it is good; if is benefits them and hurts us, it is bad. That's why it's okay for us to torture -- we need it to get information from terrorists who are going to blow up our children. However, when they do it to us, it is wrong, because it hurts us.
They have never really thought of the United States as a politically free people; the US is simply our team, and we will do whatever we need to in order to win. They are sadistic, and get off on the idea of torture, war, etc. They've never served, but they have adolescent fantasies of blowing shit up and killing bad guys.
Gary, instead of using defensive maneuvers, hoping that the RIAA will eventually drop their strategy, what do you think of trying to mount an offense against the RIAA? Maybe something like a racketeering lawsuit, or a class-action suit? Am I correct in thinking that a racketeering suit would need to be driven by government prosecutors?
You are missing the point that this is a *terror* campaign. No, the RIAA have absolutely nothing to gain from suing a 20 year old with no assets. However, if you are on the receiving end of a lawsuit, it is extremely stressful and a huge financial burden.
What they are doing is trying to send a message. That message is "We are going no holds barred, suing 20 year olds, dead men's children, poor bedridden grandmothers, so the rest of you had better watch your ass and stop downloading, or you are going to get a big load of what these poor saps got."
It's your basic tough-guy, mafia, bully routine. Beat the hell out of the skinny nerd who can't fight back to show that you are willing to be violent, and hope that that scares the other people into falling in line.
"Morals have no business in the workplace."
Are you okay with slavery?
How about sex slavery?
I totally agree with you, but your sig prompted me to think: What are some of those dangerous ideas, that sound good but actually aren't? I couldn't think of any offhand.
I'm not talking about "stop giving vaccinations to children to save energy"; I mean proposals that have a chance at getting somewhere.
"Anyway, once we've invented AI that can do our jobs, the whole human race is pretty much redundant. "
Unless that AI can self-replicate, our new jobs will be building and maintaining that AI.
We are now in the situation you describe, except with machines and labor. It used to be that we toiled in the field with sticks and rakes, smacking oxen on the back to keep them moving. Now, we ride in air-conditioned cabs of giant combines, listening to satellite radio and resting our buttocks on a leather seat, watching our progress on GPS screens. We also build, maintain, and finance those combines. Some of us work in the satellite, GPS, and technology fields.
"You might want to pick up Litvinenko's book: Blowing up Russia : Terror from Within"
If you are taking LItvinenko's words at face value, note that the in last things he said, he laid blame at Putin. What would it benefit a dying man to blame someone other than his murderer? Who knows his enemies better than himself?
There is never proof in a murder case. There is only evidence.
I think in this context, Putin means "was murdered by someone" as opposed to "died by accident".
The tag is 'pigpile' ? Personally, I am in favor of 'rolling pigpail'.
Yes. Now that Peter Jackson has gotten the taste for budgets in the hundreds of millions, and the artistic vision of 3-hour epics, it's only possible that he can create hits. There's no more chance of risk there. It's money in the bank.
"2) "Let's be really nice to him so he'll keep making these financially successful films for us.""
It's not that simple. There's no guarantee that he can continue to make successful films. If you look at the career of any "great" director (except for a few luminaries), you will find hit, flop, flop, hit, hit, flop, flop, hit, etc. Even if they made what is considered a classic film, it may have lost money or not been very successful at the box office.
So yes, continuing to work with Peter Jackson is still a big risk. Case in point: King Kong.