Basically, yes.
Until the invention of governments, massive numbers of people starved due to bad luck. They had no homes (or territory) that couldn't be taken or destroyed by bandits or raiders from neighboring groups. And they were very, very frequently sick and died of diseases easily prevented by modern medicine (which requires all the infrastructure associated with modern governments).
An imperfect government, even a pretty bad one, is infinitely better than none at all.
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
Christian theology says that prior to original sin, humans did not die--that God gave us the death penalty precisely because of original sin. And thus it would say that a child, born or not, has already been given a death sentence.
I don't know about "deified," but gcc and the GPL have earned him a certain amount of slack, and deservedly so. If you use any Open Source/Free software at all, certainly Linux, he deserves your gratitude. This stuff definitely wouldn't exist without gcc and the other GNU tools, and probably wouldn't exist without the GPL. (BSD folk may step in here and argue otherwise--is there/was there an independently developed BSD-licensed compiler in use on the BSDs?)
Even if you disagree with his politics/philosophy and use only proprietary software, he still deserves your respect as someone who took a highly moral position and then walked the walk, giving away years of his labor because he thought it was the right thing to do. If all of us could be half as faithful to our conscience the world would be a better place.
Hell, I find him annoying, too. But whatever his flaws, the community you say "deifies" him simply wouldn't exist without him.
FYI, I don't think you mean 'intelligencia' [sp. intelligensia]. I think you mean 'secret police' or 'intelligence agencies'. The intelligensia are the intellectual elite: professors, professionals, scientists, literary types, maybe smart political leaders (if there are any). The intelligensia in Egypt are usually very much *against* repression, e.g. Naguib Mahfouz, who is definitely a member of the intelligensia, but hardly a friend to the current regime.
Um. No. Lots, possibly hundreds, of people were arrested/detained, many for more than a month, and the Justice Department refused to release their names. The exact number of people so detained isn't known, because the Justic Department refuses to report that too.
One of the U.S. citizens being held indefinitely without trial is named Jose Padilla. He was arrested in Chicago at the airport, not on a foreign battlefield!
The other one is named Yaser Hamdi, and he might have been trying to kill American soldiers, but we don't really know, since he wasn't captured by U.S. forces. He was handed over to them by an Afghan warlord working with the U.S. No U.S. soldiers saw him captured and they had to take the Afghan's word for what he was doing.
I could find links to wiretap changes, but I'm feeling lazy. In any case you seem to have had a few misunderstandings of your own--ones that can easily be corrected with 5 minutes of Googling.
Does this mean you agree that you have no inherent right to the benefits government provides? Like police, fire, federal flood insurance, disaster relief, a stable currency, public education and the resultant literate workforce, all the transportation systems (road, rail, air), the U.S. legal infrastructure, rural electrification, unemployment compensation when your company goes offshore, emergency medical services, and a huge military with 800 military installations worldwide (60 of them major) and the easy access to foreign markets that produces? Without all those carefully built and expensive systems, all the willingness to work in the world gets you a couple of hundred dollars a year per capita.
No matter how you slice it, sales tax or income tax, progressive or flat, the rest of society as represented by the government has an inherent right to (some portion of) your money, because you couldn't have made even a hundredth of it without vast amounts of infrastructure built and maintained by the rest of society now and in the past. Maybe you wouldn't have chosen to spend on various parts of that infrastructure. And maybe you believe that parts of it would be better/more efficient if they were privatized. But whether you like it or not you are a huge beneficiary of the current system.
So now that we've dealt with inherent rights, we're back to simply arguing over exactly what we (collectively) want to pay for, and what is a fair division of that cost is. You and I probably disagree about what would be fair. But that's what the democratic political process (such as it is) is for. I understand and respect that you'd like to pay less. I'd like to pay the same and have it spent on different things. But spare us the 'inherent rights' compaint.
In other words, implement the most regressive taxation possible, since taxes will be passed on evenly to all consumers whether they make $12K/year or $250K/year. But we agree on one thing: double taxation doesn't make a lot of sense.
I have a better idea. Let's eliminate taxes on corporations and pay for everything solely by a progressive individual income tax. That way the people who benefit from the status quo are the ones paying for the status quo.
It's never made sense to me why anyone, liberal or conservative, would want to tax corporations. From a conservative standpoint, it places an unnecessary drag on the free market, and introduces a pernicious incentive for corporations to directly meddle in politics. From a liberal standpoint corporations provide a social good it would be better to maximize: jobs and economic activity (albeit as a side effect of their actual function, generating profits). Besides, if you think about it, corporations, since they aren't human, can neither enjoy the benefits of government services, nor suffer by their lack. Only individual people can.
As it stands, I think corporate taxes (as long as they can be passed on to consumers) are seen by the wealthy as a way to hide an extra 15% sales tax on all goods and services from those who make less that $35K.
Quote from the State Department link in parent:
"For more than two decades, this "Republic of Fear," a term developed by noted Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya, has targeted and preyed upon so-called enemies of the state in order to maintain power, get rich, and acquire land." Two decades. Two decades.
Current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in making Iraq our buddy in the late 1980's, while all this was going on.
It's not that we like Saddam Hussein, it's that we simply don't trust Bush and his foreign policy hawks at all. It is precisely their kind of incompetence that repeatedly puts the U.S. in the position of dealing with the blowback from their own stupid policies. Bin Laden was the product of our anti-Soviet policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a convenient alliance with Saudi Arabia. Hussein is (partially) a product of our anti-Soviet policies in the Mideast. I'm not saying it couldn't have been handled worse, or that it could have turned out a lot better. But c'mon, anyone could see it probably wasn't in our long-term self-interest (let alone Pakistan's) for our CIA to fund/encourage/facilitate militant, Islamist religious schools in Pakistan to produce fanatical medieval-minded mujahadeen to fight the Soviets.
I'm always surprised when more people don't know about OpenAFS. To my mind it is the obvious replacement for NFS in anything but a small-office/home network context. It's somewhat complicated to set up, but once you've got it running, it's very slick: fault-tolerant, very secure, network-backup-able, client-side cacheing for good performance, very multi-platform ( Linux, SPARC, AIX, Windows, etc. No great client for Mac yet, but various options are on the way.)
At the University of Auckland, we used it to do network software mounts on Linux and Windows on several hundred dual-boot public machines. Provided you give it the back-end hardware it needs, and do a proper configuration, it 'just works'.
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Basically, yes. Until the invention of governments, massive numbers of people starved due to bad luck. They had no homes (or territory) that couldn't be taken or destroyed by bandits or raiders from neighboring groups. And they were very, very frequently sick and died of diseases easily prevented by modern medicine (which requires all the infrastructure associated with modern governments). An imperfect government, even a pretty bad one, is infinitely better than none at all.
Last I checked, no theology in the world that believes in original sin thought it was worthy of the death penalty.
You're saying in-born flaws are equal to murder in the eyes of Christians. That's quite a lie.
Christian theology says that prior to original sin, humans did not die--that God gave us the death penalty precisely because of original sin. And thus it would say that a child, born or not, has already been given a death sentence.
I don't know about "deified," but gcc and the GPL have earned him a certain amount of slack, and deservedly so. If you use any Open Source/Free software at all, certainly Linux, he deserves your gratitude. This stuff definitely wouldn't exist without gcc and the other GNU tools, and probably wouldn't exist without the GPL. (BSD folk may step in here and argue otherwise--is there/was there an independently developed BSD-licensed compiler in use on the BSDs?)
Even if you disagree with his politics/philosophy and use only proprietary software, he still deserves your respect as someone who took a highly moral position and then walked the walk, giving away years of his labor because he thought it was the right thing to do. If all of us could be half as faithful to our conscience the world would be a better place.
Hell, I find him annoying, too. But whatever his flaws, the community you say "deifies" him simply wouldn't exist without him.
FYI, I don't think you mean 'intelligencia' [sp. intelligensia]. I think you mean 'secret police' or 'intelligence agencies'. The intelligensia are the intellectual elite: professors, professionals, scientists, literary types, maybe smart political leaders (if there are any). The intelligensia in Egypt are usually very much *against* repression, e.g. Naguib Mahfouz, who is definitely a member of the intelligensia, but hardly a friend to the current regime.
Um. No. Lots, possibly hundreds, of people were arrested/detained, many for more than a month, and the Justice Department refused to release their names. The exact number of people so detained isn't known, because the Justic Department refuses to report that too.
One of the U.S. citizens being held indefinitely without trial is named Jose Padilla. He was arrested in Chicago at the airport, not on a foreign battlefield! The other one is named Yaser Hamdi, and he might have been trying to kill American soldiers, but we don't really know, since he wasn't captured by U.S. forces. He was handed over to them by an Afghan warlord working with the U.S. No U.S. soldiers saw him captured and they had to take the Afghan's word for what he was doing.
I could find links to wiretap changes, but I'm feeling lazy. In any case you seem to have had a few misunderstandings of your own--ones that can easily be corrected with 5 minutes of Googling.
Does this mean you agree that you have no inherent right to the benefits government provides? Like police, fire, federal flood insurance, disaster relief, a stable currency, public education and the resultant literate workforce, all the transportation systems (road, rail, air), the U.S. legal infrastructure, rural electrification, unemployment compensation when your company goes offshore, emergency medical services, and a huge military with 800 military installations worldwide (60 of them major) and the easy access to foreign markets that produces? Without all those carefully built and expensive systems, all the willingness to work in the world gets you a couple of hundred dollars a year per capita.
No matter how you slice it, sales tax or income tax, progressive or flat, the rest of society as represented by the government has an inherent right to (some portion of) your money, because you couldn't have made even a hundredth of it without vast amounts of infrastructure built and maintained by the rest of society now and in the past. Maybe you wouldn't have chosen to spend on various parts of that infrastructure. And maybe you believe that parts of it would be better/more efficient if they were privatized. But whether you like it or not you are a huge beneficiary of the current system.
So now that we've dealt with inherent rights, we're back to simply arguing over exactly what we (collectively) want to pay for, and what is a fair division of that cost is. You and I probably disagree about what would be fair. But that's what the democratic political process (such as it is) is for. I understand and respect that you'd like to pay less. I'd like to pay the same and have it spent on different things. But spare us the 'inherent rights' compaint.
In other words, implement the most regressive taxation possible, since taxes will be passed on evenly to all consumers whether they make $12K/year or $250K/year. But we agree on one thing: double taxation doesn't make a lot of sense.
I have a better idea. Let's eliminate taxes on corporations and pay for everything solely by a progressive individual income tax. That way the people who benefit from the status quo are the ones paying for the status quo.
It's never made sense to me why anyone, liberal or conservative, would want to tax corporations. From a conservative standpoint, it places an unnecessary drag on the free market, and introduces a pernicious incentive for corporations to directly meddle in politics. From a liberal standpoint corporations provide a social good it would be better to maximize: jobs and economic activity (albeit as a side effect of their actual function, generating profits). Besides, if you think about it, corporations, since they aren't human, can neither enjoy the benefits of government services, nor suffer by their lack. Only individual people can.
As it stands, I think corporate taxes (as long as they can be passed on to consumers) are seen by the wealthy as a way to hide an extra 15% sales tax on all goods and services from those who make less that $35K.
Quote from the State Department link in parent: "For more than two decades, this "Republic of Fear," a term developed by noted Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya, has targeted and preyed upon so-called enemies of the state in order to maintain power, get rich, and acquire land." Two decades. Two decades.
Current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in making Iraq our buddy in the late 1980's, while all this was going on.
It's not that we like Saddam Hussein, it's that we simply don't trust Bush and his foreign policy hawks at all. It is precisely their kind of incompetence that repeatedly puts the U.S. in the position of dealing with the blowback from their own stupid policies. Bin Laden was the product of our anti-Soviet policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a convenient alliance with Saudi Arabia. Hussein is (partially) a product of our anti-Soviet policies in the Mideast. I'm not saying it couldn't have been handled worse, or that it could have turned out a lot better. But c'mon, anyone could see it probably wasn't in our long-term self-interest (let alone Pakistan's) for our CIA to fund/encourage/facilitate militant, Islamist religious schools in Pakistan to produce fanatical medieval-minded mujahadeen to fight the Soviets.
I'm always surprised when more people don't know about OpenAFS. To my mind it is the obvious replacement for NFS in anything but a small-office/home network context. It's somewhat complicated to set up, but once you've got it running, it's very slick: fault-tolerant, very secure, network-backup-able, client-side cacheing for good performance, very multi-platform ( Linux, SPARC, AIX, Windows, etc. No great client for Mac yet, but various options are on the way.) At the University of Auckland, we used it to do network software mounts on Linux and Windows on several hundred dual-boot public machines. Provided you give it the back-end hardware it needs, and do a proper configuration, it 'just works'.
Life of the infringer plus 70 years...