This is highly misleading. While USSR indeed supplied his junk, US paid for it with military aid. I will repeat so there is no confusion: USA gave Saddam money explicitely to buy arms. I hope you are not going to pretend that financing a dictator's army is somehow better or more noble then actually supplying it with AK47s. Furthermore, the USA's 0.58% includes the precursors, equipment and plans to manufacture chemical weapons, which Saddam then used on the Kurds, a.k.a the dreaded WMDs we all heard so much about.
If I spend years labouring over writing a book, is it right that someone else with a printing press should profit from printing it just as much as I do from my own printing press?
The problem with this is not his "right" but the nature of information, which is the "concept" itself, the story of the book, the shape of the sculpture etc. Information has certain qualities which render it immune to being treated as "private property". It can only be kept secret from someone. Once divuldged, it propagates effortlessly. So in order to "protect" the author of the book from copying, one has to "only" defy the properties of information. And it is where we get into trouble as this, at the first glance innocuous, restriction ends up having far, far reaching consequences, particularly on technologies which were not invented at the time of that decision.
An alternative is to pay the author from an art fund and thus avoid the entire debacle of "rights" and Orwellian "Intellectual Property".
If so, then writers will work for next to nothing, and publishers will grow rich (which is basically how things work now).
No because the publishers will have to compete on the only thing they, being businessmen, are supposed to be good at competing: efficiency and cost of delivery. As they all have access to the contents of the book to replicated, they can only compete on price/quality of the book itself. Which will lead to much cheaper and better printed books. Art foundation will labour to pay the writers for the effort of writing. Thus the author is removed from the control and influence of a publisher, who demands "profitable" sequels even if they are all drivel and the publishers will have to compete hard for the consumer's benefit.
If all the rewards come from providing content rather than creating it, what incentive does the artist have to bother creating it?
As I explained, the rewards for creating go to the author, money from foundations and patrons, and the rewards for manufacturing, distribution and packaging go to the merchants, which would be much harder to come by because multiple vendors would compete with the same contents, even against essentially free electronic formats. The publishers would have to work much harder for their money and the authors would get rewarded for quality, rather then mindless 15-volume sequels where a scene is spread out for 4 chapters to make it as long as possible as to make as many volumes published as possible.
the UN is a good organization when its actions agree with your viewpoint.
UN is merely an organization like any other. Not a divine entity. Its aims are noble (on paper) but its effectiveness is spotty. Sometimes they do a good thing, sometimes they get pushed around. I know this is too difficult for you to grasp, in your black and white universe, where UN is universally evil, but your delusions have no impact on reality.
Until the inspectors report, I think we pretty much can't make any judgment - Kofi Annan, 12/31/2002. Obviously he felt that the continued inspections were necessary.
No, he is merely covering his ass as any politician does, reserving his "judgment" till the "report" comes out. It could as well have been a report on the cafeteria expenses or the cost of washing windows at the UN HQ.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has said Iraq had failed to provide evidence in its declaration to prove that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction - CNN, 12/31/200
This is actually Colin Powell speaking in one of his misinformation sessions. I know, it must be really hard to keep track of your useless props.
The UN Security Council and Secretary General Kofi Annan declared August 6 that Iraq has violated the Gulf War cease-fire agreement by unilaterally suspending cooperation with UN weapons inspectors - USIS
This is Annan merely informing on the legal status of the inspections, as pertaining to the US sponsored inspection regime. Yes, after discovering that UNSCOM was a prop for regime change and an extension of the CIA, as Ritter explained in detail, Iraq threw them out. Which violated the "agreement". Which prompted Annan to make that announcement. It says nothing about Annan's "opinion" on the usefulness or need for the inspection regime in the first place.
None of these quotes (the ones actually belonging to Annan) say anything about that.
Any more attempts at misinformation in that vast vault of yours?
However in both cases, entire sections of humanity would be the victims of your 'let 'em all die, as long as I don't have to lift a finger' mentality.
It didn't register. Again. WWII was not fought to "stop em from dying". It was fought for self-preservation by all participants. The saving of persecuted minorities came as a bonus. But do not let this rather major difference between this and your alternate reality universes bother you.
And now another facet of your delusional mentality emerges: your anti-Semitism.
Woohoo! I did it! I actually managed to get you to call me an anti-semite for refusing to grant Jews the central role in the universe! So I take it, in order to not be an "anti-semite" one has to accept that central role and bow before the superior ones? As opposed to just demanding that we are all equal. In which case one is "anti-semite".
Brilliant! This explains everything. Whatever Israel does is by definition superior, because it is a country controlled by Jews, and they are, according to you, central and superior in the universe. Them nasty Arabs need to be pacified for the greater cause. US yearly tithe to Israel is just a normal course of events, and every nation should be paying it. Crystal clear. I got it.
And it also explains your attitude, because I am beginning to suspect that you are a proud holder of an Israeli passport and a card carrying member of Likud.
You're part of the group that backs the Arab-controlled security council, which routinely passes laws in favor of Palestine and then refuses to pass the same laws for Israel.
Whoa! Wow! I never knew I was so powerful! Lemme see, who did we plant
But see my previous point: In the past, an artist could paint a painting, get paid for it, and use the money to live off while he made his next painting
Nothing has changed for painters. They can still get patrons and even sell the "originals" the same way they sold them before to wealthy art collectors. The public gets the cheap imitations in electonic or paper format, or some other, lesser artist will make oil reproductions,or what not, and charge far less for those then the master for his original.
Now, an artis (say, n musician) can make some music, it goes all over the net via p2p, but he earns nothing from that, so instead of spending his time creating more music, he has to take a 9-5 to put food on the table, which means he creates LESS art than he would have under the old system.
That is because, just like the painter who is only entitled to get paid for his physical property (and the one time labour which was put into making it), i.e. the original, the musician is also only entitled to get paid once per performance. Be it by a patron or by charging at the gate at the concert. I would expect, first-time presentation of a new song, just like the painting original, to be performed in front of much higher paying elite audience, after of course the musician attained high enough status. But today crooked music "industry", which grew on fraud and scams, created an illusion that if you are a musician, you are entitled to money falling from heaven and are to get paid over and over and over and over for the same performance. And people get greedy looking at these conmen and their chosen "merchandise" they peddle, like Britney Spears, and the money the scam rakes in, and you are beginning to expect the same amounts of money, in hundreds of millions.
Wake up.
Britney and all the similiar "stars" are a result of connivery. A painter makes a honest living as an artist, Titney is a "product" to be mass marketed to sheeple. Art has nothing to do with this, a large scale, organized, legalized mafia has everything to do with it. If they were only satisified with duping their chosen "audience" I would just shrug my shoulders and ignore it, just like I ignore gambling casinos and other insanities. But they are not. In order to make their "work once, get paid forever" scam work, they need to corrupt the legal system, take away my liberties and cripple my personal equipment, not to mention other more grevious to society actions, such as putting scientific progress under lock and key.
This is where I draw the line: trying to ensure that an organized crime gang who peddles "stardom" to a mass of deluded sheep remains profitable is not worth my most cherished personal liberties and the future of humanity. And believe you me, this scam will come to an end sooner or later.
And it will still have nothing to do with an honest person, trying to get food on a table while he is pursuing his/her passion for art.
Much of the art we consider great today came from artists who did it for the love of art, without any such third-party support.
Which is the only way art gets created. Otherwise you end up with commercial crap. Formalized, state-assisted and private patronage, which is what I am advocating, would improve on the old-fashioned pauper-artist problem but it would not be meant to introduce a commercial element into art. Art and traditional, "widget manufacture", commerce do not mix.
Heaven forbid someone should choose to economize the short time he has available to him by combining the two processes, so that he can use his art to also generate money, so that he doesn't have to spend most of his free time doing something else - which allows him to devote more time to his art.
I have nothing against artists making money, be it through patronage or live performances or what not. I only object to the mis-application of a particular method of making money, i.e. "widget sales" approach to obtaining renumeration for what is essentially information. That approach is what causes all sorts of havoc and pandemonium with all sorts of things, and in the long run will end up causing far more severe problems then it even does now.
This used to be a lot easier in the days before the printing press and the photocopier and the internet.
Yes, as the great advances in ways of disseminating art made the lives of artists more miserable... say what?! You mean now that they can make their creations available to many, many more people then before, it puts them at a disadvantage? I was under the impression that artists cared about spreading their art as far and as wide as possible, and that it was this dissemination of their art which drove them to create in the first place, no?
You don't even realize that this completely undermines all your arguments for the UN becoming a more influential body.
Those are in your mind only as I argued no such thing. UN is influential sometimes, sometimes it is just a puppet of those who can shrewdly manipulate it and it sports an impressive bureaucracy. Its primary effectiveness lies in coordination of various international activities, primarily technical such as the ITU, but sometimes even military such as the Kuwait affair. It is in dire needs of reforms, democratic ones to begin with, in order to lessen the influence of the Orwellian newspeak named "Security Council" and the veto holding petulant 10-year olds otherwise known as the US and the UK.
and all the other nations who believed that Iraq had dangerous weapons - a group which, again, included Annan. Interesting that you not only chose to ignore this point, but completely snipped it from your summary.
Even if they were such, which I doubt, and even if Annan believed so, which I doubt as you don't quote him, all of this would have been based on "uranium yellow cake" and similar fabrications by the US and UK "intelligence", the same folks who tried to pervert UNSCOM to their ends. Besides, as those who insisted on sanctions in the first place, US and UK vetoes are the only ones pertinent to this conversation. People like you in the US administration were directly responsible for the sanctions and for their abuse.
So you've conceded that people only got together and protested the war because, like you, they are attention-seekers?
I will repeat it as simply as possible because its whizzing over your head again: the logistics of mass demonstrations is such that they can be only held rarely, and thus are held in extraordinary circumstances only. The cause which was deemed the most important of all Iraq related causes was stopping the war. Enter mass demonstrations. The other ones did not attain the required level of outrageousness and time specificity. Therefore they were dealt with in print and other types of activity. As most causes are. You would like to dismiss every cause there is because there are not 20 million people on the streets demonstrating every one of them -- and when they do they are "attention seekers". Which prompts you to dismiss them. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This sort of "logic" can only work for your damaged cranium. Which, as I pointed out, is consistent with "I am right no matter what" reasoning you are so fond of.
Yeah. I'll trust your journalistic credentials over the BBC.
My "credentials" are of no import, you twit, I gave you the primary source, i.e. Scott himself. And since he contradicted all your fabrications about UNSCOM handsomely, you are trying to divert attention to my "journalistic credentials". Pure comedy.
I'm certainly glad you weren't around in WWII, so you could tell us all 'let that Jew problem sort itself out'.
This probably will come to you as a great shock, since your "education" (I assume coming from some Zionist summer camp) is somewhat lacking: the WWII was not fought over Jews. Not even over the whole concept of Holocaust, vile as it was. It was fought because Germany, aided by Japan and Italy, invaded other countries, who fearing defeat, allied against it. The ending of the Holocaust was a side-effect of WWII not its primary cause. 6 million Jews was but a small fraction of the vast rivers of casualties on all fronts, over fifty million in all. And if Saddam was in the process of invading all his neighbours and was in the slightest capable of the industrial and military power on the scale of WWII Germany, I would be cheering for an UN action myself, complete with a draft here if needed. That is what UN is quite capable of, in those circumstances, as UN did this in WWII (UN being merely a post-WWII formalization of the Alliance)
So you can end your posturing about Jews as the planet does not revolve around them
let me just point out that Iraq was under more than 10 years of constant UN inspection, sanctions, and threats.
... sponsored by the US and the UK as I already mentioned in detail. UN is a weak organisation, hoplessely kept hostage by the security council members, US particularly. I find it especially amusing that people like you were the ones twisting the arm of the UN to keep the sanctions on and now you are using the keeping of the sanctions as an argument to support your arm-twisting! How delightfully circular, something that can only come from a bunch of delusional retards.
If the UN honestly believed there was no problem in Iraq, this wouldn't have been the case.
No it would have been vetoed by US and UK. Sanctions were kept at the explicit demand of those two. Any attempt to remove them = veto. The rest is just inconsequential fluff. Simple enough for you?
And you're evading the question - the question was why weren't there massive, organized protests against these problems?
I admit it, I failed to coordinate 6 million people to show up on the streets in 12 countries at noon Tuesday. My bad. The fact that there are volumes written on oposition to sanctions, entire organisations set up, people like Galloway getting expelled from his party over that by crooks like you falsifying Saddam's paperwork, etc, etc, is just too small an effort in your books. And the fact that people have to priorize gigiantic demonstrations aiming at the most important, of multiple, related, causes -- stopping the war was #1 -- as they can only be held rarely due to extreme logistics, is also absolutely beyond you. Which somehow does not surprise me in the slightest.
Why weren't you on your poorly-informed soapbox screaming that things had to change? Because it wasn't sexy, it wouldn't be televised, and you don't really give a shit
Oh, I was doing that, on this here very Slashdot even. I would have pointed you to my old posts but I am not a subscriber and only can see my last 20 or so. I tried to Google but it appears to be a very fragmentary record with only a small number out of my 900+ posts listed. Perheaps if you subscirbe yourself...
Quoth Time, BBC
These are secondary sources, which did not get it quite right. Quoth Scott again:
And now you have a situation where Iraq says, What are we supposed to do? If we cooperate, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. And now they start looking at UNSCOM, now there's an implementor of Security Council policy, but actually, as an organization designed to create confrontation, that gives the United States an excuse to maintain sanctions, we became not just an inconvenience, we became the bad guys. And it's the United States that's to thank for that. Madeleine Albright's mindless policy. And that's the beginning of the end for UNSCOM.
I love that meme the media were somehow duped into using: "He resigned claiming US was not tough enough" while the actual reason was "The US did not support UNSCOM's mission" -- because US wanted to use UNSCOM as a prop for regime change. A wee little difference.
Since the UN is supposed to protect the world from dictatorial human-rights abusers, and Saddam had just declared war on a sovereign nation and would undoubtedly exterminate the rebellion in Iraq which helped the UN - YES. Unequivocally.
You make me laugh. The cognitive dissonance must actually be audible to your neighbours as a high pitched whine. I will skip for the moment the obvious "catastrophic success" uncanilly resembling the present situation which this would have produced, although it would have allowed for you to pretend that your bood stained, murderous paws are clean -- UN ratified action and all that. I will ignore the fact that the UN is only specifically authorized in its charter to deal with international law violations, such as the Kuwait attack, which it dealt
You are confusing common-sense business with the activities of mega-corporations. Once corporations become as large as some small countries, they too develop an unquenchable thirst for power and control over others, the sheep known as "consumers" in particular.
So they deploy police-state mesures, even if they are actually losing money on the specifics. The general idea however is that enslaving "consumers" will in the long-term result in an uninterruptible (regardles of economics) income. Disney (like many other corporate nation-states) has been engaged in these activities for a very long time.
You did not think DMCA was about piracy, now, did you?
Wow, that is the best post I've read in awhile, and me sitting here without any mod points.
Thanks, but at the moment it is being down modded and the parent is "5 Insightful". The "Murka is #1, UN is the Anti-Christ!" crowd is going strong today.
Are you sure you are on the right forum? I think you meant to post that on http://plastic.com/ instead.
Nice! I did not know about that one. Definitely worth checking out.
The townsfolk are free to build their own exchange.
Which is precisely what is being discussed. Noone is talking about taking over the servers paid-for by the US. UN is about to buy their own and run them if they need to, but even more mundanely, they are merely discussing the process of assigning the IP addresses and names, which is exactly euivalent to the work the ITU has been doing with international phone numbers.
This does not stop however the "UN is World Government is the Coming of the Beast!" types from running around screeching about "rape" and "murder" with arms flailing.
One day they attack. The turn over the cart, burn it, kill the horses, rape the woman, and drown the man.
This is a very good analogy indeed! Why, how accurately and wisely does it cover the brutal war the UN has waged on the US, the tank battles near Houston, the nuking of Atlanta, and the poignient ruins of the White House smouldering even now! And the rape analogy! Whoooweee! Brilliant! That probably refers to the mass execution by the Canadian forces, under the command of a Chinese general of the orphans near Minneapolis, no?
How about this analogy:
---
There is a rich man who pays a hermit to experiment with stuff.
One day the hermit discovers the telephone. He sets up the first exchange and people are starting to use the new invention.
Before long the whole town is using it. The discussion turns to ways of assigning phone numbers and emergency services and what not.
But then the rich man waltzes in and says: "You peons have no right to be doing any of this, I own the telephone, the wires, the exchange, and the very idea of people talking to each other, its all mine!".
The town at first, politely, tries to point out that while indeed, the rich man was instrumental in the discovery, as he financed it, the thing is now a part of the knowledge of humanity and he cant simply demand it back.
The rich man, being an arrogant ass, is not convinced in the slightest. He wants all of the phone system to be run from his estate and he will decide all the important things, such as who gets the phone numbers, and who are to be cut off should they be "uppity" and "disrespectful", and whose conversations are to be tapped to make sure that he is not involved in some religions the man does not approve of.
The town organizes a town hall, and after much deliberation decides to move parts of the exchange from the hermit's house to the town hall (even though the hermit has operated it flawlessly) because the hermit's house is on the crazy rich man's estate and they are afraid one day the maniac will just come in with his butler and pull the plug on people he does not like. This fear is compounded by the fact that the man just recently attacked his neighbour and burned down his house "pre-emptively", claiming he had a dream that the neighbour will strangle him in his sleep.
The story would not be complete without the stable boy of the rich man, who enamoured with his master, wrties an alegory, which he nails to the barn door, decrying the "rape" and "murder", "perpetrated" on his master (and which is full of horses and horse manure which the stable boy loves). The alegory starts with:
" Ok, how bout a little analogy. The rich man and his wife were riding in a nice cart with 4 well bred horses..."
To paraphrase Holmes, the life of the law is experience, not logic.
Which is why such Witch Trials are possible. Find an ignorant enough jury, scare them with tales of fire and brimstone and off she goes to jail for 25 to life (if lucky). If you think I am exaggerating, the article describes precisely that. An ignorant of technology court, shifty and eloquent prosecutor with ulterior motives and voila! A conviction for hyperlinking.
That us why logic and not some bullshit, supefluous, subjective "experience" which can be twisted by devious lawyers and judges, is the ultimate measuring stick. And which is why I am less and less repectful of law and its voodoo "experience" priesthood, as time passes, as I learn more and more about their pitiful, corruptible, abusive ways.
...herding people onto mass transit systems where they can be blown up by the Muslim extremists they've given refugee status to.
As opposed to them being stuck in permanent 24/7 gridlock with smog from idling engines so dense that no Muslim terrorists need to bother, since people will drop like flies, coughing their lungs out, all around anyhow. Sooo glad that you identified the root cause of terrorism. Why, as soon as the public transport is abolished, everyone given an SUV and all immigrants taken back and shot, Europe will return to its natural, pure, safe, Arian state, no?
Oh, if only we all had your startling prescience and could see into the future to have known this.
No prescience required. Common sense and logic is all it takes. Something the proponents of war were all clearly short on, but quite long on adrenaline, lust to kill and self-righteous belief in their own infallibility. And they all have been proven wrong. So now you pretend that this prediction was somehow un-imaginably unlikely to be made correctly. Amusing to watch, but no one is buying this crap, and you know it.
Funny, if there were no WMDs where is your righteous indignation against all the children starved to death under UN sanctions against those very nonexistent WMDs?
Many of us (myself included) opposed the sanctions as ineffective and poorly targeted. The very same people however, who later were chief proponents of war, were insisting on the sanctions. US and UK hard-ons for Saddam were so large that they began stopping shipments of food and medicine, hoping to starve Iraq into revolt, and prevented charity organizations from sending relief. This alone tells everything one has to know about the fake concern of war proponents for the "Iraqi people". Were it not for stranded Indian workers, the resolution 666 would not have passed due to this vicious US and UK attitude and not even the crude, corrupt and unwieldy "food-for-oil" program would be in place.
Unless of course you claim that the UN proved to be too easily influenced and not resistant enough to belligerent US and UK pressure. In which case I do concur.
You're engaging in revisionist history. The UN wasn't verifying this, because the inspectors did not have the freedom they needed to verify it. But don't let the facts get in your way.
Quoth Scott Ritter:
I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.
While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.
With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years (the jury is still out regarding Iraq's VX nerve agent program - while inspectors have accounted for the laboratories, production equipment and most of the agent produced from 1990-91, major discrepancies in the Iraqi accounting preclude any final disposition at this time.)
The same holds true for biological agent, which would have been neutralized through natural processes within three years of manufacture. Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.
Revisionist history indeed. Your specialty, may I add.
Zero over the fact that the UN left the Iraqi rebellion to die horribly after the first Gulf War
Right. I see. So the UN should have amassed an army and rolled over Iraq, helping the Shia, bringing "prosperity", "freedom" and "democracy" and to be, in return, showered with
Mugabe only claimed to be redistributing the farms of the rich to the poor. In reality, most of them went to his family, friends and political cronies. The people who knew how to run the farms had them confiscated, therefore the farms are now non-productive and the people are starving. It's hard to tell if the man is just a nut or if he seriously believed his misguided policies would help the poor in his country.
This does not suprise me at all, I was however questioning the motives of the original poster who implied that capitalism is somehow divinely immune from the effects of greed motivated stupidity.
Look at how much everyone here complaints about outsourcing -- that's capatilism working to make the average human wealthier.
I am not sure if this is what you meant to demonstrate but having 500,000 people do menial work (or remain unemployed) after being fired from their previously highly paid technical positions, having countless others accept fraction of their former pay, combined with erosion of industry strikes me as eerily similiar to the Zimbabwan happenings. Why, just in 5 years the US went from exporting electronics to being a big importer of thereof.
So while one is the effect of Mr. Mugabe applying "redistribution of wealth" from the rich to the poor, the other is the effect of Mr. Bush applying "redistribution of wealth" from the middle class to the ultra-rich.
I do wonder what causes you do despise one and be so impressed with the other...
If I am correct in surmising that your argument rests on the notion that only physical objects can have objective value,
Only physical objects, labour and currency are subject to capitalism, or so one Adam Smith led people to believe.
then your penultimate statement was correct: there is no convincing me.
Pity.
Such a notion is altogether irrational, and ignores all of human history.
Examples, other then the post-copyright insanity era would be appreciated.
Consider the difference in the scale of human endeavor between the last two hundred years and the rest of known history.
You, Sir, are confusing cause with effect.
The cause is the increase in freedom of exchange of information due to technological advances, and it is that freedom which allowed people previously having no chance to learn, access to information which unlocked their talents and led to further research, which in turn communicated to others... etc.
The effect is the commercial benefits as the indurstries are capable of utilizing this information to make better products for profit.
To point: Albert Einstein would have remained a clerk, had he not access to free (as he could not afford any other) scientific journals. Corporatist crooks on the other hand would have you believe that if it were not for his greed and desire to strike it rich, combined with him dutifully paying big bucks for ideas he referred to, we would not have the Relativity Theory at all. It is to laugh.
In the words of R.A. Heinlein, "Anything free is worth what you pay for it."
Mr. Heinlein belongs to the "know the cost of everything, value of nothig" school of thought. By this line of reasoning, vast bulk of knowledge of humanity is "worthless", because it was arrived at by generations past, long before greedy crooks got to run the show. Lanugage, mathematics, physics, chemistry to mention a few. If you do measure everything in terms of money, I do pity you. Capitalism has become a religion for you, instead what it was supposed to be, a reasonable economic system with well defined scope of application.
And, please do not make (an already quite foolish ultra-libertarian) Mr. Heinlein appear any more moronic then he already does by quoting him.
Artifacts originate with ideas. The artifacts have value because the underlying concepts that shaped them have imparted value to them. Without the idea, a song is just some paper and ink. It is the unique talent of the creator of the song which gives the song whatever value is assigned to it by the listener. If the listener does not find a value in the song, he or she may choose not to deliver a value in exchange for it.
So far so good....
True capitalism embodies an exchange of values, be it admiration or dollars or other medium.
Oops. Capitalism is a system specific to material goods, labour and currency. What you are describing is a Religion. "Admiration" is not a component of the marketplace, it is not subject to supply and demand, it is not measurable, it is not transferrable, etc and so on. You are hopelessly confused as to what capitalism is, and are desperately attempting to make into a spiritual experience. Adam Smith would cringe.
As long as the exchange is freely agreed upon by both participants, there is no 'rape' or 'robbery'.
You clearly missed the part about the product being make-believe and the "seller" controlling the actions of the "buyer" after the "sale". If you truly believe this, you must think Ponzi schemes are quite reasonable and should be legalized.
To circumvent capitalism by pretending that only physical property can be valued or owned is disingenuous.
This is where I should do my Aflac duck impression by going: "Wha!!!??". Your lack of any clue as to what capitalism is, is so profound that y
You have twice mentioned 'rape' with respect to copyright protection, indicating that the protection of intellectual property was somehow depriving the general consumer of some value, while steadfastly maintaining that nearly all intellectual property so protected *has* no value. Which is it?
You mis-interpreted my saying that consumers, and in fact all citizens, are extremely ill-served in many ways by the laws, is somehow paramount to analysing general "value" of information. Nothing of the sort. Even things utterly etheral and abstract can have some arbitrary, subjective value to people, which however is entirely beyond the scope of the marketplace. Capitalist forces fail to engage here because (among other reasons) thoughts and ideas are not subject to supply and demand, as the "product" can be effortlessly duplicated by mere thought and is thus in essentially zero-cost infinite supply after the initial occurence. This initial occurence is what confuses people greatly and leads them to believe that efforts expended towards coming up with the idea have to be somehow reclaimed by "selling it". I speak nothing of the reclamation of expenses (other then to give examples of ways to do so) but I merely point out that the method of this reclamation proposed by corporations is utterly insane, as it requires suspension of belief and defiance of logic.
By "rape" I meant that some of our basic rights are being removed and redirected towards corporate entities, under the laughable disguise of "protecting the artists", like, say, Mr. Beethoven, free playback of whose symphonies by the BBC is hotly contested by "rightful" for-profit performers. The rights I speak of are those of free thought, exchange of ideas, ability to learn, conduct scientific studies, and ultimately liberty, as the various -- increasingly insidious and draconian -- measures taken to protect profits are making inroads into all the ways of communicating, processing and storing our knowledge. I hope I do not have to go on in extensive detail repeating all of the specific examples.
If you produce something which is 'crap', and I buy it, how am I being 'raped', or deprived of some value - presuming that I am not forced to buy it, of course? Conversely, if you produce something which is valuable to me, and I exchange another value (such as money) for it, how am I being 'raped'?
In both cases, since we are exchanging good money for something valueless as far as mercantile processes are concerned (which says nothing about other types of "values", such as sentimental one), we are getting essentially robbed. The only way to uphold this make-believe commercial value in some semi-plausible way is to somehow force us both not to divulge our vapourous "acquisition" to others, like singing it in the shower for instance, or retelling it to small children at school (this last one an actual example of litigation). We must do so by essentially defying the natural properties of information and by putting restrictions on exchange of thoughts and ideas.
In short, it is a scam. In a typical scam, the participants must be somehow kept fooled to pay for the non-existant "land in florida" and that them being told its "theirs" makes it so, and to keep it secret (for all sorts of convoluted reasons) so that the scammer will be free to go and sell it again, and again... and again... and...
Song-selling is an improved variation on this scam, because the demand of keeping the purchase secret has been cleverly incorporated as an up-front "legitimate" request, as oposed to the hush-hush add-on later. Not to mention the fact that the scammers got to write their own laws, which puts them in a class of their own.
Note that a critical element of a scam is to convince the mark that something which is monetarily valueless (a fake certificate or such) has indeed a great monetary value. If you apply your silly reasoning to the case of a sale of the Broo
But I'm comforted by the fact that you're completely and utterly powerless to force your bizarre world-view on the rest of us. It heartens me to know that no matter how much blather you egomaniacly vomit up, in the end you're just another impotent troll
It isn't arbitrary. I'm the absolute owner of the product of my mind.
I see Mr. Jefferson's thoughs whizzed so far above your head that they might have as well been in orbit.
You have *no* right to that product whatsoever.
A. It is not a "product" but packets of information encoded in chemical molecules, converted to electro-chemical format by olfactory senses. B. As I already explained, there are no "rights" involved, merely pure logic and science, both of which superceed any artificial constructs upon which, we humans, construct our fancy pyramides of ideas, in which there somewhere are abstract concepts such as "rights".
Via contract (in this case administered by the government) I'm granting you the benefits of that product assuming you want it and are willing to pay the price I demand. If you don't like the price you're always free to refuse to pay it.
No you dont. I received a copy of you "work" (I am being magnamonious here) as an electronic representation of the molecule patterns of the farts, to be rendered by the smell-o-matic generator I have attached to my PC. I got it from a server in Nigeria, by means of radio waves, via a Russian, satellite-based ISP. Explain to me again at which point in time did I enter into a contractual agreement with you. Note that this is a purely academic question, as I do not want any of your "product" and would have promptly removed it from my proximity should I have ever run into it, rest assured.
What's the color of the sky on your planet? Tell that to King or Grisham or Rawlings, why don't you?
Funny that you listed these talentless, overhyped, commercial hacks whose entire claim to fame is their ability to produce easily marketable -- to semi-literates -- drivel. If this is the height of your argument for "art", I rest my case. Why don't you add Britney Spears and Milli Vanilly to the list while you are at it.
I'm a capitalist, not some stupid little college prick enamored with "The Communist Manifesto". And yes, I do indeed demand that if you want something I have that you pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it then again, you're entirely free not to purchase it.
I don't think you have any idea what "capitalist" means. If you did, you would know that only physical goods, labour and currency fall into the domain of capitalist trade and that legalese mumbo-jumbo, make-believe, fart-o-matic "Intellectual Property" economy is as anti-capitalist as one can possibly get. I will spell it out for you, because I have a rather strong suspicion that things seem to be zinging above your head all too frequently: copyrights and patents constitute artificial restrictions of trade and thus are contrary to free-market ideology. Marx would laugh his ass off watching this (and it is you who brought our mis-guided revolutionary hero here). And no, I am far, far past my college days. And I do own a business, which I guess makes me more capitalist then you, which renders your pitiful attacks all the more funny.
Except for a few deluded souls we do what we do both because we enjoy it AND because we like money
I noticed you did not hesitate to take up the mantle of all artists, particularly the ones like Plato... or Da Vinci... or Beethoven. Speaking about Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven, here is a quote for you:
There ought to be only one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works and from which he could carry away whatever he needed
But I forget, you are speaking for "artists" such as Bannanarama and Ron L. Hubbard.
Just like everyone else in the bloody world
Sure. That is why we have scientists publishing in journals, that is why we have GPL and BSD software, that is why have public galleries and art museums. You should go explain the error of their commie ways to all of these "misguided" poor souls who are losing t
In no way am I 'aiding' anyone, regardless of what delusion you suffer from in this matter. This isn't an "if you're not with me you're against me" matter.
Well if you, based on your personal greed, argue for things which benefit master thieves at the expense of the society (myself included), so that you can live off of the sraps from the thieves' tables, it quickly -- and unfortunately -- becomes an adversarial scenario.
Yeah. I like to eat, and I don't work for free. Neither do you..
We all like to eat but that does not entitle us to demand that we get paid for things we arbitrarily deem we are entitled for. On the same premise I could demand that you should pay me for the air you breathe since there are likely some molecules in it which given enough time originated in my farts. Perheaps this enterntaining story will give you a better clue.
In short, you picked the wrong line of work to make a living off. Writing is something you can only live on if you convince someone to sponsor you, assuming that what you write is useful for society. By suggesting -- no demanding -- that you get paid for the smell of your farts, you are only making yourself appear greedy, egoistical and foolish.
Copyright and patent exist for good reasons. Just because current law is twisted beyond belief doesn't make the laws, or the ideas behind them, invalid.
Copyrights have reasons, indeed, just that few of them are what you think they are. In the US, copyrights were extremely controversial from the get go, and the Founding Fathers were very dubious about their merit. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
I can only dream of being able to express it as eloquently as he had.
Writers, artists and musicians aren't your serfs, intellectual or otherwise; if you want what we've got you have to pay for it.
Again the error in your thinking is that artists are making art for money. The moment I meet an "artist" who made his "art" for profit, I dont want any, thank you very much. Art is an effort to express one's internal feelings and state of mind in such a way that it can be shared by others, subsequently artists wish to disseminate their works as widely as possible. This dissemination -- and acceptance -- in fact brings them joy and fullfilment, which is a little something you should go learn about since you claim to be an artist. That does not make them serfs of others, quite opposite, it brings them fame and admiration (and sometimes fortune). Commercial hacks on the other hand wish to disseminate their kitsch for profit. A little wee difference we should be all aware of. I wonder into which category do you belong, I really do.
Copyright is the only reasonable way to ensure payment.
If it didnt require accepting illogical laws, punish
That may be a trade you're prepared to make, but it's not one I'm prepared to make. I think the world would be poorer if we had only professional artists.
This has nothing to do with "full-time" but with commitment and dedication these people have to art. If one is good enough, he/she will find many sponsors and will be free to do it full time. Everyone else will have to have a day job. But all will keep doing it for the love of art. What will go mercifully missing are all those "for profit", "hey I can get rich doing this stuff!" hacks along with sales peddling middlemen who are the primary cause of the vast rivers of junk.
The quality of being good at art (whether writing, basket weaving, painting, or whatever) is not the same as being good at business.
Funny you mentioned that because I just went to all the trouble explaining how artists should be artists, sponsored by foundations and fans, and not businessmen.
I still think the present copyright law gives too many years to authors and too many more to their survivors.
No argument here. The proper length of "protection" by logic-defying, consumer-raping, legal mumbo-jumbo is "no time at all".
If drawn back to only protect what I claimed was reasonable, the situation would be improved for you and still livable for me.
No, the situation would not be improved much if the copyright was reduced to 1 week. The very requirement to have copyright at all is to deny reason, pervert logic and disavow sicence. At that price, 1 second is too much.
I don't consider myself a "corporatist" attempting to "profit from the body of knowledge accumulated by past generations."
But you -- unwillingly through being misguided -- are aiding them. That is you subscribe to their agenda, which although at first glance might benefit you, is wholly directed at their gain and the long-term expense awesomly exceeds any gains you might have.
I'd say I'm closer to a guy trying to make a buck off the stuff he writes.
You got a problem right there. There is no way "to make a buck off the stuff you write" because the process of writing (unless performed as per-hour paid contract labour) is not subject to "making a buck". If you are an artist, you do it for the art's sake and you might get lucky if someone sponsors you. If you do write scientific texts, academia and technical institutions are your source of daily bread. Literary texts are simply not widgets you can manufacture at a profit.
Just do away entirely with large corporations would be a huge economic setback.
Economies of scale are as equally served by a large number of small businesses producing an essentially compatible product as they are by one single gigiantic one. It is a non-argument.
Not to mention (to give an example you probably care about more) also an environmental setback, since it's harder to regulate lots of small companies than a few big ones.
Harder how? You mean it will take a large number of inspectors instead of a few easilly bribed by huge wealth?
Observe that most of the damage currently being done to the South American rainforest is by small companies and individuals razing land for small-time farming, not corporate logging.
That is because the South American governments do not give a damn about it and do even encourage it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the entities involved but with the lack of protections and their enforcement. A truly nice strawman you have constructed.
I saw a study last year (sorry no link) examining a set of U.S. bills and the influence of corporate lobbying was determined to be relatively low on decisionmaking, IIRC far lower than voting blocs like unions for example.
While politicians do indeed have conflicted loyalties when they hope to get re-elected, one has to only see the trends in policies, economic behaviour and laws (such as the Intellectual Property scam) to see whose side is winning this battle. Pay attention to the rapidly increasing gap between the top 100 world wealthiest individuals and the rest of the planet. Look at the percentage of corporate CEO pay vs. the rest of the company. When I speak about "corporations" and "corporatists" I do not mean the peons in the mailing room, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
This is highly misleading. While USSR indeed supplied his junk, US paid for it with military aid. I will repeat so there is no confusion: USA gave Saddam money explicitely to buy arms. I hope you are not going to pretend that financing a dictator's army is somehow better or more noble then actually supplying it with AK47s. Furthermore, the USA's 0.58% includes the precursors, equipment and plans to manufacture chemical weapons, which Saddam then used on the Kurds, a.k.a the dreaded WMDs we all heard so much about.
The problem with this is not his "right" but the nature of information, which is the "concept" itself, the story of the book, the shape of the sculpture etc. Information has certain qualities which render it immune to being treated as "private property". It can only be kept secret from someone. Once divuldged, it propagates effortlessly. So in order to "protect" the author of the book from copying, one has to "only" defy the properties of information. And it is where we get into trouble as this, at the first glance innocuous, restriction ends up having far, far reaching consequences, particularly on technologies which were not invented at the time of that decision.
An alternative is to pay the author from an art fund and thus avoid the entire debacle of "rights" and Orwellian "Intellectual Property".
If so, then writers will work for next to nothing, and publishers will grow rich (which is basically how things work now).
No because the publishers will have to compete on the only thing they, being businessmen, are supposed to be good at competing: efficiency and cost of delivery. As they all have access to the contents of the book to replicated, they can only compete on price/quality of the book itself. Which will lead to much cheaper and better printed books. Art foundation will labour to pay the writers for the effort of writing. Thus the author is removed from the control and influence of a publisher, who demands "profitable" sequels even if they are all drivel and the publishers will have to compete hard for the consumer's benefit.
If all the rewards come from providing content rather than creating it, what incentive does the artist have to bother creating it?
As I explained, the rewards for creating go to the author, money from foundations and patrons, and the rewards for manufacturing, distribution and packaging go to the merchants, which would be much harder to come by because multiple vendors would compete with the same contents, even against essentially free electronic formats. The publishers would have to work much harder for their money and the authors would get rewarded for quality, rather then mindless 15-volume sequels where a scene is spread out for 4 chapters to make it as long as possible as to make as many volumes published as possible.
UN is merely an organization like any other. Not a divine entity. Its aims are noble (on paper) but its effectiveness is spotty. Sometimes they do a good thing, sometimes they get pushed around. I know this is too difficult for you to grasp, in your black and white universe, where UN is universally evil, but your delusions have no impact on reality.
Until the inspectors report, I think we pretty much can't make any judgment - Kofi Annan, 12/31/2002. Obviously he felt that the continued inspections were necessary.
No, he is merely covering his ass as any politician does, reserving his "judgment" till the "report" comes out. It could as well have been a report on the cafeteria expenses or the cost of washing windows at the UN HQ.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has said Iraq had failed to provide evidence in its declaration to prove that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction - CNN, 12/31/200
This is actually Colin Powell speaking in one of his misinformation sessions. I know, it must be really hard to keep track of your useless props.
The UN Security Council and Secretary General Kofi Annan declared August 6 that Iraq has violated the Gulf War cease-fire agreement by unilaterally suspending cooperation with UN weapons inspectors - USIS
This is Annan merely informing on the legal status of the inspections, as pertaining to the US sponsored inspection regime. Yes, after discovering that UNSCOM was a prop for regime change and an extension of the CIA, as Ritter explained in detail, Iraq threw them out. Which violated the "agreement". Which prompted Annan to make that announcement. It says nothing about Annan's "opinion" on the usefulness or need for the inspection regime in the first place.
None of these quotes (the ones actually belonging to Annan) say anything about that.
Any more attempts at misinformation in that vast vault of yours?
Nobody takes action against sanctions.
Right.
Nobody takes action against suffering inside a country
Uh huh.
However in both cases, entire sections of humanity would be the victims of your 'let 'em all die, as long as I don't have to lift a finger' mentality.
It didn't register. Again. WWII was not fought to "stop em from dying". It was fought for self-preservation by all participants. The saving of persecuted minorities came as a bonus. But do not let this rather major difference between this and your alternate reality universes bother you.
And now another facet of your delusional mentality emerges: your anti-Semitism.
Woohoo! I did it! I actually managed to get you to call me an anti-semite for refusing to grant Jews the central role in the universe! So I take it, in order to not be an "anti-semite" one has to accept that central role and bow before the superior ones? As opposed to just demanding that we are all equal. In which case one is "anti-semite".
Brilliant! This explains everything. Whatever Israel does is by definition superior, because it is a country controlled by Jews, and they are, according to you, central and superior in the universe. Them nasty Arabs need to be pacified for the greater cause. US yearly tithe to Israel is just a normal course of events, and every nation should be paying it. Crystal clear. I got it.
And it also explains your attitude, because I am beginning to suspect that you are a proud holder of an Israeli passport and a card carrying member of Likud.
You're part of the group that backs the Arab-controlled security council, which routinely passes laws in favor of Palestine and then refuses to pass the same laws for Israel.
Whoa! Wow! I never knew I was so powerful! Lemme see, who did we plant
Nothing has changed for painters. They can still get patrons and even sell the "originals" the same way they sold them before to wealthy art collectors. The public gets the cheap imitations in electonic or paper format, or some other, lesser artist will make oil reproductions ,or what not, and charge far less for those then the master for his original.
Now, an artis (say, n musician) can make some music, it goes all over the net via p2p, but he earns nothing from that, so instead of spending his time creating more music, he has to take a 9-5 to put food on the table, which means he creates LESS art than he would have under the old system.
That is because, just like the painter who is only entitled to get paid for his physical property (and the one time labour which was put into making it), i.e. the original, the musician is also only entitled to get paid once per performance. Be it by a patron or by charging at the gate at the concert. I would expect, first-time presentation of a new song, just like the painting original, to be performed in front of much higher paying elite audience, after of course the musician attained high enough status. But today crooked music "industry", which grew on fraud and scams, created an illusion that if you are a musician, you are entitled to money falling from heaven and are to get paid over and over and over and over for the same performance. And people get greedy looking at these conmen and their chosen "merchandise" they peddle, like Britney Spears, and the money the scam rakes in, and you are beginning to expect the same amounts of money, in hundreds of millions.
Wake up.
Britney and all the similiar "stars" are a result of connivery. A painter makes a honest living as an artist, Titney is a "product" to be mass marketed to sheeple. Art has nothing to do with this, a large scale, organized, legalized mafia has everything to do with it. If they were only satisified with duping their chosen "audience" I would just shrug my shoulders and ignore it, just like I ignore gambling casinos and other insanities. But they are not. In order to make their "work once, get paid forever" scam work, they need to corrupt the legal system, take away my liberties and cripple my personal equipment, not to mention other more grevious to society actions, such as putting scientific progress under lock and key.
This is where I draw the line: trying to ensure that an organized crime gang who peddles "stardom" to a mass of deluded sheep remains profitable is not worth my most cherished personal liberties and the future of humanity. And believe you me, this scam will come to an end sooner or later.
And it will still have nothing to do with an honest person, trying to get food on a table while he is pursuing his/her passion for art.
Which is the only way art gets created. Otherwise you end up with commercial crap. Formalized, state-assisted and private patronage, which is what I am advocating, would improve on the old-fashioned pauper-artist problem but it would not be meant to introduce a commercial element into art. Art and traditional, "widget manufacture", commerce do not mix.
Heaven forbid someone should choose to economize the short time he has available to him by combining the two processes, so that he can use his art to also generate money, so that he doesn't have to spend most of his free time doing something else - which allows him to devote more time to his art.
I have nothing against artists making money, be it through patronage or live performances or what not. I only object to the mis-application of a particular method of making money, i.e. "widget sales" approach to obtaining renumeration for what is essentially information. That approach is what causes all sorts of havoc and pandemonium with all sorts of things, and in the long run will end up causing far more severe problems then it even does now.
This used to be a lot easier in the days before the printing press and the photocopier and the internet.
Yes, as the great advances in ways of disseminating art made the lives of artists more miserable... say what?! You mean now that they can make their creations available to many, many more people then before, it puts them at a disadvantage? I was under the impression that artists cared about spreading their art as far and as wide as possible, and that it was this dissemination of their art which drove them to create in the first place, no?
Those are in your mind only as I argued no such thing. UN is influential sometimes, sometimes it is just a puppet of those who can shrewdly manipulate it and it sports an impressive bureaucracy. Its primary effectiveness lies in coordination of various international activities, primarily technical such as the ITU, but sometimes even military such as the Kuwait affair. It is in dire needs of reforms, democratic ones to begin with, in order to lessen the influence of the Orwellian newspeak named "Security Council" and the veto holding petulant 10-year olds otherwise known as the US and the UK.
and all the other nations who believed that Iraq had dangerous weapons - a group which, again, included Annan. Interesting that you not only chose to ignore this point, but completely snipped it from your summary.
Even if they were such, which I doubt, and even if Annan believed so, which I doubt as you don't quote him, all of this would have been based on "uranium yellow cake" and similar fabrications by the US and UK "intelligence", the same folks who tried to pervert UNSCOM to their ends. Besides, as those who insisted on sanctions in the first place, US and UK vetoes are the only ones pertinent to this conversation. People like you in the US administration were directly responsible for the sanctions and for their abuse.
So you've conceded that people only got together and protested the war because, like you, they are attention-seekers?
I will repeat it as simply as possible because its whizzing over your head again: the logistics of mass demonstrations is such that they can be only held rarely, and thus are held in extraordinary circumstances only. The cause which was deemed the most important of all Iraq related causes was stopping the war. Enter mass demonstrations. The other ones did not attain the required level of outrageousness and time specificity. Therefore they were dealt with in print and other types of activity. As most causes are. You would like to dismiss every cause there is because there are not 20 million people on the streets demonstrating every one of them -- and when they do they are "attention seekers". Which prompts you to dismiss them. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This sort of "logic" can only work for your damaged cranium. Which, as I pointed out, is consistent with "I am right no matter what" reasoning you are so fond of.
Yeah. I'll trust your journalistic credentials over the BBC.
My "credentials" are of no import, you twit, I gave you the primary source, i.e. Scott himself. And since he contradicted all your fabrications about UNSCOM handsomely, you are trying to divert attention to my "journalistic credentials". Pure comedy.
I'm certainly glad you weren't around in WWII, so you could tell us all 'let that Jew problem sort itself out'.
This probably will come to you as a great shock, since your "education" (I assume coming from some Zionist summer camp) is somewhat lacking: the WWII was not fought over Jews. Not even over the whole concept of Holocaust, vile as it was. It was fought because Germany, aided by Japan and Italy, invaded other countries, who fearing defeat, allied against it. The ending of the Holocaust was a side-effect of WWII not its primary cause. 6 million Jews was but a small fraction of the vast rivers of casualties on all fronts, over fifty million in all. And if Saddam was in the process of invading all his neighbours and was in the slightest capable of the industrial and military power on the scale of WWII Germany, I would be cheering for an UN action myself, complete with a draft here if needed. That is what UN is quite capable of, in those circumstances, as UN did this in WWII (UN being merely a post-WWII formalization of the Alliance)
So you can end your posturing about Jews as the planet does not revolve around them
... sponsored by the US and the UK as I already mentioned in detail. UN is a weak organisation, hoplessely kept hostage by the security council members, US particularly. I find it especially amusing that people like you were the ones twisting the arm of the UN to keep the sanctions on and now you are using the keeping of the sanctions as an argument to support your arm-twisting! How delightfully circular, something that can only come from a bunch of delusional retards.
If the UN honestly believed there was no problem in Iraq, this wouldn't have been the case.
No it would have been vetoed by US and UK. Sanctions were kept at the explicit demand of those two. Any attempt to remove them = veto. The rest is just inconsequential fluff. Simple enough for you?
And you're evading the question - the question was why weren't there massive, organized protests against these problems?
I admit it, I failed to coordinate 6 million people to show up on the streets in 12 countries at noon Tuesday. My bad. The fact that there are volumes written on oposition to sanctions, entire organisations set up, people like Galloway getting expelled from his party over that by crooks like you falsifying Saddam's paperwork, etc, etc, is just too small an effort in your books. And the fact that people have to priorize gigiantic demonstrations aiming at the most important, of multiple, related, causes -- stopping the war was #1 -- as they can only be held rarely due to extreme logistics, is also absolutely beyond you. Which somehow does not surprise me in the slightest.
Why weren't you on your poorly-informed soapbox screaming that things had to change? Because it wasn't sexy, it wouldn't be televised, and you don't really give a shit
Oh, I was doing that, on this here very Slashdot even. I would have pointed you to my old posts but I am not a subscriber and only can see my last 20 or so. I tried to Google but it appears to be a very fragmentary record with only a small number out of my 900+ posts listed. Perheaps if you subscirbe yourself ...
Quoth Time, BBC
These are secondary sources, which did not get it quite right. Quoth Scott again:
I love that meme the media were somehow duped into using: "He resigned claiming US was not tough enough" while the actual reason was "The US did not support UNSCOM's mission" -- because US wanted to use UNSCOM as a prop for regime change. A wee little difference.
Since the UN is supposed to protect the world from dictatorial human-rights abusers, and Saddam had just declared war on a sovereign nation and would undoubtedly exterminate the rebellion in Iraq which helped the UN - YES. Unequivocally.
You make me laugh. The cognitive dissonance must actually be audible to your neighbours as a high pitched whine. I will skip for the moment the obvious "catastrophic success" uncanilly resembling the present situation which this would have produced, although it would have allowed for you to pretend that your bood stained, murderous paws are clean -- UN ratified action and all that. I will ignore the fact that the UN is only specifically authorized in its charter to deal with international law violations, such as the Kuwait attack, which it dealt
You are confusing common-sense business with the activities of mega-corporations. Once corporations become as large as some small countries, they too develop an unquenchable thirst for power and control over others, the sheep known as "consumers" in particular.
So they deploy police-state mesures, even if they are actually losing money on the specifics. The general idea however is that enslaving "consumers" will in the long-term result in an uninterruptible (regardles of economics) income. Disney (like many other corporate nation-states) has been engaged in these activities for a very long time.
You did not think DMCA was about piracy, now, did you?
Thanks, but at the moment it is being down modded and the parent is "5 Insightful". The "Murka is #1, UN is the Anti-Christ!" crowd is going strong today.
Are you sure you are on the right forum? I think you meant to post that on http://plastic.com/ instead.
Nice! I did not know about that one. Definitely worth checking out.
Which is precisely what is being discussed. Noone is talking about taking over the servers paid-for by the US. UN is about to buy their own and run them if they need to, but even more mundanely, they are merely discussing the process of assigning the IP addresses and names, which is exactly euivalent to the work the ITU has been doing with international phone numbers.
This does not stop however the "UN is World Government is the Coming of the Beast!" types from running around screeching about "rape" and "murder" with arms flailing.
Just like China being the member of the ITU resulted in some phone numbers in Nebraska being refused to "anti-communist" activists.
Get a grip.
This is a very good analogy indeed! Why, how accurately and wisely does it cover the brutal war the UN has waged on the US, the tank battles near Houston, the nuking of Atlanta, and the poignient ruins of the White House smouldering even now! And the rape analogy! Whoooweee! Brilliant! That probably refers to the mass execution by the Canadian forces, under the command of a Chinese general of the orphans near Minneapolis, no?
How about this analogy:
---
There is a rich man who pays a hermit to experiment with stuff.
One day the hermit discovers the telephone. He sets up the first exchange and people are starting to use the new invention.
Before long the whole town is using it. The discussion turns to ways of assigning phone numbers and emergency services and what not.
But then the rich man waltzes in and says: "You peons have no right to be doing any of this, I own the telephone, the wires, the exchange, and the very idea of people talking to each other, its all mine!".
The town at first, politely, tries to point out that while indeed, the rich man was instrumental in the discovery, as he financed it, the thing is now a part of the knowledge of humanity and he cant simply demand it back.
The rich man, being an arrogant ass, is not convinced in the slightest. He wants all of the phone system to be run from his estate and he will decide all the important things, such as who gets the phone numbers, and who are to be cut off should they be "uppity" and "disrespectful", and whose conversations are to be tapped to make sure that he is not involved in some religions the man does not approve of.
The town organizes a town hall, and after much deliberation decides to move parts of the exchange from the hermit's house to the town hall (even though the hermit has operated it flawlessly) because the hermit's house is on the crazy rich man's estate and they are afraid one day the maniac will just come in with his butler and pull the plug on people he does not like. This fear is compounded by the fact that the man just recently attacked his neighbour and burned down his house "pre-emptively", claiming he had a dream that the neighbour will strangle him in his sleep.
The story would not be complete without the stable boy of the rich man, who enamoured with his master, wrties an alegory, which he nails to the barn door, decrying the "rape" and "murder", "perpetrated" on his master (and which is full of horses and horse manure which the stable boy loves). The alegory starts with:
" Ok, how bout a little analogy. The rich man and his wife were riding in a nice cart with 4 well bred horses ..."
Which is why such Witch Trials are possible. Find an ignorant enough jury, scare them with tales of fire and brimstone and off she goes to jail for 25 to life (if lucky). If you think I am exaggerating, the article describes precisely that. An ignorant of technology court, shifty and eloquent prosecutor with ulterior motives and voila! A conviction for hyperlinking.
That us why logic and not some bullshit, supefluous, subjective "experience" which can be twisted by devious lawyers and judges, is the ultimate measuring stick. And which is why I am less and less repectful of law and its voodoo "experience" priesthood, as time passes, as I learn more and more about their pitiful, corruptible, abusive ways.
As opposed to them being stuck in permanent 24/7 gridlock with smog from idling engines so dense that no Muslim terrorists need to bother, since people will drop like flies, coughing their lungs out, all around anyhow. Sooo glad that you identified the root cause of terrorism. Why, as soon as the public transport is abolished, everyone given an SUV and all immigrants taken back and shot, Europe will return to its natural, pure, safe, Arian state, no?
No prescience required. Common sense and logic is all it takes. Something the proponents of war were all clearly short on, but quite long on adrenaline, lust to kill and self-righteous belief in their own infallibility. And they all have been proven wrong. So now you pretend that this prediction was somehow un-imaginably unlikely to be made correctly. Amusing to watch, but no one is buying this crap, and you know it.
Funny, if there were no WMDs where is your righteous indignation against all the children starved to death under UN sanctions against those very nonexistent WMDs?
Many of us (myself included) opposed the sanctions as ineffective and poorly targeted. The very same people however, who later were chief proponents of war, were insisting on the sanctions. US and UK hard-ons for Saddam were so large that they began stopping shipments of food and medicine, hoping to starve Iraq into revolt, and prevented charity organizations from sending relief. This alone tells everything one has to know about the fake concern of war proponents for the "Iraqi people". Were it not for stranded Indian workers, the resolution 666 would not have passed due to this vicious US and UK attitude and not even the crude, corrupt and unwieldy "food-for-oil" program would be in place.
Unless of course you claim that the UN proved to be too easily influenced and not resistant enough to belligerent US and UK pressure. In which case I do concur.
You're engaging in revisionist history. The UN wasn't verifying this, because the inspectors did not have the freedom they needed to verify it. But don't let the facts get in your way.
Quoth Scott Ritter:
Revisionist history indeed. Your specialty, may I add.
Zero over the fact that the UN left the Iraqi rebellion to die horribly after the first Gulf War
Right. I see. So the UN should have amassed an army and rolled over Iraq, helping the Shia, bringing "prosperity", "freedom" and "democracy" and to be, in return, showered with
This does not suprise me at all, I was however questioning the motives of the original poster who implied that capitalism is somehow divinely immune from the effects of greed motivated stupidity.
I am not sure if this is what you meant to demonstrate but having 500,000 people do menial work (or remain unemployed) after being fired from their previously highly paid technical positions, having countless others accept fraction of their former pay, combined with erosion of industry strikes me as eerily similiar to the Zimbabwan happenings. Why, just in 5 years the US went from exporting electronics to being a big importer of thereof.
So while one is the effect of Mr. Mugabe applying "redistribution of wealth" from the rich to the poor, the other is the effect of Mr. Bush applying "redistribution of wealth" from the middle class to the ultra-rich.
I do wonder what causes you do despise one and be so impressed with the other...
Only physical objects, labour and currency are subject to capitalism, or so one Adam Smith led people to believe.
then your penultimate statement was correct: there is no convincing me.
Pity.
Such a notion is altogether irrational, and ignores all of human history.
Examples, other then the post-copyright insanity era would be appreciated.
Consider the difference in the scale of human endeavor between the last two hundred years and the rest of known history.
You, Sir, are confusing cause with effect.
The cause is the increase in freedom of exchange of information due to technological advances, and it is that freedom which allowed people previously having no chance to learn, access to information which unlocked their talents and led to further research, which in turn communicated to others ... etc.
The effect is the commercial benefits as the indurstries are capable of utilizing this information to make better products for profit.
To point: Albert Einstein would have remained a clerk, had he not access to free (as he could not afford any other) scientific journals. Corporatist crooks on the other hand would have you believe that if it were not for his greed and desire to strike it rich, combined with him dutifully paying big bucks for ideas he referred to, we would not have the Relativity Theory at all. It is to laugh.
In the words of R.A. Heinlein, "Anything free is worth what you pay for it."
Mr. Heinlein belongs to the "know the cost of everything, value of nothig" school of thought. By this line of reasoning, vast bulk of knowledge of humanity is "worthless", because it was arrived at by generations past, long before greedy crooks got to run the show. Lanugage, mathematics, physics, chemistry to mention a few. If you do measure everything in terms of money, I do pity you. Capitalism has become a religion for you, instead what it was supposed to be, a reasonable economic system with well defined scope of application.
And, please do not make (an already quite foolish ultra-libertarian) Mr. Heinlein appear any more moronic then he already does by quoting him.
Artifacts originate with ideas. The artifacts have value because the underlying concepts that shaped them have imparted value to them. Without the idea, a song is just some paper and ink. It is the unique talent of the creator of the song which gives the song whatever value is assigned to it by the listener. If the listener does not find a value in the song, he or she may choose not to deliver a value in exchange for it.
So far so good ....
True capitalism embodies an exchange of values, be it admiration or dollars or other medium.
Oops. Capitalism is a system specific to material goods, labour and currency. What you are describing is a Religion. "Admiration" is not a component of the marketplace, it is not subject to supply and demand, it is not measurable, it is not transferrable, etc and so on. You are hopelessly confused as to what capitalism is, and are desperately attempting to make into a spiritual experience. Adam Smith would cringe.
As long as the exchange is freely agreed upon by both participants, there is no 'rape' or 'robbery'.
You clearly missed the part about the product being make-believe and the "seller" controlling the actions of the "buyer" after the "sale". If you truly believe this, you must think Ponzi schemes are quite reasonable and should be legalized.
To circumvent capitalism by pretending that only physical property can be valued or owned is disingenuous.
This is where I should do my Aflac duck impression by going: "Wha!!!??". Your lack of any clue as to what capitalism is, is so profound that y
You mis-interpreted my saying that consumers, and in fact all citizens, are extremely ill-served in many ways by the laws, is somehow paramount to analysing general "value" of information. Nothing of the sort. Even things utterly etheral and abstract can have some arbitrary, subjective value to people, which however is entirely beyond the scope of the marketplace. Capitalist forces fail to engage here because (among other reasons) thoughts and ideas are not subject to supply and demand, as the "product" can be effortlessly duplicated by mere thought and is thus in essentially zero-cost infinite supply after the initial occurence. This initial occurence is what confuses people greatly and leads them to believe that efforts expended towards coming up with the idea have to be somehow reclaimed by "selling it". I speak nothing of the reclamation of expenses (other then to give examples of ways to do so) but I merely point out that the method of this reclamation proposed by corporations is utterly insane, as it requires suspension of belief and defiance of logic.
By "rape" I meant that some of our basic rights are being removed and redirected towards corporate entities, under the laughable disguise of "protecting the artists", like, say, Mr. Beethoven, free playback of whose symphonies by the BBC is hotly contested by "rightful" for-profit performers. The rights I speak of are those of free thought, exchange of ideas, ability to learn, conduct scientific studies, and ultimately liberty, as the various -- increasingly insidious and draconian -- measures taken to protect profits are making inroads into all the ways of communicating, processing and storing our knowledge. I hope I do not have to go on in extensive detail repeating all of the specific examples.
If you produce something which is 'crap', and I buy it, how am I being 'raped', or deprived of some value - presuming that I am not forced to buy it, of course? Conversely, if you produce something which is valuable to me, and I exchange another value (such as money) for it, how am I being 'raped'?
In both cases, since we are exchanging good money for something valueless as far as mercantile processes are concerned (which says nothing about other types of "values", such as sentimental one), we are getting essentially robbed. The only way to uphold this make-believe commercial value in some semi-plausible way is to somehow force us both not to divulge our vapourous "acquisition" to others, like singing it in the shower for instance, or retelling it to small children at school (this last one an actual example of litigation). We must do so by essentially defying the natural properties of information and by putting restrictions on exchange of thoughts and ideas.
In short, it is a scam. In a typical scam, the participants must be somehow kept fooled to pay for the non-existant "land in florida" and that them being told its "theirs" makes it so, and to keep it secret (for all sorts of convoluted reasons) so that the scammer will be free to go and sell it again, and again ... and again ... and ...
Song-selling is an improved variation on this scam, because the demand of keeping the purchase secret has been cleverly incorporated as an up-front "legitimate" request, as oposed to the hush-hush add-on later. Not to mention the fact that the scammers got to write their own laws, which puts them in a class of their own.
Note that a critical element of a scam is to convince the mark that something which is monetarily valueless (a fake certificate or such) has indeed a great monetary value. If you apply your silly reasoning to the case of a sale of the Broo
Have fun being wrong!
I see Mr. Jefferson's thoughs whizzed so far above your head that they might have as well been in orbit.
You have *no* right to that product whatsoever.
A. It is not a "product" but packets of information encoded in chemical molecules, converted to electro-chemical format by olfactory senses. B. As I already explained, there are no "rights" involved, merely pure logic and science, both of which superceed any artificial constructs upon which, we humans, construct our fancy pyramides of ideas, in which there somewhere are abstract concepts such as "rights".
Via contract (in this case administered by the government) I'm granting you the benefits of that product assuming you want it and are willing to pay the price I demand. If you don't like the price you're always free to refuse to pay it.
No you dont. I received a copy of you "work" (I am being magnamonious here) as an electronic representation of the molecule patterns of the farts, to be rendered by the smell-o-matic generator I have attached to my PC. I got it from a server in Nigeria, by means of radio waves, via a Russian, satellite-based ISP. Explain to me again at which point in time did I enter into a contractual agreement with you. Note that this is a purely academic question, as I do not want any of your "product" and would have promptly removed it from my proximity should I have ever run into it, rest assured.
What's the color of the sky on your planet? Tell that to King or Grisham or Rawlings, why don't you?
Funny that you listed these talentless, overhyped, commercial hacks whose entire claim to fame is their ability to produce easily marketable -- to semi-literates -- drivel. If this is the height of your argument for "art", I rest my case. Why don't you add Britney Spears and Milli Vanilly to the list while you are at it.
I'm a capitalist, not some stupid little college prick enamored with "The Communist Manifesto". And yes, I do indeed demand that if you want something I have that you pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it then again, you're entirely free not to purchase it.
I don't think you have any idea what "capitalist" means. If you did, you would know that only physical goods, labour and currency fall into the domain of capitalist trade and that legalese mumbo-jumbo, make-believe, fart-o-matic "Intellectual Property" economy is as anti-capitalist as one can possibly get. I will spell it out for you, because I have a rather strong suspicion that things seem to be zinging above your head all too frequently: copyrights and patents constitute artificial restrictions of trade and thus are contrary to free-market ideology. Marx would laugh his ass off watching this (and it is you who brought our mis-guided revolutionary hero here). And no, I am far, far past my college days. And I do own a business, which I guess makes me more capitalist then you, which renders your pitiful attacks all the more funny.
Except for a few deluded souls we do what we do both because we enjoy it AND because we like money
I noticed you did not hesitate to take up the mantle of all artists, particularly the ones like Plato ... or Da Vinci ... or Beethoven. Speaking about Mr. Ludwig von Beethoven, here is a quote for you:
But I forget, you are speaking for "artists" such as Bannanarama and Ron L. Hubbard.
Just like everyone else in the bloody world
Sure. That is why we have scientists publishing in journals, that is why we have GPL and BSD software, that is why have public galleries and art museums. You should go explain the error of their commie ways to all of these "misguided" poor souls who are losing t
Well if you, based on your personal greed, argue for things which benefit master thieves at the expense of the society (myself included), so that you can live off of the sraps from the thieves' tables, it quickly -- and unfortunately -- becomes an adversarial scenario.
Yeah. I like to eat, and I don't work for free. Neither do you..
We all like to eat but that does not entitle us to demand that we get paid for things we arbitrarily deem we are entitled for. On the same premise I could demand that you should pay me for the air you breathe since there are likely some molecules in it which given enough time originated in my farts. Perheaps this enterntaining story will give you a better clue.
In short, you picked the wrong line of work to make a living off. Writing is something you can only live on if you convince someone to sponsor you, assuming that what you write is useful for society. By suggesting -- no demanding -- that you get paid for the smell of your farts, you are only making yourself appear greedy, egoistical and foolish.
Copyright and patent exist for good reasons. Just because current law is twisted beyond belief doesn't make the laws, or the ideas behind them, invalid.
Copyrights have reasons, indeed, just that few of them are what you think they are. In the US, copyrights were extremely controversial from the get go, and the Founding Fathers were very dubious about their merit. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
I can only dream of being able to express it as eloquently as he had.
Writers, artists and musicians aren't your serfs, intellectual or otherwise; if you want what we've got you have to pay for it.
Again the error in your thinking is that artists are making art for money. The moment I meet an "artist" who made his "art" for profit, I dont want any, thank you very much. Art is an effort to express one's internal feelings and state of mind in such a way that it can be shared by others, subsequently artists wish to disseminate their works as widely as possible. This dissemination -- and acceptance -- in fact brings them joy and fullfilment, which is a little something you should go learn about since you claim to be an artist. That does not make them serfs of others, quite opposite, it brings them fame and admiration (and sometimes fortune). Commercial hacks on the other hand wish to disseminate their kitsch for profit. A little wee difference we should be all aware of. I wonder into which category do you belong, I really do.
Copyright is the only reasonable way to ensure payment.
If it didnt require accepting illogical laws, punish
This has nothing to do with "full-time" but with commitment and dedication these people have to art. If one is good enough, he/she will find many sponsors and will be free to do it full time. Everyone else will have to have a day job. But all will keep doing it for the love of art. What will go mercifully missing are all those "for profit", "hey I can get rich doing this stuff!" hacks along with sales peddling middlemen who are the primary cause of the vast rivers of junk.
The quality of being good at art (whether writing, basket weaving, painting, or whatever) is not the same as being good at business.
Funny you mentioned that because I just went to all the trouble explaining how artists should be artists, sponsored by foundations and fans, and not businessmen.
I still think the present copyright law gives too many years to authors and too many more to their survivors.
No argument here. The proper length of "protection" by logic-defying, consumer-raping, legal mumbo-jumbo is "no time at all".
If drawn back to only protect what I claimed was reasonable, the situation would be improved for you and still livable for me.
No, the situation would not be improved much if the copyright was reduced to 1 week. The very requirement to have copyright at all is to deny reason, pervert logic and disavow sicence. At that price, 1 second is too much.
But you -- unwillingly through being misguided -- are aiding them. That is you subscribe to their agenda, which although at first glance might benefit you, is wholly directed at their gain and the long-term expense awesomly exceeds any gains you might have.
I'd say I'm closer to a guy trying to make a buck off the stuff he writes.
You got a problem right there. There is no way "to make a buck off the stuff you write" because the process of writing (unless performed as per-hour paid contract labour) is not subject to "making a buck". If you are an artist, you do it for the art's sake and you might get lucky if someone sponsors you. If you do write scientific texts, academia and technical institutions are your source of daily bread. Literary texts are simply not widgets you can manufacture at a profit.
Economies of scale are as equally served by a large number of small businesses producing an essentially compatible product as they are by one single gigiantic one. It is a non-argument.
Not to mention (to give an example you probably care about more) also an environmental setback, since it's harder to regulate lots of small companies than a few big ones.
Harder how? You mean it will take a large number of inspectors instead of a few easilly bribed by huge wealth?
Observe that most of the damage currently being done to the South American rainforest is by small companies and individuals razing land for small-time farming, not corporate logging.
That is because the South American governments do not give a damn about it and do even encourage it. It has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the entities involved but with the lack of protections and their enforcement. A truly nice strawman you have constructed.
I saw a study last year (sorry no link) examining a set of U.S. bills and the influence of corporate lobbying was determined to be relatively low on decisionmaking, IIRC far lower than voting blocs like unions for example.
While politicians do indeed have conflicted loyalties when they hope to get re-elected, one has to only see the trends in policies, economic behaviour and laws (such as the Intellectual Property scam) to see whose side is winning this battle. Pay attention to the rapidly increasing gap between the top 100 world wealthiest individuals and the rest of the planet. Look at the percentage of corporate CEO pay vs. the rest of the company. When I speak about "corporations" and "corporatists" I do not mean the peons in the mailing room, you know.