With that being said, yes I prefer the libertarian philosophy of capitalism over the other forms, but only because if it were done right the libertarian form of capitalism is the only form that could ever be considered fair.
Which is, to put it gently, a logical fallacy. The "libertarian" form of capitalism is simply a staging ground for takeover by the most greedy and unscrupulous sociopaths. A starting point for feudalism, as in that "system" there is absolutely no provision for stopping a runaway accumulation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands (by a myriad of means). All of their religious dogmas about inherent self-correcting nature of the so-called "free market" are just that, patently false (and easily demonstrably so), religious convictions having nothing whatsoever to do with reality and historical evidence. It is as simple as that.
It's survival of the fittest under any system. Libertarians just believe in allowing people to compete according to a set of rules which allow for fair competition.
Absolutely false. It is one of the cornerstone lies that libertarians spread around (an extreme form of which is the truly vile and sick view called "objectivism") and by which their true desires can be easily detected.
If it were true, the streets would have been still littered with sick and dying (ala the Middle Ages) and vast swaths of our countries' populations would have been still living in indentured slavery of company towns. The very fact that we have rejected this rabid, sick philosophy is what propelled us into progress and abundant prosperity.
Libertarians despise this progress and would rather have us return to the previous incarnations of our societies where the sick indeed did litter the streets and beggar children chased golden-leaf decorated carriages of the nobility begging for scraps of food or copper coins. This is what they are really all about, as they, of course, think themselves smarter, more ruthless, more unscrupulous then the rest of us and fancy themselves in those golden carriages, as Captains of Industry, while the rest of us in dirty rags on the streets. Make no mistakes about it, this what the "libertarian capitalists" truly want, behind the thin veneer of all that laughable rhetoric about "fairness".
Socialists on the other hand usually raise taxes on the middle class to ease the competition for the rich and help the poor. So in all honesty I don't think the current libertarians are true libertarians unless their ultimate goal is to maximize the kinds of liberty which aren't harmful to other people and which raise quality of life.
See above. These "libertarians" are as much about "liberty" as the Hitler's NSDAP was about "socialism" or "workers". Its a smoke screen.
Also you cannot possibly call yourself a "libertarian" as the whole notion of taxation is a total anathema to a libertarian. Taxes and libertarians have the same kind of relationship as water and the Wicked Witch of the West. One causes the other to melt on contact.
Which only stands to reason, as "libertarians" are really all about greed and desire to dominate others, and all the sweet talk about "fairness" is meant to fool you into putting their chain on your neck.
I don't believe we need the governmnemt to provide any social services, because I believe the church has more money and power than the government and is more capable.
Whoa there! Ah so your "libertarianism" is for me to have the "liberty" to be a subject to the Holy Spanish Inquisition, version 2.0?!
You cannot be serious. With a government, we at least have chance of public oversight and scrutiny. With a Church Hierarchy we get what we got in the Middle Ages. There is a reason why most people in Europe would fight to the death if you had proposed that their lives were to be dependent on the "charity" of an organized religion.
I see what you are saying, but the problem goes like this: the other "libertarians" consider any encroachment on their ability to essentially enslave people economically (or in some cases by means of private gangs, militias, armies and what not) as not acceptable. Their idea of "freedom" is being free to own you. "Survival of the fittest" and all that jazz.
Essentially they want the government to act only as en enforcer for the concept of "private property" and "contracts" governing such. And maybe in charge of foreign Imperial Conquests. Everything else to them is a grand, totalitarian injustice.
So it all depends on what do you mean by "liberty". "Maximizing" all kinds of liberty leads directly to anarchy, followed by violence initiated by various power-hungry opportunists of infinitely greedy variety, resulting in warlordism, and then feudalism. It is not a theory but a pattern repeated many times in history, the latest examples still playing out in many places in Africa.
So "socialism", to be workable, in the absence of genetic manipulation of the reptilian instincts in human brains, requires governance to enforce some rules of the game, in this case mostly economic. It just cannot work any other way.
So the entire argument should be not about removing governance, but where it should, and where it should not, be applied and what safety checks and interlocks are to be put on the governmental power to prevent saboteurs from perverting the government to their own ends.
But I fully expect, in accordance with artfully hypocritical stances of the militant, "hawkish", Likudnik portion of the Canadian Jewry (who seem firmly in charge of all things Jewish around here), for the man to be acquitted, with fanfare, thus breaking the 100% statistics.
Which will do real wonders for the credibility of the laws and the institution enforcing them amongst all non-Jewish Canadians.
I see the government in the same light one would view nuclear power on some island where no other means of generating electricity were viable or had ability to provide power on a scale large enough.
Just like a nuclear reactor, government is a very powerful, in many cases life-saving, thing. But just like a nuclear reactor it is forever challenging to maintain control over. If you do not have enough safety interlocks, enough backups and well thought out procedures to keep this monster in check, it will use the slightest mistake to run amok, in the worst case scenario destroying all life on the island.
Because people are afraid of such power, and paranoid about it, some want to get rid of it altogether (call them "libertarians") and live by the light of candlesticks and torches, or propose some unworkable (on the island in question) schemes involving hats with solar cells on them. Their stance is similar to some of the "environmentalists" who are really "anti-modernists" and wish for us to return back to hey-covered shacks and caves.
They usually also bemoan the fact that people who are dependent on abundant electricity get "lazy" and would not survive should the nuclear power plant go down.
Some others, like myself, believe that such power can be successfully controlled, but it is a very difficult task which requires a lot of thought put into, to design the reactor in such a way that the odds of it going berserk are infinitesimal. One thing however which many who attempt such task forget is the fact that the reactor must be designed with saboteurs in mind, for some of these "environmentalists" are quite insane and would blow it up, killing themselves and all the people on the island just to "prove their point". And some others would try to manipulate the reactor for their own profit, as a tool of terror etc. and so on.
The more "liberal" (really socialist) a country gets, the more it becomes dependant on the government. You can't offer people cradle-to-grave welfare, free education, pretty much guaranteed medical help, etc, etc, without at least a small segment of your society regressing to the point of becoming children in adult bodies. If you then expect those individuals to raise children of their own, you're just asking for problems.
Of course! That is why in all the societies which were not "liberal" or "socialist" every parent was an example of award-winning child-raising, every child received thorough education and was set to become a productive member of the society! Why, they never had child slavery, forced child labor, no child beggars, no child brothels! Then, naturally, in such societies all members received medical care in accordance with their contributions to the community: the peasants theirs, the beggar children theirs, and the Lords and Masters, theirs, and in the latter days, the working sloth theirs and the Gilded Robber Barons theirs. One of course can only admire such wisdom as it is patently obvious to any self-centered supremacist worshiper of Lord Mammon that it was such an inspired system! For it is self-evident that it was the Noble Lords who drove the society forward and had to drag them ungrateful peasants along, with the aid of an impaling here, skinning alive there, or boiling in oil somewhere else (or applying the Tommy Gun copiously in the latter days)! And the retirement plans! Everyone who lived to retire, having reached the stage of toothless geriatrics at the ripe age of 43, was taken care of by the fruits of his life-long labor in the comforts of the hay-filled extravagance at the back of the common room, behind the furnace.
Aaah, the old good times! If it were only not for these damn "liberals" and "socialists" who unseated the True Nobility from their seat of power, it could be all brought back!
But not all is lost! The True Nobility is working hard to regain what was lost by this clever contrivance of the "Multi-national Corporation". If all goes well, soon the devilish schemes of the "socialists" will be overturned and our True Nobility will take its rightful place at the heart of governance, where it belongs. And then we will see! Sure some nay-sayers would point out that the True Nobility has tried this in Italy, Germany and Japan before, but the times were different then. They struck too early, the ground was not prepared, c6gunner and his ilk were not posting on the Internet back then!
Yes, I do sense it. I sense this wind of change blowing from c6gunner's ass in the post above, I truly do.
No, what you just did was try to rationalize away any opposition to your idiotic theories. Now, I could waste a half hour explaining to you exactly why everything you've written is totally ass-backwards, only to have you reject it on the basis of a deeply-flawed personal ideology....or I can spend 2 minutes writing up this comment, and then move on to more productive things. Guess which option I'll chose?
You could try an excuse such as a jewel encrusted tap left open in your country-side villa, where it will surely flood your priceless collection of Persian rugs should it not be afforded your immediate and complete attention and thus require you to abandon modernity and trek there for 3 days by camel, followed by 2 days by mule, and so, with great sadness, you will be forced to disappoint the human race by refraining from presenting your devastatingly logical counter-arguments, which would have surely advanced the course of civilization by centuries. Oh what a loss!
It would be more credible.
As it is however, your ignominious (albeit accompanied by furious and indignant braying) and total retreat has been accepted. Next time don't stick your nose into matters you have no clue about.
When the first caveman figured out how to make fire, he owned that process.
Err. No.
Just like the first caveman who looked at his finger and then another and thus came up with this new novel concept of "two" fingers, the one with the fire had no "control" over the information. You see, one of the fundamental properties of information is that it lacks a locus. That it is it cannot be ascribed to any particular location in our here time-space continuum. Copies of its physical representation can be scattered all over the place, but the information itself cannot. To make things more amusing, the concept of a representation of a particular bit of information is also wholly arbitrary and disconnected from all the other instances of such representation.
Or to make things simple for small minds such as yours: another caveman, in a cave 1000 miles away, had to, inevietably (due to the nature of physics and evolution) discover the very same bit of information, wholly independently, as many other cavemen had to in caves all over. This is the direct implication of the one of the fundamental properties of information: it does not need to propagate via copying and it can become known by many other means, irrespective of communication or physical distances. As it was with counting one's fingers to result in basic counting systems and arithmetics, devised by multiple tribes and civilizations in parallel, with no communication between them.
Why is this important? It is so because it utterly destroys your inane assertion that information can be "controlled" (and therefore "owned"). Only replication of some, specific, very narrowly defined, forms of its representation can be, perhaps, hampered in their propagation, if one assumes of course that other, equally devastating to your cause properties of information are ignored, ostrich style. Such as the fact that all information can be with arbitrary degree of precision represented in numerical form and is therefore subject to an infinite number of mathematical transforms which can provide an infinite number of permutations of such information satisfying an infinite number of arbitrary criteria, such as for example a similarity to some other arbitrary piece of data, which means, in a format your brain is capable of processing, that one can produce an infinite number of mathematical functions (or algorithms) which would make a Britney Spears song become a Beethoven's Symphony (and in reverse). Which destroys another inane idea, dear to your kind of greed worshiper, deployed in order to try to control the uncontrollable, known as "derivative works", as any bit of information can be, complete with full mathematical proof, shown to be "derivative" of any other to any arbitrary degree, on any arbitrary measuring scale.
I could go on.
Like with all other possessions, he had control over whom he shared that knowledge with.
See above. The utter, moronic wrongness of your statement should have by now become apparent to you. If it has not, I recommend devising a plan for you to "control" the sharing of a knowledge of an integer number 5, in such a way as to prevent all other people from ever acquiring this "possession" without your permission, preferably via banging your head repeatedly on some hard surface (for frankly that is the only thing it is good for).
our very DNA is a form of knowledge.
No it is not. DNA is a physical representation of information, meaning of which changes based on the environment in which it is found. A DNA strand in hard vacuum is utterly meaningless without the context of the entire organic molecule based complexity of an interpretation system we call "life".
In short, information does not behave in ways which would allow for it to be "controlled" or "owned".
In either case, passage of this knowledge was never free and indiscriminate - in t
That was the most fact-free and vitriol-filled post I've ever seen on slashdot....and that's saying something!
Oh yes, it was 100% "fact free". Like for example it did not contain any mention of a fact that the proponents of the so-called "intellectual property" are incapable of explaining away the rather prickly conundrum at its core, which is the fact that information does not have the required attributes to be "owned" and thus cannot have "rights to control" assigned to it and thus cannot be treated as anything resembling "private property", nor did it point out the inane circular-logic argumentation which they use in support of such a silly notion as "intellectual property". It had no such facts in it, none indeed, and it was instead brim-full of vitriol, unlike the post it replied to, you know, the one calling all who do not agree with his author "slack jawed ijits"!
Perhaps you should refrain from posting any of your further "thoughts" on this for a while, or at least until you manage to extract your footware out of your keyboard.
Property at law, in its simplest definition, is an exclusive right.
Oh great! Marvelous! Brilliant! Spectacular!
Oh you are sooo smart, your Holy Excellence that it makes our slacked idjit jaws slack all the way to the ground!
But... errr... just one, itsy, bitsy, tiny little wee thing: them Unbelievers insist that you cannot have a right to something which does not have them required attributes to be exclusively controlled and thus "owned". Like, say, sunlight. Or vacuum. Or flames of a fire. Or integer numbers. Or thoughts. Or, say, information (which is another name for such stuff as integer numbers as thoughts). Other then that, infinitesimal, negligible really, snag, yours is a Verily Deeeeeep and Profoundly Wise Reply! As expected of a High Priest of Illogical Avarice!
The property is the copyright, the patent, the trademark, the contractual instrument, etc.
Which, the Heathens insist, in the light of the above, are figments of the Greedy Imagination of The Priesthood's of Possession of Things. A wholly make-believe and illogical affair based upon pompously and sanctimoniously trading clothes so light and so breezy and so fine that one cannot see them at all. Usually sold to royalty, kings, emperors and such.
... and spending a little time with how the law has evolved would confirm the distinction between what is and is not property.
Oh this is sooo great! A Truly Scholarly Answer! To understand the Parsing of the Holy Books, one only has to Parse the Holy Books! Which, The Holy Books explain, is to be Explained in The Holy Books! The explanation of which can be found in The Books Holy, after Parsing them! For any doubts will flee after The Holy Book parsing, followed by applying the act of Parsing to The Holy Books! For what is Defined in the The Holy Books, The Holy Books Define!
Take this Heathens! Look upon this Grandioso Logico Circularum Rotundo and weep!
Likewise, your real property isn't the land (because no one has the authority to give you, and you don't have the power to own, land itself). It's your legal rights to control the land,
I see! So the property are rights to control the uncontrollable! Great Golly! What Wisdom! What Insight! What Holy Greed! You humble us, poor idjits, with thy Boundless Reason-less Voracity for Possession Of Everything and Everyone, oh The High Priest of Infinite Covetousness!
And anyone who believes (or disingenuously argues) that the 'property' in Intellectual Property is the information is dumber still, to the point of being what my neighbor from Texas calls a
slack-jawed idjit.
Oooh! Oooh! Oh the High Priest of the Temple of Illogical Avarice, do bestow upon us, dirty, slack-jawed, drooling ijits, thy Great Wisdom of Gilded Ages! Do tell us what the fabled "property" is in the Divine and Holy Intellectual Property. We prostate ourselves before thy Direct Connection to His Holiness, The Lord Profit, May Great Dividends and Bonuses Be Upon Him, and await thy Enlightenment!
But please, Oh Defender of the Divine Laws of Acquisition, be quick about it because them Heathen Rose-pinko-and-all-the-other-shades-of-Red Commie Heathens of Heretical Science and Reason insist that we ijits might be waiting for a looong while for what them Unbelievers call "coherent and logical" explanation....
By this token nearly all non-homogeneous functionality should be removed because somewhere out there some applications might conflict. Using the same ports, incompatible data interface options and millions of other possibilities
Hell you can't make this crap work in the physical world, with such simple things as varous receptacles and plugs, these alone having hundreds or so standards and voltage levels. And we are talking stuff which Jane Doe is supposed to use to plug in her electric iron or a TV set with exactly zero prior training.
Diversity and choices are strengths but they demand that the user is capable of operating the equipment he is buying and has some minimum level of understanding of the principles of its operation. And for some reason various goofuses deem this basic fact to be, magically, not applicable to the most complex devices human mind ever conceived: computers.
Sure some compromises can be made, but every single one of them makes whatever you do less usable to some, usually the most knowledgeable, people. In short what you are describing is a race to the lowest common denominator, where the dumbest of the dumb are the gold standard.
A far more sane choice is to select a number of tested for usability pre-sets and then offer them via reduced functionality "standard" settings and allow for setting of all the other stuff in the "advanced" set, where the expectation is that the user better know what the heck is he doing and that incompatibilities are for him to figure out.
Since instead of a bazillion option you now have a desktop that behaves correct by default.
LOL.
Define "correct".
So far I hear you saying: "Our One And True Religion solves the problem of life The Right Way, instead of giving the peons all of those silly, confusing 'options'! Sure, some heathen peons got accustomed to the 'old way' (or other religions) and conversions are painful (some peons have to be pruned for the good of the rest) but in the long run it is much better to do it The Right Way (to which only the disciples of the One And True Religion are attuned)."
Again, in the hypothetical scenario of the GP post it was the US nuking everyone who it did not like. I simply pointed out that others would be likely to respond in kind. "Goodness" did not enter into it.
... but I disagree with your assertion that the time frame is not important. I don't think that we can change each other's opinion on that.
All that remains for you to do then is to explain how getting literacy at the expense of half of your village murdered horribly, but in a period of 5 years is far superior to you developing literacy over the period of say, two generations, but without all the rape, pillaging and disemboweling for fun.
I always wandered how the "speed of progress" or "speed of growth" or some other such similarly contrived arbitrary nonsense was so important as to warrant murder and slavery. This should be some interesting explanation!
.... but the percentages are very different.
Percentages? Now there is a bit of crass apologism! So let me get this straight: if I, as a member of a 2-people household, kill the other guy (a 50% "ratio" of murder), then I am a far worse criminal then if I were to kill 1000 people when living in a city of 3000 ("only" a 30% ratio). Do explain this death arithmetic of "percentages" rather then absolutes along with that of the "speed of murderous progress"...
Hanoi was not utterly destroyed, the entire North Vietnamese population were not killed or enslaved,
US lost that particular conquest (as Rome sometimes did). As to the provinces, neither did Rome always use heavy handed tactics to manage them, frequently installing some locals as "monarchs" (and the like) to manage them by proxy, only requiring obedience and that some legions were stationed there. Curiously enough the USA stations its military forces in a great number of countries, installed "presidents" in many of them, and demands of all of its "allies" a degree of strict adherence to the Imperial ideology and religious belief which it calls Democracy (defined as the populace selecting an Empire-friendly leader, as the Empire will tolerate no other choices no matter how "democratically" made) and Capitalism (defined as a method of enriching the elites of the Empire first and foremost), and has deployed and manages a number of organizations to help it in this effort to get the subjects to "police themselves", such as NATO, the WTO, IMF etc. etc.
Yes, the sun hasn't set on the American empire, long may it exist.
I am sure that many a denizen of Rome proper expressed a similar sentiment, why with all the bread and circuses, not quite so however for the Slavic... slaves (their "modern" name still pays homage to their former role in that empire). Similarly, as a member of the privileged classes of the Empire, your outlook is far different then those in, say, South America, parts of Asia or Middle East who had to bear the brunt of the Imperial efforts at hegemony. Some of those satisfy themselves with defying the economic and social dictates of the Imperial aristocracy, some others send their ill wishes via AK-47 and RPG rounds and still some others yet even go so far as to express their displeasure via steering some airplanes into some buildings in the heart of the Imperial economic power. Such is the fate of empires: they are magnets for all the ill will of those whom they wronged as of those who would have much rather rule their own oppressive empire.
Although both of these empires were brutal and expansionist at times, they both had admirable qualities and made significant contributions.
That depends on your answer to this question: would the same "admirable qualities" be acquired in time by the conquered peoples on their own, without the empire first murdering scores of them and enslaving the rest? And no, the supposedly more rapid time frame is not important, as bloody and fast "progress" is definitely worse then the slow and peaceful variety.
The American empire is probably one of the most benign that ever existed. If you doubt that, compare the Marshall Plan to what Rome imposed on Carthage.
Some millions of dead in Vietnam (the millions of dead in this one war alone far outstrip anything Rome could have managed, simply due to differences in population density) and untold numbers of "shocked and awed" (permanently - into the ground) civilians in Iraq would disagree. Furthermore, it is far too early to praise the day, as the Sun hasn't set yet on this particular empire. A lot can still go terribly wrong as the great relics of its military power fall into the hands of various increasingly desperate or lunatic factions in the disintegrating hierarchy of imperial power.
And here I thought that I was responding to a closet US-ian supremacist, who out of poorly disguised rage and frustration that the UN and the rest of the world dares to be disobedient and not submissive enough was "tongue-in-cheek" proposing a "solution": nuke em all! (Ha, Ha, Hee, Hee, Ho, Ho, A knee-slapper!).
I simply responded in the same vein, to demonstrate what all of these comedic wargasm "war-hawks" always forget to mention: the step 2 of their wet dream, titled "Most of the time, instead of falling on the ground and beg to be our elites' eternal slaves (i.e. be liberated via "shock and awe"), those we shoot at... err... they.. kinda of... you know... fight back.".
Somehow, strangely, that one never gets mentioned until after the shit hits the fan.
And sure enough, the "jokers" suddenly lost all of their sense of humor, dropped any pretenses of being "funny" and are now frothing at the mouth about "penis envy" and "how [my - Canada in this case] little 3rd world country will become more than a tourist trap".
And that is funny. In the sort of way as the NSDAP was: a real die-of-laughter riot.
Maybe, maybe not. Rome had a lot of other things going for it (such as very slow communications) and by today's standards a minuscule population density.
The point was however that all, even the longest lasting, empires crumble eventually. And in the case of the USA the cracks are all over the place already, or you haven't been watching news lately.
Yes and history would "march on", right into another empire. Most likely Russia or China or Europe lording over everyone. But let me guess, in this "what goes around comes around" view, the world has once and for all rid itself of elitist bent on world domination by this sneak attack right?
Of course. That is why my bet on the humanity outgrowing its own idiocy is still 10:1 against.
What is most insane is the view that the US is somehow the "most" evil, when in fact right now in every country elitists strive to control the populace through fear, oppression, and outright murder.
We were discussing the hypothetical alternate-reality US which nuked Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and... France.
Name a country and I will show you a bunch of people that want to control you, having you work your life away to build their empire. Whether altruistic on the surface, the motives are almost always
the same - to hoard as many resources as possible while trying to dominate man's "destiny".
My question is, how in the fuck's name was this modded insightful? It's nothing but hate. Hunting down Americans and killing them?
Hitler just called, he said "chill the fuck out you kook"
Read the GP post, I was replying to the notion of the US nuking half of the Middle East and some Europe just because them there furriners dared to be uppity and did not know their place. My response was meant to demonstrate the consequences of such hateful and supremacist notions: i.e. they will produce hate in return, and with enough hate to go around also a rather violent end to the USA (and many other places).
Problem: the "enemy" population covers the remaining ~90% of the globe and has been preparing for fallout for decades. You only have so many nukes, so much territory and so many submarines (many/most of which can be hunted down and destroyed with enough non-nuclear, cheap hunter-killer subs right before the main nuke strike on the US). Even with full-on retaliation, majority of the Earth still wins: true most die but those who survive are free from the US Empire and perhaps they learn not to let another empire raise ever again... maybe.
That would pretty much be in line with the idiotic premise of "the more nukes you have - the more right you are" that the GP was proposing. It can only lead to everyone nuking everyone else.
10/21 The rest of the world, in a "surprise" strike, nukes the US back to the stone age, and then, for a good measure, again, back to the primordial slime age. All US citizens abroad, all their spouses, children and anyone who says a word of sympathy towards them are then hunted down, tried, and duly executed.
Following which the world takes a few decades to get over the latest of the failed hegemonic empires to stink up the planet Earth, after it has joined the ranks of the like of Rome and Ghingis Khan in the realm of the past tense. And history marches on.
You see, this game can be played by more then one player and usually, as in this case, the belligerent supremacists with these big big wet dreams of lording over everyone with their nukes (or whatever) are a tiny minority of the world populace. They best do not forget that.
You're artist, designer, or coder. You make things.
You had me as far as "things". Unless you are referring to an act of cranking out physical objects based on your design, you are not making any "things". You are however transmitting information, your brain being the source of the transmission. "Things" and "information" however are wholly separate entities in this Universe and obey a completely incompatible sets of rules, information specifically not behaving in a way in which it is possible to assign it an "owner" nor it possesses the required attributes to make it possible for it to be "bought" and "sold". This is at the core of all the illogical crap which is the so-called "Intellectual Property".
You do this for a living.
In other words your livelihood is dependent on a delusion, success of which depends on a complicated dance of inane pretenses, make-believe games and illogic - all backed up by thuggish persecution. Such a thing is only possible in a thoroughly corrupt society whereby insane, illogical schemes can be propagated for centuries solely based on the idea that they make someone some money.
One day someone sets up a web page that gives what you sell for a living away to others for free. What would you do? How would you handle it?
In a sane world that would be a natural expectation based on the basic, obvious properties of information. Therefore you would do as much as you do upon hearing that the Sun is rising in the East...
But then of course in a sane world you would not be "selling" information "for a living", which in itself is a logical conundrum: how do you "sell" something which does not have the necessary attributes to be sold? You can only pretend to be doing so. The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes comes to mind....
This is in the essence the whole point of the thing: the technological progress has demonstrated, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that the "copyrights" (and other inanities) are simply unsustainable fantasies. People who are invested into making money on these nonsensical notions however are desperate to save them from their natural fate of oblivion and so are waging a take-no-prisoners war on anyone who would dare to point out the untenable illogic of their position. The "war" has only one direction to go: increasingly totalitarian measures, at some point inevitably resulting in utter breakdown of the society as in order to enforce these silly delusions some form of comprehensive restrictions on all human communication, all communication equipment and all computing equipment will be required.
This is why all those who support the RIAA and similar operations are in essence proponents of totalitarianism and, ultimately, proponents of a "society" of feudal slavery where knowledge and access to it is what distinguishes the "nobility" from the "serfs".
Dude, your authoritarian fantasies are getting the best of you.
Brewery of alcoholic drinks is one of the oldest and most refined pursuits of man. It is the corporations who produce cheap, quick manufacturing proces based crap, not the traditional brewers. Most commercial recipes are in some way stolen from various ancient brewers all over the world.
It is like saying that people can't raise chickens or grow corn because that is the domain of Mega Corporate Greed Inc. and the poor farmers would have likely poisoned themselves!
Your viewpoint has been warped with corporate/authoritarian propaganda to the point that you are unable to see the basic historical facts.
Also, Ancient Egypt (and other ancient cultures) were awash in variety of meticulously prepared alcoholic beverages made of all sorts of vegetable matter, with some of the most quality-oriented and elaborate recipes which would make some of the modern corporate stooges look like rank amateurs.
And then there is the total delusion of prohibition (and probably The War on Drugs and The War on Terra and the War on Everything) "working", by some insane criteria which do not account at all for the publics' unwillingness to conform and massive social consequences far outstripping anything resulting from the supposed evils of whatever the "war" was declared on.
But then you do not really give a flying fuck about if any of these wars make sense, you are only interested in your fascist fantasies, the subject of the "War on X" is not really important at all, as long as "War on X" has a large number of victims, involves "us-vs-them" violent confrontations and you get to cheer for the "good" guys (the ones with all the billions of dollars of taxpayer money and no respect for fellow citizens or their civil liberties).
And if you can manage it, would be a great bonus if you were to directly profit from supplying the "authorities" in such a war to make the hypocrisy complete. Are you?
... have taught me that there are good and bad people everywhere, greedy people, stupid people (and not too stupid people with really stupid ideas).
Unfortunately there seems to be plenty enough of the greedy and stupid around to screw any societal works all the other kinds of people ever attempted. That is the primary reason why capitalism "works": it assumes that its "ideal" citizen is a sociopathic fuckup... and apparently that is a far more accurate assumption when compared with, for example, what the communists have assumed about people's characteristics and potential. I started my adult life with far more optimism about people's qualities, only to be taught, repeteadly and forcibly, that quality people are an extreme rarity. I also (due to the nature of my business) have come with contact with many multi-millionaire business owners, CEOs, investment bankers, politicians and the like, only to discover that a vast majority of them are vacuous imbeciles who would not be able to run a hot-dog stand should there be no-one to push the actual work onto. But they are (at least those who did not simply inhereit their fortunes) very, very adept at the art of manipulating other people, scamming them, ripping them off, lying, cheating and a whole myriad of other, related, activities. The sad truth is that in our society "honest" and "successful" are for all practical purposes mutually exclusive qualites when it comes to businessmen. Do not be mislead by the facades, when I was young I considered some businessmen I knew as "honest", only to discover - much later - that even the most "humane" of them had some dark (and usually very large) secret at the core of their "success", a fact which I only discovered after they had retired with their golden parachutes and the keeping of the secret became a moot point, them no longer having to fend off other fellow sharks. That is just the way it works.
Perheaps you noted that "education" did not even enter the equation when it came to these, by our societal yardstick, very, very successful people. Some did have it, the majority did not, but even those with it only used it as a showpiece and a conversation starter, if ever. But of course all of them required diplomas from their employees - funny how that works!
The only exception to this rule were governmental, specifically academia-linked, positions where in addition to political back-stabbing and musical chair dances, one also had to have a string of letters behind one's name (with wich to club the potential challengers) to your seat of power.
My point being, I not more intelligent than the average person, the difference in me was a willingness to learn, but if this kind of experience were to be propagated at a young age, it has to make an impression.
But what I am pointing out that this is not instilled by the educational system, probably never can be. What triggers such willingess to learn I do not know, but it is my view that genetics plays some major role.
Consider my own case: I have a brother who went to the same elementary school as I did and yet I went onto sponging up knowledge in highly technical fields and he became a city bureaucrat and proceeded to live a pretty much techno and sicence phobic life, until very late in his career when he found that computers could be useful in his job. But only from the very pragmatic perspective of their use as a tool, never much being interested in how they work before that, never you mind all the other forays into science I have attempted. So even the same household and the exact same starting point in education (with the exact same parental encouragement) is not sufficient to induce the kind of "hunger to learn" you are speaking about.
That is one of the reasons why I am very highly skeptical about education alone being able to achieve much (other then to flood the market with cheap, highly trained labour who is then to fight claw-and-
No it doesn't. The reason for example, doctor patient relationships are unethical is due to the imbalance of power. When it comes to adult-children relationships the same imbalance exists. You can
argue that I'm presuming that, but as a parent, I'm keenly aware of the incredible power we wield over them, even the 'rebellious teens'.
Which is known to the world under the less mysterious then this "Holy Parenting Mumbo-Jumbo" name of: coertion. Which is a part of the formula of determination of validity of consent. But it is a formula, not a one-size-fits-all "fix", results of which vary from case to case. While some (most?) parents have these authoritarian relationships with their children, some do not. In some cultures it is not even an issue as children are raised in completely different ways from young age on then in the Western societies. And none of this cookie-cutter "adult-children-relationship" system of course addresses the idea of young humans doing sexual things with their peers or with others well outside their family (of which the parents might not be even aware) and all of which are criminalized by this inane, over-simplistic method you are proposing.
Speaking of Doctor-patient relationships, that is another arena of stupidity and mumbo-jumbo. "Imbalance of power" you say? Well then how about addressing the "imbalance of power" in some sane way, instead of making sure that no doctor ever marries her patient?
But again, none of this has anything to do with sense or reason and everything to do with various hysterias, that is why it is structured the way it is.
These controversies exist non-Christian cultures too.
Nowhere near the their scale in the Judeo-Christian neck of the woods, and mostly because the Westerners are pressuring the various Eastern and other cultures into various Puritanical "reforms", and are busy to try to export their bigottries there, along with Christianity. Witness Japan: in a mere few decades, a wholly mainstream national tradition of mixed sex nude bathing in hot spring baths (Onsen) had all but disappeared (most Onsen baths are these days divided between sexes). Why? The Western value systems have been slowly imported into Japan (along with rampant consumerism, vapid pop stardom and a myriad of other cultural inanities).
I don't want to create a loop hole where child pornographers can get a 12 year old to make the videos and dodge the law. So at the end of the day, I actually support the law.
As I keep saying: utter hypocrisy.
If the 12 year old is (by some accident of genetics) more mature then the normal 12-year olds and is doing it for her/his own amusement, out if his/her own free will, then who the fuck are you to say that he/she cannot? You've again shown your true colors: you do not really give a damn about what the 12 year-old wants/believes/feels only what you believe and that she/he obeys your ideology.
Because most of them really aren't that bad when applied to the situations they were written to address.
Riiight... not until they use the "kiddie porn" laws to wedge their way into warantless searches of all electronic documents of travellers for all and any "suspicious" data... oh wait... wasn't this already happening what prompted this entire discussion?
Yea, we should all "get real" and sumbit to authoritarian, religious wackos passing their arbitrary laws you say? How is this different from a Duke or a King setting up his laws, to his liking, logic and justice be damned? If that is what you accept as inevietable and "normal" then your society has already collapsed and is corrupted beyond repair. Which I am starting to believe is, sadly, the most likely case.
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Which is, to put it gently, a logical fallacy. The "libertarian" form of capitalism is simply a staging ground for takeover by the most greedy and unscrupulous sociopaths. A starting point for feudalism, as in that "system" there is absolutely no provision for stopping a runaway accumulation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands (by a myriad of means). All of their religious dogmas about inherent self-correcting nature of the so-called "free market" are just that, patently false (and easily demonstrably so), religious convictions having nothing whatsoever to do with reality and historical evidence. It is as simple as that.
Absolutely false. It is one of the cornerstone lies that libertarians spread around (an extreme form of which is the truly vile and sick view called "objectivism") and by which their true desires can be easily detected.
If it were true, the streets would have been still littered with sick and dying (ala the Middle Ages) and vast swaths of our countries' populations would have been still living in indentured slavery of company towns. The very fact that we have rejected this rabid, sick philosophy is what propelled us into progress and abundant prosperity.
Libertarians despise this progress and would rather have us return to the previous incarnations of our societies where the sick indeed did litter the streets and beggar children chased golden-leaf decorated carriages of the nobility begging for scraps of food or copper coins. This is what they are really all about, as they, of course, think themselves smarter, more ruthless, more unscrupulous then the rest of us and fancy themselves in those golden carriages, as Captains of Industry, while the rest of us in dirty rags on the streets. Make no mistakes about it, this what the "libertarian capitalists" truly want, behind the thin veneer of all that laughable rhetoric about "fairness".
See above. These "libertarians" are as much about "liberty" as the Hitler's NSDAP was about "socialism" or "workers". Its a smoke screen.
Also you cannot possibly call yourself a "libertarian" as the whole notion of taxation is a total anathema to a libertarian. Taxes and libertarians have the same kind of relationship as water and the Wicked Witch of the West. One causes the other to melt on contact.
Which only stands to reason, as "libertarians" are really all about greed and desire to dominate others, and all the sweet talk about "fairness" is meant to fool you into putting their chain on your neck.
Whoa there! Ah so your "libertarianism" is for me to have the "liberty" to be a subject to the Holy Spanish Inquisition, version 2.0?!
You cannot be serious. With a government, we at least have chance of public oversight and scrutiny. With a Church Hierarchy we get what we got in the Middle Ages. There is a reason why most people in Europe would fight to the death if you had proposed that their lives were to be dependent on the "charity" of an organized religion.
This is pu
I see what you are saying, but the problem goes like this: the other "libertarians" consider any encroachment on their ability to essentially enslave people economically (or in some cases by means of private gangs, militias, armies and what not) as not acceptable. Their idea of "freedom" is being free to own you. "Survival of the fittest" and all that jazz.
Essentially they want the government to act only as en enforcer for the concept of "private property" and "contracts" governing such. And maybe in charge of foreign Imperial Conquests. Everything else to them is a grand, totalitarian injustice.
So it all depends on what do you mean by "liberty". "Maximizing" all kinds of liberty leads directly to anarchy, followed by violence initiated by various power-hungry opportunists of infinitely greedy variety, resulting in warlordism, and then feudalism. It is not a theory but a pattern repeated many times in history, the latest examples still playing out in many places in Africa.
So "socialism", to be workable, in the absence of genetic manipulation of the reptilian instincts in human brains, requires governance to enforce some rules of the game, in this case mostly economic. It just cannot work any other way.
So the entire argument should be not about removing governance, but where it should, and where it should not, be applied and what safety checks and interlocks are to be put on the governmental power to prevent saboteurs from perverting the government to their own ends.
Yes, that is a bit of delicious irony, isn't it?
But I fully expect, in accordance with artfully hypocritical stances of the militant, "hawkish", Likudnik portion of the Canadian Jewry (who seem firmly in charge of all things Jewish around here), for the man to be acquitted, with fanfare, thus breaking the 100% statistics.
Which will do real wonders for the credibility of the laws and the institution enforcing them amongst all non-Jewish Canadians.
I see the government in the same light one would view nuclear power on some island where no other means of generating electricity were viable or had ability to provide power on a scale large enough.
Just like a nuclear reactor, government is a very powerful, in many cases life-saving, thing. But just like a nuclear reactor it is forever challenging to maintain control over. If you do not have enough safety interlocks, enough backups and well thought out procedures to keep this monster in check, it will use the slightest mistake to run amok, in the worst case scenario destroying all life on the island.
Because people are afraid of such power, and paranoid about it, some want to get rid of it altogether (call them "libertarians") and live by the light of candlesticks and torches, or propose some unworkable (on the island in question) schemes involving hats with solar cells on them. Their stance is similar to some of the "environmentalists" who are really "anti-modernists" and wish for us to return back to hey-covered shacks and caves.
They usually also bemoan the fact that people who are dependent on abundant electricity get "lazy" and would not survive should the nuclear power plant go down.
Some others, like myself, believe that such power can be successfully controlled, but it is a very difficult task which requires a lot of thought put into, to design the reactor in such a way that the odds of it going berserk are infinitesimal. One thing however which many who attempt such task forget is the fact that the reactor must be designed with saboteurs in mind, for some of these "environmentalists" are quite insane and would blow it up, killing themselves and all the people on the island just to "prove their point". And some others would try to manipulate the reactor for their own profit, as a tool of terror etc. and so on.
The task is daunting but not impossible.
Of course! That is why in all the societies which were not "liberal" or "socialist" every parent was an example of award-winning child-raising, every child received thorough education and was set to become a productive member of the society! Why, they never had child slavery, forced child labor, no child beggars, no child brothels! Then, naturally, in such societies all members received medical care in accordance with their contributions to the community: the peasants theirs, the beggar children theirs, and the Lords and Masters, theirs, and in the latter days, the working sloth theirs and the Gilded Robber Barons theirs. One of course can only admire such wisdom as it is patently obvious to any self-centered supremacist worshiper of Lord Mammon that it was such an inspired system! For it is self-evident that it was the Noble Lords who drove the society forward and had to drag them ungrateful peasants along, with the aid of an impaling here, skinning alive there, or boiling in oil somewhere else (or applying the Tommy Gun copiously in the latter days)! And the retirement plans! Everyone who lived to retire, having reached the stage of toothless geriatrics at the ripe age of 43, was taken care of by the fruits of his life-long labor in the comforts of the hay-filled extravagance at the back of the common room, behind the furnace.
Aaah, the old good times! If it were only not for these damn "liberals" and "socialists" who unseated the True Nobility from their seat of power, it could be all brought back!
But not all is lost! The True Nobility is working hard to regain what was lost by this clever contrivance of the "Multi-national Corporation". If all goes well, soon the devilish schemes of the "socialists" will be overturned and our True Nobility will take its rightful place at the heart of governance, where it belongs. And then we will see! Sure some nay-sayers would point out that the True Nobility has tried this in Italy, Germany and Japan before, but the times were different then. They struck too early, the ground was not prepared, c6gunner and his ilk were not posting on the Internet back then!
Yes, I do sense it. I sense this wind of change blowing from c6gunner's ass in the post above, I truly do.
You could try an excuse such as a jewel encrusted tap left open in your country-side villa, where it will surely flood your priceless collection of Persian rugs should it not be afforded your immediate and complete attention and thus require you to abandon modernity and trek there for 3 days by camel, followed by 2 days by mule, and so, with great sadness, you will be forced to disappoint the human race by refraining from presenting your devastatingly logical counter-arguments, which would have surely advanced the course of civilization by centuries. Oh what a loss!
It would be more credible.
As it is however, your ignominious (albeit accompanied by furious and indignant braying) and total retreat has been accepted. Next time don't stick your nose into matters you have no clue about.
Err. No.
Just like the first caveman who looked at his finger and then another and thus came up with this new novel concept of "two" fingers, the one with the fire had no "control" over the information. You see, one of the fundamental properties of information is that it lacks a locus. That it is it cannot be ascribed to any particular location in our here time-space continuum. Copies of its physical representation can be scattered all over the place, but the information itself cannot. To make things more amusing, the concept of a representation of a particular bit of information is also wholly arbitrary and disconnected from all the other instances of such representation.
Or to make things simple for small minds such as yours: another caveman, in a cave 1000 miles away, had to, inevietably (due to the nature of physics and evolution) discover the very same bit of information, wholly independently, as many other cavemen had to in caves all over. This is the direct implication of the one of the fundamental properties of information: it does not need to propagate via copying and it can become known by many other means, irrespective of communication or physical distances. As it was with counting one's fingers to result in basic counting systems and arithmetics, devised by multiple tribes and civilizations in parallel, with no communication between them.
Why is this important? It is so because it utterly destroys your inane assertion that information can be "controlled" (and therefore "owned"). Only replication of some, specific, very narrowly defined, forms of its representation can be, perhaps, hampered in their propagation, if one assumes of course that other, equally devastating to your cause properties of information are ignored, ostrich style. Such as the fact that all information can be with arbitrary degree of precision represented in numerical form and is therefore subject to an infinite number of mathematical transforms which can provide an infinite number of permutations of such information satisfying an infinite number of arbitrary criteria, such as for example a similarity to some other arbitrary piece of data, which means, in a format your brain is capable of processing, that one can produce an infinite number of mathematical functions (or algorithms) which would make a Britney Spears song become a Beethoven's Symphony (and in reverse). Which destroys another inane idea, dear to your kind of greed worshiper, deployed in order to try to control the uncontrollable, known as "derivative works", as any bit of information can be, complete with full mathematical proof, shown to be "derivative" of any other to any arbitrary degree, on any arbitrary measuring scale.
I could go on.
See above. The utter, moronic wrongness of your statement should have by now become apparent to you. If it has not, I recommend devising a plan for you to "control" the sharing of a knowledge of an integer number 5, in such a way as to prevent all other people from ever acquiring this "possession" without your permission, preferably via banging your head repeatedly on some hard surface (for frankly that is the only thing it is good for).
No it is not. DNA is a physical representation of information, meaning of which changes based on the environment in which it is found. A DNA strand in hard vacuum is utterly meaningless without the context of the entire organic molecule based complexity of an interpretation system we call "life".
In short, information does not behave in ways which would allow for it to be "controlled" or "owned".
Oh yes, it was 100% "fact free". Like for example it did not contain any mention of a fact that the proponents of the so-called "intellectual property" are incapable of explaining away the rather prickly conundrum at its core, which is the fact that information does not have the required attributes to be "owned" and thus cannot have "rights to control" assigned to it and thus cannot be treated as anything resembling "private property", nor did it point out the inane circular-logic argumentation which they use in support of such a silly notion as "intellectual property". It had no such facts in it, none indeed, and it was instead brim-full of vitriol, unlike the post it replied to, you know, the one calling all who do not agree with his author "slack jawed ijits"!
Perhaps you should refrain from posting any of your further "thoughts" on this for a while, or at least until you manage to extract your footware out of your keyboard.
Oh great! Marvelous! Brilliant! Spectacular!
Oh you are sooo smart, your Holy Excellence that it makes our slacked idjit jaws slack all the way to the ground!
But ... errr ... just one, itsy, bitsy, tiny little wee thing: them Unbelievers insist that you cannot have a right to something which does not have them required attributes to be exclusively controlled and thus "owned". Like, say, sunlight. Or vacuum. Or flames of a fire. Or integer numbers. Or thoughts. Or, say, information (which is another name for such stuff as integer numbers as thoughts). Other then that, infinitesimal, negligible really, snag, yours is a Verily Deeeeeep and Profoundly Wise Reply! As expected of a High Priest of Illogical Avarice!
Which, the Heathens insist, in the light of the above, are figments of the Greedy Imagination of The Priesthood's of Possession of Things. A wholly make-believe and illogical affair based upon pompously and sanctimoniously trading clothes so light and so breezy and so fine that one cannot see them at all. Usually sold to royalty, kings, emperors and such.
Oh this is sooo great! A Truly Scholarly Answer! To understand the Parsing of the Holy Books, one only has to Parse the Holy Books! Which, The Holy Books explain, is to be Explained in The Holy Books! The explanation of which can be found in The Books Holy, after Parsing them! For any doubts will flee after The Holy Book parsing, followed by applying the act of Parsing to The Holy Books! For what is Defined in the The Holy Books, The Holy Books Define!
Take this Heathens! Look upon this Grandioso Logico Circularum Rotundo and weep!
I see! So the property are rights to control the uncontrollable! Great Golly! What Wisdom! What Insight! What Holy Greed! You humble us, poor idjits, with thy Boundless Reason-less Voracity for Possession Of Everything and Everyone, oh The High Priest of Infinite Covetousness!
Oooh! Oooh! Oh the High Priest of the Temple of Illogical Avarice, do bestow upon us, dirty, slack-jawed, drooling ijits, thy Great Wisdom of Gilded Ages! Do tell us what the fabled "property" is in the Divine and Holy Intellectual Property. We prostate ourselves before thy Direct Connection to His Holiness, The Lord Profit, May Great Dividends and Bonuses Be Upon Him, and await thy Enlightenment!
But please, Oh Defender of the Divine Laws of Acquisition, be quick about it because them Heathen Rose-pinko-and-all-the-other-shades-of-Red Commie Heathens of Heretical Science and Reason insist that we ijits might be waiting for a looong while for what them Unbelievers call "coherent and logical" explanation ....
That's absurd.
By this token nearly all non-homogeneous functionality should be removed because somewhere out there some applications might conflict. Using the same ports, incompatible data interface options and millions of other possibilities
Hell you can't make this crap work in the physical world, with such simple things as varous receptacles and plugs, these alone having hundreds or so standards and voltage levels. And we are talking stuff which Jane Doe is supposed to use to plug in her electric iron or a TV set with exactly zero prior training.
Diversity and choices are strengths but they demand that the user is capable of operating the equipment he is buying and has some minimum level of understanding of the principles of its operation. And for some reason various goofuses deem this basic fact to be, magically, not applicable to the most complex devices human mind ever conceived: computers.
Sure some compromises can be made, but every single one of them makes whatever you do less usable to some, usually the most knowledgeable, people. In short what you are describing is a race to the lowest common denominator, where the dumbest of the dumb are the gold standard.
A far more sane choice is to select a number of tested for usability pre-sets and then offer them via reduced functionality "standard" settings and allow for setting of all the other stuff in the "advanced" set, where the expectation is that the user better know what the heck is he doing and that incompatibilities are for him to figure out.
LOL.
Define "correct".
So far I hear you saying: "Our One And True Religion solves the problem of life The Right Way, instead of giving the peons all of those silly, confusing 'options'! Sure, some heathen peons got accustomed to the 'old way' (or other religions) and conversions are painful (some peons have to be pruned for the good of the rest) but in the long run it is much better to do it The Right Way (to which only the disciples of the One And True Religion are attuned)."
Again, in the hypothetical scenario of the GP post it was the US nuking everyone who it did not like. I simply pointed out that others would be likely to respond in kind. "Goodness" did not enter into it.
All that remains for you to do then is to explain how getting literacy at the expense of half of your village murdered horribly, but in a period of 5 years is far superior to you developing literacy over the period of say, two generations, but without all the rape, pillaging and disemboweling for fun.
I always wandered how the "speed of progress" or "speed of growth" or some other such similarly contrived arbitrary nonsense was so important as to warrant murder and slavery. This should be some interesting explanation!
Percentages? Now there is a bit of crass apologism! So let me get this straight: if I, as a member of a 2-people household, kill the other guy (a 50% "ratio" of murder), then I am a far worse criminal then if I were to kill 1000 people when living in a city of 3000 ("only" a 30% ratio). Do explain this death arithmetic of "percentages" rather then absolutes along with that of the "speed of murderous progress" ...
US lost that particular conquest (as Rome sometimes did). As to the provinces, neither did Rome always use heavy handed tactics to manage them, frequently installing some locals as "monarchs" (and the like) to manage them by proxy, only requiring obedience and that some legions were stationed there. Curiously enough the USA stations its military forces in a great number of countries, installed "presidents" in many of them, and demands of all of its "allies" a degree of strict adherence to the Imperial ideology and religious belief which it calls Democracy (defined as the populace selecting an Empire-friendly leader, as the Empire will tolerate no other choices no matter how "democratically" made) and Capitalism (defined as a method of enriching the elites of the Empire first and foremost), and has deployed and manages a number of organizations to help it in this effort to get the subjects to "police themselves", such as NATO, the WTO, IMF etc. etc.
I am sure that many a denizen of Rome proper expressed a similar sentiment, why with all the bread and circuses, not quite so however for the Slavic ... slaves (their "modern" name still pays homage to their former role in that empire). Similarly, as a member of the privileged classes of the Empire, your outlook is far different then those in, say, South America, parts of Asia or Middle East who had to bear the brunt of the Imperial efforts at hegemony. Some of those satisfy themselves with defying the economic and social dictates of the Imperial aristocracy, some others send their ill wishes via AK-47 and RPG rounds and still some others yet even go so far as to express their displeasure via steering some airplanes into some buildings in the heart of the Imperial economic power. Such is the fate of empires: they are magnets for all the ill will of those whom they wronged as of those who would have much rather rule their own oppressive empire.
That depends on your answer to this question: would the same "admirable qualities" be acquired in time by the conquered peoples on their own, without the empire first murdering scores of them and enslaving the rest? And no, the supposedly more rapid time frame is not important, as bloody and fast "progress" is definitely worse then the slow and peaceful variety.
Some millions of dead in Vietnam (the millions of dead in this one war alone far outstrip anything Rome could have managed, simply due to differences in population density) and untold numbers of "shocked and awed" (permanently - into the ground) civilians in Iraq would disagree. Furthermore, it is far too early to praise the day, as the Sun hasn't set yet on this particular empire. A lot can still go terribly wrong as the great relics of its military power fall into the hands of various increasingly desperate or lunatic factions in the disintegrating hierarchy of imperial power.
LOL.
And here I thought that I was responding to a closet US-ian supremacist, who out of poorly disguised rage and frustration that the UN and the rest of the world dares to be disobedient and not submissive enough was "tongue-in-cheek" proposing a "solution": nuke em all! (Ha, Ha, Hee, Hee, Ho, Ho, A knee-slapper!).
I simply responded in the same vein, to demonstrate what all of these comedic wargasm "war-hawks" always forget to mention: the step 2 of their wet dream, titled "Most of the time, instead of falling on the ground and beg to be our elites' eternal slaves (i.e. be liberated via "shock and awe"), those we shoot at ... err ... they .. kinda of ... you know ... fight back.".
Somehow, strangely, that one never gets mentioned until after the shit hits the fan.
And sure enough, the "jokers" suddenly lost all of their sense of humor, dropped any pretenses of being "funny" and are now frothing at the mouth about "penis envy" and "how [my - Canada in this case] little 3rd world country will become more than a tourist trap".
And that is funny. In the sort of way as the NSDAP was: a real die-of-laughter riot.
Maybe, maybe not. Rome had a lot of other things going for it (such as very slow communications) and by today's standards a minuscule population density.
The point was however that all, even the longest lasting, empires crumble eventually. And in the case of the USA the cracks are all over the place already, or you haven't been watching news lately.
Of course. That is why my bet on the humanity outgrowing its own idiocy is still 10:1 against.
We were discussing the hypothetical alternate-reality US which nuked Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and ... France.
Read the GP post, I was replying to the notion of the US nuking half of the Middle East and some Europe just because them there furriners dared to be uppity and did not know their place. My response was meant to demonstrate the consequences of such hateful and supremacist notions: i.e. they will produce hate in return, and with enough hate to go around also a rather violent end to the USA (and many other places).
Problem: the "enemy" population covers the remaining ~90% of the globe and has been preparing for fallout for decades. You only have so many nukes, so much territory and so many submarines (many/most of which can be hunted down and destroyed with enough non-nuclear, cheap hunter-killer subs right before the main nuke strike on the US). Even with full-on retaliation, majority of the Earth still wins: true most die but those who survive are free from the US Empire and perhaps they learn not to let another empire raise ever again ... maybe.
That would pretty much be in line with the idiotic premise of "the more nukes you have - the more right you are" that the GP was proposing. It can only lead to everyone nuking everyone else.
10/21 The rest of the world, in a "surprise" strike, nukes the US back to the stone age, and then, for a good measure, again, back to the primordial slime age. All US citizens abroad, all their spouses, children and anyone who says a word of sympathy towards them are then hunted down, tried, and duly executed.
Following which the world takes a few decades to get over the latest of the failed hegemonic empires to stink up the planet Earth, after it has joined the ranks of the like of Rome and Ghingis Khan in the realm of the past tense. And history marches on.
You see, this game can be played by more then one player and usually, as in this case, the belligerent supremacists with these big big wet dreams of lording over everyone with their nukes (or whatever) are a tiny minority of the world populace. They best do not forget that.
You had me as far as "things". Unless you are referring to an act of cranking out physical objects based on your design, you are not making any "things". You are however transmitting information, your brain being the source of the transmission. "Things" and "information" however are wholly separate entities in this Universe and obey a completely incompatible sets of rules, information specifically not behaving in a way in which it is possible to assign it an "owner" nor it possesses the required attributes to make it possible for it to be "bought" and "sold". This is at the core of all the illogical crap which is the so-called "Intellectual Property".
In other words your livelihood is dependent on a delusion, success of which depends on a complicated dance of inane pretenses, make-believe games and illogic - all backed up by thuggish persecution. Such a thing is only possible in a thoroughly corrupt society whereby insane, illogical schemes can be propagated for centuries solely based on the idea that they make someone some money.
In a sane world that would be a natural expectation based on the basic, obvious properties of information. Therefore you would do as much as you do upon hearing that the Sun is rising in the East ...
But then of course in a sane world you would not be "selling" information "for a living", which in itself is a logical conundrum: how do you "sell" something which does not have the necessary attributes to be sold? You can only pretend to be doing so. The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes comes to mind ....
This is in the essence the whole point of the thing: the technological progress has demonstrated, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that the "copyrights" (and other inanities) are simply unsustainable fantasies. People who are invested into making money on these nonsensical notions however are desperate to save them from their natural fate of oblivion and so are waging a take-no-prisoners war on anyone who would dare to point out the untenable illogic of their position. The "war" has only one direction to go: increasingly totalitarian measures, at some point inevitably resulting in utter breakdown of the society as in order to enforce these silly delusions some form of comprehensive restrictions on all human communication, all communication equipment and all computing equipment will be required.
This is why all those who support the RIAA and similar operations are in essence proponents of totalitarianism and, ultimately, proponents of a "society" of feudal slavery where knowledge and access to it is what distinguishes the "nobility" from the "serfs".
Dude, your authoritarian fantasies are getting the best of you.
Brewery of alcoholic drinks is one of the oldest and most refined pursuits of man. It is the corporations who produce cheap, quick manufacturing proces based crap, not the traditional brewers. Most commercial recipes are in some way stolen from various ancient brewers all over the world.
It is like saying that people can't raise chickens or grow corn because that is the domain of Mega Corporate Greed Inc. and the poor farmers would have likely poisoned themselves!
Your viewpoint has been warped with corporate/authoritarian propaganda to the point that you are unable to see the basic historical facts.
Also, Ancient Egypt (and other ancient cultures) were awash in variety of meticulously prepared alcoholic beverages made of all sorts of vegetable matter, with some of the most quality-oriented and elaborate recipes which would make some of the modern corporate stooges look like rank amateurs.
And then there is the total delusion of prohibition (and probably The War on Drugs and The War on Terra and the War on Everything) "working", by some insane criteria which do not account at all for the publics' unwillingness to conform and massive social consequences far outstripping anything resulting from the supposed evils of whatever the "war" was declared on.
But then you do not really give a flying fuck about if any of these wars make sense, you are only interested in your fascist fantasies, the subject of the "War on X" is not really important at all, as long as "War on X" has a large number of victims, involves "us-vs-them" violent confrontations and you get to cheer for the "good" guys (the ones with all the billions of dollars of taxpayer money and no respect for fellow citizens or their civil liberties).
And if you can manage it, would be a great bonus if you were to directly profit from supplying the "authorities" in such a war to make the hypocrisy complete. Are you?
Unfortunately there seems to be plenty enough of the greedy and stupid around to screw any societal works all the other kinds of people ever attempted. That is the primary reason why capitalism "works": it assumes that its "ideal" citizen is a sociopathic fuckup ... and apparently that is a far more accurate assumption when compared with, for example, what the communists have assumed about people's characteristics and potential. I started my adult life with far more optimism about people's qualities, only to be taught, repeteadly and forcibly, that quality people are an extreme rarity. I also (due to the nature of my business) have come with contact with many multi-millionaire business owners, CEOs, investment bankers, politicians and the like, only to discover that a vast majority of them are vacuous imbeciles who would not be able to run a hot-dog stand should there be no-one to push the actual work onto. But they are (at least those who did not simply inhereit their fortunes) very, very adept at the art of manipulating other people, scamming them, ripping them off, lying, cheating and a whole myriad of other, related, activities. The sad truth is that in our society "honest" and "successful" are for all practical purposes mutually exclusive qualites when it comes to businessmen. Do not be mislead by the facades, when I was young I considered some businessmen I knew as "honest", only to discover - much later - that even the most "humane" of them had some dark (and usually very large) secret at the core of their "success", a fact which I only discovered after they had retired with their golden parachutes and the keeping of the secret became a moot point, them no longer having to fend off other fellow sharks. That is just the way it works.
Perheaps you noted that "education" did not even enter the equation when it came to these, by our societal yardstick, very, very successful people. Some did have it, the majority did not, but even those with it only used it as a showpiece and a conversation starter, if ever. But of course all of them required diplomas from their employees - funny how that works!
The only exception to this rule were governmental, specifically academia-linked, positions where in addition to political back-stabbing and musical chair dances, one also had to have a string of letters behind one's name (with wich to club the potential challengers) to your seat of power.
But what I am pointing out that this is not instilled by the educational system, probably never can be. What triggers such willingess to learn I do not know, but it is my view that genetics plays some major role.
Consider my own case: I have a brother who went to the same elementary school as I did and yet I went onto sponging up knowledge in highly technical fields and he became a city bureaucrat and proceeded to live a pretty much techno and sicence phobic life, until very late in his career when he found that computers could be useful in his job. But only from the very pragmatic perspective of their use as a tool, never much being interested in how they work before that, never you mind all the other forays into science I have attempted. So even the same household and the exact same starting point in education (with the exact same parental encouragement) is not sufficient to induce the kind of "hunger to learn" you are speaking about.
That is one of the reasons why I am very highly skeptical about education alone being able to achieve much (other then to flood the market with cheap, highly trained labour who is then to fight claw-and-
Which is known to the world under the less mysterious then this "Holy Parenting Mumbo-Jumbo" name of: coertion. Which is a part of the formula of determination of validity of consent. But it is a formula, not a one-size-fits-all "fix", results of which vary from case to case. While some (most?) parents have these authoritarian relationships with their children, some do not. In some cultures it is not even an issue as children are raised in completely different ways from young age on then in the Western societies. And none of this cookie-cutter "adult-children-relationship" system of course addresses the idea of young humans doing sexual things with their peers or with others well outside their family (of which the parents might not be even aware) and all of which are criminalized by this inane, over-simplistic method you are proposing.
Speaking of Doctor-patient relationships, that is another arena of stupidity and mumbo-jumbo. "Imbalance of power" you say? Well then how about addressing the "imbalance of power" in some sane way, instead of making sure that no doctor ever marries her patient?
But again, none of this has anything to do with sense or reason and everything to do with various hysterias, that is why it is structured the way it is.
Nowhere near the their scale in the Judeo-Christian neck of the woods, and mostly because the Westerners are pressuring the various Eastern and other cultures into various Puritanical "reforms", and are busy to try to export their bigottries there, along with Christianity. Witness Japan: in a mere few decades, a wholly mainstream national tradition of mixed sex nude bathing in hot spring baths (Onsen) had all but disappeared (most Onsen baths are these days divided between sexes). Why? The Western value systems have been slowly imported into Japan (along with rampant consumerism, vapid pop stardom and a myriad of other cultural inanities).
As I keep saying: utter hypocrisy.
If the 12 year old is (by some accident of genetics) more mature then the normal 12-year olds and is doing it for her/his own amusement, out if his/her own free will, then who the fuck are you to say that he/she cannot? You've again shown your true colors: you do not really give a damn about what the 12 year-old wants/believes/feels only what you believe and that she/he obeys your ideology.
Riiight ... not until they use the "kiddie porn" laws to wedge their way into warantless searches of all electronic documents of travellers for all and any "suspicious" data ... oh wait ... wasn't this already happening what prompted this entire discussion?
Yea, we should all "get real" and sumbit to authoritarian, religious wackos passing their arbitrary laws you say? How is this different from a Duke or a King setting up his laws, to his liking, logic and justice be damned? If that is what you accept as inevietable and "normal" then your society has already collapsed and is corrupted beyond repair. Which I am starting to believe is, sadly, the most likely case.