Does everyone include these "valuable" users who "made the site a success?" Again, there is no obligation on their part to do anything. If they stood up, yes, heros, win or lose. But not being a hero doesn't make one a coward.
Their only "obligation" is, and always was, to click on the ads on digg (thus generating vast majority of digg's revenue) and participate in the digg discussions. That's it. They are the audience to whom digg owners were posturing in order to attract a following, not the money-making owners themselves.
aha! You "expect!" There's yur trouble. Try not expecting. You'll lead a much happier life.
By this token you should give up a notion of expecting to recieve goods for your money in a store, or such trifles as a salary for your labours.
Digg's users are not entitled
to anything. Why would they be? Because they hit the site, drove up the advertising revinue?
Pretty much. If they were led to believe that the site represents certain ethos, only to be disappointed, they will do what they can: i.e. express their anger and leave, thus depriving digg of much of its revenue.
At what cost to them?
Non sequitur alert. The fact that the user's only "sacrificed" a click or a view does not in any way reduce the monetary value of the ads to their marketers.
You know... a sucker is born every minute. Maybe the users that clicked on ads and bought something are suckers. The ones that expect something for moving a finger up and down are delusional.
A lot of people are apparently "delusional" when told to expect that they will get rewarded in some way for some actions, small or large, by those who made such promises, explicitely or otherwise. I am led to believe that most of commerce world-wide is based on participation of such "delusional suckers".
But they can't win. Even though the law and the MPAA/RIAA is wrong.
If everyone simply folds, MPAA/RIAA are indeed guaranteed to win. A large number of high profile cases highlighting the more illogical parts of the "law" is the only way to get the politicos to start weighing RIAA bribes vs public outrage.
They have a right to provide for themselves, and a right to keep what they earned. They have no moral obligation to tilt this windmill, and lose their shirts doing it.
They painted themselves in a corner. This is the result of their efforts at setting certain expectations of their behaviour. Now they can either fold and keep what they earned, but with the penalty of wide defections and disdain of their former audience (possibly destroying digg) or to fight, possibly losing and thus possibly destroying digg. A quandry of their own making.
Hopefully, yes. I'd really like to see the audience that is revolting right now go away.
In other words you would like those who made the site's success possible to the point that a larger audience became involved to go away after it became apparent that they have been callously used, right?
Digg has no power. Its possible they could have "grown" some and legally fought against the litigation when it comes... but... they're a business, not some moral heroes or some cult religion. They are a business. They want to make money, not lose it in $500/hr increments.
The problem is that digg tried to be a business based on certain ethos. You can't have it both ways, to project "radical", "anti-estabilishment" etc image to create your business and then fold like a cheap suit as soon as your revenue is threatened by one of the very members of the "estabilishment" and then expect that your audience wont notice.
So this pathetic "But we only tried to make moneeeeey! Waaah! We said all those things to make money! We meant none of it! Mommy! They are trying to take away my moneeeey! Waaah!" excuse is likely to achieve the flight properties of a ton of bricks with their audience.
Of all my friends, I know not a single person who's built a "homebrew video server,...
I know (personally) an engineer who did. Although we are speaking of DVDs rather then HD-DVDs (and quite compressed rips at that). It contains a pile of Disney and other kids stuff. The thing came about when he got annoyed at the horrid mess his kids managed to create with their DVDs (including scratching the mirror side) and also inspired by the observation that they seem to enjoy the same movie over and over and over and... you get the idea. Hence the MythTV box with a remote. Kids are ecstatic and he has no more trouble with their lost/damaged disks.
Digg is an innocent, law abiding bystander, and the attackers are the twits. They are accomplishing nothing.
Actually, in this case, the breakdown is more like: 1) the "Intellectual Property" laws are certifiably and demonstrably insane, 2) greedmongering abusers of the said laws demand that digg becomes their henchman-by-proxy, 3) digg complies, 4) users revolt, 5) now digg capitulates and suddenly is about to fight its would be master.
So digg was not an "innocent, law abiding bystander" anymore then some guards at Abu Ghraib were "just following lawful orders" (an extreme case of the same principle). Furthermore the "attackers" managed to beat digg into growing a pair and fighting against some of the "intellectual property" scam, thus standing up for what its owners were posturing to be all about, ergo the "twit attackers" accomplished quite a bit, it would seem to me.
But for every one of them, there are a thousand idiot 12 year-olds who are just enjoying causing chaos, like 12-year old usually do.
This might be the only time in my memory when I found thousands of chaos-loving 12 year-olds doing something actually useful for the future of the humanity.
But fear not, this whole nonsensical scam of "Intellectual Property" will, as it must, get more idiotic and common-sense defying as time goes on and to defeat the resulting disobedience and ridicule amongst the technical users the corporate politicos will attempt to implement increasingly more depraved, totalitarian police tactics. There is simply no other way for this to proceed since, ultimately, "Intellectual Property" is all about ownership of thoughts, and as such impossible without Thought Police in one form or another, made only scarier and more vicious as technologies advance closer to direct man-machine interfaces.
This HD-DVD fiasco is a perfect example of the monumental stupidity of the very phillosophical foundations of "Intellectual Property" in all of their imbecillic glory: an infinite number of integer numbers can be transformed, via an infinite number of mathematical funtions, into the number in question. Effectively to "censor" that target number one has to censor the entire science of Mathematics as one can simply post one in that infinite set of numbers and a corresponding transformation function (as many have done using simplistic schemes such as ROT13 etc).
And this just to illustrate one of the many abysmally fatal flaws of the greedmongering system called by its con-artist fathers "The Intellectual Property".
I think the major difference here as opposed to say the USA, is that vast majority of people in the UK wouldn't consider their license plate being registered on a police database somewhere as an invasion of their privacy. People in the UK are worried about corporations having their personal data, not the government; whereas it seems in the USA, the opposite is the case.
Both are specific cases of "extraordinarily powerful organizations whose activities are opaque to the general populace and which organizations have been removed out of regular citizens' control". Most multi-national (and many national) corporations have finances, resources and political power exceeding that of a majority of individual nations of Earth. That alone puts them on the same level as governments of major nations in the scope of damage and abuses they are capable of. Also an increasing number of corporations are mobilizing private armies.
So in essence both types of concern are equally valid.
One of the amusing parts is of course that it was the "conservatives" who used to be for small government.
Anyhow, I see governance to be akin to atomic energy. It is extremely powerful and productive if employed for peaceful purposes, but to be so it demands extreme safeguards, otherwise all of that power will get out of control and screw everybody up in a multi-thousand-mile radius. Alternatively, if allowed, some malicious minds might use it as a weapon, with devastating consequences.
That is why the so-called "libertarians" exist in deep, crippling fear of such a mix of power and danger, resulting in their demands that the whole thing be abandoned and forbidden. What they do not realise is that by abandoning that type of power, other kinds of power must inevietably (outside of utopian fairy-tale scenarios) take its place, some far more dangerous and difficult to control, something akin to allowing mass scale chemical pollution and C02 emmisions to replace nuclear energy.
A couple of years ago there was a massive story in the U.K. about a policewoman being shot dead by a group of armed robbers. They would have gotten away with it had it not been for an automatic license plate reading camera picking up the car details a few blocks down the road.
Its instances like that which make such advanced CCTV cameras popular with the mainstream UK public. Polls asking the average person on the street in the UK consistently reveal wide spread support for advanced CCTV cameras.
This is terrifyingly similar reasoning to that employed by Nazis. Most German polls at the time would have indicated wide support for Gestapo as it was portrayed as a front-line defense against all kinds of murderous internal enemies. Fake security pitted against "armed banditry" and "terrorism" was always the traditional, time tested way to sell slavery to the brain-dead masses.
In your particular example above, privacy of many, many thousands of motorists was violated by, for all practical purposes, an Orwellian police state in order to catch one gang of thugs. I guarantee you that in a place with "two-way telescreens" armed robbery levels will be near zero. The problem is that such "safety" is nowhere near worth the price of slavery.
The only way you're going to have any kind of assurances that people aren't bringing anything dangerous on planes is if you strip them down, give everyone uniforms, keep them in quarantine for a week, not let them bring anything with them and chain them to the floor. Essentially it needs to be like a prisoner transport.
You are of course neglecting the Surface to Air Missiles, security system compromises at the airpoirts, violent frontal assaults (i.e. suicide bomber leading a way of 20 AK-47/RPG armed terrorists to breach the walls of the "quarantine" facility to get inside - although of course a far better target would be any school, hospital or office building) and so on and on and on and on....
In short, in order satisfy this inane objective of "safety", not only the general public must be converted to prisoner status in any transportation scenario, but it must also be so everywhere else. Totalitarian police state where the whole populace is comprised either of no-rights inmates to be subjected to every method of subjegation imaginable and the "guards" who "guard" them for their own "safety".
The GP is spot on in making the implicit point that, as monocultures are bad, a Linux monoculture would be as bad as any other.
Not all "monocultures" are bad. What we do need is an "Open Standards monculture", a fully documented, free of royalties framework on which every sort of project, commercial or otherwise can build and be guaranteed interoperability with all the others.
Sort of like the highway system, where all the roads conform to a certain set of standards and one cannot make their own "standard" (say have the car lanes being 1/5 the present width then demand that people buy the road owner's "special" cars) and expect to get away with it on a large scale.
So in this context such a standarization "monoculture" is a positive thing, even though certain standards can be disadvantageous for some types of software.
Unix-like systems, includig Linux, BSD, Darwin etc, are the closest thing we've got to such a framework and subsequently this is why they receive such passionate support from all those who see freedom of choice as one of our basic rights as participants in the marketplace. Microsoft represents the exact opposite of the spectrum, a malignant, sociopathic entity of infinite greed, whose main weapon is to destroy any interoperability it believes is encouraging competition.
To be fair, since when did/. ever catch those companies either?
WorldCom was pretty much found out long before the financial "geniuses" caught on, mostly because the company was in a business/. crowd is very familiar with. The rest were outside of the./ populace's expertise area (except for the Enron ISP/"Enron OS" thing which was again pretty much exposed here long before the whole house of cards came down). Needless to say, Microsoft's activities fall rather squarely within the./ reader's expertise.
Well then, if "multiple" officials have done this, it should be easy for you to find an example...
Unfortunately the Crooks and Liars 'torture' archive only reaches as far back as their last server move, mid 2006, so I can't point to the video clips of the many interviews I watched personally, although I particularly remember the individual ones with Rice, Rumsfeld, Chertoff and Gonzales waeving and dodging desperately about "making sure that the interrogators have all the tools" etc.
It is quite amazing that the net has such short memory, quite an eye opener for me.
I was able to find some printed material, such as this infamous Bybee memo to the White House.
One of the clips now gone from C&L was the CSPAN video of this performance by Infhoe.
I could look for more (it seems to be a royal pain in the butt to find proper references to any bloviating official which are older then 2 weeks) but these should give a reasonable approximation of "multiple", although they are Republican elected officials rather then White House ones.
The fact that you think that the criminal abuse that happened at Abu Ghraib (which was identified through internal mechanisms and swiftly prosecuted resulting in several convictions) is even closely related to this tells me that you have already made your mind up on the issue regardless of the facts
You gotta be kidding. "Identified through internal mechanisms"?! Rumsfeld, Miller and Sanchez planned and supervised the wholedamndisguistingthing! "Swiftly prosecuted"?! Who?! Oh you mean some hapless idiots who had the bad luck of filming themselves doing the deeds?! What about all the other ones?! The CIA, the "private security contractors" etc and so on. You are surely jesting.
You are distorting the AG's comments. He didn't call the whole of the Geneva Convention "Quaint" and "Obsolete".
This very idea of the AG and other members of Bush administation picking and choosing what provisions are and aren't "quaint" defeats your own argument.
He said the provisions of it that require POWs to be supplied with sports equipment and special work-out clothes and be paid a monthly stipend to purchase small personal supplies "quaint" and "obsolete" if applied to Al Qaeda prisoners.
How so? Those provisions, such as Chapter V, article 38 of the 3rd Convention, are there to ensure that the prisoners are not caged in cells 24/7 and that they are allowed to remain phiscially and mentally healthy. Oh, wait, I get it, according to Bushinks, the suspected members of Al-Queda do not get those rights: they are to be slowly and methodically worn away until they crack, either mentally or physically. Now the meaning of that "quaintness" becomes clear.
Coincidentally, until Red Cross made a huge stink, the Gitmo prisoners were kept in open air cages 24/7, or did you forget that part?
So that's a no - you can't demonstrate that opposition to Chavez is tolerated.
What?! If they were not "tolerated" then there would be no opposition TV or radio channels. Instead they outnumber the "official" channels by a factor of at least 10. Are you delusional?
And you admit he does suppress opposition viewpoints.
He tries. Very much as the US elite tries to supress all opposing views in the wholly maniupulated, billionaire and corporate-owned US mass media. And subsequently Internet is one of the last places where those opposing views can be found.
Poland, however, apart from the (formally not compulsory) religion classes, is quite far from being a theocracy.
Compulsory religion study is one of the defining characteristics of a theocracy. The other is wide-spread use of the de-facto state-sanctioned religion as a weapon against undesirable political opponents. Both are prominent in Poland today.
On a more general note, supporting a very wide and (in spite of this) completely non-violent movement might have been a unusual case of relative honesty in the West's international policy.
I think it occured, by some cosmic coincidence, despite of the machinations of the various Western power elites. As a matter of fact great many of the "Cold Warriors" were deeply disappointed by the fact that the transition was not violent, thus denying them a chance ride in on their tanks "to the rescue".
The issue of religious education is a constant struggle.
In Poland, as in Iran, the struggle is for the moment pretty much over. Poland and Iran can presently be only described as Theocracies, one Catholic and the other Islamic.
No doubt you'll post a link to the Venezeulan equivalent of Michael Moore as proof that difference of opinion is tolerated there, thus proving that Venezuelan democracy is no more broken than the USA's version.
I am not sure if I follow your argument correctly but I assume that you mean a far-right-wing version of Moore as to oppose Chavez, right? In that case you would be pleased to know that with the exception of the government TV channel, all other TV and radio stations in Caracas are broadcasting far-right-wing screeds worthy of any right-wing Moore equivalent, daily.
Granted, Chavez is doing his damnest to shut them up, most recently pulling the licence of RCTV, but unless he shuts them all up, the right-wing Moores will be plentiful and on air for a looong time to come.
That was where my career as an aircraft designer went wrong; I designed them for the theoretical condition where you have a lever to switch gravity on and off.
By this logic, the aircraft you designed will also fall apart at the first gust of wind exceeding the present condition of ot blowing NNW at speed of 2km/h. Since you never bothered to design for any other "theoretical" condition of the wind blowing from any other direction or any faster during your "theory-free" "design" process.
In some countries (Belgium? Australia?) ii's obligatory to vote - you'll get fined if you don't. If those countries were to repeal such laws, they'd suddenly cease to be democracies overnight?
It is a matter of degrees not absolutes. Lack of voluntary voter turnout is an indication of a growing distance from that theoretical "real" democracy.
Choosing not to vote is still a choice, of kinds. Your logic is badly flawed, and shame on the people who modded you up. Turnout proves nothing. Didn't the USSR have 100% turnout?
You are confusing things. The turnout is only important after the other theoretical pre-condition on the way to that hypothetical "real" democracy was met: an informed and educated voting populace. That being the case, voluntary turnout is then a measure of participation. If turnout is very low, then the overwhelming "vote of sorts", as you put it, is for "we do not give a fuck since we are powerless to change anything". Which immediately destroys any pretense of "real" democracy occuring.
Actually, you know what? It's the businessmen from the old "communist" elite who have been doing things of this kind.
Well, one of the main planks of Solidarity's platform was all about bringing USA-style dog-eat-dog Capitalism to Poland. Those are the results.
Howver your state of denial amuses me greatly. If you are in Poland, look around. How is all that poor oppressed klergy (many of them participants and great supporters of Solidarity's fight for "freedom" back then) doing these days? I hear every child will need to get their stamp of approval before he or she can graduate from High School, since Bible Study is now to be an obligatory course in all schools, isn't that so? In that way you are actually ahead of the USA where the wacko fundie wingnuts are only attampting, with difficulties, to get where you already are. Congratulations.
This has nothing to do with Palestine. Stay on topic...
This has everything to do with accepting a word of "family members" about alleged attrocities, and thus having everything to do with the topic. Which metric is of course as perfectly applicable to the Palestinian families complaining about Israel's oppresion as it is to Iranian families complaining about oppression by the SAVAK or the theocrats, or Chilean families complaining about Pinochet's thugs etc and so on.
The question I asked is specifically relevant to establishing the universality of that approach, i.e. it challenges the GP to apply the same measurement he applied to Cuban exiles to another group, a group with which I guessed (wild guess I admit) he has little sympathy with. It was meant to demonstrate to him the flaw of his own argument by jolting him out of his stupor.
... and quit with the ridiculous strawman falacies
You obviously have no clue what a "strawman fallacy" is. Go look it up and come back demonstrating a part where I pretended the GP to be holding some made-up by me opinion which I then demolished.
When you say that the Bush administration is "on record" about applying torture, of course you really mean that an anonymous CIA source alleged this.
Nothing of the sort. Mutliple White House, Pentagon and DOJ officials went on air to bloviate about the Geneva Provisions being quaint and pontificate on virtues of water-boarding and "stress positions". Following which the DOJ concocted letters advising the president that somehow torture was acceptable when applied by the "unitary executive". Etc and so on for years on end.
And then of course Abu Ghraib happened and the last shreds of credibility of the admistration/Pentagon/CIA/Haliburton "contractors" flew right out of the window.
The most controversial of these alleged methods is waterboarding, but there is little outside of this anonymous CIA source that suggests that we do this.
Again, multiple officials discussed waterboarding on TV no less.
I remember a radio interview a while back with Vice President Cheney where he said that he thought it was okay to "dunk" people in water, and some people immediately pounced on that as an admission of waterboarding, but the White House immediately clarified that he was not talking about waterboarding
The White House officials, including Cheney have been caught in so many lies, flip-flops and "misstatements" that it is beyond comical to try to use one them to indicate "firmness" of any policy on their part. Unfortunately they did manage in their dodging and weaving to project a general image of ruthlessness and "ends justify the means", a state of affairs wich was applauded laudly by the whole right-wing punditosphere. No weasling out of this one now.
Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.
You are quite amusing. That is not only an endorsment it is an acknowldgment of an official policy of torture!
Let me translate it from faux-journalist-lackey-groveling-before-his-master speak:
Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
Q: It is a no-brainer to me to torture people using water as long as it is some worthless brown bastard being drowned on an odd chance to save lives of us important Americans, do you agree?
Note that this is how that question really sounds to anyone who understands the context. The question is specially crafted to downplay the significance of torture by calling it "dunking in water" and tries to imply that such a thing would only happen to "save lives" -- American lives implicitely -- while the torturee is of course, also implicitely, a "raghead". All that before Cheyney has even a chance to open his mouth. Not bad for a court-servant "journalist".
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me...
Yes we do torture to 'save' all-important Americans...
but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in.
But we cannot use the word "torture" to describe it. It is a loaded word with all sorts of connotations and we must make sure that it is not used to describe what we do. Of course any sane person will know that waterboarding and torture are one and the same but as long as we keep the pretense and cleverly word our replies, our base will know the truth and agree while we
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Their only "obligation" is, and always was, to click on the ads on digg (thus generating vast majority of digg's revenue) and participate in the digg discussions. That's it. They are the audience to whom digg owners were posturing in order to attract a following, not the money-making owners themselves.
By this token you should give up a notion of expecting to recieve goods for your money in a store, or such trifles as a salary for your labours.
Pretty much. If they were led to believe that the site represents certain ethos, only to be disappointed, they will do what they can: i.e. express their anger and leave, thus depriving digg of much of its revenue.
Non sequitur alert. The fact that the user's only "sacrificed" a click or a view does not in any way reduce the monetary value of the ads to their marketers.
A lot of people are apparently "delusional" when told to expect that they will get rewarded in some way for some actions, small or large, by those who made such promises, explicitely or otherwise. I am led to believe that most of commerce world-wide is based on participation of such "delusional suckers".
If everyone simply folds, MPAA/RIAA are indeed guaranteed to win. A large number of high profile cases highlighting the more illogical parts of the "law" is the only way to get the politicos to start weighing RIAA bribes vs public outrage.
They painted themselves in a corner. This is the result of their efforts at setting certain expectations of their behaviour. Now they can either fold and keep what they earned, but with the penalty of wide defections and disdain of their former audience (possibly destroying digg) or to fight, possibly losing and thus possibly destroying digg. A quandry of their own making.
In other words you would like those who made the site's success possible to the point that a larger audience became involved to go away after it became apparent that they have been callously used, right?
Hypocritical stances do piss me off.
The problem is that digg tried to be a business based on certain ethos. You can't have it both ways, to project "radical", "anti-estabilishment" etc image to create your business and then fold like a cheap suit as soon as your revenue is threatened by one of the very members of the "estabilishment" and then expect that your audience wont notice.
So this pathetic "But we only tried to make moneeeeey! Waaah! We said all those things to make money! We meant none of it! Mommy! They are trying to take away my moneeeey! Waaah!" excuse is likely to achieve the flight properties of a ton of bricks with their audience.
I know (personally) an engineer who did. Although we are speaking of DVDs rather then HD-DVDs (and quite compressed rips at that). It contains a pile of Disney and other kids stuff. The thing came about when he got annoyed at the horrid mess his kids managed to create with their DVDs (including scratching the mirror side) and also inspired by the observation that they seem to enjoy the same movie over and over and over and ... you get the idea. Hence the MythTV box with a remote. Kids are ecstatic and he has no more trouble with their lost/damaged disks.
Actually, in this case, the breakdown is more like: 1) the "Intellectual Property" laws are certifiably and demonstrably insane, 2) greedmongering abusers of the said laws demand that digg becomes their henchman-by-proxy, 3) digg complies, 4) users revolt, 5) now digg capitulates and suddenly is about to fight its would be master.
So digg was not an "innocent, law abiding bystander" anymore then some guards at Abu Ghraib were "just following lawful orders" (an extreme case of the same principle). Furthermore the "attackers" managed to beat digg into growing a pair and fighting against some of the "intellectual property" scam, thus standing up for what its owners were posturing to be all about, ergo the "twit attackers" accomplished quite a bit, it would seem to me.
This might be the only time in my memory when I found thousands of chaos-loving 12 year-olds doing something actually useful for the future of the humanity.
But fear not, this whole nonsensical scam of "Intellectual Property" will, as it must, get more idiotic and common-sense defying as time goes on and to defeat the resulting disobedience and ridicule amongst the technical users the corporate politicos will attempt to implement increasingly more depraved, totalitarian police tactics. There is simply no other way for this to proceed since, ultimately, "Intellectual Property" is all about ownership of thoughts, and as such impossible without Thought Police in one form or another, made only scarier and more vicious as technologies advance closer to direct man-machine interfaces.
This HD-DVD fiasco is a perfect example of the monumental stupidity of the very phillosophical foundations of "Intellectual Property" in all of their imbecillic glory: an infinite number of integer numbers can be transformed, via an infinite number of mathematical funtions, into the number in question. Effectively to "censor" that target number one has to censor the entire science of Mathematics as one can simply post one in that infinite set of numbers and a corresponding transformation function (as many have done using simplistic schemes such as ROT13 etc).
And this just to illustrate one of the many abysmally fatal flaws of the greedmongering system called by its con-artist fathers "The Intellectual Property".
Both are specific cases of "extraordinarily powerful organizations whose activities are opaque to the general populace and which organizations have been removed out of regular citizens' control". Most multi-national (and many national) corporations have finances, resources and political power exceeding that of a majority of individual nations of Earth. That alone puts them on the same level as governments of major nations in the scope of damage and abuses they are capable of. Also an increasing number of corporations are mobilizing private armies.
So in essence both types of concern are equally valid.
One of the amusing parts is of course that it was the "conservatives" who used to be for small government.
Anyhow, I see governance to be akin to atomic energy. It is extremely powerful and productive if employed for peaceful purposes, but to be so it demands extreme safeguards, otherwise all of that power will get out of control and screw everybody up in a multi-thousand-mile radius. Alternatively, if allowed, some malicious minds might use it as a weapon, with devastating consequences.
That is why the so-called "libertarians" exist in deep, crippling fear of such a mix of power and danger, resulting in their demands that the whole thing be abandoned and forbidden. What they do not realise is that by abandoning that type of power, other kinds of power must inevietably (outside of utopian fairy-tale scenarios) take its place, some far more dangerous and difficult to control, something akin to allowing mass scale chemical pollution and C02 emmisions to replace nuclear energy.
This is terrifyingly similar reasoning to that employed by Nazis. Most German polls at the time would have indicated wide support for Gestapo as it was portrayed as a front-line defense against all kinds of murderous internal enemies. Fake security pitted against "armed banditry" and "terrorism" was always the traditional, time tested way to sell slavery to the brain-dead masses.
In your particular example above, privacy of many, many thousands of motorists was violated by, for all practical purposes, an Orwellian police state in order to catch one gang of thugs. I guarantee you that in a place with "two-way telescreens" armed robbery levels will be near zero. The problem is that such "safety" is nowhere near worth the price of slavery.
You are of course neglecting the Surface to Air Missiles, security system compromises at the airpoirts, violent frontal assaults (i.e. suicide bomber leading a way of 20 AK-47/RPG armed terrorists to breach the walls of the "quarantine" facility to get inside - although of course a far better target would be any school, hospital or office building) and so on and on and on and on ....
In short, in order satisfy this inane objective of "safety", not only the general public must be converted to prisoner status in any transportation scenario, but it must also be so everywhere else. Totalitarian police state where the whole populace is comprised either of no-rights inmates to be subjected to every method of subjegation imaginable and the "guards" who "guard" them for their own "safety".
Not all "monocultures" are bad. What we do need is an "Open Standards monculture", a fully documented, free of royalties framework on which every sort of project, commercial or otherwise can build and be guaranteed interoperability with all the others.
Sort of like the highway system, where all the roads conform to a certain set of standards and one cannot make their own "standard" (say have the car lanes being 1/5 the present width then demand that people buy the road owner's "special" cars) and expect to get away with it on a large scale.
So in this context such a standarization "monoculture" is a positive thing, even though certain standards can be disadvantageous for some types of software.
Unix-like systems, includig Linux, BSD, Darwin etc, are the closest thing we've got to such a framework and subsequently this is why they receive such passionate support from all those who see freedom of choice as one of our basic rights as participants in the marketplace. Microsoft represents the exact opposite of the spectrum, a malignant, sociopathic entity of infinite greed, whose main weapon is to destroy any interoperability it believes is encouraging competition.
WorldCom was pretty much found out long before the financial "geniuses" caught on, mostly because the company was in a business /. crowd is very familiar with. The rest were outside of the ./ populace's expertise area (except for the Enron ISP/"Enron OS" thing which was again pretty much exposed here long before the whole house of cards came down). Needless to say, Microsoft's activities fall rather squarely within the ./ reader's expertise.
Unfortunately the Crooks and Liars 'torture' archive only reaches as far back as their last server move, mid 2006, so I can't point to the video clips of the many interviews I watched personally, although I particularly remember the individual ones with Rice, Rumsfeld, Chertoff and Gonzales waeving and dodging desperately about "making sure that the interrogators have all the tools" etc.
It is quite amazing that the net has such short memory, quite an eye opener for me.
I was able to find some printed material, such as this infamous Bybee memo to the White House.
One of the clips now gone from C&L was the CSPAN video of this performance by Infhoe.
Then there is Trent Lott with this.
I could look for more (it seems to be a royal pain in the butt to find proper references to any bloviating official which are older then 2 weeks) but these should give a reasonable approximation of "multiple", although they are Republican elected officials rather then White House ones.
You gotta be kidding. "Identified through internal mechanisms"?! Rumsfeld, Miller and Sanchez planned and supervised the whole damn disguisting thing! "Swiftly prosecuted"?! Who?! Oh you mean some hapless idiots who had the bad luck of filming themselves doing the deeds?! What about all the other ones?! The CIA, the "private security contractors" etc and so on. You are surely jesting.
This very idea of the AG and other members of Bush administation picking and choosing what provisions are and aren't "quaint" defeats your own argument.
How so? Those provisions, such as Chapter V, article 38 of the 3rd Convention, are there to ensure that the prisoners are not caged in cells 24/7 and that they are allowed to remain phiscially and mentally healthy. Oh, wait, I get it, according to Bushinks, the suspected members of Al-Queda do not get those rights: they are to be slowly and methodically worn away until they crack, either mentally or physically. Now the meaning of that "quaintness" becomes clear.
Coincidentally, until Red Cross made a huge stink, the Gitmo prisoners were kept in open air cages 24/7, or did you forget that part?
Nice strawman. What was actually being said, in resoponse to someone comparing Venezuela to a "real" democracy is:
1) Ideal cars do not break down and run on infinite supply of safe, free non-polluting energy.
2) Toyotas do not
3) Trabants do not
Therefore neither Toyotas nor Trabants are ideal cars.
What?! If they were not "tolerated" then there would be no opposition TV or radio channels. Instead they outnumber the "official" channels by a factor of at least 10. Are you delusional?
He tries. Very much as the US elite tries to supress all opposing views in the wholly maniupulated, billionaire and corporate-owned US mass media. And subsequently Internet is one of the last places where those opposing views can be found.
Compulsory religion study is one of the defining characteristics of a theocracy. The other is wide-spread use of the de-facto state-sanctioned religion as a weapon against undesirable political opponents. Both are prominent in Poland today.
I think it occured, by some cosmic coincidence, despite of the machinations of the various Western power elites. As a matter of fact great many of the "Cold Warriors" were deeply disappointed by the fact that the transition was not violent, thus denying them a chance ride in on their tanks "to the rescue".
In Poland, as in Iran, the struggle is for the moment pretty much over. Poland and Iran can presently be only described as Theocracies, one Catholic and the other Islamic.
I am not sure if I follow your argument correctly but I assume that you mean a far-right-wing version of Moore as to oppose Chavez, right? In that case you would be pleased to know that with the exception of the government TV channel, all other TV and radio stations in Caracas are broadcasting far-right-wing screeds worthy of any right-wing Moore equivalent, daily.
Granted, Chavez is doing his damnest to shut them up, most recently pulling the licence of RCTV, but unless he shuts them all up, the right-wing Moores will be plentiful and on air for a looong time to come.
By this logic, the aircraft you designed will also fall apart at the first gust of wind exceeding the present condition of ot blowing NNW at speed of 2km/h. Since you never bothered to design for any other "theoretical" condition of the wind blowing from any other direction or any faster during your "theory-free" "design" process.
It is a matter of degrees not absolutes. Lack of voluntary voter turnout is an indication of a growing distance from that theoretical "real" democracy.
You are confusing things. The turnout is only important after the other theoretical pre-condition on the way to that hypothetical "real" democracy was met: an informed and educated voting populace. That being the case, voluntary turnout is then a measure of participation. If turnout is very low, then the overwhelming "vote of sorts", as you put it, is for "we do not give a fuck since we are powerless to change anything". Which immediately destroys any pretense of "real" democracy occuring.
Well, one of the main planks of Solidarity's platform was all about bringing USA-style dog-eat-dog Capitalism to Poland. Those are the results.
Howver your state of denial amuses me greatly. If you are in Poland, look around. How is all that poor oppressed klergy (many of them participants and great supporters of Solidarity's fight for "freedom" back then) doing these days? I hear every child will need to get their stamp of approval before he or she can graduate from High School, since Bible Study is now to be an obligatory course in all schools, isn't that so? In that way you are actually ahead of the USA where the wacko fundie wingnuts are only attampting, with difficulties, to get where you already are. Congratulations.
This has everything to do with accepting a word of "family members" about alleged attrocities, and thus having everything to do with the topic. Which metric is of course as perfectly applicable to the Palestinian families complaining about Israel's oppresion as it is to Iranian families complaining about oppression by the SAVAK or the theocrats, or Chilean families complaining about Pinochet's thugs etc and so on.
The question I asked is specifically relevant to establishing the universality of that approach, i.e. it challenges the GP to apply the same measurement he applied to Cuban exiles to another group, a group with which I guessed (wild guess I admit) he has little sympathy with. It was meant to demonstrate to him the flaw of his own argument by jolting him out of his stupor.
You obviously have no clue what a "strawman fallacy" is. Go look it up and come back demonstrating a part where I pretended the GP to be holding some made-up by me opinion which I then demolished.
Nothing of the sort. Mutliple White House, Pentagon and DOJ officials went on air to bloviate about the Geneva Provisions being quaint and pontificate on virtues of water-boarding and "stress positions". Following which the DOJ concocted letters advising the president that somehow torture was acceptable when applied by the "unitary executive". Etc and so on for years on end.
And then of course Abu Ghraib happened and the last shreds of credibility of the admistration/Pentagon/CIA/Haliburton "contractors" flew right out of the window.
Again, multiple officials discussed waterboarding on TV no less.
The White House officials, including Cheney have been caught in so many lies, flip-flops and "misstatements" that it is beyond comical to try to use one them to indicate "firmness" of any policy on their part. Unfortunately they did manage in their dodging and weaving to project a general image of ruthlessness and "ends justify the means", a state of affairs wich was applauded laudly by the whole right-wing punditosphere. No weasling out of this one now.
You are quite amusing. That is not only an endorsment it is an acknowldgment of an official policy of torture!
Let me translate it from faux-journalist-lackey-groveling-before-his-master speak:
Q: It is a no-brainer to me to torture people using water as long as it is some worthless brown bastard being drowned on an odd chance to save lives of us important Americans, do you agree?
Note that this is how that question really sounds to anyone who understands the context. The question is specially crafted to downplay the significance of torture by calling it "dunking in water" and tries to imply that such a thing would only happen to "save lives" -- American lives implicitely -- while the torturee is of course, also implicitely, a "raghead". All that before Cheyney has even a chance to open his mouth. Not bad for a court-servant "journalist".
Yes we do torture to 'save' all-important Americans ...
But we cannot use the word "torture" to describe it. It is a loaded word with all sorts of connotations and we must make sure that it is not used to describe what we do. Of course any sane person will know that waterboarding and torture are one and the same but as long as we keep the pretense and cleverly word our replies, our base will know the truth and agree while we