In the end Obama votes extremely right-wing. He is not a liberal, but a reactionary or a neo-conservative. Imperialist or fascist might be appropriate labels if you don't mind giving Goodwin's law a pass.
While assuring us that he supports the troops in Iraq, he's made it quite clear he won't bring them home, and instead has pressured the White House to come up with a plan on the matter of their own. How Obama, or anyone, can possibly believe that the Bushites could come up with a worthwhile strategy for Iraq is beyond me.
On Iran Obama also serves the status-quo with the kind of hawkish zeal we are used to seeing in most Republicans. He's admitted he may favor surgical missile strikes on Iran and Pakistan if that's what it takes to fight the war on terror. And Obama even boasts that Bush hasn't taken a hard enough line on the foreign menaces.
How about Israel? Obama even embraced Israel's brutal bombings of Lebanon last summer -- the type of complicity we're sure to see continue if he's successful in his political evolution. Beyond that, Obama voted in favor of the Pentagon budget last year, with its beefy handouts to Halliburton and the rest tax and waste crooks. (Counterpunch)
Obama is of mixed race and is not by any means poor or working class. And yes, blacks can misjudge the cause of their problems and blame "culture" (lack of "values", rap music, religion) instead of the genuine problems of poverty and continued discrimination.
I find it doubtful that you will find a viable candidate that leans far enough to the left to garner the support of the crypto-communists over at Znet.
The editor of Zmag, Michael Albert, has been a consistent and harsh critic of Marxist-Leninism. Here he debates a representative of one of the more moderate communists parties (the ISO). Most of the people published in Zmag are social democrats, anarchists, and other non-Marxist left wing radicals. Zmag is probably less communist than The Nation, and certainly less so than the countless Trotskyist party papers. Nader is seen as the most viable third party candidate in recent years and he often writes for Zmag.
What sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama's short national career that has to be placed in the "never mind" category if one is to seriously to believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a "progressive" concerned with "social and economic justice" and global peace.
Never mind, for example, that Obama was recently hailed as a "Hamiltonian" believer in "limited government" and "free trade" by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS." Or that he had to be shamed off the "New Democrat Directory" of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator (Bruce Dixon, "Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List," Black Commentator, June 26, 2003).
Never mind that Obama (consistent with Brooks's description of him) has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street Democrats" to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington," the Nation, June 26). Or that he lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Or that Obama has supported other "mainstream Democrats" fighting antiwar progressives in primary races (see Alexander Cockburn, "Obama's Game," the Nation, April 24, 2006). Or that he criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Never mind that Obama "dismissively" referred--in a "tone laced with contempt"--to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as "something of a gadfly." Or that he chose the neoconservative Lieberman to be his "assigned" mentor in the U.S. Senate. Or that "he posted a long article on the liberal blog Daily Kos criticizing attacks against lawmakers who voted for right-wing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts." Or that he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Or that he told Time magazine's Joe Klein last year that he'd never given any thought to Al Gore's widely discussed proposal to link a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels to targeted tax relief for the nation's millions of working poor (Joe Klein, "The Fresh Face," Time, October 17, 2006).
Never mind that Obama voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill that rolls back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Cockburn; Sirota). Or that Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry--at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield (Sirota). Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards? Should the U.S. maintain the illegal operation of Iraq and pour half its federal budget into "defense" because of all the soldiers and other workers that find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex? Does the "progressive" senator really need to be reminded of the large number of socially useful and healthy alternatives that exist for the investment of human labor power at home and abroad--wetlands preservation, urban ecological retrofitting, drug counseling, teaching, infrastructure building and repair, safe and affordable housing construction, the building of windmills and solar power facilities, etc.?
In an interview with Klein, Obama expressed reservations about a universal health insurance plan recently enacted in Massachusetts,
Canada? Sweden? Finland? France!!?!?!?!?! Can someone please bomb Washington and rid us of these theocrats and war criminals. The American Teliban have oppressed us for far too long.
This is largely reposting ideas I've already expressed, but since you don't seen to get it, I'll keep trying.
What's the big deal about teens and sex anyway? In my experience, young people rather enjoy it and don't need to be protected from predators any more then anyone else does (anyone who forces non-consensual physical activity on another, regardless of the age of the victim or the attacker, is a criminal and should be treated as such). The ability to engage in any consensual physical activity is a right (regardless of the age of the participants).
I think adults (especially clergy) are sexually frustrated and afraid that they are attracted to teens. This attraction is just a biochemical response that normal people generally have to physically fit members of the opposite gender (and sometime the same) who are old enough to be fertile. Because they are themselves repressed, and their doctrine requires them to repress the rest of us, they hide their own desires by over reacting and trying to imagine that young people are not sexual. They censor both because of personal embarrassment and because of the sense of power they get by manipulating others.
Most abuse is conducted by the child's family or close relatives and friends of the family. Focusing on predatory behavior on the Internet is stealing focus away from the real problem, which is that parents have the power to abuse their children, either directly, through overt violence, or through denial of basic necessities like food and shelter, or through threats and psychological manipulation. Parents do this both for sick personal pleasure, as in most cases of sexual abuse, or because they really believe that they must impose their point of view upon the child, as in the case of forced religion and forced schooling.
How can we label people "free" and give them the rights freethinking people deserve if we allow them to grow up totally ensconced in conservative ideology?
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." -Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
But...teaching without both free access to different points of view, and the freedom to express your own point of view, is not real education, it is only indoctrination. If children aren't given the opportunity to receive all kinds of knowledge, then they accept uncritically whatever traditional "values" their parents believe in simply because their parents are close to them. When parents are given total control of where their children can spend their time, the child's intellectual development is totally at the mercy of the parent. Adults can, if they make enough of an effort, completely shape a child's world.
Despite legal adulthood being set at 18, the age in which we are given full human rights is for the most part not well agreed upon in America. For example, various states in the US have different and conflicting age of consent laws that allow for sexual freedom anywhere from age 14 to 18. Many young teens (junior high or middle school age) have detailed enough knowledge and a strong enough sense of responsibility that I would trust them to vote or drive cars. There are many legal adults age 18 and up that don't deserve these privileges. Age is an unfair and inconsistent measure of whether one deserves human rights or social privileges. Also, please note that when I refer to children in this post, I mean any human under that age of 18, a large portion of which are more knowledgeable then an average adult especially regarding information technology. I am not just talking about little kids.
Children in America really are an oppressed group; parents here can use coercion to force feed their kids whatever sick ideals they stand for. The UN convention on the rights of children (ratified by every country on Earth except Somalia and USA) ensures ch
Although I hate the "think of the children" angle, my gut reaction was to ask if that's what they told you at the NAMBLA meeting. Seriously, you don't believe there should be any restrictions whatsoever on sexual contact "regardless of their age" (your words)? That an eight year-old should be able to have consensual sex with a forty year-old? And that an eight year-old is capable of consenting to such a thing at all?
There are many factors that may diminish the ability to consent. Age is one, but it goes both ways. A senile ninety year old can hardly give consent either, but there is no maximum age of consent. Most people know that different people mature at different rates; we also degrade at different rates. Setting a minimum or maximum age of consent is foolish. (btw, I think the reason we don't have a maximum age is simple that most people don't like to think about old people having sex).
If one party is in a position of authority over another, there is also diminished ability to consent. We take it for granted that the burden of proof of a man raping a woman is lower than that of a woman raping a man. Men can easily use their physical and social power to coerce women. Sex between a police office and someone that he pulls over should immediately be suspect. Most armies restrict sexual relationships between high ranking officers and their inferiors.
There are a lot of very naive, stupid, ignorant, or mentally handicapped adults. Most are not specifically protected by the law regarding their "right" to have sex. However, when someone uses manipulation to get someone less capable than them into bed, we aught to punish the rapist. There are different degrees of incapacity. This is a huge a blurry spectrum. People impaired by drugs also engage in sex. There is obviously a huge range of lessoned consent there.
I'm not saying that age shouldn't be taken into consideration when determining whether sex was consensual or not.
However, a specific age limit is unfair and age is just one of many factors.
So do child labor laws actually exist to deny children the right to gainful employment?
Child labor laws restrict the number of hours that minors can work so that they have enough time left over to go to school. Adults are also restricted in the number of hours that they work (at least without overtime). I would prefer that both adults and young people had a four hour day that left over enough time for personal projects and lifetime education. Child labor laws and the eight hour day were major victories for the labor movement. These laws give us economic rights: the right not to be overworked.
Laws that punish harmless personal choices like sex and drug use are wrong no matter what age they target. I oppose a drinking age. I oppose banning the use of recreational chemicals by people of any age. Sure most young people are too stupid and irresponsible to handle alcohol or sex. So are most adults. Even if young people are somewhat more irresponsible than adults, singling them out is unfair. Restrictions based on age are discrimination, unjust prejudice. Blacks have more unwanted pregnancies than whites; should we restrict black sex more than white sex? Whites commit more crimes than blacks while high on cocaine; should we restrict white coke use but not black coke use? We should punish people who break the law while on drugs, but we should not ban drugs themselves (because some people can do them responsibly). In the same vein, we should punish any coerced sex, but not any other form of sexual expression.
1) 16- and 17-year-olds are by no means "children." 2) These laws were made to protect minors from older perverts, not from themselves.
I think that all human beings should have human rights, regardless of their age. One of these rights is the right to free speech and freedom of association. Anyone should be able to share any information and anyone should be able to have any consensual contact with another.
People think that it's uncommon to prosecute minors for sexually abusing themselves under statutory rape or child porn laws. This actually happens all the time. Child porn laws are not designed to protect minors at all. Most images and videos of minors having sex are made by teens in consensual relationships. Anyone who has been in high school in the age of digital cameras knows this. These laws are made by extreme religious fundamentalists who think that any sex outside of marriage is wrong. Since adults can vote, they have largely been unsuccessful in restricting adult sex (at least in the past few decades), however (even mature) minors have no say in government, so they can freely be subjected to to one of the sickest, most twisted sexual fetishes: abstinence.
"FU and the virtual horse you rode in on" to Linden Labs in regards to this letter -- especially the final sentence This license may be modified, addended, or revoked at any time by Linden Lab in its sole discretion.
What's with the FUD? Sun is not dying. Their stock has been going up over the past two years. Their latest CPU, the UltraSPARC T1 has 32 execution units (eight cores), massive cache and register files, and the highest throughput in the industry. It's not great for floating point tasks so it won't make a good toy system for playing games, but for a real work in a server, it's the most energy efficient, powerful architecture available.
Over the past several years, if you did a random port scan of the Internet (nmap -iR) the majority of open telnet (tcp port 23) servers were print servers that let you telnet in and change all sorts of settings.
Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn't enable parents to read their child's e-mail or see the child's profile page
So it tells the parents the exact same information they would get by searching for their kids name, email, or username on myspace. Even the private/hidden profiles that I've seen still show username, age and location. How is downloading some proprietary software to get publicly available information useful?
According to the FAQ For the technically minded, Wikileaks integrates technologies including modified versions of FreeNet, Tor, PGP and software of our own design.
If they don't release the source for their custom/modified anonymity network, how do we really know it works?
Giving the vendor a few weeks to create a patch before releasing an exploit is a polite thing to do for the vendor's sake, but what about the users of the vulnerable software? Hiding potential threats from them keeps them from protecting themselves. Even without a fix, you can apply a workaround or if you need serious security, even replace the buggy product. I think that researchers who find security bugs should report the fact that a vulnerability exists in a given software product immediately. They can wait to release working exploits if they want to be nice to the vendor. Moreover, any legal restriction on releasing exploit code would be totally unethical. Code, even malicious code, is a form of free expression.
By definition a revolution is simply the overthrow of a government by those who are governed. Some revolutions are led by the majority of the populace of a nation, others by a small band of revolutionaries. Some I support, others I do not.
I am not a communist; I just acknowledge historical fact. I happen to be opposed to Marxist-Leninism and any other form of authoritarian communism. There was a communist revolution in Viet Nam that gained control of the nation. There was a communist revolution in Russia that gained control of the nation. I don't support either regime, but I also don't deny that they exist(ed).
The policy of arming Indonesia continued unchanged throughout the Carter administration. Are you going to hang him, too?
In fact the policy of US military aid to Suharto's Indonesia continued through the Carter, Regan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. They should all be investigated. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, whose findings are accepted as International Law by the United States and most of Europe, hanging is an acceptable punishment for the crime of aggression. Every living US president should be investigated for this crime because each and every one started one or more aggressive wars.
I personally would prefer that they be imprisoned for life in the same cell as Saddam Hussein and others like him. I brought up hanging just to take the rather conservative position that we aught to obey the Law.
My post was not copied verbatim; here are the sources:
The conversation between Kissinger, Suharto, and Ford is declassified public record. You can find it all over the web, at the national security archive, or by submitting your own FOIA request to the federal government.
The office appointments are basic history and my phrasing is original.
The description of Ford's invasion of Cambodia was originally written by Howard Zinn and has appeared in several web pages and books.
It really is unfortunate that Ford died before be could be tried and imprisoned (or hung) for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Ford wanted to continue to escalate the conflict in Viet Nam, thankfully, congress wouldn't let him.
On April 16, 1975, Ford said: "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance by the time I asked--or sometime shortly thereafter--the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today."
Two weeks later, April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon, and the war was over.
Of course, there was also the matter of helping start, and continuing to support the East Timorese genocide:
SUHARTO: We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.
FORD: We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.
KISSINGER: You appreciate that the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems.
FORD: We could have technical and legal problems. You are familiar, Mr. President, with the problems we had on Cyprus, although this situation is different.
KISSINGER: It depends on how we construe it -- whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation. It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens happens after we return. This way there would be less chance of people talking in an unauthorized way. The President will be back on Monday at 2:00 PM Jakarta time. We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.
FORD: It would be more authoritative if we can do it in person.
KISSINGER: Whatever you do, however, we will try to handle in the best way possible.
FORD: We recognize that you have a time factor. We have merely expressed our view from our particular point of view.
KISSINGER: If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home.
Immidiatly after Ford and Kissinger left Indonesia, Suharto's army invaded Portuguese East Timor. Their campaign of terror included bombings with jets that the US and UK provided and forced injections of birth control to the native population. This genocide killed around a quarter million people.
In 1974 Gerald Ford appointed Donald Rumsfeld as his Chief of Staff.
In 1975 Ford appointed Dick Cheney as his Chief of Staff.
Later that year, Ford fired CIA Director William Colby and replaced him with George HW Bush.
The current batch of criminals are in office because of Ford.
In mid-May 1975, just three weeks after the victory of the revolutionary forces in Vietnam, an American cargo ship named the Mayaguez was sailing from South Vietnam to Thailand. When it came close to an island in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power, the ship was stopped by the Cambodians, taken to a port at a nearby island, and the crew removed to the mainland. The crew later described their treatment as courteous: "A man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia." The press reported: "Captain Miller and his men all say they were never abused by their captors. There were even accounts of kind treatment--of Cambodian soldiers feeding them first and eating what the Americans left, of the soldiers giving the seamen the mattresses off their beds." But the Cambodians did ask the crew about spying and the CIA.
President Ford sent a message to the Cambodian government to release the ship and crew, and when thirty-six hours had elapsed and there was no response (the message had been given to the Chinese liaison mission in Washington, but was returned the next day, "ostensibly undelivered," one press account said), he began military operations--U.S. planes bombed Cambodian ships. They strafed the very boat that was taking the American sailors to t
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured. For some reason my local library uses Internet explorer and not Firefox on their computers designated for web access only. It's almost enough for me to try to get elected to the library district.
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end Obama votes extremely right-wing. He is not a liberal, but a reactionary or a neo-conservative. Imperialist or fascist might be appropriate labels if you don't mind giving Goodwin's law a pass.
While assuring us that he supports the troops in Iraq, he's made it quite clear he won't bring them home, and instead has pressured the White House to come up with a plan on the matter of their own. How Obama, or anyone, can possibly believe that the Bushites could come up with a worthwhile strategy for Iraq is beyond me.
On Iran Obama also serves the status-quo with the kind of hawkish zeal we are used to seeing in most Republicans. He's admitted he may favor surgical missile strikes on Iran and Pakistan if that's what it takes to fight the war on terror. And Obama even boasts that Bush hasn't taken a hard enough line on the foreign menaces.
How about Israel? Obama even embraced Israel's brutal bombings of Lebanon last summer -- the type of complicity we're sure to see continue if he's successful in his political evolution. Beyond that, Obama voted in favor of the Pentagon budget last year, with its beefy handouts to Halliburton and the rest tax and waste crooks. (Counterpunch)
Obama is of mixed race and is not by any means poor or working class. And yes, blacks can misjudge the cause of their problems and blame "culture" (lack of "values", rap music, religion) instead of the genuine problems of poverty and continued discrimination.
I find it doubtful that you will find a viable candidate that leans far enough to the left to garner the support of the crypto-communists over at Znet.
The editor of Zmag, Michael Albert, has been a consistent and harsh critic of Marxist-Leninism. Here he debates a representative of one of the more moderate communists parties (the ISO). Most of the people published in Zmag are social democrats, anarchists, and other non-Marxist left wing radicals. Zmag is probably less communist than The Nation, and certainly less so than the countless Trotskyist party papers. Nader is seen as the most viable third party candidate in recent years and he often writes for Zmag.
What sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama's short national career that has to be placed in the "never mind" category if one is to seriously to believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a "progressive" concerned with "social and economic justice" and global peace.
Never mind, for example, that Obama was recently hailed as a "Hamiltonian" believer in "limited government" and "free trade" by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS." Or that he had to be shamed off the "New Democrat Directory" of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator (Bruce Dixon, "Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List," Black Commentator, June 26, 2003).
Never mind that Obama (consistent with Brooks's description of him) has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street Democrats" to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington," the Nation, June 26). Or that he lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Or that Obama has supported other "mainstream Democrats" fighting antiwar progressives in primary races (see Alexander Cockburn, "Obama's Game," the Nation, April 24, 2006). Or that he criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Never mind that Obama "dismissively" referred--in a "tone laced with contempt"--to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as "something of a gadfly." Or that he chose the neoconservative Lieberman to be his "assigned" mentor in the U.S. Senate. Or that "he posted a long article on the liberal blog Daily Kos criticizing attacks against lawmakers who voted for right-wing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts." Or that he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Or that he told Time magazine's Joe Klein last year that he'd never given any thought to Al Gore's widely discussed proposal to link a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels to targeted tax relief for the nation's millions of working poor (Joe Klein, "The Fresh Face," Time, October 17, 2006).
Never mind that Obama voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill that rolls back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Cockburn; Sirota). Or that Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry--at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield (Sirota). Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards? Should the U.S. maintain the illegal operation of Iraq and pour half its federal budget into "defense" because of all the soldiers and other workers that find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex? Does the "progressive" senator really need to be reminded of the large number of socially useful and healthy alternatives that exist for the investment of human labor power at home and abroad--wetlands preservation, urban ecological retrofitting, drug counseling, teaching, infrastructure building and repair, safe and affordable housing construction, the building of windmills and solar power facilities, etc.?
In an interview with Klein, Obama expressed reservations about a universal health insurance plan recently enacted in Massachusetts,
Do you jail breastfeeding mothers too?
YES Apparently about 12,000 women per year (Per YEAR!!! On average!) get arrested for breastfeeding in public in the United States. Another 30,000 women per year get arrested for being "topless" under various "indecency" laws across many states in the US.
Canada? Sweden? Finland? France!!?!?!?!?! Can someone please bomb Washington and rid us of these theocrats and war criminals. The American Teliban have oppressed us for far too long.
This is largely reposting ideas I've already expressed, but since you don't seen to get it, I'll keep trying.
What's the big deal about teens and sex anyway? In my experience, young people rather enjoy it and don't need to be protected from predators any more then anyone else does (anyone who forces non-consensual physical activity on another, regardless of the age of the victim or the attacker, is a criminal and should be treated as such). The ability to engage in any consensual physical activity is a right (regardless of the age of the participants).
I think adults (especially clergy) are sexually frustrated and afraid that they are attracted to teens. This attraction is just a biochemical response that normal people generally have to physically fit members of the opposite gender (and sometime the same) who are old enough to be fertile. Because they are themselves repressed, and their doctrine requires them to repress the rest of us, they hide their own desires by over reacting and trying to imagine that young people are not sexual. They censor both because of personal embarrassment and because of the sense of power they get by manipulating others.
Most abuse is conducted by the child's family or close relatives and friends of the family. Focusing on predatory behavior on the Internet is stealing focus away from the real problem, which is that parents have the power to abuse their children, either directly, through overt violence, or through denial of basic necessities like food and shelter, or through threats and psychological manipulation. Parents do this both for sick personal pleasure, as in most cases of sexual abuse, or because they really believe that they must impose their point of view upon the child, as in the case of forced religion and forced schooling.
How can we label people "free" and give them the rights freethinking people deserve if we allow them to grow up totally ensconced in conservative ideology?
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." -Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
But...teaching without both free access to different points of view, and the freedom to express your own point of view, is not real education, it is only indoctrination. If children aren't given the opportunity to receive all kinds of knowledge, then they accept uncritically whatever traditional "values" their parents believe in simply because their parents are close to them. When parents are given total control of where their children can spend their time, the child's intellectual development is totally at the mercy of the parent. Adults can, if they make enough of an effort, completely shape a child's world.
Despite legal adulthood being set at 18, the age in which we are given full human rights is for the most part not well agreed upon in America. For example, various states in the US have different and conflicting age of consent laws that allow for sexual freedom anywhere from age 14 to 18. Many young teens (junior high or middle school age) have detailed enough knowledge and a strong enough sense of responsibility that I would trust them to vote or drive cars. There are many legal adults age 18 and up that don't deserve these privileges. Age is an unfair and inconsistent measure of whether one deserves human rights or social privileges. Also, please note that when I refer to children in this post, I mean any human under that age of 18, a large portion of which are more knowledgeable then an average adult especially regarding information technology. I am not just talking about little kids.
Children in America really are an oppressed group; parents here can use coercion to force feed their kids whatever sick ideals they stand for. The UN convention on the rights of children (ratified by every country on Earth except Somalia and USA) ensures ch
Although I hate the "think of the children" angle, my gut reaction was to ask if that's what they told you at the NAMBLA meeting. Seriously, you don't believe there should be any restrictions whatsoever on sexual contact "regardless of their age" (your words)? That an eight year-old should be able to have consensual sex with a forty year-old? And that an eight year-old is capable of consenting to such a thing at all?
There are many factors that may diminish the ability to consent. Age is one, but it goes both ways. A senile ninety year old can hardly give consent either, but there is no maximum age of consent. Most people know that different people mature at different rates; we also degrade at different rates. Setting a minimum or maximum age of consent is foolish. (btw, I think the reason we don't have a maximum age is simple that most people don't like to think about old people having sex).
If one party is in a position of authority over another, there is also diminished ability to consent. We take it for granted that the burden of proof of a man raping a woman is lower than that of a woman raping a man. Men can easily use their physical and social power to coerce women. Sex between a police office and someone that he pulls over should immediately be suspect. Most armies restrict sexual relationships between high ranking officers and their inferiors.
There are a lot of very naive, stupid, ignorant, or mentally handicapped adults. Most are not specifically protected by the law regarding their "right" to have sex. However, when someone uses manipulation to get someone less capable than them into bed, we aught to punish the rapist. There are different degrees of incapacity. This is a huge a blurry spectrum. People impaired by drugs also engage in sex. There is obviously a huge range of lessoned consent there.
I'm not saying that age shouldn't be taken into consideration when determining whether sex was consensual or not. However, a specific age limit is unfair and age is just one of many factors.
So do child labor laws actually exist to deny children the right to gainful employment?
Child labor laws restrict the number of hours that minors can work so that they have enough time left over to go to school. Adults are also restricted in the number of hours that they work (at least without overtime). I would prefer that both adults and young people had a four hour day that left over enough time for personal projects and lifetime education. Child labor laws and the eight hour day were major victories for the labor movement. These laws give us economic rights: the right not to be overworked.
Laws that punish harmless personal choices like sex and drug use are wrong no matter what age they target. I oppose a drinking age. I oppose banning the use of recreational chemicals by people of any age. Sure most young people are too stupid and irresponsible to handle alcohol or sex. So are most adults. Even if young people are somewhat more irresponsible than adults, singling them out is unfair. Restrictions based on age are discrimination, unjust prejudice. Blacks have more unwanted pregnancies than whites; should we restrict black sex more than white sex? Whites commit more crimes than blacks while high on cocaine; should we restrict white coke use but not black coke use? We should punish people who break the law while on drugs, but we should not ban drugs themselves (because some people can do them responsibly). In the same vein, we should punish any coerced sex, but not any other form of sexual expression.
1) 16- and 17-year-olds are by no means "children." 2) These laws were made to protect minors from older perverts, not from themselves.
I think that all human beings should have human rights, regardless of their age. One of these rights is the right to free speech and freedom of association. Anyone should be able to share any information and anyone should be able to have any consensual contact with another.
People think that it's uncommon to prosecute minors for sexually abusing themselves under statutory rape or child porn laws. This actually happens all the time. Child porn laws are not designed to protect minors at all. Most images and videos of minors having sex are made by teens in consensual relationships. Anyone who has been in high school in the age of digital cameras knows this. These laws are made by extreme religious fundamentalists who think that any sex outside of marriage is wrong. Since adults can vote, they have largely been unsuccessful in restricting adult sex (at least in the past few decades), however (even mature) minors have no say in government, so they can freely be subjected to to one of the sickest, most twisted sexual fetishes: abstinence.
"FU and the virtual horse you rode in on" to Linden Labs in regards to this letter -- especially the final sentence This license may be modified, addended, or revoked at any time by Linden Lab in its sole discretion.
Lighten up, it's a joke!
What's with the FUD? Sun is not dying. Their stock has been going up over the past two years. Their latest CPU, the UltraSPARC T1 has 32 execution units (eight cores), massive cache and register files, and the highest throughput in the industry. It's not great for floating point tasks so it won't make a good toy system for playing games, but for a real work in a server, it's the most energy efficient, powerful architecture available.
Over the past several years, if you did a random port scan of the Internet (nmap -iR) the majority of open telnet (tcp port 23) servers were print servers that let you telnet in and change all sorts of settings.
Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn't enable parents to read their child's e-mail or see the child's profile page
So it tells the parents the exact same information they would get by searching for their kids name, email, or username on myspace. Even the private/hidden profiles that I've seen still show username, age and location. How is downloading some proprietary software to get publicly available information useful?
apt-get install chkrootkit rkhunter
According to the FAQ
For the technically minded, Wikileaks integrates technologies including modified versions of FreeNet, Tor, PGP and software of our own design.
If they don't release the source for their custom/modified anonymity network, how do we really know it works?
To protect the children, we must enable every cable and satellite company to provide xxx content on channel 69!
Ummm...Are we going to restrict other channels from carrying pornographic content?
No. It's technically difficult and would be expensive and violate the first amendment.
Doesn't this just give the porn companies more porn channels while doing nothing to censor kids (which is unethical anyways)?
How does After Effects and Final Cut Pro compare to Cinelerra?
Giving the vendor a few weeks to create a patch before releasing an exploit is a polite thing to do for the vendor's sake, but what about the users of the vulnerable software? Hiding potential threats from them keeps them from protecting themselves. Even without a fix, you can apply a workaround or if you need serious security, even replace the buggy product. I think that researchers who find security bugs should report the fact that a vulnerability exists in a given software product immediately. They can wait to release working exploits if they want to be nice to the vendor. Moreover, any legal restriction on releasing exploit code would be totally unethical. Code, even malicious code, is a form of free expression.
By definition a revolution is simply the overthrow of a government by those who are governed. Some revolutions are led by the majority of the populace of a nation, others by a small band of revolutionaries. Some I support, others I do not.
I am not a communist; I just acknowledge historical fact. I happen to be opposed to Marxist-Leninism and any other form of authoritarian communism. There was a communist revolution in Viet Nam that gained control of the nation. There was a communist revolution in Russia that gained control of the nation. I don't support either regime, but I also don't deny that they exist(ed).
The policy of arming Indonesia continued unchanged throughout the Carter administration. Are you going to hang him, too?
In fact the policy of US military aid to Suharto's Indonesia continued through the Carter, Regan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. They should all be investigated. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, whose findings are accepted as International Law by the United States and most of Europe, hanging is an acceptable punishment for the crime of aggression. Every living US president should be investigated for this crime because each and every one started one or more aggressive wars.
I personally would prefer that they be imprisoned for life in the same cell as Saddam Hussein and others like him. I brought up hanging just to take the rather conservative position that we aught to obey the Law.
My post was not copied verbatim; here are the sources:
The conversation between Kissinger, Suharto, and Ford is declassified public record. You can find it all over the web, at the national security archive, or by submitting your own FOIA request to the federal government.
The office appointments are basic history and my phrasing is original.
The description of Ford's invasion of Cambodia was originally written by Howard Zinn and has appeared in several web pages and books.
It really is unfortunate that Ford died before be could be tried and imprisoned (or hung) for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Ford wanted to continue to escalate the conflict in Viet Nam, thankfully, congress wouldn't let him.
On April 16, 1975, Ford said: "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance by the time I asked--or sometime shortly thereafter--the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today."
Two weeks later, April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon, and the war was over.
Of course, there was also the matter of helping start, and continuing to support the East Timorese genocide:
SUHARTO: We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.
FORD: We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.
KISSINGER: You appreciate that the use of U.S.-made arms could create problems.
FORD: We could have technical and legal problems. You are familiar, Mr. President, with the problems we had on Cyprus, although this situation is different.
KISSINGER: It depends on how we construe it -- whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation. It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens happens after we return. This way there would be less chance of people talking in an unauthorized way. The President will be back on Monday at 2:00 PM Jakarta time. We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned.
FORD: It would be more authoritative if we can do it in person.
KISSINGER: Whatever you do, however, we will try to handle in the best way possible.
FORD: We recognize that you have a time factor. We have merely expressed our view from our particular point of view.
KISSINGER: If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home.
Immidiatly after Ford and Kissinger left Indonesia, Suharto's army invaded Portuguese East Timor. Their campaign of terror included bombings with jets that the US and UK provided and forced injections of birth control to the native population. This genocide killed around a quarter million people.
In 1974 Gerald Ford appointed Donald Rumsfeld as his Chief of Staff.
In 1975 Ford appointed Dick Cheney as his Chief of Staff.
Later that year, Ford fired CIA Director William Colby and replaced him with George HW Bush.
The current batch of criminals are in office because of Ford.
In mid-May 1975, just three weeks after the victory of the revolutionary forces in Vietnam, an American cargo ship named the Mayaguez was sailing from South Vietnam to Thailand. When it came close to an island in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power, the ship was stopped by the Cambodians, taken to a port at a nearby island, and the crew removed to the mainland. The crew later described their treatment as courteous: "A man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia." The press reported: "Captain Miller and his men all say they were never abused by their captors. There were even accounts of kind treatment--of Cambodian soldiers feeding them first and eating what the Americans left, of the soldiers giving the seamen the mattresses off their beds." But the Cambodians did ask the crew about spying and the CIA.
President Ford sent a message to the Cambodian government to release the ship and crew, and when thirty-six hours had elapsed and there was no response (the message had been given to the Chinese liaison mission in Washington, but was returned the next day, "ostensibly undelivered," one press account said), he began military operations--U.S. planes bombed Cambodian ships. They strafed the very boat that was taking the American sailors to t
It always annoyed me when public money was spent on proprietary software, especially when there already are free solutions that are more secure and full featured. For some reason my local library uses Internet explorer and not Firefox on their computers designated for web access only. It's almost enough for me to try to get elected to the library district.
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
This originally appeared here.