Your case will be much better supported with a non-inane example. I'm not just being nitpicky here; see if you can come up with one. If you can't, maybe that says something about your position, no?
Er, not to mention that the claim was valid, even if the documents weren't. Dan Rather got dinged because he cited the wrong source in his proof that objects fall to Earth, which happened to be politically unpopular at the time...
The epic fail is yours, my friend. I understood your point; the problem with it is your arrogant conclusions, which are both wrongheaded and naive.
You claim people are deeply flawed nonsensical beings because we
associate irrelevant traits to our fears so that we hopefully can avoid them no matter the cost
If you really think that, you're a fool. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason people think you're a neo-nazi if you dress like Adolf Hitler is because most people who dress like Hitler are neo-nazis?? That the reason neo-nazis dress like that is to tell the world they're neo-nazis? That this isn't some knee-jerk fear response, but a conscious reaction to a conscious message? Social signifiers are an attempt to communicate. People react to the intended message.
Now, obviously sometimes messages get conveyed that were not intended; maybe people take you for a poser when your biker jacket is actually just really comfortable. That's a valid point; these are not always unambiguous messages. But for you to dismiss the importance, the meaning, of cultural signifiers, and scoff at the vast majority of people who understand and react to their meanings, is really nothing but ignorance on your part.
People are not arbitrarily overreacting, as you described in your post. All our actions are communication, with symbolic meaning. Cultural signifiers, including the ones you mention, are conscious attempts to communicate a message, and it is not at all silly or foolish or a character flaw to pay attention to those meanings.
Great point -- I'd hold up the success of stuff like Guitar Hero and Rock Band as additional examples. The gaming experience expands a great deal when the gaming developers try to target a wider market.
the whole "ideology" argument is just a try hard interpretation trying to push politic and racism discussion into what is pure entertainment?
NOTHING is "pure entertainment." Everything we do has a social significance. It may not be one that you're aware of, but it's always there, making judgments about the kinds of world-views that are correct and the kinds that aren't, what kinds of solutions to problems are reasonable or conceivable and what aren't....well, okay, I take that back. You might be able to make the case that something like Tetris has no political content. Still, almost any game with a plot or story or characters will have some kind of message involved.
I know, right? Just like how clothing totally doesn't carry any meanings. Like, if I want to wear all black, with tons of eyeliner, and fishnet stockings on my arms, that doesn't mean anything; or if I wanted to run around wearing an armband, say, or some white sheets, it's not like that could have any political meaning, right?
These are things called "social signifiers." Sarcasm aside, I understand this is something that's tough to get a handle on for solidly logical types like most geeks, but the way that we dress and act and present ourselves is part of a complex system of social messages that communicate a lot about what groups we're part of, what alliances we have, and what our beliefs are. How you present yourself is an attempt to communicate. Yes, it's illogical and arbitrary. That's the nature of human communication -- there is typically no necessary relationship between a symbol (like a word) for a thing, and the thing itself. But cultures come together and agree on certain standards, taking quite ordinary images and cultural products, and giving them symbolic meaning. That's how you know that a burning cross is not an attempt to light up your lawn nor a protest against Christianity.
Well, consider the male-female bias in protagonists. When minority (or underrepresented, women are actually a slight majority of the US population) groups are never reflected in gaming worlds (or in novels, or movies, etc.), they are being sent a message that this genre of entertainment is completely unconcerned with them, and as a result, they tune out. This narrows the focus of game development, as marketers perceive that they're only selling to the main (overrepresented) group, and that puts a big squeeze on the types of games that get developed, as the industry becomes increasingly devoted to whatever interests white fourteen-year-old boys.
That's not to say that women don't like Halo, but the narrower the market, the more marginalized its participants and the more narrow the range of products offered for the market. Having nonmale, nonwhite gamers increases the range of games available, which gives you more variety in what you can choose to play.
That wouldn't matter. All that would do is say that the chain of legal ownership got broken from whatever source he bought the software. If the license is not transferable by sale, then "I bought it to resell" has no more validity than "the software fall off the back of a truck."
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.
You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.
Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).
Sorry to burst the trans-humanist bubble, but human life is uniquely bound to biology, just as we humans are uniquely bound to Earth in ways we are not aware enough of to even begin to understand. There is something precious and irreplaceable in the ability of a human mind to experience its lived environment, and pretending to be a robot (whether that's putting all one's focus into the numbers, or spending twelve hours a day in a basement on slashdot) is a waste of that precious ability to experience the world with the finite lives we have.
Granted, liberals are tearing all that down and replacing it with the sort of self indulgent crap that invariably leads to a sense of entitlement about property and ultimately a dictatorship class, but, they haven't been successful yet.
Right. North Korea and Iran got where they are because of EVUL LIBRULS. Name one single society in which property entitlement from a progressively wealthier population led to a totalitarian dictatorship.
Anyway, the GP was commenting about news media. Someone's come up with a creepy spying technology that involves 1) doing BIZARRE MIND CONTROL on living things (near as I can tell, site is/.'d) and 2) has significant anti-civil-libertarian implications. The GP pointed out, quite rightly, that the double-standard which exists in journalism says that when we do it, it's gee-whiz tech, but if a State Enemy did it, we'd be seeing scare stories (if we saw anything at all), talking about how we're the targets, instead of the domestic population that probably would be. None of that's to defend the DPRK or Iran (though really, the political situations in those two are NOT commensurate), just to point out that nobody seems to be questioning the creepy-factor of TIA-now-improved-with-swarms-of-flyspies! Do we *really* think the same people who passed the PATRIOT Act and still carry out illegal wiretaps can be trusted to use this technology responsibly?
You can attempt not to do business with them. Beyond a certain point, you will need government intervention to avoid being affected by things they do in their interactions with others. (Take the big cockeyed mess that investment banks made of the economy recently, ferinstance, or various kinds of pollution, sudden investment-capital flight from developing countries... you can come up with a ton of examples if you think about it.)
There also needs to be a middle ground between "being a slave to the all-powerful service provider" and "living alone in the mountains." I mean, you can choose to ignore part of the government by, say, forgoing a driver's license and getting everywhere by walking or biking; you can avoid doing business with some mega-corps. But you can't dodge all of either group.
If you fail to perform due diligence by reading the contract before signing it, and refusing to sign unless you agree, then your troubles are your own doing and you have no cause for complaint.
This is a classic response, but I'm talking about things like cell phone contracts. Or (the big doozy) private health insurance. It winds up being a choice between giving up your rights, or going to live off grid in the mountains. Neither's a good option. The right answer is to use the power we can vote for (government) to place sensible limits on the power we can't (business).
If a "private corporation" did any of those things it would, by definition, be the government.
This is a surpassingly excellent logic, impenetrably circular. You've just said "any entity which carries out oppressive acts is a government, therefore government is the sole source of oppression." Okay. Meanwhile, here in the Real World, I acknowledge that I have vastly inferior rights and power in the marketplace. I am no longer capable of engaging in any realistic bargain with any of the purveyors of modern progress. You can do without cable (which I do), but what about when it comes to medicines? What about when you're doing something which you're within your rights to do (like the guy selling the books in the GGP) and someone with more money can use the threat of a lawsuit to harass you into ceding your rights? What about when it builds a shopping mall across your street and destroys your property values, or starts blaring a siren at four in the morning on weekends? Money is power; and all power can be used unjustly, whether it's government power or not.
Suppose it crosses legal boundaries. Say you're a holdout who won't sell your home property to it. Say it starts a campaign of harassment, sending people to slash your tires, vandalize your house, scare your children. What will you do now? Well, that's illegal of course! But if that's your argument, you've just conceded that you need government to enforce just relations between market entities. Once you've admitted that, there's nothing left to stand on; you need the authority of a group larger than yourself in order to create parity in negotiating conditions. (Yes, I'm aware that most Libertarian philosophies accept the role of a government that protects property rights and prevents theft. They're just blinded to the other good things governments are capable of doing, when run wisely.)
When was the last time you got to vote on your neighbor's internal decorating?
Cute. When was the last time your neighbor's decorating affected your life in any way? (Although if you have a homeowner's association, you just might have some neighborhood two-bit Napoleon limiting your decorating freedom, but I digress.) Meanwhile, there are all kinds of problems that large businesses can cause for citizens, even ones who have no market interaction with the company at all.
So long as they remain merely a corporation and not a government, or other form of criminal organization, there is no just reason to allow you to veto their choices. If they do cross that line, anyone affected by their aggression has an absolute right to veto said choices, no voting required.
Wonderful! I have an absolute right to veto the choices of an institution that is infinitely more powerful than I am. The mice have the right to put a bell on the cat... eh bien? Even the biggest majority I can put together would get swept aside by these folks, exactly what happens outside the safe world of western democracy, where companies do have private armies and aren't shy about using them.
Slashdot Mirror
you've got a device that you don't need to connect to a plug. Ever.
Unless, y'know, it's cloudy one day.
Inane example yes
Your case will be much better supported with a non-inane example.
I'm not just being nitpicky here; see if you can come up with one. If you can't, maybe that says something about your position, no?
Er, not to mention that the claim was valid, even if the documents weren't.
Dan Rather got dinged because he cited the wrong source in his proof that objects fall to Earth, which happened to be politically unpopular at the time...
Seriously. I voted for the guy, and I have very mixed views about his performance so far -- he definitely doesn't deserve this.
The epic fail is yours, my friend. I understood your point; the problem with it is your arrogant conclusions, which are both wrongheaded and naive.
You claim people are deeply flawed nonsensical beings because we
associate irrelevant traits to our fears so that we hopefully can avoid them no matter the cost
If you really think that, you're a fool. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason people think you're a neo-nazi if you dress like Adolf Hitler is because most people who dress like Hitler are neo-nazis?? That the reason neo-nazis dress like that is to tell the world they're neo-nazis? That this isn't some knee-jerk fear response, but a conscious reaction to a conscious message?
Social signifiers are an attempt to communicate. People react to the intended message.
Now, obviously sometimes messages get conveyed that were not intended; maybe people take you for a poser when your biker jacket is actually just really comfortable. That's a valid point; these are not always unambiguous messages. But for you to dismiss the importance, the meaning, of cultural signifiers, and scoff at the vast majority of people who understand and react to their meanings, is really nothing but ignorance on your part.
People are not arbitrarily overreacting, as you described in your post. All our actions are communication, with symbolic meaning. Cultural signifiers, including the ones you mention, are conscious attempts to communicate a message, and it is not at all silly or foolish or a character flaw to pay attention to those meanings.
Great point -- I'd hold up the success of stuff like Guitar Hero and Rock Band as additional examples. The gaming experience expands a great deal when the gaming developers try to target a wider market.
the whole "ideology" argument is just a try hard interpretation trying to push politic and racism discussion into what is pure entertainment?
NOTHING is "pure entertainment." Everything we do has a social significance. It may not be one that you're aware of, but it's always there, making judgments about the kinds of world-views that are correct and the kinds that aren't, what kinds of solutions to problems are reasonable or conceivable and what aren't. ...well, okay, I take that back. You might be able to make the case that something like Tetris has no political content. Still, almost any game with a plot or story or characters will have some kind of message involved.
I know, right? Just like how clothing totally doesn't carry any meanings. Like, if I want to wear all black, with tons of eyeliner, and fishnet stockings on my arms, that doesn't mean anything; or if I wanted to run around wearing an armband, say, or some white sheets, it's not like that could have any political meaning, right?
These are things called "social signifiers." Sarcasm aside, I understand this is something that's tough to get a handle on for solidly logical types like most geeks, but the way that we dress and act and present ourselves is part of a complex system of social messages that communicate a lot about what groups we're part of, what alliances we have, and what our beliefs are. How you present yourself is an attempt to communicate. Yes, it's illogical and arbitrary. That's the nature of human communication -- there is typically no necessary relationship between a symbol (like a word) for a thing, and the thing itself. But cultures come together and agree on certain standards, taking quite ordinary images and cultural products, and giving them symbolic meaning. That's how you know that a burning cross is not an attempt to light up your lawn nor a protest against Christianity.
Well, consider the male-female bias in protagonists.
When minority (or underrepresented, women are actually a slight majority of the US population) groups are never reflected in gaming worlds (or in novels, or movies, etc.), they are being sent a message that this genre of entertainment is completely unconcerned with them, and as a result, they tune out. This narrows the focus of game development, as marketers perceive that they're only selling to the main (overrepresented) group, and that puts a big squeeze on the types of games that get developed, as the industry becomes increasingly devoted to whatever interests white fourteen-year-old boys.
That's not to say that women don't like Halo, but the narrower the market, the more marginalized its participants and the more narrow the range of products offered for the market. Having nonmale, nonwhite gamers increases the range of games available, which gives you more variety in what you can choose to play.
That wouldn't matter. All that would do is say that the chain of legal ownership got broken from whatever source he bought the software. If the license is not transferable by sale, then "I bought it to resell" has no more validity than "the software fall off the back of a truck."
bleeding hearts are responsible for the national debt
Actually, you're wrong.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.
You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.
Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).
Ah yes, good catch. I've made that point myself on several occasions, but we all slip up every now and then.
"wankers"
trying to turn themselves into machines
What more admirable goal could one have?
Living as a human being, of course.
Sorry to burst the trans-humanist bubble, but human life is uniquely bound to biology, just as we humans are uniquely bound to Earth in ways we are not aware enough of to even begin to understand. There is something precious and irreplaceable in the ability of a human mind to experience its lived environment, and pretending to be a robot (whether that's putting all one's focus into the numbers, or spending twelve hours a day in a basement on slashdot) is a waste of that precious ability to experience the world with the finite lives we have.
Well, the trick is, in his country, all diabetics have health insurance.
But what will the meta-mods think??
Granted, liberals are tearing all that down and replacing it with the sort of self indulgent crap that invariably leads to a sense of entitlement about property and ultimately a dictatorship class, but, they haven't been successful yet.
Right. North Korea and Iran got where they are because of EVUL LIBRULS. Name one single society in which property entitlement from a progressively wealthier population led to a totalitarian dictatorship.
Anyway, the GP was commenting about news media. Someone's come up with a creepy spying technology that involves 1) doing BIZARRE MIND CONTROL on living things (near as I can tell, site is /.'d) and 2) has significant anti-civil-libertarian implications. The GP pointed out, quite rightly, that the double-standard which exists in journalism says that when we do it, it's gee-whiz tech, but if a State Enemy did it, we'd be seeing scare stories (if we saw anything at all), talking about how we're the targets, instead of the domestic population that probably would be.
None of that's to defend the DPRK or Iran (though really, the political situations in those two are NOT commensurate), just to point out that nobody seems to be questioning the creepy-factor of TIA-now-improved-with-swarms-of-flyspies! Do we *really* think the same people who passed the PATRIOT Act and still carry out illegal wiretaps can be trusted to use this technology responsibly?
...so it wasn't good for you?
Um... if you think that creating private property is a form of socialism, you are very confused.
It's kind of cute you think their release policies are meaningfully different to anyone else's.
Their release policies are very different from, say, Debian's. Or a lot of the OSS world's. (For obvious reasons.)
Wow, I'm surprised you didn't notice that before you had the plans built... (or do you mean the architect who designed your model?)
Police/Military would probably need to get permission to use it
The way they need to get permission to wiretap your phone?
Wait, Hans Blix? The UN Head Weapons Inspector for Iraq?
Yeah, okay. Sure they're legit.
You can attempt not to do business with them. Beyond a certain point, you will need government intervention to avoid being affected by things they do in their interactions with others. (Take the big cockeyed mess that investment banks made of the economy recently, ferinstance, or various kinds of pollution, sudden investment-capital flight from developing countries... you can come up with a ton of examples if you think about it.)
There also needs to be a middle ground between "being a slave to the all-powerful service provider" and "living alone in the mountains." I mean, you can choose to ignore part of the government by, say, forgoing a driver's license and getting everywhere by walking or biking; you can avoid doing business with some mega-corps. But you can't dodge all of either group.
If you fail to perform due diligence by reading the contract before signing it, and refusing to sign unless you agree, then your troubles are your own doing and you have no cause for complaint.
This is a classic response, but I'm talking about things like cell phone contracts. Or (the big doozy) private health insurance. It winds up being a choice between giving up your rights, or going to live off grid in the mountains. Neither's a good option. The right answer is to use the power we can vote for (government) to place sensible limits on the power we can't (business).
If a "private corporation" did any of those things it would, by definition, be the government.
This is a surpassingly excellent logic, impenetrably circular. You've just said "any entity which carries out oppressive acts is a government, therefore government is the sole source of oppression." Okay.
Meanwhile, here in the Real World, I acknowledge that I have vastly inferior rights and power in the marketplace. I am no longer capable of engaging in any realistic bargain with any of the purveyors of modern progress. You can do without cable (which I do), but what about when it comes to medicines? What about when you're doing something which you're within your rights to do (like the guy selling the books in the GGP) and someone with more money can use the threat of a lawsuit to harass you into ceding your rights? What about when it builds a shopping mall across your street and destroys your property values, or starts blaring a siren at four in the morning on weekends? Money is power; and all power can be used unjustly, whether it's government power or not.
Suppose it crosses legal boundaries. Say you're a holdout who won't sell your home property to it. Say it starts a campaign of harassment, sending people to slash your tires, vandalize your house, scare your children. What will you do now? Well, that's illegal of course! But if that's your argument, you've just conceded that you need government to enforce just relations between market entities. Once you've admitted that, there's nothing left to stand on; you need the authority of a group larger than yourself in order to create parity in negotiating conditions. (Yes, I'm aware that most Libertarian philosophies accept the role of a government that protects property rights and prevents theft. They're just blinded to the other good things governments are capable of doing, when run wisely.)
When was the last time you got to vote on your neighbor's internal decorating?
Cute. When was the last time your neighbor's decorating affected your life in any way? (Although if you have a homeowner's association, you just might have some neighborhood two-bit Napoleon limiting your decorating freedom, but I digress.) Meanwhile, there are all kinds of problems that large businesses can cause for citizens, even ones who have no market interaction with the company at all.
So long as they remain merely a corporation and not a government, or other form of criminal organization, there is no just reason to allow you to veto their choices. If they do cross that line, anyone affected by their aggression has an absolute right to veto said choices, no voting required.
Wonderful! I have an absolute right to veto the choices of an institution that is infinitely more powerful than I am. The mice have the right to put a bell on the cat... eh bien? Even the biggest majority I can put together would get swept aside by these folks, exactly what happens outside the safe world of western democracy, where companies do have private armies and aren't shy about using them.