Oh give me a break. They'd get a civil judgment. You don't even have to flee the country to escape those. It's called Chapter 7 and it's the first thing I would do if I was a student facing a $10,000 judgment from RIAA. If she's like most students she probably doesn't have many assets and they are likely all be exempt. In other words she'd lose nothing but the bankruptcy filing fee and the time it took to appear at the hearing.
If that's all it takes to make her suicidal then she really needs to seek some outside help. In the grand game known as life she's going to face many challenges that are far more scary than a RIAA action. Better learn how to cope with them now.
Yes. We won't have any idea what the truth is until someone gets a copy of the federal warrants used in the raid, or until we get information that charges are being filed.
In other words, we don't know the real story and people are dreaming up uninformed speculation based on their personal political biases? I'm shocked.
*sigh*, I'm trying to make the point that you are painting with a broad brush and claiming that a handful of nutjobs speak for all (or at least most) Christians. Most of the Christians that I've come across in my lifetime aren't prudes who are afraid of nudity and want to censor porn.
As for WJTL or WDAC they may not represent the views of "all" religious types, but since they are listener-supported and consistently in the Top 5 of their region, clearly a huge majority of Christians agree with their broadcasts - which are antinudity, anti-porn, pro-God-in-government, et cetera.
Huh? Do a "huge majority" of Christians listen to these radio shows? Again, painting with the broad brush.
I always just have Mr. Scott handle the warp drive. He does the impossible instantly, miracles take longer. When Spock lends a hand, hours can seem like days...
And sometimes Spock gets radiation poisoning and indirectly gets Kirk's son murdered. All in all, much better to let Mr. Scott handle things;)
At least in the US, the house and senate typically assume the presence of a quorum unless someone calls for quorum and demonstrates that there isn't a quorum. However, any one congressman can do that
Yeah, but that doesn't always happen. The Hughes Amendment was passed on a late night voice vote when the House Chamber was virtually empty and everybody who would have opposed it was gone for the night. Isn't Democracy grand?
There's no punishment here. As I stated before, a child that manages to obtain an 80th percentile score when he went to a school that didn't even have a book for him to study has proven far more work ethic, persistence, and dedication to academia than his counterpart with the same score that wen to a school for which the only cause of poor performance is his own lack and shortcomings.
There you go again, making assumptions that the kid from the better school should have to do better in order to prove himself. You just can't bring yourself to admit that you are giving an artificial advantage to one person at the expense of another, can you? Frankly I'm not even sure that it's Constitutional, given the equal protection requirements of the 14th amendment.
Grades alone have never been the sole determining factor of a student's admittance . A student with a 3.8 but a long list of extracurricular activities, community service, and sports is often chosen over the 4.0 student with nothing else to show. Why is it so absurd to recognize the diverse achievements of low income students as well?
It's absurd because you are giving an artificial advantage to someone based on criteria that nobody has any control over. The student who took part in all of those extracurricular activities earned extra consideration. The student who didn't take part in those activities made a choice not to do so.
Education is already centralized to some extent.
And therein lies the problem, as far as I'm concerned.
And yes, it is absolutely intentional. The high income neighborhoods with a more direct access to the law makers push very hard to maintain the status quo. And these laws have the same end effect on that population's participation in education as jim crow did on their participation in government.
I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously if you are going to play the 'Jim Crow' card. Lower income neighborhoods have the same representation that higher income neighborhoods do. In many cases I've seen representatives from inner city neighbors that are more responsive to their constituents than those from the suburbs. Your main complaint would seem to be that the higher income neighborhoods fight for the "status quo" against your alternative of increased wealth redistribution and a more centralized education system.
Has it occurred to you that we already throw ridiculous amounts of money at our educational system and yet we never seem to manage to improve it? We spend more per student than almost every other nation in the World, yet in test scores we rank behind nations that spend considerably less than we do. What does that tell you?
From what I've seen in my time in the human services field, bureaucracy and special interests do at least as much damage (if not more so) to the educational prospects of disadvantaged youth as any lack of funding. Families get lost trying to navigate a system that was ostensibly created to help them but in the end winds up serving it's own agenda. Schools aren't allowed to punish unruly students that disrupt the classroom, preventing those who want to learn from actually being able to do so. Teachers unions are so entrenched that they refuse to consider any meaningful reform of the educational system that calls for increased accountability. Special needs students wind up with more resources devoted to them than gifted ones. Schools wind up teaching to standardized tests instead of subject matter.
None of these problems have anything to do with money. They have everything to do with a bloated bureaucracy that will only be made worse by more centralized control.
But if we could provide that benefit without taking the opportunity from someone else, it would be a good start.
No, that's not a good start, because you are still choosing to give special treatment to some selected group. You are attempting to make up for past (or even ongoing) injustices by creating more injustice. Personally, I don't regard that as a particularly good idea.
I think the best way to approach the issue is to focus on socio economic class rather than race.
So the person who isn't from a disadvantaged socio-economic class gets punished if he winds up with the same scores as someone who is and is competing for a limited resource? How the hell is that fair?
Universities already adjust for this to a degree, but I think the degree should be more
And I think it should be less.
For example, few people know that the vast majority of a public school's funding comes from local property taxes.
What do you mean "few" people know this? Virtually everybody who owns property is aware of this. Why are you assuming that most people don't realize this simple fact?
The consequence is that poor neighborhoods have shitty schools which provide shitty k-12 education placing the students at an inherent disadvantage and increasing the likelihood that they'll remain poor.
So what do you want to do about it? Further centralize the educational system and make it even less accountable to the people that it's meant to serve?
Another good start would be eliminating Jim Crow'sh type laws that still exist today in the realm of education
Hyperbole much?
These practices are no different than the districting and forced segregation that happened just a couple of decades ago, though the target is "the poor" that just so happens to be a vastly black demographic.
There's no "target". The concept is one of local responsbility. You may disagree with that concept and think the system should be more centralized -- that's fine, but to make the analogy with Jim Crow and imply that it's done deliberately doesn't seem particularly honest to me.
But if it were possible to guarantee a free ride to every black child to a first class college
Because that won't create any resentment whatsoever among the 90% of the population that isn't getting such treatment. Let's give special treatment to a specific subset of the population because of past injustices and ignore the injustices created in current times by doing so. What could possibly go wrong?
But your indignation is misplaced, misguided, and misinformed.
Because I don't favor special treatment to make up for past injustices? Guilty as charged I guess.
Given that "special" was used as double-speak meaning things like one-sided extradition treaties, and us following the US into a dubious war
Oh, quit your whining, we followed you into a dubious war a long time ago that could have been avoided if Chamberlain had some backbone. The United States as a non-interventionist country quite content to worry about things on our side of the pond until you had to go and bankrupt the Empire and upset the geopolitical world order. Can't you see how this is all your fault?
He doesn't have the leisure time to think about all of the nuances of foreign relations and doesn't have the general experience to know all of it either
If only there was a department of some sort that specialized in diplomatic protocol and niceties.......
I have yet to see any Afro-Americans demanding apologies from Africans, let alone reparations.
Because they don't have any money. That's what it's all about at the end of the day. I've yet to understand how giving money to the descendants of slaves repairs the damage that was done by the slave trade, but there you go.
My bloodline includes Native American, Polish, Jewish and German ancestry (typical American mutt here I suppose). When do I get my rent check for this nice continent my ancestors "gave" you? When do I get my check from Germany for all the damage done to my Polish and Jewish ancestors? When do I get my check from the British and Americans to make up for Dresden?
I preferred him back when his main focus was on pointing out the hypocrisy/stupidity of the political system/media and not on sharing his own political viewpoints. The old Jon Stewart would have mocked a celebrity who used his platform to espouse his own political viewpoints.
Or make sensible rules, like we have for stamps and money, that we only name things for people dead long enough to have stable reputations. (gee, maybe that would help in other contexts as well . ..)
Yeah, like naming our multi-billion dollar warships. Apparently most of them should be named after late 20th century Presidents instead of war heroes, famous battles, etc. *sigh*
Yeah, Christians all have a "common book". So what? Commodore is making sweeping generalizations about "religious types", claiming that "they" fear nudity and "they" claim the US is a godless nation. Then he claims that you can learn how "they" think by listening to the radio. Hmm......
You don't even need to attend church - just spend a few days listening to religious radio like WJTL.com or WDAC.com - research and learn how they truly think.
That's like saying Keith Olbermann is representative of all Liberals.....
It opens up the reasonable line of argument that restrictions on weapons not used in militia service does not interfere with the reason for the right to bear arms.
Handguns and so-called "assault rifles" aren't useful for militia service? You are making some interesting arguments but they aren't grounded in what the gun control lobby is trying to do.
It's similar to, "Because people sometimes experience pain, possession of morphine shall be legal." It's not unreasonable to suggest that possession of morphine for purposes other than pain relief may be restricted without interfering with the original objective of the rule
If my taking of morphine isn't going to place my neighbors in harms way or somehow decrease the utility of the drug (i.e: antibiotics that are misused lead to the development of drug resistant bacteria) then why exactly is it "reasonable" to regulate the possession of it? What part of the Constitution gives the Government a veto over the substances that I can put into my body?
Are all rights really important enough to call civil liberties?
Yes, they are.
Is there nothing that an individual can physically do that the government has no right to curtail?
No, the government has no right to curtail my actions until they endanger someone else. The government can stop me from swinging my fist into your face but it can't stop me from swinging my fist.
Correction: They work against what you believe is the foundational civil liberty. They don't agree with you. The fact that your opinion and their opinion differ is not hypocrisy
You don't see the hypocrisy in fighting for as broad of a reading of the Constitution as possible except for one part? They fight for rights that aren't even mentioned in the document (the right to privacy) under this theory but the one part of the document that they don't like doesn't get the same treatment? That doesn't seem just a little bit hypocritical to you?
Do you think it is a fundamental right that I can possess, for example, a bomb large enough to destroy the city I live in?
Historically the right to keep and bear arms originated in the Common Law concept of self-defense. It has also been required at varying points throughout history so that the people could serve the state in times of need. I don't think even the hardest core 2nd amendment supporter could make the case that you need a nuclear weapon for self-defense or service of your state in times of need.
it is only a matter of degree to argue that a fully automatic weapon, say, can be banned without violating civil rights.
If it was only automatic weapons they wanted to ban you wouldn't have as many people complaining about it. Instead they want to ban semi-automatic "assault rifles" (which are no more powerful than the typical semi-automatic hunting rifle and whose main difference seems to be that they look scary), handguns, high capacity magazines, etc, etc. Every single one of those items has a legitimate purpose for self-defense, service to the state and other (hunting/target shooting/etc) purposes. Hell, one could make the argument that fully automatic weapons have legitimate purposes too and it's a bit of a stretch between a fully automatic MP-5 and your nuclear weapon example.
Obama bailing out the auto industry and trying to fix health care is the path to socialism, but spying on Americans without due process and then trying to forbid them from talking to an attorney, you're okay with that.
Why do you assume that someone who is opposed to the former must be in favor of the latter?
it has got to be pretty clear by now that no one in Washington has the balls to even utter the word "treason" -- which is effectively what the blatant ignorance of the Supreme Law of the Land amounts to [truthout.org]
*sigh*, is it just me or do people throw around the 'T' word way too easily around here? Perhaps the Founding Fathers were right to define it in the Constitution so it wouldn't be abused.....
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Oh give me a break. They'd get a civil judgment. You don't even have to flee the country to escape those. It's called Chapter 7 and it's the first thing I would do if I was a student facing a $10,000 judgment from RIAA. If she's like most students she probably doesn't have many assets and they are likely all be exempt. In other words she'd lose nothing but the bankruptcy filing fee and the time it took to appear at the hearing.
If that's all it takes to make her suicidal then she really needs to seek some outside help. In the grand game known as life she's going to face many challenges that are far more scary than a RIAA action. Better learn how to cope with them now.
Yes. We won't have any idea what the truth is until someone gets a copy of the federal warrants used in the raid, or until we get information that charges are being filed.
In other words, we don't know the real story and people are dreaming up uninformed speculation based on their personal political biases? I'm shocked.
*sigh*, I'm trying to make the point that you are painting with a broad brush and claiming that a handful of nutjobs speak for all (or at least most) Christians. Most of the Christians that I've come across in my lifetime aren't prudes who are afraid of nudity and want to censor porn.
As for WJTL or WDAC they may not represent the views of "all" religious types, but since they are listener-supported and consistently in the Top 5 of their region, clearly a huge majority of Christians agree with their broadcasts - which are antinudity, anti-porn, pro-God-in-government, et cetera.
Huh? Do a "huge majority" of Christians listen to these radio shows? Again, painting with the broad brush.
Pretty sure reality TV's sole purpose is destroying my faith in humanity
Fixed that for you.
I always just have Mr. Scott handle the warp drive. He does the impossible instantly, miracles take longer. When Spock lends a hand, hours can seem like days...
And sometimes Spock gets radiation poisoning and indirectly gets Kirk's son murdered. All in all, much better to let Mr. Scott handle things ;)
At least in the US, the house and senate typically assume the presence of a quorum unless someone calls for quorum and demonstrates that there isn't a quorum. However, any one congressman can do that
Yeah, but that doesn't always happen. The Hughes Amendment was passed on a late night voice vote when the House Chamber was virtually empty and everybody who would have opposed it was gone for the night. Isn't Democracy grand?
There's no punishment here. As I stated before, a child that manages to obtain an 80th percentile score when he went to a school that didn't even have a book for him to study has proven far more work ethic, persistence, and dedication to academia than his counterpart with the same score that wen to a school for which the only cause of poor performance is his own lack and shortcomings.
There you go again, making assumptions that the kid from the better school should have to do better in order to prove himself. You just can't bring yourself to admit that you are giving an artificial advantage to one person at the expense of another, can you? Frankly I'm not even sure that it's Constitutional, given the equal protection requirements of the 14th amendment.
Grades alone have never been the sole determining factor of a student's admittance . A student with a 3.8 but a long list of extracurricular activities, community service, and sports is often chosen over the 4.0 student with nothing else to show. Why is it so absurd to recognize the diverse achievements of low income students as well?
It's absurd because you are giving an artificial advantage to someone based on criteria that nobody has any control over. The student who took part in all of those extracurricular activities earned extra consideration. The student who didn't take part in those activities made a choice not to do so.
Education is already centralized to some extent.
And therein lies the problem, as far as I'm concerned.
And yes, it is absolutely intentional. The high income neighborhoods with a more direct access to the law makers push very hard to maintain the status quo. And these laws have the same end effect on that population's participation in education as jim crow did on their participation in government.
I'm sorry but I can't take you seriously if you are going to play the 'Jim Crow' card. Lower income neighborhoods have the same representation that higher income neighborhoods do. In many cases I've seen representatives from inner city neighbors that are more responsive to their constituents than those from the suburbs. Your main complaint would seem to be that the higher income neighborhoods fight for the "status quo" against your alternative of increased wealth redistribution and a more centralized education system.
Has it occurred to you that we already throw ridiculous amounts of money at our educational system and yet we never seem to manage to improve it? We spend more per student than almost every other nation in the World, yet in test scores we rank behind nations that spend considerably less than we do. What does that tell you?
From what I've seen in my time in the human services field, bureaucracy and special interests do at least as much damage (if not more so) to the educational prospects of disadvantaged youth as any lack of funding. Families get lost trying to navigate a system that was ostensibly created to help them but in the end winds up serving it's own agenda. Schools aren't allowed to punish unruly students that disrupt the classroom, preventing those who want to learn from actually being able to do so. Teachers unions are so entrenched that they refuse to consider any meaningful reform of the educational system that calls for increased accountability. Special needs students wind up with more resources devoted to them than gifted ones. Schools wind up teaching to standardized tests instead of subject matter.
None of these problems have anything to do with money. They have everything to do with a bloated bureaucracy that will only be made worse by more centralized control.
I was going for sarcasm with my post but perhaps you weren't aware of the fact that the US was already fighting the Germans before Pearl Harbor?
But if we could provide that benefit without taking the opportunity from someone else, it would be a good start.
No, that's not a good start, because you are still choosing to give special treatment to some selected group. You are attempting to make up for past (or even ongoing) injustices by creating more injustice. Personally, I don't regard that as a particularly good idea.
I think the best way to approach the issue is to focus on socio economic class rather than race.
So the person who isn't from a disadvantaged socio-economic class gets punished if he winds up with the same scores as someone who is and is competing for a limited resource? How the hell is that fair?
Universities already adjust for this to a degree, but I think the degree should be more
And I think it should be less.
For example, few people know that the vast majority of a public school's funding comes from local property taxes.
What do you mean "few" people know this? Virtually everybody who owns property is aware of this. Why are you assuming that most people don't realize this simple fact?
The consequence is that poor neighborhoods have shitty schools which provide shitty k-12 education placing the students at an inherent disadvantage and increasing the likelihood that they'll remain poor.
So what do you want to do about it? Further centralize the educational system and make it even less accountable to the people that it's meant to serve?
Another good start would be eliminating Jim Crow'sh type laws that still exist today in the realm of education
Hyperbole much?
These practices are no different than the districting and forced segregation that happened just a couple of decades ago, though the target is "the poor" that just so happens to be a vastly black demographic.
There's no "target". The concept is one of local responsbility. You may disagree with that concept and think the system should be more centralized -- that's fine, but to make the analogy with Jim Crow and imply that it's done deliberately doesn't seem particularly honest to me.
But if it were possible to guarantee a free ride to every black child to a first class college
Because that won't create any resentment whatsoever among the 90% of the population that isn't getting such treatment. Let's give special treatment to a specific subset of the population because of past injustices and ignore the injustices created in current times by doing so. What could possibly go wrong?
But your indignation is misplaced, misguided, and misinformed.
Because I don't favor special treatment to make up for past injustices? Guilty as charged I guess.
Given that "special" was used as double-speak meaning things like one-sided extradition treaties, and us following the US into a dubious war
Oh, quit your whining, we followed you into a dubious war a long time ago that could have been avoided if Chamberlain had some backbone. The United States as a non-interventionist country quite content to worry about things on our side of the pond until you had to go and bankrupt the Empire and upset the geopolitical world order. Can't you see how this is all your fault?
He doesn't have the leisure time to think about all of the nuances of foreign relations and doesn't have the general experience to know all of it either
If only there was a department of some sort that specialized in diplomatic protocol and niceties.......
I have yet to see any Afro-Americans demanding apologies from Africans, let alone reparations.
Because they don't have any money. That's what it's all about at the end of the day. I've yet to understand how giving money to the descendants of slaves repairs the damage that was done by the slave trade, but there you go.
My bloodline includes Native American, Polish, Jewish and German ancestry (typical American mutt here I suppose). When do I get my rent check for this nice continent my ancestors "gave" you? When do I get my check from Germany for all the damage done to my Polish and Jewish ancestors? When do I get my check from the British and Americans to make up for Dresden?
I prefer the more sober John Stewart
I preferred him back when his main focus was on pointing out the hypocrisy/stupidity of the political system/media and not on sharing his own political viewpoints. The old Jon Stewart would have mocked a celebrity who used his platform to espouse his own political viewpoints.
Or make sensible rules, like we have for stamps and money, that we only name things for people dead long enough to have stable reputations. (gee, maybe that would help in other contexts as well . . .)
Yeah, like naming our multi-billion dollar warships. Apparently most of them should be named after late 20th century Presidents instead of war heroes, famous battles, etc. *sigh*
Yeah, Christians all have a "common book". So what? Commodore is making sweeping generalizations about "religious types", claiming that "they" fear nudity and "they" claim the US is a godless nation. Then he claims that you can learn how "they" think by listening to the radio. Hmm......
They fear nudity.
Who is this 'they' you speak of?
You don't even need to attend church - just spend a few days listening to religious radio like WJTL.com or WDAC.com - research and learn how they truly think.
That's like saying Keith Olbermann is representative of all Liberals.....
You don't "have" to provide your SSN to anyone
So when I file my tax return without the SSN the IRS won't give me any grief?
It opens up the reasonable line of argument that restrictions on weapons not used in militia service does not interfere with the reason for the right to bear arms.
Handguns and so-called "assault rifles" aren't useful for militia service? You are making some interesting arguments but they aren't grounded in what the gun control lobby is trying to do.
It's similar to, "Because people sometimes experience pain, possession of morphine shall be legal." It's not unreasonable to suggest that possession of morphine for purposes other than pain relief may be restricted without interfering with the original objective of the rule
If my taking of morphine isn't going to place my neighbors in harms way or somehow decrease the utility of the drug (i.e: antibiotics that are misused lead to the development of drug resistant bacteria) then why exactly is it "reasonable" to regulate the possession of it? What part of the Constitution gives the Government a veto over the substances that I can put into my body?
Are all rights really important enough to call civil liberties?
Yes, they are.
Is there nothing that an individual can physically do that the government has no right to curtail?
No, the government has no right to curtail my actions until they endanger someone else. The government can stop me from swinging my fist into your face but it can't stop me from swinging my fist.
Correction: They work against what you believe is the foundational civil liberty. They don't agree with you. The fact that your opinion and their opinion differ is not hypocrisy
You don't see the hypocrisy in fighting for as broad of a reading of the Constitution as possible except for one part? They fight for rights that aren't even mentioned in the document (the right to privacy) under this theory but the one part of the document that they don't like doesn't get the same treatment? That doesn't seem just a little bit hypocritical to you?
Do you think it is a fundamental right that I can possess, for example, a bomb large enough to destroy the city I live in?
Historically the right to keep and bear arms originated in the Common Law concept of self-defense. It has also been required at varying points throughout history so that the people could serve the state in times of need. I don't think even the hardest core 2nd amendment supporter could make the case that you need a nuclear weapon for self-defense or service of your state in times of need.
it is only a matter of degree to argue that a fully automatic weapon, say, can be banned without violating civil rights.
If it was only automatic weapons they wanted to ban you wouldn't have as many people complaining about it. Instead they want to ban semi-automatic "assault rifles" (which are no more powerful than the typical semi-automatic hunting rifle and whose main difference seems to be that they look scary), handguns, high capacity magazines, etc, etc. Every single one of those items has a legitimate purpose for self-defense, service to the state and other (hunting/target shooting/etc) purposes. Hell, one could make the argument that fully automatic weapons have legitimate purposes too and it's a bit of a stretch between a fully automatic MP-5 and your nuclear weapon example.
Bolding the part you like doesn't make the part that says "the right of the people" go away.
Obama bailing out the auto industry and trying to fix health care is the path to socialism, but spying on Americans without due process and then trying to forbid them from talking to an attorney, you're okay with that.
Why do you assume that someone who is opposed to the former must be in favor of the latter?
it has got to be pretty clear by now that no one in Washington has the balls to even utter the word "treason" -- which is effectively what the blatant ignorance of the Supreme Law of the Land amounts to [truthout.org]
*sigh*, is it just me or do people throw around the 'T' word way too easily around here? Perhaps the Founding Fathers were right to define it in the Constitution so it wouldn't be abused.....