The trickier cases are things where a student wishes to lead other students in a prayer before a school event. Or have a moment of silence during which they could pray.
The "separation of church and state" thinking would ban students from doing these things, even when the state had no control over the prayer choices.
It's one thing to be free of state-mandated religion, it's another for the religion of other students to be actively suppressed by the state.
I don't see why, for instance, before a school event all the people who want to can't go have a prayer together in one spot. And why the people who want a different prayer couldn't go have their own prayer on another spot. Or have a moment of silence, or chat about the weather, or whatever.
Yet we've had courts ban such things in the name of "separation of church and state", which seems rather different than what the Founders intended.
It seems to come down to vocal minorities not wanting the majority to be free to exercise their faith in the public sphere, lest the minority feel left out. But coercing the majority to not exercise their religion isn't any better than coercing the minority into another religion.
We need to have tolerance both ways. Let people pray, or not pray, as they themselves see fit.
Honestly, apart from the fact you (presumably) like the choices the Texas School Board is making, I can't see the difference.
The only difference I can see is scale (one nationwide decision vs state-by-state decisions).
The sad thing about this whole controversy is how many people seem to assume the status quo is free from bias.
It's not. It never was, and never will be. History is a story we tell about the past based on our imperfect knowledge and our cultural biases, even when we do our best to be objective. Which is why in the US we view our Founding Fathers as courageous freedom fighters rather than opportunistic, treasonous rebels (same facts, different viewpoint!).
I don't necessarily agree with certain of the Texas changes (I've only read some of the 78 pages of the diffs).
But maybe some good will come of the controversy. Maybe students and parents will be reminded that history, like real life, isn't black and white. That multiple viewpoints exist (and that even a dominant viewpoint may be later reconsidered). Certainly I think they've been reminded that history classes have limited time, and deciding what parts of history make the cut is a subjective but societally important set of decisions.
Don't you want your "coders" to be "software engineers"? After all, if they don't understand the practice of software engineering, the software they develop is going to be a nightmare to maintain.
Before we had laws to protect people, it was like that. people could hire and fire for any reason. This lead to sweat shops and people working them selves to death. No thanks, I perfer a decent civilization.
"Easily hired and fired" does not equate to sweatshops or other abuse.
In many parts of the United States, employment is "at will", meaning either the employer or employee may chose to terminate the relationship at any time. The employer could be a great company. The employee could be a great employee. But if the relationship is no longer a good fit, in the judgment of either party, they go their separate ways.
Of course there are some basic laws against discrimination on basis of race, sex, religion, etc. Thus we have civilization without the excessive employment rules imposed by entities such as unions.
This seems to me better than requiring someone to work poorly to be fired. If an organization needs only half as many workers as it used to (maybe it lost a large customer) it seems wrong to require it to maintain its previous level of staff just because nobody was a bad employee. That just makes companies reluctant to hire anybody to begin with, because they know they won't be able to adjust downwards when necessary. That reluctance to hire inhibits companies' growth and fosters unemployment problems in the workforce.
Pretending those particular parents are the only ones footing the bill for the school is lunacy.
I don't claim that only those particular parents are footing the bill. Simply that they are one of the stakeholders and as such have a right to challenge policies they believe to be counterproductive or disproportionate to the "offense". I agree with you that there are other stakeholders who also have valid interests.
As for the janitorial argument, I could see some benefits from limiting gum (less so hard candy), but I didn't see any mention of such a motivation in the article. Rather, the school district claimed it was enforcing an alleged state rule against non-nutritious foods.
Respect must be earned, it is not automatically granted to anyone with power. When a school (like any other government entity) abuses that power, it invites scorn and disrespect for its authority.
That is not the fault of the parent. That is the fault of poor judgment by the relevant school personnel.
If the school wants to earn some respect, it could have apologized for its obviously overzealous behavior, and promised to use better judgment in the future. That would have shown some maturity and provided a good example to the student body for how to behave when you make a mistake.
The school is not free. It is paid by the parents' tax dollars, and as such they absolutely have a right to challenge a school's misguided policy.
There is also a huge difference between ensuring that that a child is not malnourished/abused, and banning any sort of sweets in that child's lunch. As long as the lunch is nutritious, inclusion of a piece of candy or other treat is not something the school should be involved in. They are there to educate the kids, not to usurp parental authority.
The school would have done better to simply send the parents a note stating that the child received candy from a friend. That allows the parents to take whatever action they feel appropriate. If the parents want the school to help them ensure their child doesn't eat candy, that's fine. But the school should not be allowed to override the parents' wishes as long as the parents' wishes are not abusive, which including a Jolly Rancher clearly is not.
WikiLeaks claims they decrypted the material. While that's certainly possible, we have no way to know if this is true. They might have received it unencrypted, but made these assertions (including the Internet posts requesting supercomputer time) to throw investigators off-track.
I've read several classics precisely because they're supposedly classics.
Sometimes they're great. Sometimes... they're not. Not just in terms of "did I like it", but "could I find notable artistic merit".
It reminds me of the studies about how people evaluate the taste of wine. If you put the same wine in two bottles, and tell people one is a $5 bottle, and the other is a $50 bottle, the tasters will rave about the delicacies of the "$50" wine and pan the "$5" wine. Even though it's the same wine
I've come to the conclusion "classic" works of art have the same phenomenon. Some really are great works. Others just got a nice label at some point in history and nobody's bold enough to admit the "classic" is just average.
Reviews like these conflate the writers opinion with some kind of consensus opinion that has formed over time and usually built from thoughtful consideration of the subject
Agreed that any one person's opinion is not going to be definitive.
But I think you over-estimate how much thoughtful consideration goes into making some works "classic". IMO there's a fair amount of groupthink too. After all, if you're a student, and some "expert" says X is a classic, if you come out and say "that was utter garbage", then everyone says "what the hell do you know?". Until you learn to see things the same way all the other "critics" do, at which point you become part of the club.
And there's also a bit of people reading stuff into works that the author may never have intended. There was a recent South Park episode that really hit the nail on the head with this, IMO. (I forget the episode's title, but it involves the boys writing their own controversial novel).
I don't have to love a work to recognize good craft, but there is the occasional "classic" that does kind of make you wonder what all the fuss was about. "The Catcher in the Rye" was one of those for me.
Being open about the situation and not doing what amounts to a cover-up would have helped. A statement of apology and explanation should have been made.
They didn't think they "may" have weapons, they thought they "did" have weapons. AK47s and a RPG to be specific.
If they were uncertain about that, I would totally get your argument.
But on the video, the guy who said he saw an RPG didn't say "he might have an RPG". He said the guy DID have an RPG. He stated this confidently with no ambiguity.
If you're confident the guy's got an RPG... even if he's not pointing it at you yet, he's both a potential threat and a valid target in a war zone.
Don't get me wrong - the soldiers screwed up big. But it seemed like an innocent mistake, albeit one with tragic consequences.
You know, I've looked at and appreciated a bunch of Wikileaks material before, and thus was predisposed to like them.
But then I saw how they handled this video, and I did a 180. I would've understood if they just posted the video. But the lengthy preface to the video, putting it on a site called "collateralmurder.com", the zooming/highlighting of easy-to-miss details (the benefit of which the soldiers lacked in real-time), just seemed design to prejudice us against the soldiers rather than help us determine the truth.
The truth here was the soldiers made a big mistake (identifying camera equipment as a RPG), and innocent civilians lost their lives as a result. But Wikileaks seems intent on pushing beyond that truth and into manipulating our emotions. Which is where they lost me. We don't need any more 24-hour emotion machines in this world.
I watched the whole video, and I didn't see it in the regular feed the first time through. It was only apparent when the Wikileaks people zoomed the video way in. I can see how the soldiers missed it.
"What's wrong with this" is they had mounted infantry 100m away. The gunship crew could have just called in the coordinates and had the eyeballs check it out. They might have seen that the "AK-47" was a tripod and the "RPG" was a camera lens
I disagree. For one thing, it's not like the guy who identified the "RPG" expressed any hesitation about his analysis, that would lead his comrades or superiors to request another set of eyes. He stated very clearly and confidently in the video that the individuals had RPGs.
Secondly, approaching with infantry exposes far more people to harm. The only reason to do this would have been if you had doubt about who the targets were - which you can clearly tell from the video they did not.
The error here came not from the aftermath, but from that initial error of seeing an RPG where there wasn't one.
And there was no excuse for blowing away the minivan trying to carry off the wounded survivor.
If you believed, as they did (mistakenly), that the targeted individuals were insurgents armed with RPGs and AK-47s, then logically two others things would be true:
1. The van coming to pick these guys up would be more insurgents. It's not like this was an ambulance or other marked rescue vehicle. 2. The corpses of the insurgents could have important intelligence information (pdas, laptops, cell phones, etc) being taken by said newly-arrived insurgents.
Did they screw up? Absolutely. Did they knowingly attack civilians - "murder" - as Wikileaks would have you believe? After watching the whole video, I think it's clear the answer is no.
Wikileaks was able to go over the video with a fine-toothed comb, zooming in to find small details you couldn't see watching the regular feed. Those solders didn't have that luxury. They were in a war zone and saw someone with what they believed was an RPG. That's a risk to them and their comrades. They did what they thought was right in the heat of battle, based upon what later turned out to be faulty information.
What's more, it seems to me Wikileaks is abusing the tragedy. I would have understood if they had just posted the video unedited for everyone to make up their own minds. But I can't imagine what is gained, other than anti-American propaganda, by putting the video up on a site entitled "Collateral Murder", as well as by prefacing the real video with a lengthy sentimental story about the civilians. It seems designed to inflame our emotions against the soldiers before we even see the evidence.
Incidentally, "young men who smoke have lower IQs" is not equivalent to "young men with low IQs are more likely to take up smoking". What if there is a causal link? What if smoking depresses your IQ?
Could be a confounding variable too.
Low self-control causes difficulty learning (if you can't suppress your desire to be playing while you should be studying, listening to the teacher, etc.) which will probably show itself on IQ tests.
Low self-control also probably makes you more likely to smoke, and to keep smoking after you've tried it.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a link in the other direction too (smoking causing further problems).
The study was comparing smokers and nonsmokers, all of whom were in the military. So whatever sampling bias may exist would seem to apply equally to smoking and nonsmoking members.
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I did not mean to endorse the various licensing shenanigans that various IP holders have pursued.
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
I understand that the marginal cost of an additional copy of these products is extremely low.
Nonetheless, there is a sizable initial development cost. Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work.
We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks. If you don't want to pay, you don't have to watch.
I can understand calling for reform. I can understand deciding a given movie isn't worth the price and not watching it.
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
you are still left with the problem of grossly disproportionate "punishments" and an end result that looks like Sharia Law more than anything else.
A civil fine is hardly comparable to some of the things that can be done under Sharia law.
While I agree the penalties are quite excessive, I have a hard time sympathizing with the perpetrators here, given that it's been well-publicized for years that copyright infringement lawsuits happen and are very expensive. If people STILL choose to break the law, basically to save a few bucks or a little bit of time... seems to me they've assumed that risk and have nobody to blame but themselves.
Studios do exaggerate their losses. But that's beside the point.
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms. In this case, parting with a few bucks to view the movie at a theater or on a rental.
If you choose to freeload, it's hardly any secret you can get sued for it. It's been happening for years. Anyone still doing it has accepted the risk they might be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright? Last time I checked, there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take what is not yours.
Much like software developers, filmmakers have a right to set the licensing terms for their work. If you don't want to pay to watch their movies... don't watch. Or wait until the copyright expires.
A third party isn't the most productive way to attack the problem at this time. The two major parties have huge advantages in organization and donor bases that make direct assault a suicide mission.
Better bets:
Reform the process for drawing district lines. It's insane to have a Congress with approval ratings near 10% that nonetheless has re-election rates approaching 90%. We got here through gerrymandering. Reforming that process won't be easy, given incumbents' self-interest, but it seems more possible than full-out third-party campaigns for each Congressional seat.
Try to rebuild the libertarian wing of whichever major party you feel closer to. Both Republicans and Democrats used to have politicians who valued freedom. In the last couple decades they've been replaced with corrupt busybodies, but the population as a whole is still sympathetic to a moderate brand of libertarianism that would reject the cronyism and rent-seeking that goes with big government and big business.
Slashdot Mirror
The trickier cases are things where a student wishes to lead other students in a prayer before a school event. Or have a moment of silence during which they could pray.
The "separation of church and state" thinking would ban students from doing these things, even when the state had no control over the prayer choices.
It's one thing to be free of state-mandated religion, it's another for the religion of other students to be actively suppressed by the state.
I don't see why, for instance, before a school event all the people who want to can't go have a prayer together in one spot. And why the people who want a different prayer couldn't go have their own prayer on another spot. Or have a moment of silence, or chat about the weather, or whatever.
Yet we've had courts ban such things in the name of "separation of church and state", which seems rather different than what the Founders intended.
It seems to come down to vocal minorities not wanting the majority to be free to exercise their faith in the public sphere, lest the minority feel left out. But coercing the majority to not exercise their religion isn't any better than coercing the minority into another religion.
We need to have tolerance both ways. Let people pray, or not pray, as they themselves see fit.
Honestly, apart from the fact you (presumably) like the choices the Texas School Board is making, I can't see the difference.
The only difference I can see is scale (one nationwide decision vs state-by-state decisions).
The sad thing about this whole controversy is how many people seem to assume the status quo is free from bias.
It's not. It never was, and never will be. History is a story we tell about the past based on our imperfect knowledge and our cultural biases, even when we do our best to be objective. Which is why in the US we view our Founding Fathers as courageous freedom fighters rather than opportunistic, treasonous rebels (same facts, different viewpoint!).
I don't necessarily agree with certain of the Texas changes (I've only read some of the 78 pages of the diffs).
But maybe some good will come of the controversy. Maybe students and parents will be reminded that history, like real life, isn't black and white. That multiple viewpoints exist (and that even a dominant viewpoint may be later reconsidered). Certainly I think they've been reminded that history classes have limited time, and deciding what parts of history make the cut is a subjective but societally important set of decisions.
Don't you want your "coders" to be "software engineers"? After all, if they don't understand the practice of software engineering, the software they develop is going to be a nightmare to maintain.
Before we had laws to protect people, it was like that. people could hire and fire for any reason. This lead to sweat shops and people working them selves to death.
No thanks, I perfer a decent civilization.
"Easily hired and fired" does not equate to sweatshops or other abuse.
In many parts of the United States, employment is "at will", meaning either the employer or employee may chose to terminate the relationship at any time. The employer could be a great company. The employee could be a great employee. But if the relationship is no longer a good fit, in the judgment of either party, they go their separate ways.
Of course there are some basic laws against discrimination on basis of race, sex, religion, etc. Thus we have civilization without the excessive employment rules imposed by entities such as unions.
This seems to me better than requiring someone to work poorly to be fired. If an organization needs only half as many workers as it used to (maybe it lost a large customer) it seems wrong to require it to maintain its previous level of staff just because nobody was a bad employee. That just makes companies reluctant to hire anybody to begin with, because they know they won't be able to adjust downwards when necessary. That reluctance to hire inhibits companies' growth and fosters unemployment problems in the workforce.
Pretending those particular parents are the only ones footing the bill for the school is lunacy.
I don't claim that only those particular parents are footing the bill. Simply that they are one of the stakeholders and as such have a right to challenge policies they believe to be counterproductive or disproportionate to the "offense". I agree with you that there are other stakeholders who also have valid interests.
As for the janitorial argument, I could see some benefits from limiting gum (less so hard candy), but I didn't see any mention of such a motivation in the article. Rather, the school district claimed it was enforcing an alleged state rule against non-nutritious foods.
Respect must be earned, it is not automatically granted to anyone with power. When a school (like any other government entity) abuses that power, it invites scorn and disrespect for its authority.
That is not the fault of the parent. That is the fault of poor judgment by the relevant school personnel.
If the school wants to earn some respect, it could have apologized for its obviously overzealous behavior, and promised to use better judgment in the future. That would have shown some maturity and provided a good example to the student body for how to behave when you make a mistake.
The school is not free. It is paid by the parents' tax dollars, and as such they absolutely have a right to challenge a school's misguided policy.
There is also a huge difference between ensuring that that a child is not malnourished/abused, and banning any sort of sweets in that child's lunch. As long as the lunch is nutritious, inclusion of a piece of candy or other treat is not something the school should be involved in. They are there to educate the kids, not to usurp parental authority.
The school would have done better to simply send the parents a note stating that the child received candy from a friend. That allows the parents to take whatever action they feel appropriate. If the parents want the school to help them ensure their child doesn't eat candy, that's fine. But the school should not be allowed to override the parents' wishes as long as the parents' wishes are not abusive, which including a Jolly Rancher clearly is not.
WikiLeaks claims they decrypted the material. While that's certainly possible, we have no way to know if this is true. They might have received it unencrypted, but made these assertions (including the Internet posts requesting supercomputer time) to throw investigators off-track.
Deterrence is the whole point of having nuclear weapons. If you don't have to use them, they've done their job well.
Thus nukes "sitting around" are not "useless".
There's nothing like saving a country from being on the receiving end of nuclear holocaust for a profession to "provide value to society".
I've read several classics precisely because they're supposedly classics.
Sometimes they're great. Sometimes... they're not. Not just in terms of "did I like it", but "could I find notable artistic merit".
It reminds me of the studies about how people evaluate the taste of wine. If you put the same wine in two bottles, and tell people one is a $5 bottle, and the other is a $50 bottle, the tasters will rave about the delicacies of the "$50" wine and pan the "$5" wine. Even though it's the same wine
I've come to the conclusion "classic" works of art have the same phenomenon. Some really are great works. Others just got a nice label at some point in history and nobody's bold enough to admit the "classic" is just average.
Reviews like these conflate the writers opinion with some kind of consensus opinion that has formed over time and usually built from thoughtful consideration of the subject
Agreed that any one person's opinion is not going to be definitive.
But I think you over-estimate how much thoughtful consideration goes into making some works "classic". IMO there's a fair amount of groupthink too. After all, if you're a student, and some "expert" says X is a classic, if you come out and say "that was utter garbage", then everyone says "what the hell do you know?". Until you learn to see things the same way all the other "critics" do, at which point you become part of the club.
And there's also a bit of people reading stuff into works that the author may never have intended. There was a recent South Park episode that really hit the nail on the head with this, IMO. (I forget the episode's title, but it involves the boys writing their own controversial novel).
I don't have to love a work to recognize good craft, but there is the occasional "classic" that does kind of make you wonder what all the fuss was about. "The Catcher in the Rye" was one of those for me.
Being open about the situation and not doing what amounts to a cover-up would have helped. A statement of apology and explanation should have been made.
That would've been the smart move.
Perhaps because they were afraid it would be distorted into a propaganda video.
They didn't think they "may" have weapons, they thought they "did" have weapons. AK47s and a RPG to be specific.
If they were uncertain about that, I would totally get your argument.
But on the video, the guy who said he saw an RPG didn't say "he might have an RPG". He said the guy DID have an RPG. He stated this confidently with no ambiguity.
If you're confident the guy's got an RPG... even if he's not pointing it at you yet, he's both a potential threat and a valid target in a war zone.
Don't get me wrong - the soldiers screwed up big. But it seemed like an innocent mistake, albeit one with tragic consequences.
You know, I've looked at and appreciated a bunch of Wikileaks material before, and thus was predisposed to like them.
But then I saw how they handled this video, and I did a 180. I would've understood if they just posted the video. But the lengthy preface to the video, putting it on a site called "collateralmurder.com", the zooming/highlighting of easy-to-miss details (the benefit of which the soldiers lacked in real-time), just seemed design to prejudice us against the soldiers rather than help us determine the truth.
The truth here was the soldiers made a big mistake (identifying camera equipment as a RPG), and innocent civilians lost their lives as a result. But Wikileaks seems intent on pushing beyond that truth and into manipulating our emotions. Which is where they lost me. We don't need any more 24-hour emotion machines in this world.
I watched the whole video, and I didn't see it in the regular feed the first time through. It was only apparent when the Wikileaks people zoomed the video way in. I can see how the soldiers missed it.
"What's wrong with this" is they had mounted infantry 100m away. The gunship crew could have just called in the coordinates and had the eyeballs check it out. They might have seen that the "AK-47" was a tripod and the "RPG" was a camera lens
I disagree. For one thing, it's not like the guy who identified the "RPG" expressed any hesitation about his analysis, that would lead his comrades or superiors to request another set of eyes. He stated very clearly and confidently in the video that the individuals had RPGs.
Secondly, approaching with infantry exposes far more people to harm. The only reason to do this would have been if you had doubt about who the targets were - which you can clearly tell from the video they did not.
The error here came not from the aftermath, but from that initial error of seeing an RPG where there wasn't one.
And there was no excuse for blowing away the minivan trying to carry off the wounded survivor.
If you believed, as they did (mistakenly), that the targeted individuals were insurgents armed with RPGs and AK-47s, then logically two others things would be true:
1. The van coming to pick these guys up would be more insurgents. It's not like this was an ambulance or other marked rescue vehicle.
2. The corpses of the insurgents could have important intelligence information (pdas, laptops, cell phones, etc) being taken by said newly-arrived insurgents.
Did they screw up? Absolutely. Did they knowingly attack civilians - "murder" - as Wikileaks would have you believe? After watching the whole video, I think it's clear the answer is no.
Wikileaks was able to go over the video with a fine-toothed comb, zooming in to find small details you couldn't see watching the regular feed. Those solders didn't have that luxury. They were in a war zone and saw someone with what they believed was an RPG. That's a risk to them and their comrades. They did what they thought was right in the heat of battle, based upon what later turned out to be faulty information.
What's more, it seems to me Wikileaks is abusing the tragedy. I would have understood if they had just posted the video unedited for everyone to make up their own minds. But I can't imagine what is gained, other than anti-American propaganda, by putting the video up on a site entitled "Collateral Murder", as well as by prefacing the real video with a lengthy sentimental story about the civilians. It seems designed to inflame our emotions against the soldiers before we even see the evidence.
Incidentally, "young men who smoke have lower IQs" is not equivalent to "young men with low IQs are more likely to take up smoking". What if there is a causal link? What if smoking depresses your IQ?
Could be a confounding variable too.
Low self-control causes difficulty learning (if you can't suppress your desire to be playing while you should be studying, listening to the teacher, etc.) which will probably show itself on IQ tests.
Low self-control also probably makes you more likely to smoke, and to keep smoking after you've tried it.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a link in the other direction too (smoking causing further problems).
The study was comparing smokers and nonsmokers, all of whom were in the military. So whatever sampling bias may exist would seem to apply equally to smoking and nonsmoking members.
I won't even touch your concept of "reasonable".
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I did not mean to endorse the various licensing shenanigans that various IP holders have pursued.
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
I understand that the marginal cost of an additional copy of these products is extremely low.
Nonetheless, there is a sizable initial development cost. Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work.
We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks. If you don't want to pay, you don't have to watch.
I can understand calling for reform. I can understand deciding a given movie isn't worth the price and not watching it.
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
While that doesn't make it "right" it sure as hell mitigates things.
Agreed. The current penalties are grossly out of proportion to the offense.
you are still left with the
problem of grossly disproportionate "punishments" and an end result that
looks like Sharia Law more than anything else.
A civil fine is hardly comparable to some of the things that can be done under Sharia law.
While I agree the penalties are quite excessive, I have a hard time sympathizing with the perpetrators here, given that it's been well-publicized for years that copyright infringement lawsuits happen and are very expensive. If people STILL choose to break the law, basically to save a few bucks or a little bit of time... seems to me they've assumed that risk and have nobody to blame but themselves.
Studios do exaggerate their losses. But that's beside the point.
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms. In this case, parting with a few bucks to view the movie at a theater or on a rental.
If you choose to freeload, it's hardly any secret you can get sued for it. It's been happening for years. Anyone still doing it has accepted the risk they might be on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright? Last time I checked, there is neither a moral nor legal right to simply take what is not yours.
Much like software developers, filmmakers have a right to set the licensing terms for their work. If you don't want to pay to watch their movies... don't watch. Or wait until the copyright expires.
A third party isn't the most productive way to attack the problem at this time. The two major parties have huge advantages in organization and donor bases that make direct assault a suicide mission.
Better bets:
Reform the process for drawing district lines. It's insane to have a Congress with approval ratings near 10% that nonetheless has re-election rates approaching 90%. We got here through gerrymandering. Reforming that process won't be easy, given incumbents' self-interest, but it seems more possible than full-out third-party campaigns for each Congressional seat.
Try to rebuild the libertarian wing of whichever major party you feel closer to. Both Republicans and Democrats used to have politicians who valued freedom. In the last couple decades they've been replaced with corrupt busybodies, but the population as a whole is still sympathetic to a moderate brand of libertarianism that would reject the cronyism and rent-seeking that goes with big government and big business.