There's a good reason why guitars need tube amps, but what's the point of staying analog after picking it up with the mic? If you need the tape compression sound you can always feed that track through a deck later.
Because during the A/D and then D/A processes, the harmonics generated in tube amp distortion and other natural analog effects and acoustic artifacts including the dynamic range are lost/altered. Once lost, there's no "putting it back in", as you suggest with your "feed that track through a deck later" portion of your comment.
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia, but let's not force this analog nonsense on future generations under the guise of "better quality".
What I find hilarious about people who look down their noses at "old analog systems" and only own digitally-recorded music and digital/solid-state playback equipment is that the majority of what is being recorded is analog to start with.
Take electric guitar amplifiers. The most-desired (and most-recorded) guitar amplifiers (and the flagship models of the largest current makers) are all analog vacuum-tube technology. Musical equipment makers have been trying to push solid-state equipment since the '70s and digital audio equipment since the '80s and it's fallen flat, with the exception of a handful of digital audio equipment (like some delay-based digital effects pedals) that reduced size/cost so much that the advantages outweighed the less-pleasant sound. Even then, those pieces of digital audio equipment are receiving input from, and are sending their output to, analog equipment (and much of it vacuum-tube based).
What many miss is that human ears and the brains that interpret what those ears hear are analog. Digital recordings are great if you want your computer to listen to music as opposed to human ears. Human ears generally find analog recordings, and the sound produced by vacuum tubes, to be a more pleasant listening experience than digital/solid-state.
Analog and vacuum tubes are not going anywhere. If anything, they're trending up, as there is a resurgence in vacuum tube manufacturing and analog recording.
Note: I'm an electronics technician and electric guitarist with ~40 years in both fields. I design & build vacuum tube guitar amplifiers and play semi-professionally (by choice), going on tour when the mood & opportunity strikes.
...Are you seriously arguing that the money's on renewable energy's side?
The US government stands to gain a lot of power (no pun intended) and there are many very, very rich people that stand to make a metric buttload of money from carbon-trading and other "green" businesses that are basically just income-redistribution mechanisms, not anything that actually mitigates the problems being given as justification.
The US government and their rich cronies who push for the AGW agenda have far more money AND power than the oil companies.
Sorry to reveal that "inconvenient truth" and burst your bubble.
Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee. Not cash, a guarantee that let them borrow at a lower interest rate that we now have to pay back.
In one quarter, Exxon Mobil made 17 times more money than Solyndra's loan guarantee.
Except that taxpayers aren't on the hook to repay Exxon/Mobil profits.
Taxpayers ARE, however, on the hook to repay a loan guarantee (a few of them, actually...LightSquared, among many, anyone?) that is nothing more nor less than a payoff in very thin disguise to an Obama campaign contributor, as are many other similar loan guarantees to "green energy" companies.
If you could produce data that disproved a major current theory that stood to make very rich and powerful people even more powerful and rich, you'd be in line for a bullet to the back of the head.
Canada.. We got government , a great social net , everyone's got healthcare and yet , im still free
You're "free" eh?
Say/post something publicly that violates broad Canadian hate-speech laws and then tell me how free you are. Tell the RCMP about your marijuana growing operation and then tell me how free you are. Walk into a shop and try to buy some blank CDs without paying music industry groups a percentage and then tell me how "free" you are
Oh yeah, you're "free" all right. And we've always been at war with Oceania.
If the Founding Fathers had meant to protect your email from search and seizure...
They did that already. It was that whole bit about;
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Now, we just need to remove enough power from the government so that they will actually adhere to the restrictions they are already supposed to be limited by.
If enough people want to change what they want the government to do, there's already a way to do that: The Constitutional Amendment process. That those pushing for expanded government powers refuse to pursue the process laid out in the Constitution through the Amendment process is proof that they don't think enough people want more/expanded government powers.
If one starts down the path of ignoring/bypassing the parts of the Constitution that one doesn't like, pretty soon, the parts you DO like will be ignored/bypassed as well.
This is what's happening currently. TFS is just one of the symptoms.
Your "small-government" Republicans are just as much on board with this as the "big-government" Democrats.
"My" Republicans!?!?
Are you freaking kidding me!?!?
I hated Bush's and the Republican's freedom-killing actions just as much as I hate those carried out by those with a "D" after their names.
Mainstream political parties are meaningless. It's the actions taken, not the party. I think they all should all be taken out and hung from the nearest tree.
Wake up! Stop buying into their political distractions.
you CAN have both, in the right ways and when designed not to walk all over our assumed basic human rights.
Show me an example. A real-world example.
There has never been, and there will never be, a large government that does not destroy individual freedom. Not unless human nature is altered so fundamentally that what results cannot be called "human" any longer.
Many of the same people who are most angered and most vocally oppose such blatant 1984 style mass surveillance are the same ones that consistently vote and rally for more and bigger government, and support the politicians who favor a bigger/more-powerful government.
Yet, they don't see a conflict. They don't seem to understand that when you make a government large and powerful enough to provide all these social programs, entitlements, and levels of regulation, this is what happens. Politicians, being the type of people that politicians typically are, will use every opportunity of increased government scope & power to increase their control over the citizens and reduce/eliminate citizen rights and protections.
You can have a government that provides a social "safety net" and major social services/entitlements, and that regulates everything down to kid's lemonade stands and have things like this domestic surveillance-data facility.
Or, you can decide to risk people having the ability to make bad choices and possibly failing and have freedom.
Amoral corporations don't believe in right and wrong, only in legal and illegal, and to expect them to have compassion or any sense of social responsibility is equally stupid.
And it's this kind of thinking that is destroying capitalist nations like the US and the UK (I'm british, btw)
No, it's governments that have become too large and powerful, and thus made it easy for corporations to "capture" government regulatory agencies, legislative bodies, and individual politicians and leaders. If there wasn't so much government, it would be orders of magnitude more difficult to conceal and perpetuate corruption.
If government power was more decentralized, corruption could only affect limited, localized areas of a nation, and not be a simple matter of compromising a few individuals in the central government to affect corrupt changes across the entire nation in one fell swoop.
This is not the fault of Capitalism, it's the fault of a too-large and powerful central government that, as all large governments do, becomes increasingly corrupt. Actually, it's OUR fault...for not hanging enough politicians from the nearest tree for the crap we've been blissfully ignoring for decades while we happily belly-up at the government trough for our share of the bread & circuses they use to distract us while they confiscate our wealth and freedoms at the point of a gun.
There's nothing wrong with either the US or UK that the televised execution of a few hundred of the most powerful politicians in each nation on the steps of their respective national capitol buildings, along with a 2/3rds reduction in the government budget, wouldn't solve.
Interestingly enough, there are still organizations today in the US that got their start practicing eugenics. Planned Parenthood was started by Margaret Sanger, a proponent of eugenics, as a eugenics program intended to curb population growth among blacks and other non-whites in the US, as well as those with hereditary/genetic diseases and mental conditions. Many argue that the original eugenics mission and goals of Planned Parenthood has never changed, and has only been hidden, obfuscated, and denied.
Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
There are a lot of people building their own amps these days, from "boutique" amp builders that charge exorbitant prices and use exotic/specialty and select "new old-stock" original parts & tubes, to fairly average guitarists that want a quality hand-built tube amp but lack the money to afford a Marshall or a boutique amp.
I've been playing for ~40 years, and my favorite, best-sounding amps are the ones I've built.
In these cases, a government owned company can deploy it using state and federal grants.
Except that those same service providers that refuse to service that market have, in other similar instances, and very likely would again, scream bloody murder about government's "unfair competition" and promptly tie up any such proposal in endless lawsuits.
How the heck does anyone figure that policy overrides the law?
Because they have an organized and heavily-armed domestic para-military force (which the Federal government has been encouraging the creation & use of, and providing local PDs grants and other funding mechanisms to create) with which they respond with overwhelming and deadly force to any perceived resistance from any common citizen, but are almost never employed in the rare arrests of politicians, the super-rich, and others in equally "elite" positions.
Many people are intimidated out of complaining too loudly, as there's always *some* law that could be used as a pretext for a raid. And gee, it's sooo hard for the SWAT officer to tell that, after being told to be ready for anything, and in the confusion of a raid in a darkened house at 4 AM, looking down the narrow beam of the flashlight attached to the barrel of that military assault rifle through vision-impairing combat goggles, that you're actually reaching for your underwear and not reaching for a gun...
I'm sure they'd send flowers for the services, however.
And btw. Facebook Chat blocks Pirate Bay too. All the major IM services have been running automated malware blocks for a very long time. I'm surprised people are surprised that Pirate Bay is on the list (regardless whether you think it is "right" or not).
I know that Yahoo used to block Photobucket URL links in Yahoo Messenger, both in IM and chat. Never cared much for Yahoo's "Flickr" photo upload/hosting service. I guess the rule is that it's OK to block competitors' links (or anything/anyone else) as long as you're confident that the competitor in question is unlikely to be able to field a sufficiently-large/threatening legal phalanx of lawyers and rented politicians (because politicians rarely, if ever, stay bought).
You've evidently never heard of classical liberalism, which is essentially the same thing as contemporary right-libertarianism. "Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets." (Emphasis mine). It was originally propounded by the left, that is, by people opposed to the feudal ancien regime of the crown and the aristocracy.
Certainly the contemporary (mainstream) left is not propounding that anymore, but your blindness to historical variation is precisely what I am trying to alleviate.
I'm telling you that I understand what "classical liberalism" is. After Progressivism failed and was largely discredited in the 1920s, Progressives changed their name to, and/or started calling themselves, "Liberal". In more recent times, after the term "Liberal" became associated in the public's mind as the large-government, high-tax, weak on defense, strong on removing/limiting rights, big-spenders that they've always been, they've started calling themselves "Progressives" again.
Same failed ideology, just repeated changing of the curtains, so to speak.
So, I understand the terms I'm using and the historical context. I also understand what historical details matter in the context of what I originally posted, and what has nothing to do with the points I made.
Stop trying to distract and obfuscate. I'm sorry if it's uncomfortable to your worldview, but I have been correct in every point I've made in every post in this thread.
I was not, nor was anyone else other than yourself, talking about classical liberalism. That just tells me you've run out of arguments.
See, right there is why we can't have a logical argument. Leftists and leftist ideologies, as practiced in the real world where leftists have control of a nation, have never been about free markets. Just the opposite, in fact. They want a government-controlled and run economy with the means of production and wealth-generation in the hands and/or under the control of government. I don't know where you got the idea that leftists were ever in favor of free markets, but it/they are wrong.
Check out this explanation of the relationships between different systems. Analogy starts at ~2:25 into the video.
Although he seems a bit hysterical about many things, I found this explanation/analogy interesting and informative. It seems to do a good job in communicating the concepts being discussed, regardless of the occasional hysteria in some of his other monologues I've seen.
Yes. Yes it does. Leftism/Liberalism/Progressivism cannot function without it. They must restrict/remove individual freedom and the ability to make free choices from the population in order for leftism to work (well, "work" for the relatively short time such regimes typically survive before they devolve into revolution & chaos). See my sig.
Most of the rest of your post is hair-splitting, pontificating, and hand-waving.
Leftist always means authoritarian/totalitarian. In every single case where leftists are or have been in full power/control of the government. Not every authoritarian/totalitarian regime is leftist, but every leftist regime is authoritarian/totalitarian.
I'll take capitalism over anything else any day of the week and twice on Sundays. No other system has lifted more people from poverty or provided so many people such high standards of living. Capitalism has allowed more people to live in freedom than any other system ever invented. Capitalism is the only system ever created where wealth is a renewable resource for everyone as long as they are willing to work and/or come up with an idea, skill, or invention thatâ(TM)s useful to someone else.
I was with you until this last ad-hominem garbage (nice touch taking sexual preference to political discussion) you came out with in the last paragraph.
Yeah, that's not typical of me. I was tired and just going "stream-of-consciousness" there, I think.
You are aware that "leftist" views have generated more radical and even violent revolutions than any "right" movements? (The final outcome has not by average been very great but the "leftist" cannot be blamed for the lack of trying...)
Yes, I'm quite aware. I was referring to the leftists in the general population, not the few leaders, appearing to exhibit submissive tendencies in desiring more control of their lives by others. The left's leaders are a whole different animal.
The leadership on the left's behavior and dialog suggests that they may have a God complex. They seem to want to control every aspect of everyone's lives. Given that, it's no wonder they want to suppress/eliminate religion. It competes with their vision of themselves as Supreme Being.
This capacity, this mentality is why people don't rise up en masse and reject the bullshit they're spoonfed on a daily basis. Because attacking the messenger like a spoiled child is so much easier, and so much more convenient than taking on severe systemic problems.
This.
Thanks for putting it so succinctly. Bravo,sir!
Normalcy bias is strong, and people will defend their comfortable little mental picture of the world quite aggressively, even up to actual violence at times, rather than deal with both their own self-deception and the prospect of having to take actions they may politically/ideologically disagree with to deal with the actual reality of the situation/problem at hand.
The tactics of the GP you discuss which are based on normalcy bias are well-recognized and even included as part of the political tactics to silence opposing voices in "Rules For Radicals" by Saul Alinsky.
Personally, I can't understand how a political movement could possibly paint itself as being for the empowerment of the masses, when it openly views silencing any opposing voices or embarrassing/inconvenient questions from the masses as standard and normal.
I wonder if a sexual survey conducted on those with leftist political views would show a predominance of "bottoms" (submissives) as opposed to population norms? After all, they seem to want to be told what to do, how to live, how much money to make, and even what to think by government. They keep voting for politicians who advocate for those things, after all.
Hosting all that data costs money. From a law enforcement point of view it's probably worthless after 5 years anyway.
But you're missing the point. Politically and citizen-control-wise, it can be worth far, far more than gold. Absolutely worth it, to them, to spend our money (not theirs) on it. Just another tax and tick on the debt clock that will never cost *them* a dime.
They have to take our money to retain the data, so that when we get angry because they take our money to retain the data, they can use the data they retained to protect themselves from the citizens who are angry that they're retaining the data.
If you are an idiot, invest all your money/assets unwisely and lose it all, what is in store for you next? Are you just going to quetly lie down and die?
No, you will crawl to the government and start begging for help. If they don't provide you with something to make your ends meet, you will turn to crime. No matter how cynical you are regarding the government, it is not in their best interest or image to have their citizens at such stage. It kind of affects their bottom line and approval ratings.
Thus they need to somehow make it more difficult for you to do something stupid. Imposing limits on how much you can invest in a potentially risky venture seems like an easy way to protect an average, easily-manipulated idiots from themselves.
My god, you're right! We need the government to make *all* our decisions for us and save us from ourselves! What if people choose the wrong place to live, choose the wrong job, choose the wrong hobbies, join the wrong religion or political party, or associate with the wrong people? What if they engage in risky things like ski-jumping or rock-climbing and injure or kill themselves? Hell, what if they go to a *casino* and lose their house!?!?
The only thing more costly to a society than people's poor choices is the price to that society if the freedom/ability to make bad choices is removed. Most successful business owners started and failed at multiple business ventures before they learned enough and gained enough experience through those failures to create a successful venture. The same with nearly every single inventor.
If no opportunity to take risks and no consequences for failure are allowed to exist, there is no opportunity to succeed. One must exist for the other to exist. It's a ying/yang relationship. To attempt to do away with risking failure and failure's consequences and expect success is like trying to make a DC current flow through a conductor with only the positive or only the negative pole of a battery connected.
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There's a good reason why guitars need tube amps, but what's the point of staying analog after picking it up with the mic? If you need the tape compression sound you can always feed that track through a deck later.
Because during the A/D and then D/A processes, the harmonics generated in tube amp distortion and other natural analog effects and acoustic artifacts including the dynamic range are lost/altered. Once lost, there's no "putting it back in", as you suggest with your "feed that track through a deck later" portion of your comment.
Strat
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia, but let's not force this analog nonsense on future generations under the guise of "better quality".
What I find hilarious about people who look down their noses at "old analog systems" and only own digitally-recorded music and digital/solid-state playback equipment is that the majority of what is being recorded is analog to start with.
Take electric guitar amplifiers. The most-desired (and most-recorded) guitar amplifiers (and the flagship models of the largest current makers) are all analog vacuum-tube technology. Musical equipment makers have been trying to push solid-state equipment since the '70s and digital audio equipment since the '80s and it's fallen flat, with the exception of a handful of digital audio equipment (like some delay-based digital effects pedals) that reduced size/cost so much that the advantages outweighed the less-pleasant sound. Even then, those pieces of digital audio equipment are receiving input from, and are sending their output to, analog equipment (and much of it vacuum-tube based).
What many miss is that human ears and the brains that interpret what those ears hear are analog. Digital recordings are great if you want your computer to listen to music as opposed to human ears. Human ears generally find analog recordings, and the sound produced by vacuum tubes, to be a more pleasant listening experience than digital/solid-state.
Analog and vacuum tubes are not going anywhere. If anything, they're trending up, as there is a resurgence in vacuum tube manufacturing and analog recording.
Note: I'm an electronics technician and electric guitarist with ~40 years in both fields. I design & build vacuum tube guitar amplifiers and play semi-professionally (by choice), going on tour when the mood & opportunity strikes.
Strat
last time i checked science wasn't and has never been a religion.
Hogwash.
Three letters for you.
AGW
It's turned into a Holy War where the main casualty has been Science.
Strat
...Are you seriously arguing that the money's on renewable energy's side?
The US government stands to gain a lot of power (no pun intended) and there are many very, very rich people that stand to make a metric buttload of money from carbon-trading and other "green" businesses that are basically just income-redistribution mechanisms, not anything that actually mitigates the problems being given as justification.
The US government and their rich cronies who push for the AGW agenda have far more money AND power than the oil companies.
Sorry to reveal that "inconvenient truth" and burst your bubble.
Strat
Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee. Not cash, a guarantee that let them borrow at a lower interest rate that we now have to pay back.
In one quarter, Exxon Mobil made 17 times more money than Solyndra's loan guarantee.
Except that taxpayers aren't on the hook to repay Exxon/Mobil profits.
Taxpayers ARE, however, on the hook to repay a loan guarantee (a few of them, actually...LightSquared, among many, anyone?) that is nothing more nor less than a payoff in very thin disguise to an Obama campaign contributor, as are many other similar loan guarantees to "green energy" companies.
Strat
If you could produce data that disproved a major current theory that stood to make very rich and powerful people even more powerful and rich, you'd be in line for a bullet to the back of the head.
FTFY
Strat
Canada ..
We got government , a great social net , everyone's got healthcare and yet , im still free
You're "free" eh?
Say/post something publicly that violates broad Canadian hate-speech laws and then tell me how free you are. Tell the RCMP about your marijuana growing operation and then tell me how free you are. Walk into a shop and try to buy some blank CDs without paying music industry groups a percentage and then tell me how "free" you are
Oh yeah, you're "free" all right. And we've always been at war with Oceania.
Strat
If the Founding Fathers had meant to protect your email from search and seizure...
They did that already. It was that whole bit about;
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Now, we just need to remove enough power from the government so that they will actually adhere to the restrictions they are already supposed to be limited by.
If enough people want to change what they want the government to do, there's already a way to do that: The Constitutional Amendment process. That those pushing for expanded government powers refuse to pursue the process laid out in the Constitution through the Amendment process is proof that they don't think enough people want more/expanded government powers.
If one starts down the path of ignoring/bypassing the parts of the Constitution that one doesn't like, pretty soon, the parts you DO like will be ignored/bypassed as well.
This is what's happening currently. TFS is just one of the symptoms.
Strat
Your "small-government" Republicans are just as much on board with this as the "big-government" Democrats.
"My" Republicans!?!?
Are you freaking kidding me!?!?
I hated Bush's and the Republican's freedom-killing actions just as much as I hate those carried out by those with a "D" after their names.
Mainstream political parties are meaningless. It's the actions taken, not the party. I think they all should all be taken out and hung from the nearest tree.
Wake up! Stop buying into their political distractions.
Strat
you CAN have both, in the right ways and when designed not to walk all over our assumed basic human rights.
Show me an example. A real-world example.
There has never been, and there will never be, a large government that does not destroy individual freedom. Not unless human nature is altered so fundamentally that what results cannot be called "human" any longer.
Strat
Many of the same people who are most angered and most vocally oppose such blatant 1984 style mass surveillance are the same ones that consistently vote and rally for more and bigger government, and support the politicians who favor a bigger/more-powerful government.
Yet, they don't see a conflict. They don't seem to understand that when you make a government large and powerful enough to provide all these social programs, entitlements, and levels of regulation, this is what happens. Politicians, being the type of people that politicians typically are, will use every opportunity of increased government scope & power to increase their control over the citizens and reduce/eliminate citizen rights and protections.
You can have a government that provides a social "safety net" and major social services/entitlements, and that regulates everything down to kid's lemonade stands and have things like this domestic surveillance-data facility.
Or, you can decide to risk people having the ability to make bad choices and possibly failing and have freedom.
You cannot have both.
Choose.
Strat
No, it's governments that have become too large and powerful, and thus made it easy for corporations to "capture" government regulatory agencies, legislative bodies, and individual politicians and leaders. If there wasn't so much government, it would be orders of magnitude more difficult to conceal and perpetuate corruption.
If government power was more decentralized, corruption could only affect limited, localized areas of a nation, and not be a simple matter of compromising a few individuals in the central government to affect corrupt changes across the entire nation in one fell swoop.
This is not the fault of Capitalism, it's the fault of a too-large and powerful central government that, as all large governments do, becomes increasingly corrupt. Actually, it's OUR fault...for not hanging enough politicians from the nearest tree for the crap we've been blissfully ignoring for decades while we happily belly-up at the government trough for our share of the bread & circuses they use to distract us while they confiscate our wealth and freedoms at the point of a gun.
There's nothing wrong with either the US or UK that the televised execution of a few hundred of the most powerful politicians in each nation on the steps of their respective national capitol buildings, along with a 2/3rds reduction in the government budget, wouldn't solve.
Strat
Eugenics [wikipedia.org] is the classic example.
Interestingly enough, there are still organizations today in the US that got their start practicing eugenics. Planned Parenthood was started by Margaret Sanger, a proponent of eugenics, as a eugenics program intended to curb population growth among blacks and other non-whites in the US, as well as those with hereditary/genetic diseases and mental conditions. Many argue that the original eugenics mission and goals of Planned Parenthood has never changed, and has only been hidden, obfuscated, and denied.
Strat
Making a good analog amp isn't especially difficult. What is difficult is doing it a cost that allows it to be retailed profitably. There are tons of absolutely killer boutique amp builders out there making great stuff that'll blow away pretty much anything mass-market (including marshall), but your're paying $4k+ for that sort of thing.
There are a lot of people building their own amps these days, from "boutique" amp builders that charge exorbitant prices and use exotic/specialty and select "new old-stock" original parts & tubes, to fairly average guitarists that want a quality hand-built tube amp but lack the money to afford a Marshall or a boutique amp.
I've been playing for ~40 years, and my favorite, best-sounding amps are the ones I've built.
Cathode-Biased KT66s, Parallel-Triode preamp, ~30 watts: http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h103/stratman_el84/Testament%2030/
Cathode-Biased EL84s, Unique SRPP ( http://valvewizard1.webs.com/srpp.html ) Preamp Design, ~20 Watts: http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h103/stratman_el84/Testament%20MK%20I/
Both amps sound fantastic, and they cost a fraction of what anything comparable commercially costs.
Strat
In these cases, a government owned company can deploy it using state and federal grants.
Except that those same service providers that refuse to service that market have, in other similar instances, and very likely would again, scream bloody murder about government's "unfair competition" and promptly tie up any such proposal in endless lawsuits.
Google for "municipal broadband lawsuits".
Strat
Politicians aren't a thing.
Yes, they are.
But who, over 10 years old, still calls it a "thing"?
Strat
How the heck does anyone figure that policy overrides the law?
Because they have an organized and heavily-armed domestic para-military force (which the Federal government has been encouraging the creation & use of, and providing local PDs grants and other funding mechanisms to create) with which they respond with overwhelming and deadly force to any perceived resistance from any common citizen, but are almost never employed in the rare arrests of politicians, the super-rich, and others in equally "elite" positions.
Many people are intimidated out of complaining too loudly, as there's always *some* law that could be used as a pretext for a raid. And gee, it's sooo hard for the SWAT officer to tell that, after being told to be ready for anything, and in the confusion of a raid in a darkened house at 4 AM, looking down the narrow beam of the flashlight attached to the barrel of that military assault rifle through vision-impairing combat goggles, that you're actually reaching for your underwear and not reaching for a gun...
I'm sure they'd send flowers for the services, however.
Strat
And btw. Facebook Chat blocks Pirate Bay too. All the major IM services have been running automated malware blocks for a very long time. I'm surprised people are surprised that Pirate Bay is on the list (regardless whether you think it is "right" or not).
I know that Yahoo used to block Photobucket URL links in Yahoo Messenger, both in IM and chat. Never cared much for Yahoo's "Flickr" photo upload/hosting service. I guess the rule is that it's OK to block competitors' links (or anything/anyone else) as long as you're confident that the competitor in question is unlikely to be able to field a sufficiently-large/threatening legal phalanx of lawyers and rented politicians (because politicians rarely, if ever, stay bought).
Strat
Try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dVxHHDBsBQ
You've evidently never heard of classical liberalism, which is essentially the same thing as contemporary right-libertarianism. "Classical liberalism is the philosophy committed to the ideal of limited government, constitutionalism, rule of law, due process, and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and free markets." (Emphasis mine). It was originally propounded by the left, that is, by people opposed to the feudal ancien regime of the crown and the aristocracy.
Certainly the contemporary (mainstream) left is not propounding that anymore, but your blindness to historical variation is precisely what I am trying to alleviate.
I'm telling you that I understand what "classical liberalism" is. After Progressivism failed and was largely discredited in the 1920s, Progressives changed their name to, and/or started calling themselves, "Liberal". In more recent times, after the term "Liberal" became associated in the public's mind as the large-government, high-tax, weak on defense, strong on removing/limiting rights, big-spenders that they've always been, they've started calling themselves "Progressives" again.
Same failed ideology, just repeated changing of the curtains, so to speak.
So, I understand the terms I'm using and the historical context. I also understand what historical details matter in the context of what I originally posted, and what has nothing to do with the points I made.
Stop trying to distract and obfuscate. I'm sorry if it's uncomfortable to your worldview, but I have been correct in every point I've made in every post in this thread.
I was not, nor was anyone else other than yourself, talking about classical liberalism. That just tells me you've run out of arguments.
Strat
...leftist free market...
See, right there is why we can't have a logical argument. Leftists and leftist ideologies, as practiced in the real world where leftists have control of a nation, have never been about free markets. Just the opposite, in fact. They want a government-controlled and run economy with the means of production and wealth-generation in the hands and/or under the control of government. I don't know where you got the idea that leftists were ever in favor of free markets, but it/they are wrong.
Check out this explanation of the relationships between different systems. Analogy starts at ~2:25 into the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dVxHHDBsB
Although he seems a bit hysterical about many things, I found this explanation/analogy interesting and informative. It seems to do a good job in communicating the concepts being discussed, regardless of the occasional hysteria in some of his other monologues I've seen.
Strat
"Leftist" does not mean "Authoritarian".
Yes. Yes it does. Leftism/Liberalism/Progressivism cannot function without it. They must restrict/remove individual freedom and the ability to make free choices from the population in order for leftism to work (well, "work" for the relatively short time such regimes typically survive before they devolve into revolution & chaos). See my sig.
Most of the rest of your post is hair-splitting, pontificating, and hand-waving.
Leftist always means authoritarian/totalitarian. In every single case where leftists are or have been in full power/control of the government. Not every authoritarian/totalitarian regime is leftist, but every leftist regime is authoritarian/totalitarian.
I'll take capitalism over anything else any day of the week and twice on Sundays. No other system has lifted more people from poverty or provided so many people such high standards of living. Capitalism has allowed more people to live in freedom than any other system ever invented. Capitalism is the only system ever created where wealth is a renewable resource for everyone as long as they are willing to work and/or come up with an idea, skill, or invention thatâ(TM)s useful to someone else.
Strat
I was with you until this last ad-hominem garbage (nice touch taking sexual preference to political discussion) you came out with in the last paragraph.
Yeah, that's not typical of me. I was tired and just going "stream-of-consciousness" there, I think.
You are aware that "leftist" views have generated more radical and even violent revolutions than any "right" movements? (The final outcome has not by average been very great but the "leftist" cannot be blamed for the lack of trying...)
Yes, I'm quite aware. I was referring to the leftists in the general population, not the few leaders, appearing to exhibit submissive tendencies in desiring more control of their lives by others. The left's leaders are a whole different animal.
The leadership on the left's behavior and dialog suggests that they may have a God complex. They seem to want to control every aspect of everyone's lives. Given that, it's no wonder they want to suppress/eliminate religion. It competes with their vision of themselves as Supreme Being.
Strat
This capacity, this mentality is why people don't rise up en masse and reject the bullshit they're spoonfed on a daily basis. Because attacking the messenger like a spoiled child is so much easier, and so much more convenient than taking on severe systemic problems.
This.
Thanks for putting it so succinctly. Bravo,sir!
Normalcy bias is strong, and people will defend their comfortable little mental picture of the world quite aggressively, even up to actual violence at times, rather than deal with both their own self-deception and the prospect of having to take actions they may politically/ideologically disagree with to deal with the actual reality of the situation/problem at hand.
The tactics of the GP you discuss which are based on normalcy bias are well-recognized and even included as part of the political tactics to silence opposing voices in "Rules For Radicals" by Saul Alinsky.
Personally, I can't understand how a political movement could possibly paint itself as being for the empowerment of the masses, when it openly views silencing any opposing voices or embarrassing/inconvenient questions from the masses as standard and normal.
I wonder if a sexual survey conducted on those with leftist political views would show a predominance of "bottoms" (submissives) as opposed to population norms? After all, they seem to want to be told what to do, how to live, how much money to make, and even what to think by government. They keep voting for politicians who advocate for those things, after all.
Strat
Hosting all that data costs money. From a law enforcement point of view it's probably worthless after 5 years anyway.
But you're missing the point. Politically and citizen-control-wise, it can be worth far, far more than gold. Absolutely worth it, to them, to spend our money (not theirs) on it. Just another tax and tick on the debt clock that will never cost *them* a dime.
They have to take our money to retain the data, so that when we get angry because they take our money to retain the data, they can use the data they retained to protect themselves from the citizens who are angry that they're retaining the data.
It's turtles all the way down.
Strat
If you are an idiot, invest all your money/assets unwisely and lose it all, what is in store for you next? Are you just going to quetly lie down and die?
No, you will crawl to the government and start begging for help. If they don't provide you with something to make your ends meet, you will turn to crime. No matter how cynical you are regarding the government, it is not in their best interest or image to have their citizens at such stage. It kind of affects their bottom line and approval ratings.
Thus they need to somehow make it more difficult for you to do something stupid. Imposing limits on how much you can invest in a potentially risky venture seems like an easy way to protect an average, easily-manipulated idiots from themselves.
My god, you're right! We need the government to make *all* our decisions for us and save us from ourselves! What if people choose the wrong place to live, choose the wrong job, choose the wrong hobbies, join the wrong religion or political party, or associate with the wrong people? What if they engage in risky things like ski-jumping or rock-climbing and injure or kill themselves? Hell, what if they go to a *casino* and lose their house!?!?
The only thing more costly to a society than people's poor choices is the price to that society if the freedom/ability to make bad choices is removed. Most successful business owners started and failed at multiple business ventures before they learned enough and gained enough experience through those failures to create a successful venture. The same with nearly every single inventor.
If no opportunity to take risks and no consequences for failure are allowed to exist, there is no opportunity to succeed. One must exist for the other to exist. It's a ying/yang relationship. To attempt to do away with risking failure and failure's consequences and expect success is like trying to make a DC current flow through a conductor with only the positive or only the negative pole of a battery connected.
Strat