Why do we have police? Because citizens, as good as we are, cannot be trusted to police ourselves without a ton of laws and police to make sure we do what we're supposed to. No, we have police to keep the population obedient to the will and whim of the political elite.
Why should the market be any better? It's run by those same people who could not be trusted to maintain law biding composure. As opposed to the government who is run by people who could not be trusted to maintain law abiding composure?
The reason that we have (and need, unfortunately) governments is that often what the best choice for society at large is a poor choice for a give segment of that society. But here is the big disconnect between Socialists and Free Market types:
Socialists believe that government is inherently good - The government will do what is best for society at large, simply because it is government and government is basicly a trustworthy and good institution.
Free Market people believe that the government is simply another large profit making corporation, except one that is able to kill, imprison, and fight wars. Government regulation to "protect" the enviornment is simply a pretense for a large, violent corporation to sieze even more resources and power. The regulation will not protect the enviornment, any more than the war on drugs stops drugs, or the war on terror stops terror, or the war on poverty ended poverty.
If you want to convince the free market types of the need for government regulation to protect the enviornment, you are going to need to first convince them that:
A) The government really wants to protect the enviornment. B) That the government is competent enough to protect the enviornment. C) That the government will not trample civil liberties and destroy the economy doing A & B.
You have an implicit faith in government, but not everyone else does. Not everyone things the government is the big, friendly, trustworthy loving messiah that people inclined towards Socialism believe the government to be.
I wonder what would have happen, had George Lucas been able to get the rights to Flash Gordon from Dino De Laurentiis as he originally wanted, and made a Flash Gordon film instead of Star Wars!
The problem with this theory is that many of these places were places where, through long-term military intervention exactly like colonization (since that's what it was), "we" (as in the West) attempted to "give" people Western culture at the point of the gun, quite strenuously. Colonization was despicable, and never should have happened. And the colonization style model of "development" that the poster you are replying to is suggesting would never really work.
But, to be fair, many African countries saw a dramatic decrease in the standard of living after the end of colonialism. Ending colonization doesn't nessicarily mean liberating the people in the country. In many cases, ending colonization left a power vacum to be filled by some brutal warlord or kleptocrat.
Just because they had the word Socialist in their name didn't make them anti-capitalist in their actions. If capitalism is defined as a "free market economy" (which is typically what people mean when they say "capitalist"), then the Nazis were as anti-capitalist as you can possibly get.
They believed that all industry and agriculture should be nationalized, and that the state should set prices and wages, and the economy should be centrally planned for what they percieved as the "public good". In terms of its position on economic planning, Nazism is very similiar to Castro's Cuba.
If, like many socialists, you define capitalism to mean "bad mean poo poo heads", yeah fine... but it is a useless definition if you want to have any understanding of the situation. Nazism and Fascism believes in a planned economy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy ). Planned economies are inherently anti free market (by definition), and to argue otherwise is just playing word games.
Of course they did have tight control of the economy during the war, it was WWII after all. A tightly controlled state-run economy was a fundamental part of their ideology.
Companies like Krupp, IG Farben, and Rheinmetall did very well. So does Havana Club and Citgo/PDVSA. Are you saying that Castro and Hugo Chavez are pro-capitalism?
I thought Hitler and the Nazis were devout christians ( fair enough they may not have justified their actions in terms of religion ) and that it was a Muslim school which has decided to take these teaching options. No, the Nazis were not devout Christians... This is another example of rewriting history in order to give the Nazis characterists of modern day political enemies.
The biggest repeated myths about the Nazis are that they were Christian (which is entirely false, while they borrowed a mish-mash of religious iconography from european paganism, christianity, hinduism, etc., they didn't have any specific religious beliefs)... or that they supported capitalism (the Nazi party was the "National Socialist German Workers' Party", and supported a nationalized centrally planned economy closer to modern day Cuba or North Korea than anything else).
Since the Nazis are pretty much the archetype of evil in our society, people who are anti-Christian or anti-capitalism or anti-anything-else want to paint the Nazis as being Christian or capitalist or whatever it is that they don't like (Godwins law in effect).
Yes, but at least in the case of Creationism, there doesn't seem to be any racist intent (unless I am very misinformed about what Creationism is all about). If I have a choice between plain stupidity, and racist hateful stupidity, isn't the first option less harmful?
This kind of rewriting history, or ignoring huge parts of history, is becoming more and more common. As governments, even Western governments, become more fascist and/or totalitarian, and as classical liberalism is taking it's last gasps before dying, public education is more concerned about suppressing the horror stories of previous fascist and totalitarian societies.
It is pure propaganda and finger pointing to blame Muslims for wanting to cover up the Holocaust. I am sure there are a few Muslims who do oppose the teaching of the holocaust, but the government has never had an aversion to telling religious minorities to screw off... why the sudden sensitivity to religion, ONLY in the case when it comes to supressing the teaching of the abuses of totalitarian government? I don't hear plans for schools in England to stop teaching evolution, or change the words to "Allah Save The Queen". Obviously the schools are interested in denying the Holocaust for other reasons, and are allowing Muslims to be the scapegoat for public outrage.
Is it the Muslims who are also responsible that 90% of Swedish teens don't know what a Gulag is? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag link in case you are a Swedish teen ) Or that (according to the article I referenced) "They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy". (and a link to the source: http://news.sawf.org/Lifestyle/36893.aspx ) The last time I checked, Muslims weren't big apologists for atheistic Communism. What religious minority are you going to blame in that case, huh?
Clearly, the governments of the world (and particularly the western world), have an agenda of denying and covering up the horrors of totalitarianism as those governments become more and more totalitarian. If you teach kids the horrors of totalitarianism, the kids might not so readily give the state so much power!
You're kidding, right? Those free market loving Republicans have been behind the biggest push in building a police state America has ever seen. Not to mention the biggest increase in discretionary spending EVER. Since when have the Republicans supported a free market?
Labor laws in this country are what keep children out of factories and (usually) limit the workday and job requirements to something that is not going to wear out and compromise the health of the worker in as little as 5 or 6 years*. No, this is not true at all. Child labor largely disappeared in the U.S. by the time child labor laws were passed... if children were actually a critical part of the U.S. labor force at the time, child labor laws would have caused an economic depression (but most likely would have never been passed). And there are many countries that have extremly strict child labor laws (India for example), that have plenty of exploitive child labor. Economic prosperity eliminates child labor - Countries rich enough not to need child labor and backbreaking labor to survive will not have that sort of labor, despite what the law says. A poverty stricken country will have back breaking labor, and child labor, despite what the law says.
Social progress follows technological and economic forces... the government likes to come in after the fact and take credit for the social progress, and the government controlled manditory education further deifies the government in the minds of people. But it is clear: If child labor was legal, you would not send your child to work. And if child labor was illegal, but sending your child to work was the only way to keep him from starving to death, you would send him to work illegally.
Wait a few years and SonyMusic/RIAA/MPAA TM might be able to. Yeah, but city governments are storming the homes of innocent people, and shooting them dead, TODAY! You can make all the snarky comments you like about the RIAA and MPAA, but, for example, the Atlanta police raided the home of an 88 year old woman, machine gunned her, and then discussed plans for planting false evidence while she lay on the ground bleeding to death begging for help. ( http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/51151/ ) This kind of shit happens every day... although probably not to the lilly white socialist dorks who can't possibly imagine any problems at all with the government controlling their internet access.
People are telling me, with a straight face, that we should let these kinds of murderers have a monopoly on our internet access to "protect us" from the "evil corporations"? Yeah, right. I never had any corporation point a loaded gun in my face, or threaten my life, so sell your municipal wifi plans to another sucker.
Just what do you do when private industry (the precious "market") has utterly failed? The "free market" is like "free speech". The free market simply means that economic interactions are done without violent coercion. The "market" is simply an aggregate of millions of individual choices made by millions of individual people, each with their own desires, goals, and priorities. It doesn't exist as an entity. You are anthropomorphisizing the market into a boogyman, when "the market" is simply a word used to describe an entirely abstract concept.
When you talk about "market failure", what you are REALLY saying is that "free people have not made the choices I want them to make, therefore we should force them to do the things I want them to do, because my way is the best way".
It seems that a definition is in order. Profit is the amount of revenue received minus the production cost and overhead. So, no, government doesn't need to make a profit, it just needs to cover its costs and overhead. Neither of which are zero. In reality, the politician has to give inflated contracts to companies that are politically connected (i.e. make big campaign donations to that politician). The companies in turn need to hire the politicians unemployed brother-in-law as a "consultant" for lots of money. And the local city workers union needs to get a lot of new jobs created, nessicary or not, before they are going to throw their support behind the issue.
The cost of corruption is far greater than the costs of an open, honest, profit. There are huge political/commercial machines that are making vast sums of money in ways that an open for-profit transaction simply doesn't allow.
And, again, the idea that companies don't have waste and bureacracy is laughable. Just talk to anyone who works at a reasonably large company and they'll tell you stories. Yes, but companies don't have SWAT teams, prisons, etc.. A large corporation is going to have some of the same beurocratic problems as big government, because both are essentially the same thing... big government is a monopoly corporation with guns.
BUT, Walmart or Sony isn't going to kick down my door and throw me in prison. Walmart and Sony aren't going to regulate what political party I can donate to, or deny me permission to do construction work on my house. They may not be perfect, but I can easily disassociate my life from them.
Government services don't have the overhead of profit. Unless government has the magical power to produce goods and services out of thin air, the government needs to make a profit. The only difference is that private industry relies on a voluntary system of generating revenue, where as the government relies on the threat of violence to compel people to pay.
Of course, in most cases it is the government and corporations are working together (such as in the case of municiple wifi). If a corporation can't sell enough wifi equipment to willing buyers, all it has to do is lobby the government to force the taxpayers to purchase wifi equipment at gunpoint.
Does anyone see any downsides to this? The fact that the networks are owned by the government, controlled by the government, etc. which pretty much gives the police state carte blanche to spy on its citizens. Of course the people who support government wi-fi tend to also be pro-police-state, so you might see this as a plus.
Look at the prices of the food, and the collection of BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot, at the local Whole Foods Market. Clearly Yuppies are the target market for organic food.
In an era of mass production of consumer products, deliberate inefficiency (hand made items, organic foods, "fair trade" coffee) is an ever more important form of conspicuous consumption. It also allows people with money to participate in the age-old tradition of declaring their moral superiority with their wealth.
The modern yuppie has adopted some hippie characteristics as part of their estetic.
Using your 1.5 Mbps figure: sure, you can't get more than 1.5 Mbps from that site. But, if you've got 6 Mbps down, you can get 1.5 Mbps from that site, and 1.5 Mbps from a different site, and 1.5 Mbps from another site, and 1.5 Mbps from one more site while you're at it.
Which means you can be snagging a torrent of Feisty Fawn while downloading HL2:E1 and simultaneously fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets, getting the maximum possible throughput from each. What your saying is true... But clearly, downloading torrents of Feisty Fawn and fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets would make a person a "power user".:) That sort of user already has plenty of bandwidth.
We are talking about bringing bandwidth to Mom & Pop America. If we give every home in the U.S. and beyond a 100 Mbps connection, without making any other changes to the backbone or people upgrading their server bandwidth in turn, things will get slower - a lot slower. And perhaps a lot more perverted.
Come on, I hear people bragging about their high bandwidth... I have 1000 mbps at home, but in a lot of ways it is pretty pointless, because the best you can hope for in normal everyday useage is about 1.5 mbps. The fact is, the data speed into your home is limited by the backbone and the ability of servers to actually serve data that fast. There is no way that I am going to be downloading something from a high traffic public server a few thousand kilometers away at higher than 1.5 mbps. My home connection is not the limiting factor in that kind of situation.
Right now, with out major improvements in other areas, giving higher than 1.5 mbps into the home is pretty pointless.
Would it be starting the Vietnam war? Would it be the failed Bay of Pigs invasion? Would it be when he was sleeping with a Nazi spy during WWII? Would it be when he ordered the FBI to put Martin Luther King under 24 hour surveillance? When he was political allies with senator McCarthy supporting State Department witch hunts (and got his brother Robert a job with McCarthy, and hooked up his sister with McCarthy romanticly)? Would it be his cheating on his wife?
1) The fact that my reply wasn't particularly serious appears to have gone over your head. Perhaps I should have realised that I was replying to an American, and therefore ensured that each word was delimited by an emoticon to make things clear. Wow... what an asshole! Talk about reading things into a comment in order to justify some wierd hateful stereotype you have. Are all Europeans as arrogant and bigoted as you?
A country where people feel free to protest peacefully about things that most others regard as trivial is one where people still have at least some freedoms. However, if protests themselves become irrelevant irrespective of how many people are involved, then citizens should start being afraid, because the name for a system where politicians do whatever they want irrespective of whether the public likes it or not is "a dictatorship". Allowing people to vote for their dictators once in a while doesn't change the fact that they are dictators. No, citizens should be afraid when protests are no longer legal... but they should not be afraid if protests are no longer relevant. Free speech doesn't mean you have the right to be taken seriously, it simply means you have the right to free expression. If you abuse the credulity of the people, at some point they are going to stop taken you seriously. Like "the boy who cried wolf". Protestors have played themselves out - People have been desensitized to protest as a means of expression.
Not only that, but protesting is a crude form of expression. It doesn't educate people about an issue, it doesn't often change minds about an issue... and many times, it is designed to intimidate with the implicit threat of violence rather than be a form of expression (Many of the current batch of protests, such as the anti-WTO protests, are organized to actually disrupt the meetings, as opposed to simply show disaproval to the people at the meeting).
Also, a large protest doesn't mean that a plurality of people are behind something. Some friends of mine have no trouble getting 20,000 kids to come out to their convention for their underground band every year... if an underground band who gets little radio play and isn't on MTV or anything can get 20,000 kids modivated to travel to someplace for a weekend for $150 a head admission (not including travel costs and accomidation), then the 50,000 or so angry protestors at an "anti-globalization" rally don't nessicarilly represent a plurality of the population because they come out for free. In modern times, with cheap publishing, telephones, TV, radio, and especially the Internet, it isn't hard to get a few thousand people for just about any reason together. I am sure you could get together a giant protest of people who believe they have been abducted by aliens if you want, but that doesn't mean they represent the mainstream of thought.
Finally, at a protest, you can't control who is going to come and "support" your position. For example, not too long ago there was an anti-Iraq war protest where a handful of protestors decided that vandilizing the nearby synagogue and beating up a few Jewish people was the perfect way to show their dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy. The only detail I really remember about the protest from the news report, is that some of the protestors were racist assholes. The actions of a few people managed to co-opt the entire protest in my mind, such that the only thing I can remember about that protest is something extremly negative. Even if they only represented a tiny minority of the protestors, a few idiots are going to inevitably do or say something stupid, and thus are going to alienate people to their cause. The idiots are always going to get way more attention and media coverage than the normal respectable people because their actions are more sensationalistic. Since the person organizing the protest can't keep any other group of people who have their own twisted agendas from showing up and taking part, chances are your protest message is going to alienate people, not win them over.
Be fair, please -- they wouldn't protest against Castro either. But, to be fair, *SOMEONE* would protest Chavez and Castro (just not the typical anti-globalization protestors)... which just proves my point that protests and outrage are now the norm, not the exception... and therefore are irrelevant.
That might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, but not today. Today there is pretty much a group of people who protest as a recreation activity slash lifestyle choice. Those same people who are protesting Bush were protesting Clinton, protest global trade meetings, protest the world bank, and will protest any world leader except Hugo Chavez. It is like the boy who cried wolf, protests are the natural and expected state of things and no longer represent any real spontanious popular movement.
It is non-ionizing radiation... so it won't cause cancer. Probably, the giant thermonuclear fireball that usually hangs in the sky is more of a threat to your health.
Slashdot Mirror
Socialists believe that government is inherently good - The government will do what is best for society at large, simply because it is government and government is basicly a trustworthy and good institution.
Free Market people believe that the government is simply another large profit making corporation, except one that is able to kill, imprison, and fight wars. Government regulation to "protect" the enviornment is simply a pretense for a large, violent corporation to sieze even more resources and power. The regulation will not protect the enviornment, any more than the war on drugs stops drugs, or the war on terror stops terror, or the war on poverty ended poverty.
If you want to convince the free market types of the need for government regulation to protect the enviornment, you are going to need to first convince them that:
A) The government really wants to protect the enviornment.
B) That the government is competent enough to protect the enviornment.
C) That the government will not trample civil liberties and destroy the economy doing A & B.
You have an implicit faith in government, but not everyone else does. Not everyone things the government is the big, friendly, trustworthy loving messiah that people inclined towards Socialism believe the government to be.
I wonder what would have happen, had George Lucas been able to get the rights to Flash Gordon from Dino De Laurentiis as he originally wanted, and made a Flash Gordon film instead of Star Wars!
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I guess we would have been deprived of this masterpiece:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uQVLFn2PTzY&mode=relat
But, to be fair, many African countries saw a dramatic decrease in the standard of living after the end of colonialism. Ending colonization doesn't nessicarily mean liberating the people in the country. In many cases, ending colonization left a power vacum to be filled by some brutal warlord or kleptocrat.
They believed that all industry and agriculture should be nationalized, and that the state should set prices and wages, and the economy should be centrally planned for what they percieved as the "public good". In terms of its position on economic planning, Nazism is very similiar to Castro's Cuba.
If, like many socialists, you define capitalism to mean "bad mean poo poo heads", yeah fine... but it is a useless definition if you want to have any understanding of the situation. Nazism and Fascism believes in a planned economy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy ). Planned economies are inherently anti free market (by definition), and to argue otherwise is just playing word games. Of course they did have tight control of the economy during the war, it was WWII after all. A tightly controlled state-run economy was a fundamental part of their ideology. Companies like Krupp, IG Farben, and Rheinmetall did very well. So does Havana Club and Citgo/PDVSA. Are you saying that Castro and Hugo Chavez are pro-capitalism?
The biggest repeated myths about the Nazis are that they were Christian (which is entirely false, while they borrowed a mish-mash of religious iconography from european paganism, christianity, hinduism, etc., they didn't have any specific religious beliefs)... or that they supported capitalism (the Nazi party was the "National Socialist German Workers' Party", and supported a nationalized centrally planned economy closer to modern day Cuba or North Korea than anything else).
Since the Nazis are pretty much the archetype of evil in our society, people who are anti-Christian or anti-capitalism or anti-anything-else want to paint the Nazis as being Christian or capitalist or whatever it is that they don't like (Godwins law in effect).
Yes, but at least in the case of Creationism, there doesn't seem to be any racist intent (unless I am very misinformed about what Creationism is all about). If I have a choice between plain stupidity, and racist hateful stupidity, isn't the first option less harmful?
This kind of rewriting history, or ignoring huge parts of history, is becoming more and more common. As governments, even Western governments, become more fascist and/or totalitarian, and as classical liberalism is taking it's last gasps before dying, public education is more concerned about suppressing the horror stories of previous fascist and totalitarian societies.
It is pure propaganda and finger pointing to blame Muslims for wanting to cover up the Holocaust. I am sure there are a few Muslims who do oppose the teaching of the holocaust, but the government has never had an aversion to telling religious minorities to screw off... why the sudden sensitivity to religion, ONLY in the case when it comes to supressing the teaching of the abuses of totalitarian government? I don't hear plans for schools in England to stop teaching evolution, or change the words to "Allah Save The Queen". Obviously the schools are interested in denying the Holocaust for other reasons, and are allowing Muslims to be the scapegoat for public outrage.
Is it the Muslims who are also responsible that 90% of Swedish teens don't know what a Gulag is? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag link in case you are a Swedish teen ) Or that (according to the article I referenced) "They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy". (and a link to the source: http://news.sawf.org/Lifestyle/36893.aspx ) The last time I checked, Muslims weren't big apologists for atheistic Communism. What religious minority are you going to blame in that case, huh?
Clearly, the governments of the world (and particularly the western world), have an agenda of denying and covering up the horrors of totalitarianism as those governments become more and more totalitarian. If you teach kids the horrors of totalitarianism, the kids might not so readily give the state so much power!
Social progress follows technological and economic forces... the government likes to come in after the fact and take credit for the social progress, and the government controlled manditory education further deifies the government in the minds of people. But it is clear: If child labor was legal, you would not send your child to work. And if child labor was illegal, but sending your child to work was the only way to keep him from starving to death, you would send him to work illegally.
People are telling me, with a straight face, that we should let these kinds of murderers have a monopoly on our internet access to "protect us" from the "evil corporations"? Yeah, right. I never had any corporation point a loaded gun in my face, or threaten my life, so sell your municipal wifi plans to another sucker.
When you talk about "market failure", what you are REALLY saying is that "free people have not made the choices I want them to make, therefore we should force them to do the things I want them to do, because my way is the best way".
The cost of corruption is far greater than the costs of an open, honest, profit. There are huge political/commercial machines that are making vast sums of money in ways that an open for-profit transaction simply doesn't allow. And, again, the idea that companies don't have waste and bureacracy is laughable. Just talk to anyone who works at a reasonably large company and they'll tell you stories. Yes, but companies don't have SWAT teams, prisons, etc.. A large corporation is going to have some of the same beurocratic problems as big government, because both are essentially the same thing... big government is a monopoly corporation with guns.
BUT, Walmart or Sony isn't going to kick down my door and throw me in prison. Walmart and Sony aren't going to regulate what political party I can donate to, or deny me permission to do construction work on my house. They may not be perfect, but I can easily disassociate my life from them.
Of course, in most cases it is the government and corporations are working together (such as in the case of municiple wifi). If a corporation can't sell enough wifi equipment to willing buyers, all it has to do is lobby the government to force the taxpayers to purchase wifi equipment at gunpoint.
Look at the prices of the food, and the collection of BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot, at the local Whole Foods Market. Clearly Yuppies are the target market for organic food.
In an era of mass production of consumer products, deliberate inefficiency (hand made items, organic foods, "fair trade" coffee) is an ever more important form of conspicuous consumption. It also allows people with money to participate in the age-old tradition of declaring their moral superiority with their wealth.
The modern yuppie has adopted some hippie characteristics as part of their estetic.
Using your 1.5 Mbps figure: sure, you can't get more than 1.5 Mbps from that site. But, if you've got 6 Mbps down, you can get 1.5 Mbps from that site, and 1.5 Mbps from a different site, and 1.5 Mbps from another site, and 1.5 Mbps from one more site while you're at it.
Which means you can be snagging a torrent of Feisty Fawn while downloading HL2:E1 and simultaneously fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets, getting the maximum possible throughput from each. What your saying is true... But clearly, downloading torrents of Feisty Fawn and fetching all posts from alt.binary.erotica.midgets would make a person a "power user".
We are talking about bringing bandwidth to Mom & Pop America. If we give every home in the U.S. and beyond a 100 Mbps connection, without making any other changes to the backbone or people upgrading their server bandwidth in turn, things will get slower - a lot slower. And perhaps a lot more perverted.
It is kind of like "Organic" foods... Most commercial pesticides are organic in this sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry ... But they are not "organic" in this sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food ...
What used to have something to do with carbon and hydrogen now means "yuppie approved".
Once you insert a technical term into the public vernacular, it will take on a widely different meaning.
Come on, I hear people bragging about their high bandwidth... I have 1000 mbps at home, but in a lot of ways it is pretty pointless, because the best you can hope for in normal everyday useage is about 1.5 mbps. The fact is, the data speed into your home is limited by the backbone and the ability of servers to actually serve data that fast. There is no way that I am going to be downloading something from a high traffic public server a few thousand kilometers away at higher than 1.5 mbps. My home connection is not the limiting factor in that kind of situation.
Right now, with out major improvements in other areas, giving higher than 1.5 mbps into the home is pretty pointless.
What idealistic parts of JFK life inspire you?
Would it be starting the Vietnam war? Would it be the failed Bay of Pigs invasion? Would it be when he was sleeping with a Nazi spy during WWII? Would it be when he ordered the FBI to put Martin Luther King under 24 hour surveillance? When he was political allies with senator McCarthy supporting State Department witch hunts (and got his brother Robert a job with McCarthy, and hooked up his sister with McCarthy romanticly)? Would it be his cheating on his wife?
A modified xbox could include cheat software.
Not only that, but protesting is a crude form of expression. It doesn't educate people about an issue, it doesn't often change minds about an issue... and many times, it is designed to intimidate with the implicit threat of violence rather than be a form of expression (Many of the current batch of protests, such as the anti-WTO protests, are organized to actually disrupt the meetings, as opposed to simply show disaproval to the people at the meeting).
Also, a large protest doesn't mean that a plurality of people are behind something. Some friends of mine have no trouble getting 20,000 kids to come out to their convention for their underground band every year... if an underground band who gets little radio play and isn't on MTV or anything can get 20,000 kids modivated to travel to someplace for a weekend for $150 a head admission (not including travel costs and accomidation), then the 50,000 or so angry protestors at an "anti-globalization" rally don't nessicarilly represent a plurality of the population because they come out for free. In modern times, with cheap publishing, telephones, TV, radio, and especially the Internet, it isn't hard to get a few thousand people for just about any reason together. I am sure you could get together a giant protest of people who believe they have been abducted by aliens if you want, but that doesn't mean they represent the mainstream of thought.
Finally, at a protest, you can't control who is going to come and "support" your position. For example, not too long ago there was an anti-Iraq war protest where a handful of protestors decided that vandilizing the nearby synagogue and beating up a few Jewish people was the perfect way to show their dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy. The only detail I really remember about the protest from the news report, is that some of the protestors were racist assholes. The actions of a few people managed to co-opt the entire protest in my mind, such that the only thing I can remember about that protest is something extremly negative. Even if they only represented a tiny minority of the protestors, a few idiots are going to inevitably do or say something stupid, and thus are going to alienate people to their cause. The idiots are always going to get way more attention and media coverage than the normal respectable people because their actions are more sensationalistic. Since the person organizing the protest can't keep any other group of people who have their own twisted agendas from showing up and taking part, chances are your protest message is going to alienate people, not win them over.
That might have been true 20 or 30 years ago, but not today. Today there is pretty much a group of people who protest as a recreation activity slash lifestyle choice. Those same people who are protesting Bush were protesting Clinton, protest global trade meetings, protest the world bank, and will protest any world leader except Hugo Chavez. It is like the boy who cried wolf, protests are the natural and expected state of things and no longer represent any real spontanious popular movement.
It is non-ionizing radiation... so it won't cause cancer. Probably, the giant thermonuclear fireball that usually hangs in the sky is more of a threat to your health.