Clearly the problem is that pick axes and chat rooms are too easy to access to the general public. It is madness that any person can just boot up their computer and access a chat room, or just walk into a hardware store and purchase a pick axe, with no sort of government supervision or licencing. It is undeniable that if chat rooms and pick axes were restricted the same way firearms are restricted now, then a brutal chat-room-pick-axe attacks like this would have never happened.
How anyone can look at this violent crime, and not support chat-room-control and pick-axe control is proof that they are brainwashed by the chat room industry and the pick-axe industry!
People wouldn't need the insurance companies, if it wasn't for the lawsuits. If schools didn't have insurance, and had to pay out $1,000,000 from their budget every time a child skinned their knee, the schools would still implement these insane restrictions on students (probably even more so, as the results of a lawsuit would be even more catastrophic for the school).
Blaming the insurance companies is a way to take blame from legislaters who created the type of liability laws which are the real problem, and instead try to blame it on "evil capitalists". Sorry, the demands that insurance companies make are reasonable when they are faced with a rabid and non-sensical judiciary, and legislators who most likely began their careers as ambulance chasing trial lawyers.
So when child obesity grows to even more extreme levels, because government schools don't let kids engage in "potentially dangerous" physical activities, and when kids are harrassed by police when they play ball in the vacant lot or ride their bikes in the street... and pretty much the only thing kids are allowed to do are supervised indoor activities... how will we blame child obesity on the cola companies and capitalism? Who are the American people going to sue for this?
Maybe because the population of Iceland is about 1/5th the population of Manhattan Island. Iceland on the world scale is slightly less significant than East Harlem.
The reason that "illegal" immigration is such a problem, is because "legal" immigration is such a long and difficult process. I have not met a single person who was outraged about "illegal" immigration that wanted to make it easier for immigrants to come into the country legally.
So you are only against "illegal" immigration, right? How about this, we change the laws so that everyone who comes to the U.S. (barring a someone with contagious disease or appearing in an international criminal database), gets made an American citizens, right away, no questions asked. It would be legal, so you wouldn't have a problem with that, right?
The way to stop illegal immigration is to give everyone who wants it a legal way to immigrate!
The law IS a powerful instrument. So can we expect these FDA regulations to be as effective as our 100 billion dollar and millions in prisons War on Drugs? Or should we expect it to be as successful as our military victory in Iraq? As successful as our public education system? As successful as Amtrack? I am sure the FDA website provides as impartial and accurate information about our victories against tainted food, as does the DEA website about our victory over the drug scourge.
the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.
I hear you on laws against fraud, but why standardized food labeling? You realize there are all sorts of specialty foods, for diabetics, vegans, low-carb diets, Hallal or Kosher, macrobiotics etc., and each could use a food labeling system more specialized for their niche market. If you are worried about meat monoculture, why aren't you worried about labeling monoculture?
I have absolutly no trouble finding non-GMO food, despite there being no laws requiring GMO food to be labeled. See, it is funny, the people who sell non-GMO food realize there is a market for it, and so they explicitly label their food as such.
It's true that both are "American Centrist" parties, but they do have differences.
They use different rhetoric. But it is ultimatly the same policies. They are superficially different, but support almost exactly the same thing.
Still have a country. The only truly Libertarian "countries" establish in the 20th century were invaded and annexed by their neighbours.
A "true" Libertarian society is an ideal, and not possible in the real world. But there have been FAR MORE Libertarian societies in the 20th Century than ours - For example, Switzerland, who have no proper military, a decentralized canton based government (even though Switzerland is tiny, it is LESS centralized than the U.S. which is huge), are pro-free-trade, relatively low tax rate and much fewer buisness regulations. The U.S. government could shrink by an order of magnitude, without major problems.
You tend to end up a corprotocracy where you're governed by an unelected corporation that has no legal requirement to care about your well being.
Corporations are a product of government regulation, not restricted by them. The modern mega-corporation can not exists without government subsidies or contracts, regulations to keep competitors from the market, and special legal status and infrastructure provided by the government. The more powerful and more centralized the state is, the more likely a single corporation (or powerful oligarchy of corporations), will take it over. Isn't it clear in the last 50 years, government regulation has been increasing? And isn't it clear that in the last 50 years, corporations have gotten more and more power over the government? If you look closely, most regulations are designed to benifit a certain industry or corporation, not harm it.
It's not going to happen, anyway, so why don't you focus on goals that are actually acheivable?
I don't have to worry about achieving my goals... the current state of affairs in not sustainable. The government is too top heavy, too big, too inflexible, and there are too many people who want too many things from it. There are more and more regulations produced everyday, with worse and worse punishments, but nowhere near the resource to enforce them all. The days of our current U.S. government are limited, and you are likely to see a collapse of the U.S. government the same way the Soviet Union collapsed not too long ago. The U.S. government WILL drasticly decrease, like it or not. It would be far better if the U.S. realized this, and reduced government in an orderly, steady manner such as China is doing, instead of waiting for it to collapse all at once like the Soviet Union did. But regardless, the U.S. is heading towards a more Libertarian society for better or worse.
My goal is to avoid being collateral damage when the government collapses.
Save me the lecturing. I could care less about who wins the election for the following reasons:
1. Democrats and Republicans are are essentially the same party ideologically.
2. Third parties (which I support), are frivolously sued, prevented from advertising by "campaign finance reform", locked out by gerimandering, and are subject to far worse restriction that the "wronged" Democrats. In about half the country, it is not legally possible for third party candidates to run. Usually it is the Democrats who are being going after 3rd parties (at least in the last couple years), because the Democrats believe that 3rd parties are "Stealing" the anti-Bush vote, and that by locking out 3rd parties those people will vote Democrat. When Democrats are doing everything possible to make sure I am not able to vote for the party I want to vote for, I have little sympathy if the same thing happens to them. Let them get a taste of their own medicine!
If either the Democrats, or Republics won, either way the election wouldn't be remotely democratic.
3. You are missing the point, that the executive branch has been given vastly more power than was origionally intended in the constitution. The executive branch controls the FDA, the FTA, the FCC, TSA, the FBI, CIA, NSA, is commander-in-cheif of the military, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Engery, and hundreds of other extra-constitutional government agencies.
If we had a more limited government, with a much smaller role for the executive brand, there wouldn't be the temptation to steal the election - kind of like the Dominos pizza guys who advertise they don't carry more than $50 - if the stakes are kept low enough, things just aren't worth stealing.
If people continue to believe that the government should have virtually unlimited power (so it can "solve their problems" of course), then inevitably control of the government becomes desirable to those people who want unlimited power. Limit the executive branch to it's original basic constitutional functions, and the presidency would not be valuable enough to inspire widespread election fraud.
I suppose you could subvert the system if the race was extremly close. In that case, does it really matter? Does a leader somehow really have much more of a mandate if the they get 50.001% of the vote instead of 49.999%? The whole point of an election is to select a popular leader, not to "beat the other guy", so why worry over that situation? If the vote is that close, you are going to get a popular leader either way.
What makes you think nationalizing the voting process would make it harder to cheat in an election? If anything, the patchwork of differing voting systems makes it harder to create some silver bullet exploit that would swing an election.
If monoculture is bad for computer security, why would monoculture be good for voting security?
I agree, there are a certain set of behaviors that are appropriate, especially for a work enviornment. However, at a workplace you are being paid, and the types of social control tends to be apolitical.
But political correctness is far beyond that. For example, things that the Seattle Public School system considers "racist" and are grounds for disipline, directly quoted from their speech codes:
"having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard".
So in the Seattle Public Schools, correcting a student's grammer, disiplining them for being late, or critisizing socialism, could get you fired for being "racist". Do you think those things are racist?
Now, do you understand why people are so dead set against political correctness and speech codes? Do you think this policy is even remotely sane?
You are 100% correct. YouTube is not capble of censorship, since anyone who wants to can buy their own damn web server and serve video themselves. YouTube has no moral or legal obligation to play this video.
That being said, if this wasn't a conservative video you would have Slashdotters up in arms about this.
If the student's intent was malicious and not just to be funny, they could easily put the teacher's job in a situation for review. A student shows his parents the myspace page, the parent notifies otehr parents, brings it up to the pta, to the school board. All of a sudden this teacher is on a suspension until an investigation is complete as to whether or not this teacher is actually a sexual predator. This is the good-case scenario, worst case of course is that the teacher cannot prove her innocence and all this fake evidence is enough to get the teacher fired and even listed as a sex offender, being pubicly humiliated.
Isn't that a case better handled by not having a lynch mob mentality and giving people the benifit of the doubt? I mean, isn't the fact that a fake profile could get you thrown in prison in the worst case, fired from your job and on a sexual preditor list in the best case, the bigger problem?
Only the government, state or law-enforcement officials may "demand" your Social Security Number.
Completly false. Employers are REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number to handle SS deductions. Banks and credit card companies are REQUIRED BY LAW to retain your social security number in order to do financial reporting (so the IRS can check and make sure you aren't spending more than your reported earnings). Gun shops are REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number as part of criminal background checks. There are a whole slew of situations where, not only can a company ask you for your SSN, but they are required to take your SSN!
Visa can not demand you give it to them.
Visa IS REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number, or a tax ID number if it is a corporation, as part of their financial reporting requirments.
Private schools by law, can not demand you forfeit such information.
Private schools BY LAW ARE REQUIRED to take your SS number if the private school accepts federal government loans or grants for students.
Don't try to obscure the blame that the government bears for your SSN being your ID number. Aside from the fact that they have made legislation making SSN the de-facto ID number (Real ID Act), it was the government that decided that you would have one single number that would follow you for the rest of your life as your unique identity (as opposed to the system they used for passports, where your passport is given a unique ID, but that number will change over the course of your life... your passport is assigned a number, not the person)
No... comedians from the 80s made fun of political correctness... but many universities and schools have elaborate speech codes that are strictly enforced. Comedians in the 80s were making fun of a very real movement that began in the 80s, and never died, of creating institutional rules that govern speech.
When the hell were we ever talking about global warming or Michael Criton? We were talking about university speech-codes... are YOU smoking crack? I had to double check and triple check what you were even responding to. What does Political Correctness have to do with global warming or pop literature? Are you sure you are replying to the right message?
Political correctness IS relevant to the discussion. Political Correctness is a form of censorship. The premise of political censorship it that it is "good" censorship. That is is promoting "correct" ideals politically, and so it isn't bad like the other kinds of censorship. But the whole point of "Political Correctness" is to ban or supress "bad" ideas, and only let people express "good" ideas.
What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.
Slashdot Mirror
What country are you speaking of?
Clearly the problem is that pick axes and chat rooms are too easy to access to the general public. It is madness that any person can just boot up their computer and access a chat room, or just walk into a hardware store and purchase a pick axe, with no sort of government supervision or licencing. It is undeniable that if chat rooms and pick axes were restricted the same way firearms are restricted now, then a brutal chat-room-pick-axe attacks like this would have never happened.
How anyone can look at this violent crime, and not support chat-room-control and pick-axe control is proof that they are brainwashed by the chat room industry and the pick-axe industry!
People wouldn't need the insurance companies, if it wasn't for the lawsuits. If schools didn't have insurance, and had to pay out $1,000,000 from their budget every time a child skinned their knee, the schools would still implement these insane restrictions on students (probably even more so, as the results of a lawsuit would be even more catastrophic for the school).
Blaming the insurance companies is a way to take blame from legislaters who created the type of liability laws which are the real problem, and instead try to blame it on "evil capitalists". Sorry, the demands that insurance companies make are reasonable when they are faced with a rabid and non-sensical judiciary, and legislators who most likely began their careers as ambulance chasing trial lawyers.
So when child obesity grows to even more extreme levels, because government schools don't let kids engage in "potentially dangerous" physical activities, and when kids are harrassed by police when they play ball in the vacant lot or ride their bikes in the street... and pretty much the only thing kids are allowed to do are supervised indoor activities... how will we blame child obesity on the cola companies and capitalism? Who are the American people going to sue for this?
Maybe because the population of Iceland is about 1/5th the population of Manhattan Island. Iceland on the world scale is slightly less significant than East Harlem.
The reason that "illegal" immigration is such a problem, is because "legal" immigration is such a long and difficult process. I have not met a single person who was outraged about "illegal" immigration that wanted to make it easier for immigrants to come into the country legally.
So you are only against "illegal" immigration, right? How about this, we change the laws so that everyone who comes to the U.S. (barring a someone with contagious disease or appearing in an international criminal database), gets made an American citizens, right away, no questions asked. It would be legal, so you wouldn't have a problem with that, right?
The way to stop illegal immigration is to give everyone who wants it a legal way to immigrate!
The law IS a powerful instrument. So can we expect these FDA regulations to be as effective as our 100 billion dollar and millions in prisons War on Drugs? Or should we expect it to be as successful as our military victory in Iraq? As successful as our public education system? As successful as Amtrack? I am sure the FDA website provides as impartial and accurate information about our victories against tainted food, as does the DEA website about our victory over the drug scourge.
the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.
I hear you on laws against fraud, but why standardized food labeling? You realize there are all sorts of specialty foods, for diabetics, vegans, low-carb diets, Hallal or Kosher, macrobiotics etc., and each could use a food labeling system more specialized for their niche market. If you are worried about meat monoculture, why aren't you worried about labeling monoculture?
I have absolutly no trouble finding non-GMO food, despite there being no laws requiring GMO food to be labeled. See, it is funny, the people who sell non-GMO food realize there is a market for it, and so they explicitly label their food as such.
It's true that both are "American Centrist" parties, but they do have differences.
They use different rhetoric. But it is ultimatly the same policies. They are superficially different, but support almost exactly the same thing.
Still have a country. The only truly Libertarian "countries" establish in the 20th century were invaded and annexed by their neighbours.
A "true" Libertarian society is an ideal, and not possible in the real world. But there have been FAR MORE Libertarian societies in the 20th Century than ours - For example, Switzerland, who have no proper military, a decentralized canton based government (even though Switzerland is tiny, it is LESS centralized than the U.S. which is huge), are pro-free-trade, relatively low tax rate and much fewer buisness regulations. The U.S. government could shrink by an order of magnitude, without major problems.
You tend to end up a corprotocracy where you're governed by an unelected corporation that has no legal requirement to care about your well being.
Corporations are a product of government regulation, not restricted by them. The modern mega-corporation can not exists without government subsidies or contracts, regulations to keep competitors from the market, and special legal status and infrastructure provided by the government. The more powerful and more centralized the state is, the more likely a single corporation (or powerful oligarchy of corporations), will take it over. Isn't it clear in the last 50 years, government regulation has been increasing? And isn't it clear that in the last 50 years, corporations have gotten more and more power over the government? If you look closely, most regulations are designed to benifit a certain industry or corporation, not harm it.
It's not going to happen, anyway, so why don't you focus on goals that are actually acheivable?
I don't have to worry about achieving my goals... the current state of affairs in not sustainable. The government is too top heavy, too big, too inflexible, and there are too many people who want too many things from it. There are more and more regulations produced everyday, with worse and worse punishments, but nowhere near the resource to enforce them all. The days of our current U.S. government are limited, and you are likely to see a collapse of the U.S. government the same way the Soviet Union collapsed not too long ago. The U.S. government WILL drasticly decrease, like it or not. It would be far better if the U.S. realized this, and reduced government in an orderly, steady manner such as China is doing, instead of waiting for it to collapse all at once like the Soviet Union did. But regardless, the U.S. is heading towards a more Libertarian society for better or worse.
My goal is to avoid being collateral damage when the government collapses.
Save me the lecturing. I could care less about who wins the election for the following reasons:
1. Democrats and Republicans are are essentially the same party ideologically.
2. Third parties (which I support), are frivolously sued, prevented from advertising by "campaign finance reform", locked out by gerimandering, and are subject to far worse restriction that the "wronged" Democrats. In about half the country, it is not legally possible for third party candidates to run. Usually it is the Democrats who are being going after 3rd parties (at least in the last couple years), because the Democrats believe that 3rd parties are "Stealing" the anti-Bush vote, and that by locking out 3rd parties those people will vote Democrat. When Democrats are doing everything possible to make sure I am not able to vote for the party I want to vote for, I have little sympathy if the same thing happens to them. Let them get a taste of their own medicine!
If either the Democrats, or Republics won, either way the election wouldn't be remotely democratic.
3. You are missing the point, that the executive branch has been given vastly more power than was origionally intended in the constitution. The executive branch controls the FDA, the FTA, the FCC, TSA, the FBI, CIA, NSA, is commander-in-cheif of the military, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, Department of Engery, and hundreds of other extra-constitutional government agencies.
If we had a more limited government, with a much smaller role for the executive brand, there wouldn't be the temptation to steal the election - kind of like the Dominos pizza guys who advertise they don't carry more than $50 - if the stakes are kept low enough, things just aren't worth stealing.
If people continue to believe that the government should have virtually unlimited power (so it can "solve their problems" of course), then inevitably control of the government becomes desirable to those people who want unlimited power. Limit the executive branch to it's original basic constitutional functions, and the presidency would not be valuable enough to inspire widespread election fraud.
I suppose you could subvert the system if the race was extremly close. In that case, does it really matter? Does a leader somehow really have much more of a mandate if the they get 50.001% of the vote instead of 49.999%? The whole point of an election is to select a popular leader, not to "beat the other guy", so why worry over that situation? If the vote is that close, you are going to get a popular leader either way.
What makes you think nationalizing the voting process would make it harder to cheat in an election? If anything, the patchwork of differing voting systems makes it harder to create some silver bullet exploit that would swing an election.
If monoculture is bad for computer security, why would monoculture be good for voting security?
You pay to have the recycling done.
I agree, there are a certain set of behaviors that are appropriate, especially for a work enviornment. However, at a workplace you are being paid, and the types of social control tends to be apolitical.
e _schools_racism_2006-05-29/searace.htm
But political correctness is far beyond that. For example, things that the Seattle Public School system considers "racist" and are grounds for disipline, directly quoted from their speech codes:
"having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard".
So in the Seattle Public Schools, correcting a student's grammer, disiplining them for being late, or critisizing socialism, could get you fired for being "racist". Do you think those things are racist?
Now, do you understand why people are so dead set against political correctness and speech codes? Do you think this policy is even remotely sane?
Here is the actual policy page I am quoting from:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/seattl
You are 100% correct. YouTube is not capble of censorship, since anyone who wants to can buy their own damn web server and serve video themselves. YouTube has no moral or legal obligation to play this video.
That being said, if this wasn't a conservative video you would have Slashdotters up in arms about this.
If the student's intent was malicious and not just to be funny, they could easily put the teacher's job in a situation for review. A student shows his parents the myspace page, the parent notifies otehr parents, brings it up to the pta, to the school board. All of a sudden this teacher is on a suspension until an investigation is complete as to whether or not this teacher is actually a sexual predator. This is the good-case scenario, worst case of course is that the teacher cannot prove her innocence and all this fake evidence is enough to get the teacher fired and even listed as a sex offender, being pubicly humiliated.
Isn't that a case better handled by not having a lynch mob mentality and giving people the benifit of the doubt? I mean, isn't the fact that a fake profile could get you thrown in prison in the worst case, fired from your job and on a sexual preditor list in the best case, the bigger problem?
I was going to post a Microsoft shooting itself in the foot joke, but it seems that virtually every else immediatly thought exactly the same thing.
Only the government, state or law-enforcement officials may "demand" your Social Security Number.
Completly false. Employers are REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number to handle SS deductions. Banks and credit card companies are REQUIRED BY LAW to retain your social security number in order to do financial reporting (so the IRS can check and make sure you aren't spending more than your reported earnings). Gun shops are REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number as part of criminal background checks. There are a whole slew of situations where, not only can a company ask you for your SSN, but they are required to take your SSN!
Visa can not demand you give it to them.
Visa IS REQUIRED BY LAW to take your social security number, or a tax ID number if it is a corporation, as part of their financial reporting requirments.
Private schools by law, can not demand you forfeit such information.
Private schools BY LAW ARE REQUIRED to take your SS number if the private school accepts federal government loans or grants for students.
Don't try to obscure the blame that the government bears for your SSN being your ID number. Aside from the fact that they have made legislation making SSN the de-facto ID number (Real ID Act), it was the government that decided that you would have one single number that would follow you for the rest of your life as your unique identity (as opposed to the system they used for passports, where your passport is given a unique ID, but that number will change over the course of your life... your passport is assigned a number, not the person)
No... comedians from the 80s made fun of political correctness... but many universities and schools have elaborate speech codes that are strictly enforced. Comedians in the 80s were making fun of a very real movement that began in the 80s, and never died, of creating institutional rules that govern speech.
When the hell were we ever talking about global warming or Michael Criton? We were talking about university speech-codes... are YOU smoking crack? I had to double check and triple check what you were even responding to. What does Political Correctness have to do with global warming or pop literature? Are you sure you are replying to the right message?
No... The PC movement on campus is to ban things that aren't PC.
Project Censored would be good, if it wasn't so completly biased.
For example, "censored stories" like this:
"Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America"
"Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed"
"Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem"
Basicly, all the stories are the sort of one-sided propoganda pieces you expect in Workers Daily, or something like that.
The difference is, nobody thinks of the FCC as a bastion of freedom of speech. Everyone pretty much agrees that they exist to restrict people.
Political correctness IS relevant to the discussion. Political Correctness is a form of censorship. The premise of political censorship it that it is "good" censorship. That is is promoting "correct" ideals politically, and so it isn't bad like the other kinds of censorship. But the whole point of "Political Correctness" is to ban or supress "bad" ideas, and only let people express "good" ideas.
What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.