In the last election you had Democrats suing the Green Party, suing the Libertarian party, to suspend them from participation in elections, and openly and proudly admitting that it was "on a pretense, so those parties don't steal our votes". You have the Democrats sponsering a new law that would make all political funding based on seats in congress (meaning that political parties that don't have seats on congress could not legally accept any funding, essentially making any party other than Democrats and Republicans illegal). You have the Democratic party openly telling it's members to go to Green Party primaries and to sabatoge candidate selection.
You have major political parties openly and proudly commiting major political fraud in order to, what they admit openly, to supress people's choices in the election. Yet, people are worried about a few anomolies in a couple of electronic voting machines?
Lets just get this straight, the people who concerned about this aren't concerned about protecting Democracy... they are concerned about helping the Democratic party. They think Diebold are Repbulican supporters and will give votes to Republicans, and they want to protect the Democrats.
If these people were REALLY concerned about Democracy, they would be outraged as the massive and open voting fraud, gerrymandering, canditate and voter intimidation, and outright sabotage perpetrated by their own party.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure the Republicans would do the same evil things in a different situation... but it is the Democrats who are worried that third parties will harm them, because no-one really likes the Democrats, they just vote for them because they hate the Republicans more. The Democrats lost to Bush the first time because of Nadar and the Greens, and they are worried that third parties will "steal" (as they like to call it) the anti-Bush, anti-Republican vote.
Labor was overpriced in the dot com boom. It was Dutch Tulip Fever. Companies were hiring people, and not worrying about making a profit, and instead selling worthless stock for insane amounts of money.
You making less money isn't the fault of cheap labor in India... you making less money was the fault of the collective insanity and greed of the stock speculators in the late 90s. The Dot Com Boom was like spending a whole lot of money on your credit cards... it is fun while it lasts, but eventually someone is going to have to pay for all of it.
I doubt that is the reason... There is no law of the universe that says that Indians and Chinese can't do work every bit as good as we do.
There are sound economic reasons why we would see more employment in computers and technology in our country, even when jobs are being exported.
First of all, there are are going to always be a certain amount of companies that are not viable without I.T. outsourcing. A company that otherwise might not be able to function with expensive domestic I.T. services, can hire cheap offshore services for commodity I.T. work, but still use highly skilled and well-paid domestic labor for the functions of the company that they specialize in. (For example, a robotics company can hire an offshore firm to handle tech calls, and to run their web servers, while at the same time having domestic electronics engineers do actual engineering on robotics.).
Second of all, if I.T. is cheap overseas, it is cheap because the I.T. labor force there is underutilzed. As more and more I.T. services are outsourced to a location, and skilled I.T. workers become more in demand, the economic benifits of offshoring start to diminish. Eventually, labor in the offshore country for I.T. will approach the cost of domestic labor.
Offshoring is either a temporary way to cut costs, or it is good for us in the long run. Offshoring isn't the end of the world like people like to make out.
Offshoring is not bad either... we our helping our own economy if the country we are offshoring to has a comparitive advantage in producing the goods and services we need.
When we send work offshore to places that can do it cheaper and/or better, we free labor here that can do stuff that WE have a comparitive advantage in and can do cheaper and/or better. It is called specialization, and it works.
No country is "losing jobs" to offshoring. The U.S. or Western Europe may be losing jobs, but that is because of our own economic mismanagement, not because "them dern fureners!" are stealing anything from us. If it wasn't for Offshoring, our economy would have collapsed long ago.
Individuals who make up government = government. Unless I am misunderstanding, and the Trading Standards Office is some sort of private organization, it is completly legit to claim the UK government did something because one of it's paid employees did something as part of their job.
How about we put the waste right back into the ground, where the nuclear materials originally came from in the first place?
There might be worries "Oh, it will pollute the ground water! What about earthquakes? Containment systems can fail!"... but aren't these concerns about the tons of Uranium and other radioactive materals in the ground before they are mined? I mean a 100,000 years ago in Africa, there were NATURAL nuclear reactors in the ground. There is all kinds of Uranium under the ground, without any special protection, or concern about the groundwater and the like.
The good news is, the politicians will no longer be screaming to ban video games any more...
The bad news is, now the government will pay subsidies to video game makers not to make video games (like they give to farmers to not to grow things).:)
[quote]starving and sabotaging the government.[/quote] Starving and sabotaging the government? Are you fucking out of your mind? Since 2001, government spending has increased by 29%. Non-defense spending has increased 36%. We have seen the largest increase in spending, both military spending and social spending adjusted for inflation IN AMERICAN HISTORY. The federal government consumes at least 20% of the GDP of the United States. There are so many new laws and so much legislation being passed, that it is impossible for our legislators to even READ all the new legislation they are passing. It takes entire LIBRARIES to store all the new legislation being created. The U.S. has the strictest laws in the world, with an imprisoned population of over 2 million people!!!
As for education spending, I was wrong, the U.S. is #1 in the world in funding. We spend more than any other country, anywhere. No-one wants to admit that the reason that U.S. kids are retards compared to the rest of the industrialized world has nothing to do with money.
You got to be utterly and completly brainwashed, utterly and completly delusional out of touch with reality, to think for a second that government is somehow being "gutted" or "starved". With the half-a-trillion dollar a year deficiet, our government is being grow and spending so much money that the growth of government is highly unsustainable. We have no historical cases for this kind of debt or growth of government and spending (even the ol' Soviet Union wasn't this crazy), so there isn't any sort of way economists can analyse this systematicly- but most agree that the U.S. government is reaching the limits of what the WORLD ECONOMY can sustain!! We are so pro-government, and increasing government so much, that we are not only endangering ourselves, we are endangering the world!
[quote]These opinions are a dime a dozen on all the American whiteboy sites.[/quote] Well, you only hear it from "whiteboy" sites as you call it, because government-worshipers like you make sure that anyone who is anti-government and isn't white gets their brains blown out. Your progressive hero, ol "Great Society" Lindy had Malcom X killed for opposing the U.S government. He had Martin Luther King killed for question the Vietnam war. Anyone not white who isn't a cheerleader for the pro-big-government status-quo in American gets a death senstance. People like you have made sure that white people are the only ones that can speak out against the ever-more-Totalitarian U.S. government without being murdered - so it is no coincindence that you only hear white people speak out against government. Anyone else has to worry about their safety, and the safety of their family unless they puppet the Democratic party, or occasionally the Republican party.
[quote]You could perhaps do us a favor and move to a relatively lawless region like the Congo for five years, then report back with your experiences. I'll wait![/quote] Do you have even the slightest understanding of what is happening in the Congo, and the history of the region? You do realize that the Congo like most of Africa was conquered by imperialist states from Europe. These governments stole the natural resources and commited horrible attrocities on the people. Then they appointed puppet "democratic" leaders and declared the Congo "independent". Of course, the borders of the country were borders created by Europeans and didn't reflect the ethnic divisions or tradional social boundries - so those ethnic anomosities were exploited by foriegn governments, each supporting certain factions resulting in bloody civil war that destroyed government and central authority.
The problems in the Congo were created by foriegn governments that were way too big and too powerful and should have minded their own buisness and stayed out of Africa. It was not caused by some sort of indiginous Libertarian or Anarchist movement.
Perhaps you should seek professional help if you are hearing your DVD player and DVDs speaking to each other. I hear they can do remarkable things with pharmaceuticals these days.
It is really silly to worry about lawsuits anymore - You WILL be sued, no-matter what. Anyone with anything to lose is a target. The only thing you can do is make sure you have good lawyers.
The unfortunatly thing is that all these lawsuits make it prohibitivly expensive for the little guys (who can't afford an army of lawyers), and give big corporations the advantage - and at the same time that this is handing the world over to big corporations, we have to listen to people tell us that if it wasn't for this lawsuits "we would be taken advantage of by big corporations". *sigh*
But I'll humor you. Since the government couldn't possibly protect any aspects of the environment (since "it" is the very same government damaging others!), I'll let you explain to me how the private sector will do a better job of protecting the environment without government regulation.
The "private sector" as in corporations will not protect the enviornment in an of themselves in the absense of government regulation (of course, big corporations as we understand them are the product of government regulation in the first place... corporations require a whole slew of special privledges and direct and indirect subsidies to exist. Corporations as they exist today are not a natural product of the free market; Big corporations couldn't exist without big government)
However, there isn't just corporations or government. Many extremly powerful institutions fall outside those categories. For example, labor unions are extremely powerful non-governmental organizations. Most of the advances in pay, benifits, working hours, etc., were fought for and won by labor unions (and then over the years governments took credit for the whole thing). Religion is an extremly powerful non-corporate, non-government institution - if you doubt the power of religion just look at what happened when someone printed a few lame Mohammed cartoons.
There is no reason why people couldn't organize a new institution to protect the enviornment. In fact, that is what would have happened if the left had not hijacked the enviornmentalist movement and turned it into a big propoganda machine for government central planning.
You don't need a police force, atomic weapons, an "elected" leader, and a flag and nationalistic anthem in order to solve problems. There are any number of diverse systems of social organization, economic exchange, and self-regulation society can use instead of government sponsered violence. There are any number of possible institutions besides "government" or "corporations" that people can establish. Unfortunatly so many people have adopted a messianic view of the state as the great savior, they cannot comprehend any solution to any problem but government. There is really a whole world of possibilities out there if we allow a little freedom and are willing to experiment.
The government doesn't protect us from "companies from dumping whatever they want, whenever they want". It simply charges for the franchise rights if people want to dump. Companies that pay their protection fee (i.e. donate to political campaigns) dump with impunity and without regulation.
And lets not forget that from shooting uranium from weapons, to subsidizing the clear cutting of government owned forests, and to spending billions on superhighways instead of much cheaper mass transit, to subsidizing farmers to grow harmful crops using enviornmentaly unsafe methods, to being the single greatest CO2 producer, letting the government regulate the enviornment is a bit like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
Maybe you could argue that the currently the government reduces polution (by limiting it to only people who can afford to bribe politicians)... but that is a bit like claiming McDonalds helps reduce fast food by charging for frachises and driving other chains out of buisness. Sorry, I just don't buy it.
FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology.
If we try to "protect" culture the same way that the enviornmental movement tries to "protect" the enviornment, the solution is to have all culture monitored and strictly controled by the government.
[quote]Except when genocide goes relatively unnoticed, as it did with the slave trade and its gross negligence toward human life.[/quote] Once again, the slave trade was facilitated by imperialism. Without the governments and militaries of Europe taking control of Africa, the slave trade would not have been economicly viable.
[quote]I also do not agree that any diverse movement like socialism or capitalism must be equivalent to its most extreme element. That's just a double standard usually employed by extremists from the "other side". In your case, you even go as far as implying that the sins of all states are the sins of socialism, even when those are fostering capitalism.[/quote] Socialism is state capitalism. It can come about from Corporations taking over the state, or the state taking over corporations, but it is always fundamentaly the same in the end.
[quote]Yet a right-wing collectivism like racism is not interchangeable with a form that is based on universal human rights[/quote] Any type of state-run collectivism is never based on universal human rights. Collectivism requires central planning, central planning requires violence or the threat of violence to get all people to adhere to the central plan, and a power elite to do the planning. It is a top down, authoritarian structure. The "needs" of the collective (as percieved by a tiny power elite) trump the right of the individual. Collectivism is fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
There is the case of voluntary non-government collectivism, but this is pretty obscure as an ideology and so not worth discussing. Most people calling themselves Socialists support the government style of Socialism.
[quote]It all comes down to whether someone is trying to sell you extremism in terms of either ideas or deeds. That's where today's individualists need to take a good long look in the mirror while they reflect on the third-world tradgedy that transpired on the Gulf Coast last year. Maybe they could ask how much money they saved through extreme indifference; It would be a start.[/quote] I think you are refering to hurricane Katrina. If you are, I hope you know that the U.S. spends more per capita and percentage of GDP each year on disaster preparedness, and the government is spending billions to rebuild after Katrina. The problem in no way shape or form has anything to do with a lack of government spending. The U.S. government can't burn money fast enough on this Katrina thing.
The trouble with Katrina was that our system of disaster recovery is based on a Soviet model. "G. W. Bush didn't do anything to help New Orleans"... well sorry, if you are dependent on a state power structure and a single leader thousands of miles away, then you are fucked. That kind of concentration of power is a disaster in itself, there is no way it is going to turn out good.
The whole situation was a perfect example of why collectivism doesn't work. While private citicens, corporations, and foriegn governments were bring in truckloads of bottled water, food, supplies - most of them being turned away by FEMA... while private volunteers were being threated to be shot for attempting to enter the area to save people... the government was busy sending it's FEMA emergency rescue workers to 2 day sexual harrasment seminars to comply with federal law, and having firemen pass out public relations fliers on the other side of the state. All those dramatic helicoptor rescues you see on television? Do you know how many military style inflatable rafts can be purchased for the cost of one $20,000,000 helicopter? Not to mention the problem that the government has subsidized people to live on a flood plain for the past 50 years.
And the levee system used to be controlled localy, but the Army took over the levee system. Now, who do you think will do a better job at running a levee? Local people from New Orleans who will lose their homes and families if there are a problem, or the federal government, who will get to spend more of the people's m
But that does not indicate the ideology provides particular justification for genocide.
It doesn't provide the paticular justification for genocide, but it provides the mechanism to acomplish genocide - and history has shown that where there is a way, there is a will.:)
All Totalitarian states have commited acts of genocide. Socialism (Communists support Socialism as a means to achieve Communism), is a totalitarian system. If the government has total control of the economy, it has total control of everything (how do you print a political newspaper if printing presses are owned by the state? How do start a club if any meeting place is owned by the state? How can you move freely throughout your country if housing is assigned by the state?).
Modern day neo-socialists will dispute my definition of "Socialism", but most people who call themselves "Socialist" nowadays are really welfare capitalists. I am using the strict Marxist definition of Socialism, which is openly and proudly totalitarian.
Even the organized genocide of the native population in the United States happened because of centralized authority - the civil war had established the supremesy of a strong central government, and the war had created a large national army with a huge budget (prior to the U.S. civil war, the United States did not have a standing professional Army... only unpaid volunteer militia... and military spending was virtually non-existant compared to the modern United States). It was the massive expansion of government powers and resources which facilited westward expansion and the inevitable genocide.
Communism, as envision in the Marxist Leninist ideology, is destined to commit genocide - not because of any particular dedication to genocide in the ideology, but because the centralization of power and almost total control by the state makes it inevitable.
More authority, more power, more control, more restriction and regulation inevitable leads to oppression, and in the extreme to genocide. Any ideology that supports those concepts (which seems to be most mainstream political ideologies nowadays), supports genocide, no matter if it wants to admit it or not. Mass murder, racism, genocide, and war are simply the most ugly extreme of collectivism and anti-individualism.
Don't blame the athletics departments... U.S. schools are amoung the top 3 best funded schools in the world. There are schools that recieve a fraction of the amount of money your typical U.S. school recieves, and do far better.
The problems in U.S. schools have NOTHING... NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with funding.
Communist purges were usually acts of genocide... The majority of people who were targeted in the purges of Mao, Stalin, etc., were ethnic minorities. Communism was every bit as racist an genocidal as the Nazis... and of course their genocide was much more effective. The only difference is the Communists pretended that it wasn't genocide.
China, despite the rhetoric it sometimes uses, is now becoming a capitalist country. There is no great ideological divide spliting the world into two. China might be the next big boy on the block, and there is bound to be a natural competition between superpowers, but it is not the polorized world of the cold war. It is not the great battle of civilizations and ideologies.
Lenin said that the irresistable forces of history would garantee that Socialism would be more scientificly advanced then Capitalism - This is one of the fundamental reasons for supporting a Socialist economy. By winning the space race, it was a way to discredit Socialism and the historical determinism of Marxism-Leninism. The U.S. sending men to the moon first destroyed people's faith in the Soviet system. But, since we share the same ideology as China, there is nothing to be gained in some grand struggle by going into space.
In a capitalist society, if they build a superior rocket system, we can just BUY it from China (the same way they buy Boeing jets from us). It isn't a crushing blow to our economic system.
No, manned spaceflight could be considered "infrastructure", like roads and power plants... which is arguably a legit function of government. However, NASA having a monopoly on space science isn't a legit function of government, and has set space science back years.
Does the U.S. government have a monopoly on research on the rainforests? Or medical research? Or any type of other research? No! We have companies, universities, non-profit groups, and plain old hobbiest doing all kinds of research. That is because the proper infrastructure exists for the private sector to do most of the research.
If NASA helped develope cheap space travel, it would become reasonable for universites and private companies to do space science. In the same way a team from a University can board a plane, fly to a city in South America, and then hire a boat or truck to go to the rainforest, they could do the same thing with space exploration. Imagine if all the research on the rainforests required the U.S. government to build a custom craft or probe to do the exploring: it would be a joke compared to how research happens now.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have serious doubts about NASA being able to develop space infrastructure any more than it can effectivly do science. I think that private spacetravel like we have seen with the X Prize and SpaceShipOne is the real begining of space travel. Going to the Moon was pretty amazing, but it was basicly the equivalent to building the pyramids or the great wall of china - The U.S. and NASA didn't have any paticular genius, they simply had such insane resources to pump into the project. It is not a sustainable model for science or exploration.
I mean, there probably isn't legislation that says "Record Companies may not secret install rootkits from music CDs", but it seems like a clear cut case of good ol' fashion fraud to me.
I don't think legislation is going to do anything... if they aren't enforcing the laws against fraud now, what makes us think they will do it with a new law?
Slashdot Mirror
In the last election you had Democrats suing the Green Party, suing the Libertarian party, to suspend them from participation in elections, and openly and proudly admitting that it was "on a pretense, so those parties don't steal our votes". You have the Democrats sponsering a new law that would make all political funding based on seats in congress (meaning that political parties that don't have seats on congress could not legally accept any funding, essentially making any party other than Democrats and Republicans illegal). You have the Democratic party openly telling it's members to go to Green Party primaries and to sabatoge candidate selection.
You have major political parties openly and proudly commiting major political fraud in order to, what they admit openly, to supress people's choices in the election. Yet, people are worried about a few anomolies in a couple of electronic voting machines?
Lets just get this straight, the people who concerned about this aren't concerned about protecting Democracy... they are concerned about helping the Democratic party. They think Diebold are Repbulican supporters and will give votes to Republicans, and they want to protect the Democrats.
If these people were REALLY concerned about Democracy, they would be outraged as the massive and open voting fraud, gerrymandering, canditate and voter intimidation, and outright sabotage perpetrated by their own party.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure the Republicans would do the same evil things in a different situation... but it is the Democrats who are worried that third parties will harm them, because no-one really likes the Democrats, they just vote for them because they hate the Republicans more. The Democrats lost to Bush the first time because of Nadar and the Greens, and they are worried that third parties will "steal" (as they like to call it) the anti-Bush, anti-Republican vote.
The fat controllers were actually the selling point on the Xbox for me. Most game controllers are just too small for my hands.
Labor was overpriced in the dot com boom. It was Dutch Tulip Fever. Companies were hiring people, and not worrying about making a profit, and instead selling worthless stock for insane amounts of money.
You making less money isn't the fault of cheap labor in India... you making less money was the fault of the collective insanity and greed of the stock speculators in the late 90s. The Dot Com Boom was like spending a whole lot of money on your credit cards... it is fun while it lasts, but eventually someone is going to have to pay for all of it.
I doubt that is the reason... There is no law of the universe that says that Indians and Chinese can't do work every bit as good as we do.
There are sound economic reasons why we would see more employment in computers and technology in our country, even when jobs are being exported.
First of all, there are are going to always be a certain amount of companies that are not viable without I.T. outsourcing. A company that otherwise might not be able to function with expensive domestic I.T. services, can hire cheap offshore services for commodity I.T. work, but still use highly skilled and well-paid domestic labor for the functions of the company that they specialize in. (For example, a robotics company can hire an offshore firm to handle tech calls, and to run their web servers, while at the same time having domestic electronics engineers do actual engineering on robotics.).
Second of all, if I.T. is cheap overseas, it is cheap because the I.T. labor force there is underutilzed. As more and more I.T. services are outsourced to a location, and skilled I.T. workers become more in demand, the economic benifits of offshoring start to diminish. Eventually, labor in the offshore country for I.T. will approach the cost of domestic labor.
Offshoring is either a temporary way to cut costs, or it is good for us in the long run. Offshoring isn't the end of the world like people like to make out.
Offshoring is not bad either... we our helping our own economy if the country we are offshoring to has a comparitive advantage in producing the goods and services we need.
When we send work offshore to places that can do it cheaper and/or better, we free labor here that can do stuff that WE have a comparitive advantage in and can do cheaper and/or better. It is called specialization, and it works.
No country is "losing jobs" to offshoring. The U.S. or Western Europe may be losing jobs, but that is because of our own economic mismanagement, not because "them dern fureners!" are stealing anything from us. If it wasn't for Offshoring, our economy would have collapsed long ago.
Individuals who make up government = government. Unless I am misunderstanding, and the Trading Standards Office is some sort of private organization, it is completly legit to claim the UK government did something because one of it's paid employees did something as part of their job.
How about we put the waste right back into the ground, where the nuclear materials originally came from in the first place?
There might be worries "Oh, it will pollute the ground water! What about earthquakes? Containment systems can fail!"... but aren't these concerns about the tons of Uranium and other radioactive materals in the ground before they are mined? I mean a 100,000 years ago in Africa, there were NATURAL nuclear reactors in the ground. There is all kinds of Uranium under the ground, without any special protection, or concern about the groundwater and the like.
There were several platforms that Wing Commander was available on: DOS/PC, Amiga, Sega, etc.
Are you sure it wasn't that the Amiga version was depicted on the DOS/PC cover or something like that?
The good news is, the politicians will no longer be screaming to ban video games any more...
:)
The bad news is, now the government will pay subsidies to video game makers not to make video games (like they give to farmers to not to grow things).
[quote]starving and sabotaging the government.[/quote]
Starving and sabotaging the government? Are you fucking out of your mind? Since 2001, government spending has increased by 29%. Non-defense spending has increased 36%. We have seen the largest increase in spending, both military spending and social spending adjusted for inflation IN AMERICAN HISTORY. The federal government consumes at least 20% of the GDP of the United States. There are so many new laws and so much legislation being passed, that it is impossible for our legislators to even READ all the new legislation they are passing. It takes entire LIBRARIES to store all the new legislation being created. The U.S. has the strictest laws in the world, with an imprisoned population of over 2 million people!!!
As for education spending, I was wrong, the U.S. is #1 in the world in funding. We spend more than any other country, anywhere. No-one wants to admit that the reason that U.S. kids are retards compared to the rest of the industrialized world has nothing to do with money.
You got to be utterly and completly brainwashed, utterly and completly delusional out of touch with reality, to think for a second that government is somehow being "gutted" or "starved". With the half-a-trillion dollar a year deficiet, our government is being grow and spending so much money that the growth of government is highly unsustainable. We have no historical cases for this kind of debt or growth of government and spending (even the ol' Soviet Union wasn't this crazy), so there isn't any sort of way economists can analyse this systematicly- but most agree that the U.S. government is reaching the limits of what the WORLD ECONOMY can sustain!! We are so pro-government, and increasing government so much, that we are not only endangering ourselves, we are endangering the world!
[quote]These opinions are a dime a dozen on all the American whiteboy sites.[/quote]
Well, you only hear it from "whiteboy" sites as you call it, because government-worshipers like you make sure that anyone who is anti-government and isn't white gets their brains blown out. Your progressive hero, ol "Great Society" Lindy had Malcom X killed for opposing the U.S government. He had Martin Luther King killed for question the Vietnam war. Anyone not white who isn't a cheerleader for the pro-big-government status-quo in American gets a death senstance. People like you have made sure that white people are the only ones that can speak out against the ever-more-Totalitarian U.S. government without being murdered - so it is no coincindence that you only hear white people speak out against government. Anyone else has to worry about their safety, and the safety of their family unless they puppet the Democratic party, or occasionally the Republican party.
[quote]You could perhaps do us a favor and move to a relatively lawless region like the Congo for five years, then report back with your experiences. I'll wait![/quote]
Do you have even the slightest understanding of what is happening in the Congo, and the history of the region? You do realize that the Congo like most of Africa was conquered by imperialist states from Europe. These governments stole the natural resources and commited horrible attrocities on the people. Then they appointed puppet "democratic" leaders and declared the Congo "independent". Of course, the borders of the country were borders created by Europeans and didn't reflect the ethnic divisions or tradional social boundries - so those ethnic anomosities were exploited by foriegn governments, each supporting certain factions resulting in bloody civil war that destroyed government and central authority.
The problems in the Congo were created by foriegn governments that were way too big and too powerful and should have minded their own buisness and stayed out of Africa. It was not caused by some sort of indiginous Libertarian or Anarchist movement.
Perhaps you should seek professional help if you are hearing your DVD player and DVDs speaking to each other. I hear they can do remarkable things with pharmaceuticals these days.
It is really silly to worry about lawsuits anymore - You WILL be sued, no-matter what. Anyone with anything to lose is a target. The only thing you can do is make sure you have good lawyers.
The unfortunatly thing is that all these lawsuits make it prohibitivly expensive for the little guys (who can't afford an army of lawyers), and give big corporations the advantage - and at the same time that this is handing the world over to big corporations, we have to listen to people tell us that if it wasn't for this lawsuits "we would be taken advantage of by big corporations". *sigh*
Well, lets say you put your pictures up on a billboard in times square, then tried to sue anyone who published a picture of time square.
The web is PUBLIC. When you put something on the internet, you understand that people are going to use it for things like search engines.
If you don't want them on the web, password protect the pictures... or use a robots.txt file... or whatever.
You clearly don't understand how the world is changed. Here are the rules:
1. You no longer have the right to free speech.
2. However, you DO have the right to not be offended.
But I'll humor you. Since the government couldn't possibly protect any aspects of the environment (since "it" is the very same government damaging others!), I'll let you explain to me how the private sector will do a better job of protecting the environment without government regulation.
The "private sector" as in corporations will not protect the enviornment in an of themselves in the absense of government regulation (of course, big corporations as we understand them are the product of government regulation in the first place... corporations require a whole slew of special privledges and direct and indirect subsidies to exist. Corporations as they exist today are not a natural product of the free market; Big corporations couldn't exist without big government)
However, there isn't just corporations or government. Many extremly powerful institutions fall outside those categories. For example, labor unions are extremely powerful non-governmental organizations. Most of the advances in pay, benifits, working hours, etc., were fought for and won by labor unions (and then over the years governments took credit for the whole thing). Religion is an extremly powerful non-corporate, non-government institution - if you doubt the power of religion just look at what happened when someone printed a few lame Mohammed cartoons.
There is no reason why people couldn't organize a new institution to protect the enviornment. In fact, that is what would have happened if the left had not hijacked the enviornmentalist movement and turned it into a big propoganda machine for government central planning.
You don't need a police force, atomic weapons, an "elected" leader, and a flag and nationalistic anthem in order to solve problems. There are any number of diverse systems of social organization, economic exchange, and self-regulation society can use instead of government sponsered violence. There are any number of possible institutions besides "government" or "corporations" that people can establish. Unfortunatly so many people have adopted a messianic view of the state as the great savior, they cannot comprehend any solution to any problem but government. There is really a whole world of possibilities out there if we allow a little freedom and are willing to experiment.
The government doesn't protect us from "companies from dumping whatever they want, whenever they want". It simply charges for the franchise rights if people want to dump. Companies that pay their protection fee (i.e. donate to political campaigns) dump with impunity and without regulation.
And lets not forget that from shooting uranium from weapons, to subsidizing the clear cutting of government owned forests, and to spending billions on superhighways instead of much cheaper mass transit, to subsidizing farmers to grow harmful crops using enviornmentaly unsafe methods, to being the single greatest CO2 producer, letting the government regulate the enviornment is a bit like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
Maybe you could argue that the currently the government reduces polution (by limiting it to only people who can afford to bribe politicians)... but that is a bit like claiming McDonalds helps reduce fast food by charging for frachises and driving other chains out of buisness. Sorry, I just don't buy it.
FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology.
If we try to "protect" culture the same way that the enviornmental movement tries to "protect" the enviornment, the solution is to have all culture monitored and strictly controled by the government.
You could also canabalize the internal parts that won't be visible to the public anyway, and keep the shell.
[quote]Except when genocide goes relatively unnoticed, as it did with the slave trade and its gross negligence toward human life.[/quote]
Once again, the slave trade was facilitated by imperialism. Without the governments and militaries of Europe taking control of Africa, the slave trade would not have been economicly viable.
[quote]I also do not agree that any diverse movement like socialism or capitalism must be equivalent to its most extreme element. That's just a double standard usually employed by extremists from the "other side". In your case, you even go as far as implying that the sins of all states are the sins of socialism, even when those are fostering capitalism.[/quote]
Socialism is state capitalism. It can come about from Corporations taking over the state, or the state taking over corporations, but it is always fundamentaly the same in the end.
[quote]Yet a right-wing collectivism like racism is not interchangeable with a form that is based on universal human rights[/quote]
Any type of state-run collectivism is never based on universal human rights. Collectivism requires central planning, central planning requires violence or the threat of violence to get all people to adhere to the central plan, and a power elite to do the planning. It is a top down, authoritarian structure. The "needs" of the collective (as percieved by a tiny power elite) trump the right of the individual. Collectivism is fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
There is the case of voluntary non-government collectivism, but this is pretty obscure as an ideology and so not worth discussing. Most people calling themselves Socialists support the government style of Socialism.
[quote]It all comes down to whether someone is trying to sell you extremism in terms of either ideas or deeds. That's where today's individualists need to take a good long look in the mirror while they reflect on the third-world tradgedy that transpired on the Gulf Coast last year. Maybe they could ask how much money they saved through extreme indifference; It would be a start.[/quote]
I think you are refering to hurricane Katrina. If you are, I hope you know that the U.S. spends more per capita and percentage of GDP each year on disaster preparedness, and the government is spending billions to rebuild after Katrina. The problem in no way shape or form has anything to do with a lack of government spending. The U.S. government can't burn money fast enough on this Katrina thing.
The trouble with Katrina was that our system of disaster recovery is based on a Soviet model. "G. W. Bush didn't do anything to help New Orleans"... well sorry, if you are dependent on a state power structure and a single leader thousands of miles away, then you are fucked. That kind of concentration of power is a disaster in itself, there is no way it is going to turn out good.
The whole situation was a perfect example of why collectivism doesn't work. While private citicens, corporations, and foriegn governments were bring in truckloads of bottled water, food, supplies - most of them being turned away by FEMA... while private volunteers were being threated to be shot for attempting to enter the area to save people... the government was busy sending it's FEMA emergency rescue workers to 2 day sexual harrasment seminars to comply with federal law, and having firemen pass out public relations fliers on the other side of the state. All those dramatic helicoptor rescues you see on television? Do you know how many military style inflatable rafts can be purchased for the cost of one $20,000,000 helicopter? Not to mention the problem that the government has subsidized people to live on a flood plain for the past 50 years.
And the levee system used to be controlled localy, but the Army took over the levee system. Now, who do you think will do a better job at running a levee? Local people from New Orleans who will lose their homes and families if there are a problem, or the federal government, who will get to spend more of the people's m
But that does not indicate the ideology provides particular justification for genocide.
:)
It doesn't provide the paticular justification for genocide, but it provides the mechanism to acomplish genocide - and history has shown that where there is a way, there is a will.
All Totalitarian states have commited acts of genocide. Socialism (Communists support Socialism as a means to achieve Communism), is a totalitarian system. If the government has total control of the economy, it has total control of everything (how do you print a political newspaper if printing presses are owned by the state? How do start a club if any meeting place is owned by the state? How can you move freely throughout your country if housing is assigned by the state?).
Modern day neo-socialists will dispute my definition of "Socialism", but most people who call themselves "Socialist" nowadays are really welfare capitalists. I am using the strict Marxist definition of Socialism, which is openly and proudly totalitarian.
Even the organized genocide of the native population in the United States happened because of centralized authority - the civil war had established the supremesy of a strong central government, and the war had created a large national army with a huge budget (prior to the U.S. civil war, the United States did not have a standing professional Army... only unpaid volunteer militia... and military spending was virtually non-existant compared to the modern United States). It was the massive expansion of government powers and resources which facilited westward expansion and the inevitable genocide.
Communism, as envision in the Marxist Leninist ideology, is destined to commit genocide - not because of any particular dedication to genocide in the ideology, but because the centralization of power and almost total control by the state makes it inevitable.
More authority, more power, more control, more restriction and regulation inevitable leads to oppression, and in the extreme to genocide. Any ideology that supports those concepts (which seems to be most mainstream political ideologies nowadays), supports genocide, no matter if it wants to admit it or not. Mass murder, racism, genocide, and war are simply the most ugly extreme of collectivism and anti-individualism.
Don't blame the athletics departments... U.S. schools are amoung the top 3 best funded schools in the world. There are schools that recieve a fraction of the amount of money your typical U.S. school recieves, and do far better.
The problems in U.S. schools have NOTHING... NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with funding.
Communist purges were usually acts of genocide... The majority of people who were targeted in the purges of Mao, Stalin, etc., were ethnic minorities. Communism was every bit as racist an genocidal as the Nazis... and of course their genocide was much more effective. The only difference is the Communists pretended that it wasn't genocide.
China, despite the rhetoric it sometimes uses, is now becoming a capitalist country. There is no great ideological divide spliting the world into two. China might be the next big boy on the block, and there is bound to be a natural competition between superpowers, but it is not the polorized world of the cold war. It is not the great battle of civilizations and ideologies.
Lenin said that the irresistable forces of history would garantee that Socialism would be more scientificly advanced then Capitalism - This is one of the fundamental reasons for supporting a Socialist economy. By winning the space race, it was a way to discredit Socialism and the historical determinism of Marxism-Leninism. The U.S. sending men to the moon first destroyed people's faith in the Soviet system. But, since we share the same ideology as China, there is nothing to be gained in some grand struggle by going into space.
In a capitalist society, if they build a superior rocket system, we can just BUY it from China (the same way they buy Boeing jets from us). It isn't a crushing blow to our economic system.
No, manned spaceflight could be considered "infrastructure", like roads and power plants... which is arguably a legit function of government. However, NASA having a monopoly on space science isn't a legit function of government, and has set space science back years.
Does the U.S. government have a monopoly on research on the rainforests? Or medical research? Or any type of other research? No! We have companies, universities, non-profit groups, and plain old hobbiest doing all kinds of research. That is because the proper infrastructure exists for the private sector to do most of the research.
If NASA helped develope cheap space travel, it would become reasonable for universites and private companies to do space science. In the same way a team from a University can board a plane, fly to a city in South America, and then hire a boat or truck to go to the rainforest, they could do the same thing with space exploration. Imagine if all the research on the rainforests required the U.S. government to build a custom craft or probe to do the exploring: it would be a joke compared to how research happens now.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have serious doubts about NASA being able to develop space infrastructure any more than it can effectivly do science. I think that private spacetravel like we have seen with the X Prize and SpaceShipOne is the real begining of space travel. Going to the Moon was pretty amazing, but it was basicly the equivalent to building the pyramids or the great wall of china - The U.S. and NASA didn't have any paticular genius, they simply had such insane resources to pump into the project. It is not a sustainable model for science or exploration.
I mean, there probably isn't legislation that says "Record Companies may not secret install rootkits from music CDs", but it seems like a clear cut case of good ol' fashion fraud to me.
I don't think legislation is going to do anything... if they aren't enforcing the laws against fraud now, what makes us think they will do it with a new law?