More interestingly than that, the argument against a bill of rights is not that it guarantees rights but that it limits them. You only get the rights as defined without a bill of rights all rights are yours and must be challenged in a court of law to take away any implied on non-limited rights. Bill of rights, these are you rights and not one bit more and we will use interpretive law and corrupted courts to limit them based upon wealth.
The US Founding Fathers had the same debate. The products of that debate were the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution.
At least you are lucky to be in the USA where gun ownership is guaranteed by your constitution. I also note with approval that in some states citizens can reverse laws or sack governors (Schwarzenegger e.g.). Pity that those rules are not at Federal level either there or anywhere here. (Oz).
I have heard of two models that might serve to limit political power.
1. The Greek democratic model. Select a few hundred or a few thousand citizens by lot every two years, and tell them they gotta legislate for a couple years.
2. Require that every piece of legislation expire after ten years. If it is really necessary legislation, legislators will re-enact it every decade.
I'm a fan of both. I love the Athenian idea that every citizen (well, back then every male citizen) was expected to be ready and able to assume public responsibility at any given time. They didn't have career politicians, and the career politician is the number one threat to freedom in Western society. There's no real incentive to campaign or to manipulate when you didn't ask to be there and will only serve one term. Not having a bunch of lawyers writing the laws would also mean that the law will be easier for the average person to understand.
One principle I believe in is that the people who want political power are the ones who should not have it. The lottery for legislation duty should be like a military draft -- you serve or you face jail time. The people who don't want to be there are the ones I want writing the laws.
Nothing like the gargantuan US tax code would exist under that system.
For your second idea, I love that too except it should be five years. The whole problem with bought-and-paid-for laws written by the likes of the MAFIAA is they can keep trying, again and again, year after year, to get these laws passed. They only need to win once and those laws are forever on the books to the detriment of us all. If we are going to have a full-time legislature five years is better than ten under a federal system. It would force them to concentrate on priorities and leave the rest to the states, as it should have been.
and create propaganda to twist the minds of people who haven't studied the facts
Just curious... for those people who choose not to study facts before coming to a conclusion about something... what did they think would happen to their minds?
So you disagree with the parent's comment that "media owners have every right to choose their business model".
He didn't say that. My reading comprehension tells me so! Yours is faulty, and/or you're obsessed.
The point of the guy who started this thread was that the MAFIAA are a bunch of liars. They are liars whether or not they have the right to choose their business model. They have their "party line" and no amount of evidence is going to change what they say. It is their article of faith, their religion. That is who they are.
If you knew that, then you too are a liar, trying to sow confusion in order to divert the conversation into an argument you can win. Those are the actions of an insecure coward or a shill. If you didn't know that, you allowed emotion to cloud your reason and invented an excuse to rail against the guy where none existed, no doubt so you could climb up on your high horse and celebrate your "victory".
government says that communications technology has made existing laws insufficient, and it establishes new powers to maintain order
... which is the part that's bullshit, really. I have no intention of doing such a thing, but hypothetically speaking, if I were to trick you out of your bank account number, what difference does it make whether I do that face-to-face, over the telephone, or via e-mail? None whatsoever. Fraud is still fraud, even "with a computer". If someone were to break into your home, they are gulity of breaking-and-entering as well as trespassing. If someone were to brute-force your password and gain unauthorized access to your computer, they are committing the same crimes against your property.
No exotic new laws are needed to cover these things. The only reason it seems that way is because the government and the legal profession have a pathological, parasitic need to be needed.
From a *legal* point of view how is this different than helicopters with observers and video cameras?
I get the creepiness angle, you are far more likely to be "seen" when an expensive helicopter/crew is replaced with some number of drones. I just don't get the *new* legal issue. The police have been using that birds eye view for quite some time.
I'm sorry but when (probably not "if") the USA becomes a totalitarian police state, it will be because so many people like you looked at each indicator in isolation and excused it this way, instead of looking at the cumulative total of hundreds of such indicators and realizing the picture they were painting.
What you're doing is like looking at two individual pixels of the Goatse image and saying "they're just dots of color, nothing obscene or distasteful about that" while ignoring the whole picture of which they are a part. It's a form of tunnelvision.
It's not your fault unless you decide at this point to excuse and defend it, at which point you would own it fully. I am hoping that instead you will disown it and see how the most innocent mistakes can have terrible consequences. Seeing that for yourself would be a good reason; because I or anyone else said so would be a terrible reason to do anything.
Cut Obama some slack, after all, he wasn't even born or raised in this country.
And the fact that you would be instantly slandered and ostracised by so many people for bringing that up, tells you something about the truth of this.
The people who get all upset about that remind me of Nixon telling the nation "I'm not a crook!".
As far as I can tell, Obama's entire personal history is fabricated and we have no idea who he really is. That's why no one remembers him, why his Social Security number is from a different state than his birth certificate, why his birth certificate is from a state with an incentive to overstate its population, why all his associates have been Communists and violent Communists, etc. etc. The list goes on, and if you ask these questions or think there's anything fishy about multiple red flags, you're insulted, given a degrading label like "birther", and told to sit down and shut up.
And why is that? Because such an extreme level of deception coming from such high places in government just Couldn't Happen Here? Ever heard of the Big Lie? When dealing with a nation or other large group of people, a big whopper of a lie is easier for them to accept than a small lie or a series of small lies. Hitler himself said it best:
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation
are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.
The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for
they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
That is probably the single biggest weakness of the general population: they're naive. Hitler understood that they have no concept of how power-hungry sociopaths think. In their naivete, they assume that what they would or wouldn't do has any relation at all to what a sociopath would or wouldn't do. Therefore, as stated above, they tell little lies and wouldn't be surprised if others did the same, but they would be ashamed to tell a big lie and so assume no one else would. This is also called being self-centered, for it assumes others operate like you do, and it's just the sort of weakness tyrants prey on.
*Its interesting to note the corollary to Godwin's law: That a reference to Hitler automatically ends a discussion. In part, because often that's a sign that the discussion has descended to the level of being ridiculous.
Godwin's law is merely a heuristic, a rule of thumb. It should never be mindlessly and automatically applied. It's appropriate for most subjects but it makes no sense to pronounce a "Godwin" when the actual subject of discussion is out-of-control governments that become cancers to their nations. In that case, it would be foolish to disregard the history of such events.
The way it was done by Hitler is the same way it's always done. Only the fine details vary. You have a people who are broken in some way; with Germany it was the loss of the first World War, inflation of their currency, and the severe punitive reparations they were made to pay because of that war. That creates the vulnerability. Then an evil leader can give those broken people a phony sense of worth, usually by creating a national enemy for them to unite against; with Germany it was primarily the Jews. Exploit the "us vs. them" divide-and-conquer, implement a bit of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis and accuse any dissenters of being unpatriotic. That's all it takes to have legions of people who will gladly die fighting your wars, just to finally feel like they're somebody, like they're part of something bigger than themselves. That's a need known only to isolated/alienated (in the Erich Fromm sense) egos, that mentally healthy populations don't have, by the way.
But also because Americans (in particular) aren't comfortable with the idea that they are being manipulated by their own leaders for other than the good of the group.
If it were for a True Good then it could be done openly with reason. That it is done covertly with manipulation tells you all there is to know about the nature of such leaders.
Then only let people with super high karma edit their own posts. Or make it so that they can only "Add" to their posts.
Proofreading (or not being sloppy, or whatever you care to call it) just isn't that hard. It's easier when you can touch-type. It's even easier still with a "Preview" button. It's also a damned good habit to cultivate.
Of course, easiest of all is blaming your failure to do so on a system that wasn't designed precisely the way you would have liked...
Australian civil libertarians know that in a country with no constitutionally-protected civil rights, people will be surveilled for political reasons.
Fixed that for you.
That happens also in countries with constitutionally-protected civil rights. Really it happens anyplace where the highest penalty an elected official is likely to ever suffer is the loss of his job. That's really the problem with the American Constitution -- it is the highest law of the land, yet it has no severe criminal penalties for politicians who support unconstitutional laws. Start throwing abusive legislators in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prisons where the typically feeble old men will be somebody's bitch and suddenly abuses of power will become more rare.
You know, the same thing the rest of us are legally threatened with for doing much less damage to society than a legislature can do. Plus the beauty is, the more time politicians spend trying to prosecute each other, the less time they have to produce bad laws. And any successful prosecutions would function like term limits. It's really a win-win, unless you disagree with me that a lust for political power should make someone less privileged than the rest of society, not more.
when societies fracture and become "us vs them" is when bad things happen
Yes, they sure do. And when those bad things happen, why, of course the solution will be more government power and more funding for an increasingly paramilitary police force. If your idea is implemented, said RF devices will become illegal or (if already illegal) the laws against them will be strengthened. Of course those laws will be hard to enforce if you don't equip and train the police to catch people operating such devices, and make it easier for police to search for them. The War on (some) Drugs already established this pattern.
Does anyone still doubt this? The way dysfunctional government operates is that it either neglects a foreseeable situation until it becomes a crisis or it just straight up creates problems through its bureaucratic failures, and the solution is always more government. This one would be the latter case -- the drones are not the result of overwhelming popular demand that the politicians are responding to; it is a bureaucracy that insists on doing this anyway.
Government power is a great big hammer that gives a great big woody to those who wield it, and of course everything is a nail.
You know what a bicameral legislature should have been? One house creates laws and the other house repeals as many as possible, the result being that only the necessary ones are kept. Speaking of foreseeable situations, what happens when you have something like law that only ever expands and there is no reliable mechanism to make it contract? It collapses under its own weight, of course, and that's an eventuality. How foolish it is not to anticipate that, not to design legal systems that account for it!
Many people also have very little hardware knowledge and are intimidated by the technical aspects of computers.
I am fairly ignorant about auto mechanics. I mean I can do basic things like change the oil but you wouldn't want me performing any major work under the hood.
Do you think I would replace the fuel pump by myself without assistance? No, that would be stupid. No one would be surprised if I tried that and something went wrong that wouldn't have happened to an experienced mechanic.
I have friends who are skilled with auto mechanics. I would go to one of them first.
I may not know much about auto mechanics but I am aware that I don't know. I plan accordingly. I don't undertake a project I don't understand unless I can accept a large risk of failure (say I have a junk car that I don't care about, that isn't my primary transportation, that would be ok for me to learn on).
We actually live in a world where adult people find this kind of reasoning difficult to understand and implement. Think about that for a moment.
what the fuck hardware are you running? or are you just stuck in the 90's
I am sorry to say while Linux has improved its hardware support, I find that it runs into those wierdest gaps in its support.
A video driver that refuses to detect native resolution, or leaves pixel droppings.
A wifi card that does WEP but not WPA. Things like that. Most people do not find a PC that will meet Linux compatibility. But get a PC that works, then later try Linux, only to find those little glitches that makes it feel cheap. It is usually the driver and hardware companies not being forthcoming. But still it doesn't work right people won't like it.
Insulting people who report hardware problems helps no one. If you want a world where Linux is common on the desktop you are going to get your head out of the blind zealotry, admit your OS of choose isn't perfect and help fix it.
This is one of those "I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you" type of situations. If you don't like surprise problems (neither do I), the way to do it is to match the hardware to the operating system. Not the other way around. With modern Linux distributions this is downright easy, but this is general to any OS.
If you're not willing to do that, your best bet is to buy a system that already has Linux pre-installed, as another poster has mentioned. That way you know the hardware is compatible. That's also general to any OS.
Those are the two correct ways to do this without a (with Linux usually small) risk of preventable compatibility problems. They are not exclusive to Linux. If you don't know how to do these things, you can at least recognize that you're out of your element and ask someone who does. That's the prudent thing to do when you're about to invest a non-trivial sum of cash or time in something you don't really understand. That could be cars, computers, financial securities, whatever -- the principle is the same.
None of this requires technical expertise because that can be supplied before a rash decision is made. I don't know what it is about computers but people seem to shut down whatever common sense they possess, even when they demonstrate it elsewhere. I can see why they're tempted to blame the computer, because then it's "not their fault" and they avoid (i.e. run from) admitting to themselves how little sense they used, but that doesn't solve anything. It's just a weak excuse.
So, you suggest helping to fix the OS. That would be fixing what isn't broken. This form is a common one: suggesting a technical solution to a non-technical problem. That can be tempting sometimes. It's unfortunately misguided because it's entangled with effects while failing to address causes.
The OS can add support for more hardware but that doesn't mean that blindly buying hardware, later throwing an OS on it, and praying that it works is good decision-making. It's still the impatient, error-prone way to do things. More hardware support only means that the (usually small) risk of compatibility problems with this particular OS gets a bit smaller. That's why anyone who has problems here and complains instead of accepting the lesson is whining.
Truth explaining what their mistake was is in a non-malicious way would be the help they need. Afterwards you can try giving them the help they want, by supplying the driver(s) they lack or by finding some kind of workaround. That's if you really care and are not just trying to get rid of them with a quick-fix.
When I was on Facebook, I didn't friend anyone unless I actually *knew* the person.
I feel the same way. That's why Facebook is completely useless to me and never appealed to me. Make sense? If I had some unhealthy need for the casual attention of strangers and distant acquaintences then I would have a case for using Facebook.
If I wanted substandard Web hosting or if I wanted to play frivolous mini-games I can do that without the long list of downsides that come with using Facebook.
It's the information students share WITH THE WHOLE WORLD ONLY?
... that she felt a need to lie in order to obtain.
See, it's the lying and the blatant dishonesty that is the problem here. It should never be tolerated from any authority figure. Especially those who work with impressionable youth.
She pretended to be a student? Doesn't sound that wrong to me if that's all she did.
If she had time for this crap then her salary was useless overhead anyway.
Ever wonder why schools always need more and more money? Adjusted for inflation, expenditures for students and salaries for teachers haven't changed much at all relative to the far higher amount we pay for public schooling compared to 20-30 years ago. What has changed? The number of administrative staff has drastically increased.
And this is how they use their time?
Also, it bothers me the way you think it's acceptable for an authority figure to deceive impressionable young people in order to learn about things that happen outside of school that those young people would not have voluntarily shared with said authority figure. If you're a fan of authoritarianism and the use of surveillance with no justification, please explain why. Somehow I doubt you would personally like for your life to be subject to such people, but maybe I have that all wrong.
It's possible they'll never admit it, but many young people would love to see an authority figure who is honest, noble, and genuinely respectable. For most of them it would be the first time they have ever witnessed such a thing.
If only we had a representative democracy, I bet this wouldn't be a problem.
Actually I believe we do. What we are experiencing is the emotionally governed (mostly fear-based) decision-making by a majority of people who have become too fat, intellectually lazy*, naive, complacent, and unable to look beyond the immediate moment. If not for that, most of our politicians would be fearful for their careers. If not for that, we'd probably see third parties and/or write-in candidates win major federal elections at least once in a while.
These are the people who fear dying in a terrorist attack more than an ever-growing government that is hell-bent on reducing freedom. They do this even though they are more likely to die from being struck by lightning. They do this even though every or nearly every other out-of-control government in all of history has deteriorated into a hellishly oppressive state.
These are the people who buy into the "for the children" rhetoric without taking one moment to consider the kind of nation those children will grow up to inherit. If you care so much about children, then you also want them to know and love prosperity and freedom, not fear and restriction.
These are the people who will vote for the candidate with the best marketing campaign and the most catchy sound bites, rather than the candidate who expouses principles they know to be sound.
These are the people who actually admire petty, infantile figures like Kim Kardashian and care more about American Idol and professional athletes than they do about the future of their nation.
These are the people who can use something like a computer for five years or more without ever knowing more about how it works and how to maintain it than when they started out. If it's not strictly necessary in order to make money, they generally don't care to learn it.
The minority of us who have sense, principles, personal responsibility, love learning new things, celebrate wisdom, truly love freedom without confusing it with license, think critically, and have undone the damage that government schooling did (or tried to do) to their natural curiosity and joy of discovery, do not deserve the kind of government the majority wants.
I seriously do not blame anyone for wanting to expatriate. They are simply refusing to deny the direction in which things are moving. Many of them, like myself, have tried to provide a different message, tried to promote awareness, and found that it's generally not valued. If the majority wants to be fat, stupid, and emotionally immature, at some point you have to respect their wishes. What you don't necessarily have to do is reap what they have sown for themselves.
* "Stupid" if you like, because they do not love to learn new things though they are capable of it and have more access to knowledge now than ever before in all of history.
I can create a fully undetected trojan in ten minutes from any remote access Trojan.
The problem here was not knowing how to manually
change the physical address of thenic.
This is not the users fault..
Really? I believe you just rejected the entire notion of personal responsibility, especially in the face of a shit-hitting-the-fan situation like in Syria.
In the absence of such a volatile political situation, here's how I feel about myself. If I have Internet access (which they do, to be using Skype), and the information is freely available (which it is, via Google) and the operating system already provides a way to do this (which it does), then I take full responsibility for any problems I experience as a result of not knowing how. If I were taking my time, in no hurry, under no pressure, then it would take me only a few minutes with Google to find out how to change a MAC for my OS of choice.
By taking responsibility for my ignorance, I can become aware of where I am ignorant and I can take steps to inform myself and eliminate it. You see, I am not interested in blame-games, like this need to always have an excuse so that nothing is ever my fault or my ignorance or my shortcoming. Hear this well: that shit is just plain childish and it prevents people from bettering themselves. I reject it because it deserves to be rejected. It is neither selfish (because it does not help the person who believes that), nor is it altruistic (because it helps no one else). It is just plain stupid.
If anyone should see me say "I didn't know something and I could have easily found out, this was a mistake, an instance of laziness on my part, and it's time for me to remedy that by educating myself" and thinks of me as a lesser man because of it, let them. Anyone who would do that is, in fact, the misguided person who does not do likewise only because they lack the courage to be so honest with themselves.
Now for the love of all that is sacred, can we stop coddling and excusing willful ignorance? How about we encourage curiosity and self-education instead? Is that so much to ask, just because it focuses on solving the problem and doesn't leave much room for this infantile concern with "fault" and blame?
using an OS that doesn't provide built-in system tools for such basic things as configuring a NIC, including the MAC address, because said OS from Redmond assumes you're an idiot who would only be confused by such things
Eh? My Windows must be broken, because I was able to do it just fine.
My Computer
Other Places, My Network Places
Network Tasks, View Network Connections
Right-click "Local Area Connection", Properties
Under "Connect using: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet", Configure...
"Advanced" tab, "Locally Administered Address" property
Click the radio box on "value", type something.
So in any case, there is no good reason to trust an unknown executable that purports to accomplish this task.
I've heard it said by some, in the context of the Second Amendment, that today's nearest equivalent to the musket is the computer. It is a recognition of the way information and control of information is a form of power. I don't fully agree with that because regrettably most serious conflicts eventually escalate to physical force, but it's an interesting notion all the same. Unfortunately that means so long as the average person refuses to inform themselves and RTFM, government will always have an advantage. A little technical knowledge (and not very much at all really) would have prevented this whole malware situation in Syria. The activists would have immediately known that such an.exe is not to be trusted.
Just curious, can your GUI example above be done via PowerShell? I ask as someone who does not have a Windows installation.
I sense a bit of hostility towards people less technical than yourself. I take it you don't provide technical support to anyone?
Wouldn't that only encourage hostility towards the less-technical?
Though I suppose that depends on how you define "less technical". If you mean people who could not competently administer a multi-user server from the command line, and just want to do their browsing or office work, that's one thing. If you mean people who double-left-click when you carefully, explicitly ask them to "single right click with your right mouse button" that's another thing entirely.
The former category is worthy of assistance and likely to appreciate it. They tend to understand the notion that if I thought I knew medicine better than my doctor, I wouldn't bother seeking his advice; since I don't understand medicine better than him, I should follow his advice.
For the latter category, leaving them to deal with their own problems is actually the best and most compassionate thing you could do for them. A well-meaning attempt to "help" them only teaches them to be excessively dependent, guaranteeing they will never advance beyond their present inability to follow the simplest and most trivial of instructions. Also, they tend to be more demanding and less appreciative even when you are helping them for free, as a favor, because only an entitlement mentality could cause a person with a functioning brain to act like such a idiot.
Didn't take long before some jerk on this site started bashing America. Yeah I can see the similarities here.
Make no mistake, neutering the Fourth Amendment is a step towards a government like Syria's. It's what you would do if you admired Syria and wanted to eventually become like them.
I don't like him one bit, but I believe Obama is an intelligent man. He is more than smart enough to be aware of this.
Like the other AC said, we note you failed to refute the post.
>>>When the file comes from a trusted source, it's not stupid. You have to trust someone eventually
Exactly. If I got a file from a Ron Paul activist, and it was someone I knew, I'd run it without hesitation. How would I know the Paulbot friend had been arrested and his/her account was actually the DHS in disguise?
Eh I don't know about you, but if someone offered me a binary executable for the purpose of changing my MAC address, I would tell them "no thanks, I'll just use the built-in 'ifconfig' utility". I like that option better than playing amateur cloak-and-dagger.
I say this rarely on slashdot, so if you are reading it, be proud. I agree completely with everything you just said. I'm not sure what other mechanisms exist besides rationalization, however; It is an umbrella term that describes any thinking process that normalizes something 'wrong' into something 'acceptable'. You go into more detail in your post about a couple thought patterns, but I don't see how it departs from the umbrella of rationalizations.
I appreciate the compliment. Not the rarity, or lack thereof, but the fact that you will not compromise your criteria for what you will and won't accept as true. That's what I would expect from a real person who cares about the Truth. That is refreshing to me anywhere I encounter it. It never gets old. It is novel each time.
We're in danger of quibbling at this point, because my answer to you is not really intended to contradict you. It is possible for you and I to have different opinions on precisey what constitutes "rationalization". The only matter of import is that we both would recognize when someone is engaging in a form of denial, and we both would recognize this to be wrong. That's because (I hope) we both have a deep, heart-felt love of what is Real and True and see the folly (and misery) of investing oneself in anything less than that. If we have that in common, the specific terms we would use are just "to-may-toe" and "to-mah-toe".
Having said that... for me, the significant difference is that the person who rationalizes at least pays lip service to reason and rationality and admits they are good things. Their error is that they try to force-fit a square peg into a round hole; they take what is not rational and try to frame it in rational terms, as though that could lend an aura of reason to what is not remotely reasonable. But they do recognize the importance of reason and they disguise their personal shortcomings by trying to portray them as some kind of inevitable outcome of a reasonable thought process. Their real flaw is that they think reason is something they can declare and invent, rather than something they discover and submit to. You can see the arrogance in that.
There are other people who are entirely different. They don't even pretend to be authoritative. They are completely authoritarian. They don't pretend that what they want is arrived at by some kind of process of reasoning. They are completely emotional. If it feels good, or might feel good, or might "stick it" to something they dislike, they do it, even if they know it is irrational. To them reason is on equal footing with emotion. To them, it is not superior to emotion. Their passions are not governed by any overriding influence, making them like the loose cannon which threatens to sink the ship. They neither pretend to be rational nor do they see a need to do so. Not surprisingly, they are often self-destructive and tend not to perceive that as a result of their own decision-making. If you want a prototype, imagine the irresponsible woman who has lots of sex, uses no birth control, gets knocked up, has a bunch of children she cannot afford, and then complains that poverty sucks.
Misinformation like "welfare is for minorities" exists only because certain groups are playing racial politics.
Actually I agree with you and I was being (slightly) deliberately inflammatory there.
Look very hard at politics and media, particularly when the Democrats are involved (Republicans have a less emotional, more business-oriented style of corruption). When "social justice" and "compassion" and welfare and things of that nature are brought up, it is typically portrayed in a way designed to appeal to blacks and Hispanics. If a politician wants to cut those benefits or even change them, he is portrayed as "racist" or "hateful" etc. Remember that black woman who was quoted in the media, talking about how she loves her "Obama money" that came from "Obama's stash"? That's the portrayal. All of this, even though the majority of those recipients are in fact white.
It is the people pushing for welfare who portray it as being a race issue.
This is easy to explain. For one, white people don't have a victim mentality and a group identity. They generally don't see themselves as a uniform group that forms an "other" apart from mainstream society. A white person who does feel like an "other" feels that way because of being a geek, using drugs, following an unpopular religion, or something not related to genetics and race. Two, dividing rich and poor, white/black/Hispanic, religious-secular, etc. is an age-old tactic designed to ensure loyalty to a particular party. Look at the percentage of blacks who vote Democrat versus the percentage of Christain whites who vote Republican. Think they're taking a nuanced examination of the issues? No. It's all identity politics.
Truth doesn't matter to these people. Winning does. Specifically, winning power. They really don't care how much damage they need to do to get it. They will Balkanize the entire nation if it will get them a few more votes. That's what you're dealing with.
Slashdot Mirror
More interestingly than that, the argument against a bill of rights is not that it guarantees rights but that it limits them. You only get the rights as defined without a bill of rights all rights are yours and must be challenged in a court of law to take away any implied on non-limited rights. Bill of rights, these are you rights and not one bit more and we will use interpretive law and corrupted courts to limit them based upon wealth.
The US Founding Fathers had the same debate. The products of that debate were the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution.
At least you are lucky to be in the USA where gun ownership is guaranteed by your constitution. I also note with approval that in some states citizens can reverse laws or sack governors (Schwarzenegger e.g.). Pity that those rules are not at Federal level either there or anywhere here. (Oz).
I have heard of two models that might serve to limit political power.
1. The Greek democratic model. Select a few hundred or a few thousand citizens by lot every two years, and tell them they gotta legislate for a couple years. 2. Require that every piece of legislation expire after ten years. If it is really necessary legislation, legislators will re-enact it every decade.
I'm a fan of both. I love the Athenian idea that every citizen (well, back then every male citizen) was expected to be ready and able to assume public responsibility at any given time. They didn't have career politicians, and the career politician is the number one threat to freedom in Western society. There's no real incentive to campaign or to manipulate when you didn't ask to be there and will only serve one term. Not having a bunch of lawyers writing the laws would also mean that the law will be easier for the average person to understand.
One principle I believe in is that the people who want political power are the ones who should not have it. The lottery for legislation duty should be like a military draft -- you serve or you face jail time. The people who don't want to be there are the ones I want writing the laws.
Nothing like the gargantuan US tax code would exist under that system.
For your second idea, I love that too except it should be five years. The whole problem with bought-and-paid-for laws written by the likes of the MAFIAA is they can keep trying, again and again, year after year, to get these laws passed. They only need to win once and those laws are forever on the books to the detriment of us all. If we are going to have a full-time legislature five years is better than ten under a federal system. It would force them to concentrate on priorities and leave the rest to the states, as it should have been.
and create propaganda to twist the minds of people who haven't studied the facts
Just curious... for those people who choose not to study facts before coming to a conclusion about something ... what did they think would happen to their minds?
So you disagree with the parent's comment that "media owners have every right to choose their business model".
He didn't say that. My reading comprehension tells me so! Yours is faulty, and/or you're obsessed.
The point of the guy who started this thread was that the MAFIAA are a bunch of liars. They are liars whether or not they have the right to choose their business model. They have their "party line" and no amount of evidence is going to change what they say. It is their article of faith, their religion. That is who they are.
If you knew that, then you too are a liar, trying to sow confusion in order to divert the conversation into an argument you can win. Those are the actions of an insecure coward or a shill. If you didn't know that, you allowed emotion to cloud your reason and invented an excuse to rail against the guy where none existed, no doubt so you could climb up on your high horse and celebrate your "victory".
Either way, you're completely wrong.
government says that communications technology has made existing laws insufficient, and it establishes new powers to maintain order
... which is the part that's bullshit, really. I have no intention of doing such a thing, but hypothetically speaking, if I were to trick you out of your bank account number, what difference does it make whether I do that face-to-face, over the telephone, or via e-mail? None whatsoever. Fraud is still fraud, even "with a computer". If someone were to break into your home, they are gulity of breaking-and-entering as well as trespassing. If someone were to brute-force your password and gain unauthorized access to your computer, they are committing the same crimes against your property.
No exotic new laws are needed to cover these things. The only reason it seems that way is because the government and the legal profession have a pathological, parasitic need to be needed.
From a *legal* point of view how is this different than helicopters with observers and video cameras? I get the creepiness angle, you are far more likely to be "seen" when an expensive helicopter/crew is replaced with some number of drones. I just don't get the *new* legal issue. The police have been using that birds eye view for quite some time.
I'm sorry but when (probably not "if") the USA becomes a totalitarian police state, it will be because so many people like you looked at each indicator in isolation and excused it this way, instead of looking at the cumulative total of hundreds of such indicators and realizing the picture they were painting.
What you're doing is like looking at two individual pixels of the Goatse image and saying "they're just dots of color, nothing obscene or distasteful about that" while ignoring the whole picture of which they are a part. It's a form of tunnelvision.
It's not your fault unless you decide at this point to excuse and defend it, at which point you would own it fully. I am hoping that instead you will disown it and see how the most innocent mistakes can have terrible consequences. Seeing that for yourself would be a good reason; because I or anyone else said so would be a terrible reason to do anything.
Cut Obama some slack, after all, he wasn't even born or raised in this country.
And the fact that you would be instantly slandered and ostracised by so many people for bringing that up, tells you something about the truth of this.
The people who get all upset about that remind me of Nixon telling the nation "I'm not a crook!".
As far as I can tell, Obama's entire personal history is fabricated and we have no idea who he really is. That's why no one remembers him, why his Social Security number is from a different state than his birth certificate, why his birth certificate is from a state with an incentive to overstate its population, why all his associates have been Communists and violent Communists, etc. etc. The list goes on, and if you ask these questions or think there's anything fishy about multiple red flags, you're insulted, given a degrading label like "birther", and told to sit down and shut up.
And why is that? Because such an extreme level of deception coming from such high places in government just Couldn't Happen Here? Ever heard of the Big Lie? When dealing with a nation or other large group of people, a big whopper of a lie is easier for them to accept than a small lie or a series of small lies. Hitler himself said it best:
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
That is probably the single biggest weakness of the general population: they're naive. Hitler understood that they have no concept of how power-hungry sociopaths think. In their naivete, they assume that what they would or wouldn't do has any relation at all to what a sociopath would or wouldn't do. Therefore, as stated above, they tell little lies and wouldn't be surprised if others did the same, but they would be ashamed to tell a big lie and so assume no one else would. This is also called being self-centered, for it assumes others operate like you do, and it's just the sort of weakness tyrants prey on.
And with this remark, I end the thread.
Heh, not quite.
*Its interesting to note the corollary to Godwin's law: That a reference to Hitler automatically ends a discussion. In part, because often that's a sign that the discussion has descended to the level of being ridiculous.
Godwin's law is merely a heuristic, a rule of thumb. It should never be mindlessly and automatically applied. It's appropriate for most subjects but it makes no sense to pronounce a "Godwin" when the actual subject of discussion is out-of-control governments that become cancers to their nations. In that case, it would be foolish to disregard the history of such events.
The way it was done by Hitler is the same way it's always done. Only the fine details vary. You have a people who are broken in some way; with Germany it was the loss of the first World War, inflation of their currency, and the severe punitive reparations they were made to pay because of that war. That creates the vulnerability. Then an evil leader can give those broken people a phony sense of worth, usually by creating a national enemy for them to unite against; with Germany it was primarily the Jews. Exploit the "us vs. them" divide-and-conquer, implement a bit of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis and accuse any dissenters of being unpatriotic. That's all it takes to have legions of people who will gladly die fighting your wars, just to finally feel like they're somebody, like they're part of something bigger than themselves. That's a need known only to isolated/alienated (in the Erich Fromm sense) egos, that mentally healthy populations don't have, by the way.
But also because Americans (in particular) aren't comfortable with the idea that they are being manipulated by their own leaders for other than the good of the group.
If it were for a True Good then it could be done openly with reason. That it is done covertly with manipulation tells you all there is to know about the nature of such leaders.
The motivations might be:
Then only let people with super high karma edit their own posts. Or make it so that they can only "Add" to their posts.
Proofreading (or not being sloppy, or whatever you care to call it) just isn't that hard. It's easier when you can touch-type. It's even easier still with a "Preview" button. It's also a damned good habit to cultivate.
Of course, easiest of all is blaming your failure to do so on a system that wasn't designed precisely the way you would have liked...
Australian civil libertarians know that in a country with no constitutionally-protected civil rights, people will be surveilled for political reasons.
Fixed that for you.
That happens also in countries with constitutionally-protected civil rights. Really it happens anyplace where the highest penalty an elected official is likely to ever suffer is the loss of his job. That's really the problem with the American Constitution -- it is the highest law of the land, yet it has no severe criminal penalties for politicians who support unconstitutional laws. Start throwing abusive legislators in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prisons where the typically feeble old men will be somebody's bitch and suddenly abuses of power will become more rare.
You know, the same thing the rest of us are legally threatened with for doing much less damage to society than a legislature can do. Plus the beauty is, the more time politicians spend trying to prosecute each other, the less time they have to produce bad laws. And any successful prosecutions would function like term limits. It's really a win-win, unless you disagree with me that a lust for political power should make someone less privileged than the rest of society, not more.
when societies fracture and become "us vs them" is when bad things happen
Yes, they sure do. And when those bad things happen, why, of course the solution will be more government power and more funding for an increasingly paramilitary police force. If your idea is implemented, said RF devices will become illegal or (if already illegal) the laws against them will be strengthened. Of course those laws will be hard to enforce if you don't equip and train the police to catch people operating such devices, and make it easier for police to search for them. The War on (some) Drugs already established this pattern.
Does anyone still doubt this? The way dysfunctional government operates is that it either neglects a foreseeable situation until it becomes a crisis or it just straight up creates problems through its bureaucratic failures, and the solution is always more government. This one would be the latter case -- the drones are not the result of overwhelming popular demand that the politicians are responding to; it is a bureaucracy that insists on doing this anyway.
Government power is a great big hammer that gives a great big woody to those who wield it, and of course everything is a nail.
You know what a bicameral legislature should have been? One house creates laws and the other house repeals as many as possible, the result being that only the necessary ones are kept. Speaking of foreseeable situations, what happens when you have something like law that only ever expands and there is no reliable mechanism to make it contract? It collapses under its own weight, of course, and that's an eventuality. How foolish it is not to anticipate that, not to design legal systems that account for it!
Many people also have very little hardware knowledge and are intimidated by the technical aspects of computers.
I am fairly ignorant about auto mechanics. I mean I can do basic things like change the oil but you wouldn't want me performing any major work under the hood.
Do you think I would replace the fuel pump by myself without assistance? No, that would be stupid. No one would be surprised if I tried that and something went wrong that wouldn't have happened to an experienced mechanic.
I have friends who are skilled with auto mechanics. I would go to one of them first.
I may not know much about auto mechanics but I am aware that I don't know. I plan accordingly. I don't undertake a project I don't understand unless I can accept a large risk of failure (say I have a junk car that I don't care about, that isn't my primary transportation, that would be ok for me to learn on).
We actually live in a world where adult people find this kind of reasoning difficult to understand and implement. Think about that for a moment.
what the fuck hardware are you running? or are you just stuck in the 90's
I am sorry to say while Linux has improved its hardware support, I find that it runs into those wierdest gaps in its support. A video driver that refuses to detect native resolution, or leaves pixel droppings. A wifi card that does WEP but not WPA. Things like that. Most people do not find a PC that will meet Linux compatibility. But get a PC that works, then later try Linux, only to find those little glitches that makes it feel cheap. It is usually the driver and hardware companies not being forthcoming. But still it doesn't work right people won't like it. Insulting people who report hardware problems helps no one. If you want a world where Linux is common on the desktop you are going to get your head out of the blind zealotry, admit your OS of choose isn't perfect and help fix it.
This is one of those "I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you" type of situations. If you don't like surprise problems (neither do I), the way to do it is to match the hardware to the operating system. Not the other way around. With modern Linux distributions this is downright easy, but this is general to any OS.
If you're not willing to do that, your best bet is to buy a system that already has Linux pre-installed, as another poster has mentioned. That way you know the hardware is compatible. That's also general to any OS.
Those are the two correct ways to do this without a (with Linux usually small) risk of preventable compatibility problems. They are not exclusive to Linux. If you don't know how to do these things, you can at least recognize that you're out of your element and ask someone who does. That's the prudent thing to do when you're about to invest a non-trivial sum of cash or time in something you don't really understand. That could be cars, computers, financial securities, whatever -- the principle is the same.
None of this requires technical expertise because that can be supplied before a rash decision is made. I don't know what it is about computers but people seem to shut down whatever common sense they possess, even when they demonstrate it elsewhere. I can see why they're tempted to blame the computer, because then it's "not their fault" and they avoid (i.e. run from) admitting to themselves how little sense they used, but that doesn't solve anything. It's just a weak excuse.
So, you suggest helping to fix the OS. That would be fixing what isn't broken. This form is a common one: suggesting a technical solution to a non-technical problem. That can be tempting sometimes. It's unfortunately misguided because it's entangled with effects while failing to address causes.
The OS can add support for more hardware but that doesn't mean that blindly buying hardware, later throwing an OS on it, and praying that it works is good decision-making. It's still the impatient, error-prone way to do things. More hardware support only means that the (usually small) risk of compatibility problems with this particular OS gets a bit smaller. That's why anyone who has problems here and complains instead of accepting the lesson is whining.
Truth explaining what their mistake was is in a non-malicious way would be the help they need. Afterwards you can try giving them the help they want, by supplying the driver(s) they lack or by finding some kind of workaround. That's if you really care and are not just trying to get rid of them with a quick-fix.
When I was on Facebook, I didn't friend anyone unless I actually *knew* the person.
I feel the same way. That's why Facebook is completely useless to me and never appealed to me. Make sense? If I had some unhealthy need for the casual attention of strangers and distant acquaintences then I would have a case for using Facebook.
If I wanted substandard Web hosting or if I wanted to play frivolous mini-games I can do that without the long list of downsides that come with using Facebook.
It's the information students share WITH THE WHOLE WORLD ONLY?
... that she felt a need to lie in order to obtain.
See, it's the lying and the blatant dishonesty that is the problem here. It should never be tolerated from any authority figure. Especially those who work with impressionable youth.
Is that really so difficult to understand?
She pretended to be a student? Doesn't sound that wrong to me if that's all she did.
If she had time for this crap then her salary was useless overhead anyway.
Ever wonder why schools always need more and more money? Adjusted for inflation, expenditures for students and salaries for teachers haven't changed much at all relative to the far higher amount we pay for public schooling compared to 20-30 years ago. What has changed? The number of administrative staff has drastically increased.
And this is how they use their time?
Also, it bothers me the way you think it's acceptable for an authority figure to deceive impressionable young people in order to learn about things that happen outside of school that those young people would not have voluntarily shared with said authority figure. If you're a fan of authoritarianism and the use of surveillance with no justification, please explain why. Somehow I doubt you would personally like for your life to be subject to such people, but maybe I have that all wrong.
It's possible they'll never admit it, but many young people would love to see an authority figure who is honest, noble, and genuinely respectable. For most of them it would be the first time they have ever witnessed such a thing.
Yes you have a right to fear the government, but you should fear the most immediate threat.
That would be the government, by a huge margin.
That you don't think so leads me to believe all of your history teachers should be publically flogged.
If only we had a representative democracy, I bet this wouldn't be a problem.
Actually I believe we do. What we are experiencing is the emotionally governed (mostly fear-based) decision-making by a majority of people who have become too fat, intellectually lazy*, naive, complacent, and unable to look beyond the immediate moment. If not for that, most of our politicians would be fearful for their careers. If not for that, we'd probably see third parties and/or write-in candidates win major federal elections at least once in a while.
These are the people who fear dying in a terrorist attack more than an ever-growing government that is hell-bent on reducing freedom. They do this even though they are more likely to die from being struck by lightning. They do this even though every or nearly every other out-of-control government in all of history has deteriorated into a hellishly oppressive state.
These are the people who buy into the "for the children" rhetoric without taking one moment to consider the kind of nation those children will grow up to inherit. If you care so much about children, then you also want them to know and love prosperity and freedom, not fear and restriction.
These are the people who will vote for the candidate with the best marketing campaign and the most catchy sound bites, rather than the candidate who expouses principles they know to be sound.
These are the people who actually admire petty, infantile figures like Kim Kardashian and care more about American Idol and professional athletes than they do about the future of their nation.
These are the people who can use something like a computer for five years or more without ever knowing more about how it works and how to maintain it than when they started out. If it's not strictly necessary in order to make money, they generally don't care to learn it.
The minority of us who have sense, principles, personal responsibility, love learning new things, celebrate wisdom, truly love freedom without confusing it with license, think critically, and have undone the damage that government schooling did (or tried to do) to their natural curiosity and joy of discovery, do not deserve the kind of government the majority wants.
I seriously do not blame anyone for wanting to expatriate. They are simply refusing to deny the direction in which things are moving. Many of them, like myself, have tried to provide a different message, tried to promote awareness, and found that it's generally not valued. If the majority wants to be fat, stupid, and emotionally immature, at some point you have to respect their wishes. What you don't necessarily have to do is reap what they have sown for themselves.
* "Stupid" if you like, because they do not love to learn new things though they are capable of it and have more access to knowledge now than ever before in all of history.
I can create a fully undetected trojan in ten minutes from any remote access Trojan. The problem here was not knowing how to manually change the physical address of thenic.
This is not the users fault..
Really? I believe you just rejected the entire notion of personal responsibility, especially in the face of a shit-hitting-the-fan situation like in Syria.
In the absence of such a volatile political situation, here's how I feel about myself. If I have Internet access (which they do, to be using Skype), and the information is freely available (which it is, via Google) and the operating system already provides a way to do this (which it does), then I take full responsibility for any problems I experience as a result of not knowing how. If I were taking my time, in no hurry, under no pressure, then it would take me only a few minutes with Google to find out how to change a MAC for my OS of choice.
By taking responsibility for my ignorance, I can become aware of where I am ignorant and I can take steps to inform myself and eliminate it. You see, I am not interested in blame-games, like this need to always have an excuse so that nothing is ever my fault or my ignorance or my shortcoming. Hear this well: that shit is just plain childish and it prevents people from bettering themselves. I reject it because it deserves to be rejected. It is neither selfish (because it does not help the person who believes that), nor is it altruistic (because it helps no one else). It is just plain stupid.
If anyone should see me say "I didn't know something and I could have easily found out, this was a mistake, an instance of laziness on my part, and it's time for me to remedy that by educating myself" and thinks of me as a lesser man because of it, let them. Anyone who would do that is, in fact, the misguided person who does not do likewise only because they lack the courage to be so honest with themselves.
Now for the love of all that is sacred, can we stop coddling and excusing willful ignorance? How about we encourage curiosity and self-education instead? Is that so much to ask, just because it focuses on solving the problem and doesn't leave much room for this infantile concern with "fault" and blame?
using an OS that doesn't provide built-in system tools for such basic things as configuring a NIC, including the MAC address, because said OS from Redmond assumes you're an idiot who would only be confused by such things
Eh? My Windows must be broken, because I was able to do it just fine.
My Computer Other Places, My Network Places Network Tasks, View Network Connections Right-click "Local Area Connection", Properties Under "Connect using: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet", Configure... "Advanced" tab, "Locally Administered Address" property Click the radio box on "value", type something.
So in any case, there is no good reason to trust an unknown executable that purports to accomplish this task.
.exe is not to be trusted.
I've heard it said by some, in the context of the Second Amendment, that today's nearest equivalent to the musket is the computer. It is a recognition of the way information and control of information is a form of power. I don't fully agree with that because regrettably most serious conflicts eventually escalate to physical force, but it's an interesting notion all the same. Unfortunately that means so long as the average person refuses to inform themselves and RTFM, government will always have an advantage. A little technical knowledge (and not very much at all really) would have prevented this whole malware situation in Syria. The activists would have immediately known that such an
Just curious, can your GUI example above be done via PowerShell? I ask as someone who does not have a Windows installation.
I sense a bit of hostility towards people less technical than yourself. I take it you don't provide technical support to anyone?
Wouldn't that only encourage hostility towards the less-technical?
Though I suppose that depends on how you define "less technical". If you mean people who could not competently administer a multi-user server from the command line, and just want to do their browsing or office work, that's one thing. If you mean people who double-left-click when you carefully, explicitly ask them to "single right click with your right mouse button" that's another thing entirely.
The former category is worthy of assistance and likely to appreciate it. They tend to understand the notion that if I thought I knew medicine better than my doctor, I wouldn't bother seeking his advice; since I don't understand medicine better than him, I should follow his advice.
For the latter category, leaving them to deal with their own problems is actually the best and most compassionate thing you could do for them. A well-meaning attempt to "help" them only teaches them to be excessively dependent, guaranteeing they will never advance beyond their present inability to follow the simplest and most trivial of instructions. Also, they tend to be more demanding and less appreciative even when you are helping them for free, as a favor, because only an entitlement mentality could cause a person with a functioning brain to act like such a idiot.
Didn't take long before some jerk on this site started bashing America. Yeah I can see the similarities here.
Make no mistake, neutering the Fourth Amendment is a step towards a government like Syria's. It's what you would do if you admired Syria and wanted to eventually become like them.
I don't like him one bit, but I believe Obama is an intelligent man. He is more than smart enough to be aware of this.
Like the other AC said, we note you failed to refute the post.
>>>When the file comes from a trusted source, it's not stupid. You have to trust someone eventually
Exactly. If I got a file from a Ron Paul activist, and it was someone I knew, I'd run it without hesitation. How would I know the Paulbot friend had been arrested and his/her account was actually the DHS in disguise?
Eh I don't know about you, but if someone offered me a binary executable for the purpose of changing my MAC address, I would tell them "no thanks, I'll just use the built-in 'ifconfig' utility". I like that option better than playing amateur cloak-and-dagger.
I say this rarely on slashdot, so if you are reading it, be proud. I agree completely with everything you just said. I'm not sure what other mechanisms exist besides rationalization, however; It is an umbrella term that describes any thinking process that normalizes something 'wrong' into something 'acceptable'. You go into more detail in your post about a couple thought patterns, but I don't see how it departs from the umbrella of rationalizations.
I appreciate the compliment. Not the rarity, or lack thereof, but the fact that you will not compromise your criteria for what you will and won't accept as true. That's what I would expect from a real person who cares about the Truth. That is refreshing to me anywhere I encounter it. It never gets old. It is novel each time.
... for me, the significant difference is that the person who rationalizes at least pays lip service to reason and rationality and admits they are good things. Their error is that they try to force-fit a square peg into a round hole; they take what is not rational and try to frame it in rational terms, as though that could lend an aura of reason to what is not remotely reasonable. But they do recognize the importance of reason and they disguise their personal shortcomings by trying to portray them as some kind of inevitable outcome of a reasonable thought process. Their real flaw is that they think reason is something they can declare and invent, rather than something they discover and submit to. You can see the arrogance in that.
We're in danger of quibbling at this point, because my answer to you is not really intended to contradict you. It is possible for you and I to have different opinions on precisey what constitutes "rationalization". The only matter of import is that we both would recognize when someone is engaging in a form of denial, and we both would recognize this to be wrong. That's because (I hope) we both have a deep, heart-felt love of what is Real and True and see the folly (and misery) of investing oneself in anything less than that. If we have that in common, the specific terms we would use are just "to-may-toe" and "to-mah-toe".
Having said that
There are other people who are entirely different. They don't even pretend to be authoritative. They are completely authoritarian. They don't pretend that what they want is arrived at by some kind of process of reasoning. They are completely emotional. If it feels good, or might feel good, or might "stick it" to something they dislike, they do it, even if they know it is irrational. To them reason is on equal footing with emotion. To them, it is not superior to emotion. Their passions are not governed by any overriding influence, making them like the loose cannon which threatens to sink the ship. They neither pretend to be rational nor do they see a need to do so. Not surprisingly, they are often self-destructive and tend not to perceive that as a result of their own decision-making. If you want a prototype, imagine the irresponsible woman who has lots of sex, uses no birth control, gets knocked up, has a bunch of children she cannot afford, and then complains that poverty sucks.
Misinformation like "welfare is for minorities" exists only because certain groups are playing racial politics.
Actually I agree with you and I was being (slightly) deliberately inflammatory there.
Look very hard at politics and media, particularly when the Democrats are involved (Republicans have a less emotional, more business-oriented style of corruption). When "social justice" and "compassion" and welfare and things of that nature are brought up, it is typically portrayed in a way designed to appeal to blacks and Hispanics. If a politician wants to cut those benefits or even change them, he is portrayed as "racist" or "hateful" etc. Remember that black woman who was quoted in the media, talking about how she loves her "Obama money" that came from "Obama's stash"? That's the portrayal. All of this, even though the majority of those recipients are in fact white.
It is the people pushing for welfare who portray it as being a race issue.
This is easy to explain. For one, white people don't have a victim mentality and a group identity. They generally don't see themselves as a uniform group that forms an "other" apart from mainstream society. A white person who does feel like an "other" feels that way because of being a geek, using drugs, following an unpopular religion, or something not related to genetics and race. Two, dividing rich and poor, white/black/Hispanic, religious-secular, etc. is an age-old tactic designed to ensure loyalty to a particular party. Look at the percentage of blacks who vote Democrat versus the percentage of Christain whites who vote Republican. Think they're taking a nuanced examination of the issues? No. It's all identity politics.
Truth doesn't matter to these people. Winning does. Specifically, winning power. They really don't care how much damage they need to do to get it. They will Balkanize the entire nation if it will get them a few more votes. That's what you're dealing with.