Which is precisely the point of the attempted censorship.
It will work about as well as drug prohibition. It's a law that is easily evaded and won't be widely respected. Yes you can try to order men around this way and micromanage their every action but it never really works. On an international Internet it's just too easy to get around it.
You admit yourself, from your lofty view of total freedom to say what you like, that people will be exposed to offensive material.
Yes, they will. Let's see. The most comprehensive, amazing, massive collection of information that has ever appeared before in all of human history plus the ability to instantly communicate with nearly anyone in the world and exchange information as equals... that's on the plus side. The occasional troll or asshat, that's on the minus side. Yeah, I think I like the trade-off. It's not broken and doesn't need fixing. Dealing with the minus side is called by various names -- I tend to favor "grow a pair".
You practice self-censorship (i.e. burying your head in the sand) in the face of something you don't like.
This word, it does not seem to mean what you think it means. Self-censorship means I want to say something but I fear the consequences of saying it. Not watching shows that don't interest me isn't self-censorship. Not listening to people I think are crazy isn't self-censorship. It's not burying your head in the sand, either.
Right now someone somewhere is listening to a song you absolutely couldn't stand. It would drive you up the wall with its annoying refrain and irritating sound. You didn't look for this song and purchase it online, not because you fear it but because you don't generally buy things you know you won't like. Are you hiding from it? Are you cowering in the shadows? Are you burying your head in the sand? Or are you merely acting in a rational manner by not participating (voting with your feet/wallet) in things you dislike?
I question the intellectual honesty of someone who can't disagree with something without falsely mischaracterizing it, as you have done.
I don't think that government censorship is an appropriate response, but "la-la-la I can't hear you" doesn't always work.
Where that doesn't work, sucking it up and moving on does. That's a tiny, tiny price to pay to live in the Information Age. Sometimes you just don't know how good you have it.
If they don't use CP as the bait then it's usually that old bogie Terrorism. No-one in the media has the brains or balls to understand that filtering won't do much to either of these.
That or, being shrewd businessmen overseeing a large flow of information (only some of which makes it to prime time), they understand very well that it won't do anything. Instead, they view rampant Statism and centralization of human life in terms of consequentialism, i.e. they believe it serves some kind of "greater good" so any evils it perpetrates are somehow worth while.
Consequentialism is simply the idea that "the ends always justify the means". It's the belief that you can do a truly good thing using evil and dehumanizing methods. It's the way fanatics and worshippers of power tend to think. There are both, in abundance, in the mainstream media. The media is always sympathetic to power grabs. They are happy to report with entire articles why it's for your own good, with maybe a sentence or two that reads "but some groups express privacy concerns" without ever covering what they are or whether they are well-founded.
They are unwise but they're simply not that stupid. Otherwise they wouldn't be so effective. At some point it has to be deliberate because they sympathize with Statism and want to bring it about, either because they believe in it whole-heartedly or because they believe it's inevitable and think they will be rewarded for their early compliance.
Obviously this happens because people are generally stupid (don't take it as a flamebait, it's just an observation), and people vote for those, who promise them something regardless of long term consequences.
What do you expect? They're government educated by a system that is more concerned about not hurting anyone's feelings than it is with things like dialectic, critical thinking, and instilling intellectual independence. Most are far too passive (something promoted in the media by repeated example) to recognize this as a problem on their own and educate themselves despite the Information Age. This page sums it up nicely. The "lesson of dependency" is the hinge on which all the others rest.
I'll highlight the most glaring stupidity of this proposal, the unspoken and unacknowledged aspect it deliberately ignores.
There is some content on the Internet that "any normal human being would be offended by," he said.
... that you almost definitely won't see unless you are looking for it. It reminds me of people who call up a talk show to tell the host how much they hate him, his views, and his show... yet they're quite familiar with all of it. You'd think a person would go with one of the multitude of other choices and listen to something other than whatever he finds offensive, but that would mean having nothing to bitch about. Nothing to bitch about would mean being denied their five minutes of climbing up on their high horse and feeling superior to someone else while they pontificate against them. This is very important to nothing human beings with no real sense of purpose in their lives and would be a great loss to them.
There are things I don't like so I don't watch them, listen to them, read them, etc, but it never occurs to me to feel offended. I don't get any pleasure or satisfaction from trying to force my will on others because I'm not an insecure fevered ego. If I were, I'd feel a sacred duty to work on fixing it while never making it someone else's problem. So, the fact that I don't enjoy something doesn't make me feel like no one else should (assuming it's just a matter of taste -- i.e. I don't feel that way about armed robbery -- since some of you are childish and jump all over every little thing not spelled out for you).
"I'm offended!" is a covert and thus cowardly way of saying "therefore, you should yield to me and change it to accommodate my tastes". It's an emotional appeal unconsciously designed to conceal a desire to control. The people who want to control others using this method are far too timid to try gaining any kind of domination or power to get what they want, so they go for the pity appeal instead. They try to gain the sympathy of someone who already has power or authority and by proxy obtain the control they desire. If they are thwarted, they accuse the authority of being insensitive and try to ridicule or shame (i.e. manipulate) them into doing their will.
The minority who weren't looking for "offensive" material and saw it anyway were duped by crapflooders, goatse trolls and the like. These are the same disruptive types who aren't going to respect censorship laws. They would view them as a challenge. If anything, using Tor or some other international, jurisdiction-crossing proxy to evade censorship would only add to their thrill.
to extract enough energy, the cyclist would be super buff, and thus roid crazy. i don't want even crazier cyclists on the road.
a simpler solution would be to require anybody who uses public roads to have a limited license (limited in the sense that it covers tested knowledge of road rules but not operation of a motor vehicle).
Sounds like a regular driver's license in the States to me.
Knowledge of signs and traffic laws is just about all they test for. That's why so many idiots brake uphill, on banked curves, don't understand that you steer better when you're not also braking, don't know what "end speed limit" does and doesn't mean, tailgate, can't stay off the median in their SUVs, never heard of engine braking, think four-wheel-drive means they'll never oversteer on ice/snow, and don't understand what the left lane is for... just to name a few off the top of my head.
If they actually required you to know how to effectively handle the vehicle and (maybe using a simulator) to keep calm during emergency maneuvers, to correct without overcorrecting, to read traffic patterns and use foresight... maybe 30% of the people driving today would retain their license. The rest would have a lot of learning to do before being issued one.
They talk a great game about safety but it's a secondary priority. The primary priority is ticket revenue. Getting shitty drivers off the road means fewer people racking up fines. They have no real incentive to do it no matter how many injuries and deaths it would prevent.
no Just saying, also I've heard of 13 year olds offering services in barter for cigarettes that would make a crack whore blush
Difference is, marijuana being found in high schools is so common it's basically normal. Why? Because there is demand for it. Prohibition means there is no way to regulate that demand and attempt to confine it to adults only, so minors trade it amongst themselves in a way they don't so easily do with alcohol. This just isn't hard to understand. Incidentally the little thug-wannabe dealers were 16-18. I presume having a car made it easier to conduct their illicit enterprises. None of that is relevant, though.
What is relevant is that prohibition not only fails to eliminate availability, it actually makes the substance in question more easily obtainable by anyone. When you push something underground and in the dark you can't inspect the way it is being done like when you allow it to be above-ground and in the light. Again, it's a really tragically simple principle to have so many fail to undestand it.
Regarding your post... I personally try to refrain from reductio ad absurdum because it's a sorry substitute for solid reasoning. "This other much worse thing X happens, therefore the bad thing Y is insignificant, just sayin'..." Try that in anything like a formal debate and you'll get eaten alive, with good reason. You might as well say the fact that murder happens means we should never consider theft a problem.
Well your cigarettes and alcohol analogy has problems, both are age restricted
There is one really funny thing that the drug prohibitionists don't understand. When I was in high school there were several students who sold marijuana to other students. It was widely available. They had a reputation and people knew who they were. They didn't check IDs when they made a sale.
The result? It was actually easier to obtain marijuana, an illegal "controlled" substance, than it was to obtain alcohol. Buying alcohol meant you needed someone over 21 to risk their freedom by helping you evade the age restriction. Buying marijuana was just a matter of having the cash. This is a direct result of drug prohibition.
The foolishness of the prohibiton mentality is difficult to quantify. It doesn't even bother to look at the results of its ideas once implemented. It's a religious faith not concerned with things like results and evidence.
Making very addictive and VERY harmful drugs illegal is probably be a good way of preventing people from "trying it once" then getting hooked on it and ending up in an alleyway turning tricks for meth money.
I can't agree on it for marijuana, but meth, crack, and other such drugs are just a *bit* more dangerous and addictive than marijuana. Y'know. Just a tad.
Since when did we start using law as a sorry substitute for what should be things like awareness, prudence, common sense, good decision-making, and an ability to think for oneself? As I often say, you really don't want the kind of society movement in this direction will create.
Further, it's subtle but your reasoning (while sincere) contradicts itself. I don't think you're stupid or wrong-headed or anything like that. I think you mean well, you want the most good for others, but you're misguided concerning how that happens. That's my opinion.
Why do we try to keep folks who've never seen fire away from touching it. Because it hurts them.
We don't arrange that by making fire illegal. That's the hinge.
Grasp that and you understand how your notion amounts to protecting people from themselves, through the instrument of law backed by threat of state violence, in the holy name of declaring yourself better able than the individuals involved to know what is good for them. Can you name for me the goal or ultimate purpose of even a single particular life? In a final, ultimate way which dictates the decisions that should be made? Can you do that even for your own, let alone someone else's?
The only answer to this is freedom, the willingness to live and let live, to respect the rights of individuals to work this out on their own. It works as long as they don't impair the ability of others to do the same. Ensuring that is the proper role of a more enlightened state. The problem of what to decide for everyone is avoided when you take another path, that of letting the life that makes a decision experience the results. It tends to be self-correcting if you don't separate conscious decision-making from consequence.
What we do with fire is what we should do with drugs. We explain what it is, why it can be dangerous, why it can be welcome and useful, what the safety protocols are, what is risky and what is relatively safe, and how to use it if and when it is desired. We do this even though a single uncontrolled fire could destroy an entire forest, neighborhood, or even a city. What we don't do is send state agents armed with guns and other weaponry to imprison everyone who lights a campfire, uses a grill, or starts a car.
The article of faith is that Prohibition and the mentality behind it was ever valid, beneficial, or based on a solid understanding of reality. Plenty of ideas are well-intentioned yet utterly foolish and destructive. This is one of them.
Every organised religion in the world would like a word with you on how human mind works and just how exceptional (or deluded about yourself) you are.
It's really simple. If you invade the sanctity of my life by forcibly trying to make something my problem (such as driving drunk and endangering me) then yes, I do have the right to stop you, most likely by calling the police.
But if you are an adult person who acts like one, and can confine the consequences of your decisions to yourself, then I have no cause and no right to interfere. If I really don't like what you do with that freedom then my best option is to provide a counter-example by not doing that with my own life.
Let's say you use drugs but you do it at home, you don't drive impaired, you don't steal or commit other crimes to obtain the money to buy them, you stay home, you sober up, you go about your business the next day without imposing on anyone or endangering anyone... on what grounds would I hassle you over that? For what? What right would I have to tell you that you may not do something just because I wouldn't?
A real love for freedom is simply not compatible with a Puritannical busybody mentality that tries to enforce its morality on others without their consent. That kind of mentality would be more at home with some kind of autocracy or other absolute dictatorship. If I don't like the books you read and strongly disapprove of them, then I don't have to read them. If I think the religion you practice is total bullshit, that's okay because I don't have to practice it. If I think the music you listen to is garbage, I don't have to listen to it myself. If I think the substances you ingest are useless and pointless and have no merit, that's alright because I don't have to ingest them simply because you do.
Unless you are posing a threat to me, I have no right and no reason to bother you over what you choose to do with your life. I don't share the insecurity and the desire to control that the moral busybodies base their lives around. That isn't how I get my jollies. All I want is to live and let live while enjoying the same freedom I want others to have. This is really so exceptional? How far we have fallen.
That's the part I have observed often enough to understand but I cannot relate to it.
I certainly have my likes and dislikes. They are opinions, tastes, and preferences. I am entitled to them as anyone else is. But I never thought that my feelings about something override the facts of the matter. That's a kind of childish make-believe world I am thankful not to live in. The fact I don't like something doesn't make it less true.
I call that adulthood. By my standards, lots of chronological adults are just overgrown children. The problem is that they vote (at the polls and with their feet and wallets) and think their opinions are equivalent to facts and logic.
As has been demonstrated by countless, moronic drunk drivers, what is meant to be kept behind the closed doors of one's home doesn't always stay there.
That's no justification for continued prohibition.
Some people (who are quite sober) commit murder. Clearly, we should lock everyone up in solitary confinement shortly after birth, immediately after being weaned. For their own good. No, we can't give them a cellmate because they might shank them. Of course that's ridiculous but we've got a War On Murder to fight!
What is it about people altering their consciousness so many are really so afraid of? I mean... if prohibition was working and actually prevented anyone from obtaining drugs then we could discuss its merits. But it doesn't even accomplish any of its stated goals. It's a completely invalid idea. To talk about it as though it were worth considering is either dishonest or foolish, take your pick.
They cannot even keep drugs out of maximum-security prisons. Are the implications of this really so hard to understand, or is this more like a religious belief that is impervious to evidence? Prohibition: it hasn't worked, it isn't working, and it can't work. Not even in the most ideal conditions for it (prisons). Normally when something has been falsified (by both history and logic) even half as thoroughly as Prohibition has been, intelligent people drop the invalid idea, you never hear it from them again, and they move on to other ideas that might work.
What kind of insanity causes people to continue advocating such obviously failed ideas? Do they think they can divide by zero if they just keep trying hard enough?
Like I said, I think this is a religious or other faith-based belief because it has absolutely no contact with reality.
This really sums up what Prohibition is all about:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
As a form of payment credit cards are great -- that means you buy only what you know you can pay off that same month, and unlike cash you enjoy a paper trail and all sorts of fraud protections and the ability to audit and budget and conveniently purchase online.
Debit cards can do the same.
Sure, though in the case of fraud it's _your_ money on the line and not the bank's, and there's no ability to quickly get extra money in an emergency when you really need it now, and the fact that it's charged against your checking account (money you actually have right now) means you have a computer system to implement your fiscal discipline for you...
There's a reason the banks promoted debit cards like crazy. When the bank heavily promotes something, it's not because it serves your interests at their disadvantage. Responsibly used credit is better than debit. Debit is better only if you just can't control yourself and refuse to learn because it limits the damage you can do. It's a simpler game with fewer rules and that appeals to impulsive people who don't like to make budgets and plan ahead; but consequently, there are fewer ways you can take advantage of various rewards and bonuses without financially hanging yourself the way they want you to.
If you're using a credit card as a way to get a loan... you're doing it wrong. That's what the banks would love for you to do but you can also think for yourself and not play their game the way they would like you to (by being impulsive, undisciplined, not having a plan, and yielding easily to temptations of instant gratification).
As a form of payment credit cards are great -- that means you buy only what you know you can pay off that same month, and unlike cash you enjoy a paper trail and all sorts of fraud protections and the ability to audit and budget and conveniently purchase online. As a loan, credit cards are horrible -- they are designed to give you just enough rope to hang yourself with. That's why when you show responsibility and make all your payments on time, the banks respond by giving you more credit. They are hoping you will finally get in over your head. That's the way they play this game.
That's why so many of the agreements give the bank the ability to increase your interest when you are late on making a payment, because people struggling to make their payments really need more debt right? It's designed to be a hole that becomes increasingly hard to dig yourself out of. The bank makes more profit that way. If you are so poor that you can barely make ends meet, using credit cards for a loan is only going to make your situation worse.
Sure, emergencies (rare, unforeseeable events) do happen, but aside from that you need to live within your means. Nothing else is sustainable. The banks really love when you try to live beyond your means. Remember that debt is the only form of slavery that's still legal.
No, dipshit, I specifically didn't include Sept 11, because it's an outlier. My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering. You, being the liar you are, came in and tried to confuse the issue by giving out numbers for EVERY RAPE IN THE COUNTRY, as if the government is responsible for them all.
Your statistics are irrelevant. You may as well rattle off the number of murders in Bolivia. You need to compare the number of people hurt by terrorists to the number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job. That is the relevant statistic. And use a ten year window, because both incidents are rare and we need to use a larger window to get a better sample size.
The danger isn't rape. The danger is that it's getting increasingly easier for anyone to be declared a "terrorist" with little or no burden of proof from the government making the accusation. Then they play games with "enemy combatant" status and want the power to assassinate US citizens with no trial or other due process. Now they want more surveillance tools?
What's getting raped is whatever trust, credibility, and goodwill the US federal government has left. If it helps them obtain more power (that will never be relinquished, that will continue to find reasons to justify its use) then I'm sure they consider those things to be "collateral damage".
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it.
All of that is really easier than deciding not to use economic warfare to push other nations around? It's easier than not using our intelligence agencies to overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators who play ball with us?
Or did you think they hate us for our great freedoms? In that case they should like us by now and admire the path we're on.
Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian
So not being a coward makes one a hardcore libertarian? Or being observant enough to recognize the problems with the government's brand of "security" and the way it's always sold in terms of fear requires a particular political philosophy?
See this is the problem with politics. Everyone wants to be a member of some team and then it's a "go team go!" mentality instead of starting with the facts, a good understanding of history, and proceeding from there. I'm happy to dismantle every program like this and then take my chances of dying in a terrorist attack. I'm more likely to get struck by lightning but I'll chance that too, even without a portable Faraday cage.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself.
And why isn't that in itself sufficient justification for the practice?
I'm not concerned with justifications or the need to make them.
But otherwise, to answer what I think you are asking if the need for justification let go of... which is why I pointed that out... I would say it's because that need/desire is manifesting by putting a spin on another subject (space travel), instead of just honestly expressing itself on its own terms (the human experience and dealing with mortality). Long before there were rockets, people wrestled with these same questions.
Wanting to leave some kind of legacy is not really an answer to how to cope with mortality because anyone in the future who would learn of this legacy are themselves as mortal as you were. No, it is actually a way of avoiding the matter.
They'll die right here on earth too. I guarantee that. Maybe theyll get hit by a bus. Maybe have a heart attack at 50. Maybe develop cancer by 55 and In 50 years time no one will even know they existed.
That's okay because eventually, anyone who could have known they existed will be dead too. So you see it's self-correcting.
I mean it doesn't make much sense to say we over-value human life and then worry about the partial memories of those lives. The life itself is more valuable than the memory; if you recognize no other reason for this, then at least because it can continue to make more memories.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself. Otherwise I agree with you about having balls and understanding that exploring new frontiers might mean facing new dangers and this is not a good reason to give up. It would make a lot more sense than dying in some pointless undeclared war against a foreign nation that isn't really a threat to you.
They're just another greedy business. The only reason they bother making a good game is to bilk you out of your money.
To be fair, actually working to earn that money by creating something of value to exchange for it isn't terribly greedy.
Usually "greed" wants to short-circuit this process and get something for little or nothing, or use anti-competitive tactics, or vendor lock-in to escape competing on merit, or abuse the political system to get laws written in its favor.
If you think Bethesda honestly created a great game that is worth what they charge and you buy it, they deserve and have earned the money they made.
Another nice thing, is that it is much cheaper for large business to bribe local politicians.
This is where the fact that the citizens outnumber those businesses works in our favor.
Contrast that to the federal level where you either bring tremendous lobbying dollars to the table or your voice is drowned out. Those businesses and lobbyists are the only ones who can afford influence when it is this way. That in combination with a high incumbency rate is precisely why the voters are marginalized.
Lowering the cost and effort required to be heard by your elected officials makes them more accessible to everyone, not less. What you count as a disadvantage there is actually the most desirable aspect of keeping things small and local wherever possible.
You can't put a restriction or surveillance on any citizen without court order.
This right is protected by every EU country constitution.
This one is a matter of scope, not a binary "yes there is a court order or no one hasn't been obtained". Sabam wanted to get a single court order that applies to all users of this particular ISP.
The question then is shouldn't they have a burden of proof to identify and accuse individuals and not apply monitoring to everyone who happens to use a particular company just in case they *might* be filesharing, along with all the increased costs this would imply? Any kind of sanity would say "yes". The desperation of the copyright cartels and their desire to place their profits above even basic human freedoms would say "no".
They wanted a filtering system? How would such monitoring even detect copyrighted traffic anyway? You can't just monitor all BitTorrent traffic because legitimate items such as Linux distros are downloaded there. A digest or hash wouldn't be so reliable because it wouldn't apply anymore to a file that was altered or transcoded and wouldn't easily apply to files that are compressed. Torrents can be encrypted and there are alternate peer-to-peer protocols. It's not really even a feasible task in the first place.
I'd mod you up if I had points. That's exactly how it's worked in the US. The GOP has figured out that by scaring the crap out of people and blaming the government for them being scared that they can get reelected without even trying to provide a better government. More than that they've found that they get rewarded for making the government as dysfunctional as possible.
What's scary is that at this time they aren't even lying about their priorities.
Oh. Here I thought you were going to relate having a federal government that has too much power over the states to the situation with the EU where a strong central government with too much control of the member nations is what GP was warning about. But you turned it into an anti-Republican rant instead. That's... not nearly so useful.
Can we just settle this matter and move on? The Democrats? They fucking suck and will gladly take us down the road to totalitarianism and it will be in the name of "fairness" and "spreading the wealth around" and unions. The Republicans? They fucking suck and will gladly take us down the road to fascism and it will be in the name of "patriotism" and "national defense" and being pro-business.
You see, the nice thing about not allowing the central federal government to get too powerful is that neither group can do much damage that way because almost all of the government a citizen experiences comes from the local and state levels. Local and state politicians no matter their affiliation are more accountable and it is much easier to relocate (and deny them your taxes) if you really have a problem with the way they run things.
The EU might seem wonderful right now but if you triple its power it won't be so nice anymore. But no, you wanted to rant about a political party and not about the system under which it operates, demonstrating to anyone with the slightest insight that you have been suckered by the two-party system. Wake up, man. It's designed to cause precisely this kind of squabbling that never changes anything.
Yeah the government is dysfunctional, no dispute there, and it took the coordinated efforts of both parties (really a single Statist Party with two factions) to make it that way. After you keep trying one thing hundreds of times and it keeps failing over and over again, it's time to try something different. What that something might be is the worthy question.
It's funny how people don't seem so nutso when you have a clearer understanding of a topic.
That's one of the most widely recognized yet unwritten rules of Slashdot. I'm one of the few stubborn non-conformists who don't follow it.
The rule goes: "never miss an opportunity to be condescending and talk to someone like they must be a total idiot -- if they say anything that could be interpreted in an absurd way, don't EVER assume that maybe you have misunderstood them because that would mean missing an opportunity to meet your desperate need to feel superior to random strangers who have done you no harm."
It goes along with other rules such as "never infer anything on your own -- be deliberately dense, mechanically and literally interpret everything, and impatiently require that every possible nuance of a subject be spelled out for you" and "if you dislike something, or it offends you, or you wish it weren't true, it must be factually incorrect and you have no burden of proof when you claim it has been falsified" and "Googling an unfamiliar term takes a whole 20 seconds if you are particularly slow and this is such a terrible burden it is better to spend 10 minutes asking other people to do it for you and report back on the results."
It could be called sacrificing one's dignity at the altar of the ego.
I wasn't actually disagreeing with what was said. I don't even like children.
I just get tired of the whole cliched "enjoy your blah blah" sarcastic shit. Say what you mean. Say, "Your shit is coming to an end, and I hope you AREN'T enjoying it, because you're fucking stupid and you're the fucking problem."
Not you, of course, causality. I'm talking about the AC I responded to.
In that case I can see where you are coming from and I really, really appreciate a calm, level response like the one you just provided, particularly at the point where some kind of egotistical need to feel superior typically kicks in. This is respectable and not because I say so.
I get so tired of the hyperemotional demagoguery and the ad-hominems that have become the norm as the art of constructive discourse continues to wane. Well, what really continues to decline is the notion that your opinions and personal feelings are something separate from reason and the facts of the matter, that disliking something doesn't falsify it. That's the real disconnect I keep observing.
You can read some Henry David Thoreau and understand why he would have preferred to remain in jail instead of having a well-meaning but less-principled individual pay his poll tax for him.
Thoreau's essay (search for "Civil Disobedience" online) is excellent and should be required reading of every high school student in America.
(Preferring to remain in jail is a little less impressive when it's only overnight, until Emerson comes to bail him out in the morning. Kinda like how his whole self-reliance theme is a little less powerful when he's squatting on land owned by Emerson. But still, considering the essay that came out of the overnight stay in jail, and its subsequent influence, it was pretty awesome.)
I especially loved and appreciated the part about the level of consciousness from which the State's response came. I don't remember the description exactly, but he wrote about the way it was his thoughts, beliefs, principles, and meditations that they found so intolerable, yet they took out their vengence on his body by locking it up. He said they did this just as boys who, unable to get back at their enemy, will abuse his dog. The jailor shut and locked the cell door, imprisoning his body, but his meditations went right through and out the door behind him.
This was not someone you could intimidate by the usual methods and he did not need violence to achieve that status. This is what I admire.
"the good that violence appears to do is temporary; the harm that it does is permanent." I suppose there are a lot of low-brow, smarmy types with nothing to contribute so for them maybe I should add "within the context of protest and trying to change society"
You could, but then you would just be making a fool of yourself for no reason at all. What good does violence do in child-rearing? In traffic?
I suspect that you were trying to justify warfare with your statement. So then I ask you, name one war that has not done permanent damage?
There is a time when war is absolutely necessary. People like Hitler and Mussolini couldn't have been reasoned with. How well did appeasement work again? The time for peaceful change within Germany was before he became such a powerful dictator. The fact that war does permanent damage makes it a thing of last resort. It does not mean you are obligated to lay down and allow a tyrant to walk all over you.
Or for a less extreme example, have you ever been physically attacked in a completely unprovoked manner by someone you have harmed in no way? If you counter-attack and knock them out, are you not merely defending yourself against an aggressor? Do you not believe that receiving such a response might make the thug think twice about attacking the next innocent?
But for a peaceful protest? No, there is no excuse for violence. I am sorry if you cannot distinguish the difference and attribute this failure of yours to some kind of foolishness on my part. I do not consider warfare justified when there are other options. Peaceful protest is one such option. So is voting (though not so effective in a two-party system). So is the soap box. There is simply no excuse for protestors to initiate violence. Likewise, there is no excuse for police to use violence against protestors who are peaceful and do not pose a threat.
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Which is precisely the point of the attempted censorship.
It will work about as well as drug prohibition. It's a law that is easily evaded and won't be widely respected. Yes you can try to order men around this way and micromanage their every action but it never really works. On an international Internet it's just too easy to get around it.
You admit yourself, from your lofty view of total freedom to say what you like, that people will be exposed to offensive material.
Yes, they will. Let's see. The most comprehensive, amazing, massive collection of information that has ever appeared before in all of human history plus the ability to instantly communicate with nearly anyone in the world and exchange information as equals... that's on the plus side. The occasional troll or asshat, that's on the minus side. Yeah, I think I like the trade-off. It's not broken and doesn't need fixing. Dealing with the minus side is called by various names -- I tend to favor "grow a pair".
You practice self-censorship (i.e. burying your head in the sand) in the face of something you don't like.
This word, it does not seem to mean what you think it means. Self-censorship means I want to say something but I fear the consequences of saying it. Not watching shows that don't interest me isn't self-censorship. Not listening to people I think are crazy isn't self-censorship. It's not burying your head in the sand, either.
Right now someone somewhere is listening to a song you absolutely couldn't stand. It would drive you up the wall with its annoying refrain and irritating sound. You didn't look for this song and purchase it online, not because you fear it but because you don't generally buy things you know you won't like. Are you hiding from it? Are you cowering in the shadows? Are you burying your head in the sand? Or are you merely acting in a rational manner by not participating (voting with your feet/wallet) in things you dislike?
I question the intellectual honesty of someone who can't disagree with something without falsely mischaracterizing it, as you have done.
I don't think that government censorship is an appropriate response, but "la-la-la I can't hear you" doesn't always work.
Where that doesn't work, sucking it up and moving on does. That's a tiny, tiny price to pay to live in the Information Age. Sometimes you just don't know how good you have it.
If they don't use CP as the bait then it's usually that old bogie Terrorism. No-one in the media has the brains or balls to understand that filtering won't do much to either of these.
That or, being shrewd businessmen overseeing a large flow of information (only some of which makes it to prime time), they understand very well that it won't do anything. Instead, they view rampant Statism and centralization of human life in terms of consequentialism, i.e. they believe it serves some kind of "greater good" so any evils it perpetrates are somehow worth while.
Consequentialism is simply the idea that "the ends always justify the means". It's the belief that you can do a truly good thing using evil and dehumanizing methods. It's the way fanatics and worshippers of power tend to think. There are both, in abundance, in the mainstream media. The media is always sympathetic to power grabs. They are happy to report with entire articles why it's for your own good, with maybe a sentence or two that reads "but some groups express privacy concerns" without ever covering what they are or whether they are well-founded.
They are unwise but they're simply not that stupid. Otherwise they wouldn't be so effective. At some point it has to be deliberate because they sympathize with Statism and want to bring it about, either because they believe in it whole-heartedly or because they believe it's inevitable and think they will be rewarded for their early compliance.
Obviously this happens because people are generally stupid (don't take it as a flamebait, it's just an observation), and people vote for those, who promise them something regardless of long term consequences.
What do you expect? They're government educated by a system that is more concerned about not hurting anyone's feelings than it is with things like dialectic, critical thinking, and instilling intellectual independence. Most are far too passive (something promoted in the media by repeated example) to recognize this as a problem on their own and educate themselves despite the Information Age. This page sums it up nicely. The "lesson of dependency" is the hinge on which all the others rest.
I'll highlight the most glaring stupidity of this proposal, the unspoken and unacknowledged aspect it deliberately ignores.
There is some content on the Internet that "any normal human being would be offended by," he said.
... that you almost definitely won't see unless you are looking for it. It reminds me of people who call up a talk show to tell the host how much they hate him, his views, and his show ... yet they're quite familiar with all of it. You'd think a person would go with one of the multitude of other choices and listen to something other than whatever he finds offensive, but that would mean having nothing to bitch about. Nothing to bitch about would mean being denied their five minutes of climbing up on their high horse and feeling superior to someone else while they pontificate against them. This is very important to nothing human beings with no real sense of purpose in their lives and would be a great loss to them.
There are things I don't like so I don't watch them, listen to them, read them, etc, but it never occurs to me to feel offended. I don't get any pleasure or satisfaction from trying to force my will on others because I'm not an insecure fevered ego. If I were, I'd feel a sacred duty to work on fixing it while never making it someone else's problem. So, the fact that I don't enjoy something doesn't make me feel like no one else should (assuming it's just a matter of taste -- i.e. I don't feel that way about armed robbery -- since some of you are childish and jump all over every little thing not spelled out for you).
"I'm offended!" is a covert and thus cowardly way of saying "therefore, you should yield to me and change it to accommodate my tastes". It's an emotional appeal unconsciously designed to conceal a desire to control. The people who want to control others using this method are far too timid to try gaining any kind of domination or power to get what they want, so they go for the pity appeal instead. They try to gain the sympathy of someone who already has power or authority and by proxy obtain the control they desire. If they are thwarted, they accuse the authority of being insensitive and try to ridicule or shame (i.e. manipulate) them into doing their will.
The minority who weren't looking for "offensive" material and saw it anyway were duped by crapflooders, goatse trolls and the like. These are the same disruptive types who aren't going to respect censorship laws. They would view them as a challenge. If anything, using Tor or some other international, jurisdiction-crossing proxy to evade censorship would only add to their thrill.
to extract enough energy, the cyclist would be super buff, and thus roid crazy. i don't want even crazier cyclists on the road.
a simpler solution would be to require anybody who uses public roads to have a limited license (limited in the sense that it covers tested knowledge of road rules but not operation of a motor vehicle).
Sounds like a regular driver's license in the States to me.
Knowledge of signs and traffic laws is just about all they test for. That's why so many idiots brake uphill, on banked curves, don't understand that you steer better when you're not also braking, don't know what "end speed limit" does and doesn't mean, tailgate, can't stay off the median in their SUVs, never heard of engine braking, think four-wheel-drive means they'll never oversteer on ice/snow, and don't understand what the left lane is for... just to name a few off the top of my head.
If they actually required you to know how to effectively handle the vehicle and (maybe using a simulator) to keep calm during emergency maneuvers, to correct without overcorrecting, to read traffic patterns and use foresight... maybe 30% of the people driving today would retain their license. The rest would have a lot of learning to do before being issued one.
They talk a great game about safety but it's a secondary priority. The primary priority is ticket revenue. Getting shitty drivers off the road means fewer people racking up fines. They have no real incentive to do it no matter how many injuries and deaths it would prevent.
no Just saying, also I've heard of 13 year olds offering services in barter for cigarettes that would make a crack whore blush
Difference is, marijuana being found in high schools is so common it's basically normal. Why? Because there is demand for it. Prohibition means there is no way to regulate that demand and attempt to confine it to adults only, so minors trade it amongst themselves in a way they don't so easily do with alcohol. This just isn't hard to understand. Incidentally the little thug-wannabe dealers were 16-18. I presume having a car made it easier to conduct their illicit enterprises. None of that is relevant, though.
... I personally try to refrain from reductio ad absurdum because it's a sorry substitute for solid reasoning. "This other much worse thing X happens, therefore the bad thing Y is insignificant, just sayin'..." Try that in anything like a formal debate and you'll get eaten alive, with good reason. You might as well say the fact that murder happens means we should never consider theft a problem.
What is relevant is that prohibition not only fails to eliminate availability, it actually makes the substance in question more easily obtainable by anyone. When you push something underground and in the dark you can't inspect the way it is being done like when you allow it to be above-ground and in the light. Again, it's a really tragically simple principle to have so many fail to undestand it.
Regarding your post
C'mon. You can do better than that.
Well your cigarettes and alcohol analogy has problems, both are age restricted
There is one really funny thing that the drug prohibitionists don't understand. When I was in high school there were several students who sold marijuana to other students. It was widely available. They had a reputation and people knew who they were. They didn't check IDs when they made a sale.
The result? It was actually easier to obtain marijuana, an illegal "controlled" substance, than it was to obtain alcohol. Buying alcohol meant you needed someone over 21 to risk their freedom by helping you evade the age restriction. Buying marijuana was just a matter of having the cash. This is a direct result of drug prohibition.
The foolishness of the prohibiton mentality is difficult to quantify. It doesn't even bother to look at the results of its ideas once implemented. It's a religious faith not concerned with things like results and evidence.
Making very addictive and VERY harmful drugs illegal is probably be a good way of preventing people from "trying it once" then getting hooked on it and ending up in an alleyway turning tricks for meth money.
I can't agree on it for marijuana, but meth, crack, and other such drugs are just a *bit* more dangerous and addictive than marijuana. Y'know. Just a tad.
Since when did we start using law as a sorry substitute for what should be things like awareness, prudence, common sense, good decision-making, and an ability to think for oneself? As I often say, you really don't want the kind of society movement in this direction will create.
Further, it's subtle but your reasoning (while sincere) contradicts itself. I don't think you're stupid or wrong-headed or anything like that. I think you mean well, you want the most good for others, but you're misguided concerning how that happens. That's my opinion.
Why do we try to keep folks who've never seen fire away from touching it. Because it hurts them.
We don't arrange that by making fire illegal. That's the hinge.
Grasp that and you understand how your notion amounts to protecting people from themselves, through the instrument of law backed by threat of state violence, in the holy name of declaring yourself better able than the individuals involved to know what is good for them. Can you name for me the goal or ultimate purpose of even a single particular life? In a final, ultimate way which dictates the decisions that should be made? Can you do that even for your own, let alone someone else's?
The only answer to this is freedom, the willingness to live and let live, to respect the rights of individuals to work this out on their own. It works as long as they don't impair the ability of others to do the same. Ensuring that is the proper role of a more enlightened state. The problem of what to decide for everyone is avoided when you take another path, that of letting the life that makes a decision experience the results. It tends to be self-correcting if you don't separate conscious decision-making from consequence.
What we do with fire is what we should do with drugs. We explain what it is, why it can be dangerous, why it can be welcome and useful, what the safety protocols are, what is risky and what is relatively safe, and how to use it if and when it is desired. We do this even though a single uncontrolled fire could destroy an entire forest, neighborhood, or even a city. What we don't do is send state agents armed with guns and other weaponry to imprison everyone who lights a campfire, uses a grill, or starts a car.
The article of faith is that Prohibition and the mentality behind it was ever valid, beneficial, or based on a solid understanding of reality. Plenty of ideas are well-intentioned yet utterly foolish and destructive. This is one of them.
Every organised religion in the world would like a word with you on how human mind works and just how exceptional (or deluded about yourself) you are.
It's really simple. If you invade the sanctity of my life by forcibly trying to make something my problem (such as driving drunk and endangering me) then yes, I do have the right to stop you, most likely by calling the police.
... on what grounds would I hassle you over that? For what? What right would I have to tell you that you may not do something just because I wouldn't?
But if you are an adult person who acts like one, and can confine the consequences of your decisions to yourself, then I have no cause and no right to interfere. If I really don't like what you do with that freedom then my best option is to provide a counter-example by not doing that with my own life.
Let's say you use drugs but you do it at home, you don't drive impaired, you don't steal or commit other crimes to obtain the money to buy them, you stay home, you sober up, you go about your business the next day without imposing on anyone or endangering anyone
A real love for freedom is simply not compatible with a Puritannical busybody mentality that tries to enforce its morality on others without their consent. That kind of mentality would be more at home with some kind of autocracy or other absolute dictatorship. If I don't like the books you read and strongly disapprove of them, then I don't have to read them. If I think the religion you practice is total bullshit, that's okay because I don't have to practice it. If I think the music you listen to is garbage, I don't have to listen to it myself. If I think the substances you ingest are useless and pointless and have no merit, that's alright because I don't have to ingest them simply because you do.
Unless you are posing a threat to me, I have no right and no reason to bother you over what you choose to do with your life. I don't share the insecurity and the desire to control that the moral busybodies base their lives around. That isn't how I get my jollies. All I want is to live and let live while enjoying the same freedom I want others to have. This is really so exceptional? How far we have fallen.
It's because a lot of people don't like drugs.
That's the part I have observed often enough to understand but I cannot relate to it.
I certainly have my likes and dislikes. They are opinions, tastes, and preferences. I am entitled to them as anyone else is. But I never thought that my feelings about something override the facts of the matter. That's a kind of childish make-believe world I am thankful not to live in. The fact I don't like something doesn't make it less true.
I call that adulthood. By my standards, lots of chronological adults are just overgrown children. The problem is that they vote (at the polls and with their feet and wallets) and think their opinions are equivalent to facts and logic.
As has been demonstrated by countless, moronic drunk drivers, what is meant to be kept behind the closed doors of one's home doesn't always stay there.
That's no justification for continued prohibition.
... if prohibition was working and actually prevented anyone from obtaining drugs then we could discuss its merits. But it doesn't even accomplish any of its stated goals. It's a completely invalid idea. To talk about it as though it were worth considering is either dishonest or foolish, take your pick.
Some people (who are quite sober) commit murder. Clearly, we should lock everyone up in solitary confinement shortly after birth, immediately after being weaned. For their own good. No, we can't give them a cellmate because they might shank them. Of course that's ridiculous but we've got a War On Murder to fight!
What is it about people altering their consciousness so many are really so afraid of? I mean
They cannot even keep drugs out of maximum-security prisons. Are the implications of this really so hard to understand, or is this more like a religious belief that is impervious to evidence? Prohibition: it hasn't worked, it isn't working, and it can't work. Not even in the most ideal conditions for it (prisons). Normally when something has been falsified (by both history and logic) even half as thoroughly as Prohibition has been, intelligent people drop the invalid idea, you never hear it from them again, and they move on to other ideas that might work.
What kind of insanity causes people to continue advocating such obviously failed ideas? Do they think they can divide by zero if they just keep trying hard enough?
Like I said, I think this is a religious or other faith-based belief because it has absolutely no contact with reality.
This really sums up what Prohibition is all about:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
As a form of payment credit cards are great -- that means you buy only what you know you can pay off that same month, and unlike cash you enjoy a paper trail and all sorts of fraud protections and the ability to audit and budget and conveniently purchase online.
Debit cards can do the same.
Sure, though in the case of fraud it's _your_ money on the line and not the bank's, and there's no ability to quickly get extra money in an emergency when you really need it now, and the fact that it's charged against your checking account (money you actually have right now) means you have a computer system to implement your fiscal discipline for you...
There's a reason the banks promoted debit cards like crazy. When the bank heavily promotes something, it's not because it serves your interests at their disadvantage. Responsibly used credit is better than debit. Debit is better only if you just can't control yourself and refuse to learn because it limits the damage you can do. It's a simpler game with fewer rules and that appeals to impulsive people who don't like to make budgets and plan ahead; but consequently, there are fewer ways you can take advantage of various rewards and bonuses without financially hanging yourself the way they want you to.
they have the money to buy shit dumb fucks.
If you're using a credit card as a way to get a loan ... you're doing it wrong. That's what the banks would love for you to do but you can also think for yourself and not play their game the way they would like you to (by being impulsive, undisciplined, not having a plan, and yielding easily to temptations of instant gratification).
As a form of payment credit cards are great -- that means you buy only what you know you can pay off that same month, and unlike cash you enjoy a paper trail and all sorts of fraud protections and the ability to audit and budget and conveniently purchase online. As a loan, credit cards are horrible -- they are designed to give you just enough rope to hang yourself with. That's why when you show responsibility and make all your payments on time, the banks respond by giving you more credit. They are hoping you will finally get in over your head. That's the way they play this game.
That's why so many of the agreements give the bank the ability to increase your interest when you are late on making a payment, because people struggling to make their payments really need more debt right? It's designed to be a hole that becomes increasingly hard to dig yourself out of. The bank makes more profit that way. If you are so poor that you can barely make ends meet, using credit cards for a loan is only going to make your situation worse.
Sure, emergencies (rare, unforeseeable events) do happen, but aside from that you need to live within your means. Nothing else is sustainable. The banks really love when you try to live beyond your means. Remember that debt is the only form of slavery that's still legal.
Maybe if this is just a CIA thing, where they all are real smart professionals
"Smart" and "professional" are a really bad combination when the people in question are also fuckin' evil.
No, dipshit, I specifically didn't include Sept 11, because it's an outlier. My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering. You, being the liar you are, came in and tried to confuse the issue by giving out numbers for EVERY RAPE IN THE COUNTRY, as if the government is responsible for them all.
Your statistics are irrelevant. You may as well rattle off the number of murders in Bolivia. You need to compare the number of people hurt by terrorists to the number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job. That is the relevant statistic. And use a ten year window, because both incidents are rare and we need to use a larger window to get a better sample size.
The danger isn't rape. The danger is that it's getting increasingly easier for anyone to be declared a "terrorist" with little or no burden of proof from the government making the accusation. Then they play games with "enemy combatant" status and want the power to assassinate US citizens with no trial or other due process. Now they want more surveillance tools?
What's getting raped is whatever trust, credibility, and goodwill the US federal government has left. If it helps them obtain more power (that will never be relinquished, that will continue to find reasons to justify its use) then I'm sure they consider those things to be "collateral damage".
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it.
All of that is really easier than deciding not to use economic warfare to push other nations around? It's easier than not using our intelligence agencies to overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators who play ball with us?
Or did you think they hate us for our great freedoms? In that case they should like us by now and admire the path we're on.
Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian
So not being a coward makes one a hardcore libertarian? Or being observant enough to recognize the problems with the government's brand of "security" and the way it's always sold in terms of fear requires a particular political philosophy?
See this is the problem with politics. Everyone wants to be a member of some team and then it's a "go team go!" mentality instead of starting with the facts, a good understanding of history, and proceeding from there. I'm happy to dismantle every program like this and then take my chances of dying in a terrorist attack. I'm more likely to get struck by lightning but I'll chance that too, even without a portable Faraday cage.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself.
And why isn't that in itself sufficient justification for the practice?
I'm not concerned with justifications or the need to make them.
... which is why I pointed that out ... I would say it's because that need/desire is manifesting by putting a spin on another subject (space travel), instead of just honestly expressing itself on its own terms (the human experience and dealing with mortality). Long before there were rockets, people wrestled with these same questions.
But otherwise, to answer what I think you are asking if the need for justification let go of
Wanting to leave some kind of legacy is not really an answer to how to cope with mortality because anyone in the future who would learn of this legacy are themselves as mortal as you were. No, it is actually a way of avoiding the matter.
They'll die right here on earth too. I guarantee that. Maybe theyll get hit by a bus. Maybe have a heart attack at 50. Maybe develop cancer by 55 and In 50 years time no one will even know they existed.
That's okay because eventually, anyone who could have known they existed will be dead too. So you see it's self-correcting.
I mean it doesn't make much sense to say we over-value human life and then worry about the partial memories of those lives. The life itself is more valuable than the memory; if you recognize no other reason for this, then at least because it can continue to make more memories.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself. Otherwise I agree with you about having balls and understanding that exploring new frontiers might mean facing new dangers and this is not a good reason to give up. It would make a lot more sense than dying in some pointless undeclared war against a foreign nation that isn't really a threat to you.
They're just another greedy business. The only reason they bother making a good game is to bilk you out of your money.
To be fair, actually working to earn that money by creating something of value to exchange for it isn't terribly greedy.
Usually "greed" wants to short-circuit this process and get something for little or nothing, or use anti-competitive tactics, or vendor lock-in to escape competing on merit, or abuse the political system to get laws written in its favor.
If you think Bethesda honestly created a great game that is worth what they charge and you buy it, they deserve and have earned the money they made.
Another nice thing, is that it is much cheaper for large business to bribe local politicians.
This is where the fact that the citizens outnumber those businesses works in our favor.
Contrast that to the federal level where you either bring tremendous lobbying dollars to the table or your voice is drowned out. Those businesses and lobbyists are the only ones who can afford influence when it is this way. That in combination with a high incumbency rate is precisely why the voters are marginalized.
Lowering the cost and effort required to be heard by your elected officials makes them more accessible to everyone, not less. What you count as a disadvantage there is actually the most desirable aspect of keeping things small and local wherever possible.
You can't put a restriction or surveillance on any citizen without court order. This right is protected by every EU country constitution.
This one is a matter of scope, not a binary "yes there is a court order or no one hasn't been obtained". Sabam wanted to get a single court order that applies to all users of this particular ISP.
The question then is shouldn't they have a burden of proof to identify and accuse individuals and not apply monitoring to everyone who happens to use a particular company just in case they *might* be filesharing, along with all the increased costs this would imply? Any kind of sanity would say "yes". The desperation of the copyright cartels and their desire to place their profits above even basic human freedoms would say "no".
They wanted a filtering system? How would such monitoring even detect copyrighted traffic anyway? You can't just monitor all BitTorrent traffic because legitimate items such as Linux distros are downloaded there. A digest or hash wouldn't be so reliable because it wouldn't apply anymore to a file that was altered or transcoded and wouldn't easily apply to files that are compressed. Torrents can be encrypted and there are alternate peer-to-peer protocols. It's not really even a feasible task in the first place.
I'd mod you up if I had points. That's exactly how it's worked in the US. The GOP has figured out that by scaring the crap out of people and blaming the government for them being scared that they can get reelected without even trying to provide a better government. More than that they've found that they get rewarded for making the government as dysfunctional as possible.
What's scary is that at this time they aren't even lying about their priorities.
Oh. Here I thought you were going to relate having a federal government that has too much power over the states to the situation with the EU where a strong central government with too much control of the member nations is what GP was warning about. But you turned it into an anti-Republican rant instead. That's ... not nearly so useful.
Can we just settle this matter and move on? The Democrats? They fucking suck and will gladly take us down the road to totalitarianism and it will be in the name of "fairness" and "spreading the wealth around" and unions. The Republicans? They fucking suck and will gladly take us down the road to fascism and it will be in the name of "patriotism" and "national defense" and being pro-business.
You see, the nice thing about not allowing the central federal government to get too powerful is that neither group can do much damage that way because almost all of the government a citizen experiences comes from the local and state levels. Local and state politicians no matter their affiliation are more accountable and it is much easier to relocate (and deny them your taxes) if you really have a problem with the way they run things.
The EU might seem wonderful right now but if you triple its power it won't be so nice anymore. But no, you wanted to rant about a political party and not about the system under which it operates, demonstrating to anyone with the slightest insight that you have been suckered by the two-party system. Wake up, man. It's designed to cause precisely this kind of squabbling that never changes anything.
Yeah the government is dysfunctional, no dispute there, and it took the coordinated efforts of both parties (really a single Statist Party with two factions) to make it that way. After you keep trying one thing hundreds of times and it keeps failing over and over again, it's time to try something different. What that something might be is the worthy question.
It's funny how people don't seem so nutso when you have a clearer understanding of a topic.
That's one of the most widely recognized yet unwritten rules of Slashdot. I'm one of the few stubborn non-conformists who don't follow it.
The rule goes: "never miss an opportunity to be condescending and talk to someone like they must be a total idiot -- if they say anything that could be interpreted in an absurd way, don't EVER assume that maybe you have misunderstood them because that would mean missing an opportunity to meet your desperate need to feel superior to random strangers who have done you no harm."
It goes along with other rules such as "never infer anything on your own -- be deliberately dense, mechanically and literally interpret everything, and impatiently require that every possible nuance of a subject be spelled out for you" and "if you dislike something, or it offends you, or you wish it weren't true, it must be factually incorrect and you have no burden of proof when you claim it has been falsified" and "Googling an unfamiliar term takes a whole 20 seconds if you are particularly slow and this is such a terrible burden it is better to spend 10 minutes asking other people to do it for you and report back on the results."
It could be called sacrificing one's dignity at the altar of the ego.
I wasn't actually disagreeing with what was said. I don't even like children.
I just get tired of the whole cliched "enjoy your blah blah" sarcastic shit. Say what you mean. Say, "Your shit is coming to an end, and I hope you AREN'T enjoying it, because you're fucking stupid and you're the fucking problem."
Not you, of course, causality. I'm talking about the AC I responded to.
In that case I can see where you are coming from and I really, really appreciate a calm, level response like the one you just provided, particularly at the point where some kind of egotistical need to feel superior typically kicks in. This is respectable and not because I say so.
I get so tired of the hyperemotional demagoguery and the ad-hominems that have become the norm as the art of constructive discourse continues to wane. Well, what really continues to decline is the notion that your opinions and personal feelings are something separate from reason and the facts of the matter, that disliking something doesn't falsify it. That's the real disconnect I keep observing.
Thank you for a counter-example.
You can read some Henry David Thoreau and understand why he would have preferred to remain in jail instead of having a well-meaning but less-principled individual pay his poll tax for him.
Thoreau's essay (search for "Civil Disobedience" online) is excellent and should be required reading of every high school student in America.
(Preferring to remain in jail is a little less impressive when it's only overnight, until Emerson comes to bail him out in the morning. Kinda like how his whole self-reliance theme is a little less powerful when he's squatting on land owned by Emerson. But still, considering the essay that came out of the overnight stay in jail, and its subsequent influence, it was pretty awesome.)
I especially loved and appreciated the part about the level of consciousness from which the State's response came. I don't remember the description exactly, but he wrote about the way it was his thoughts, beliefs, principles, and meditations that they found so intolerable, yet they took out their vengence on his body by locking it up. He said they did this just as boys who, unable to get back at their enemy, will abuse his dog. The jailor shut and locked the cell door, imprisoning his body, but his meditations went right through and out the door behind him.
This was not someone you could intimidate by the usual methods and he did not need violence to achieve that status. This is what I admire.
"the good that violence appears to do is temporary; the harm that it does is permanent." I suppose there are a lot of low-brow, smarmy types with nothing to contribute so for them maybe I should add "within the context of protest and trying to change society"
You could, but then you would just be making a fool of yourself for no reason at all. What good does violence do in child-rearing? In traffic?
I suspect that you were trying to justify warfare with your statement. So then I ask you, name one war that has not done permanent damage?
There is a time when war is absolutely necessary. People like Hitler and Mussolini couldn't have been reasoned with. How well did appeasement work again? The time for peaceful change within Germany was before he became such a powerful dictator. The fact that war does permanent damage makes it a thing of last resort. It does not mean you are obligated to lay down and allow a tyrant to walk all over you.
Or for a less extreme example, have you ever been physically attacked in a completely unprovoked manner by someone you have harmed in no way? If you counter-attack and knock them out, are you not merely defending yourself against an aggressor? Do you not believe that receiving such a response might make the thug think twice about attacking the next innocent?
But for a peaceful protest? No, there is no excuse for violence. I am sorry if you cannot distinguish the difference and attribute this failure of yours to some kind of foolishness on my part. I do not consider warfare justified when there are other options. Peaceful protest is one such option. So is voting (though not so effective in a two-party system). So is the soap box. There is simply no excuse for protestors to initiate violence. Likewise, there is no excuse for police to use violence against protestors who are peaceful and do not pose a threat.