Astroturf, really? How does my comment in any way take a side? It applies to everyone, regardless of their political/idealogical leanings. Everyone who goes to the trouble to organize an event large enough to require some consideration about the use of public streets, and who goes to the trouble and expense of working with public safety officials (who have to route traffic around that location, provide sanitation facitilities, and everything else) deserves the opportunity to hold their event. This applies to everyone.
You, on the other hand, appear to favor mob rule, and think that free speech is owned by whoever can shout the loudest or perhaps burn a car in the path of someone else's demonstration. Yeah, you love freedom, I can tell. I'm sure you also think that having your fellow demonstrators smash store windows somehow makes you look more mature and thoughtful, too, right?
That explains how they're preventing you from talking about them like this, right?
I suppose you'd rather that police working events, instead of using a cheap rig on a trailer, spend a whole lot more tax dollars on helicopter air time and more personnel walking around in uniform? A vantage point above a crowd cuts way down on how much else you have to spend to deal with large groups of people where there's a concern about problems where they've routinely occurred before (like people torching cars after ballgames, street gangs doing stupid crap during parades, protesters smashing store windows, that sort of thing). What's the problem, you don't like the fact that it's weather sealed? It would look less sinister if it was a standard cherry picker?
forcing blood tests on the street
You haven't actually been paying attention at all, have you? Oh, I get it. You're making stuff up. My bad, fed a troll.
Why? If a cop, who has been trained to spot signs of inebriation, is reasonably sure you've been drinking, a warrant to test that fact is... reasonable. Your complaint that the warrant's assignment is someone more convenient than usual under these circumstances doesn't hold water. Where a judge is sitting and signing things has no bearing on it.
If you have a complaint, it should be about whether it's reasonable for the cop to even look you in the eye and ask you a question about if you've been drinking when you have exhibited any signs of impaired driving. But checkpoints have been challenged many times, and (because operating a vehicle on the state's/county's roads is subject to some pretty specific conditions) not found wanting, constitutionally. The physical location of the judiciary has nothing to do with any of that.
free speech zones really do protect my freedom of asse
No, they protect the free speech and assembly rights of the people holding the event. Want freedom to block the street, and not have your event overrun by people who want to shout you down? Just do the same thing they did, and get a permit to use the street. At which point, the very same cops and emergency responders who are making sure the people you hate are allowed to have their event won't be allowed to trash your event when you have one.
Of course, you don't care. I'm guessing that you're the type that thinks that only your point of view deserves any consideration, right? You sound like a big Che Guevara fan. He had it right. No need for rule of law, trials and evidence and whatnot - people who don't agree with the people who shout the loudest and are the most willing to burn businesses just get shot.
If you don't understand why people holding a large event should be allowed to assemble and speak without having to fight off punks determined to shout them down, then you don't understand why you should be able to do it, and benefit from the same protections, either.
Though I suspect that your idea of speech and assembly doesn't involve speaking, or peacefully assembling, right? Man, it sucks when you aren't allowed to torch cars in the middle of someone else's political rally, doesn't it? Bummer. Nobody should have first amendment rights but you, huh?
Excellent! Please continue to trot out debunked, causality-absent stats from agenda-grinding web sites! That really helps.
While you're at it, dig for some numbers on who actually does the bulk of the killing in Afghanistan. Hint: it's not US soldiers, though they're forced to on occasion. Which brings up your ratio stuff... which is tied entirely to the Taliban's delightful tactics of positioning themselves deliberately to cause civilian casualities, and of course of being the largest source of those casualties themselves.
Who has been charged? DId an act written in 1917 and never updated cover the internet do you think?
Manning, so far. It's a large investigation still in progress, as you well know. The internet, of course, has nothing at all to do with anything. Everything that's happened could have happened (though more slowly) using microfilm or other mechanisms last century. Instead of Manning handing stolen documents to Assange over the wire, if would have been via the mail, or a handoff, or any other method. What makes you think that the means by which the person lifting a pile of stolen documents and giving them to someone to spread around has anything to do with whether or not it's and act of breaking the law?
And, please, stop comparing the Pentagon Papers/NYT case. Even the people involved in that event have said it's a poor analogy.
What does Al Gore have to do with it? Millions of people have received their only indoctrination on this entire topic because school teachers have used his movie as the way to learn about it. Fetish? I didn't bring him up, someone else did. But anyone interested in this topic being discussed rationally needs to want him and his motives out of the discussion. You may not care about him, but you seem to care about people understanding the science. He doesn't promote the science around the issue, or the scientific method at all, for that matter. You SHOULD care about that, though you don't. He has the attention of millions of people that you'll never get a chance to talk to.
Which point, exactly? He's a guy that has shown an uncanny ability to say what he thinks a particular audience wants to hear, or what he thinks is politically expedient (see his absurd support, and the surrounding BS he dished out, for ethanol subsidies, as a prime example). He a disengenuous, condescending, officious, lecturing, holier-than-thou prig. His smoke-stacks-equal-giant-hurricanes imagery is shallow, shrill, fear mongering. His positioning for enormous personal profit through trafficking in sham carbon credits is the height of scumbaggery. Were those the points you were making?
Please learn the difference between weather and climate before you embarrass yourself more.
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
There's zero evidence of what? That a Democrat is running the site? Which means, despite lack of any evidence, that it therefore must be a Republican? Are you even listening to yourself?
When you provide the physical infrastructure that is used to perform or coordinate that DDoS attack, you really can't complain that the people tasked with investigating the crime are going to need to lay hands on the system and data in question, intact. ISPs and hosting facilities especially, because the next attack could be on something they're, themselves, trying to keep on the air as it's being attacked.
Secondly, someone exercising freedom of Assembly is not always a protester, but of course, this would involve seeing someone else's point of view.
The fact that you are blocking a public street without making any prior arrangements to do so isn't a "point of view" thing - it's a simple are you, or aren't you doing it sort of thing.
As for linking to a Polish document about freedom of assembly? Who has said anything about interfering with freedom of assembly? The US has done more to protect and promote freedom of assembly than any other state in the history of humanity. That has nothing whatsoever to do with physically preventing fellow citizens from using the streets that serve their homes, businesses, and public services/venues.
You mean there ARE banks which were are required to do business with
No, I don't mean that and you know it. But if you want to do business with a bank that, for example, offers you FDIC protected checking accounts, then you looking for a different sort of service provider. PayPal isn't in that line of work.
And, on your other comment... you're confusing FDIC insurance and the accompanying regulations with being bailed out, which are completely different things.
If you have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, you are not free
Lucky for you, then, that you don't have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, right? On the other hand, it seems like a good idea to make arrangements with the people who are tasked with keeping the streets working and safe when you are setting out to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use the streets they pay for. Or are you implying that the only way to speak out against the government is to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use public property?
Any government that implements such a policy is nothing more than a bunch of thugs and deserves as much respect.
You've got it backwards. Any protester who thinks he has to forcibly prevent other people from using the street because otherwise he doesn't think he can express himself is a thug who should be treated as such.
despite looking like a bank and acting like a bank
And despite not pretending to provide many of the services a bank provides, and not arranging to have the funds insured by the government, and despite you not having to have anything to do with them, whatsoever, if you don't feel like it.
They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.
But they did consider not being ripped off by your government or your fellow citizens to be a right (they were most eloquent about the rights to one's property and works - just read the mountains of papers, letters, and other supporting documents produced by those wise fellows). What they didn't like was having to operate a press under the authority of the crown.
instead of simply assuming without question that copyright must exist
It's one of the most examined topics in the last couple hundred years. It's been the subject of endless academic hand-waving, court proceedings, legislation, contest, findings, and journalistic scrutiny. The rationale is well established and tested, and the basic ethics and good sense of it are plain as day, even if you don't feel like doing the paperwork.
having authority over the marketplace is good enough
In what way does Amazon have authority over the marketplace? There are thousands of book sellers. Explain how Amazon's decision not to carry a particular genre is preventing those sellers from doing so. Be specific.
Freedom of assembly has nothing to do with campaign finance, which is where you cut the root of the political party system.
It has everything to do with it. The first amendment says I'm free to speak, and free to assemble. If I want to assemble with a thousand other people who think the same way, and we all want to use some of our money to buy a newspaper ad as one of the ways we speak our minds, what's wrong with that? It's exactly the sort of thing that the First Amendment is there to prevent the government from getting involved in.
If organizations are prohibited from performing interstate fundraising and cross-candidate contributions
Right, because people can't be trusted to interact across borders, or to speak - especially when more than one of them have the same thing to say. Intolerable!
BS. If it were done on their behalf, they'd be paying for it.
They do. You have to pay fees to election boards in order appear as a candidate.
Your argument makes the completely unsupported assumption that reducing large candidate fields is desirable
It does have the desireable effect of not leaving you with an election winner that only got, say, 5% of the vote. Hardly a mandate. Regardless, why do you care? If a group deciding to try to run a candidate for a state-wide or national office wants to take advantage of a primary election to establish who that candidate should be, what's it to you? If you're not in that party, it's likely you're not going to vote for the candidate their primary process chooses anway, right? The fact that one or more parties has used an election to choose their candidate for another election doesn't prevent two dozen independent candidates from also going for that that final win.
Of course those two dozen candidates are going to have a hard time attracting a winning piece of the electoral pie.
State election boards not only administer primaries on behalf of parties that register to use those services, but they also whittle down the field of at-large education board contenders, city council seats, county board members and a jillion other large fields that vary from one place to the next. It isn't just about Democrats and Republicans.
The tolerant left has been mysoginistically hating her since the day they met her. The irrational vitriol, sleazy attacks and crap that they would absolutely go insane over if it was said about their own politicians has never let up, and is only worse by the day. I am sort of surprised that the normally media-savvy left doesn't understand how shrilly juvenile they sound in that regard. It doesn't help them at all.
Bush had a huge, active effort to deal with AIDS in Africa - much more than Clinton or Obama. Did AIDS groups support Bush?
They didn't support him generally, and not even specifically on that effort. Nor did environmentalist/conservationist groups support him when he set aside more coastal/reef areas for permanent protection that any president before him. Too much BDS, that's all.
The public pays to run elections. Any group that meets certain standards can ask a state's board of elections to include their group's contenders in a primary election, administered by the state as the public service that it is. The D's and the R's happen to be two of the largest and longest-organized such groups. Start your own! Win elections! Then change the role that state governments play in elections, one state at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Astroturf, really? How does my comment in any way take a side? It applies to everyone, regardless of their political/idealogical leanings. Everyone who goes to the trouble to organize an event large enough to require some consideration about the use of public streets, and who goes to the trouble and expense of working with public safety officials (who have to route traffic around that location, provide sanitation facitilities, and everything else) deserves the opportunity to hold their event. This applies to everyone.
You, on the other hand, appear to favor mob rule, and think that free speech is owned by whoever can shout the loudest or perhaps burn a car in the path of someone else's demonstration. Yeah, you love freedom, I can tell. I'm sure you also think that having your fellow demonstrators smash store windows somehow makes you look more mature and thoughtful, too, right?
police state
That explains how they're preventing you from talking about them like this, right?
I suppose you'd rather that police working events, instead of using a cheap rig on a trailer, spend a whole lot more tax dollars on helicopter air time and more personnel walking around in uniform? A vantage point above a crowd cuts way down on how much else you have to spend to deal with large groups of people where there's a concern about problems where they've routinely occurred before (like people torching cars after ballgames, street gangs doing stupid crap during parades, protesters smashing store windows, that sort of thing). What's the problem, you don't like the fact that it's weather sealed? It would look less sinister if it was a standard cherry picker?
forcing blood tests on the street
You haven't actually been paying attention at all, have you? Oh, I get it. You're making stuff up. My bad, fed a troll.
a violation of reasonable search and seizure
... reasonable. Your complaint that the warrant's assignment is someone more convenient than usual under these circumstances doesn't hold water. Where a judge is sitting and signing things has no bearing on it.
Why? If a cop, who has been trained to spot signs of inebriation, is reasonably sure you've been drinking, a warrant to test that fact is
If you have a complaint, it should be about whether it's reasonable for the cop to even look you in the eye and ask you a question about if you've been drinking when you have exhibited any signs of impaired driving. But checkpoints have been challenged many times, and (because operating a vehicle on the state's/county's roads is subject to some pretty specific conditions) not found wanting, constitutionally. The physical location of the judiciary has nothing to do with any of that.
free speech zones really do protect my freedom of asse
No, they protect the free speech and assembly rights of the people holding the event. Want freedom to block the street, and not have your event overrun by people who want to shout you down? Just do the same thing they did, and get a permit to use the street. At which point, the very same cops and emergency responders who are making sure the people you hate are allowed to have their event won't be allowed to trash your event when you have one.
Of course, you don't care. I'm guessing that you're the type that thinks that only your point of view deserves any consideration, right? You sound like a big Che Guevara fan. He had it right. No need for rule of law, trials and evidence and whatnot - people who don't agree with the people who shout the loudest and are the most willing to burn businesses just get shot.
If you don't understand why people holding a large event should be allowed to assemble and speak without having to fight off punks determined to shout them down, then you don't understand why you should be able to do it, and benefit from the same protections, either.
Though I suspect that your idea of speech and assembly doesn't involve speaking, or peacefully assembling, right? Man, it sucks when you aren't allowed to torch cars in the middle of someone else's political rally, doesn't it? Bummer. Nobody should have first amendment rights but you, huh?
Excellent! Please continue to trot out debunked, causality-absent stats from agenda-grinding web sites! That really helps.
... which is tied entirely to the Taliban's delightful tactics of positioning themselves deliberately to cause civilian casualities, and of course of being the largest source of those casualties themselves.
While you're at it, dig for some numbers on who actually does the bulk of the killing in Afghanistan. Hint: it's not US soldiers, though they're forced to on occasion. Which brings up your ratio stuff
Who has been charged? DId an act written in 1917 and never updated cover the internet do you think?
Manning, so far. It's a large investigation still in progress, as you well know. The internet, of course, has nothing at all to do with anything. Everything that's happened could have happened (though more slowly) using microfilm or other mechanisms last century. Instead of Manning handing stolen documents to Assange over the wire, if would have been via the mail, or a handoff, or any other method. What makes you think that the means by which the person lifting a pile of stolen documents and giving them to someone to spread around has anything to do with whether or not it's and act of breaking the law?
And, please, stop comparing the Pentagon Papers/NYT case. Even the people involved in that event have said it's a poor analogy.
What does Al Gore have to do with it? Millions of people have received their only indoctrination on this entire topic because school teachers have used his movie as the way to learn about it. Fetish? I didn't bring him up, someone else did. But anyone interested in this topic being discussed rationally needs to want him and his motives out of the discussion. You may not care about him, but you seem to care about people understanding the science. He doesn't promote the science around the issue, or the scientific method at all, for that matter. You SHOULD care about that, though you don't. He has the attention of millions of people that you'll never get a chance to talk to.
Which point, exactly? He's a guy that has shown an uncanny ability to say what he thinks a particular audience wants to hear, or what he thinks is politically expedient (see his absurd support, and the surrounding BS he dished out, for ethanol subsidies, as a prime example). He a disengenuous, condescending, officious, lecturing, holier-than-thou prig. His smoke-stacks-equal-giant-hurricanes imagery is shallow, shrill, fear mongering. His positioning for enormous personal profit through trafficking in sham carbon credits is the height of scumbaggery. Were those the points you were making?
they don't like Al Gore as a politician. It's intellectually lazy and dishonest
They don'lt like him as a person because he's intellectually lazy and dishonest.
Please learn the difference between weather and climate before you embarrass yourself more.
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
There is zero evidence.
There's zero evidence of what? That a Democrat is running the site? Which means, despite lack of any evidence, that it therefore must be a Republican? Are you even listening to yourself?
When you provide the physical infrastructure that is used to perform or coordinate that DDoS attack, you really can't complain that the people tasked with investigating the crime are going to need to lay hands on the system and data in question, intact. ISPs and hosting facilities especially, because the next attack could be on something they're, themselves, trying to keep on the air as it's being attacked.
Secondly, someone exercising freedom of Assembly is not always a protester, but of course, this would involve seeing someone else's point of view.
The fact that you are blocking a public street without making any prior arrangements to do so isn't a "point of view" thing - it's a simple are you, or aren't you doing it sort of thing.
As for linking to a Polish document about freedom of assembly? Who has said anything about interfering with freedom of assembly? The US has done more to protect and promote freedom of assembly than any other state in the history of humanity. That has nothing whatsoever to do with physically preventing fellow citizens from using the streets that serve their homes, businesses, and public services/venues.
You mean there ARE banks which were are required to do business with
... you're confusing FDIC insurance and the accompanying regulations with being bailed out, which are completely different things.
No, I don't mean that and you know it. But if you want to do business with a bank that, for example, offers you FDIC protected checking accounts, then you looking for a different sort of service provider. PayPal isn't in that line of work.
And, on your other comment
doing nothing illegal
Which definition of "DDoS" are you using, here?
If you have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, you are not free
Lucky for you, then, that you don't have to ask the government for permission to speak out against the government, right? On the other hand, it seems like a good idea to make arrangements with the people who are tasked with keeping the streets working and safe when you are setting out to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use the streets they pay for. Or are you implying that the only way to speak out against the government is to prevent your fellow citizens from being able to use public property?
Any government that implements such a policy is nothing more than a bunch of thugs and deserves as much respect.
You've got it backwards. Any protester who thinks he has to forcibly prevent other people from using the street because otherwise he doesn't think he can express himself is a thug who should be treated as such.
despite looking like a bank and acting like a bank
And despite not pretending to provide many of the services a bank provides, and not arranging to have the funds insured by the government, and despite you not having to have anything to do with them, whatsoever, if you don't feel like it.
They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.
But they did consider not being ripped off by your government or your fellow citizens to be a right (they were most eloquent about the rights to one's property and works - just read the mountains of papers, letters, and other supporting documents produced by those wise fellows). What they didn't like was having to operate a press under the authority of the crown.
instead of simply assuming without question that copyright must exist
It's one of the most examined topics in the last couple hundred years. It's been the subject of endless academic hand-waving, court proceedings, legislation, contest, findings, and journalistic scrutiny. The rationale is well established and tested, and the basic ethics and good sense of it are plain as day, even if you don't feel like doing the paperwork.
having authority over the marketplace is good enough
In what way does Amazon have authority over the marketplace? There are thousands of book sellers. Explain how Amazon's decision not to carry a particular genre is preventing those sellers from doing so. Be specific.
Freedom of assembly has nothing to do with campaign finance, which is where you cut the root of the political party system.
It has everything to do with it. The first amendment says I'm free to speak, and free to assemble. If I want to assemble with a thousand other people who think the same way, and we all want to use some of our money to buy a newspaper ad as one of the ways we speak our minds, what's wrong with that? It's exactly the sort of thing that the First Amendment is there to prevent the government from getting involved in.
If organizations are prohibited from performing interstate fundraising and cross-candidate contributions
Right, because people can't be trusted to interact across borders, or to speak - especially when more than one of them have the same thing to say. Intolerable!
BS. If it were done on their behalf, they'd be paying for it.
They do. You have to pay fees to election boards in order appear as a candidate.
Your argument makes the completely unsupported assumption that reducing large candidate fields is desirable
It does have the desireable effect of not leaving you with an election winner that only got, say, 5% of the vote. Hardly a mandate. Regardless, why do you care? If a group deciding to try to run a candidate for a state-wide or national office wants to take advantage of a primary election to establish who that candidate should be, what's it to you? If you're not in that party, it's likely you're not going to vote for the candidate their primary process chooses anway, right? The fact that one or more parties has used an election to choose their candidate for another election doesn't prevent two dozen independent candidates from also going for that that final win.
Of course those two dozen candidates are going to have a hard time attracting a winning piece of the electoral pie.
State election boards not only administer primaries on behalf of parties that register to use those services, but they also whittle down the field of at-large education board contenders, city council seats, county board members and a jillion other large fields that vary from one place to the next. It isn't just about Democrats and Republicans.
Hate machine starts up again
The tolerant left has been mysoginistically hating her since the day they met her. The irrational vitriol, sleazy attacks and crap that they would absolutely go insane over if it was said about their own politicians has never let up, and is only worse by the day. I am sort of surprised that the normally media-savvy left doesn't understand how shrilly juvenile they sound in that regard. It doesn't help them at all.
Bush had a huge, active effort to deal with AIDS in Africa - much more than Clinton or Obama. Did AIDS groups support Bush?
They didn't support him generally, and not even specifically on that effort. Nor did environmentalist/conservationist groups support him when he set aside more coastal/reef areas for permanent protection that any president before him. Too much BDS, that's all.
there is clearly no democratic party member that is behind this website
... how?
And you know this fact
Why should the public pay for party primaries?
The public pays to run elections. Any group that meets certain standards can ask a state's board of elections to include their group's contenders in a primary election, administered by the state as the public service that it is. The D's and the R's happen to be two of the largest and longest-organized such groups. Start your own! Win elections! Then change the role that state governments play in elections, one state at a time.