Or, to put it more realistically and less pejoratively, companies need to come up with business models that don't rely on scarcity of non-scarce commodities.
The rights of most of the content you can find on TPB are not in the hands of the respective creators anyway.
In such cases, they're in the hands of the of someone that the content creator has specifically chosen to handle their business afairs, so they themselves can pay more attention to creating content. It's their choice. They've delegated the chores to a record lable, a publisher, a partners, or even their own separately formed company, specifically, for a reason. How does the fact that the artist has chosen someone to work with make it more OK to rip them off? Ah, it doesn't, does it. It's just flimsy cover for sophomoric pirates who are hoping that by invoking Teh Man they can make themselves feel better about the ripping off the entertainment they want.
And that is your choice. The kind folks at TPB want to deprive you of that choice, and culturally normalize the notion that you should not have that choice.
So you're saying that if I like the art, but don't like the artist, I'm morally obliged to download the art from the internet for free. Will do.
No, I'm saying that if you don't like the artist, that you're being an intellectually dishonest, ethically twisted hypocrite for copying the work regardless.
Ah, I see that you have a keen insight into the creative process.
If you think that all an author is doing is randomly dumping data onto paper, why do you feel the need to dictate to that person how other people can reproduce his work? If you think that writers are just recording random data, then you should have absolutely no problem leaving it up to them to decide when and how it's reproduced - because nobody as sophisticated as you would ever want such noise, right? Right.
I made a joke on here a few days ago using a line from an Alanis Morrisette song. I'll probably be next up for a stint in the big house
That's what Fair Use is all about, and it's why you'd never get in trouble for it.
But setting up and running a web site expressly to help people can rip off entire works and thereby avoid having to pay for entertainment that the artists do not wish to provide for free? You don't see the distinction? You can't see the distinction between, say, Google linking you to a site that's reviewing a book, or to the author's web site... and the TPB making a sustained, in-public policy of helping people to rip off the artist's entire work?
now you jail people who facilitate my search for good music
Yeah, that's it. TPB is just a search tool. Aren't you even a little embarassed, trotting that one out?
Because good artists are the ones who love doing it. Crappy artists are in it for the money.
What are you, eight years old? Have you ever been to a film studio, or looked at an actual render farm capable of doing real CGI work? You think that passion for doing that sort of work actually, all by itself, magically buys the film maker five thousand servers running highly specialized software, and an entire IT department to support it? You think that a master cellist can "love" a multi-thousand dollar instrument into existence, or make a recording studio appear out of thin air? Ah, I see. You want all creative works to be done on weekends, with everything that it takes to creative complex works paid for with the proceeds from someone's day job, right? Yeah, that'll really raise the ol' bar, huh. I'm not sure why never want to see professionally competent creative works again, but it's a strange thing to wish for.
If copyright law didn't exist then the author (actually, more typically, the publisher.. it's funny how authors go on about their sacred right to control their work but they're happy to sign over their rights to someone with a checkbook) would have no say.
Ah, the usual weasley attempt to somehow make the act of ripping someone off somehow feel better by bringing up the business relationship that the artist strikes with the company that helps them with the business end of producing and marketing their work. Why do you care if an author self-publishes, or prefers to let someone who specializes in all of that work deal with it, while she just does what she's good at (writing)? It's the author's choice. Just like the author might choose to release her work to the public under a license that does grant you the ability to reproduce it however you want. There are many that do. So, now you have your choice between authors that do want to give some or all of their work away, and authors who do not want to. That is a choice made by the author. And you clearly have no respect for an author that chooses to sell, rather than give away, her work. So why would you want work by an author you don't respect? What sort of ethical house of cards have you built your world view on?
Don't like the artist (or software creator, etc) because you think their personal choice of business arrangement is getting in the way of your preferred ripped-off-entertainment lifestyle? Then walk away from that artist's work, and avoid being a giant hypocrite. As people here are so fond of pointing out, there are plenty of artists that give their stuff away (they always try to avoid mentioning, of course, that most of it is utter crap, trying to get noticed). So, off you go. Leave the poor, pathetic, grasping content creators who aren't in the mood to be your personal entertainment slaves all alone. Just ignore them. Support only the artists who want to work for you for free. There, see? Now you have no complaints. The people who don't want to work for you for free will now only have fans that like those people, and who support their business decisions. Those artists, and those fans, can live in a parallel world that you don't have to fret about. You and the top notch quality talent that has no interest or ability in getting generating a market that will pay for their life's work can get along famously in your own, separate ecosystem.
Long term copyright is not in the best interest of the people. Therefore it is unethical.
Quit being such a weasle. So, protecting the copyrights of a person who spent ten years writing a book is OK for... a year? a month? a day?
TPB's very public and unapologetic support for people who want to rip off that creative work immediately makes whatever slipperly, pointless distinction you're lamely trying to make between a one day copyright and a lifetime copyright disappear. Of course you already know that. What you're really saying is that you want other people's works for free, even when they're not offering them to you that way. Just admit it. You want the people who create things to be your pet entertainment slaves. And you want people like TPB to make it easier for you to enslave them. Your completely sophomoric defense of the "best interest of the people" is hilarious, since you don't seem to consider writers, composers, filmakers, photographers or anyone else who creates what you want to be part of "the people."
The only reason why I don't have the right is because there's a law that takes it away.
No, you have that backwards. It's not your "right" to reproduce someone else's work that's "taken away," it's the rights of the creator of that work to have a say in how and when its reproduced that are being preserved. If you don't like the fact that an artist or other creator wants to be in charge of their own work, then just walk away. You obviously don't like that artist anyway, since you don't respect the decisions they've made about how and when they wish to publish what they've created. There are plenty of artists that do grant you the license to do whatever you want with their work. Why not simply support them, instead of ripping off someone else?
It doesn't matter if "it" is impervious. Users are not. If they want to install and run a poison app. Not if they are so anxious to pirate commercial applications that they're willing to hold their breath and hope that the nice guy in Romania who is "sharing" his kindly cracked copy of CS4 would never, ever do anything naughty. Not if they're just stupid app users who bought a Mac because everyone promised them they'd never have to ever ever worry about such things, and that false sense of security makes them willing to run anything that's handed to them, because, gosh, nothing can hurt them and their magic Mac.
There's NO way this administration would ever actually do anything to support coal.
Sure there is. Unionized minors are right up their alley, vote-wise. His party is all about pandering for those votes, and that's fertile ground for more of them. Just watch.
If they form a monastery around the clock it may survive. The monastery need not be religious, it just needs people who are willing to carry on the original vision.
Yeah, that's fine until a different set of monks decides to take over the place by force and destroy what the last monks laboriously built and tended to because it's an affront to what the new monks' prophet is supposedly telling them through their new edition magic book. That's pretty much what happened to the giant Buddhas in Banyan. The Clock Monks had better take the notion of training in deadly force well into their planning, because in a lot less than ten thousand years, somebody just a little crazy with just little bit of C4 or fertilizer, etc., will turn this thing into a pile of interesting scrap metal to appease their inner demons, or impress a hot girl who has to wear a head covering, etc. There will always be crazy people, and it's a lot easier to destroy than it is to build.
Progressives want to change things to improve the life of people without power in expense of the quality of life of the people with power
That certainly is one recurring theme in the Progressive playbook: the notion that it's impossible for a person who wants more out of life to have it unless a government agency takes it from someone else who created it, keeps a slice of it to pay for operations, and then hands it over. That so misunderstands how a nation's standard of living increases as to be laughable (if it weren't so evil). But never the less, millions of people still subscribe to the "redistribute the wealth" concept, rather than "create more" model. And there's the irony, again, in the label "progressive." They think that progress can only be made for one person if another person's progress is reversed. It's such a childish perspective, reeking of adolescent envy and a thorough misapprehension of the origins of economic prosperity... but there you have it. A muggging is "progress" as long as the person who started out with less cash winds up with more, right?
Many more people die from heart attacks and car accidents each year. Why the big fuss over terrorism?
Because it only takes a handful of people to kill thousands of other people who were otherwise decades away from having a heart attack, and very unlikely to die in a car accident. And because our economy is already structurally built to handle random traffic deaths and the inevitable cardiac events in a certain percentage of the population - those things aren't disruptive in the large scheme of things. But an act that forces the shutdown of public transportation for a day or two, or which causes a blackout in a few large metropolitan areas for even a few days, or causes a large part of the population to have to stay home because of a smallpox outbreak... anything on that scale can do many billions of dollars of indirect damage, which can ruin businesses, eventually costing jobs, ruining families financially, and so on.
If you had a crack house operating next door to you, with drug-addled idiots and pimps taking shots at each other every night, would you say, "Meh, it's always possible I'll have a heart attack soon, so why worry about the fact that getting rid of these clowns will reduce the odds I'll catch a bullet?" When people's deliberate actions threaten you our your family, or threaten the functioning of the society that allows that family to exist, that's very different than bad weather, accidents, or heart disease. And when charming folks like North Korea - always happy to sell weapons to third parties for a bit of cash - are busy making nukes, or places like Pakistan - also with nukes - are in a part of the world where people who publicly promise to eventually get and use such weapons against the west have a habit of being supported by local tribes and religious wackadoos, then it's really quite a bit different than a heart attack risk or bad brakes on a car. Of course, you know all of that, don't you.
You threw out the first generalized, nonspecific criticism... Perils of Pointless Innovation... "progressive" politics"
But that was specific! "Progressives" are utterly rudderless in their idealogy, goals, strategies - their only coherent thought is that however things are (no matter the topic, or scale, or people, or interests involved), they have to Change (as in, the undefined Change We Can Believe In that so many people blindly voted for, and are now seeing rather lurchingly and alarmingly playing out in real life). Activists whose primary interest is simply seeing things stirred up and changed, rather than having an interest in building an intellectually solid and philosophically rational cultural framework... those people aren't interested in intellectual integrity, they are simply in the Activist Business or wearing their Progesssive platitudes as a fasion of sorts. They are in the business of manufacturing inequities where none exist (or don't in the advertised form), grievenances out of increasingly microsopic differences between people, and votes out of the notion that quaint things like, say, the First Amendment aren't fair.
When their message becomes "Change to XYZ" (so that X, Y, and Z can actually be debated on their merits) rather than "anything that exists now sucks," (rinse, repeat, perpetually) then they'll be exhibiting maturity worth a debate. The adolescent urge to graft pointless or performance-killing features onto a perfectly good game engine just because you can isn't any different than grafting pointless, tax-costing, liberty-killing Nanny State "features" onto the government just because you can say that you're progressing in some way. That's as specific as I need to get!
At least with progressives they're trying to make people's lives better
Which people? At whose expense? Be specific.
Forcing people to regress into a time that never actually existed is hardly the sterling achievement you seem to think
Ah. If you would, please point out where I mentioned anything like that, OK?
There's a hell of a lot of progress necessary before we can consider it in the same realm as pointless
Change for the sake of change doesn't identify a specific problem, propose a specific solution, or identify a goal - a situation when a given change will no longer require action. But the legions of people who simply can't stand a status quo in any form, in any area of culture or human activity, for any reason ("Change! Never mind to what, or how!") fail miserably to ever articulate an actual, rational, intellectually coherent set of ideals for a freely functioning society. For example: they can't stand the First Amendment, because it provides for politically incorrect, "unfair" speech (see the "progressive" call for the restoration - regressively, one might say - for the hillariously mis-named "fairness doctrine"). When the progressives can't rid themselves of a large contingent that wants that sort of "change" to a status quo like freedom of speech, don't talk to me about the rest of noble work they have in mind.
regressive, bigoted ineffectual policies
Such as? Which government policies are bigoted? Are you referring to the ones that favor students or businesses based on gender or the color of someone's skin? That sort of bigotry? But that's exactly the sort of thing that progressive politicians enact and celebrate at every opportunity. Progressives absolutely thrive on dividing society up into grievance groups, skin pigment groups, and newly-minted-victim groups. Divisiveness, economic class baiting, resentment and exploitation of actual taxpayers - those the badges of honor among progressive politicians. The "hicks" you love to hate are far less of an issue than typical grievance group activists.
Yup, it's been downhill since we abandoned feudalism
Are you kidding me? The current congress and administration couldn't be trying harder to make serfs out of the people who actually work and pay taxes, and to be certain that their offspring are in the same boat. The Orwellian use of the work "progressive" has got to be one of the best running gags of the last hundred years.
but you really think pumping tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere doesn't have any affect at all?
Did I say that?
I'm talking about the huge number of true believers who, when asked, will assert that the only reason there is any climate change is because of human activity. And the big entities - the UN, for example - and high-exposure naggers - like Al Gore - trot out, repeatedly, that man is the cause of climate change. Period.
You want a lucid, rational discussion about the issue? Make the people who own the discussion in the public eye stop lying like that. Especially when any casual observer can directly connect their rhetoric to other craven political agendas.
...How MUCH it is affecting is still very much up for debate...
Only for quacks like you. Scientists pretty much all agree at this point.
Really? Scientists pretty much all agree on how much, specifically, human acivity is impacting global climate cycles? Because you get guys like Al Gore saying that man is the (not "part of the") climate change picture. I hear this constantly: that man is the cause of climate change. Which is absurd on the face of it. So, you're obviously not in that camp, which sets you apart from the loudest, most vocal, most commonly quoted people on this subject. Please, though, do mention some numbers - specifically how much the climate would be changing (say, since the last ice age) without human activity. That way we'll have some percentages to work with.
It seems you're also having trouble understanding "autocratic" and "dictatorial." The police department in question works at the pleasure of that city's mayor and city council. They are elected officials, and the city holds regular, bloodless elections that can - at the whim of th voters - completely change the landscape. There is likewise a state and federal court system in place to hear and act upon cases of unconstitutional behavior by local officials. There are civil and criminal proceedings that can be, and are routinely followed in such cases - should the PD and the judge who issued the warrant actually have crossed a line somewhere (this hasn't actually been established, obviously).
Systems with checks, balances, and the means by which to redress lapses in them aren't autocratic or dictatorial. What's the point of saying you found a definition of a word if the definition doesn't actually apply? Does the city council in Pheonix not care? Does the state government in Arizona not care? If not, are you unable to use elections to alter who sets the policies and disciplines government employees that work under them? The mayor of Pheonix isn't Hugo Chavez, or Raul Castro.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, to put it more realistically and less pejoratively, companies need to come up with business models that don't rely on scarcity of non-scarce commodities.
How is bandwidth and server capacity non-scarce?
You (the creator) get some control for a limited time in exchange for a benefit to society at large. If you don't like it, don't publish.
Yes, that is a more refined definition. The real (moral, ethical) point that the TPB types make is that the "limited time" part should be zero.
The rights of most of the content you can find on TPB are not in the hands of the respective creators anyway.
In such cases, they're in the hands of the of someone that the content creator has specifically chosen to handle their business afairs, so they themselves can pay more attention to creating content. It's their choice. They've delegated the chores to a record lable, a publisher, a partners, or even their own separately formed company, specifically, for a reason. How does the fact that the artist has chosen someone to work with make it more OK to rip them off? Ah, it doesn't, does it. It's just flimsy cover for sophomoric pirates who are hoping that by invoking Teh Man they can make themselves feel better about the ripping off the entertainment they want.
Better to be famous and unpaid than just unpaid.
And that is your choice. The kind folks at TPB want to deprive you of that choice, and culturally normalize the notion that you should not have that choice.
So you're saying that if I like the art, but don't like the artist, I'm morally obliged to download the art from the internet for free. Will do.
No, I'm saying that if you don't like the artist, that you're being an intellectually dishonest, ethically twisted hypocrite for copying the work regardless.
putting random bits on 600 pages of dead tree
Ah, I see that you have a keen insight into the creative process.
If you think that all an author is doing is randomly dumping data onto paper, why do you feel the need to dictate to that person how other people can reproduce his work? If you think that writers are just recording random data, then you should have absolutely no problem leaving it up to them to decide when and how it's reproduced - because nobody as sophisticated as you would ever want such noise, right? Right.
I made a joke on here a few days ago using a line from an Alanis Morrisette song. I'll probably be next up for a stint in the big house
That's what Fair Use is all about, and it's why you'd never get in trouble for it.
But setting up and running a web site expressly to help people can rip off entire works and thereby avoid having to pay for entertainment that the artists do not wish to provide for free? You don't see the distinction? You can't see the distinction between, say, Google linking you to a site that's reviewing a book, or to the author's web site... and the TPB making a sustained, in-public policy of helping people to rip off the artist's entire work?
now you jail people who facilitate my search for good music
Yeah, that's it. TPB is just a search tool. Aren't you even a little embarassed, trotting that one out?
Because good artists are the ones who love doing it. Crappy artists are in it for the money.
What are you, eight years old? Have you ever been to a film studio, or looked at an actual render farm capable of doing real CGI work? You think that passion for doing that sort of work actually, all by itself, magically buys the film maker five thousand servers running highly specialized software, and an entire IT department to support it? You think that a master cellist can "love" a multi-thousand dollar instrument into existence, or make a recording studio appear out of thin air? Ah, I see. You want all creative works to be done on weekends, with everything that it takes to creative complex works paid for with the proceeds from someone's day job, right? Yeah, that'll really raise the ol' bar, huh. I'm not sure why never want to see professionally competent creative works again, but it's a strange thing to wish for.
If copyright law didn't exist then the author (actually, more typically, the publisher.. it's funny how authors go on about their sacred right to control their work but they're happy to sign over their rights to someone with a checkbook) would have no say.
Ah, the usual weasley attempt to somehow make the act of ripping someone off somehow feel better by bringing up the business relationship that the artist strikes with the company that helps them with the business end of producing and marketing their work. Why do you care if an author self-publishes, or prefers to let someone who specializes in all of that work deal with it, while she just does what she's good at (writing)? It's the author's choice. Just like the author might choose to release her work to the public under a license that does grant you the ability to reproduce it however you want. There are many that do. So, now you have your choice between authors that do want to give some or all of their work away, and authors who do not want to. That is a choice made by the author. And you clearly have no respect for an author that chooses to sell, rather than give away, her work. So why would you want work by an author you don't respect? What sort of ethical house of cards have you built your world view on?
Don't like the artist (or software creator, etc) because you think their personal choice of business arrangement is getting in the way of your preferred ripped-off-entertainment lifestyle? Then walk away from that artist's work, and avoid being a giant hypocrite. As people here are so fond of pointing out, there are plenty of artists that give their stuff away (they always try to avoid mentioning, of course, that most of it is utter crap, trying to get noticed). So, off you go. Leave the poor, pathetic, grasping content creators who aren't in the mood to be your personal entertainment slaves all alone. Just ignore them. Support only the artists who want to work for you for free. There, see? Now you have no complaints. The people who don't want to work for you for free will now only have fans that like those people, and who support their business decisions. Those artists, and those fans, can live in a parallel world that you don't have to fret about. You and the top notch quality talent that has no interest or ability in getting generating a market that will pay for their life's work can get along famously in your own, separate ecosystem.
Long term copyright is not in the best interest of the people. Therefore it is unethical.
... a year? a month? a day?
Quit being such a weasle. So, protecting the copyrights of a person who spent ten years writing a book is OK for
TPB's very public and unapologetic support for people who want to rip off that creative work immediately makes whatever slipperly, pointless distinction you're lamely trying to make between a one day copyright and a lifetime copyright disappear. Of course you already know that. What you're really saying is that you want other people's works for free, even when they're not offering them to you that way. Just admit it. You want the people who create things to be your pet entertainment slaves. And you want people like TPB to make it easier for you to enslave them. Your completely sophomoric defense of the "best interest of the people" is hilarious, since you don't seem to consider writers, composers, filmakers, photographers or anyone else who creates what you want to be part of "the people."
The only reason why I don't have the right is because there's a law that takes it away.
No, you have that backwards. It's not your "right" to reproduce someone else's work that's "taken away," it's the rights of the creator of that work to have a say in how and when its reproduced that are being preserved. If you don't like the fact that an artist or other creator wants to be in charge of their own work, then just walk away. You obviously don't like that artist anyway, since you don't respect the decisions they've made about how and when they wish to publish what they've created. There are plenty of artists that do grant you the license to do whatever you want with their work. Why not simply support them, instead of ripping off someone else?
this makes it impervious to viruses
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
It doesn't matter if "it" is impervious. Users are not. If they want to install and run a poison app. Not if they are so anxious to pirate commercial applications that they're willing to hold their breath and hope that the nice guy in Romania who is "sharing" his kindly cracked copy of CS4 would never, ever do anything naughty. Not if they're just stupid app users who bought a Mac because everyone promised them they'd never have to ever ever worry about such things, and that false sense of security makes them willing to run anything that's handed to them, because, gosh, nothing can hurt them and their magic Mac.
There's NO way this administration would ever actually do anything to support coal.
Sure there is. Unionized minors are right up their alley, vote-wise. His party is all about pandering for those votes, and that's fertile ground for more of them. Just watch.
If they form a monastery around the clock it may survive. The monastery need not be religious, it just needs people who are willing to carry on the original vision.
Yeah, that's fine until a different set of monks decides to take over the place by force and destroy what the last monks laboriously built and tended to because it's an affront to what the new monks' prophet is supposedly telling them through their new edition magic book. That's pretty much what happened to the giant Buddhas in Banyan . The Clock Monks had better take the notion of training in deadly force well into their planning, because in a lot less than ten thousand years, somebody just a little crazy with just little bit of C4 or fertilizer, etc., will turn this thing into a pile of interesting scrap metal to appease their inner demons, or impress a hot girl who has to wear a head covering, etc. There will always be crazy people, and it's a lot easier to destroy than it is to build.
Progressives want to change things to improve the life of people without power in expense of the quality of life of the people with power
That certainly is one recurring theme in the Progressive playbook: the notion that it's impossible for a person who wants more out of life to have it unless a government agency takes it from someone else who created it, keeps a slice of it to pay for operations, and then hands it over. That so misunderstands how a nation's standard of living increases as to be laughable (if it weren't so evil). But never the less, millions of people still subscribe to the "redistribute the wealth" concept, rather than "create more" model. And there's the irony, again, in the label "progressive." They think that progress can only be made for one person if another person's progress is reversed. It's such a childish perspective, reeking of adolescent envy and a thorough misapprehension of the origins of economic prosperity... but there you have it. A muggging is "progress" as long as the person who started out with less cash winds up with more, right?
Many more people die from heart attacks and car accidents each year. Why the big fuss over terrorism?
Because it only takes a handful of people to kill thousands of other people who were otherwise decades away from having a heart attack, and very unlikely to die in a car accident. And because our economy is already structurally built to handle random traffic deaths and the inevitable cardiac events in a certain percentage of the population - those things aren't disruptive in the large scheme of things. But an act that forces the shutdown of public transportation for a day or two, or which causes a blackout in a few large metropolitan areas for even a few days, or causes a large part of the population to have to stay home because of a smallpox outbreak... anything on that scale can do many billions of dollars of indirect damage, which can ruin businesses, eventually costing jobs, ruining families financially, and so on.
If you had a crack house operating next door to you, with drug-addled idiots and pimps taking shots at each other every night, would you say, "Meh, it's always possible I'll have a heart attack soon, so why worry about the fact that getting rid of these clowns will reduce the odds I'll catch a bullet?" When people's deliberate actions threaten you our your family, or threaten the functioning of the society that allows that family to exist, that's very different than bad weather, accidents, or heart disease. And when charming folks like North Korea - always happy to sell weapons to third parties for a bit of cash - are busy making nukes, or places like Pakistan - also with nukes - are in a part of the world where people who publicly promise to eventually get and use such weapons against the west have a habit of being supported by local tribes and religious wackadoos, then it's really quite a bit different than a heart attack risk or bad brakes on a car. Of course, you know all of that, don't you.
You threw out the first generalized, nonspecific criticism ... Perils of Pointless Innovation ... "progressive" politics"
But that was specific! "Progressives" are utterly rudderless in their idealogy, goals, strategies - their only coherent thought is that however things are (no matter the topic, or scale, or people, or interests involved), they have to Change (as in, the undefined Change We Can Believe In that so many people blindly voted for, and are now seeing rather lurchingly and alarmingly playing out in real life). Activists whose primary interest is simply seeing things stirred up and changed, rather than having an interest in building an intellectually solid and philosophically rational cultural framework... those people aren't interested in intellectual integrity, they are simply in the Activist Business or wearing their Progesssive platitudes as a fasion of sorts. They are in the business of manufacturing inequities where none exist (or don't in the advertised form), grievenances out of increasingly microsopic differences between people, and votes out of the notion that quaint things like, say, the First Amendment aren't fair.
When their message becomes "Change to XYZ" (so that X, Y, and Z can actually be debated on their merits) rather than "anything that exists now sucks," (rinse, repeat, perpetually) then they'll be exhibiting maturity worth a debate. The adolescent urge to graft pointless or performance-killing features onto a perfectly good game engine just because you can isn't any different than grafting pointless, tax-costing, liberty-killing Nanny State "features" onto the government just because you can say that you're progressing in some way. That's as specific as I need to get!
At least with progressives they're trying to make people's lives better
Which people? At whose expense? Be specific.
Forcing people to regress into a time that never actually existed is hardly the sterling achievement you seem to think
Ah. If you would, please point out where I mentioned anything like that, OK?
There's a hell of a lot of progress necessary before we can consider it in the same realm as pointless
Change for the sake of change doesn't identify a specific problem, propose a specific solution, or identify a goal - a situation when a given change will no longer require action. But the legions of people who simply can't stand a status quo in any form, in any area of culture or human activity, for any reason ("Change! Never mind to what, or how!") fail miserably to ever articulate an actual, rational, intellectually coherent set of ideals for a freely functioning society. For example: they can't stand the First Amendment, because it provides for politically incorrect, "unfair" speech (see the "progressive" call for the restoration - regressively, one might say - for the hillariously mis-named "fairness doctrine"). When the progressives can't rid themselves of a large contingent that wants that sort of "change" to a status quo like freedom of speech, don't talk to me about the rest of noble work they have in mind.
regressive, bigoted ineffectual policies
Such as? Which government policies are bigoted? Are you referring to the ones that favor students or businesses based on gender or the color of someone's skin? That sort of bigotry? But that's exactly the sort of thing that progressive politicians enact and celebrate at every opportunity. Progressives absolutely thrive on dividing society up into grievance groups, skin pigment groups, and newly-minted-victim groups. Divisiveness, economic class baiting, resentment and exploitation of actual taxpayers - those the badges of honor among progressive politicians. The "hicks" you love to hate are far less of an issue than typical grievance group activists.
Yup, it's been downhill since we abandoned feudalism
Are you kidding me? The current congress and administration couldn't be trying harder to make serfs out of the people who actually work and pay taxes, and to be certain that their offspring are in the same boat. The Orwellian use of the work "progressive" has got to be one of the best running gags of the last hundred years.
Ah .. yes .. office suites!
And "progressive" politics.
you seem to be the only one framing climate change as something only humans are doing
Oh. I see. I'm imagining the reporting on the subject .
but you really think pumping tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere doesn't have any affect at all?
Did I say that?
I'm talking about the huge number of true believers who, when asked, will assert that the only reason there is any climate change is because of human activity. And the big entities - the UN, for example - and high-exposure naggers - like Al Gore - trot out, repeatedly, that man is the cause of climate change. Period.
You want a lucid, rational discussion about the issue? Make the people who own the discussion in the public eye stop lying like that. Especially when any casual observer can directly connect their rhetoric to other craven political agendas.
...How MUCH it is affecting is still very much up for debate...
Only for quacks like you. Scientists pretty much all agree at this point.
Really? Scientists pretty much all agree on how much, specifically, human acivity is impacting global climate cycles? Because you get guys like Al Gore saying that man is the (not "part of the") climate change picture. I hear this constantly: that man is the cause of climate change. Which is absurd on the face of it. So, you're obviously not in that camp, which sets you apart from the loudest, most vocal, most commonly quoted people on this subject. Please, though, do mention some numbers - specifically how much the climate would be changing (say, since the last ice age) without human activity. That way we'll have some percentages to work with.
How much additional CO2 will we put into the atmosphere to irrigate the Sahara?
Fool. Just use carbonated water.
It seems you're also having trouble understanding "autocratic" and "dictatorial." The police department in question works at the pleasure of that city's mayor and city council. They are elected officials, and the city holds regular, bloodless elections that can - at the whim of th voters - completely change the landscape. There is likewise a state and federal court system in place to hear and act upon cases of unconstitutional behavior by local officials. There are civil and criminal proceedings that can be, and are routinely followed in such cases - should the PD and the judge who issued the warrant actually have crossed a line somewhere (this hasn't actually been established, obviously).
Systems with checks, balances, and the means by which to redress lapses in them aren't autocratic or dictatorial. What's the point of saying you found a definition of a word if the definition doesn't actually apply? Does the city council in Pheonix not care? Does the state government in Arizona not care? If not, are you unable to use elections to alter who sets the policies and disciplines government employees that work under them? The mayor of Pheonix isn't Hugo Chavez, or Raul Castro.