in the pilot, the doctor said he created a test to find out who are cylons from hair samples
That's one of the great things about this show. There's very little technobabble. When they vaporized samples of Leoben's body they detected certain trace elements that identified him as a cylon. That's a technique we use now to identify the chemical composition of things. What Baltar was instructed to do was to take hours and hours of lab work and turn it into something practical that could be used to test nearly 50,000 people.
caught the tour guide guy and put him in jail
That was one of the best parts of the pilot, man! I'm sorry to hear you missed it. See, Baltar's imaginary Six told him to single out Doral. When the Marines were putting him aboard the anchorage he screamed out "I'm not a cylon!" As they were closing the doors, Tigh yelled back, "Maybe, but we just can't take that chance."
The fact that Doral just happened to be a cylon was purely luck... or a part of the cylon plan. Or the hand of God. Who knows.
I'm among the biggest "Firefly" fans around, but I'd find it hard to compare to BSG. BSG is a hard drama. "Firefly" was pretty light-hearted. They don't really compare at all.
But if I'd have to pick, I'd say BSG is a better show all around.
That said, $OTHER_SERIES is virtually always set to "Babylon 5," which will never cease to baffle me.
Have you looked at the stream? It's very good. It's small, of course, because it's low-bandwidth Web video, but it's very well encoded. I'm just looking at the first few minutes of it now, but it looks very, very clean. Hardly an artifact to be found. (Except during dissolves, of course.)
I'm glad they decided to show the first episode, too. I've seen the whole first season, and while it's virtually all excellent, I think "33" is the best of them all.
Sort of. The "Starbuck gets stranded on a desert planet" idea was a good one, so it showed up in the new show, albeit in a totally different context. The idea of a raid on a mining outpost from "The Living Legend" was reused in the episode "The Hand of God." The title "The Hand of God" was used in both the old show and the new show, but I don't think there are any similarities between the episodes at all, really.
It's weird. It's like Ron Moore and his team sat down and watched the whole run of the old show (it was only 18 episodes or so, something like that) and got familiar with it, then went off and did their own thing. You can see traces of the old show in broad ideas and in itty bitty details (like the fact that Starbuck waggles her wings in "You Can't Go Home Again"), but it's not like they're trying to do a remake.
Any such UN action would be precisely agreed upon by the member states
Again, you left out the part where the states that comprise the UN do not have the authority to represent their populations because they are not legitimate and sovereign. If the UN were a sovereign-states-only club, that would be one thing. But it's not.
A faction, in this context, is any group with similar interests and votes in a particular situation.
No, a faction is a voting bloc. I think you meant to refer to a party, or more likely to a caucus.
There's nothing that makes, for example, the U.S. constitution a more valid legal document than a hypothetical 'Citizen of the World' agreement.
Of course there is. It's all right there in the Preamble. We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution. It's all right there: We, the people. Do ordain and establish. Not "we, the unelected, unaccountable ministers of dozens of different states and pseudo-states, both legitimate and not, do impose upon Them, The People, this blah-blah-whatever-whatever." See the difference?
It's just another contract between persons
Except there are no actual persons involved. What redress of grievance do you have with the United Nations? If you were to get hauled up before the ICCt and find that your unalienable right to a trial by jury had been summarily disregarded, what mechanism would exist to rectify that injustice?
In conclusion, any mandate given to any international body should be considered legitimate and valid in all the nations that ratified that mandate.
Ah, so you would consider the Third International to be on the same plane as the Constitution of the United States, would you?
"Democracy" isn't necessarily any better than a dictatorship.
If you were wondering, this is the part where I decided that you're a liar and an idiot. Although I thought this was especially funny:
Countries pick it (including most of Western Europe, whose democracies aren't nascent)
The modern nation of Germany was established in 1949. The modern state of France dates back to 1958. Italy, 1948. Spain has only been a sovereign nation since 1978!
The rest of your comment, verbose as it was, was just about as erroneous and even less entertaining. In particular, I found that the part where you just made up some utterly false credentials for yourself was singularly disappointing. Nobody in a position like that which you described for yourself could ever be so blissfully ignorant of basic political theory or postwar history. It doesn't bother me that you were oh so wrong about so many things. But it distresses me greatly that you felt compelled to lie about it.
Consequently, I am not interested in anything more that you might have to say on this subject.
Toodles.
Re:In a few months, this book will be mostly usele
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· Score: 2, Informative
Name me an Apple corporate or educational account with a thousand Macintosh workstations?
Last time I checked, USC had about 20,000 Macs on campus. Pixar has several thousand, of course, though I don't have a precise figure. I believe the Washington Post has upwards of a thousand, and the various magazines in the American Way family (the American Airlines in flight magazine, plus they publish Southwest Spirit, Celebrated Living and some other in-flight mags) easily has several thousand.
Not everybody operates in the small-business world, ya know.
CRT displays don't work like that. Measuring the resolution of a CRT display -- fundamentally an analog device -- is a very tricky proposition involving lots of hand-waving. Two absolutely identical TVs are going to behave slightly differently because there's that much variation in the process of manufacturing a CRT.
There are, as far as I know, no CRTs that can actually resolve 1,000 lines of resolution. Really expensive tubes from Sony (found in their BVM series, $30,000 and up) will hold 800 or 900. They've got a 40" BVM that I think will resolve something close to 1,000 lines, but that's simply because it's a bigger tube.
When it comes to television -- CRT-type television, I mean-- you need to stop thinking in terms of digital resolution. TVs don't have pixels at all, so it's kind of pointless to talk about them as if they did.
Who gets to decide which are "legitimate, sovereign states" and which aren't? Me? You?
Basically, yes. It's not an abstract question. It's a matter of defining terms. Political science works from certain axioms, just like geometry. Remember geometric axioms? They're statements that nobody bothers to argue. They're just accepted as true, like fundamental ground rules. In politics, one fundamental axiom is that the power of government derives from the sovereignty of the individual. Get that? What it means, basically, is that no person has power over any other. There are no kings, no emperors, no dictators or autocrats. There is no divine right, no heavenly appointment of the monarch. These are ideas that some people believed in the past, but we reject them now. We all agree, as an axiom, that everybody is equal and that nobody has authority over anybody else.
But we have to have governments. In order to establish a government, the people who are to be governed by it voluntarily give up some of their sovereignty and cede it to a state. See? The power starts with the people, and the people give it to the government that they establish to maintain order, to provide for their defense, to promote prosperity, and so on.
Any government that isn't based on this fundamental idea -- that the power rests with the people, and that government exists at the whim of the people and only with their consent -- is, by definition, not a legitimate government.
If you haven't studied political science, don't just assume that you know what words like "sovereign" and "legitimate" mean in this context. They're technical terms with very specific meanings. Okay?
Take Saudia Arabia for example.
Fundamentally not a sovereign state.
What about China?
Definitely not a sovereign state.
What about the Britain?
Sovereign.
As is usually the case in the real world, these distinctions are not nearly as black and white as we'd like them to be.
You seem to be arguing the nihilist position: that the fact that the situation is complex means we can't make judgments. I reject this argument out of hand. It's as bogus as Zeno's Paradox.
If there's anyone that the world's liberal democracies are going to disagree with it's probably going to be "oppressive police states".
That's a good point. It is obviously a good idea for the world's sovereign states to have a forum for dealing with the pro tem regimes of the various pseudo-states and quasi-national entities. However, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that pseudo-states are not really states. It's basically a hostage situation. When a criminal takes a family hostage, sometimes the right thing to do is go in with guns blazing and kill him. Sometimes the right thing to do is to try to negotiate to get him into a position where you can remove him from his position. It depends on the situation.
At no time would anybody suggest that the cops and the hostage-holding criminal are equivalent, either morally or practically.
Actually, if you're referring to the UN general assembly here, it's made up of whatever representatives the member countries choose to send.
I was speaking of the Security Council. The General Assembly has no authority, and exists solely to provide a nice, big room so heads of state can give important speeches. For all intents and purposes, we can assume that the General Assembly does not exist.
What happens now if you get pissed off at the guy who's in charge of (for example) the CIA?
The DCI is approved by the Senate. He's directly accountable to the people.
After all the UN has no binding authority over its member nations.
Exactly. The problem arises when you run into people who either believe that it does have authority, or that it should have authority.
When it comes to the internet, where cooperation between nations is crucial, th
To stop war and generally promote what can be considered the "global" will, as voted on by each member country.
Yes on one and no on two. Because the UN is not a sovereign organization, it lacks the authority to, as you put it, promote the global will. Only the people have the power to express their will, and there is no conduit between the people and the UN.
The idea in the U.N. is to halt extreme examples of repression while promoting the democratic norms necessary for democracy.
That's a fine idea. It's got nothing to do with the UN, however. If it did, China, one of the most oppressive states in the world right now, would not have unlimited veto power over the Security Council.
After all, it is the U.N. that supports fledgling democracies.
I think you've been listening to too much of the UN's PR. They United Nations actually does nothing at all to "support fledgling democracies." For example, the UN staunchly refused to do anything to help establish democracy in Iraq. It refused to do anything to help establish democracy in Afghanistan. It continues to refuse to do anything to help establish democracy among the self-governing Arab people in Israel. The list goes on and on.
unless you want violent conflict FOREVER you have to have a body like the U.N. to mediate
The UN does not mediate. In order to mediate, a person or body must have authority. The UN lacks authority. The idea behind the UN is to provide a forum for diplomacy. That's all.
The previous point had been about how a independent force would allow the U.N. to have succeed in situations like Darfur.
Correct. And the previous point was dead wrong. Because the UN continues to refuse to do anything about Darfur. The UN refuses to even call it by its right name: Arab genocide of blacks.
if you want things like Darfur not to happen then you have to give the U.N. more power.
But the UN has no power! The UN is not sovereign, and it's not legitimate. It has no legal or moral authority to do anything at all. When you talk of giving a body like that power, you're basically talking about trying to establish global tyranny. Even if it's an entirely benevolent tyranny, it's still tyranny. Better to live free in an imperfect world than to cede our civil liberties to an unelected, unaccountable world government, yes? Surely you would agree with that.
They are supposed to have a small independent force so that when things like Darfur happens and the U.N. security counsil decides something needs to happen then they have a force tha they can immediately send off.
No, that's not right. That's neither the idea behind the UN Charter nor the idea behind any modern interpretation of the Charter.
If you say countries should be allowed to go in unilaterally, then what was wrong with Iraq going into Kuwait?
You are committing the fallacy of false equivalence. All other things being equal, of course countries can act unilaterally. That's all countries ever do! All action is inherently unilateral, even when conducted in cooperation. But here's the thing: all things are not equal. What's the difference between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the US invasion of Iraq? Context. Iraq annexed Kuwait and invaded with the intent of seizing all private property and depriving the people of their civil liberties. The US invaded Kuwait with the intent of overthrowing a tyrannical, autocratic regime and establishing a sovereign democracy. It's the difference between a burglar breaking your door down to steal your TV, and a fireman breaking your door down to rescue you from a fire. Context. See?
Legislative bodies don't have to have the consent of those they govern. They don't have to be elected. There were legislative bodies long before there was democracy.
Um. You said three things here, and every one of them is false. Yes, legislatures do have to have the consent of the gov
Agreed. I don't remember what the on-paper estimate of my iPod's battery life was (I have the same 20 GB model that's available now; bought it last summer), but I regularly get 14 or even 15 hours out of it. Battery life is a little better if you just listen to your music (either in shuffle mode or straight through), and a little worse if you use the skip buttons a lot. The less the hard drive spins up, the longer the battery lasts.
The 20 GB white iPod is still Apple's best-selling model in terms of dollars. They're not dropping it. It's just that Hitachi is selling 40 GB drives at a price that's not really where it needs to be compared to the 20 GB and 30 GB drives. Apple couldn't produce a 40 GB iPod and have it sell at the price point they wanted ($400), so they dropped it.
Sigh. You've got a great deal to learn about political philosophy. You lack a basic understanding of the vocabulary of the discipline. Thank you for trying to interject your opinions, but I'm sorry to have to tell you that they just don't really mean very much. Please go to your local library and find any introductory textbook on the theory of modern government. Read, in particular, the sections on sovereignty and legitimacy. Learn. Okay? Thanks.
Arguing about any innate rights is a whole other thread
I'm sorry, but no. It is, in fact, the very heart of this one. Because we're talking about the difference between people and groups of people, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate governances. (Incidentally, the term of choice is "unalienable," not "innate." "Innate" means "present from birth," which is certainly true of our rights, but "unalienable" means those rights cannot be taken away under any circumstances. That's the important aspect of the idea.)
just like a handful of people make a town, a handful of towns make a county and a handful of counties make a country
Again, you're assuming hierarchy where none exists. What is the relationship between Minneapolis and St. Paul? None whatsoever. What is the relationship between Los Angeles and San Francisco? None whatsoever. What is the relationship between California and Oregon? None whatsoever.
The fact is that the people of Los Angeles make up Los Angeles, and the people of California make up California. There's no hierarchy there.
I was specifically referring to relations between nations, not between individuals in those nations.
That is exactly my point. You are trying to talk about one without the other. That's an error.
There isn't, however, any inherent reason why a 'supranational' judicial system were 'tyrannical'
Let's talk about the definition of "tyranny" for a second. Tyranny is that state of affairs where a person or group is held to be under the authority or dominion of an illegitimate regime. That's what "tyranny" means, okay? Remember your high-school history? "Taxation without representation is tyranny?" Basic ideas here.
Imagine there existed some world court where you could be hauled up on charges. This court does not respect our fundamental ideas about civil rights. There is no guarantee of due process, there is no guarantee of a fair trial, and most importantly, there is absolutely no recourse if any of those liberties should be trampled. This court was not established with your consent, either directly through referendum or indirectly through your duly elected representatives. Rather, it was imposed on you by authorities beyond your borders that have no legitimate claim to sovereignty over you whatsoever.
If the ICCt had been ratified by the Senate, that's precisely the situation we would have faced. Of course it would have been tyrannical. It would have been the very definition of tyrannical.
Surely a law, say, banning abortion within the U.S. isn't any more tyrannical than, say, an international law banning piracy.
More Intro to Poli Sci. The difference is legitimacy. A law passed in the United States is a legitimate law, as long as that law isn't in violation of the Constitution. (If it is, it's not technically a law at all. It's just that everybody operates under the mistaken impression that it is until the error is corrected by the high court.) Why? Because a law that's passed in the United States is passed by our duly elected representatives. If we don't approve of that law, we can lobby our representatives to change it, or simply throw the bums out come next election.
An "international law" -- I use quotes because such a construct could never be considered a law at all -- would be passed by... whom? Some unelected body against which the people have no option for the redress of grievance?
Now, let's talk about treaties. Two or more nations can come together to agree to abide by a treaty. When the Senate ratifies a treaty, that treaty takes on the force of law. Like any other law, it must pass constitutional muster; a treaty that violates our Constitution isn't a valid treaty at all. (We can't sign a treaty that gives away our right to a trial by jury, for instance. That would be unconstitutional.) However, a treaty is only binding on the people of the United States for as lo
The U.N. is not supposed to a body that promotes democracy.
Then what the hell is it for?
Once you drop that you are just begging for a coalition of "unacceptable" states to form and start another world war.
Better to fight another world war than to legitimize tyranny.
Most of the failures of the U.N. people have noted have been due to the lack of power which you claim makes them tyrannical.
You don't understand. That completely misses the point. If I were king of the world with absolute power over life and death, I could make some pretty dramatic changes, too. But that still wouldn't make it right.
If the U.N. had had an independent force (as we _originally_ supported when the U.N. was founded) then such genocides wouldn't have happened.
Cough-cough. Darfur. Cough-cough.
The U.N. works so slowly because it isn't a military -- it is a legislature body.
No, the UN, is not a legislative body. Legislative bodies can only exist with the consent of those governed by them. The UN does not exist with that consent. Nobody votes for representatives to the UN. If you want to claim that the UN is a lawmaking body, then it's inherently a tyrannical one.
The world is just like a nation at a different scale; each country is a person.
Except it's not. A country is not a person. A country is not a citizen. A country has no unalienable rights, no sovereign franchise.
These are fundamental ideas in political philosophy. It's going to be very hard to get around them. In a nutshell, it is the individual, not any kind of group or collective unit, political or otherwise, that has the power. We have the right to establish governments for ourselves, and we have the right to dismiss those governments when we find that they no longer suit our needs. In this way, individuals are fundamentally different from collective units like nations.
Currently most see no problems with laws governing persons within a country, logically, there should be no problems with laws governing nations, either.
Your use of the word "logically" here is funny to me. Because, you see, there's nothing even remotely logical about what you propose. Your suggestion is based on a false equivalence. Nations are not the same as people, politically speaking. They are fundamentally different.
Let's talk about laws for a second, okay? You say that since nations have laws that govern people, it should be okay to have supranational laws that govern nations. The reason that's bogus is that these hypothetical supranational laws must also govern people. Because nations are nothing but the enacted political will of the people, see. (Well, sovereign nations, that is. If you throw countries like the DPRK or Iran or Syria into the mix, the point gets kind of fuzzy. That's because, technically, those places aren't nations at all. They're quasi-national entities. Because they don't have legitimate governments, they're not sovereign, so they're not technically nations at all.)
So basically your suggestion is that it should be okay to have supranational laws that govern our day-to-day lives. Problem with that is that a law that exists without the consent of those held to it isn't a law at all. It's just a rumor. If the UN, for instance, were to try to pass a "law" that says nobody can drive a blue car, that "law" means absolutely nothing to me. Because I didn't have the opportunity to vote on it in a referendum, nor did I have the chance to elect the people who passed it. It's not binding. It's not a law at all. See?
Now, if we wanted to establish some sort of suprafederal government, that'd be fine. Say all the sovereign nations of the world decided to get together and unite in one giant federation to be governed by a legislature made up of duly elected representatives. No problem, at least in principle. (In practice it probably couldn't work, but let's stick to the abstract for now.) Problem is, that's not what the UN is. That's not what it was ever intended to be, and it's not what it attempts to be. So that's way off in the realm of the hypothetical, and is hardly even worth talking about.
Like I said, these are very basic ideas in political philosophy: legitimacy, sovereignty, tyranny. These are, like, the basic building blocks of politics.
The International Criminal Court is a very, very bad idea... but it has nothing at all to do with what you've described here. Its jurisdiction is limited to crimes against humanity and war crimes. Crimes of property -- such as theft of works, like you cited -- aren't covered by the ICCt.
Of course, that's not saying that somebody might someday try to establish a supranational criminal court with jurisdiction over crimes of property. That would be about the most tyrannical thing I can think of, and naturally it would be terrible. But it's also entirely hypothetical at this point.
Basically what I'm saying here is that there are enough excellent reasons to oppose the ICCt already. We don't have to resort to imagining new ones.
You didn't ask me, but I'll throw out some suggestions.
How about recognizing a moral difference between legitimate, sovereign states and pseudo-states run by dictators and tyrants? The whole premise of the UN is that it puts the world's liberal democracies on exactly the same plane as oppressive police states, and that's just bogus.
Second, how about embracing the basic tenets of democracy? Right now, the UN is a completely unaccountable body. Its "legislative branch," for lack of a better term, is made up of unelected ministers and ambassadors. Its "executive branch" is comprised of career bureaucrats whose sole qualification for their position is that they were able to get themselves appointed to it. In the US, we elect our legislators directly, and all executive-branch appointments have to be approved by the Senate. There's a clear chain of accountability every step of the way. What happens if I get pissed off at the guy who's in charge of (for example) the ITU? How do I express my opinion? I can't write my Congressman. Well, I mean, I could, but there's no way he'd be able to do anything about it. Neither could my Senators. Technically the Secretary of State should be involved, but in practice, she's really not. So the UN comprises this vast, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy. And now you're telling me that we want to give them more responsibility over things that affect our day-to-day lives? I don't think so.
The UN's purpose, above all others, is to be a sort of diplomatic sewing circle. It exists to give the diplomats of the world a place to sit around and talk things over. The minute we started giving the UN actual authority -- or, more accurately, the minute the UN started taking authority and we didn't object to it -- the body became little more than a benevolent, impotent tyranny.
That's a crummy analogy. The fact that the UN is a massive, overstaffed bureaucracy is one of its liabilities; it's a mistake to try to spin it as an asset. The fact remains that the office of the Secretary General -- the CEO, if you prefer to look at it that way -- is incredibly corrupt. Either that means the whole organization is run by an incredibly corrupt executive staff, or the organization is so bloated that nobody's really in charge. In either case, it's bad news.
Did it ever occur to you that it's not some arbitrary standard, but a carefully chosen course of action?
The possibility occurred, sure. But you don't have to be a brain surgeon to see that that's not what's going on here. It's totally political.
In the case of software, it might be the case sometimes that you can, in fact, get ahead quicker with closed-source tools. But that goes against some peoples ethics, because they are forbidden from sharing those tools with their friends.
We have a word for that. The word is "stupid." Just because there's a rationalization for a stupid position doesn't make the position any less stupid.
You are either ignorant or a troll.
Hint: Somebody who disagrees with you is not automatically uninformed or insincere. We have a word for that, too That word is "arrogant."
So far you're stupid and arrogant. Wanna go for number three?
Slashdot Mirror
in the pilot, the doctor said he created a test to find out who are cylons from hair samples
... or a part of the cylon plan. Or the hand of God. Who knows.
That's one of the great things about this show. There's very little technobabble. When they vaporized samples of Leoben's body they detected certain trace elements that identified him as a cylon. That's a technique we use now to identify the chemical composition of things. What Baltar was instructed to do was to take hours and hours of lab work and turn it into something practical that could be used to test nearly 50,000 people.
caught the tour guide guy and put him in jail
That was one of the best parts of the pilot, man! I'm sorry to hear you missed it. See, Baltar's imaginary Six told him to single out Doral. When the Marines were putting him aboard the anchorage he screamed out "I'm not a cylon!" As they were closing the doors, Tigh yelled back, "Maybe, but we just can't take that chance."
The fact that Doral just happened to be a cylon was purely luck
I'm among the biggest "Firefly" fans around, but I'd find it hard to compare to BSG. BSG is a hard drama. "Firefly" was pretty light-hearted. They don't really compare at all.
But if I'd have to pick, I'd say BSG is a better show all around.
That said, $OTHER_SERIES is virtually always set to "Babylon 5," which will never cease to baffle me.
Have you looked at the stream? It's very good. It's small, of course, because it's low-bandwidth Web video, but it's very well encoded. I'm just looking at the first few minutes of it now, but it looks very, very clean. Hardly an artifact to be found. (Except during dissolves, of course.)
I'm glad they decided to show the first episode, too. I've seen the whole first season, and while it's virtually all excellent, I think "33" is the best of them all.
Sort of. The "Starbuck gets stranded on a desert planet" idea was a good one, so it showed up in the new show, albeit in a totally different context. The idea of a raid on a mining outpost from "The Living Legend" was reused in the episode "The Hand of God." The title "The Hand of God" was used in both the old show and the new show, but I don't think there are any similarities between the episodes at all, really.
It's weird. It's like Ron Moore and his team sat down and watched the whole run of the old show (it was only 18 episodes or so, something like that) and got familiar with it, then went off and did their own thing. You can see traces of the old show in broad ideas and in itty bitty details (like the fact that Starbuck waggles her wings in "You Can't Go Home Again"), but it's not like they're trying to do a remake.
Any such UN action would be precisely agreed upon by the member states
Again, you left out the part where the states that comprise the UN do not have the authority to represent their populations because they are not legitimate and sovereign. If the UN were a sovereign-states-only club, that would be one thing. But it's not.
A faction, in this context, is any group with similar interests and votes in a particular situation.
No, a faction is a voting bloc. I think you meant to refer to a party, or more likely to a caucus.
There's nothing that makes, for example, the U.S. constitution a more valid legal document than a hypothetical 'Citizen of the World' agreement.
Of course there is. It's all right there in the Preamble. We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution. It's all right there: We, the people. Do ordain and establish. Not "we, the unelected, unaccountable ministers of dozens of different states and pseudo-states, both legitimate and not, do impose upon Them, The People, this blah-blah-whatever-whatever." See the difference?
It's just another contract between persons
Except there are no actual persons involved. What redress of grievance do you have with the United Nations? If you were to get hauled up before the ICCt and find that your unalienable right to a trial by jury had been summarily disregarded, what mechanism would exist to rectify that injustice?
In conclusion, any mandate given to any international body should be considered legitimate and valid in all the nations that ratified that mandate.
Ah, so you would consider the Third International to be on the same plane as the Constitution of the United States, would you?
Sounds like a personal problem to me. The solution, as is always the case with such things, lies within. Hint for you: Be less of a dumbass.
"Democracy" isn't necessarily any better than a dictatorship.
If you were wondering, this is the part where I decided that you're a liar and an idiot. Although I thought this was especially funny:
Countries pick it (including most of Western Europe, whose democracies aren't nascent)
The modern nation of Germany was established in 1949. The modern state of France dates back to 1958. Italy, 1948. Spain has only been a sovereign nation since 1978!
The rest of your comment, verbose as it was, was just about as erroneous and even less entertaining. In particular, I found that the part where you just made up some utterly false credentials for yourself was singularly disappointing. Nobody in a position like that which you described for yourself could ever be so blissfully ignorant of basic political theory or postwar history. It doesn't bother me that you were oh so wrong about so many things. But it distresses me greatly that you felt compelled to lie about it.
Consequently, I am not interested in anything more that you might have to say on this subject.
Toodles.
Name me an Apple corporate or educational account with a thousand Macintosh workstations?
Last time I checked, USC had about 20,000 Macs on campus. Pixar has several thousand, of course, though I don't have a precise figure. I believe the Washington Post has upwards of a thousand, and the various magazines in the American Way family (the American Airlines in flight magazine, plus they publish Southwest Spirit, Celebrated Living and some other in-flight mags) easily has several thousand.
Not everybody operates in the small-business world, ya know.
The OpenFlight model format is based on Open Inventor. It's ubiquitous.
Wow. What a dumbass comment.
CRT displays don't work like that. Measuring the resolution of a CRT display -- fundamentally an analog device -- is a very tricky proposition involving lots of hand-waving. Two absolutely identical TVs are going to behave slightly differently because there's that much variation in the process of manufacturing a CRT.
There are, as far as I know, no CRTs that can actually resolve 1,000 lines of resolution. Really expensive tubes from Sony (found in their BVM series, $30,000 and up) will hold 800 or 900. They've got a 40" BVM that I think will resolve something close to 1,000 lines, but that's simply because it's a bigger tube.
When it comes to television -- CRT-type television, I mean-- you need to stop thinking in terms of digital resolution. TVs don't have pixels at all, so it's kind of pointless to talk about them as if they did.
Who gets to decide which are "legitimate, sovereign states" and which aren't? Me? You?
Basically, yes. It's not an abstract question. It's a matter of defining terms. Political science works from certain axioms, just like geometry. Remember geometric axioms? They're statements that nobody bothers to argue. They're just accepted as true, like fundamental ground rules. In politics, one fundamental axiom is that the power of government derives from the sovereignty of the individual. Get that? What it means, basically, is that no person has power over any other. There are no kings, no emperors, no dictators or autocrats. There is no divine right, no heavenly appointment of the monarch. These are ideas that some people believed in the past, but we reject them now. We all agree, as an axiom, that everybody is equal and that nobody has authority over anybody else.
But we have to have governments. In order to establish a government, the people who are to be governed by it voluntarily give up some of their sovereignty and cede it to a state. See? The power starts with the people, and the people give it to the government that they establish to maintain order, to provide for their defense, to promote prosperity, and so on.
Any government that isn't based on this fundamental idea -- that the power rests with the people, and that government exists at the whim of the people and only with their consent -- is, by definition, not a legitimate government.
If you haven't studied political science, don't just assume that you know what words like "sovereign" and "legitimate" mean in this context. They're technical terms with very specific meanings. Okay?
Take Saudia Arabia for example.
Fundamentally not a sovereign state.
What about China?
Definitely not a sovereign state.
What about the Britain?
Sovereign.
As is usually the case in the real world, these distinctions are not nearly as black and white as we'd like them to be.
You seem to be arguing the nihilist position: that the fact that the situation is complex means we can't make judgments. I reject this argument out of hand. It's as bogus as Zeno's Paradox.
If there's anyone that the world's liberal democracies are going to disagree with it's probably going to be "oppressive police states".
That's a good point. It is obviously a good idea for the world's sovereign states to have a forum for dealing with the pro tem regimes of the various pseudo-states and quasi-national entities. However, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that pseudo-states are not really states. It's basically a hostage situation. When a criminal takes a family hostage, sometimes the right thing to do is go in with guns blazing and kill him. Sometimes the right thing to do is to try to negotiate to get him into a position where you can remove him from his position. It depends on the situation.
At no time would anybody suggest that the cops and the hostage-holding criminal are equivalent, either morally or practically.
Actually, if you're referring to the UN general assembly here, it's made up of whatever representatives the member countries choose to send.
I was speaking of the Security Council. The General Assembly has no authority, and exists solely to provide a nice, big room so heads of state can give important speeches. For all intents and purposes, we can assume that the General Assembly does not exist.
What happens now if you get pissed off at the guy who's in charge of (for example) the CIA?
The DCI is approved by the Senate. He's directly accountable to the people.
After all the UN has no binding authority over its member nations.
Exactly. The problem arises when you run into people who either believe that it does have authority, or that it should have authority.
When it comes to the internet, where cooperation between nations is crucial, th
To stop war and generally promote what can be considered the "global" will, as voted on by each member country.
Yes on one and no on two. Because the UN is not a sovereign organization, it lacks the authority to, as you put it, promote the global will. Only the people have the power to express their will, and there is no conduit between the people and the UN.
The idea in the U.N. is to halt extreme examples of repression while promoting the democratic norms necessary for democracy.
That's a fine idea. It's got nothing to do with the UN, however. If it did, China, one of the most oppressive states in the world right now, would not have unlimited veto power over the Security Council.
After all, it is the U.N. that supports fledgling democracies.
I think you've been listening to too much of the UN's PR. They United Nations actually does nothing at all to "support fledgling democracies." For example, the UN staunchly refused to do anything to help establish democracy in Iraq. It refused to do anything to help establish democracy in Afghanistan. It continues to refuse to do anything to help establish democracy among the self-governing Arab people in Israel. The list goes on and on.
unless you want violent conflict FOREVER you have to have a body like the U.N. to mediate
The UN does not mediate. In order to mediate, a person or body must have authority. The UN lacks authority. The idea behind the UN is to provide a forum for diplomacy. That's all.
The previous point had been about how a independent force would allow the U.N. to have succeed in situations like Darfur.
Correct. And the previous point was dead wrong. Because the UN continues to refuse to do anything about Darfur. The UN refuses to even call it by its right name: Arab genocide of blacks.
if you want things like Darfur not to happen then you have to give the U.N. more power.
But the UN has no power! The UN is not sovereign, and it's not legitimate. It has no legal or moral authority to do anything at all. When you talk of giving a body like that power, you're basically talking about trying to establish global tyranny. Even if it's an entirely benevolent tyranny, it's still tyranny. Better to live free in an imperfect world than to cede our civil liberties to an unelected, unaccountable world government, yes? Surely you would agree with that.
They are supposed to have a small independent force so that when things like Darfur happens and the U.N. security counsil decides something needs to happen then they have a force tha they can immediately send off.
No, that's not right. That's neither the idea behind the UN Charter nor the idea behind any modern interpretation of the Charter.
If you say countries should be allowed to go in unilaterally, then what was wrong with Iraq going into Kuwait?
You are committing the fallacy of false equivalence. All other things being equal, of course countries can act unilaterally. That's all countries ever do! All action is inherently unilateral, even when conducted in cooperation. But here's the thing: all things are not equal. What's the difference between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the US invasion of Iraq? Context. Iraq annexed Kuwait and invaded with the intent of seizing all private property and depriving the people of their civil liberties. The US invaded Kuwait with the intent of overthrowing a tyrannical, autocratic regime and establishing a sovereign democracy. It's the difference between a burglar breaking your door down to steal your TV, and a fireman breaking your door down to rescue you from a fire. Context. See?
Legislative bodies don't have to have the consent of those they govern. They don't have to be elected. There were legislative bodies long before there was democracy.
Um. You said three things here, and every one of them is false. Yes, legislatures do have to have the consent of the gov
Agreed. I don't remember what the on-paper estimate of my iPod's battery life was (I have the same 20 GB model that's available now; bought it last summer), but I regularly get 14 or even 15 hours out of it. Battery life is a little better if you just listen to your music (either in shuffle mode or straight through), and a little worse if you use the skip buttons a lot. The less the hard drive spins up, the longer the battery lasts.
What more do you want?
iTunes.
The 20 GB white iPod is still Apple's best-selling model in terms of dollars. They're not dropping it. It's just that Hitachi is selling 40 GB drives at a price that's not really where it needs to be compared to the 20 GB and 30 GB drives. Apple couldn't produce a 40 GB iPod and have it sell at the price point they wanted ($400), so they dropped it.
Sigh. You've got a great deal to learn about political philosophy. You lack a basic understanding of the vocabulary of the discipline. Thank you for trying to interject your opinions, but I'm sorry to have to tell you that they just don't really mean very much. Please go to your local library and find any introductory textbook on the theory of modern government. Read, in particular, the sections on sovereignty and legitimacy. Learn. Okay? Thanks.
Arguing about any innate rights is a whole other thread
... whom? Some unelected body against which the people have no option for the redress of grievance?
I'm sorry, but no. It is, in fact, the very heart of this one. Because we're talking about the difference between people and groups of people, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate governances. (Incidentally, the term of choice is "unalienable," not "innate." "Innate" means "present from birth," which is certainly true of our rights, but "unalienable" means those rights cannot be taken away under any circumstances. That's the important aspect of the idea.)
just like a handful of people make a town, a handful of towns make a county and a handful of counties make a country
Again, you're assuming hierarchy where none exists. What is the relationship between Minneapolis and St. Paul? None whatsoever. What is the relationship between Los Angeles and San Francisco? None whatsoever. What is the relationship between California and Oregon? None whatsoever.
The fact is that the people of Los Angeles make up Los Angeles, and the people of California make up California. There's no hierarchy there.
I was specifically referring to relations between nations, not between individuals in those nations.
That is exactly my point. You are trying to talk about one without the other. That's an error.
There isn't, however, any inherent reason why a 'supranational' judicial system were 'tyrannical'
Let's talk about the definition of "tyranny" for a second. Tyranny is that state of affairs where a person or group is held to be under the authority or dominion of an illegitimate regime. That's what "tyranny" means, okay? Remember your high-school history? "Taxation without representation is tyranny?" Basic ideas here.
Imagine there existed some world court where you could be hauled up on charges. This court does not respect our fundamental ideas about civil rights. There is no guarantee of due process, there is no guarantee of a fair trial, and most importantly, there is absolutely no recourse if any of those liberties should be trampled. This court was not established with your consent, either directly through referendum or indirectly through your duly elected representatives. Rather, it was imposed on you by authorities beyond your borders that have no legitimate claim to sovereignty over you whatsoever.
If the ICCt had been ratified by the Senate, that's precisely the situation we would have faced. Of course it would have been tyrannical. It would have been the very definition of tyrannical.
Surely a law, say, banning abortion within the U.S. isn't any more tyrannical than, say, an international law banning piracy.
More Intro to Poli Sci. The difference is legitimacy. A law passed in the United States is a legitimate law, as long as that law isn't in violation of the Constitution. (If it is, it's not technically a law at all. It's just that everybody operates under the mistaken impression that it is until the error is corrected by the high court.) Why? Because a law that's passed in the United States is passed by our duly elected representatives. If we don't approve of that law, we can lobby our representatives to change it, or simply throw the bums out come next election.
An "international law" -- I use quotes because such a construct could never be considered a law at all -- would be passed by
Now, let's talk about treaties. Two or more nations can come together to agree to abide by a treaty. When the Senate ratifies a treaty, that treaty takes on the force of law. Like any other law, it must pass constitutional muster; a treaty that violates our Constitution isn't a valid treaty at all. (We can't sign a treaty that gives away our right to a trial by jury, for instance. That would be unconstitutional.) However, a treaty is only binding on the people of the United States for as lo
The U.N. is not supposed to a body that promotes democracy.
Then what the hell is it for?
Once you drop that you are just begging for a coalition of "unacceptable" states to form and start another world war.
Better to fight another world war than to legitimize tyranny.
Most of the failures of the U.N. people have noted have been due to the lack of power which you claim makes them tyrannical.
You don't understand. That completely misses the point. If I were king of the world with absolute power over life and death, I could make some pretty dramatic changes, too. But that still wouldn't make it right.
If the U.N. had had an independent force (as we _originally_ supported when the U.N. was founded) then such genocides wouldn't have happened.
Cough-cough. Darfur. Cough-cough.
The U.N. works so slowly because it isn't a military -- it is a legislature body.
No, the UN, is not a legislative body. Legislative bodies can only exist with the consent of those governed by them. The UN does not exist with that consent. Nobody votes for representatives to the UN. If you want to claim that the UN is a lawmaking body, then it's inherently a tyrannical one.
The world is just like a nation at a different scale; each country is a person.
Except it's not. A country is not a person. A country is not a citizen. A country has no unalienable rights, no sovereign franchise.
These are fundamental ideas in political philosophy. It's going to be very hard to get around them. In a nutshell, it is the individual, not any kind of group or collective unit, political or otherwise, that has the power. We have the right to establish governments for ourselves, and we have the right to dismiss those governments when we find that they no longer suit our needs. In this way, individuals are fundamentally different from collective units like nations.
Currently most see no problems with laws governing persons within a country, logically, there should be no problems with laws governing nations, either.
Your use of the word "logically" here is funny to me. Because, you see, there's nothing even remotely logical about what you propose. Your suggestion is based on a false equivalence. Nations are not the same as people, politically speaking. They are fundamentally different.
Let's talk about laws for a second, okay? You say that since nations have laws that govern people, it should be okay to have supranational laws that govern nations. The reason that's bogus is that these hypothetical supranational laws must also govern people. Because nations are nothing but the enacted political will of the people, see. (Well, sovereign nations, that is. If you throw countries like the DPRK or Iran or Syria into the mix, the point gets kind of fuzzy. That's because, technically, those places aren't nations at all. They're quasi-national entities. Because they don't have legitimate governments, they're not sovereign, so they're not technically nations at all.)
So basically your suggestion is that it should be okay to have supranational laws that govern our day-to-day lives. Problem with that is that a law that exists without the consent of those held to it isn't a law at all. It's just a rumor. If the UN, for instance, were to try to pass a "law" that says nobody can drive a blue car, that "law" means absolutely nothing to me. Because I didn't have the opportunity to vote on it in a referendum, nor did I have the chance to elect the people who passed it. It's not binding. It's not a law at all. See?
Now, if we wanted to establish some sort of suprafederal government, that'd be fine. Say all the sovereign nations of the world decided to get together and unite in one giant federation to be governed by a legislature made up of duly elected representatives. No problem, at least in principle. (In practice it probably couldn't work, but let's stick to the abstract for now.) Problem is, that's not what the UN is. That's not what it was ever intended to be, and it's not what it attempts to be. So that's way off in the realm of the hypothetical, and is hardly even worth talking about.
Like I said, these are very basic ideas in political philosophy: legitimacy, sovereignty, tyranny. These are, like, the basic building blocks of politics.
Go away, troll.
Were you drunk when you posted this? Were you on some kind of medication? Are you mentally ill in some way?
I'm just wondering what possible excuse you could have for writing something so mind-blowingly rude.
Whatever it is, it's sure to be a good one. Right?
The International Criminal Court is a very, very bad idea ... but it has nothing at all to do with what you've described here. Its jurisdiction is limited to crimes against humanity and war crimes. Crimes of property -- such as theft of works, like you cited -- aren't covered by the ICCt.
Of course, that's not saying that somebody might someday try to establish a supranational criminal court with jurisdiction over crimes of property. That would be about the most tyrannical thing I can think of, and naturally it would be terrible. But it's also entirely hypothetical at this point.
Basically what I'm saying here is that there are enough excellent reasons to oppose the ICCt already. We don't have to resort to imagining new ones.
You didn't ask me, but I'll throw out some suggestions.
How about recognizing a moral difference between legitimate, sovereign states and pseudo-states run by dictators and tyrants? The whole premise of the UN is that it puts the world's liberal democracies on exactly the same plane as oppressive police states, and that's just bogus.
Second, how about embracing the basic tenets of democracy? Right now, the UN is a completely unaccountable body. Its "legislative branch," for lack of a better term, is made up of unelected ministers and ambassadors. Its "executive branch" is comprised of career bureaucrats whose sole qualification for their position is that they were able to get themselves appointed to it. In the US, we elect our legislators directly, and all executive-branch appointments have to be approved by the Senate. There's a clear chain of accountability every step of the way. What happens if I get pissed off at the guy who's in charge of (for example) the ITU? How do I express my opinion? I can't write my Congressman. Well, I mean, I could, but there's no way he'd be able to do anything about it. Neither could my Senators. Technically the Secretary of State should be involved, but in practice, she's really not. So the UN comprises this vast, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy. And now you're telling me that we want to give them more responsibility over things that affect our day-to-day lives? I don't think so.
The UN's purpose, above all others, is to be a sort of diplomatic sewing circle. It exists to give the diplomats of the world a place to sit around and talk things over. The minute we started giving the UN actual authority -- or, more accurately, the minute the UN started taking authority and we didn't object to it -- the body became little more than a benevolent, impotent tyranny.
That's a crummy analogy. The fact that the UN is a massive, overstaffed bureaucracy is one of its liabilities; it's a mistake to try to spin it as an asset. The fact remains that the office of the Secretary General -- the CEO, if you prefer to look at it that way -- is incredibly corrupt. Either that means the whole organization is run by an incredibly corrupt executive staff, or the organization is so bloated that nobody's really in charge. In either case, it's bad news.
Did it ever occur to you that it's not some arbitrary standard, but a carefully chosen course of action?
The possibility occurred, sure. But you don't have to be a brain surgeon to see that that's not what's going on here. It's totally political.
In the case of software, it might be the case sometimes that you can, in fact, get ahead quicker with closed-source tools. But that goes against some peoples ethics, because they are forbidden from sharing those tools with their friends.
We have a word for that. The word is "stupid." Just because there's a rationalization for a stupid position doesn't make the position any less stupid.
You are either ignorant or a troll.
Hint: Somebody who disagrees with you is not automatically uninformed or insincere. We have a word for that, too That word is "arrogant."
So far you're stupid and arrogant. Wanna go for number three?