And honestly, I don't believe in the Christian God either. This does not mean the man did not believe in a God concept.
Einstein did not believe the universe was randomly generated, this means he believed in intelligent design whether or not it's a Christian God or just some self aware universe, he believed in a God.
Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. All we see here is that he's not a Christian and perhaps he was drifting away from being a traditional Jew.
Reading it, you'd think this would stop the theists from repeatedly dragging the man unwillingly into their camp; but since this well-known remark...
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it
...didn't do it... somehow, I doubt this new letter will, either, clear as it may be.
All it says is that Einstein does not believe in a personal God. The God in the bible is a personal God that cares about the fate of humanity.
I don't believe in a personal God either, but I do believe in a God. Einstein also said that God does not play dice with the universe. If the universe is not random, there must be a God.
Andrew Carnegie, Jay Cooke, Charles Crocker, George Hearst, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, George Mortimer Pullman, etc etc etc. And today Bill Gates and crew. And I am skipping of course Europe, where later Messieurs Krupp, Messerschmidt and buddies had so much fun. Read some history dude before spewing such horrid nonsense. ----------
I know who these people are. If it were not for capitalism, instead of having non violent people such as these running the world, you'd have the most violent organized criminals running the world. While I don't know Bill Gates personally, from what I do know about him, he's not a violent person himself. So once again it's either let capitalism control society, or let violence control society. Since I'm not a violent person myself, I'm a capitalist. It's simple to understand.
Which means that it would have been far less powerful in restraining such individuals. Decentralized means that a rich enough individual can overpower such a weak "state" in every of its decentralized localities one at a time, instead of having to contend with a strong central power. Dude, there are corporations and individuals out there who already challenge whole present nations in military power and wealth. You want to give them even bigger advantage?! Logic is not your strong suite, is it?
You've got it backwards. When you give rich and powerful individuals centralized government, along with centralized corporations and a centralized church, what you end up with is a society exactly like what we have now. You don't seem to have any common sense, the people who have the money will control the government whether it's decentralized or not. The difference is, when you decentralize things under the libertarian model you create a mechanism where any brilliant individual can control their domain independently from another domain. Instead of one man being king of the world, you'd have chiefs of every city. To use the internet as a metaphor, instead of having one centralized server with all the worlds information on it, if you use a peer to peer system then everyone has access to the leadership and influence on the overall system.
As things as right now, you can't call up your local leader and get anything done. And you probably don't know the local mafia bosses, or the church leaders, or the billionaire CEO's, but without that kinda access you wont have any influence over anybody, and therefore no influence over your government. Right now, the little influence you do have comes from the fact that you are worth X amount of money to these people as a consumer, a tax payer, a drug addict, or whatever, but they see you as being worth a certain amount of $ and so they will listen to you if you threaten to take your money elsewhere. Money is the only power you have when you don't know them personally.
Which they create out of the ashes of weak, defenseless, decentralized utopias they have conquered one small bit at a time. As they always have. Again, read some history dude.
Decentralized does not mean defenseless. To believe something as dumb as this is like thinking that tribal governments are defenseless. We've seen all along, in Iraq, or in other places that tribal forms of government are far from defenseless. You have to do a better job proving the point that decentralized power becomes defenselessness, because I'm under the impression that the only way to ever have anything close to democracy is through decentralization. If you centralize too much you end up with absolute monarchy, and eventually either dictatorship, or an emperor who rules an empire. If the emperor is insane like Nero, then you aren't going to be very safe at all, in fact you'd be in more danger in that position than you would be if decentralized.
Oh yes! Because "tribal command order" had fared oooh-soo-well after coming in contact with the ruthless power of various European monarchies, all over the world! Hey, for a brilli
Which is, to put it gently, a logical fallacy. The "libertarian" form of capitalism is simply a staging ground for takeover by the most greedy and unscrupulous sociopaths.
Those are very intense emotional words. But you are absolutely wrong. Capitalism is how the "system" controls the most greedy unscrupulous sociopaths. The libertarian form of capitalism that I advocate would be far more decentralized than what we currently have. Unscrupulous sociopaths tend to prefer centralized forms of power, government, etc. Libertarian socialism therefore is the exact opposite order, more similar to a tribal command order than a totally centralized world government with a king on top.
A starting point for feudalism, as in that "system" there is absolutely no provision for stopping a runaway accumulation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands (by a myriad of means).
Libertarian capitalism does not mean corporatism. Currently we have a corrupt corporate monarchy, but not because of libertarianism or capitalism, because in absence of either of these two systems you still have the scum rising to the top. This could happen just as easily under communism.
The reason this happens is because of centralization of power, be it through corporate monopoly, duopoly, corporate welfare, or state run corporations, they all lead to centralized power in fewer and fewer hands. Even our federal reserve by design a private and extremely centralized power structure. It's centralization which is the problem, not ideology, not whether or not you use capitalism. It's the client/server, slave/master model, that is the source of all of these problems.
All of their religious dogmas about inherent self-correcting nature of the so-called "free market" are just that, patently false (and easily demonstrably so),
We have never had a free market. A truly free market favors decentralization because a decentralized market is cheaper and more efficient than a centralized market. The market has never been free or fair, I'll agree with you on that point.
Absolutely false. It is one of the cornerstone lies that libertarians spread around (an extreme form of which is the truly vile and sick view called "objectivism") and by which their true desires can be easily detected.
I'm not endorsing objectivism, nor will I condemn it. There is truth and falsehood in every ideology. My ideology is reason. Not emotionalism.
The truth is, that which is ethical is that which is reasonable. And when making decisions you should weigh the costs vs the benefits, and do what is in your best interest. The problem we have and that Ayn Rand and the objectivists never considered, is the fact that humans as a species simply aren't capable of being reasonable, and this is why as a species humans aren't capable of being ethical.
If all humans were reasonable/ethical beings, objectivism would work, but to expect objectivism to work with these kinds of people is like believing in hippy Utopia. Therefore I am not an Objectivist, I'm a rationalist, I believe in reason, and I have faith in reason. I do not have faith in man, unlike Ayn Rand and the objectivists who still have faith in humanity.
In my honest opinion, money is a behavior modification instrument. Money is not something to be worshiped because it's not something in and of itself. Money is merely a tool which can be used to socially engineer world peace and harmony, and I support anyone who wishes to use money to guide humanity by it's greed to produce the most rational and desireable outcome, which is the continued survival of the human species.
I also support the manipulation of the human mind through the use of negotiable instruments to produce the outcome of saving the environment, so that other species can survive along with us. And this is why I'm a libertarian. The only way you'll be able to get anything done, positive or negative, is through behavior modification technologies, of whic
Being a libertarian has nothing to do with being a capitalist.
With that being said, yes I prefer the libertarian philosophy of capitalism over the other forms, but only because if it were done right the libertarian form of capitalism is the only form that could ever be considered fair.
It's survival of the fittest under any system. Libertarians just believe in allowing people to compete according to a set of rules which allow for fair competition.
Socialists on the other hand usually raise taxes on the middle class to ease the competition for the rich and help the poor. So in all honesty I don't think the current libertarians are true libertarians unless their ultimate goal is to maximize the kinds of liberty which aren't harmful to other people and which raise quality of life.
I'm not a supporter of giving people the freedm to be a slave. I don't believe we need the governmnemt to provide any social services, because I believe the church has more money and power than the government and is more capable. The government seems best at making way and then taxing us to make us pay for it, or drafting us to make us fight in it.
I'm not an anarchist who wants to remove government. I want the government to stay out of our private lives. Government should not be able to have a war on drugs in my opinion. Government shuld not be able to control the food we eat. Government should not have any influence over the education system besides giving vouchers so kids can go to private school, or grants, or loans. I'm not a supporter of public schools because public schools haven't been shown to work.
I do not support the no child left behind. I do not support standardized testing. I do not support any infringement on our civil liberties because I believe when you lose your liberty you lose your security and you become more of a slave in the process.
As far as feudalism and warlordism, capitalism is what leads to that, not libertarianism. You can be libertarian without being a capitalist at all.
And as far as government goes, I'm not anti government, I'm anti big government. I like decentralized government. I like decentralized power structures.
I'd consider myself a libertarian socialist, socialism is good as long as liberty is maximized.
Socialism without liberty however is just glorified slavery, and this is why I'm not a Stalin socialist Democrat, or a Hitler fascist Republican.
I don't support any party which reduces my quality of life, no matter what the ideology is or the promises they make. I want liberty because it improves my quality of life, and as long as I'm not harming anyone, the government has no moral basis with which to remove my liberty.
The best solution, is for parents to demand that ISPs offer internet monitoring services.
Certain keywords they select should be flagged. Personal information should also be flagged.
When their children upload this information to the ISP, the ISP should keep it on record just as banks keep on record when you make a transaction.
If the child gives their name and address to the internet, the parent should know the list of websites and IP addresses that this information was passed onto. If it's uploaded to the IP address of a known sex offender, the parents should receive a phone call alerting them that their child has uploaded personal information to a known sex offender.
And that would solve this problem. There is no need to ban sex offenders from MySpace, or ban sex offenders from the internet. Or create illegal hyperlinks, or use any of the technologically ignorant solutions (hey it's my opinion).
We should simply use the technology to allow parents to act as the dataminer, and give parents backdoor access to the ISP's database, and to MySpaces database, and to the databases which contain information on the sex offenders, all for a fee.
If the ISP's don't want to implement these features, fuck them, just go ahead and set up the business yourself and use it as a chance to get rich off the hysteria. The point I'm making is that the best way to protect children in this world, is to empower the people who love them, and that is their parents.
Parents should be able to spy on an internet connection they are paying for. And parents should have every right and even be ENCOURAGED to spy on their children. Parents should be able to hire investigators to go on MySpace and PRETEND to be a pedophile and ask their child for personal information just to see if their child will give it out.
These are my opinions, I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe children have a right to privacy at all unless their parents give it to them. I do not want the government policing or criminalizing the internet, and I do not want censorship on the internet even if it's claimed as a way to arrest pedophiles.
I do want children to be protected. And I think the parent is the only one capable of protecting their child.
I'm not for censorship. I'm for spying on children. If parents think their teenager is mature enough for uncensored internet access, thats fine with me.
But when the teenager uploads private information like their real name, their telephone number, their address, the ISP should send a letter to the parents telling them the list of sites which this information was uploaded to, or the list of IP addresses.
And there should be corporations setup with the specific purpose of helping parents to spy on their childrens internet access. The parent should be able to set certain types of information to flag, and when the child uploads that information to the internet it should be recorded by the corporation set up to monitor the flagged information.
Very much like the NSA setup where keywords are flagged, this is how you'd want it. Certain keywords should be flagged. Parents should be able to access the logs since they are paying for the internet connection and for the special internet monitoring service offered by the ISP.
This way the risks are not eliminated, as they can still access the internet and be exposed to all sorts of uncensored information. The difference is the parents will KNOW what their kids are doing and will be able to look out for certain risky or dangerous behaviors.
I don't think we need anymore laws. In fact I think there is no need for using the law to solve parenting problems. The whole pedophile kidnapping type of problems are the result of poor parenting, or parents who don't know what information their children are giving to strangers.
Parents should know who their childrens friends are and should know when their children give out personal information to strangers. The technology needs to be in place to help parents spy on their children more easily.
Let's set up businesses to help parents spy on their childrens internet access. All communication uploaded which includes certain search terms or real names, addresses and other private information should be flagged and recorded.
A company could form to monitor the internet activity of their children for parents.
Allow parents to create a list of personal information which can not be posted on Myspace from the IP address of the account of their child.
Also allow parents to access a special portion of the site where they can monitor everything their teenager says on MySpace.
And ISP's can also allow parents to access all the communications logs that are kept for 2 years for whatever purposes.
As long as parents see what their kids are saying online, the parents will have the power to protect them from pedophiles. There should be certain kinds of information which if their child ever says it online it should be flagged and a letter should be sent saying "personal information has been uploaded to this list of websites, and to this list of IP addresses, for more details please call us".
Basically, a business could be started to log the communications of households who have minors accessing the internet, and this communications log could be set to flag when certain information is uploaded. The corporation doing the monitoring should not have the right to access any of it, it should be encrypted and private and only accessible by the parents.
Facebook has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia to develop and enhance controls to protect minors from inappropriate content.
Where in TFA does it say "that parents have shifted the legal liability on website owners and internet users"? They haven't as far as I can tell. They might want to blame someone else for their own short-comings but I expect that any reasonable court would tell the parents the truth and pull no punches while doing so.
Facebook et al might agree to many things to make life safer for those who are not yet adults, but assuming responsibility for those minors is something that they haven't said they will do, nor will they ever do so if I'm not mistaken.
If you've been paying attention to the massive sequence of politically motivated legislation and many articles you will see that the laws are designed to shift the blame onto the internet.
When those 8 girls beat up the 1 girl and it was posted on YouTube, the parents did not blame those 8 girls, the parents of the victim blamed YouTube and MySpace. They blame the internet.
If you look at the laws being passed, the laws do not say that minors who enter "adult" chatrooms are liable, or that their parents are liable, the laws place liability on the chatroom itself, and on the adults in the chatroom. This means that the chatroom is open to a lawsuit if something bad happens to the minor who entered the adult chatroom in the first place. This also means that the adult users in the chatroom are open to lawsuits if they don't censor themselves around the minor.
Instead of empowering parents, and placing liability on parents who have the absolute responsibility of protecting their children from the horrors and dangers of the internet, the current set of laws have been putting pressure and responsibility onto the internet itself.
Internet websites now have the responsibility of doing backround checks on their members to remove all known sex offenders. So now MySpace has the responsibility of dealing with sex offenders? And now Facebook too has to be concerned with who among their members are sex offenders?
In my opinion, internet sites, and members on these sites, should be given some level of legal immunity. In exchange for this legal immunity I think these sites should be legally required to add parental controls and some forms of parental censorship mechanisms. Basically all responsibility for what teenager accesses on the internet should be placed on the parent.
The only time I think the parents should not be responsible is in situations where the minor gives names, addresses, and other personal information, or in situations where pedophiles and the like actively stalk underaged individuals.
In the situation where the minor gives their phone number and address to the pedophile, disregarding whatever their parents told them, then the liability shouldn't be placed on the parents in this situation.
The other situation I can think of is if a pedophile actively stalks an individual they know to be underage, and is trying to gather indentity information. In this case the parents, and the minor are not liable at all.
All liability in this case would fall on the stalker/pedophile, and on sites like MySpace and Facebook which allow organized stalking to be more easily conducted. If a parents teenage daughter were to be kidnapped, and we find that the kidnapper used MySpace to gather all the necessary information to organize the stalking and kidnapping, then I believe MySpace is legally liable.
What I don't want to happen is for the people who have no understanding of the internet, or the technology involved, to keep blaming the internet, and treating the internet and all social networking sites and chatrooms as a place that is just filled with pedophiles and therefore automatically it's just bad and has to be banned, censored, controlled, and criminalized.
I could tell you how to find darknets, but the problem is, if you tell people where to find them, then all the governments will plant moles and it doesnt work anymore.
It's not about being popular. It's about having people you can trust, and honestly most of us don't have more than 3 of those sorts of people.
Have you actually seen Freenet? The only purpose it's pretty much used for is the exchange of the worst crimes of humanity. When it's actually proven to be used for a legitimate purpose that needs anonymity, then you can criticize people's perception of it. Of course if people only used Freenet for "legitimate" purposes then their would be no need for Freenet. That's pretty much the point. If you are living in an age where people (and more importantly governments and their enforcement agencies) think that free and uncensored information is "the worst crimes of humanity" then Freenet is important. Yes this age existed long before the Internet (think Galileo or Copernicus and their radical ideas), or think to the present. The same types of people who wanted to block radical and blasphemous thoughts and ideas 500 years ago are the same types of people who are against Freenet. The dissemination of information (in binary form or otherwise) is not in itself inherently harmful. Of course one could always argue about the marginal effects of 'blasphemous', 'immoral', or 'anti-social' binary information being made available; but any information that you don't like to perceive is far better to be brought out into the open than to have people be punished for thought crimes. This is why you can expect governments and government agents to upload kiddie porn onto Freenet with the purpose and point of forcing the US government to ban Freenet entirely.
And it's not out of the range of possibility that the developers of Freenet can be targetted by hostile governments as well.
Slashdot Mirror
And honestly, I don't believe in the Christian God either. This does not mean the man did not believe in a God concept.
Einstein did not believe the universe was randomly generated, this means he believed in intelligent design whether or not it's a Christian God or just some self aware universe, he believed in a God.
Athiests believe the universe is a complete accident and that everything in the universe is random. Nothing Einstein has ever said in any of his writings support that he believes that the universe is random. All we see here is that he's not a Christian and perhaps he was drifting away from being a traditional Jew.
Reading it, you'd think this would stop the theists from repeatedly dragging the man unwillingly into their camp; but since this well-known remark...
...didn't do it... somehow, I doubt this new letter will, either, clear as it may be.
All it says is that Einstein does not believe in a personal God. The God in the bible is a personal God that cares about the fate of humanity.I don't believe in a personal God either, but I do believe in a God. Einstein also said that God does not play dice with the universe. If the universe is not random, there must be a God.
You wouldn't be a shoplifter, you'd be considered like a terrorist.
Andrew Carnegie, Jay Cooke, Charles Crocker, George Hearst, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, George Mortimer Pullman, etc etc etc. And today Bill Gates and crew. And I am skipping of course Europe, where later Messieurs Krupp, Messerschmidt and buddies had so much fun. Read some history dude before spewing such horrid nonsense.
----------
I know who these people are. If it were not for capitalism, instead of having non violent people such as these running the world, you'd have the most violent organized criminals running the world. While I don't know Bill Gates personally, from what I do know about him, he's not a violent person himself. So once again it's either let capitalism control society, or let violence control society. Since I'm not a violent person myself, I'm a capitalist. It's simple to understand.
Which means that it would have been far less powerful in restraining such individuals. Decentralized means that a rich enough individual can overpower such a weak "state" in every of its decentralized localities one at a time, instead of having to contend with a strong central power. Dude, there are corporations and individuals out there who already challenge whole present nations in military power and wealth. You want to give them even bigger advantage?! Logic is not your strong suite, is it?
You've got it backwards. When you give rich and powerful individuals centralized government, along with centralized corporations and a centralized church, what you end up with is a society exactly like what we have now. You don't seem to have any common sense, the people who have the money will control the government whether it's decentralized or not. The difference is, when you decentralize things under the libertarian model you create a mechanism where any brilliant individual can control their domain independently from another domain. Instead of one man being king of the world, you'd have chiefs of every city. To use the internet as a metaphor, instead of having one centralized server with all the worlds information on it, if you use a peer to peer system then everyone has access to the leadership and influence on the overall system.
As things as right now, you can't call up your local leader and get anything done. And you probably don't know the local mafia bosses, or the church leaders, or the billionaire CEO's, but without that kinda access you wont have any influence over anybody, and therefore no influence over your government. Right now, the little influence you do have comes from the fact that you are worth X amount of money to these people as a consumer, a tax payer, a drug addict, or whatever, but they see you as being worth a certain amount of $ and so they will listen to you if you threaten to take your money elsewhere. Money is the only power you have when you don't know them personally.
Which they create out of the ashes of weak, defenseless, decentralized utopias they have conquered one small bit at a time. As they always have. Again, read some history dude.
Decentralized does not mean defenseless. To believe something as dumb as this is like thinking that tribal governments are defenseless. We've seen all along, in Iraq, or in other places that tribal forms of government are far from defenseless. You have to do a better job proving the point that decentralized power becomes defenselessness, because I'm under the impression that the only way to ever have anything close to democracy is through decentralization. If you centralize too much you end up with absolute monarchy, and eventually either dictatorship, or an emperor who rules an empire. If the emperor is insane like Nero, then you aren't going to be very safe at all, in fact you'd be in more danger in that position than you would be if decentralized.
Oh yes! Because "tribal command order" had fared oooh-soo-well after coming in contact with the ruthless power of various European monarchies, all over the world! Hey, for a brilli
Which is, to put it gently, a logical fallacy. The "libertarian" form of capitalism is simply a staging ground for takeover by the most greedy and unscrupulous sociopaths.
Those are very intense emotional words. But you are absolutely wrong. Capitalism is how the "system" controls the most greedy unscrupulous sociopaths. The libertarian form of capitalism that I advocate would be far more decentralized than what we currently have. Unscrupulous sociopaths tend to prefer centralized forms of power, government, etc. Libertarian socialism therefore is the exact opposite order, more similar to a tribal command order than a totally centralized world government with a king on top.
A starting point for feudalism, as in that "system" there is absolutely no provision for stopping a runaway accumulation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands (by a myriad of means).
Libertarian capitalism does not mean corporatism. Currently we have a corrupt corporate monarchy, but not because of libertarianism or capitalism, because in absence of either of these two systems you still have the scum rising to the top. This could happen just as easily under communism.
The reason this happens is because of centralization of power, be it through corporate monopoly, duopoly, corporate welfare, or state run corporations, they all lead to centralized power in fewer and fewer hands. Even our federal reserve by design a private and extremely centralized power structure. It's centralization which is the problem, not ideology, not whether or not you use capitalism. It's the client/server, slave/master model, that is the source of all of these problems.
All of their religious dogmas about inherent self-correcting nature of the so-called "free market" are just that, patently false (and easily demonstrably so),
We have never had a free market. A truly free market favors decentralization because a decentralized market is cheaper and more efficient than a centralized market. The market has never been free or fair, I'll agree with you on that point.
Absolutely false. It is one of the cornerstone lies that libertarians spread around (an extreme form of which is the truly vile and sick view called "objectivism") and by which their true desires can be easily detected.
I'm not endorsing objectivism, nor will I condemn it. There is truth and falsehood in every ideology. My ideology is reason. Not emotionalism.
The truth is, that which is ethical is that which is reasonable. And when making decisions you should weigh the costs vs the benefits, and do what is in your best interest. The problem we have and that Ayn Rand and the objectivists never considered, is the fact that humans as a species simply aren't capable of being reasonable, and this is why as a species humans aren't capable of being ethical.
If all humans were reasonable/ethical beings, objectivism would work, but to expect objectivism to work with these kinds of people is like believing in hippy Utopia. Therefore I am not an Objectivist, I'm a rationalist, I believe in reason, and I have faith in reason. I do not have faith in man, unlike Ayn Rand and the objectivists who still have faith in humanity.
In my honest opinion, money is a behavior modification instrument. Money is not something to be worshiped because it's not something in and of itself. Money is merely a tool which can be used to socially engineer world peace and harmony, and I support anyone who wishes to use money to guide humanity by it's greed to produce the most rational and desireable outcome, which is the continued survival of the human species.
I also support the manipulation of the human mind through the use of negotiable instruments to produce the outcome of saving the environment, so that other species can survive along with us. And this is why I'm a libertarian. The only way you'll be able to get anything done, positive or negative, is through behavior modification technologies, of whic
Relationships are also no substitute for technology.
Not all kids are honest, or bright.
Being a libertarian has nothing to do with being a capitalist.
With that being said, yes I prefer the libertarian philosophy of capitalism over the other forms, but only because if it were done right the libertarian form of capitalism is the only form that could ever be considered fair.
It's survival of the fittest under any system. Libertarians just believe in allowing people to compete according to a set of rules which allow for fair competition.
Socialists on the other hand usually raise taxes on the middle class to ease the competition for the rich and help the poor. So in all honesty I don't think the current libertarians are true libertarians unless their ultimate goal is to maximize the kinds of liberty which aren't harmful to other people and which raise quality of life.
I'm not a supporter of giving people the freedm to be a slave. I don't believe we need the governmnemt to provide any social services, because I believe the church has more money and power than the government and is more capable.
The government seems best at making way and then taxing us to make us pay for it, or drafting us to make us fight in it.
I'm not an anarchist who wants to remove government. I want the government to stay out of our private lives. Government should not be able to have a war on drugs in my opinion. Government shuld not be able to control the food we eat. Government should not have any influence over the education system besides giving vouchers so kids can go to private school, or grants, or loans. I'm not a supporter of public schools because public schools haven't been shown to work.
I do not support the no child left behind. I do not support standardized testing. I do not support any infringement on our civil liberties because I believe when you lose your liberty you lose your security and you become more of a slave in the process.
As far as feudalism and warlordism, capitalism is what leads to that, not libertarianism. You can be libertarian without being a capitalist at all.
And as far as government goes, I'm not anti government, I'm anti big government. I like decentralized government. I like decentralized power structures.
I'd consider myself a libertarian socialist, socialism is good as long as liberty is maximized.
Socialism without liberty however is just glorified slavery, and this is why I'm not a Stalin socialist Democrat, or a Hitler fascist Republican.
I don't support any party which reduces my quality of life, no matter what the ideology is or the promises they make. I want liberty because it improves my quality of life, and as long as I'm not harming anyone, the government has no moral basis with which to remove my liberty.
I'm not suggesting that the US govern the entire internet. Only US run corporations have to follow US laws.
And the US internet already is like the great firewall of China. Our internet is not uncensorable.
I do not favor censorship, but if parents do not want their children to access certain sites I favor giving parents the right to censor children.
Similar to "you can access this website with your parents permission.", as a way to protect the website owners.
The best solution, is for parents to demand that ISPs offer internet monitoring services.
Certain keywords they select should be flagged.
Personal information should also be flagged.
When their children upload this information to the ISP, the ISP should keep it on record just as banks keep on record when you make a transaction.
If the child gives their name and address to the internet, the parent should know the list of websites and IP addresses that this information was passed onto. If it's uploaded to the IP address of a known sex offender, the parents should receive a phone call alerting them that their child has uploaded personal information to a known sex offender.
And that would solve this problem. There is no need to ban sex offenders from MySpace, or ban sex offenders from the internet. Or create illegal hyperlinks, or use any of the technologically ignorant solutions (hey it's my opinion).
We should simply use the technology to allow parents to act as the dataminer, and give parents backdoor access to the ISP's database, and to MySpaces database, and to the databases which contain information on the sex offenders, all for a fee.
If the ISP's don't want to implement these features, fuck them, just go ahead and set up the business yourself and use it as a chance to get rich off the hysteria. The point I'm making is that the best way to protect children in this world, is to empower the people who love them, and that is their parents.
Parents should be able to spy on an internet connection they are paying for. And parents should have every right and even be ENCOURAGED to spy on their children. Parents should be able to hire investigators to go on MySpace and PRETEND to be a pedophile and ask their child for personal information just to see if their child will give it out.
These are my opinions, I am not a lawyer, but I do not believe children have a right to privacy at all unless their parents give it to them. I do not want the government policing or criminalizing the internet, and I do not want censorship on the internet even if it's claimed as a way to arrest pedophiles.
I do want children to be protected. And I think the parent is the only one capable of protecting their child.
I'm not for censorship. I'm for spying on children.
If parents think their teenager is mature enough for uncensored internet access, thats fine with me.
But when the teenager uploads private information like their real name, their telephone number, their address, the ISP should send a letter to the parents telling them the list of sites which this information was uploaded to, or the list of IP addresses.
And there should be corporations setup with the specific purpose of helping parents to spy on their childrens internet access. The parent should be able to set certain types of information to flag, and when the child uploads that information to the internet it should be recorded by the corporation set up to monitor the flagged information.
Very much like the NSA setup where keywords are flagged, this is how you'd want it. Certain keywords should be flagged. Parents should be able to access the logs since they are paying for the internet connection and for the special internet monitoring service offered by the ISP.
This way the risks are not eliminated, as they can still access the internet and be exposed to all sorts of uncensored information. The difference is the parents will KNOW what their kids are doing and will be able to look out for certain risky or dangerous behaviors.
I don't think we need anymore laws. In fact I think there is no need for using the law to solve parenting problems. The whole pedophile kidnapping type of problems are the result of poor parenting, or parents who don't know what information their children are giving to strangers.
Parents should know who their childrens friends are and should know when their children give out personal information to strangers. The technology needs to be in place to help parents spy on their children more easily.
Let's set up businesses to help parents spy on their childrens internet access. All communication uploaded which includes certain search terms or real names, addresses and other private information should be flagged and recorded.
A company could form to monitor the internet activity of their children for parents.
Allow parents to create a list of personal information which can not be posted on Myspace from the IP address of the account of their child.
Also allow parents to access a special portion of the site where they can monitor everything their teenager says on MySpace.
And ISP's can also allow parents to access all the communications logs that are kept for 2 years for whatever purposes.
As long as parents see what their kids are saying online, the parents will have the power to protect them from pedophiles. There should be certain kinds of information which if their child ever says it online it should be flagged and a letter should be sent saying "personal information has been uploaded to this list of websites, and to this list of IP addresses, for more details please call us".
Basically, a business could be started to log the communications of households who have minors accessing the internet, and this communications log could be set to flag when certain information is uploaded. The corporation doing the monitoring should not have the right to access any of it, it should be encrypted and private and only accessible by the parents.
Facebook has reached an agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states and the District of Columbia to develop and enhance controls to protect minors from inappropriate content.
Where in TFA does it say "that parents have shifted the legal liability on website owners and internet users"? They haven't as far as I can tell. They might want to blame someone else for their own short-comings but I expect that any reasonable court would tell the parents the truth and pull no punches while doing so.
Facebook et al might agree to many things to make life safer for those who are not yet adults, but assuming responsibility for those minors is something that they haven't said they will do, nor will they ever do so if I'm not mistaken.
If you've been paying attention to the massive sequence of politically motivated legislation and many articles you will see that the laws are designed to shift the blame onto the internet.
When those 8 girls beat up the 1 girl and it was posted on YouTube, the parents did not blame those 8 girls, the parents of the victim blamed YouTube and MySpace. They blame the internet.
If you look at the laws being passed, the laws do not say that minors who enter "adult" chatrooms are liable, or that their parents are liable, the laws place liability on the chatroom itself, and on the adults in the chatroom. This means that the chatroom is open to a lawsuit if something bad happens to the minor who entered the adult chatroom in the first place. This also means that the adult users in the chatroom are open to lawsuits if they don't censor themselves around the minor.
Instead of empowering parents, and placing liability on parents who have the absolute responsibility of protecting their children from the horrors and dangers of the internet, the current set of laws have been putting pressure and responsibility onto the internet itself.
Internet websites now have the responsibility of doing backround checks on their members to remove all known sex offenders. So now MySpace has the responsibility of dealing with sex offenders? And now Facebook too has to be concerned with who among their members are sex offenders?
In my opinion, internet sites, and members on these sites, should be given some level of legal immunity. In exchange for this legal immunity I think these sites should be legally required to add parental controls and some forms of parental censorship mechanisms. Basically all responsibility for what teenager accesses on the internet should be placed on the parent.
The only time I think the parents should not be responsible is in situations where the minor gives names, addresses, and other personal information, or in situations where pedophiles and the like actively stalk underaged individuals.
In the situation where the minor gives their phone number and address to the pedophile, disregarding whatever their parents told them, then the liability shouldn't be placed on the parents in this situation.
The other situation I can think of is if a pedophile actively stalks an individual they know to be underage, and is trying to gather indentity information. In this case the parents, and the minor are not liable at all.
All liability in this case would fall on the stalker/pedophile, and on sites like MySpace and Facebook which allow organized stalking to be more easily conducted. If a parents teenage daughter were to be kidnapped, and we find that the kidnapper used MySpace to gather all the necessary information to organize the stalking and kidnapping, then I believe MySpace is legally liable.
What I don't want to happen is for the people who have no understanding of the internet, or the technology involved, to keep blaming the internet, and treating the internet and all social networking sites and chatrooms as a place that is just filled with pedophiles and therefore automatically it's just bad and has to be banned, censored, controlled, and criminalized.
This doesn't change the fact that parents have shifted the legal liability on website owners and internet users.
Isn't that how most of the serious Freenet users will operate? They'll upload and run.
The longer you use Freenet the greater the likelyhood of the bad guys tracking you down.
The internet will be shutdown on suspicion of kiddie porn and pedophiles. And it's all MySpaces fault.
Better to investigate than not to investigate and have the entire internet be shut down.
What if the governments simply fund the development of a trojan which infects your machine and sees you are running Freenet?
They need to make a Freenet LiveCD.
I could tell you how to find darknets, but the problem is, if you tell people where to find them, then all the governments will plant moles and it doesnt work anymore.
It's not about being popular. It's about having people you can trust, and honestly most of us don't have more than 3 of those sorts of people.
Use a Freenet LiveCD and have it run in encrypted in ram.
How do you know these Tor sites aren't being run by governments hostile to Tor as a concept/technology?
It seems that the best anti Tor strategy for a governnment that hates Tor, would be to upload as much pro child porn sites as humanely possible.
Why use Freenet at all if this is the case? Mute is good enough, or even a sneakernet.
And it's not out of the range of possibility that the developers of Freenet can be targetted by hostile governments as well.
And by doing this, they can force the world to ban and shun freenet. No more freenet.