No they can't, in fact half of them don't even speak English.
Yeah, you're right, they can't. Except for the fact they did, but who cares about facts.
Perhaps we should jail the entire United States over the Virginia tech massacre while we are at it.
If that attack was a military/terrorist attack with political goals sponsored by an organisation as part of an ongoing campaign it would be appropriate to attack and destroy that organisation. If they were being sponsored and protected by a government it would be appropriate to take action against that government including, if necessary, military action. Neither Afghanistan nor any other country has had its entire population jailed, if you're going to use a straw man argument you could at least use one that isn't quite so stupid.
Yeah... Let's harass every country that could potentially do that.
Not a great idea, how about just the groups who actually have done it. Like the 9/11 attacks were done by Al-Qaeda for example. You know, those guys hiding in Afghanistan.
Even after the fact there is no way to adequately describe the Crash Of 2008 in terms of capitalism or of communism.
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Jefferson.
What is happening has been well understood for a long time. Usury is described in the Old Testament as a method of gaining mastery over both individuals and nations. Not to get religious, I'm sure that information would be available in other ancient philosophies as well, that's just the one I'm familiar with. "The rich rule over the poor, the borrower is servant to the lender" is somewhere in the book of proverbs IIRC. Don't exchanges things of value for things of no value (in this case, fiat currency) is so obvious I don't know if anyone has even bothered to write it down. Spend less than you earn.
Even a fairly cursory look at history and basic financial literacy will show very clearly how to avoid this situation. The desire for rapid economic expansion has led to the acceptance of fractional reserve lending as the default method of financing business and government. That is "We'll pretend the money exists so we can have stuff right now" (fraud) as opposed to "We'll use our excess production to fund expansion" (capitalism). Whatever the current political view predominates, I propose that any economic system based on fraud will eventually collapse. I suggest to you that this has not been considered a mystery throughout the ages.
Proverbs 13:11
Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.
The answers are right there, they have been all along. People just haven't wanted to implement them.
His words contribute little to the discussion, and aside from the accidental limelight of being very marginally associated with the President, he really has no significance today. He is effectively one of the senile Old Guard, still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_AyersHe is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.
You think the "Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar" at the College of Education at the University of Illinois has no significance in education? I suggest you give that some more thought. He may not usually be in the public consciousness but his ideas are carried by his students into the classrooms. He directly influences the education system. He doesn't need to get your attention to do it.
Capitalism won the battle. Accept that you don't have to fight that one any more.
I must have missed that. In my country (Australia) many of the goals of the communists have been implemented and from here it seems like that in the US too, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Perhaps. Granted, some of these, like centrally controlled banking systems, are not exclusively desired by communists. We have a centrally controlled credit supply and "money" that only has value by government edict, leaving only the appearance of capitalism. We have a money supply that is created out of thin air and backed by government force. If you or I did such a thing it would be called counterfeiting and we would be sent to prison. Other things that have traditionally been used as currency in the event of economic collapse, such as alcohol, are tightly regulated or even illegal to produce for most people. How anyone can think that the current problems are a failure of capitalism is beyond me. Ok, it isn't really, I'm aware of the propaganda, but seriously, Jefferson warned about the effect the banks would have, how is it that people don't understand?
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
We need a restoration of the free enterprise system, not its destruction. That's quite difficult to achieve if people believe they've been living in a free market system when they are actually in a planned economy.
Let people own businesses and buy and sell, but control the currency of all transactions and manipulate the market by taxes, regulation, inflation and the mass production of consumers/employees through 12 year compulsory indoctrination. This leaves the appearance of capitalism as a veneer over a planned economy.
When problems occur in your planned economy, blame capitalism.
Increase controls and regulation
It's painful to see how easily people are manipulated.
Can you point to a non-political group? Even a lonely parent who decides to home-school his kids evidently has a political outlook and in fact he is implementing it.
The control a parent has over a child is temporary. There are many aspects of families and parenthood that would be considered tyrannical if implemented by governments. Families are essentially run as monarchies, more so the younger the children are. I'm not against politics being taught to children per se, I am against political indoctrination by the state as a method of population control.
I see the question as being who is in control, the government or the people? I categorise compulsory state schooling with compulsory state religion. It seems to have risen up as a government response to freedom of religion. Personally, having different political and religious views than my parents, I don't see a problem with parents teaching such things to children. The state doing it is a different matter.
When you consider the place of importance Marx and Engels give to public education as part of their revolution you will see exactly why conservatives don't like government schooling in general and Ayers in particular.
Because conservatives do not see education as important for exactly the same reasons...
Hence my comment about not liking government schooling in general. You replied before I finished this comment. In case you don't want to read it, the most relevant point in this case: "It would not matter what political group controlled the system, my objection is the same."
Defeat Communism and socialism by having a purely private educational system.
In no post in this discussion have I said government has no place in education. What I am against is the compulsory indoctrination of populations through school. This is something that communists most definitely want. Marx proposed public schools as a political tool necessary to implement communism and frankly admitted that education as a form of social control was not an original idea. All totalitarians want that, especially since freedom of religion has happened. That was previously the governments favored method of thought control.
My contention is that the purpose of education ought to be to benefit the student, not to bend them to the political will of others.
Yes, having a huge uneducated underclass is really going to keep the US on top of the world.
The US had a high level of education before government schooling.
If US conservatives wanted to change society in a constructive way, they would come up with a conservative state educational system that was successful, so that people would want it for their children.
Why does the answer have to be the government doing it for you? Maybe that's your cultural heritage, mine is a bit more independent. I'd recommend reading John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History
of American Education or if you don't have time, at least the prologue Quote: "Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective."
Explain to me why the most socialist European countries have the most successful outcomes in terms of education, better than the US.
I don't know. Is it because they allow social, political and cultural values they oppose to be taught to their children by compulsion? Explain to me why I have had to deal with workers who have put their 12 years of school in but seem almost completely unable to think. (I'm not in the US by the way but a much more socialist country).
Personally I think there are many things that are good if you choose them but can be horribly bad if forced on you. Sex is one example, school most definitely has the potential to be this way. I think of the schools run by Hamas, by the Nazis, by the communists, etc where a central purpose of the school is to produce compliant slaves. Notice they do not need to change the structure of schools to do this sort of brainwashing, simply change the content. This ought to make us seriously examine our own school systems. My own examination leads me to the conclusion that compulsory government schooling has as its primary purpose to produce compliant citizens, fit to obey a corporation or government. It would not matter what political group controlled the system, my objection is the same.
That's pretty thin evidence for your claim and your claim has little to do with what I said. Show me where Science classes are to be replaced with Social Justice classes or stop wasting my time.
Thin evidence? An outright admission that he wants political, social and cultural values in the classroom that are "the exact opposite values" of the existing society? It's exactly about what you said. It probably won't result in a cancelled science class in favor of a social justice class but that the political agenda will flavor all the classes at the expense of academic rigour.
As for wasting your time, if you weren't prepared to read a comment you didn't like you came to the wrong place. Manage your own time.
That's one of the things that's actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator - Bill Ayers, faithfully following his 60's communist ideology to this day (well, up until October 1, 2006 anyway).
Another choice quote: But he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom.
Please drop out of any further public discussions on the interwebs, until you have done some reading on current issues and can identify your opponents.
Well, since your proposition that "60's progressives" (communists) have disappeared or lack influence has been shown to be wrong, we can conclude that either (1) you didn't know you were wrong, in which case it in necessary for those of us who understand to educate others or (2) you did know you were wrong and are trying to silence opposition to communist propaganda, in which case it is necessary for us to oppose you since we disagree with communism.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume (1). Either way, no, we won't be dropping out of public discussion.
I'm not a conservative, but placing the curricular focus on "social justice, equity and community", you have to sacrifice other, more important areas that are founded in fact (like science).
That's not the curriculum, that's the ideology of the system being argued for.
That might be what you are hoping for, but as far as Ayer's agenda goes you are wrong.
From "Revolution, Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA" interview with Bill Ayers"he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom" so he is very much wanting to spread that ideology in the classroom.
No, I'm talking about the political and social agenda pushed through the education system. I assume from your post that you didn't read my other linked post (since you probably wouldn't have brought up evolution otherwise). I linked to an Ayers interview http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html in which he states: "But he [John Dewey] never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom." Which is to say that Ayers regards radical political and social change to be a central purpose of the education system. As I said in my other post: "The man wants the government to force me to give him access to my children so he can indoctrinate them with cultural, political and social values I don't agree with. What's the reason I should cooperate again?".
Being a homeschooling parent, it isn't that my children are being indoctrinated, it's that I'm being forced to pay for the indoctrination of others. I'd even go as far to say that it isn't any particular part of curriculum that bothers me, nor the quality of teachers (I know some excellent teachers) but the system itself. In my view the most important and consistent lesson of mass compulsory schooling is not "think" but "obey", a lesson I see as fundamentally incompatible with a free society. This lesson is necessary to the system and largely independent of any curriculum content, although there are those that would add the propaganda content as well. Some people just aren't content to let people think for themselves.
Evolution/creation is just a distraction. We all want children to be taught the truth, both sides insisting that their view be taught and maligning the other. Both wanting the government to have their view taught. Neither side asking the real question: "What business is it of the government to decide what my children are taught". Science has a way of sticking around, I doubt very much that it would disappear without compulsory schooling. While people are arguing about content of science classes they are missing the fact that propaganda in the classroom is a favorite tool of despots. I don't want to put the tools of tyranny in the hands of anyone, whatever their beliefs.
Ok, so the guy is so brilliant, why isn't he the one with the multi-million dollar program trying to improve the school system?
He's a communist. Private entrepreneurship is not one of the favored methods of advancing communism. More highly approved by communists would be to influence the government school system so that your agenda is implemented by government force, which is the approach Ayers takes.
I wonder why conservatives don't attack education schools. This is seriously the mantra of every education program/class/professor.
Many conservatives do object to the left wing propaganda promoted throughout the education system, and even government schooling in general. I also wrote things in this reply that I won't bother to repeat now.
And you wonder why conservatives don't like Ayers?
I hadn't before, but I am wondering now.. what is it about small schools, social justice, equity and community that conservatives dislike?
This interview with Bill Ayers might help you understand. "But he [John Dewey] never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom." Ayers openly admits that his purpose for "education" is to pursue a social and political indoctrination system. Since the interview is on "Revolution, Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA" I'm sure you can connect the dots as to what the intended indoctrination is.
When you consider the place of importance Marx and Engels give to public education as part of their revolution you will see exactly why conservatives don't like government schooling in general and Ayers in particular. If you read his pdf linked in the summary, you will see that one of his main objections to what's going on is what he calls the "ownership society" a.k.a private property rights.
The man wants the government to force me to give him access to my children so he can indoctrinate them with cultural, political and social values I don't agree with. What's the reason I should cooperate again?
If you don't want to burn a disk and have an existing installation with separate/boot partition you can just grab the vmlinuz and initrd.img files from the isolinux directory, put them in boot and write a grub entry for them.
But if you cut an $8 billion hole in Microsoft, you run the risk of making them frantic to patch that hole. And as we know, they have some pretty well-developed skills for being really aggressive at the expense of the end user.
So you're saying if a bully steals your lunch don't have him punished in case he hurts you? That might be a temporary survival tactic suitable for a small schoolchild but it's the totally wrong thinking when deciding how to apply the law to corporations in the courts. This idea of don't stop the bully being a bully because they're a bully is what encourages them in their behaviour and advances the absolute rule of corporations. If the court has to deliberately avoid making just decisions for fear of retaliation from a company then it is time for the courts to step up to the fight and get that company compliant with the law or destroyed.
Open source is people working for common good by producing something that is available for anyone to use as they need it. It is very much communism.
With your original code (not based on other people's work) you have the choice to retain it as proprietary or release it as open source. That alone makes it not communism because under communism you would have no property right to validate your choice, the government would release or retain your code as it saw fit.
RedHat, Sun, IBM etc are not communist organisations as far as I can tell. Just because something "fits very well to the idea of communism" does not make it communism or a communist idea. Having drinking water available "fits very well to the idea of communism". In fact, not a single communist government that I'm aware of has tried to eliminate the availability of drinking water. Yet having drinking water is not "communism". Likewise open source may very well fit communist ideology, but it also works well in a capitalist ideology. Remember that regardless of RMS's politics, GNU came from the US and not any of the communist countries. In my view, open source works far better than proprietary software as an enabler of capitalism. If software is seen primarily as a tool for production rather than a product to sell then freely available software lowers the barrier to entry into business.
How about workers owning the means of production, that's a communist idea right? And yet communism destroys private property rights making it impossible for the workers to own the means of production but under capitalism you have the right to acquire capital, thereby owning the means of production. I started out as a worker. Am I a communist because I now own the means by which I produce, ie: my own tools and equipment? Certainly not, that was achieved entirely by capitalism. Open source is not communism.
However, any coder producing something for the community and to boost their ego is exactly how the communism was supposed to work.
People working together for mutual benefit, charity and public works are things that were happening long before communism came along. They are not "communist ideas" (See "drinking water"). The defining characteristic of communism is that these things were to be done by government compulsion rather than as a result of free choice. As for propaganda against communism, how many implementations of communism have to result in mass deaths in the population before that becomes a valid metric with which we can assess communism? I'd say we've seen enough to make a judgement by now.
That said, even without the mass murders, communism can be rejected outright just on the basis of logical inconsistency. Communism is fundamentally self contradictory. You can't give people ownership of the means of production and the work of their hands by eliminating their property rights. That should be blatantly obvious.
The situation is a bit more complex. For instance, there are few parts in the world where individuals will not gladly accept my euros as payment; there are even lots of parts where individuals rather get paid in euros than the local currency. And if someone wants to pay me in dollars (paper money), I (and a lot of other individuals) will accept that money, as long as the conversion rate is good enough. And no, the dollar is not legal tender where I live.
It isn't more complex at all. Foreign currency doesn't change the nature of paper money, it just shifts the enforcement to another government. Without government force paper money has no value except perhaps as a collectors item. When nearly every transaction in an economy is motivated by the desire to acquire something that only has value by government edict then that economy is closer to being a command economy than a free market.
No. Money has value because one knows that someone else will accept it in return for something.
And you only know that because the government enforces the payment of debts in that currency. You can go anywhere and people will accept gold and silver as payment without the government artificially making it valuable. Without government enforcement, paper money has no trading value. So while they don't dictate the actual value of the dollar they do dictate that the dollar has any value at all.
Communism/socialism without bounds has been failing for some time now; I get the feeling that we can see more and more that capitalism without boundaries is also failing.
Government enforced monopolies are not "capitalism without boundaries".
Besides that, effectively all transactions are done with money that only has value by government decree. A free market would usually use gold, silver or some type of commodity for money. Market principles still operate but with central control of the money supply you don't have a free market.
That only applies as long as the decisions of a court are in sync with the wishes of the people.
Not with the jury system of juries being made up of the general public. If you have enough public support for your cause to win a civil war then you will on average have several people on the jury who support that cause and you can determine the outcome of any election, negating the need for the civil war.
I fully support the right to bear arms but right now a civil war would have far worse effect on the US than current copyright law. If they start having special forces hit squads doing summary executions of downloaders I'll change my mind on that, but court decisions you don't like in a system where you can be judged by a jury of your peers? Get real.
Slashdot Mirror
No they can't, in fact half of them don't even speak English.
Yeah, you're right, they can't. Except for the fact they did, but who cares about facts.
Perhaps we should jail the entire United States over the Virginia tech massacre while we are at it.
If that attack was a military/terrorist attack with political goals sponsored by an organisation as part of an ongoing campaign it would be appropriate to attack and destroy that organisation. If they were being sponsored and protected by a government it would be appropriate to take action against that government including, if necessary, military action. Neither Afghanistan nor any other country has had its entire population jailed, if you're going to use a straw man argument you could at least use one that isn't quite so stupid.
Yeah... Let's harass every country that could potentially do that.
Not a great idea, how about just the groups who actually have done it. Like the 9/11 attacks were done by Al-Qaeda for example. You know, those guys hiding in Afghanistan.
I forgot those dessert dwelling peasants attacked our freedom right? Give me a break.
Yeah, what could they possibly do. It's not like they could fly planes into buildings packed with people or anything.
Even after the fact there is no way to adequately describe the Crash Of 2008 in terms of capitalism or of communism.
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Jefferson.
What is happening has been well understood for a long time. Usury is described in the Old Testament as a method of gaining mastery over both individuals and nations. Not to get religious, I'm sure that information would be available in other ancient philosophies as well, that's just the one I'm familiar with. "The rich rule over the poor, the borrower is servant to the lender" is somewhere in the book of proverbs IIRC. Don't exchanges things of value for things of no value (in this case, fiat currency) is so obvious I don't know if anyone has even bothered to write it down. Spend less than you earn.
Even a fairly cursory look at history and basic financial literacy will show very clearly how to avoid this situation. The desire for rapid economic expansion has led to the acceptance of fractional reserve lending as the default method of financing business and government. That is "We'll pretend the money exists so we can have stuff right now" (fraud) as opposed to "We'll use our excess production to fund expansion" (capitalism). Whatever the current political view predominates, I propose that any economic system based on fraud will eventually collapse. I suggest to you that this has not been considered a mystery throughout the ages.
Proverbs 13:11 Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.
The answers are right there, they have been all along. People just haven't wanted to implement them.
His words contribute little to the discussion, and aside from the accidental limelight of being very marginally associated with the President, he really has no significance today. He is effectively one of the senile Old Guard, still fighting the battles of the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ayers He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.
You think the "Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar" at the College of Education at the University of Illinois has no significance in education? I suggest you give that some more thought. He may not usually be in the public consciousness but his ideas are carried by his students into the classrooms. He directly influences the education system. He doesn't need to get your attention to do it.
Capitalism won the battle. Accept that you don't have to fight that one any more.
I must have missed that. In my country (Australia) many of the goals of the communists have been implemented and from here it seems like that in the US too, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Perhaps. Granted, some of these, like centrally controlled banking systems, are not exclusively desired by communists. We have a centrally controlled credit supply and "money" that only has value by government edict, leaving only the appearance of capitalism. We have a money supply that is created out of thin air and backed by government force. If you or I did such a thing it would be called counterfeiting and we would be sent to prison. Other things that have traditionally been used as currency in the event of economic collapse, such as alcohol, are tightly regulated or even illegal to produce for most people. How anyone can think that the current problems are a failure of capitalism is beyond me. Ok, it isn't really, I'm aware of the propaganda, but seriously, Jefferson warned about the effect the banks would have, how is it that people don't understand?
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
We need a restoration of the free enterprise system, not its destruction. That's quite difficult to achieve if people believe they've been living in a free market system when they are actually in a planned economy.
It's painful to see how easily people are manipulated.
Can you point to a non-political group? Even a lonely parent who decides to home-school his kids evidently has a political outlook and in fact he is implementing it.
The control a parent has over a child is temporary. There are many aspects of families and parenthood that would be considered tyrannical if implemented by governments. Families are essentially run as monarchies, more so the younger the children are. I'm not against politics being taught to children per se, I am against political indoctrination by the state as a method of population control.
I see the question as being who is in control, the government or the people? I categorise compulsory state schooling with compulsory state religion. It seems to have risen up as a government response to freedom of religion. Personally, having different political and religious views than my parents, I don't see a problem with parents teaching such things to children. The state doing it is a different matter.
executions that are as respectful of life as possible
WTF?
Hence my comment about not liking government schooling in general. You replied before I finished this comment. In case you don't want to read it, the most relevant point in this case: "It would not matter what political group controlled the system, my objection is the same."
Defeat Communism and socialism by having a purely private educational system.
In no post in this discussion have I said government has no place in education. What I am against is the compulsory indoctrination of populations through school. This is something that communists most definitely want. Marx proposed public schools as a political tool necessary to implement communism and frankly admitted that education as a form of social control was not an original idea. All totalitarians want that, especially since freedom of religion has happened. That was previously the governments favored method of thought control.
My contention is that the purpose of education ought to be to benefit the student, not to bend them to the political will of others.
Yes, having a huge uneducated underclass is really going to keep the US on top of the world.
The US had a high level of education before government schooling.
If US conservatives wanted to change society in a constructive way, they would come up with a conservative state educational system that was successful, so that people would want it for their children.
Why does the answer have to be the government doing it for you? Maybe that's your cultural heritage, mine is a bit more independent. I'd recommend reading John Taylor Gatto's book The Underground History of American Education or if you don't have time, at least the prologue Quote: "Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective."
Explain to me why the most socialist European countries have the most successful outcomes in terms of education, better than the US.
I don't know. Is it because they allow social, political and cultural values they oppose to be taught to their children by compulsion? Explain to me why I have had to deal with workers who have put their 12 years of school in but seem almost completely unable to think. (I'm not in the US by the way but a much more socialist country).
Personally I think there are many things that are good if you choose them but can be horribly bad if forced on you. Sex is one example, school most definitely has the potential to be this way. I think of the schools run by Hamas, by the Nazis, by the communists, etc where a central purpose of the school is to produce compliant slaves. Notice they do not need to change the structure of schools to do this sort of brainwashing, simply change the content. This ought to make us seriously examine our own school systems. My own examination leads me to the conclusion that compulsory government schooling has as its primary purpose to produce compliant citizens, fit to obey a corporation or government. It would not matter what political group controlled the system, my objection is the same.
That's pretty thin evidence for your claim and your claim has little to do with what I said. Show me where Science classes are to be replaced with Social Justice classes or stop wasting my time.
Thin evidence? An outright admission that he wants political, social and cultural values in the classroom that are "the exact opposite values" of the existing society? It's exactly about what you said. It probably won't result in a cancelled science class in favor of a social justice class but that the political agenda will flavor all the classes at the expense of academic rigour.
As for wasting your time, if you weren't prepared to read a comment you didn't like you came to the wrong place. Manage your own time.
There are no "60's progressives" out there any more. Or rather, the few that remain have no influence since they are so clearly senile.
That's not what Bill Ayers said in this interview.
That's one of the things that's actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator - Bill Ayers, faithfully following his 60's communist ideology to this day (well, up until October 1, 2006 anyway).
Another choice quote: But he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom.
Please drop out of any further public discussions on the interwebs, until you have done some reading on current issues and can identify your opponents.
Well, since your proposition that "60's progressives" (communists) have disappeared or lack influence has been shown to be wrong, we can conclude that either (1) you didn't know you were wrong, in which case it in necessary for those of us who understand to educate others or (2) you did know you were wrong and are trying to silence opposition to communist propaganda, in which case it is necessary for us to oppose you since we disagree with communism.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume (1). Either way, no, we won't be dropping out of public discussion.
That might be what you are hoping for, but as far as Ayer's agenda goes you are wrong.
From "Revolution, Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA" interview with Bill Ayers "he never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom" so he is very much wanting to spread that ideology in the classroom.
I assume you're referring to evolution
No, I'm talking about the political and social agenda pushed through the education system. I assume from your post that you didn't read my other linked post (since you probably wouldn't have brought up evolution otherwise). I linked to an Ayers interview http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html in which he states: "But he [John Dewey] never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom." Which is to say that Ayers regards radical political and social change to be a central purpose of the education system. As I said in my other post: "The man wants the government to force me to give him access to my children so he can indoctrinate them with cultural, political and social values I don't agree with. What's the reason I should cooperate again?".
Being a homeschooling parent, it isn't that my children are being indoctrinated, it's that I'm being forced to pay for the indoctrination of others. I'd even go as far to say that it isn't any particular part of curriculum that bothers me, nor the quality of teachers (I know some excellent teachers) but the system itself. In my view the most important and consistent lesson of mass compulsory schooling is not "think" but "obey", a lesson I see as fundamentally incompatible with a free society. This lesson is necessary to the system and largely independent of any curriculum content, although there are those that would add the propaganda content as well. Some people just aren't content to let people think for themselves.
Evolution/creation is just a distraction. We all want children to be taught the truth, both sides insisting that their view be taught and maligning the other. Both wanting the government to have their view taught. Neither side asking the real question: "What business is it of the government to decide what my children are taught". Science has a way of sticking around, I doubt very much that it would disappear without compulsory schooling. While people are arguing about content of science classes they are missing the fact that propaganda in the classroom is a favorite tool of despots. I don't want to put the tools of tyranny in the hands of anyone, whatever their beliefs.
Ok, so the guy is so brilliant, why isn't he the one with the multi-million dollar program trying to improve the school system?
He's a communist. Private entrepreneurship is not one of the favored methods of advancing communism. More highly approved by communists would be to influence the government school system so that your agenda is implemented by government force, which is the approach Ayers takes.
I wonder why conservatives don't attack education schools. This is seriously the mantra of every education program/class/professor.
Many conservatives do object to the left wing propaganda promoted throughout the education system, and even government schooling in general. I also wrote things in this reply that I won't bother to repeat now.
I address this in another reply http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1111931&cid=26693661
This interview with Bill Ayers might help you understand. "But he [John Dewey] never resolved a central contradiction in our work, the contradiction between trying to change the school and being embedded in society that has the exact opposite values culturally and politically and socially from the values you're trying to build in a classroom." Ayers openly admits that his purpose for "education" is to pursue a social and political indoctrination system. Since the interview is on "Revolution, Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA" I'm sure you can connect the dots as to what the intended indoctrination is.
When you consider the place of importance Marx and Engels give to public education as part of their revolution you will see exactly why conservatives don't like government schooling in general and Ayers in particular. If you read his pdf linked in the summary, you will see that one of his main objections to what's going on is what he calls the "ownership society" a.k.a private property rights.
The man wants the government to force me to give him access to my children so he can indoctrinate them with cultural, political and social values I don't agree with. What's the reason I should cooperate again?
wget -O
wget -O
Grub entry:
title Fedora 10 installation
root [your boot partition] /vmlinuz-fc10install /initrd-fc10install.img
kernel
initrd
You were a Mac user. Then why the hell did you come to Linux?
Apparently for some people sexual orientation can change over time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15803251?dopt=Abstract
But if you cut an $8 billion hole in Microsoft, you run the risk of making them frantic to patch that hole. And as we know, they have some pretty well-developed skills for being really aggressive at the expense of the end user.
So you're saying if a bully steals your lunch don't have him punished in case he hurts you? That might be a temporary survival tactic suitable for a small schoolchild but it's the totally wrong thinking when deciding how to apply the law to corporations in the courts. This idea of don't stop the bully being a bully because they're a bully is what encourages them in their behaviour and advances the absolute rule of corporations. If the court has to deliberately avoid making just decisions for fear of retaliation from a company then it is time for the courts to step up to the fight and get that company compliant with the law or destroyed.
Open source is people working for common good by producing something that is available for anyone to use as they need it. It is very much communism.
With your original code (not based on other people's work) you have the choice to retain it as proprietary or release it as open source. That alone makes it not communism because under communism you would have no property right to validate your choice, the government would release or retain your code as it saw fit.
RedHat, Sun, IBM etc are not communist organisations as far as I can tell. Just because something "fits very well to the idea of communism" does not make it communism or a communist idea. Having drinking water available "fits very well to the idea of communism". In fact, not a single communist government that I'm aware of has tried to eliminate the availability of drinking water. Yet having drinking water is not "communism". Likewise open source may very well fit communist ideology, but it also works well in a capitalist ideology. Remember that regardless of RMS's politics, GNU came from the US and not any of the communist countries. In my view, open source works far better than proprietary software as an enabler of capitalism. If software is seen primarily as a tool for production rather than a product to sell then freely available software lowers the barrier to entry into business.
How about workers owning the means of production, that's a communist idea right? And yet communism destroys private property rights making it impossible for the workers to own the means of production but under capitalism you have the right to acquire capital, thereby owning the means of production. I started out as a worker. Am I a communist because I now own the means by which I produce, ie: my own tools and equipment? Certainly not, that was achieved entirely by capitalism. Open source is not communism.
However, any coder producing something for the community and to boost their ego is exactly how the communism was supposed to work.
People working together for mutual benefit, charity and public works are things that were happening long before communism came along. They are not "communist ideas" (See "drinking water"). The defining characteristic of communism is that these things were to be done by government compulsion rather than as a result of free choice. As for propaganda against communism, how many implementations of communism have to result in mass deaths in the population before that becomes a valid metric with which we can assess communism? I'd say we've seen enough to make a judgement by now.
That said, even without the mass murders, communism can be rejected outright just on the basis of logical inconsistency. Communism is fundamentally self contradictory. You can't give people ownership of the means of production and the work of their hands by eliminating their property rights. That should be blatantly obvious.
The situation is a bit more complex. For instance, there are few parts in the world where individuals will not gladly accept my euros as payment; there are even lots of parts where individuals rather get paid in euros than the local currency. And if someone wants to pay me in dollars (paper money), I (and a lot of other individuals) will accept that money, as long as the conversion rate is good enough. And no, the dollar is not legal tender where I live.
It isn't more complex at all. Foreign currency doesn't change the nature of paper money, it just shifts the enforcement to another government. Without government force paper money has no value except perhaps as a collectors item. When nearly every transaction in an economy is motivated by the desire to acquire something that only has value by government edict then that economy is closer to being a command economy than a free market.
No. Money has value because one knows that someone else will accept it in return for something.
And you only know that because the government enforces the payment of debts in that currency. You can go anywhere and people will accept gold and silver as payment without the government artificially making it valuable. Without government enforcement, paper money has no trading value. So while they don't dictate the actual value of the dollar they do dictate that the dollar has any value at all.
Communism/socialism without bounds has been failing for some time now; I get the feeling that we can see more and more that capitalism without boundaries is also failing.
Government enforced monopolies are not "capitalism without boundaries".
Besides that, effectively all transactions are done with money that only has value by government decree. A free market would usually use gold, silver or some type of commodity for money. Market principles still operate but with central control of the money supply you don't have a free market.
That only applies as long as the decisions of a court are in sync with the wishes of the people.
Not with the jury system of juries being made up of the general public. If you have enough public support for your cause to win a civil war then you will on average have several people on the jury who support that cause and you can determine the outcome of any election, negating the need for the civil war.
I fully support the right to bear arms but right now a civil war would have far worse effect on the US than current copyright law. If they start having special forces hit squads doing summary executions of downloaders I'll change my mind on that, but court decisions you don't like in a system where you can be judged by a jury of your peers? Get real.