Violent revolutions almost always make things worse. 1776 might have been an exception, but I'm starting to believe that was nothing more than propaganda. When (not if...there's always a when) push comes to shove, there probably will be some shots involved. The shooting had been going on for years before the Declaration.
If this turns into a shooting match, the rebels will be crushed. Sherman's March will look like a picnic in comparison. So let's find a way to work this out peacefully. In our lifetimes. I was raised to believe in "the buck stops here" attitude. Leaving it to future generations is the cowardly tactic that our ancestors took to place us in this position. Do we really want to make it worse for our kids?
This is wishful thinking. US troops have been deployed against US citizens in the past. The War Between the States is the most brutally obvious example that we've been indoctrinated to fear. But they've been deployed depressingly often to break up strikes.
A fairly recent survey showed that something like 70% of them would obey if ordered to fire on unarmed US civilians. History shows that the rest would be hanged as traitors. Bradley Manning is setting an important example right now.
Yes, the militarized police are scary. The Branch Davidians give us a good idea of what we can look forward to, if things turn violent. Not just the government's cold brutality. The rest of the country's apathy. Most people I run across still believe those poor people deserved to be burned alive. But the military will get involved if people seriously start shooting back. The best explanation I've heard for Iraq is that it was conditioning them to shoot unarmed civilians.
And Adams warned us about legislation against criticizing the gov't.
To be fair, he was probably thinking of Ike's warning about the military-industrial complex. I'd blame this on public education rather than trolling. Even if it did come from an AC. Then again, I'm feeling optimistic today.
I'm a registered Republican. I'm more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. I absolutely despise Obama. I am absolutely furious that people like you made me try to pick between him and McCain last time (for the record, as bad as Obama is, I still believe McCain would have been worse).
I am very seriously looking at finding another country to live in because it looks like idiots like you are going to nominate either Romney or Gingrich. Santorum I could understand. At least he looks like he has meaningful differences with Obama, if you aren't paying much attention.
As much as I hate the terms...Gingrich is a hypocritical liberal big-government RINO.
He isn't completely indistinguishable from Obama like Romney on every issue that matters, but the differences aren't enough to matter.
You're pretty much describing exactly the system we have in America today. The press can say anything they want, and there isn't any way to know who (if anyone) is telling the truth.
The mainstream media corporations are owned by conglomerates who also happen to own lots of politicians (and banks). It's in their interest to promote a system where people don't think too much about what's really going on. This is one of the major reasons they devote so much airtime to broken celebrity marriages while neglecting scandals like this, Fast and Furious, the latest defense appropriations bill, etc, etc. Not to mention things like, say, the freaking wars. A few of them have admitted (off the record) to me that their job is about ratings, not truth. Very few even realize that their job is more about obscurity than anything else.
The only method I've found for finding anything close to "truth" is to scour publications from across the political spectrum. Compare and contrast with al Jazeera and the BBC. Keep track of what various bloggers (of different mindsets) are saying. Keep my finger on the post of opinion sites like/. Assume that anything the MSM claims about a topic is a lie. Enjoy the internet as a fact-checking mechanism while it's available.
Compared to the morass of lies that is general accepted in America as "journalism", libel and slander are minor irritants, at worst.
Lying to sell a product is totally different. That is fraud. For the vast majority of the herd, the MSM completely excludes everyone else's press. But, hey. They have the money, and the credentials. So they must be telling everybody all the important stuff, right?
Maybe things are different in Canada. In the US, the media has become the propaganda arm for the giant commercial arm that owns 'our' government. Oh, hey, look! This star basketball player got suspended for three games some mysterious reason!
IANAL, but, AFAICT, speculation and innuendo most definitely are protected. "Real" journalists do that sort of thing all the time.
e.g. Headline: Is Obama a Muslim? Story: Of course he isn't...
Most people just read the headline. A few months later, their brains will have filtered out the smaller words and just remember "Obama, Muslim". That's one of the big reasons so many people today still believe he is.
I don't remember the target, but I remember a long-running smear campaign a few years back. Some guy registered a domain named something along the lines of so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com then put up a website full of innuendo. Things like "Are the rumors that so-and-so molests children true? We here at so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com don't believe them for a second. Anonymous sources claim that so-and-so enjoys torturing kittens, but we don't think those sources are credible."
IIRC, the legal battle was pretty spectacular. After the website owner won, they kissed and made up. He transferred ownership of the domain to his target, and it's been largely forgotten. I'm not having any luck tracking it down on google, so this is hearsay and should probably be ignored.
We also have a lot of leeway when providing examples. It would probably be libel for someone to write "Alex Greeley, of Frog Leap, ND sells illegal fireworks" (I intend that example to be completely fictional. If there is such a person and place, I apologize profusely. I did not mean anything by it). But I could have used a real person and place and probably gotten away with it just fine.
Anyway. What you can't do is come out and make inflammatory declarative statements directly. She apparently wrote that the behavior of some lawyer (who she named) in some case (which she cited) was criminal. No evidence beyond an anonymous source. "Real" journalists can't get away with that sort of thing.
To me, that's why this ruling is so scary. It doesn't seem relevant to the case at hand.
The thing is, Americans take freedom of speech and the press very seriously. Or, at least, we should.
There's a vital reason they're enshrined in the very first Amendment. Right behind freedom of religion. These principles are much more serious than libel and slander. We should be extremely wary of anything that threatens them.
The really sad thing is that corporations donating money for political ads is considered protected free speech. Just more proof of who owns 'our' government.
I'm not claiming that libel/slander are good things. Or even that they aren't serious. Just that this sets the precedent that anyone without the 'proper' credentials can now be suppressed. Say, anyone who questions the official 9/11 story, or criticizes the reasons for going back into Iraq, or points out skeletons in a politician's closet...the potential for abuse here is pretty much limitless.
I'm not going to do your research for you <G>, and I'm not sure I believe a minimum wage is "worthless."
It's a really long topic for discussion. But the basic overview (AIUI) runs along these lines:
A worker's own self-interest keeps the boss from royally fucking him. If he isn't satisfied with how much he's getting paid, he's free to get another job. If no one else is willing to work at that rate, then the boss has to make a better offer.
The idea behind strikes and unions is very closely tied into this. If you have useless dangerous jobs that you could train a chimp to do, and feel like it would be worth $1 an hour to have a human do it instead, that worker really does not have any bargaining power. If all your valuable skilled workers go on strike to get him some safety equipment, it's a lot more likely to happen.
With no minimum wage, if you have three cushy jobs that are worth $3 an hour to your business, you could hire some unskilled teenagers to do them at that rate. They get cushy jobs and start gaining experience in the work force (which is a really important thing to keep in mind). With minimum wage, you have to hire one person to do all 3 jobs, which makes them a lot less cushy and destroys two jobs.
That "gaining experience in the work force" is a really important factor to consider. In a lot of ways, we're still in the middle of the worst economic disaster since the Depression. We have a lot of kids in their mid-20s who are living at home and have never had a job. The entry-level ones they should have worked in high school are filled with people in their mid-30s or 40s who are desperately trying to support families. This kind of long-term unemployment is disastrous for many aspects of their lives. If they could get some job, any job, for $2 an hour...I suspect most would turn their nose up at the chance. But I'm sure some would jump at it.
In my mind, that's kind of where the argument loses at least a little steam. With no minimum wage, the bosses could fire the middle-age people and easily replace them with eager younglings for, say, 1/3 the price. But, if they're willing to do the work for less, shouldn't that option be available to them? I mean, this seems like basic "supply/demand" and "right to make your own decisions about how you spend your time" to me.
In a lot of ways, that ties in with the idea that illegals "steal" American jobs because they work for so little, undercutting minimum wage. There may be some truth to this. I don't really know what (if anything) it says about the minimum wage discussion. OTOH, I've worked for a few people who strongly preferred hiring illegals. Not because they're cheaper (we got paid the same) but because they work so much harder.
Personally, I think minimum wage is, at best, a band-aid on a much bigger problem. We get focused on questions like it and ignore the more fundamental questions. (Whatever they may be).
I know this isn't the answer you're looking for. But hopefully it's a little more useful than Arlet's.
Re:The greatest thing we can do for society
on
The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 1
That last part is really the misconception that underlies one of the core truths of our culture. The idea that those things should be locked up and dribbled out in exchange for work.
If that changes, so will pretty much everything else about our reality. Personally, I think this would be a really Good Thing.
Historically speaking, abundance-style cultures like smbell is talking about are much happier all around. They're still human, so of course those problems are still present. But they're much less prevalent. Because their people are so much happier the ones in scarcity-driven cultures like ours.
How many "primitive" cultures have we run across who voluntarily embraced our way of life?
Imagine a society in which there aren't any "poor", because everyone has free and open access to the resources that matter (food, most importantly). There'd probably still be the rich, because of the originally mentioned tendency of some to accumulate junk they don't need, but, really, who cares?
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Violent revolutions almost always make things worse. 1776 might have been an exception, but I'm starting to believe that was nothing more than propaganda. When (not if...there's always a when) push comes to shove, there probably will be some shots involved. The shooting had been going on for years before the Declaration.
If this turns into a shooting match, the rebels will be crushed. Sherman's March will look like a picnic in comparison. So let's find a way to work this out peacefully. In our lifetimes. I was raised to believe in "the buck stops here" attitude. Leaving it to future generations is the cowardly tactic that our ancestors took to place us in this position. Do we really want to make it worse for our kids?
This is wishful thinking. US troops have been deployed against US citizens in the past. The War Between the States is the most brutally obvious example that we've been indoctrinated to fear. But they've been deployed depressingly often to break up strikes.
A fairly recent survey showed that something like 70% of them would obey if ordered to fire on unarmed US civilians. History shows that the rest would be hanged as traitors. Bradley Manning is setting an important example right now.
Yes, the militarized police are scary. The Branch Davidians give us a good idea of what we can look forward to, if things turn violent. Not just the government's cold brutality. The rest of the country's apathy. Most people I run across still believe those poor people deserved to be burned alive. But the military will get involved if people seriously start shooting back. The best explanation I've heard for Iraq is that it was conditioning them to shoot unarmed civilians.
I think Ron Paul and his fan base are probably the exceptions that prove the rule. You are pretty much totally correct.
Same here. It's a sad, scary thought.
There's a lot of truth in this.
And Adams warned us about legislation against criticizing the gov't. To be fair, he was probably thinking of Ike's warning about the military-industrial complex. I'd blame this on public education rather than trolling. Even if it did come from an AC. Then again, I'm feeling optimistic today.
The KKK's in the closet these days, but it's still alive and kicking. As sad as that is.
Good point. America has turned into an extremely scary place to live.
I'm a registered Republican. I'm more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. I absolutely despise Obama. I am absolutely furious that people like you made me try to pick between him and McCain last time (for the record, as bad as Obama is, I still believe McCain would have been worse).
I am very seriously looking at finding another country to live in because it looks like idiots like you are going to nominate either Romney or Gingrich. Santorum I could understand. At least he looks like he has meaningful differences with Obama, if you aren't paying much attention.
As much as I hate the terms...Gingrich is a hypocritical liberal big-government RINO. He isn't completely indistinguishable from Obama like Romney on every issue that matters, but the differences aren't enough to matter.
You're pretty much describing exactly the system we have in America today. The press can say anything they want, and there isn't any way to know who (if anyone) is telling the truth.
The mainstream media corporations are owned by conglomerates who also happen to own lots of politicians (and banks). It's in their interest to promote a system where people don't think too much about what's really going on. This is one of the major reasons they devote so much airtime to broken celebrity marriages while neglecting scandals like this, Fast and Furious, the latest defense appropriations bill, etc, etc. Not to mention things like, say, the freaking wars. A few of them have admitted (off the record) to me that their job is about ratings, not truth. Very few even realize that their job is more about obscurity than anything else.
The only method I've found for finding anything close to "truth" is to scour publications from across the political spectrum. Compare and contrast with al Jazeera and the BBC. Keep track of what various bloggers (of different mindsets) are saying. Keep my finger on the post of opinion sites like /. Assume that anything the MSM claims about a topic is a lie. Enjoy the internet as a fact-checking mechanism while it's available.
Compared to the morass of lies that is general accepted in America as "journalism", libel and slander are minor irritants, at worst.
Lying to sell a product is totally different. That is fraud. For the vast majority of the herd, the MSM completely excludes everyone else's press. But, hey. They have the money, and the credentials. So they must be telling everybody all the important stuff, right?
Maybe things are different in Canada. In the US, the media has become the propaganda arm for the giant commercial arm that owns 'our' government. Oh, hey, look! This star basketball player got suspended for three games some mysterious reason!
IANAL, but, AFAICT, speculation and innuendo most definitely are protected. "Real" journalists do that sort of thing all the time.
e.g. Headline: Is Obama a Muslim? Story: Of course he isn't...
Most people just read the headline. A few months later, their brains will have filtered out the smaller words and just remember "Obama, Muslim". That's one of the big reasons so many people today still believe he is.
I don't remember the target, but I remember a long-running smear campaign a few years back. Some guy registered a domain named something along the lines of so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com then put up a website full of innuendo. Things like "Are the rumors that so-and-so molests children true? We here at so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com don't believe them for a second. Anonymous sources claim that so-and-so enjoys torturing kittens, but we don't think those sources are credible."
IIRC, the legal battle was pretty spectacular. After the website owner won, they kissed and made up. He transferred ownership of the domain to his target, and it's been largely forgotten. I'm not having any luck tracking it down on google, so this is hearsay and should probably be ignored.
We also have a lot of leeway when providing examples. It would probably be libel for someone to write "Alex Greeley, of Frog Leap, ND sells illegal fireworks" (I intend that example to be completely fictional. If there is such a person and place, I apologize profusely. I did not mean anything by it). But I could have used a real person and place and probably gotten away with it just fine.
Anyway. What you can't do is come out and make inflammatory declarative statements directly. She apparently wrote that the behavior of some lawyer (who she named) in some case (which she cited) was criminal. No evidence beyond an anonymous source. "Real" journalists can't get away with that sort of thing.
To me, that's why this ruling is so scary. It doesn't seem relevant to the case at hand.
Whichever, it's very scary stuff.
Well put.
Bingo.
The thing is, Americans take freedom of speech and the press very seriously. Or, at least, we should.
There's a vital reason they're enshrined in the very first Amendment. Right behind freedom of religion. These principles are much more serious than libel and slander. We should be extremely wary of anything that threatens them.
The really sad thing is that corporations donating money for political ads is considered protected free speech. Just more proof of who owns 'our' government.
I'm not claiming that libel/slander are good things. Or even that they aren't serious. Just that this sets the precedent that anyone without the 'proper' credentials can now be suppressed. Say, anyone who questions the official 9/11 story, or criticizes the reasons for going back into Iraq, or points out skeletons in a politician's closet...the potential for abuse here is pretty much limitless.
Yep, exactly.
I'd call them downright tyrannical.
Who does the auditing? Where do they get the authority to do so?
I'm not going to do your research for you <G>, and I'm not sure I believe a minimum wage is "worthless."
It's a really long topic for discussion. But the basic overview (AIUI) runs along these lines:
A worker's own self-interest keeps the boss from royally fucking him. If he isn't satisfied with how much he's getting paid, he's free to get another job. If no one else is willing to work at that rate, then the boss has to make a better offer.
The idea behind strikes and unions is very closely tied into this. If you have useless dangerous jobs that you could train a chimp to do, and feel like it would be worth $1 an hour to have a human do it instead, that worker really does not have any bargaining power. If all your valuable skilled workers go on strike to get him some safety equipment, it's a lot more likely to happen.
With no minimum wage, if you have three cushy jobs that are worth $3 an hour to your business, you could hire some unskilled teenagers to do them at that rate. They get cushy jobs and start gaining experience in the work force (which is a really important thing to keep in mind). With minimum wage, you have to hire one person to do all 3 jobs, which makes them a lot less cushy and destroys two jobs.
That "gaining experience in the work force" is a really important factor to consider. In a lot of ways, we're still in the middle of the worst economic disaster since the Depression. We have a lot of kids in their mid-20s who are living at home and have never had a job. The entry-level ones they should have worked in high school are filled with people in their mid-30s or 40s who are desperately trying to support families. This kind of long-term unemployment is disastrous for many aspects of their lives. If they could get some job, any job, for $2 an hour...I suspect most would turn their nose up at the chance. But I'm sure some would jump at it.
In my mind, that's kind of where the argument loses at least a little steam. With no minimum wage, the bosses could fire the middle-age people and easily replace them with eager younglings for, say, 1/3 the price. But, if they're willing to do the work for less, shouldn't that option be available to them? I mean, this seems like basic "supply/demand" and "right to make your own decisions about how you spend your time" to me.
In a lot of ways, that ties in with the idea that illegals "steal" American jobs because they work for so little, undercutting minimum wage. There may be some truth to this. I don't really know what (if anything) it says about the minimum wage discussion. OTOH, I've worked for a few people who strongly preferred hiring illegals. Not because they're cheaper (we got paid the same) but because they work so much harder.
Personally, I think minimum wage is, at best, a band-aid on a much bigger problem. We get focused on questions like it and ignore the more fundamental questions. (Whatever they may be).
I know this isn't the answer you're looking for. But hopefully it's a little more useful than Arlet's.
But $2/hr is usually a little better than $0.
You're absolutely correct about this.
That last part is really the misconception that underlies one of the core truths of our culture. The idea that those things should be locked up and dribbled out in exchange for work.
If that changes, so will pretty much everything else about our reality. Personally, I think this would be a really Good Thing.
Historically speaking, abundance-style cultures like smbell is talking about are much happier all around. They're still human, so of course those problems are still present. But they're much less prevalent. Because their people are so much happier the ones in scarcity-driven cultures like ours.
How many "primitive" cultures have we run across who voluntarily embraced our way of life?
Redistribution is just another word for theft.
Imagine a society in which there aren't any "poor", because everyone has free and open access to the resources that matter (food, most importantly). There'd probably still be the rich, because of the originally mentioned tendency of some to accumulate junk they don't need, but, really, who cares?