If Obama tries to be different, he risks alienating long-time democrat supporters, if he tries to be the same he risks alienating all the people who want to vote for him for change.
this is what we call the "epic fail" strategy, especially in his case.
The reason we didn't win in 2004 was because the democrats were "too weak" to differentiate themselves from the pubs.
In obama's case, where the whole point of his campaign was "CHANGE", this is the most epic of failures since the zune.
Why? In what way is your freedom to speak being reduced by someone else's policy that says you can do whatever you want as long as it's not illegal?
because they don't bother to protect you. In other words, all it takes is an accusation, or even a threat of a threat of an accusation. They shut you down and you have to retain a lawyer using money you (according to the laws of averages) do not have to "PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE". Ah, guilty until proven innocent, it's the american way.. wait a minute...
As I expected, you were too cowardly to directly answer the simple questions that cut to heart of what you're saying. So, let's try reducing it to ONE simpler one for you:
I didn't refuse to answer your question because you weren't asking one. You were simply frothing on at length about how private property should make you lord and master over other people. I did answer your question, but not with a yes or no because it's more nuanced than that. of course, only a sith deals in absolutes.. or a reaganite scumbag with an agenda against the public trust.
I will present that answer yet again:
You are intentionally confusing two separate things. For me, possession is freedom: I don't get to share my possessions with anyone and can enjoy them anytime I like and for as long as I like. However, for some people, possession is others' non-freedom, it is POWER to put them in their place, like you just tried, some sort of acquired gentry, sort of holier-then-thou. It is often masked with profit prospects, but since it is an irrational feature of a kind of mind the truth is other way around: feeling being somehow above a number of others, dominating, making them mentally suffer, is primary and monetary profit is only a secondary reward. My view of capitalism as it was pictured by freedom seekers from feudalism is: You can do whatever you want with your property... yourself. None could possibly complain to that and it is understood that it is an essence of what property actually means. However, if you are letting me use it (for a rent or whatever), or even worse, you possess it with sole purpose of letting someone else use it, it still doesn't entitle you to put additional rules upon my life, to subdue my (allegedly) unalienable freedoms. In essence, it is a core of a blackmail and should be illegal and void. We can negotiate the price of rent (amortization of rented goods plus your pure profit) and if I damage or destroy your property, you are of course surely entitled to complete reimbursement from me. You cannot let and not let at the same time. Either hold it to yourself or respect others you deal with, like you would respect your other, wealthier, business partners, or otherwise just admit that you are a hypocrite.
... there's also this answer:
and you don't see something fundamentally wrong with that?
The whole point of the US constitution was to remove the burdens of feudalism, and yet the above post describes exactly that.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
In the days of our forefathers, The estates of the nobility were also the primary economic units.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government. To do otherwise is to erect half a fence, and put a sign on the other half saying "it would be nice if you didn't enter", all the while claiming airtight security.
In other words, the spurious "private property" crap needs to end when you start leasing it out for others to use. At that point it needs to be treated like public property, barring permanent damage on the part of the tenant.
After reading Obama's explanation it looks like he wants to show he can compromise with the rightwing, and probably appear more moderate to the on-the-fence voters.
This was not the issue to compromise on, hell it's not even a "right wing" issue. The traditional right believe in small government specifically because limiting it prevents this kind of invasive crap.
If he wanted to compromise with the right wing, he could do it on gun control, or by proposing a centralized health insurance company (structured to be independent like the fed) rather than towing the line on "socialized medicine".
She cosigned the induce act, remember that lovely piece of legislation? The one that would have made the general purpose pc, the smart phone, the blackberry, and the ipod illegal?
yeah, she's such a great, "stand-up for the little guy" kind of politican.
You can run your own website for a few dollars a month: -On someone else's private property i mean err.. servers -Using a domain name registrar who is third party, and is leasing "THEIR PRIVATE PROPERTY", e.g. the domain name, to you, and "reserve the right to remove it".
etc. etc. a few dollars is horse hockey!. You have to own it end to end. The domain name registrar, the server hardware, the hard line, the backbone. Bill gates could "own" a website as his own private property, but few others could.
There have been rulings by sock puppet judges claiming otherwise, claiming that it only refers to laws which would retroactively make things ILLEGAL and put people in jail for things which weren't a crime.
This is not mentioned in the clause though, which specifically states: "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
This is yet the second time i'm mentioning slashdot helped bury this.
I'm an old school moderate, which, since 1994, means I'm "OMG PINKO LEFTIST GODLESS COMMIE ENEMY OF THE STATE", and I sacrificed karma by the pana-max shipfull pointing this out.
All to no avail, the leftist version of the moronic bushite scum we love to hate descended upon my posts and anyone who dared to agree with my assertions this man should be examined under the same scepticism as any other beltway sellout with zealous fury, "-1 troll" mods in hand.
If you hate the irrational blindness of bush supporters, then mod someone calling for skepticism of Obama, you are a hypocrite.
Ah, so because the flag stayed the same, that means the ideology stayed the same?
I don't think so.
Some may try to rationalize and deny it, but the US has already become a neo-fascist regime. The media is it's own special interest trading with government. There are "press blackouts" of important issues just like shirow envisioned in ghost in the shell, and the checks and balances have been gone for 7 years already.
I'll say it, and I want you to write it until you actually do it: "Wake UP!"
until someone disagrees with you, forges a DMCA notice, and your site gets nuked by ICANN, Your ISP, Your web host, or any of the "private property" holders who are between you and "your site".
They don't care if it's actually hosting illegal content or not, which in this hypothetical case it is not, but you have no recourse, and they get to do whatever they want because it's "their private property".
This is bullcrap. It's nothing more than feudalism hidden behind an intellectually dishonest facade of "private property"
The plain and simple is, you believe in feudalism. You believe the haves should be able to gag the have-nots, and engage in intellectually dishonest rhetoric about "private property" to further this agenda.
I'll quote an astute point made which was passed over by the mods:
You are intentionally confusing two separate things. For me, possession is freedom: I don't get to share my possessions with anyone and can enjoy them anytime I like and for as long as I like. However, for some people, possession is others' non-freedom, it is POWER to put them in their place, like you just tried, some sort of acquired gentry, sort of holier-then-thou. It is often masked with profit prospects, but since it is an irrational feature of a kind of mind the truth is other way around: feeling being somehow above a number of others, dominating, making them mentally suffer, is primary and monetary profit is only a secondary reward. My view of capitalism as it was pictured by freedom seekers from feudalism is: You can do whatever you want with your property... yourself. None could possibly complain to that and it is understood that it is an essence of what property actually means. However, if you are letting me use it (for a rent or whatever), or even worse, you possess it with sole purpose of letting someone else use it, it still doesn't entitle you to put additional rules upon my life, to subdue my (allegedly) unalienable freedoms. In essence, it is a core of a blackmail and should be illegal and void. We can negotiate the price of rent (amortization of rented goods plus your pure profit) and if I damage or destroy your property, you are of course surely entitled to complete reimbursement from me. You cannot let and not let at the same time. Either hold it to yourself or respect others you deal with, like you would respect your other, wealthier, business partners, or otherwise just admit that you are a hypocrite.
cops as a whole (though maybe not some individually) are hyper-conservative authoritarians.
They incite the crowd by acting first, then conveniently "omit" that in their final report.
By the way, if you acted in a way where a large enough crowd gathers to effectively block access to your property, then that's your fault and not theirs.
Even if we were to stipulate that (which is nonsense, because you're presuming that the property owner is not subject to the rule of law, which is false), a web site like flickr has no such market share/power.
first off. contract law means they can get you to sign away pretty much everything.
Second, the very fact their TOS remains that way shows they have that much market share. If they didn't have that much power, they would not be able to stipulate that kind of catch-all "we own you" clause.
If they didn't have the power to force you to take their terms, then there wouldn't be that clause saying 'we can do whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want, without prior notice'.
if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door
Which might be worth talking about, except that the government doesn't play the role of running commercial web sites. These two have nothing to do with each other. In a feudal society, the contracts between you and a third party aren't governed by a constitutional framework. Which your contract with Flickr IS, when you agree to it.
Yeah, because we all know competitors are offering better terms of service, right?
this brings us back to my point. When a property owner has sufficient market power, they gain equivalent authority to government. They should be held to the same constitutional accountability.
You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
According to court precedent, this is not the case when serious constitutional rights are abrogated. Companies are not allowed to cam the lady's restroom, nor are they allowed to engage in discriminatory polices on premises.. in the regular world the government has sued again and again for violation of constitutional rights based on this (think the civil rights era). Yet you say it's perfectly OK for webhosts to be capriciously discriminatory.
It's plain and simple.. if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door.
Yes, but that all was only needed in the first place because of prior government restrictions. In a truly free market, people wouldn't have to pay taxes, there would be no patents, copyright, etc. In those conditions racism, sexism, and etc. don't fly. We would also have virtually 0 monopolies, and some things would progress at a faster rate.
I suggest you read the journal entry in my sig if you think no monopoly would arise in a "truly free market"..assuming such a thing actually ever existed in the first place (hint: the last time it did we didn't have metal tools).
and you don't see something fundamentally wrong with that?
The whole point of the US constitution was to remove the burdens of feudalism, and yet the above post describes exactly that.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
In the days of our forefathers, The estates of the nobility were also the primary economic units.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government. To do otherwise is to erect half a fence, and put a sign on the other half saying "it would be nice if you didn't enter", all the while claiming airtight security.
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property.
except theyre renting it out to individuals for the express purpose of their own expression, whether it's for directly paid fees or advertising revenue from traffic. Their interference/censorship at any point in this process is equivalent to a landlord entering your house in the dead of night and ripping down your kids rap posters because he doesn't like that "negro music".
You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
According to court precedent, this is not the case when serious constitutional rights are abrogated. Companies are not allowed to cam the lady's restroom, nor are they allowed to engage in discriminatory polices on premises.. in the regular world the government has sued again and again for violation of constitutional rights based on this (think the civil rights era). Yet you say it's perfectly OK for webhosts to be capriciously discriminatory.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place.
And If I rented it to you and tried the same thing you'd put me in garnishment until my great grandchildren were too old to reproduce.
Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
false dichotomy. I am not opening my house and advertising it as a public forum like these web hosts are.
Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it.
And nobody is forcing you to visit the websites or view the pictures hosted there, but they have an obligation to treat people equally and not discriminate on them based on political views or aesthetic tastes.
Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
Yes more. If your press is for hire, like the server, you are not allowed to turn people who like the conservatives away because you support the liberal party.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
Apparently you missed the memo at the turn of the 19th century. In the times of our forefathers, royalty also controlled the economic markets, as their estates were the megacorps of the day. In industrial and post-industrial global economics, nationals and multinationals hold equivalent or greater power than governments, and need to be held to the same accountability.
Slashdot Mirror
If Obama tries to be different, he risks alienating long-time democrat supporters, if he tries to be the same he risks alienating all the people who want to vote for him for change.
this is what we call the "epic fail" strategy, especially in his case.
The reason we didn't win in 2004 was because the democrats were "too weak" to differentiate themselves from the pubs.
In obama's case, where the whole point of his campaign was "CHANGE", this is the most epic of failures since the zune.
If Obama isn't elected, far worse will occur in terms of civil liberties than if he wins.
Are you sure?
1 - Democrats, and obama in general, tend to have a very good grasp of technology.
2 - While Republicans pillage society based on the old industrial cartels, dems do it on behalf of the entertainment cartels.
usually 1+2=3, but in this case 1+2 = "dead internet"
There is an alternative to tweedle-dee and tweedle-dee... vote for him.
It's as if millions of australians fired up their ebay and bit torrent clients.
Why? In what way is your freedom to speak being reduced by someone else's policy that says you can do whatever you want as long as it's not illegal?
because they don't bother to protect you. In other words, all it takes is an accusation, or even a threat of a threat of an accusation. They shut you down and you have to retain a lawyer using money you (according to the laws of averages) do not have to "PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE".
Ah, guilty until proven innocent, it's the american way.. wait a minute...
As I expected, you were too cowardly to directly answer the simple questions that cut to heart of what you're saying. So, let's try reducing it to ONE simpler one for you:
I didn't refuse to answer your question because you weren't asking one. You were simply frothing on at length about how private property should make you lord and master over other people. I did answer your question, but not with a yes or no because it's more nuanced than that. of course, only a sith deals in absolutes.. or a reaganite scumbag with an agenda against the public trust.
I will present that answer yet again:
there's also this answer:
and you don't see something fundamentally wrong with that?
The whole point of the US constitution was to remove the burdens of feudalism, and yet the above post describes exactly that.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
In the days of our forefathers, The estates of the nobility were also the primary economic units.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government. To do otherwise is to erect half a fence, and put a sign on the other half saying "it would be nice if you didn't enter", all the while claiming airtight security.
In other words, the spurious "private property" crap needs to end when you start leasing it out for others to use. At that point it needs to be treated like public property, barring permanent damage on the part of the tenant.
After reading Obama's explanation it looks like he wants to show he can compromise with the rightwing, and probably appear more moderate to the on-the-fence voters.
This was not the issue to compromise on, hell it's not even a "right wing" issue. The traditional right believe in small government specifically because limiting it prevents this kind of invasive crap.
If he wanted to compromise with the right wing, he could do it on gun control, or by proposing a centralized health insurance company (structured to be independent like the fed) rather than towing the line on "socialized medicine".
Honestly, it's not as if some robot is paintaing abstract art or writing poetry here.
Robots exceeding humans in strength and precision when designed to do so is not news, it's our technology "working as intended".
If they didn't exceed human strength or precision, i'd expect articles like "engineer blacklisted as incompetent for designing defective robotics"
She cosigned the induce act, remember that lovely piece of legislation? The one that would have made the general purpose pc, the smart phone, the blackberry, and the ipod illegal?
yeah, she's such a great, "stand-up for the little guy" kind of politican.
You can run your own website for a few dollars a month:
-On someone else's private property i mean err.. servers
-Using a domain name registrar who is third party, and is leasing "THEIR PRIVATE PROPERTY", e.g. the domain name, to you, and "reserve the right to remove it".
etc. etc. a few dollars is horse hockey!. You have to own it end to end. The domain name registrar, the server hardware, the hard line, the backbone. Bill gates could "own" a website as his own private property, but few others could.
ex post facto laws are unconstitutional.
There have been rulings by sock puppet judges claiming otherwise, claiming that it only refers to laws which would retroactively make things ILLEGAL and put people in jail for things which weren't a crime.
This is not mentioned in the clause though, which specifically states:
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
This is yet the second time i'm mentioning slashdot helped bury this.
I'm an old school moderate, which, since 1994, means I'm "OMG PINKO LEFTIST GODLESS COMMIE ENEMY OF THE STATE", and I sacrificed karma by the pana-max shipfull pointing this out.
All to no avail, the leftist version of the moronic bushite scum we love to hate descended upon my posts and anyone who dared to agree with my assertions this man should be examined under the same scepticism as any other beltway sellout with zealous fury, "-1 troll" mods in hand.
If you hate the irrational blindness of bush supporters, then mod someone calling for skepticism of Obama, you are a hypocrite.
Ah, so because the flag stayed the same, that means the ideology stayed the same?
I don't think so.
Some may try to rationalize and deny it, but the US has already become a neo-fascist regime. The media is it's own special interest trading with government. There are "press blackouts" of important issues just like shirow envisioned in ghost in the shell, and the checks and balances have been gone for 7 years already.
I'll say it, and I want you to write it until you actually do it: "Wake UP!"
the old, so-called, "Fairness Doctrine" that once censored conservative propaganda with a capital "P" on television and radio broadcasting
[
until someone disagrees with you, forges a DMCA notice, and your site gets nuked by ICANN, Your ISP, Your web host, or any of the "private property" holders who are between you and "your site".
They don't care if it's actually hosting illegal content or not, which in this hypothetical case it is not, but you have no recourse, and they get to do whatever they want because it's "their private property".
This is bullcrap. It's nothing more than feudalism hidden behind an intellectually dishonest facade of "private property"
blah blah blah froth froth forth...
The plain and simple is, you believe in feudalism. You believe the haves should be able to gag the have-nots, and engage in intellectually dishonest rhetoric about "private property" to further this agenda.
I'll quote an astute point made which was passed over by the mods:
read it here
what country do you live in where a hard line costs 50 bucks a month?!
if you buy your own server, the web provider will cut the account, if you own the web provider, icann will kill your domain name.. it never ends..
you would need millions of dollars to own everything from end to end.
that's a crock.
cops as a whole (though maybe not some individually) are hyper-conservative authoritarians.
They incite the crowd by acting first, then conveniently "omit" that in their final report.
By the way, if you acted in a way where a large enough crowd gathers to effectively block access to your property, then that's your fault and not theirs.
ah, so only rich people are entitled to freedom, how nice of you to betray your elitism.
Even if we were to stipulate that (which is nonsense, because you're presuming that the property owner is not subject to the rule of law, which is false), a web site like flickr has no such market share/power.
first off. contract law means they can get you to sign away pretty much everything.
Second, the very fact their TOS remains that way shows they have that much market share. If they didn't have that much power, they would not be able to stipulate that kind of catch-all "we own you" clause.
how is that not the case?
If they didn't have the power to force you to take their terms, then there wouldn't be that clause saying 'we can do whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want, without prior notice'.
if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door
Which might be worth talking about, except that the government doesn't play the role of running commercial web sites. These two have nothing to do with each other. In a feudal society, the contracts between you and a third party aren't governed by a constitutional framework. Which your contract with Flickr IS, when you agree to it.
Yeah, because we all know competitors are offering better terms of service, right?
this brings us back to my point. When a property owner has sufficient market power, they gain equivalent authority to government. They should be held to the same constitutional accountability.
I notice your careful avoidance of this point:
According to court precedent, this is not the case when serious constitutional rights are abrogated. Companies are not allowed to cam the lady's restroom, nor are they allowed to engage in discriminatory polices on premises.. in the regular world the government has sued again and again for violation of constitutional rights based on this (think the civil rights era). Yet you say it's perfectly OK for webhosts to be capriciously discriminatory.
It's plain and simple.. if you don't hold large property owners to the same constitutional standards as the governments whose power they equal, you have ushered feudalism in through the back door.
Yes, but that all was only needed in the first place because of prior government restrictions. In a truly free market, people wouldn't have to pay taxes, there would be no patents, copyright, etc. In those conditions racism, sexism, and etc. don't fly. We would also have virtually 0 monopolies, and some things would progress at a faster rate.
I suggest you read the journal entry in my sig if you think no monopoly would arise in a "truly free market"..assuming such a thing actually ever existed in the first place (hint: the last time it did we didn't have metal tools).
and you don't see something fundamentally wrong with that?
The whole point of the US constitution was to remove the burdens of feudalism, and yet the above post describes exactly that.
If you're on someone's land, even if you're paying them for the use of it, you are not free, period. They dictate your life.
The "private property" angle is no more than a backdoor for tyranny.
In the days of our forefathers, The estates of the nobility were also the primary economic units.
In the modern world, corporations have equivalent or greater power than government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards as government. To do otherwise is to erect half a fence, and put a sign on the other half saying "it would be nice if you didn't enter", all the while claiming airtight security.
Or how about cue some common sense? If I'm on your private property, I have no fucking rights over you or your property. It's your private property.
except theyre renting it out to individuals for the express purpose of their own expression, whether it's for directly paid fees or advertising revenue from traffic.
Their interference/censorship at any point in this process is equivalent to a landlord entering your house in the dead of night and ripping down your kids rap posters because he doesn't like that "negro music".
You have the right to control who can be on it, or use it. Otherwise it's not really yours. It's that simple.
According to court precedent, this is not the case when serious constitutional rights are abrogated. Companies are not allowed to cam the lady's restroom, nor are they allowed to engage in discriminatory polices on premises.. in the regular world the government has sued again and again for violation of constitutional rights based on this (think the civil rights era). Yet you say it's perfectly OK for webhosts to be capriciously discriminatory.
If I happened to be over at your house and started spewing stuff that you find offensive, you're well within your rights to ask me to leave or not to let me in in the first place.
And If I rented it to you and tried the same thing you'd put me in garnishment until my great grandchildren were too old to reproduce.
Or are you saying that I can drop by your house at any time I wish, and start telling obscene jokes to your wife? I mean, if you don't, you're censoring my free speech, right? You wouldn't want to sound like a "reaganite", would you?
false dichotomy. I am not opening my house and advertising it as a public forum like these web hosts are.
Get this: freedom of speech doesn't mean that anyone else is forced to listen to you, nor that anyone else must help you spread it.
And nobody is forcing you to visit the websites or view the pictures hosted there, but they have an obligation to treat people equally and not discriminate on them based on political views or aesthetic tastes.
Freedom of press applies to whoever owns the press. That's it. It means that if you have a newspaper (or in modern days a server), the government can't come tell you to remove an anti-Bush column. No more.
Yes more. If your press is for hire, like the server, you are not allowed to turn people who like the conservatives away because you support the liberal party.
In short, it doesn't grant you power over anyone. It just says that the government can't have certain powers over you.
Apparently you missed the memo at the turn of the 19th century. In the times of our forefathers, royalty also controlled the economic markets, as their estates were the megacorps of the day. In industrial and post-industrial global economics, nationals and multinationals hold equivalent or greater power than governments, and need to be held to the same accountability.
This guy needs a mod-up.
The establishment of "free speech zones" marked the end of the US as a free constitutional republic.
We entered fascist territory then, and have been plunging into the abyss ever since.