People voting for the underdog in the early primaries gave some joker third-tier Arkansas governor candidate momentum to break through to the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. That wasn't so long ago, was it? Certainly it was in the age of television and big money and all that crap everyone seems to trot out here to argue (I think unbelievably faithlessly) that everything is hopeless and we should just sell our votes for iPods.
I think you might be surprised this time around. I didn't believe that a libertarian could ever gain traction again either, but people are starting to get rightly sick of the stuff coming out of government these days that there are so many libertarian pressure points lying around to be pushed, and Paul (having listened to him do the rounds on talk shows lately) is starting to push them. Lots of people are sick of us spending billions upon billions to have military bases in Germany, Japan, Korea, et al. to say nothing of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lots of people are sick of the drug war and are not seeing the sense of prohibition anymore, especially given its costs in lives and money. Lots of people were angry with the Kelo decision and the idea that government can use public power to take their homes and businesses away just to turn around and give them to other private businesses. Lots of people are sick of the cops being armed like the fucking marines and patrolling the halls of schools and streets and harassing people with impunity. Lots of people are sick of corporate welfare, interest rate manipulations making their savings inflate into toilet paper bills, and being taxed more and more for less and less benefit.
I honestly think that a lot of people are willing to look past the parts of the agenda they find disquieting because either they don't believe he'll be capable of tearing the state down that far or they simply are desperate for a new voice and a new approach. If he surprises in NH, the shit will hit the fan, and I think possibly in a good way.
I've seen both Paul and Kucinich speak, and unlss my eyes and ears deceived me, they both sounded reasonable and articulate. Paul has the additional benefit of that kindly old grandfather aire that plays well when juxtaposed with froth-mouthers like Giuliani. Obama impresses everyone with his erudition and is quite photogenic. And not for nothing but both Obama and Paul have raised a good chunk of change (strangely enough, pretty much all from small unaffiliated donors). Sorry, but I'm just not seeing how the "TV and Money change everything" meme applies here.
And if prospective first ladies were the measure of a candidate, Kucinich would be crushing everyone in the polls. Just saying.
Candidates "like that" have beaten the party machinery several times in history. In all honesty, I think it more likely that we will see an Obama v. Huckabee or Obama v. Paul race. And not for nothing, but Obama is not the run-of-the-mill candidate either. This is a guy who wants to approach foreign policy through *gasp* diplomacy (only Paul agrees with him on this radical idea), and he's a guy whose talking about setting up all federal depts and agencies with live blogs and online minutes of meetings and you know, dragging the federal government kicking and screaming into the 21st century. None of the other candidates have talked about anything like that.
Even with good choices among the "electable" popular candidates, the fact that you fuckers (collectively, that is, not directed at parent) still are whining about how nothing can ever change and that your vote doesn't matter is a group-think kood-aid moment of Apple computer proportions. The only way we will see Hillary v. Giuliani is if jokers like you guys not only don't vote in the primaries but also consistently spout about how everything is so god-damned hopeless.
The ideas that they espoused were foundational, and without understanding what they stood for and why they did what they did, the American Constitutional system is nearly impossible to utilize. I agree that sometimes the rhetoric of "The founding fathers said..." borders on the religious, but they are an important intellectual resource for the historical context of intent whose worth is hard to overestimate.
Having said that, they did not live in a world with automobiles, nuclear weapons, and the Internet, and so for simple reasons of context they should not be used as gospel. However, the ideas that motivated their writings and the design of the Constitution still have applicability and potency, and should not be dismissed. Lessig wrote, I think, most clearly about a reasonable way to approach original intent in Code in the discussion on latent ambiguity.
I'm pretty sure you didn't read a damn thing I wrote. I agreed that the eventual winner will be from one of the two major parties because it is a winner-take-all system. My point was even in those parties there are honest, forthright, intelligent candidates who would do the presidency proud, if only people would vote for them...which after all is what this nauseating discussion on the worth of a vote is really about.
Throughout American history right up to the present day there have been candidates who were not the favorites of their party apparatus, nor favorites of big business or big labor, who have been the party's candidate; some of them even won. Cleveland, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, W.J. Bryan, Carter, Goldwater, etc. ad nauseaum. Hell, Eugene V. Debs got over a million votes (at a time when the voting public was much smaller than it is now) while he was in prison for civil disobedience. The fact that even everyone on Slashdot, a community of reasonably educated free-thinking skeptics, have all drunk the kool-aid on "electability of candidates" is disheartening to me, but history has shown repeatedly that the ossified party structures and the same-old bland candidates can only be upset by people getting out and voting who they want rather than "who they think has a chance of winning".
When Theodore Roosevelt got elected, they did need (the adjusted for inflation equivalent of) tens of millions of dollars, and be in the back pocket of special interests to get elected. Somehow he back-doored them and fixed 'em good. Could it have been that his message resonated with folks? Nah, that's crazy. Obviously the only thing that matters in politics is money.
Frankly...that's a load of horse. People bitch and complain about how there are no choices except "sycophant A or sycophant B", but that is literally untrue. Even in the major parties--yeah, that's right, both parties--there are candidates of forthright honesty and ideological integrity (or at least consistancy) whose concerns seem to tend more toward their constituents than toward the powers-that-be.
It is depressingly cynical to look at a field of candidates that include men like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and then turn around and say "yep, all the candidates are the same old thing, not worth a damn, believe in nothing but power for its own sake, care only about themselves, etc.". The right to vote is important and useful to use, and if there are men like that in the field, to use that vote to support them. Unelectability is a buzzword to convince people to not use their vote to matter; Abraham Lincoln was an "unelectable" nobody from the boondocks, and look how that turned out.
If equal protection under the law were an even approximately achievable goal, I might agree. But it isn't, since most legal burdens are not shared equally simply because of the accidents of circumstance: CEOs don't get traffic tickets not because they don't speed, but because by and large they don't drive. Most people I know including myself can't afford to not drive to work, hence me and my driving brethren are burdened by a law that does not touch one of my fellow citizens, simply because he can hire someone else to do his driving for him (or charter a plane, or take a taxi).
Since in this example converse unequal obligations (like, for the CEO, obligations not to defraud or embezzle or to comply with industry regulations which most people need not concern themselves with) are not policed with the same proportion of state resources nor are leveraged with proportionate penalty when those duties are breached. Even if they were, the power to defraud or outright distort the regulations as they are written (never mind corrupt their enforcement) is unequal. e.g. I have next to no chance to affect the speed limit regulations in my state, however Mr. Pharma CEO has a great deal of say in influencing the regulations over at the FDA.
Since docking middle-class or poor people lots of money in fines and/or throwing them in jail has never, shortly said, made any of their lives better (or, I'd imagine, reformed them in an significant way), why do we continue to endorse the meaningless and destructive platitudes of incarceration? "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" is meaningless to a person who needs to be on time to a meeting to keep their job but must speed because they had another obligation to drop off their kids at school, and yet cannot afford a speeding ticket.
Of course, I'm not saying there is much of an imperative in copying music (nobody's livelihood rests on the ability to get free tunes/movies), but rather that the underlying mechanism is deeply flawed in its punitive aspect, and that flaw resonates with people confronted with examples of particularly acute disproportionality (single mom w/ two kids, etc).
p.s. I got out of college not so long ago, and while our culture demands more and more that people go to college to be employed, the institutions for the most part remain a significant bastion of monied privilege.
Except in practice they are not obliged to follow the same laws. Not by a long shot. The flaw in the idea of equal accountability is that the regulations of the law do not burden everyone equally (or even close). A small example: a CEO never needs to worry about breaking the speed limit to rush to a meeting; he has other folks to do that for him. Hence, he need not be obliged to care about traffic laws.
More broadly, however, one may trace many of the inequities of burden to wealth because as far as most legal duties go, civil and regulatory law hold sway. In that arena, the penalty is money, and some people can afford to be violators, or when they can't, can afford lawyers skillful enough to reduce the chances of their ever being found culpable. Others are not so fortunate. In that world where both of them live, it is absurd on its face to argue that equal laws occasion equal burdens or even equal obligations.
From the law's point of view, there probably isn't much difference. But as far as practical consequence, there is a world of difference. Since lawyers are (nominally) human beings, I think it is legitimate to ask how a person in their position can be so far gone that they see no practical difference between suing a single-mother-with-part time job into oblivion (and by extension, her children) and suing some fairly privileged college kid with no assets and no dependents. The difference in human consequences is very real.
It's not about whether you can win the motion, or even whether you will look good or bad doing so. It's whether you can sleep at night. PR should be the last concern to a human being making decisions which will devastate other peoples' lives.
You, sir, win the thread. I only wish that that point wasn't so damned useless from a practical point of view. That is, regardless of the unbelievably stupendously large amounts of opinion and conjecture being circulated intentionally or otherwise as fact, don't we still have something of an ethical imperative to separate out the fact from the fiction?
Dude, you're talking to a crowd which by-and-large believes that if the Death Star Plans were GPL'd, that Galaxy far, far away would have been a much better place to live in.
It's hard to speak on behalf of an entire people while remaining anonymous. On the other hand, blowing shit up (e.g. Gaspee and Liberty) or destroying large quantities of private property (e.g. Boston Tea Party) is pretty hard to do on a constant basis without remaining anonymous. Unless you declare war, which the Declaration of Independence essentially did. So, your point is pretty much ridiculous on both ends.
I'm pretty sure without those Sons of Liberty "cowards", American history would have turned out very differently. But, hey, here's to all the dead revolutionaries we can toast to because we know their names.
Ahh, no I must disagree here. In all seriousness, any law which makes the majority of citizens into criminals by its design is a law which is perverse and illegitimate on its face. After all, laws are codifications of the boundaries of expected social behaviors; if they do not serve that function, they become broken and do damage to the society in which they operate. Laws also operate to describe to individuals in a society that society's priorities; if those priorities do not serve the person whose asked to obey them at least in some bare capacity, then they cannot be expected to obey or respect them. Laws which seem to demonstrate to a public that they are not the priority to be served will only breed disregard for the authority emanating from all laws, even those which are legitimate. This is a corrosive pattern.
This is not a "lame civil disobedience" argument, just a sober view of the facts on the ground: no law can require respect of principles which are not respected, and by and large by their actions many people, especially of the younger generations, demonstrate they simply do not respect the concept of enshrining exclusive distribution rights for digital content. In such a situation, a government may continue to attempt to instill through the use of force such a respect (e.g. also drugs, prostitution), or realize that resources can be better spent elsewhere and instead decide to try to address the issue in another way, such as Canada seems to be doing.
Northern Minnesota has been itching for an "incident" for 150 years. I don't think an abstract idea like "Mutually Assured Destruction" will deter an incursion. One photo set of a captured American partisan fighter being Labatt Blue-boarded and you've got yourself World War III.
In a sudden outbreak of reason and common sense, a government has decided that its own people are not "the enemy". The US quickly responded that such subversive hippie-dippy communist ideas will not be tolerated on their doorstep.
That makes sense, but in a case like this, how could the state even have standing to sue? It's not like they are the copyright holder. With a polluting corporation, the state could argue that the offender is damaging the public commons, and thus demonstrate harm; where is the harm to the state involved in one person making a copy of a book, movie, or song, or in helping another to do so?
While I have agreed with most of your arguments so far in this thread, I don't think the fusion reactor and SETI are analogous. The fundamental difference is that we have in the wild confirmation that fusion releases energy (e.g. the Sun), and that initiation of fusion reactions is within our technical capabilities (e.g. hydrogen bomb, tokamak, etc.); the only question there is one of efficiency. Hence, fusion power generation is more of an engineering puzzle than a physics one.
On the other hand, SETI is searching for something that we do not have the foggiest idea about, that is whether it even exists, and if it does what form it would take. In that sense, SETI is much more of a shot in the dark, and relies upon so many more assumptions unsupported by evidence than fusion power generation does.
Nevertheless, I ultimately agree with you that the cost/benefit for such a program is not necessarily in its tangible probabilities, and its overall cost is negligible compared to all the other stupid things we spend money on.
You seem incorrigible (and I'm not even gonna get into 14th amendment jurisprudence), but to answer the questions in your last paragraph: Yes, Yes, (Yes, to be repetitive), Yes, and probably not. But, hey, whatever. He's probably just--how did you put it?--another right wing wackjob trying to hide his agenda. That must be it.
But in truth these are torts against those particular individuals, not against the government proper. If they then used positions of authority to appropriate tax funds to assist their suit, that would be inappropriate, no? I think it a reasonable rule that the government cannot sue for libel/slander. Individual officers may do so on their own time as per any individual injury, knowing of course that the bar is raised because they are such public officials and thus natural targets of opinion and speculation.
And Rhode Island still almost didn't. The ratification convention, I shit you not, happened about a hundred yards from where I'm sitting now, in a surprisingly tiny meeting house in Kingston. The story goes that the federalists did not have the numbers to force the issue, and the convention was deadlocked, so they recessed the session, and took the anti-ratification contingent for a round of heavy drinking. While many of their opponents were heavily inebriated, the federalists rushed back to the meeting house, reconvened with a bare quorum, and passed the motion to ratify (and even then just barely).
If given the chance next year I'll vote for Ron Paul again, I first voted for him for President in 1988.
I probably will as well, though as I said I'm not as sanguine about all his policy positions. For me, he is more like the Federal "Reset Button", which I think this government could use (and is overdue for). If it turns out I have to pick as usual between a democratic statist and a republican statist in the final election, I will take the liberal statism in a heartbeat; at least they don't want to tell me what God to worship and seem to at least fleetingly care about people who nobody else cares about. Ron Paul right now is the only Republican I would vote for, and Clinton is the only Democrat I would not vote for, in a pinch. Things are that bad.
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Is sniffing tor packets illegal? Clue me in.
People voting for the underdog in the early primaries gave some joker third-tier Arkansas governor candidate momentum to break through to the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. That wasn't so long ago, was it? Certainly it was in the age of television and big money and all that crap everyone seems to trot out here to argue (I think unbelievably faithlessly) that everything is hopeless and we should just sell our votes for iPods.
I think you might be surprised this time around. I didn't believe that a libertarian could ever gain traction again either, but people are starting to get rightly sick of the stuff coming out of government these days that there are so many libertarian pressure points lying around to be pushed, and Paul (having listened to him do the rounds on talk shows lately) is starting to push them. Lots of people are sick of us spending billions upon billions to have military bases in Germany, Japan, Korea, et al. to say nothing of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lots of people are sick of the drug war and are not seeing the sense of prohibition anymore, especially given its costs in lives and money. Lots of people were angry with the Kelo decision and the idea that government can use public power to take their homes and businesses away just to turn around and give them to other private businesses. Lots of people are sick of the cops being armed like the fucking marines and patrolling the halls of schools and streets and harassing people with impunity. Lots of people are sick of corporate welfare, interest rate manipulations making their savings inflate into toilet paper bills, and being taxed more and more for less and less benefit.
I honestly think that a lot of people are willing to look past the parts of the agenda they find disquieting because either they don't believe he'll be capable of tearing the state down that far or they simply are desperate for a new voice and a new approach. If he surprises in NH, the shit will hit the fan, and I think possibly in a good way.
I've seen both Paul and Kucinich speak, and unlss my eyes and ears deceived me, they both sounded reasonable and articulate. Paul has the additional benefit of that kindly old grandfather aire that plays well when juxtaposed with froth-mouthers like Giuliani. Obama impresses everyone with his erudition and is quite photogenic. And not for nothing but both Obama and Paul have raised a good chunk of change (strangely enough, pretty much all from small unaffiliated donors). Sorry, but I'm just not seeing how the "TV and Money change everything" meme applies here.
And if prospective first ladies were the measure of a candidate, Kucinich would be crushing everyone in the polls. Just saying.
Candidates "like that" have beaten the party machinery several times in history. In all honesty, I think it more likely that we will see an Obama v. Huckabee or Obama v. Paul race. And not for nothing, but Obama is not the run-of-the-mill candidate either. This is a guy who wants to approach foreign policy through *gasp* diplomacy (only Paul agrees with him on this radical idea), and he's a guy whose talking about setting up all federal depts and agencies with live blogs and online minutes of meetings and you know, dragging the federal government kicking and screaming into the 21st century. None of the other candidates have talked about anything like that.
Even with good choices among the "electable" popular candidates, the fact that you fuckers (collectively, that is, not directed at parent) still are whining about how nothing can ever change and that your vote doesn't matter is a group-think kood-aid moment of Apple computer proportions. The only way we will see Hillary v. Giuliani is if jokers like you guys not only don't vote in the primaries but also consistently spout about how everything is so god-damned hopeless.
The ideas that they espoused were foundational, and without understanding what they stood for and why they did what they did, the American Constitutional system is nearly impossible to utilize. I agree that sometimes the rhetoric of "The founding fathers said..." borders on the religious, but they are an important intellectual resource for the historical context of intent whose worth is hard to overestimate.
Having said that, they did not live in a world with automobiles, nuclear weapons, and the Internet, and so for simple reasons of context they should not be used as gospel. However, the ideas that motivated their writings and the design of the Constitution still have applicability and potency, and should not be dismissed. Lessig wrote, I think, most clearly about a reasonable way to approach original intent in Code in the discussion on latent ambiguity.
I'm pretty sure you didn't read a damn thing I wrote. I agreed that the eventual winner will be from one of the two major parties because it is a winner-take-all system. My point was even in those parties there are honest, forthright, intelligent candidates who would do the presidency proud, if only people would vote for them...which after all is what this nauseating discussion on the worth of a vote is really about.
Throughout American history right up to the present day there have been candidates who were not the favorites of their party apparatus, nor favorites of big business or big labor, who have been the party's candidate; some of them even won. Cleveland, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, W.J. Bryan, Carter, Goldwater, etc. ad nauseaum. Hell, Eugene V. Debs got over a million votes (at a time when the voting public was much smaller than it is now) while he was in prison for civil disobedience. The fact that even everyone on Slashdot, a community of reasonably educated free-thinking skeptics, have all drunk the kool-aid on "electability of candidates" is disheartening to me, but history has shown repeatedly that the ossified party structures and the same-old bland candidates can only be upset by people getting out and voting who they want rather than "who they think has a chance of winning".
When Theodore Roosevelt got elected, they did need (the adjusted for inflation equivalent of) tens of millions of dollars, and be in the back pocket of special interests to get elected. Somehow he back-doored them and fixed 'em good. Could it have been that his message resonated with folks? Nah, that's crazy. Obviously the only thing that matters in politics is money.
Frankly...that's a load of horse. People bitch and complain about how there are no choices except "sycophant A or sycophant B", but that is literally untrue. Even in the major parties--yeah, that's right, both parties--there are candidates of forthright honesty and ideological integrity (or at least consistancy) whose concerns seem to tend more toward their constituents than toward the powers-that-be.
It is depressingly cynical to look at a field of candidates that include men like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and then turn around and say "yep, all the candidates are the same old thing, not worth a damn, believe in nothing but power for its own sake, care only about themselves, etc.". The right to vote is important and useful to use, and if there are men like that in the field, to use that vote to support them. Unelectability is a buzzword to convince people to not use their vote to matter; Abraham Lincoln was an "unelectable" nobody from the boondocks, and look how that turned out.
If equal protection under the law were an even approximately achievable goal, I might agree. But it isn't, since most legal burdens are not shared equally simply because of the accidents of circumstance: CEOs don't get traffic tickets not because they don't speed, but because by and large they don't drive. Most people I know including myself can't afford to not drive to work, hence me and my driving brethren are burdened by a law that does not touch one of my fellow citizens, simply because he can hire someone else to do his driving for him (or charter a plane, or take a taxi).
Since in this example converse unequal obligations (like, for the CEO, obligations not to defraud or embezzle or to comply with industry regulations which most people need not concern themselves with) are not policed with the same proportion of state resources nor are leveraged with proportionate penalty when those duties are breached. Even if they were, the power to defraud or outright distort the regulations as they are written (never mind corrupt their enforcement) is unequal. e.g. I have next to no chance to affect the speed limit regulations in my state, however Mr. Pharma CEO has a great deal of say in influencing the regulations over at the FDA.
Since docking middle-class or poor people lots of money in fines and/or throwing them in jail has never, shortly said, made any of their lives better (or, I'd imagine, reformed them in an significant way), why do we continue to endorse the meaningless and destructive platitudes of incarceration? "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" is meaningless to a person who needs to be on time to a meeting to keep their job but must speed because they had another obligation to drop off their kids at school, and yet cannot afford a speeding ticket.
Of course, I'm not saying there is much of an imperative in copying music (nobody's livelihood rests on the ability to get free tunes/movies), but rather that the underlying mechanism is deeply flawed in its punitive aspect, and that flaw resonates with people confronted with examples of particularly acute disproportionality (single mom w/ two kids, etc).
p.s. I got out of college not so long ago, and while our culture demands more and more that people go to college to be employed, the institutions for the most part remain a significant bastion of monied privilege.
Except in practice they are not obliged to follow the same laws. Not by a long shot. The flaw in the idea of equal accountability is that the regulations of the law do not burden everyone equally (or even close). A small example: a CEO never needs to worry about breaking the speed limit to rush to a meeting; he has other folks to do that for him. Hence, he need not be obliged to care about traffic laws.
More broadly, however, one may trace many of the inequities of burden to wealth because as far as most legal duties go, civil and regulatory law hold sway. In that arena, the penalty is money, and some people can afford to be violators, or when they can't, can afford lawyers skillful enough to reduce the chances of their ever being found culpable. Others are not so fortunate. In that world where both of them live, it is absurd on its face to argue that equal laws occasion equal burdens or even equal obligations.
From the law's point of view, there probably isn't much difference. But as far as practical consequence, there is a world of difference. Since lawyers are (nominally) human beings, I think it is legitimate to ask how a person in their position can be so far gone that they see no practical difference between suing a single-mother-with-part time job into oblivion (and by extension, her children) and suing some fairly privileged college kid with no assets and no dependents. The difference in human consequences is very real.
It's not about whether you can win the motion, or even whether you will look good or bad doing so. It's whether you can sleep at night. PR should be the last concern to a human being making decisions which will devastate other peoples' lives.
You, sir, win the thread. I only wish that that point wasn't so damned useless from a practical point of view. That is, regardless of the unbelievably stupendously large amounts of opinion and conjecture being circulated intentionally or otherwise as fact, don't we still have something of an ethical imperative to separate out the fact from the fiction?
Dude, you're talking to a crowd which by-and-large believes that if the Death Star Plans were GPL'd, that Galaxy far, far away would have been a much better place to live in.
It's hard to speak on behalf of an entire people while remaining anonymous. On the other hand, blowing shit up (e.g. Gaspee and Liberty) or destroying large quantities of private property (e.g. Boston Tea Party) is pretty hard to do on a constant basis without remaining anonymous. Unless you declare war, which the Declaration of Independence essentially did. So, your point is pretty much ridiculous on both ends.
I'm pretty sure without those Sons of Liberty "cowards", American history would have turned out very differently. But, hey, here's to all the dead revolutionaries we can toast to because we know their names.
Ahh, no I must disagree here. In all seriousness, any law which makes the majority of citizens into criminals by its design is a law which is perverse and illegitimate on its face. After all, laws are codifications of the boundaries of expected social behaviors; if they do not serve that function, they become broken and do damage to the society in which they operate. Laws also operate to describe to individuals in a society that society's priorities; if those priorities do not serve the person whose asked to obey them at least in some bare capacity, then they cannot be expected to obey or respect them. Laws which seem to demonstrate to a public that they are not the priority to be served will only breed disregard for the authority emanating from all laws, even those which are legitimate. This is a corrosive pattern.
This is not a "lame civil disobedience" argument, just a sober view of the facts on the ground: no law can require respect of principles which are not respected, and by and large by their actions many people, especially of the younger generations, demonstrate they simply do not respect the concept of enshrining exclusive distribution rights for digital content. In such a situation, a government may continue to attempt to instill through the use of force such a respect (e.g. also drugs, prostitution), or realize that resources can be better spent elsewhere and instead decide to try to address the issue in another way, such as Canada seems to be doing.
Northern Minnesota has been itching for an "incident" for 150 years. I don't think an abstract idea like "Mutually Assured Destruction" will deter an incursion. One photo set of a captured American partisan fighter being Labatt Blue-boarded and you've got yourself World War III.
In a sudden outbreak of reason and common sense, a government has decided that its own people are not "the enemy". The US quickly responded that such subversive hippie-dippy communist ideas will not be tolerated on their doorstep.
That makes sense, but in a case like this, how could the state even have standing to sue? It's not like they are the copyright holder. With a polluting corporation, the state could argue that the offender is damaging the public commons, and thus demonstrate harm; where is the harm to the state involved in one person making a copy of a book, movie, or song, or in helping another to do so?
While I have agreed with most of your arguments so far in this thread, I don't think the fusion reactor and SETI are analogous. The fundamental difference is that we have in the wild confirmation that fusion releases energy (e.g. the Sun), and that initiation of fusion reactions is within our technical capabilities (e.g. hydrogen bomb, tokamak, etc.); the only question there is one of efficiency. Hence, fusion power generation is more of an engineering puzzle than a physics one.
On the other hand, SETI is searching for something that we do not have the foggiest idea about, that is whether it even exists, and if it does what form it would take. In that sense, SETI is much more of a shot in the dark, and relies upon so many more assumptions unsupported by evidence than fusion power generation does.
Nevertheless, I ultimately agree with you that the cost/benefit for such a program is not necessarily in its tangible probabilities, and its overall cost is negligible compared to all the other stupid things we spend money on.
While IANAL, I've never heard of the state bringing a civil suit against an individual citizen. Does that ever even happen?
You seem incorrigible (and I'm not even gonna get into 14th amendment jurisprudence), but to answer the questions in your last paragraph: Yes, Yes, (Yes, to be repetitive), Yes, and probably not. But, hey, whatever. He's probably just--how did you put it?--another right wing wackjob trying to hide his agenda. That must be it.
But in truth these are torts against those particular individuals, not against the government proper. If they then used positions of authority to appropriate tax funds to assist their suit, that would be inappropriate, no? I think it a reasonable rule that the government cannot sue for libel/slander. Individual officers may do so on their own time as per any individual injury, knowing of course that the bar is raised because they are such public officials and thus natural targets of opinion and speculation.
And Rhode Island still almost didn't. The ratification convention, I shit you not, happened about a hundred yards from where I'm sitting now, in a surprisingly tiny meeting house in Kingston. The story goes that the federalists did not have the numbers to force the issue, and the convention was deadlocked, so they recessed the session, and took the anti-ratification contingent for a round of heavy drinking. While many of their opponents were heavily inebriated, the federalists rushed back to the meeting house, reconvened with a bare quorum, and passed the motion to ratify (and even then just barely).
If given the chance next year I'll vote for Ron Paul again, I first voted for him for President in 1988.
I probably will as well, though as I said I'm not as sanguine about all his policy positions. For me, he is more like the Federal "Reset Button", which I think this government could use (and is overdue for). If it turns out I have to pick as usual between a democratic statist and a republican statist in the final election, I will take the liberal statism in a heartbeat; at least they don't want to tell me what God to worship and seem to at least fleetingly care about people who nobody else cares about. Ron Paul right now is the only Republican I would vote for, and Clinton is the only Democrat I would not vote for, in a pinch. Things are that bad.