That page is one of the most annoying and condescending pretenses at using logic I've ever seen.
The guy's attempts at logical reasoning consist of a series of "Are the particles *psychic* for them to be able to interact?" and "If space exists, then where is it?". Is this what passes for logic nowadays?
I've no problem with the idea that the concept of "space" may be fundamentally flawed, and may soon get outdated by better visualisations of the universe, but this guy's attempt at reasoning and arguing is the worst ever.
Particularly amused by how he switches from condescenscion to excitable appeals to the imagination like "Imagine waking up in New York City and having breakfast in Paris or Rome and lunch in Rio de Janceiro!" A rather banal imagination as well; he could have talked of having breakfast on the moon, and lunch on Europa.
And then he uses ignorant arguments like: "After all, a change in position is an effect in need of a cause just as much as any other effect. If a particle at rest is caused to move in a certain direction, what keeps it moving in the same direction after the initial force is taken away? Can a particle move itself? Can an effect be its own cause? Of course not."
So close and yet so far. Ofcourse with the Einsteinian concept of relative space, all this objection goes away -- as from the POV of the particle, the particle does NOT change its position without interaction. The particle is always from its own POV at the center of all things, and it's the universe that changes around it.
"It is important to think of motion as a series of quantum jumps whereby the position of a particle continually changes from one discrete value to another."
Yes, it is fundamentally important to *his* argument if we think of motion like that, because if we think of it in any other way, his argument has no legs to even begin to stand.
In truth this person has the concept of absolute-space entrenched in his mind, and he claims to deny it while merely envisioning a different storage for all of space's properties: something I don't really see as a meaningful objection really -- any programmer knows that you have many ways of simulating the same behaviour using different data structures, and in the end the level of access to those data structures is far more important than where exactly they are located.
He wants us to think it's a scientific revolution for him to replace Aristotelian spatial positioning
space.getPosition(x)
with a different spatial positioning
x.position
. But that's all that he does. Not even a mathematical reconception -- a mere change in the location of data storage. *yawn*
But with relativity, it doesn't even make sense to talk of "position" in regards to *one* object. There's "getPosition", there's only getDistance applied to two items and called by a third.
z.getDistance(x, y)
Even this positioning concept may be illusionary and flawed, but it's far less hole-ridden than what *he* discusses.
First of all, something either is or isn't real. A fact either is or isn't.
Dolphins may be self-aware (for a given meaning of "self-aware") or they are not. The moral consequences of the possibility won't change the facts on the ground.
As such I find your argument... morally deficient in a far more. In essense, instead of arguing whether animals are self-aware or not, you seem to be simply trying to scare us away from such a conclusions with the consequences of it.
--
Other than that -- you really think that people didn't believe that slaves were self-aware in the years of slavery? People did know that slaves thought and felt. It was not the discovery of self-awareness in slaves that caused the abolition of slavery. It wasn't even the idea of racial equality.
I have a more materialist view of history, I think. The abolition of slavery was fundamentally caused by the fact that its economic benefits became lesser and lesser with the industrial evolution.
You certainly seem to have mastered abandonment of human communication via the use of meaningless slogans. "Corporatization of our bodies", "raping our dreams", "very essense of our being human".
I challenge you to define these, especially the last one. What is the essense of being human to you, that bionic implants would destroy it?
I wonder if you are defining the word God as "He who made everything", or whether you have an alternate more complex definition that would embrace theists of other conceptions of deity.
Would God still be God to you if instead of a directing mind that "created everything", he was (as I believe the Mormons think) a fellow intelligence that may have advanced from a lower level akin to our own to what He is now, and working inside the constraints of the system that he was in rather than constructing one from scratch?
Would God still be God, if instead of a trinitarian deity, he was divided along Male-Female principles as I think the Wiccans worship?
"He made everything, and the rules of the system."
According to which religion? Or don't you particularly mind which God made those rules, as long as you believe that *some* intellect did?
Really, the trick to battle theists is the old "divide and conquer" technique. Let them see that no matter how they try to make common cause with other theista against non-theists, us non-theists see right through them and their united front is as hole-ridden as their argument. Don't let them argue for the existence of *a* God, without defining *which* God that is.
You think that Nazism was "cruelty for cruelty's sake"
It certainly was the glorification of the exercise of power of the strong over the weak.
where Nazism was trying to create a better world by removing all evil "races" from the world, so that the "master race" could rightly populate it.
They didn't need to call them evil, they just needed to call them inferior. "Inferiority" was by itself adequate justification to oppress and murder them.
"Creating a better world" is meaningless if you don't ask "a better world for who"? Communism still preached a utopian -equality for everyone- world. Nazism still preached a "crush our inferiors, so that we alone may exist".
Lenin/Stalin/Mao/etc were ruthless in pursuing that vision. Or perhaps they never believed in it and just used it as an excuse to reach to the top, I don't know. It still remains that "equality for everyone" was a *good* vision, while "crush our enemies, so that we alone may remain" is an evil selfish vision.
You are defending communism. The tyranny in communism did not happen by accident.
It happened via the ruthlessness of its actors, enabled by the tragic flaw of all collectivism -- the overconcentration of power in the hands of a few.
I do think it was inevitable that communism would lead to tyranny -- in the same way that I think it inevitable that a blind man walking right on the edge of a cliff will sooner or later, inevitably, fall off.
But that's still different in my mind than Nazism whose oppression was very much part of their core ideology. Criminal negligence is still different in my mind than criminal intent, even if the number of the dead are the same.
"Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee." I don't think that's accurate. Nazism maintained that some people were not human.
Heh -- okay, let me modify that then: Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee, and then adding insult to injury by declaring said face subhuman.:-)
I think that they are evil for the same reasons: they both inevitably lead to mass abrogation the individual rights to life, liberty, and property.
I still think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between something that leads to tyranny via accident, and something that leads to tyranny by intent... There still exist honest (if deluded) communists that think that all the crimes and all the tyranny of communism were just a matter of details in implementation... Not so with Nazis, who don't consider tyranny towards the untermenschen to have been even an evil at all, and (given the chance) would take us through the path of murder and genocide with both eyes open.
Well, in terms of "number of people killed", Stalin did beat Hitler's record. I believe that Stalin managed around 25 million, through his concentration camps and engineered famines.
I don't think so, not if we lay all the victims of World War 2 on Hitler's feet, as I think we should -- that's about 60 millions I think. Moreover Stalin ofcourse ruled for over 30 years, while Hitler's own victims piled up in about one third that time.
Also, there's no reason we should characterize Communism as a whole by Stalin's period of rule. Nazism however was exclusively defined by Hitler's period.
After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism.
Are you including the dead of World War 2 to the people killed by "fascism"?
But either way, "killed many more people than fascism" is rather an unfair comparison between an ideology that controlled half the world for over half a century, and an ideology that controlled for about 10 years in the European continent alone.
However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely.
In which elements they are indistinguishable from fascism, not *worse* than it -- except in that nazism is unashamedly open about its determination to make people into slaves, while communism thinks it's acting for everyone's eventual good. Which one is more "evil" then? The one that uses ruthless violence for selfish or nationalistic purposes, or the one that uses ruthless violence for purposes it considers to be for the benefit of the whole of mankind?
It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). That's equally bad.
Equally bad? Perhaps, though I would just call it "mass murder" rather than "genocide" -- as it seems to me that etymologically alone "genocide" can't be directed at social classes, only at tribes.
However, as an example: the French Revolution that established Republicanism and abolished Monarchy *also* launched mass murder against certain social classes. And then Napoleon launched a war throughout the continent. Would those incidents have caused you to conclude that Republican democracy as a whole is more murderous than Monarchy is? Would you have seen it as proof that democracy is inherently evil?
Or would you have tried to study what republican democracy actually is, what communism, or nazism actually *are*, instead of falling into the flaw that correlation-equals-causation?
Or to put it in another way are the crimes of the Czars and other European monarchs (or indeed republican governments) which wasted millions of lives in World War I not counted among the evils of "monarchy" or the evils of "capitalism" or whatever? Why is only the new ideology whose dead we count, and not the old ones?
Here's what I believe: That communism is inherently flawed. That communism is *murderously*, *tragically* flawed in its collectivism, which ends up concentrating power to the hands of few, inevitably leading the murderous, ruthless and the power-hungry to the top. Shown in Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, shown *everywhere* that communists have taken power.
But that alone doesn't make communism more *evil* than Nazism which (not just in practice but in theory also) is ALL about the powerful crushing the weak underfoot. If the ideal of Communism (never reached, never even approached) is about an egalitarian society, Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee. If Communism leads you to hell via the path of good intentions, Nazism leads you to hell via an even shorter route, the path of evil intentions.
Well, in terms of "number of people killed", Stalin did beat Hitler's record. I believe that Stalin managed around 25 million, through his concentration camps and engineered famines.
I don't think so, not if we lay all the victims of World War 2 on Hitler's feet, as I think we should -- that's about 60 millions I think. Moreover Stalin ofcourse ruled for over 30 years, while Hitler's own victims piled up in about one third that time.
Also, there's no reason we should characterize Communism as a whole by Stalin's period of rule. Nazism however was exclusively defined by Hitler's period.
After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism.
Are you including the dead of World War 2 to the people killed by "fascism"?
But either way, "killed many more people than fascism" is rather an unfair comparison between an ideology that controlled half the world for over half a century, and an ideology that controlled for about 10 years in the European continent alone.
However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely.
In which elements they are indistinguishable from fascism, not *worse* than it -- except in that nazism is unashamedly open about its determination to make people into slaves, while communism thinks it's acting for everyone's eventual good. Which one is more "evil" then? The one that uses ruthless violence for selfish or nationalistic purposes, or the one that uses ruthless violence for purposes it considers to be for the benefit of the whole of mankind?
It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). That's equally bad.
Equally bad? Perhaps, though I would just call it "mass murder" rather than "genocide" -- as it seems to me that etymologically alone "genocide" can't be directed at social classes, only at tribes.
However, as an example: the French Revolution that established Republicanism and abolished Monarchy *also* launched mass murder against certain social classes. And then Napoleon launched a war throughout the continent. Would those incidents have caused you to conclude that Republican democracy as a whole is more murderous than Monarchy is? Would you have seen it as proof that democracy is inherently evil?
Or would you have tried to study what republican democracy actually is, what communism, or nazism actually *are*, instead of falling into the flaw that correlation-equals-causation?
Or to put it in another way are the crimes of the Czars and other European monarchs (or indeed republican governments) which wasted millions of lives in World War I not counted among the evils of "monarchy" or the evils of "capitalism" or whatever? Why is only the new ideology whose dead we count, and not the old ones?
Here's what I believe: That communism is inherently flawed. That communism is *murderously*, *tragically* flawed in its collectivism, which ends up concentrating power to the hands of few, inevitably leading the murderous, ruthless and the power-hungry to the top. Shown in Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, shown *everywhere* that communists have taken power.
But that alone doesn't make communism more *evil* than Nazism which (not just in practice but in theory also) is ALL about the powerful crushing the weak underfoot. If the ideal of Communism (never reached, never even approached) is about an egalitarian society, Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee. If Communism leads you to hell via the path of good intentions, Nazism leads you to hell via an even shorter route, the path of evil intentions.
both the communists and nazis were equally evil, equally bent on world control, domination, and destruction.
Equally evil? And yet after 70 years of communism in Soviet Union, the Ukrainian/Kazakh/Turkmen/Estonian/etc nations still exist and were not thoroughly exterminated by the dominant Russian nation -- do you think that the Poles would have survived as long under Nazi German occupation? The Jews definitely wouldn't have.
The communists were equally bent on "world control, domination, and destruction" as the Nazis? If you mean that they wanted the whole world to follow their ideology, ofcourse -- and capitalists also wanted the whole world to be capitalistic. And democrats likewise want democracy to spread.
BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE *NAZIS* WANTED. The Nazis didn't *want* black Nazis and Jewish Nazis. The fate of blacks and Jews under Communism in theory would have been the global equality of all nations and ethnic groups (even if practice didn't tend to follow the egalitarian dreams) -- the fate of blacks, Jews and any other "inferior people" under Nazism would be either extermination or *eternal* servitude. In both theory *and* practice.
As such, your claims that communists were "equally evil" to the Nazis is a mere inanity -- though ofcourse a very commonplace one in right-wing circles. And yet the genocidal ethnic cleansing began in Yugoslavia only with the uprise of nationalism *after* the fall of the communist regime there. Equally bent on destruction as the Nazis, eh, all Communists? Not so.
China's regime fears a uncensored Google.
But China's regime seems to desire a censored Google.
I have to say that if censored Google *truly* was better for the Chinese people than no Google at all, then China's regime would indeed have allowed no Google at all.
The fact that it allows censored Google is a strong indication to me that it is indeed worse than no Google
People seem to me to suffer from the delusion that Western companies can outtrick such a regime by playing its game under its rules. "We'll do exactly what they want, that's how we'll defeat them!" Altogether foolish, I think.
This country was founded on the idea that you can say what you want to say as long as you don't physically harm another person or their physical property.
So, let's say that some mobster tells his goon "kill this man for me", that's just free speech because the mobster didn't himself pull the trigger, he just told another person to pull the trigger?
How many people did Hitler or Stalin or Saddam or Osama *personally* kill? Signing an execution (or even genocide) order doesn't count in this context, because signing pieces of paper is again just free speech I suppose.
The world's biggest mass-murderers wouldn't have nearly as many victims if they needed to personally murder every single one of their victims.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy's attempts at logical reasoning consist of a series of "Are the particles *psychic* for them to be able to interact?" and "If space exists, then where is it?". Is this what passes for logic nowadays?
I've no problem with the idea that the concept of "space" may be fundamentally flawed, and may soon get outdated by better visualisations of the universe, but this guy's attempt at reasoning and arguing is the worst ever.
Particularly amused by how he switches from condescenscion to excitable appeals to the imagination like "Imagine waking up in New York City and having breakfast in Paris or Rome and lunch in Rio de Janceiro!" A rather banal imagination as well; he could have talked of having breakfast on the moon, and lunch on Europa.
And then he uses ignorant arguments like:
"After all, a change in position is an effect in need of a cause just as much as any other effect. If a particle at rest is caused to move in a certain direction, what keeps it moving in the same direction after the initial force is taken away? Can a particle move itself? Can an effect be its own cause? Of course not."
So close and yet so far. Ofcourse with the Einsteinian concept of relative space, all this objection goes away -- as from the POV of the particle, the particle does NOT change its position without interaction. The particle is always from its own POV at the center of all things, and it's the universe that changes around it.
"It is important to think of motion as a series of quantum jumps whereby the position of a particle continually changes from one discrete value to another."
Yes, it is fundamentally important to *his* argument if we think of motion like that, because if we think of it in any other way, his argument has no legs to even begin to stand.
In truth this person has the concept of absolute-space entrenched in his mind, and he claims to deny it while merely envisioning a different storage for all of space's properties: something I don't really see as a meaningful objection really -- any programmer knows that you have many ways of simulating the same behaviour using different data structures, and in the end the level of access to those data structures is far more important than where exactly they are located.
He wants us to think it's a scientific revolution for him to replace Aristotelian spatial positioning with a different spatial positioning . But that's all that he does. Not even a mathematical reconception -- a mere change in the location of data storage. *yawn*
But with relativity, it doesn't even make sense to talk of "position" in regards to *one* object. There's "getPosition", there's only getDistance applied to two items and called by a third.Even this positioning concept may be illusionary and flawed, but it's far less hole-ridden than what *he* discusses.
"and I turned out just fine."
We only have your word for that.
"I bet there are plenty of people whose parents had them watch scary movies as a kid. It's the same thing."
Not if those parents *warned* their kids that the movies may scare them.
First of all, something either is or isn't real. A fact either is or isn't. Dolphins may be self-aware (for a given meaning of "self-aware") or they are not. The moral consequences of the possibility won't change the facts on the ground. As such I find your argument... morally deficient in a far more. In essense, instead of arguing whether animals are self-aware or not, you seem to be simply trying to scare us away from such a conclusions with the consequences of it. -- Other than that -- you really think that people didn't believe that slaves were self-aware in the years of slavery? People did know that slaves thought and felt. It was not the discovery of self-awareness in slaves that caused the abolition of slavery. It wasn't even the idea of racial equality. I have a more materialist view of history, I think. The abolition of slavery was fundamentally caused by the fact that its economic benefits became lesser and lesser with the industrial evolution.
You certainly seem to have mastered abandonment of human communication via the use of meaningless slogans. "Corporatization of our bodies", "raping our dreams", "very essense of our being human".
I challenge you to define these, especially the last one. What is the essense of being human to you, that bionic implants would destroy it?
I wonder if you are defining the word God as "He who made everything", or whether you have an alternate more complex definition that would embrace theists of other conceptions of deity.
Would God still be God to you if instead of a directing mind that "created everything", he was (as I believe the Mormons think) a fellow intelligence that may have advanced from a lower level akin to our own to what He is now, and working inside the constraints of the system that he was in rather than constructing one from scratch?
Would God still be God, if instead of a trinitarian deity, he was divided along Male-Female principles as I think the Wiccans worship?
"He made everything, and the rules of the system."
According to which religion? Or don't you particularly mind which God made those rules, as long as you believe that *some* intellect did?
Really, the trick to battle theists is the old "divide and conquer" technique. Let them see that no matter how they try to make common cause with other theista against non-theists, us non-theists see right through them and their united front is as hole-ridden as their argument. Don't let them argue for the existence of *a* God, without defining *which* God that is.
You think that Nazism was "cruelty for cruelty's sake"
It certainly was the glorification of the exercise of power of the strong over the weak.
where Nazism was trying to create a better world by removing all evil "races" from the world, so that the "master race" could rightly populate it.
They didn't need to call them evil, they just needed to call them inferior. "Inferiority" was by itself adequate justification to oppress and murder them.
"Creating a better world" is meaningless if you don't ask "a better world for who"? Communism still preached a utopian -equality for everyone- world. Nazism still preached a "crush our inferiors, so that we alone may exist".
Lenin/Stalin/Mao/etc were ruthless in pursuing that vision. Or perhaps they never believed in it and just used it as an excuse to reach to the top, I don't know. It still remains that "equality for everyone" was a *good* vision, while "crush our enemies, so that we alone may remain" is an evil selfish vision.
You are defending communism. The tyranny in communism did not happen by accident.
It happened via the ruthlessness of its actors, enabled by the tragic flaw of all collectivism -- the overconcentration of power in the hands of a few.
I do think it was inevitable that communism would lead to tyranny -- in the same way that I think it inevitable that a blind man walking right on the edge of a cliff will sooner or later, inevitably, fall off.
But that's still different in my mind than Nazism whose oppression was very much part of their core ideology. Criminal negligence is still different in my mind than criminal intent, even if the number of the dead are the same.
"Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee."
:-)
I don't think that's accurate. Nazism maintained that some people were not human.
Heh -- okay, let me modify that then: Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee, and then adding insult to injury by declaring said face subhuman.
I think that they are evil for the same reasons: they both inevitably lead to mass abrogation the individual rights to life, liberty, and property.
I still think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between something that leads to tyranny via accident, and something that leads to tyranny by intent... There still exist honest (if deluded) communists that think that all the crimes and all the tyranny of communism were just a matter of details in implementation... Not so with Nazis, who don't consider tyranny towards the untermenschen to have been even an evil at all, and (given the chance) would take us through the path of murder and genocide with both eyes open.
Well, in terms of "number of people killed", Stalin did beat Hitler's record. I believe that Stalin managed around 25 million, through his concentration camps and engineered famines.
I don't think so, not if we lay all the victims of World War 2 on Hitler's feet, as I think we should -- that's about 60 millions I think. Moreover Stalin ofcourse ruled for over 30 years, while Hitler's own victims piled up in about one third that time.
Also, there's no reason we should characterize Communism as a whole by Stalin's period of rule. Nazism however was exclusively defined by Hitler's period.
After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism.
Are you including the dead of World War 2 to the people killed by "fascism"?
But either way, "killed many more people than fascism" is rather an unfair comparison between an ideology that controlled half the world for over half a century, and an ideology that controlled for about 10 years in the European continent alone.
However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely.
In which elements they are indistinguishable from fascism, not *worse* than it -- except in that nazism is unashamedly open about its determination to make people into slaves, while communism thinks it's acting for everyone's eventual good. Which one is more "evil" then? The one that uses ruthless violence for selfish or nationalistic purposes, or the one that uses ruthless violence for purposes it considers to be for the benefit of the whole of mankind?
It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). That's equally bad.
Equally bad? Perhaps, though I would just call it "mass murder" rather than "genocide" -- as it seems to me that etymologically alone "genocide" can't be directed at social classes, only at tribes.
However, as an example: the French Revolution that established Republicanism and abolished Monarchy *also* launched mass murder against certain social classes. And then Napoleon launched a war throughout the continent. Would those incidents have caused you to conclude that Republican democracy as a whole is more murderous than Monarchy is? Would you have seen it as proof that democracy is inherently evil?
Or would you have tried to study what republican democracy actually is, what communism, or nazism actually *are*, instead of falling into the flaw that correlation-equals-causation?
Or to put it in another way are the crimes of the Czars and other European monarchs (or indeed republican governments) which wasted millions of lives in World War I not counted among the evils of "monarchy" or the evils of "capitalism" or whatever? Why is only the new ideology whose dead we count, and not the old ones?
Here's what I believe: That communism is inherently flawed. That communism is *murderously*, *tragically* flawed in its collectivism, which ends up concentrating power to the hands of few, inevitably leading the murderous, ruthless and the power-hungry to the top. Shown in Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, shown *everywhere* that communists have taken power.
But that alone doesn't make communism more *evil* than Nazism which (not just in practice but in theory also) is ALL about the powerful crushing the weak underfoot. If the ideal of Communism (never reached, never even approached) is about an egalitarian society, Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee. If Communism leads you to hell via the path of good intentions, Nazism leads you to hell via an even shorter route, the path of evil intentions.
Well, in terms of "number of people killed", Stalin did beat Hitler's record. I believe that Stalin managed around 25 million, through his concentration camps and engineered famines. I don't think so, not if we lay all the victims of World War 2 on Hitler's feet, as I think we should -- that's about 60 millions I think. Moreover Stalin ofcourse ruled for over 30 years, while Hitler's own victims piled up in about one third that time. Also, there's no reason we should characterize Communism as a whole by Stalin's period of rule. Nazism however was exclusively defined by Hitler's period. After 70 years of communism in the Soviet Union, uncountable millions of "political enemies" had died in labour camps, starved to death, or were eliminated by the KGB. Fact: communism has killed many more people than fascism. Are you including the dead of World War 2 to the people killed by "fascism"? But either way, "killed many more people than fascism" is rather an unfair comparison between an ideology that controlled half the world for over half a century, and an ideology that controlled for about 10 years in the European continent alone. However, they do eliminate alternative political ideologies. Communism requires everyone to act in the interest of the state (in other words, to be slaves). Thus, alternative ideologies must be stamped out, lest the people begin to think that they want to be able to own property, choose their occupation, and speak freely. In which elements they are indistinguishable from fascism, not *worse* than it -- except in that nazism is unashamedly open about its determination to make people into slaves, while communism thinks it's acting for everyone's eventual good. Which one is more "evil" then? The one that uses ruthless violence for selfish or nationalistic purposes, or the one that uses ruthless violence for purposes it considers to be for the benefit of the whole of mankind? It's still genocide, but it's not directed at an ethnic group, it's directed at social classes (e.g. Bolsheviks, to pick an example from Lenin's time). That's equally bad. Equally bad? Perhaps, though I would just call it "mass murder" rather than "genocide" -- as it seems to me that etymologically alone "genocide" can't be directed at social classes, only at tribes. However, as an example: the French Revolution that established Republicanism and abolished Monarchy *also* launched mass murder against certain social classes. And then Napoleon launched a war throughout the continent. Would those incidents have caused you to conclude that Republican democracy as a whole is more murderous than Monarchy is? Would you have seen it as proof that democracy is inherently evil? Or would you have tried to study what republican democracy actually is, what communism, or nazism actually *are*, instead of falling into the flaw that correlation-equals-causation? Or to put it in another way are the crimes of the Czars and other European monarchs (or indeed republican governments) which wasted millions of lives in World War I not counted among the evils of "monarchy" or the evils of "capitalism" or whatever? Why is only the new ideology whose dead we count, and not the old ones? Here's what I believe: That communism is inherently flawed. That communism is *murderously*, *tragically* flawed in its collectivism, which ends up concentrating power to the hands of few, inevitably leading the murderous, ruthless and the power-hungry to the top. Shown in Soviet Union, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, shown *everywhere* that communists have taken power. But that alone doesn't make communism more *evil* than Nazism which (not just in practice but in theory also) is ALL about the powerful crushing the weak underfoot. If the ideal of Communism (never reached, never even approached) is about an egalitarian society, Nazism is about a boot crushing a human face forever with glee. If Communism leads you to hell via the path of good intentions, Nazism leads you to hell via an even shorter route, the path of evil intentions.
both the communists and nazis were equally evil, equally bent on world control, domination, and destruction. Equally evil? And yet after 70 years of communism in Soviet Union, the Ukrainian/Kazakh/Turkmen/Estonian/etc nations still exist and were not thoroughly exterminated by the dominant Russian nation -- do you think that the Poles would have survived as long under Nazi German occupation? The Jews definitely wouldn't have. The communists were equally bent on "world control, domination, and destruction" as the Nazis? If you mean that they wanted the whole world to follow their ideology, ofcourse -- and capitalists also wanted the whole world to be capitalistic. And democrats likewise want democracy to spread. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE *NAZIS* WANTED. The Nazis didn't *want* black Nazis and Jewish Nazis. The fate of blacks and Jews under Communism in theory would have been the global equality of all nations and ethnic groups (even if practice didn't tend to follow the egalitarian dreams) -- the fate of blacks, Jews and any other "inferior people" under Nazism would be either extermination or *eternal* servitude. In both theory *and* practice. As such, your claims that communists were "equally evil" to the Nazis is a mere inanity -- though ofcourse a very commonplace one in right-wing circles. And yet the genocidal ethnic cleansing began in Yugoslavia only with the uprise of nationalism *after* the fall of the communist regime there. Equally bent on destruction as the Nazis, eh, all Communists? Not so.
China's regime fears a uncensored Google. But China's regime seems to desire a censored Google. I have to say that if censored Google *truly* was better for the Chinese people than no Google at all, then China's regime would indeed have allowed no Google at all. The fact that it allows censored Google is a strong indication to me that it is indeed worse than no Google People seem to me to suffer from the delusion that Western companies can outtrick such a regime by playing its game under its rules. "We'll do exactly what they want, that's how we'll defeat them!" Altogether foolish, I think.
This country was founded on the idea that you can say what you want to say as long as you don't physically harm another person or their physical property.
So, let's say that some mobster tells his goon "kill this man for me", that's just free speech because the mobster didn't himself pull the trigger, he just told another person to pull the trigger?
How many people did Hitler or Stalin or Saddam or Osama *personally* kill? Signing an execution (or even genocide) order doesn't count in this context, because signing pieces of paper is again just free speech I suppose.
The world's biggest mass-murderers wouldn't have nearly as many victims if they needed to personally murder every single one of their victims.