Look into "seasteading," eg. here. Although the idea of "building an island" as alluded to below is still impractically expensive, there's some possibility of building a smaller structure or (as I think yet more practical) getting together something like a subsistence farm on a very basic ocean-going raft.
As for other means of resisting oppression, check out these guys (whose resources even include a computer game) and the book On Strategic Nonviolent Conflicthere. Networking and communication are part of the way to oppose unjust laws, and in the West there's still enough freedom that they're a low-risk way to get involved.
Well, it's not like those countries are literally in the Stone Age. They're dirt-poor by Western standards, but they have access to some modern technology and can scrape together the money for relatively cheap stuff. (Unfortunately this includes Kalashnikovs.) As the West continues to develop cutting-edge technology, the standard for what kind of things the world's poor can afford rises. That is, nobody at all had LEDs until the 20th century.
Inventions like this raise the level of technology available to most of the world, and do more good for more people than (say) yet another model of iPod. One of the main things I've learned from studying history is that the maximum level of technology in a society is less important than the level that the masses have. Making things cheaper is one of the main ways in which technology has advanced; eg. iron is actually inferior to bronze in several ways, but is cheaper.
In fact, in some ways poor countries have had an opportunity to leapfrog the West. If your country has never had a copper-wire phone system, and you're just getting started with phones, you may as well start off with cell phones or fiber optics.
I'm interested in the concept of "seasteading," the idea of colonizing the ocean surface. It's been proposed that a sea-farm can produce a profitable crop by using the huge "land" area available to grow algae and/or seaweed/kelp. Seaweed has many industrial uses as well as being edible, while simpler algae might be used for biofuels. Does this concept seem plausible to you -- doing it at sea? On one hand there's free "land" with solar energy, and less regulation and taxation, but on the other there're probably high maintenance costs and no subsidies. It seems as though the key to doing this profitably would be volume, which means developing dead-simple algae buoys of some kind plus a way to get the stuff to market.
Even the authors of a book on seasteading, who emphasize the need for practicality, seem to assume that you need a multi-million-dollar giant techno-platform to get started. What do you think of a homestead-style biofuel farm consisting mainly of a boat and a raft?
A recent conversation about science and religion troubles me. I try to be an optimist about other people's ability to learn and understand science, but I find that many religious people I encounter have a different basic thought process than me, such that they don't see logic and evidence as important aspects of all areas of thought. I asked a friend, what can I do to try to win people over to science? The gist of his response was, why would anyone choose to convert to your belief system of scientific rationality? After all, religion offers tangible benefits like a social community and moral reassurance, and you don't need to accept evolution or even Newtonian physics to use the machines that the wacky science-believers invent.
It might be that science and engineering are doomed to being a minority belief system, as they arguably are even today. Unless there's a great deal of freedom, the allowed use and advancement of technology depends on the whims of the dominant religion. Scientists may as well be an order of wizards viewed with suspicion and fear by the general public -- no matter how hard they try to be mainstream.
Because we've voluntarily given up much of our freedom and are poised to lose even more, I'm not confident in science's chances for winning converts.
There was that group of people who marched on Tiananmen Square carrying a Statue of Liberty, at the risk of getting shot. So would you agree that at least some small group of Chinese, at least in the recent past, fervently desired freedom? Given that modern Chinese know they might well be shot if they try such a stunt again, and that the Chinese government feels it needs to threaten, censor and monitor them, isn't it plausible that a substantial number of Chinese are tolerating the system mainly out of fear and hopelessness?
That is, if the Chinese really didn't mind living under a nominally-Communist oligarchy, why would their government go to all the trouble of running the place as a police state? The government could stop wasting money on censorship, because people would voluntarily avoid heretical sites like Wikipedia and refrain from criticizing the Party. There'd be no need to crack down on Falun Gong and Christianity, because people wouldn't join such movements. There'd be no need for the government to bother licensing pollsters or controlling the media as mentioned above, because people would say they like the Party without needing a gun to their heads. In summary, the use of force by the Chinese government is strong evidence that no, the Chinese people don't love it very much.
The poster might be thinking of Deuteronomy 13, which says to kill friends and family members by stoning if they commit heresy. Or maybe Deuteronomy 7, which introduces the idea of God telling the ancient Hebrews to exterminate seven "nations" (being careful not to interbreed with them) and have Him "destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed." Modern Christians thankfully don't interpret those passages as being in effect now, as I understand it.
Nintendo did even more to control what games were released than that. As told in the book "Game Over," a history of Nintendo, Nintendo developed a hardware/software system called 10NES so that only cartridges with a patented key chip would run in a NES console. Since only Nintendo could make the key, no one could make a working Nintendo game without permission. This system let them both take a cut of every third-party game's profits, and exercise some quality control to prevent another 1983-style crash.
In theory. Unlicensed companies found ways around the 10NES system, including overloading the lock chip with a voltage spike. Tengen apparently illegally got access to a hidden part of the key design and reverse-engineered it to make their own key-chip, codenamed "Rabbit." (The Wikipedia article quotes an interview that downplays the accusation of theft.) Tengen then went on to produce unlicensed versions of Tetris and Gauntlet. So, even having control over the hardware doesn't give a company full control over how it's used.
By the way, let's not assume that the only options for the game industry are DRM-heavy online distribution and the traditional retail consignment/sale method. My favorite option as a buyer would be to have a DVD mailed to me directly from the maker. They get the profit, I get a physical object that'll work without their future permission.
That's one of the reasons why government-run health care is so dangerous, besides its illegality on the federal level. If minimizing the burden on the health care system justifies forcibly restricting people's behavior, where does that stop? Wouldn't the health agency then have a justification for, say, telling you where to live, how much to exercise, what to eat, what books to read (to keep your blood pressure down) and so on? I look at something petty like a tax on cola and see an entering wedge. On that score I'm with the guys who said the same thing about tea.
Indeed, our current tax system is routinely used to mask how our government manipulates the economy. That means everything from "corporate welfare" to lobbyists' specially-bought tax rules (as seen recently in the TARP bailout bill), to plain old earmarking. Although I'm not fully behind the FairTax proposal, it has the virtue of creating fewer places to hide abuses of power. We'd have to more openly look at what we're spending and who's getting the benefit.
Note that "general welfare" is not a power granted to the federal government. According at least to the people who helped write it, that phrase is absolutely not "an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare." It's just an introductory phrase leading to the rest of the sentence, which lists the enumerated powers. That's why it says "common defense" and then goes on to specify that Congress can create a military; reading "common defense" as a power would make that part redundant. So, when we talk about federal spending, we should be looking at what legal authority there is for it -- if any.
It's also interesting to consider how much of that spending is authorized by the Constitution. I'd rate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some share of other spending in the unauthorized, and therefore illegal, category. Whether it's a good idea is a different topic.
By the way, re: others' reference to Social Security as a trust fund, that's not how it's actually been managed. As I understand it, the money gets dumped into the general revenue and spent for other purposes. A lawyer who did that with an official trust fund for a client would go to jail.
In my case, I oppose such a plan because it is unconstitutional. There is no legal authority for our Congress or President to order that the radio spectrum be used in a certain way, or to have censorship authority over it. "Interstate commerce?" No, that phrase meant (according to the Founders, anyway) that the federal government could prevent states from taxing each other, not that it could regulate absolutely everything. The same constitutional argument strikes down socialized health care, for those arguing for it above.
It could probably be done through reading the visual cortex. Check out thesereferences to a 1999 study that extracted recognizable images from neurons in a live cat. That is, the researchers were able to see from the cat's brain what it was looking at.
I wish I had the book I have about this in front of me. As I understand it, the question is still up for debate, partly because the courts consist of English majors trying to apply old decisions to new technology. However, it does seem to be settled in the US that electronic transmissions are like physical mail; that there are no restrictions on searching mail at the border, and that border searches don't need to be done physically right along the borderline. That combination of ideas would justify elimination of 4th Amendment search-and-seizure limits on Internet traffic, and authorize ISP monitoring. You never know whether someone's packets might be straying through Canada, eh? Correct me if I'm wrong; I wish I were on this point.
As a writer, your question is why I'm especially disturbed by the reports of entire computers being seized for a fishing expedition at the border. I keep many of my thoughts in writing.
The reason is that people now believe that the federal government has authority over all things, and that the President is the one in charge of it, as opposed to, you know, presiding. Because of the massive power grab by Washington over the last century or so, it really does have the power to, say, allocate a few million dollars to fix a bus station in your town. Not the legal authority, but the power.
It's not an Obama-specific problem. All Presidential candidates these days boast about how when they're elected, they'll create new spending programs and fund this and that, as though Congress weren't involved. It's also standard practice to use executive orders as stealth legislation. Did you know, for instance, that the US has been in a continuous state of national emergency since 1979 due to the Iran Hostage Crisis?
By the way, as little as I like Obama, I don't see any problem with him using the Net to solicit opinions. At worst it'll be like the UK petition site where the Queen's subjects protest and get ignored.
The Federalist Papers were written by the Federalist faction, to persuade people to accept the Constitution and quell fears that it would create a tyrannical central authority. At the time, one of the debates was over whether there should be "prior amendments" to explicitly limit the new government's power. Author "Publius" (Madison & Co.) argued that a bill of rights would actually be harmful, because it would get misinterpreted to mean that freedom of speech &c. are the only limits on federal power. To avoid that problem, the Bill of Rights then included the 10th Amendment. Even so, Publius was correct in that point.
If you look at the documents by which the states ratified the Constitution, and the vote counts for them, you can see the suspicion that Americans had at the time against the Constitution. Several prominent Founders, including Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine, argued against the Constitution, and others such as William Randolph of Virginia saw it only as better than nothing, as "Union or no Union."
Madison & Co. argued in the Federalist Papers (around #41) that the Anti-Federalist faction was being paranoid for predicting that such clauses as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" would be perverted into general-purpose powers for the feds to do absolutely anything. As you note, the Bill of Rights was added specifically to make it clear that there are limits on federal power, and that the federal government would have no powers but those specifically granted to it. Several states in their ratifying documents echoed that statement and even added that they reserved the right to secede! Still, the idea that the Founders supported absolute democracy is not quite accurate, because of their decision to limit what the new government could do. If they had really trusted "the people" not to elect representatives who would violate their rights, then there would've been no need for any limits on government power. Eg. Jefferson: "It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Later, the 14th Amendment did impose some explicit restrictions on the states such as due process. But that only happened after several states tried to exercise their right of secession and the central government demonstrated that the union was no longer a voluntary one.
It's important to understand that the US Constitution's guarantees of freedom do not consist only of the Bill of Rights. As written, it created a sharply limited government under which most of the things the US federal government does today, eg. pensions and health care funding, are illegal. (See eg. the commentary in the Federalist Papers about "interstate commerce" and "general welfare.") Today we've abandoned all of the Constitutional restrictions on federal power except for some aspects of the Bill of Rights. To say that "it can't happen here" for some foreign outrage is a mistake unless we uphold all of the Constitution. I wonder at this point whether such a thing is possible.
As evidence that the US government can and will attempt to censor our media, consider the FCC's indecency fines for TV broadcasts, the Republicans' advocacy of restrictions on Internet gambling, and the Democrats' advocacy of the "Fairness Doctrine."
By accepting such a censorship system under any terms, you've given up your freedom. Say that a censorship filter can be proven to work perfectly, with zero false negatives/positives, zero performance loss, and zero cost. I would still adamantly oppose it. Do you see why?
Is that all you're willing to do, though? Vote for the other guy and maybe encourage others to do likewise? I've had to ask myself that question about US politics.
In the US specifically, there is no federal authority for any such thing, so it would be completely illegal. If done at the state or local level it might be legal, but would still be a stupid idea. It would be impractical for technological reasons, immoral due to it being none of the government's proper business, and generally a waste of money handled by a bloated bureaucracy.
The Constitutional angle is one that gets too little attention in the US. In Australia, the people are still nominally subjects of the Queen of England, so I suggest fixing that and then getting a strictly limited government.
I agree that such a proposal probably would get substantial support from both parties and maybe even from a majority of citizens. However, it would be unconstitutional unless done through a Constitutional amendment. (Ditto for "free" Internet access.) That's an angle of debate that is unfortunately outside the mainstream.
($5000K/person health insurance? That's almost enough to get the Six Million Dollar Man upgrade! =) )
Health care is not a right under our laws or the philosophy behind them, and in fact there is no Constitutional authority for government-provided health care in the US. Any federal government program that provides health care outside of some "necessary and proper" function of one of its actual powers, eg. providing health care to soldiers as part of maintaining an army, is illegal. "Free" Internet access is just a more egregious example of such an abuse of power.
See for instance the Federalist Papers, #41, in which the Federalist (pro-Constitution) faction explained why the new Constitution was desirable. Their argument was that they had created a Constitution of sharply limited powers, and that the idea of such phrases as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" into unlimited powers was a paranoid fantasy.
"Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction..." [See the next paragraph too.]
The idea back then was that unlimited government would lead to tyranny, or at least an ever-contracting liberty for the states and individuals. So, treating the Constitution as a blank check to do whatever a majority wills violates the principles of the Founders. To the extent that we let the government act outside of this limited legal authority, it is a threat to our rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Look into "seasteading," eg. here. Although the idea of "building an island" as alluded to below is still impractically expensive, there's some possibility of building a smaller structure or (as I think yet more practical) getting together something like a subsistence farm on a very basic ocean-going raft.
As for other means of resisting oppression, check out these guys (whose resources even include a computer game) and the book On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict here. Networking and communication are part of the way to oppose unjust laws, and in the West there's still enough freedom that they're a low-risk way to get involved.
Well, it's not like those countries are literally in the Stone Age. They're dirt-poor by Western standards, but they have access to some modern technology and can scrape together the money for relatively cheap stuff. (Unfortunately this includes Kalashnikovs.) As the West continues to develop cutting-edge technology, the standard for what kind of things the world's poor can afford rises. That is, nobody at all had LEDs until the 20th century.
Inventions like this raise the level of technology available to most of the world, and do more good for more people than (say) yet another model of iPod. One of the main things I've learned from studying history is that the maximum level of technology in a society is less important than the level that the masses have. Making things cheaper is one of the main ways in which technology has advanced; eg. iron is actually inferior to bronze in several ways, but is cheaper.
In fact, in some ways poor countries have had an opportunity to leapfrog the West. If your country has never had a copper-wire phone system, and you're just getting started with phones, you may as well start off with cell phones or fiber optics.
I'm interested in the concept of "seasteading," the idea of colonizing the ocean surface. It's been proposed that a sea-farm can produce a profitable crop by using the huge "land" area available to grow algae and/or seaweed/kelp. Seaweed has many industrial uses as well as being edible, while simpler algae might be used for biofuels. Does this concept seem plausible to you -- doing it at sea? On one hand there's free "land" with solar energy, and less regulation and taxation, but on the other there're probably high maintenance costs and no subsidies. It seems as though the key to doing this profitably would be volume, which means developing dead-simple algae buoys of some kind plus a way to get the stuff to market.
Even the authors of a book on seasteading, who emphasize the need for practicality, seem to assume that you need a multi-million-dollar giant techno-platform to get started. What do you think of a homestead-style biofuel farm consisting mainly of a boat and a raft?
A recent conversation about science and religion troubles me. I try to be an optimist about other people's ability to learn and understand science, but I find that many religious people I encounter have a different basic thought process than me, such that they don't see logic and evidence as important aspects of all areas of thought. I asked a friend, what can I do to try to win people over to science? The gist of his response was, why would anyone choose to convert to your belief system of scientific rationality? After all, religion offers tangible benefits like a social community and moral reassurance, and you don't need to accept evolution or even Newtonian physics to use the machines that the wacky science-believers invent.
It might be that science and engineering are doomed to being a minority belief system, as they arguably are even today. Unless there's a great deal of freedom, the allowed use and advancement of technology depends on the whims of the dominant religion. Scientists may as well be an order of wizards viewed with suspicion and fear by the general public -- no matter how hard they try to be mainstream.
Because we've voluntarily given up much of our freedom and are poised to lose even more, I'm not confident in science's chances for winning converts.
There was that group of people who marched on Tiananmen Square carrying a Statue of Liberty, at the risk of getting shot. So would you agree that at least some small group of Chinese, at least in the recent past, fervently desired freedom? Given that modern Chinese know they might well be shot if they try such a stunt again, and that the Chinese government feels it needs to threaten, censor and monitor them, isn't it plausible that a substantial number of Chinese are tolerating the system mainly out of fear and hopelessness?
That is, if the Chinese really didn't mind living under a nominally-Communist oligarchy, why would their government go to all the trouble of running the place as a police state? The government could stop wasting money on censorship, because people would voluntarily avoid heretical sites like Wikipedia and refrain from criticizing the Party. There'd be no need to crack down on Falun Gong and Christianity, because people wouldn't join such movements. There'd be no need for the government to bother licensing pollsters or controlling the media as mentioned above, because people would say they like the Party without needing a gun to their heads. In summary, the use of force by the Chinese government is strong evidence that no, the Chinese people don't love it very much.
The poster might be thinking of Deuteronomy 13, which says to kill friends and family members by stoning if they commit heresy. Or maybe Deuteronomy 7, which introduces the idea of God telling the ancient Hebrews to exterminate seven "nations" (being careful not to interbreed with them) and have Him "destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed." Modern Christians thankfully don't interpret those passages as being in effect now, as I understand it.
Nintendo did even more to control what games were released than that. As told in the book "Game Over," a history of Nintendo, Nintendo developed a hardware/software system called 10NES so that only cartridges with a patented key chip would run in a NES console. Since only Nintendo could make the key, no one could make a working Nintendo game without permission. This system let them both take a cut of every third-party game's profits, and exercise some quality control to prevent another 1983-style crash.
In theory. Unlicensed companies found ways around the 10NES system, including overloading the lock chip with a voltage spike. Tengen apparently illegally got access to a hidden part of the key design and reverse-engineered it to make their own key-chip, codenamed "Rabbit." (The Wikipedia article quotes an interview that downplays the accusation of theft.) Tengen then went on to produce unlicensed versions of Tetris and Gauntlet. So, even having control over the hardware doesn't give a company full control over how it's used.
By the way, let's not assume that the only options for the game industry are DRM-heavy online distribution and the traditional retail consignment/sale method. My favorite option as a buyer would be to have a DVD mailed to me directly from the maker. They get the profit, I get a physical object that'll work without their future permission.
That's one of the reasons why government-run health care is so dangerous, besides its illegality on the federal level. If minimizing the burden on the health care system justifies forcibly restricting people's behavior, where does that stop? Wouldn't the health agency then have a justification for, say, telling you where to live, how much to exercise, what to eat, what books to read (to keep your blood pressure down) and so on? I look at something petty like a tax on cola and see an entering wedge. On that score I'm with the guys who said the same thing about tea.
Indeed, our current tax system is routinely used to mask how our government manipulates the economy. That means everything from "corporate welfare" to lobbyists' specially-bought tax rules (as seen recently in the TARP bailout bill), to plain old earmarking. Although I'm not fully behind the FairTax proposal, it has the virtue of creating fewer places to hide abuses of power. We'd have to more openly look at what we're spending and who's getting the benefit.
Note that "general welfare" is not a power granted to the federal government. According at least to the people who helped write it, that phrase is absolutely not "an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare." It's just an introductory phrase leading to the rest of the sentence, which lists the enumerated powers. That's why it says "common defense" and then goes on to specify that Congress can create a military; reading "common defense" as a power would make that part redundant. So, when we talk about federal spending, we should be looking at what legal authority there is for it -- if any.
It's also interesting to consider how much of that spending is authorized by the Constitution. I'd rate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some share of other spending in the unauthorized, and therefore illegal, category. Whether it's a good idea is a different topic.
By the way, re: others' reference to Social Security as a trust fund, that's not how it's actually been managed. As I understand it, the money gets dumped into the general revenue and spent for other purposes. A lawyer who did that with an official trust fund for a client would go to jail.
Why have this and a related comment a few doors up been modded "flamebait?" It's especially ironic in a discussion that involves freedom of speech.
In my case, I oppose such a plan because it is unconstitutional. There is no legal authority for our Congress or President to order that the radio spectrum be used in a certain way, or to have censorship authority over it. "Interstate commerce?" No, that phrase meant (according to the Founders, anyway) that the federal government could prevent states from taxing each other, not that it could regulate absolutely everything. The same constitutional argument strikes down socialized health care, for those arguing for it above.
It could probably be done through reading the visual cortex. Check out these references to a 1999 study that extracted recognizable images from neurons in a live cat. That is, the researchers were able to see from the cat's brain what it was looking at.
I wish I had the book I have about this in front of me. As I understand it, the question is still up for debate, partly because the courts consist of English majors trying to apply old decisions to new technology. However, it does seem to be settled in the US that electronic transmissions are like physical mail; that there are no restrictions on searching mail at the border, and that border searches don't need to be done physically right along the borderline. That combination of ideas would justify elimination of 4th Amendment search-and-seizure limits on Internet traffic, and authorize ISP monitoring. You never know whether someone's packets might be straying through Canada, eh? Correct me if I'm wrong; I wish I were on this point.
As a writer, your question is why I'm especially disturbed by the reports of entire computers being seized for a fishing expedition at the border. I keep many of my thoughts in writing.
The reason is that people now believe that the federal government has authority over all things, and that the President is the one in charge of it, as opposed to, you know, presiding. Because of the massive power grab by Washington over the last century or so, it really does have the power to, say, allocate a few million dollars to fix a bus station in your town. Not the legal authority, but the power.
It's not an Obama-specific problem. All Presidential candidates these days boast about how when they're elected, they'll create new spending programs and fund this and that, as though Congress weren't involved. It's also standard practice to use executive orders as stealth legislation. Did you know, for instance, that the US has been in a continuous state of national emergency since 1979 due to the Iran Hostage Crisis?
By the way, as little as I like Obama, I don't see any problem with him using the Net to solicit opinions. At worst it'll be like the UK petition site where the Queen's subjects protest and get ignored.
The Federalist Papers were written by the Federalist faction, to persuade people to accept the Constitution and quell fears that it would create a tyrannical central authority. At the time, one of the debates was over whether there should be "prior amendments" to explicitly limit the new government's power. Author "Publius" (Madison & Co.) argued that a bill of rights would actually be harmful, because it would get misinterpreted to mean that freedom of speech &c. are the only limits on federal power. To avoid that problem, the Bill of Rights then included the 10th Amendment. Even so, Publius was correct in that point.
If you look at the documents by which the states ratified the Constitution, and the vote counts for them, you can see the suspicion that Americans had at the time against the Constitution. Several prominent Founders, including Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine, argued against the Constitution, and others such as William Randolph of Virginia saw it only as better than nothing, as "Union or no Union."
Madison & Co. argued in the Federalist Papers (around #41) that the Anti-Federalist faction was being paranoid for predicting that such clauses as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" would be perverted into general-purpose powers for the feds to do absolutely anything. As you note, the Bill of Rights was added specifically to make it clear that there are limits on federal power, and that the federal government would have no powers but those specifically granted to it. Several states in their ratifying documents echoed that statement and even added that they reserved the right to secede! Still, the idea that the Founders supported absolute democracy is not quite accurate, because of their decision to limit what the new government could do. If they had really trusted "the people" not to elect representatives who would violate their rights, then there would've been no need for any limits on government power. Eg. Jefferson: "It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power."
Later, the 14th Amendment did impose some explicit restrictions on the states such as due process. But that only happened after several states tried to exercise their right of secession and the central government demonstrated that the union was no longer a voluntary one.
It's important to understand that the US Constitution's guarantees of freedom do not consist only of the Bill of Rights. As written, it created a sharply limited government under which most of the things the US federal government does today, eg. pensions and health care funding, are illegal. (See eg. the commentary in the Federalist Papers about "interstate commerce" and "general welfare.") Today we've abandoned all of the Constitutional restrictions on federal power except for some aspects of the Bill of Rights. To say that "it can't happen here" for some foreign outrage is a mistake unless we uphold all of the Constitution. I wonder at this point whether such a thing is possible.
As evidence that the US government can and will attempt to censor our media, consider the FCC's indecency fines for TV broadcasts, the Republicans' advocacy of restrictions on Internet gambling, and the Democrats' advocacy of the "Fairness Doctrine."
By accepting such a censorship system under any terms, you've given up your freedom. Say that a censorship filter can be proven to work perfectly, with zero false negatives/positives, zero performance loss, and zero cost. I would still adamantly oppose it. Do you see why?
Is that all you're willing to do, though? Vote for the other guy and maybe encourage others to do likewise? I've had to ask myself that question about US politics.
That's absurd. You think Australians are all a bunch of wallabys and koalas?
You completely forgot about the talking kangaroos with big knives! Aren't they, like, half the population?
In the US specifically, there is no federal authority for any such thing, so it would be completely illegal. If done at the state or local level it might be legal, but would still be a stupid idea. It would be impractical for technological reasons, immoral due to it being none of the government's proper business, and generally a waste of money handled by a bloated bureaucracy.
The Constitutional angle is one that gets too little attention in the US. In Australia, the people are still nominally subjects of the Queen of England, so I suggest fixing that and then getting a strictly limited government.
I agree that such a proposal probably would get substantial support from both parties and maybe even from a majority of citizens. However, it would be unconstitutional unless done through a Constitutional amendment. (Ditto for "free" Internet access.) That's an angle of debate that is unfortunately outside the mainstream.
($5000K/person health insurance? That's almost enough to get the Six Million Dollar Man upgrade! =) )
Health care is not a right under our laws or the philosophy behind them, and in fact there is no Constitutional authority for government-provided health care in the US. Any federal government program that provides health care outside of some "necessary and proper" function of one of its actual powers, eg. providing health care to soldiers as part of maintaining an army, is illegal. "Free" Internet access is just a more egregious example of such an abuse of power.
See for instance the Federalist Papers, #41, in which the Federalist (pro-Constitution) faction explained why the new Constitution was desirable. Their argument was that they had created a Constitution of sharply limited powers, and that the idea of such phrases as "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" into unlimited powers was a paranoid fantasy.
"Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction..." [See the next paragraph too.]
The idea back then was that unlimited government would lead to tyranny, or at least an ever-contracting liberty for the states and individuals. So, treating the Constitution as a blank check to do whatever a majority wills violates the principles of the Founders. To the extent that we let the government act outside of this limited legal authority, it is a threat to our rights.