The anti-gunners have been dying to go after gun manufacturers for decades. MADD would love nothing more than to go after the beer/wine/liquor mfgs. We have a long, disgraceful history of going after 3rd parties for the actions of an individual.
Guns have no other use than as a weapon. Booze has no other use than to make someone intoxicated. (Once upon a time it had medicinal uses as an antiseptic or an anesthetic. These days, we have actual antiseptics and anesthetics for that, and no one uses liquor for it anymore.) When you're creating and selling a product that has no other use than something immoral and harmful, there's a huge difference between that and creating a platform that enables speech, which has plenty of potential uses that are moral and helpful.
I really do hate that kind of cop out. What it does is to paint morality as some kind of subjective thing that cannot be quantified, discussed logically, or expressed in any kind of scientific terminology, which I think is laughably false.
Wow. When did you suddenly start making so much sense? o_0
Having said that, ironically enough I find that "good" is somewhat tricky to define in an objective, definitive sense, but "evil" is dead easy: any act whereby a person places their own interests above the well-being of others to such a degree that they are willing to knowingly cause harm to others in order to achieve their goal is an evil act. Defining "good", though... what's the objective opposite of "cause harm to others"? It's not simple.
"From an economic perspective, open ecosystems--open innovation--always trumps a controlled ecosystem." And that's what the manufacturers are afraid of. If everyone benefits, there may be more total benefit going around, but their own share of it is a lot smaller. As has been noted before, the people who hate free markets the most are the businesspeople who have to compete in them!
Utah -- a state that overhauled its forfeiture system 15 years ago -- rolled those reforms back just as national scrutiny was increasing.
I'm not surprised. You'd think a bunch of conservative Mormons would have a lot of respect for the idea of "Thou Shalt Not Steal," but they've got some real problems when the person doing the stealing has any sort of legal cover.
For example, my brother lives in Provo, Utah, and apparently over there it's perfectly legal to steal a car, if you run a towing service. If you call the police and report your car stolen, the first thing they'll do is ask where it was parked, and if there's any chance it may have been towed, before opening an investigation they'll tell you to call the towing services and see if they have your car. If they do, whatever happened is presumed to have been completely legitimate and you're screwed; even if you didn't actually park illegally, you have to pay whatever extortion they demand to get your vehicle back and the cops won't do a thing about it. ISTM that's barely discernible from straight-up Grand Theft Auto, but apparently they think there's an important difference there.
Based upon a pattern I've explained multiple times on here before, that goes back decades.
Remember Bush Sr.? Remember "read my lips, no new taxes?" And then there were new taxes, and a sucky economy, and people got sick of him and threw him out.
They picked a new guy who was kind of the anti-Bush: (relatively) young, charming, with an informal air about him. Problem is, he turned out to be thoroughly corrupt and oh-by-the-way also a sexual predator, and the country had to sit through years of scandal upon scandal upon scandal. (Everyone remembers Monica Lewinsky; do you remember the rest of them? I do.) The Clinton presidency was worse than the Bush presidency, and after 8 years of Clinton screwing around, people were fed up... so we got sick of him and threw him out.
Of course, it seems utterly bizarre now, but do you remember what Bush Jr.'s campaign platform was, the first time around? "I will restore dignity to the White House." It was sorely needed, and he did a great job of portraying himself as the anti-Clinton, so we elected him. And we all remember how that went: he was utterly incompetent and in way over his head, especially after 9/11, and the Bush Jr. presidency turned out to be worse than the Clinton presidency. After 8 years of him screwing things up, we got sick of it and threw him out.
Well, you can guess what happened next, right? Yup: we elected the guy who managed to portray himself as the Anti-Bush. Hope and Change and all that. Well, things have changed since then, but it's been mostly more of the same changes we were getting through the Bush years: changes for the worse. The Obama administration has been even worse than the Bush Jr. administration, and after 8 years of him screwing things up... it's not hard to guess what's going to happen in the next election.
The next President is going to be whichever Republican candidate most successfully portrays himself as the Anti-Obama. (And he or she will most likely end up being even worse than Obama... somehow.) You can say no, that's not going to happen, but consider this: for a significant percentage of today's voters, that's the only pattern they've ever known. And the ones older than that are... well... older, and statistically speaking older demographics are more likely to vote Republican.
I don't like it, but I believe that it's going to happen. Just watch and see.
I haven't seen that one, but I did see Clinton Cash, and if any of the stories in that one are true, Bill and Hillary both belong behind bars (for straight-up treason, in a few cases!) and not out on the campaign trail.
If they had any sense, net neutrality opponents should be happy about this, as it's abundantly clear the FCC's only looking to enforce the most ham-fisted of neutrality abuses (filtering, blocking, heavy throttling of competing services), and ISPs can continue doing precisely what they're doing now (aggressively cashing in on uncompetitive markets) with no worry of regulatory interference. Most ISPs understand the message is subtle but it's there: ISPs can continue to experiment with this kind of "creative" pricing, they just need to be subtle about it. There's zero indication that Wheeler has any interest in serious rate regulation.
It's because you're seeing a different subtle message than they're seeing.
The "problem" is that the FCC is daring to do its job at all, rather than simply continue to let telecoms run roughshod all over our rights.
It's that we have major presidential candidates talking about breaking up "too big to fail" banks, putting that idea into the national discourse and getting serious people to take it seriously.
It's that the EPA is daring, for the first time ever, to do something about power plants dumping unlimited amounts of pollution into our atmosphere.
The subtle message is that the second Gilded Age is slowly but surely coming to an end. The writing is on the wall, and it's got the parasites terrified. And so like any cornered animal, they're fighting viciously to try and do all they can to escape what they've got coming.
Personally, I expect things to continue to get worse, at home and throughout the world, for about 5 more years before they start getting better.
I want you to name any candidate from either side that is not a joke?
I've been watching both sides pretty closely, and it appears that we have two this time around: Hillary Clinton, (who by all rights ought to be a joke but unfortunately she's deadly serious, with emphasis on the "deadly",) and Bernie Sanders (who's running on fixing a lot of problems not only in American politics but in the campaign process itself, and actually having a noteworthy amount of success. Which hasn't stopped the segments of the mainstream media who want the next election to be a coronation for Hillary from doing their best to pretend he doesn't exist, unfortunately.)
On the Republican side, no non-joke candidates that I can see this time. And that's unfortunate, especially since whichever Republican candidate wins the primary is very likely to become the next President.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: watched the GOP debates for once
The "American" identity you think exists does not. American culture is a mix of cultures, bringing in all sorts of things from other places where people came. The idea that people came to America and gave up their previous identity is laughable and ignorant.
They brought in some things and left others behind. As I pointed out a few posts ago, the USA is quite notable for the time of its founding for lacking any concept of titled nobility, to give just one example. No one came here from Europe and tried to be more Europe. In fact, we kinda had this big war over the idea that that was exactly what we were not supposed to be. (Yes, I know, England isn't technically part of the continent of Europe, but you know what I mean.)
See this is why people claim you're a bigot. That's the kind of ignorant, fact-free statement that suggests someone who just doesn't like someone who is different.
Yup, you got me. I can't stand people who are different. That's why I spent two years in South America, where the culture, the food, and even the climate were completely different from what I'm used to, where you can't even perform such fundamental tasks as buying food without learning to speak a second language: because I hate "different."
That's a myth. A myth pushed by racists.
Are their actual writings, copies of which (and some originals even) still exist today, mythical?
And... seriously, you claim to despise partisan politics, to such a degree that you refuse to publish party affiliations when talking about a member of Congress in one of your posts. (Which is a laudable ideal that I completely agree with, BTW.) So why are you playing the "systemic racism" card? That's essentially the "terrorism" of the far left: a problem that hurt a lot of Americans years ago, that we must never be allowed to forget, or to acknowledge how little of an actual problem it is today, because it's so valuable for playing on people's emotions for political profit. It's this huge blind spot that a lot of people have. Even people who are aware of the Shirky Principle and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy don't seem to understand that yes, they apply to groups such as civil rights organizations too.
If you actually take a more than superficial look into racial issues, what you find is that almost every time, Occam's Razor cuts accusations of racism in the USA, particularly of the "systemic" variety, to shreds, as the underlying problems in almost every case can be adequately explained without any need to invoke a racially-prejudiced oppressor. (My personal favorite is the widely-reported claim that the housing crash of 2008 was somehow a racist event, because when all the dust had settled, the data showed that all of the socioeconomic gains that the black community had made since the Civil Rights movement had been nullified. The part that they're not telling, because it doesn't fit their narrative, is that long before 2008, economists were already pointing out how those gains had been erased, and that the culprit was the widespread use of drugs, particularly cocaine, in many parts of the black community; real estate had nothing to do with it. Taken at face value, this might even suggest that the negative impact of the housing crash on black Americans was disproportionately light!)
Moving to a new country is not giving up your identity.
"Giving up your identity" is your phrase, not mine. Please don't put words in my mouth, particularly not for the sake of pointing out how silly they sound when I didn't actually say them. Changing where you live, though--especially to a far away place--absolutely does involve changing your identity to a pretty serious degree, because a lot of your identity is bound up with where you live. It affects everything from the climate you live in, (which in turn affects what sorts of clothes are practical to wear,) to the people you associate with (your neighbors) to the meanings of certain words.
No. Not at all. Moving to a country for new opportunities or to experience new things or to get away from persecution is one thing. Pretending that you don't keep your *culture* and *customs* or even *language* is another thing entirely.
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but if I had to guess, I'd guess that you haven't moved very many times in your life even within the USA, much less outside of it. Would I be right?
Speaking as someone who's actually done it, when you go to live in another country, trying to keep your old customs and language is just asking for trouble. I wasn't kidding when I said you have to know Spanish to buy food in Argentina. If you go to the supermarket and the clerk asks you "¿Por favor de teclar tu nùmero DNI?" and you don't know what that means, you're not leaving that store with any food! (They're asking for an identification number roughly equivalent to SSNs in the USA. It's required by law as part of the sale. That's just one of a hundred cultural details that you pick up very quickly by basic necessity.)
Again, please check your assumptions here because they match up identically to standard racist and bigoted thinking and you appear to be pushing the myths of such people.
This is known, somewhat informally, as the "Hitler Ate Sugar" fallacy:
1) Hitler was evil. 2) Hitler ate sugar. 3) Therefore, eating sugar is evil.
Simply because some person or group that is undoubtedly evil says or does some specific thing does not necessarily make that specific thing evil too. It's a rhetorical trap that's all too easy to fall into.
the version you seem to have gleaned is not an accurate portrayal of either historical or modern America.
I wasn't aware that history had "versions". It's supposed to be something objective: history is what really happened. Of course, that's often not politically palatable to certain groups, so they come up with "versions" that better fit their ideals. But I prefer to stick with what really happened. Personally I find it difficult to take seriously people who talk about history having versions and believe in contemporary systemic racism. But maybe that's just me.
This is truly a bizarre lawsuit. Yelp pulls its infamous protection racket scam on Superior... and instead of fighting back against Yelp, they turn around and try to victimize a bunch of Yelp's users because they're less likely to be able to fight back?
If you have to ask that question, you don't know the first thing about American history.
I've studied it pretty extensively, actually, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything. What is the important "first thing" that I'm missing?
Holding onto pieces of your past culture are quite typical. Each successive generation tends to integrate more and that's fine.
...right up until they don't, and then it isn't. You end up with ghettoized communities and all of the social problems that that brings with it, which we are actually seeing today. Which, as I explained above, is why the idea of American national identity was created in the first place: because we had some very smart people who had studied history and government pretty extensively, who knew about these sorts of problems and tried to head them off. They made some mistakes, but this wasn't one of them.
Telling people to give up their identities just because *you* think it's appropriate is fairly ridiculous, don't you think?
What I think is ridiculous is for someone who has already chosen to "give up their identity," as you put it--or at the very least, to perform major surgery on it--to then be dishonest about it and pretend that they didn't. Moving to another country is not a simple task that one undertakes lightly; you've got to have a really good reason to not want to stay where you are. So if you wanted to leave your past behind that badly, isn't it a little bit ridiculous to then cling to it?
On the post: The Increasing Attacks On The Most Important Law On The Internet
Re: Not as basic concept as you would think
Guns have no other use than as a weapon. Booze has no other use than to make someone intoxicated. (Once upon a time it had medicinal uses as an antiseptic or an anesthetic. These days, we have actual antiseptics and anesthetics for that, and no one uses liquor for it anymore.) When you're creating and selling a product that has no other use than something immoral and harmful, there's a huge difference between that and creating a platform that enables speech, which has plenty of potential uses that are moral and helpful.
On the post: Zuckerberg Tells Angela Merkel Facebook Is On The Hate Speech Censorship Case
Re: Re: Re: Re: The real answer to hate speech
Wow. When did you suddenly start making so much sense? o_0
Having said that, ironically enough I find that "good" is somewhat tricky to define in an objective, definitive sense, but "evil" is dead easy: any act whereby a person places their own interests above the well-being of others to such a degree that they are willing to knowingly cause harm to others in order to achieve their goal is an evil act. Defining "good", though... what's the objective opposite of "cause harm to others"? It's not simple.
On the post: Zuckerberg Tells Angela Merkel Facebook Is On The Hate Speech Censorship Case
Re: The real answer to hate speech
Are you sure?
Remember, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me believe I deserved it.
On the post: Canada Wants To Cut Price Of 'World's Most Expensive Drug'; US Manufacturer Sues To Stop It
Re: An offer they can't refuse...
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 44: Why The Freedom To Tinker Matters
On the post: DRM Still Breaking Games Nearly A Decade After Purchase
Anyone still want to tell me I'm wrong when I say DRM is a hacking tool and needs to be legally classified as such?
On the post: 71% Of Americans Oppose Civil Asset Forfeiture. Too Bad Their Representatives Don't Care.
I'm not surprised. You'd think a bunch of conservative Mormons would have a lot of respect for the idea of "Thou Shalt Not Steal," but they've got some real problems when the person doing the stealing has any sort of legal cover.
For example, my brother lives in Provo, Utah, and apparently over there it's perfectly legal to steal a car, if you run a towing service. If you call the police and report your car stolen, the first thing they'll do is ask where it was parked, and if there's any chance it may have been towed, before opening an investigation they'll tell you to call the towing services and see if they have your car. If they do, whatever happened is presumed to have been completely legitimate and you're screwed; even if you didn't actually park illegally, you have to pay whatever extortion they demand to get your vehicle back and the cops won't do a thing about it. ISTM that's barely discernible from straight-up Grand Theft Auto, but apparently they think there's an important difference there.
On the post: Cox Points Out That Rightscorp Is Either A Mass Infringer Itself... Or Admits That Downloading Songs Can Be Fair Use
I ought to report you guys to the Department of Redundancy Department for that...
On the post: FTC Finally Goes After Roca Labs For Its Sketchy 'Weight Loss' Scheme & Misleading Promotions
Apparently someone mis-edited something in the sentence above?
On the post: Another Teen Frightens School Personnel With Technical Stuff; Panic, Stupidity Fail To Ensue
I've actually played the game in question
On the post: Ridiculously Thin Skinned Donald Trump Threatening Critics With Totally Bogus Trademark Infringement Lawsuit
Re: Re: Re: Re: Seriously. Please stop
Remember Bush Sr.? Remember "read my lips, no new taxes?" And then there were new taxes, and a sucky economy, and people got sick of him and threw him out.
They picked a new guy who was kind of the anti-Bush: (relatively) young, charming, with an informal air about him. Problem is, he turned out to be thoroughly corrupt and oh-by-the-way also a sexual predator, and the country had to sit through years of scandal upon scandal upon scandal. (Everyone remembers Monica Lewinsky; do you remember the rest of them? I do.) The Clinton presidency was worse than the Bush presidency, and after 8 years of Clinton screwing around, people were fed up... so we got sick of him and threw him out.
Of course, it seems utterly bizarre now, but do you remember what Bush Jr.'s campaign platform was, the first time around? "I will restore dignity to the White House." It was sorely needed, and he did a great job of portraying himself as the anti-Clinton, so we elected him. And we all remember how that went: he was utterly incompetent and in way over his head, especially after 9/11, and the Bush Jr. presidency turned out to be worse than the Clinton presidency. After 8 years of him screwing things up, we got sick of it and threw him out.
Well, you can guess what happened next, right? Yup: we elected the guy who managed to portray himself as the Anti-Bush. Hope and Change and all that. Well, things have changed since then, but it's been mostly more of the same changes we were getting through the Bush years: changes for the worse. The Obama administration has been even worse than the Bush Jr. administration, and after 8 years of him screwing things up... it's not hard to guess what's going to happen in the next election.
The next President is going to be whichever Republican candidate most successfully portrays himself as the Anti-Obama. (And he or she will most likely end up being even worse than Obama... somehow.) You can say no, that's not going to happen, but consider this: for a significant percentage of today's voters, that's the only pattern they've ever known. And the ones older than that are... well... older, and statistically speaking older demographics are more likely to vote Republican.
I don't like it, but I believe that it's going to happen. Just watch and see.
On the post: Ridiculously Thin Skinned Donald Trump Threatening Critics With Totally Bogus Trademark Infringement Lawsuit
Re:
On the post: Ridiculously Thin Skinned Donald Trump Threatening Critics With Totally Bogus Trademark Infringement Lawsuit
Re: Re: Re: Re: Seriously. Please stop
On the post: The Wall Street Journal Doubles Down On Dumb: Falsely Claims Net Neutrality ('Obamanet') Has Crushed Broadband Investment
It's because you're seeing a different subtle message than they're seeing.
The "problem" is that the FCC is daring to do its job at all, rather than simply continue to let telecoms run roughshod all over our rights.
It's that courts are finally waking up to the widespread scam of exploiting drivers by classifying them as "independent contractors" rather than employees and smacking down abusive businesses that do so. (The link's worth reading, and it's probably not what you think. It wasn't Uber who invented this particular abusive practice, not by a long shot!)
It's that we have major presidential candidates talking about breaking up "too big to fail" banks, putting that idea into the national discourse and getting serious people to take it seriously.
It's that the EPA is daring, for the first time ever, to do something about power plants dumping unlimited amounts of pollution into our atmosphere.
The subtle message is that the second Gilded Age is slowly but surely coming to an end. The writing is on the wall, and it's got the parasites terrified. And so like any cornered animal, they're fighting viciously to try and do all they can to escape what they've got coming.
Personally, I expect things to continue to get worse, at home and throughout the world, for about 5 more years before they start getting better.
On the post: Ridiculously Thin Skinned Donald Trump Threatening Critics With Totally Bogus Trademark Infringement Lawsuit
Re: Re: Seriously. Please stop
I've been watching both sides pretty closely, and it appears that we have two this time around: Hillary Clinton, (who by all rights ought to be a joke but unfortunately she's deadly serious, with emphasis on the "deadly",) and Bernie Sanders (who's running on fixing a lot of problems not only in American politics but in the campaign process itself, and actually having a noteworthy amount of success. Which hasn't stopped the segments of the mainstream media who want the next election to be a coronation for Hillary from doing their best to pretend he doesn't exist, unfortunately.)
On the Republican side, no non-joke candidates that I can see this time. And that's unfortunate, especially since whichever Republican candidate wins the primary is very likely to become the next President.
On the post: Donald Trump Threatens Ridiculous Defamation Lawsuit Over Attack Ad
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: watched the GOP debates for once
They brought in some things and left others behind. As I pointed out a few posts ago, the USA is quite notable for the time of its founding for lacking any concept of titled nobility, to give just one example. No one came here from Europe and tried to be more Europe. In fact, we kinda had this big war over the idea that that was exactly what we were not supposed to be. (Yes, I know, England isn't technically part of the continent of Europe, but you know what I mean.)
Yup, you got me. I can't stand people who are different. That's why I spent two years in South America, where the culture, the food, and even the climate were completely different from what I'm used to, where you can't even perform such fundamental tasks as buying food without learning to speak a second language: because I hate "different."
Are their actual writings, copies of which (and some originals even) still exist today, mythical?
And... seriously, you claim to despise partisan politics, to such a degree that you refuse to publish party affiliations when talking about a member of Congress in one of your posts. (Which is a laudable ideal that I completely agree with, BTW.) So why are you playing the "systemic racism" card? That's essentially the "terrorism" of the far left: a problem that hurt a lot of Americans years ago, that we must never be allowed to forget, or to acknowledge how little of an actual problem it is today, because it's so valuable for playing on people's emotions for political profit. It's this huge blind spot that a lot of people have. Even people who are aware of the Shirky Principle and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy don't seem to understand that yes, they apply to groups such as civil rights organizations too.
If you actually take a more than superficial look into racial issues, what you find is that almost every time, Occam's Razor cuts accusations of racism in the USA, particularly of the "systemic" variety, to shreds, as the underlying problems in almost every case can be adequately explained without any need to invoke a racially-prejudiced oppressor. (My personal favorite is the widely-reported claim that the housing crash of 2008 was somehow a racist event, because when all the dust had settled, the data showed that all of the socioeconomic gains that the black community had made since the Civil Rights movement had been nullified. The part that they're not telling, because it doesn't fit their narrative, is that long before 2008, economists were already pointing out how those gains had been erased, and that the culprit was the widespread use of drugs, particularly cocaine, in many parts of the black community; real estate had nothing to do with it. Taken at face value, this might even suggest that the negative impact of the housing crash on black Americans was disproportionately light!)
"Giving up your identity" is your phrase, not mine. Please don't put words in my mouth, particularly not for the sake of pointing out how silly they sound when I didn't actually say them. Changing where you live, though--especially to a far away place--absolutely does involve changing your identity to a pretty serious degree, because a lot of your identity is bound up with where you live. It affects everything from the climate you live in, (which in turn affects what sorts of clothes are practical to wear,) to the people you associate with (your neighbors) to the meanings of certain words.
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but if I had to guess, I'd guess that you haven't moved very many times in your life even within the USA, much less outside of it. Would I be right?
Speaking as someone who's actually done it, when you go to live in another country, trying to keep your old customs and language is just asking for trouble. I wasn't kidding when I said you have to know Spanish to buy food in Argentina. If you go to the supermarket and the clerk asks you "¿Por favor de teclar tu nùmero DNI?" and you don't know what that means, you're not leaving that store with any food! (They're asking for an identification number roughly equivalent to SSNs in the USA. It's required by law as part of the sale. That's just one of a hundred cultural details that you pick up very quickly by basic necessity.)
This is known, somewhat informally, as the "Hitler Ate Sugar" fallacy:
1) Hitler was evil.
2) Hitler ate sugar.
3) Therefore, eating sugar is evil.
Simply because some person or group that is undoubtedly evil says or does some specific thing does not necessarily make that specific thing evil too. It's a rhetorical trap that's all too easy to fall into.
I wasn't aware that history had "versions". It's supposed to be something objective: history is what really happened. Of course, that's often not politically palatable to certain groups, so they come up with "versions" that better fit their ideals. But I prefer to stick with what really happened. Personally I find it difficult to take seriously people who talk about history having versions and believe in contemporary systemic racism. But maybe that's just me.
On the post: Florida Moving Company Attempting To Sue Its Way Back To Yelp Respectability
Talk about perpetuating a bad cycle...
On the post: Donald Trump Threatens Ridiculous Defamation Lawsuit Over Attack Ad
Re: Re: Re: Re: watched the GOP debates for once
I've studied it pretty extensively, actually, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know everything. What is the important "first thing" that I'm missing?
...right up until they don't, and then it isn't. You end up with ghettoized communities and all of the social problems that that brings with it, which we are actually seeing today. Which, as I explained above, is why the idea of American national identity was created in the first place: because we had some very smart people who had studied history and government pretty extensively, who knew about these sorts of problems and tried to head them off. They made some mistakes, but this wasn't one of them.
What I think is ridiculous is for someone who has already chosen to "give up their identity," as you put it--or at the very least, to perform major surgery on it--to then be dishonest about it and pretend that they didn't. Moving to another country is not a simple task that one undertakes lightly; you've got to have a really good reason to not want to stay where you are. So if you wanted to leave your past behind that badly, isn't it a little bit ridiculous to then cling to it?
On the post: Donald Trump Threatens Ridiculous Defamation Lawsuit Over Attack Ad
Re: Re: Re: Re: watched the GOP debates for once
On the post: Donald Trump Threatens Ridiculous Defamation Lawsuit Over Attack Ad
Re: Re: Re: Re: watched the GOP debates for once
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