I'm on the other side because I understand that racism did not magically disappear when we elected a black president.
Again, that is not at all what I said. If anything, my position is the exact opposite: we were able to elect a black president because racism is long dead in the US.
The spirit of this lives on in the carefully crafted language of coded racism: "food stamp president", "welfare queens"
These are economic issues that racism-ists try to disguise as racial issues to raise their own profile. Last I heard, most food stamp and welfare recipients in this country are white.
Oh, and there are also the ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights, under the guise of "preventing fraud".
Which, again, are blown heavily out of proportion. Opponents of voter fraud reform like to toss around statistics like "there were only six cases of confirmed voter fraud discovered IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in the last Presidential election." (Not sure if that's the actual number, but it was definitely low enough to make it look like a non-problem.)
This is a classic example of lying with statistics. Because what the last election (the last several, in fact) also have had were many, many precincts in which more ballots were cast than there were registered voters, particularly in swing states. That right there is prima facie evidence of the existence of fraud, and if they only figured out who and how six times, then something is very, very wrong. That makes perfect sense.
You know what doesn't make sense? The racism-ist argument that this is voter ID laws are maliciously designed to impose undue economic hardship upon minorities to keep them from voting. If anything, this is (yet again!) an economic problem being hijacked and made to look like a racism problem, but in reality it's not even a genuine economic problem!
The last time I got an ID, it cost me $20. It's good for 5 years. And I don't care how poor you are; there's no one who can't find some way of coming up with $20 once every 5 years! The entire argument is ridiculous on the face of it.
We no longer see heavily armed police using dogs and tear gas and fire hoses against peaceful protesters -- oh, wait. We just saw that.
Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make when analyzing any complex system is to think in only 1 degree of cause and effect. Yes, there was a heavy-handed police response. That was bad. But if you stop there you reach wrong conclusions.
Here's a better conclusion for you: You know what's even worse in every way than a heavy-handed police response? Riots in the streets. You know, the sort of thing that happened when activist media blew the Rodney King story way out of proportion? The sort of thing that almost happened in response to the Trayvon Martin case? And now when a bunch of the same people who went around stirring up trouble in the Trayvon Martin case appeared in Ferguson to try again... well, if I were a cop and someone did that in my town, I'd be inclined to err on the side of caution too!
Racism in the US is a thing of the past, and the more that people from generations who grew up before the Civil Rights movement die off, the more whatever's left of it dies with them.
We haven't even gotten into private sector employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and oh so many things.
The last software company I worked for was quite a melting pot. The second (or maybe third) most senior developer on the team I worked with was a South American immigrant of native descent. One of the lead developers on another project was an Indian woman. One of the guys who wrote significant parts of the codebase and then left to take another job before I started with the company was arabic, and so on. We had people of all races and colors all over the company... and one black guy. We had nothing against hiring minorities of any type, but so few black people ever even applied that you might not know it if you were just to look at the org chart.
I'll leave the reasons why to a sociologist, but from the research I've seen, in the majority of cases today in which people with an agenda want to raise the hue and cry of racism, the cold, dispassionate data points instead to economics or (particularly among blacks) to self-sabotaging cultural issues within minority communities themselves.
I want the rest of the Techdirt community to take a moment and read this, because it's important to highlight what problems we still have in this country, and Mason Wheeler is a huge part of the problem.
No, the problem we have in this country is that there are a lot of people with an agenda who don't want racism to be dead, because they make plenty of hay out of it. And then there's the problem of people believing it. It's really another expression of the same problem we see in legacy media companies: when the problem you're solving goes away, there's no more need for your services, so the natural reaction against legitimate obsolescence is to use illegitimate, underhanded tactics to push back against it.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but racists are held in about the same high regard as pedophiles in the USA, and for good reason: they're idiots who make trouble, and we're sick of it. Problem is, these days so is the other side. Martin Luther King's dead, his heirs (as reported by Techdirt!) are a bunch of worthless parasites on society, and sometimes it seems like all we've got left are the Malcolm X types.
This isn't about "screaming" racism,
The fact that you think that just underscores how serious the problem is. You're being taken for a ride and you don't even know it. Have a look at what was going on in this case before any of the stuff being covered in the news started. Yes, what happened to the kid was a horrifying tragedy, but it was a local issue, and there were no riots requiring militarized police response and major news coverage before a bunch of activists showed up in Ferguson to "spread awareness" and drum up some outrage.
Seems to me the racism-ists didn't get the race riot they wanted in the Trayvon Martin case, so now they're trying again with a more sympathetic dead kid to rally around. That's about as cynical and ugly as it gets.
it's about battling the idiots that think only a "pitiful amount" of racism still exists just because we elected a black President with something like 55% of the popular vote.
Did I say "just because"? Pay attention, folks, if you're taking a moment and reading this. That right there is a sure sign of someone who knows their argument is crap: misrepresentation and mockery. Make people laugh at the other side's argument so they won't think about it.
The fact of the matter is that we've got successful black people being very successful at every level of society, private and public, and nobody is stopping them. Meanwhile, we've also got a bunch of unsuccessful black people with really screwed-up lives... and a bunch of unsuccessful white people with really screwed-up lives. That actually sounds a lot like equality to me!
As a matter of media coverage, the riots barely existed. That's a different matter, and your racism-ism (the knee-jerk reaction to blame anything bad that happens involving a minority on racism automatically) is showing.
Frankly, we still don't have a very clear picture of what happened (or is happening) in Ferguson, because all we've been getting is one side of the story, and Techdirt (rather uncharacteristically!) jumping on the exact same bandwagon as all the rest of the media is really not helping.
I will say, though, that people screaming "RACISM!!!!!" at every opportunity looked silly 20 years ago, they looked ridiculous after we elected a black president by a landslide, and today they mostly just look dangerous, more harmful than what pitiful amounts of actual racism still remain in this country.
Precisely. Behind almost every societal problem is the problem of short-term thinking. Bad things were going to happen no matter what; the question is, do we make a clean break of it, get it over with, and start rebuilding, or draw things out and make them worse?
As Sirota again notes at the end of his article, this issue is not just for the SEC, but for other federal agencies as well, including the DOJ, which more or less admitted that it wouldn't prosecute Wall Street firms connected to the 2008 financial mess, because it might have "a negative impact on the national economy."
This drives me nuts. As if leaving them intact hasn't hurt our economy?
Look at the last 5 years. Unemployment and underemployment drags onward, climbing slowly higher. They say we're in a "recovery," but all the shuttered stores along Main Street and empty storefronts at the local mall tell a different story.
A pernicious debt bubble began to pop, and instead of letting it happen and working to clear out bad debt so we could reset and get back to normal, the government has doubled down on it, stepping in when it was only halfway finished with the full might of the Federal Reserve behind moronic efforts to reinflate it! And we've all seen the results with our own eyes. The stock market is rallying, but ordinary Americans are getting ground down by the millions.
The systemic problems remain in place exactly as they have been, and only when we stop propping them up and allow nature to take its course will we get back to real propserity. If we continue on this path... well, just look at Japan over the last couple decades. They had the same problems in the 90s that we had in 2008, and we've responded the same way they did. Do we really want to end up with their economy?
Yeah, I'm kind of of two minds about this. On one hand, it's not nice to see kids being exploited. On the other, think back to high school and college: the "victims" here are almost without exception the very dregs of the educational system, and here we have a court saying it's not enough that they get something for free that most of us who actually care about learning have to take on exorbitant debt burdens for, but that they ought to actually be paid for it too?!?
it creates jobs by destroying other jobs that are not accounted for
Thank you, report authors! People need to realize that this is a real thing. Next time you hear people say that Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the USA, remember that every place where a Wal-Mart shows up, it wreaks economic havoc on local stores and businesses, driving far more people out of business than it employs. And if they employ more people than any other company, by simple arithmetic that means they are, on balance, a truly massive job destroyer and ought to be regarded as the dangerous societal parasites they are, and not as some sort of benefactors.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: And this is (another reason) why the "war on terror" has been lost the moment it was started
Exactly. A lot of people have a vested interest in obscuring the facts here, but when you get down to it, there is no such thing as "the Palestinian people." They do not exist in any objective sense.
Before the nation of Israel was established, there were a handful of groups in that area that went by the name "Palestinian." They were all Jewish groups. Aside from Jerusalem itself, which is holy to Muslims, Arabs did not want to live there because it was such an inhospitable desert that even inhospitable-desert-dwellers found it hostile.
But that all changed when some of the more powerful nations finally saw sense and said "nobody but Jews are living here anyway, and it's their ancestral homeland, so we really should just make it official." A bunch of Jews moved in and started turning Israel into a beautiful place... and that's when it all hit the fan. A bunch of Jordanians moved in and illegally colonized some of the nicest bits of Israel, and then tried to retcon history itself and claim it was actually their home when it never had been.
In the USA, we've got an illegal immigration problem, and we mostly don't do much about it because the illegal immigrants mostly keep their heads down. But imagine if they all started claiming that the states along the southern border belonged to them now, and that oh, seriously, it really always had, and they started murdering and blowing up anyone who said otherwise? Yeah, you'd better believe we'd be responding exactly the way Israel is responding to their illegal immigration problem!
That last sentence is quite telling. As a judge, how is it of Bates' concern whether or not the intelligence community decides to pursue intelligence-gathering efforts? He seems to assume that limiting the ability of the intelligence community to spy on people is, inherently, a problem.
Seems to me that that right there is direct evidence that the guy is compromised and unfit to continue to hold this position. Limiting the ability of the intelligence community to spy on people is not a problem; it is literally the entire reason the FISA court exists, and if he doesn't get that, he doesn't belong anywhere near the decision-making process.
Of course, as we've discussed elsewhere, in many courts, the burden is quite the opposite. First you have to prove that a violation of the law occurred before you get to uncover the anonymous person.
But this is Internet Law. The quaint notion of Presumption of Innocence went out the window the moment the DMCA was signed into law. Now an accusation is evidence of guilt, and the burden is on the accused to prove they're innocent... unless the accuser says "no, I really do think he did it," in which case you're guilty, case closed.
Some forms of cancer actually have reliable treatments. (Unfortunately, there are over 100 types of cancer, and many of them are still incurable.)
Be very careful conflating "treatment" with "cure". A whole lot of R&D these days is going in to the development of cancer treatments, specifically for stuff that will turn deadly cancers into "manageable chronic conditions." A cure is the last thing most pharmaceutical companies want to produce, not when they can instead come up with a product that the person becomes dependent on taking (and continuing to purchase) for the rest of their life.
By the strictest, original sense of the word, they are actively trying to turn patients into drug addicts--people for whom loss of access to the drug would result in severe or even life-threatening medical problems--rather than curing them.
And thus we see, yet again, the harm done by trade secrets. This is a concept that needs to be eradicated in its entirety.
Patents were supposed to have done away with trade secrets. This is literally the purpose that patents were created for: to give tradesmen a strong incentive to publish their discoveries, rather than keeping them secret and then the secret all too often ends up dying with them. But somewhere along the line, things went sideways, and we ended up enshrining protection for trade secrets in law instead of working to stamp them out, and time and time again we see the harm that that causes.
One would not presume that Bob Marley, who wrote the well-known song “I Shot the Sheriff,” actually shot a sheriff, or that Edgar Allan Poe buried a man beneath his floorboards, as depicted in his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” simply because of their respective artistic endeavors on those subjects.
However, there's a long and sordid history of rappers actually being involved in the sort of horrific gang violence that they glorify in their music, and writing their "art" from personal experience. What the court here calls a risk of "poisoning the jury against the defendant" could well be nothing more than showing them the actual truth.
While I agree that in general the creation of art should not be considered as evidence of criminality, a certain level of common sense should apply, and questions such as "is this specific class of art historically known to be strongly correlated with harm to others and actual criminality?" should be taken into consideration.
I'm not talking about a $50-off coupon for a $60 item. More like a $70-off coupon for a $60 item. There are literally corporations that pay negative taxes.
Because I have neither the technical skills to develop an ebola cure, nor the resources to finance those who do in producing one. Claiming that I have some obligation to contribute to this, specifically, makes exactly as much sense as claiming that a child has the obligation to try to rescue a person pinned under a car: as good as it would be to do so, it's simply beyond my capacity.
There is, in fact, a major project of great potential benefit to society that I am directly contributing my time and talents to, but as I'm under NDA, (and as boasting about it would be in direct violation of my moral code,) I don't really have much to say about it at the moment except to be careful with your assumptions.
On the post: Turns Out When Police Act Cordial, Rather Than As An Oppressive Military Force, Things Work Out Better
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Yes... but...
Again, that is not at all what I said. If anything, my position is the exact opposite: we were able to elect a black president because racism is long dead in the US.
These are economic issues that racism-ists try to disguise as racial issues to raise their own profile. Last I heard, most food stamp and welfare recipients in this country are white.
Which, again, are blown heavily out of proportion. Opponents of voter fraud reform like to toss around statistics like "there were only six cases of confirmed voter fraud discovered IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in the last Presidential election." (Not sure if that's the actual number, but it was definitely low enough to make it look like a non-problem.)
This is a classic example of lying with statistics. Because what the last election (the last several, in fact) also have had were many, many precincts in which more ballots were cast than there were registered voters, particularly in swing states. That right there is prima facie evidence of the existence of fraud, and if they only figured out who and how six times, then something is very, very wrong. That makes perfect sense.
You know what doesn't make sense? The racism-ist argument that this is voter ID laws are maliciously designed to impose undue economic hardship upon minorities to keep them from voting. If anything, this is (yet again!) an economic problem being hijacked and made to look like a racism problem, but in reality it's not even a genuine economic problem!
The last time I got an ID, it cost me $20. It's good for 5 years. And I don't care how poor you are; there's no one who can't find some way of coming up with $20 once every 5 years! The entire argument is ridiculous on the face of it.
Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make when analyzing any complex system is to think in only 1 degree of cause and effect. Yes, there was a heavy-handed police response. That was bad. But if you stop there you reach wrong conclusions.
Here's a better conclusion for you: You know what's even worse in every way than a heavy-handed police response? Riots in the streets. You know, the sort of thing that happened when activist media blew the Rodney King story way out of proportion? The sort of thing that almost happened in response to the Trayvon Martin case? And now when a bunch of the same people who went around stirring up trouble in the Trayvon Martin case appeared in Ferguson to try again... well, if I were a cop and someone did that in my town, I'd be inclined to err on the side of caution too!
Racism in the US is a thing of the past, and the more that people from generations who grew up before the Civil Rights movement die off, the more whatever's left of it dies with them.
The last software company I worked for was quite a melting pot. The second (or maybe third) most senior developer on the team I worked with was a South American immigrant of native descent. One of the lead developers on another project was an Indian woman. One of the guys who wrote significant parts of the codebase and then left to take another job before I started with the company was arabic, and so on. We had people of all races and colors all over the company... and one black guy. We had nothing against hiring minorities of any type, but so few black people ever even applied that you might not know it if you were just to look at the org chart.
I'll leave the reasons why to a sociologist, but from the research I've seen, in the majority of cases today in which people with an agenda want to raise the hue and cry of racism, the cold, dispassionate data points instead to economics or (particularly among blacks) to self-sabotaging cultural issues within minority communities themselves.
On the post: Turns Out When Police Act Cordial, Rather Than As An Oppressive Military Force, Things Work Out Better
Re: Re: Re: Re: Yes... but...
No, the problem we have in this country is that there are a lot of people with an agenda who don't want racism to be dead, because they make plenty of hay out of it. And then there's the problem of people believing it. It's really another expression of the same problem we see in legacy media companies: when the problem you're solving goes away, there's no more need for your services, so the natural reaction against legitimate obsolescence is to use illegitimate, underhanded tactics to push back against it.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but racists are held in about the same high regard as pedophiles in the USA, and for good reason: they're idiots who make trouble, and we're sick of it. Problem is, these days so is the other side. Martin Luther King's dead, his heirs (as reported by Techdirt!) are a bunch of worthless parasites on society, and sometimes it seems like all we've got left are the Malcolm X types.
The fact that you think that just underscores how serious the problem is. You're being taken for a ride and you don't even know it. Have a look at what was going on in this case before any of the stuff being covered in the news started. Yes, what happened to the kid was a horrifying tragedy, but it was a local issue, and there were no riots requiring militarized police response and major news coverage before a bunch of activists showed up in Ferguson to "spread awareness" and drum up some outrage.
Seems to me the racism-ists didn't get the race riot they wanted in the Trayvon Martin case, so now they're trying again with a more sympathetic dead kid to rally around. That's about as cynical and ugly as it gets.
Did I say "just because"? Pay attention, folks, if you're taking a moment and reading this. That right there is a sure sign of someone who knows their argument is crap: misrepresentation and mockery. Make people laugh at the other side's argument so they won't think about it.
The fact of the matter is that we've got successful black people being very successful at every level of society, private and public, and nobody is stopping them. Meanwhile, we've also got a bunch of unsuccessful black people with really screwed-up lives... and a bunch of unsuccessful white people with really screwed-up lives. That actually sounds a lot like equality to me!
On the post: Turns Out When Police Act Cordial, Rather Than As An Oppressive Military Force, Things Work Out Better
Re: Re: Yes... but...
Frankly, we still don't have a very clear picture of what happened (or is happening) in Ferguson, because all we've been getting is one side of the story, and Techdirt (rather uncharacteristically!) jumping on the exact same bandwagon as all the rest of the media is really not helping.
I will say, though, that people screaming "RACISM!!!!!" at every opportunity looked silly 20 years ago, they looked ridiculous after we elected a black president by a landslide, and today they mostly just look dangerous, more harmful than what pitiful amounts of actual racism still remain in this country.
On the post: Snowden Says He Purposely Left Clues For NSA To See What He Took; Shocked By NSA's Incompetence In Figuring It Out
Re:
On the post: Bad Idea: California Legislature Passes Bill To Mandate Mobile Phone Kill Switches
Re:
On the post: Know Your Troll: Innovative Display Technologies Targeting Any Company That Creates A Product With An LCD Screen
Re:
On the post: Is It A Shakedown When The Gov't Does It? SEC Much Less Likely To Prosecute You If You're A Big Campaign Funder
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Is It A Shakedown When The Gov't Does It? SEC Much Less Likely To Prosecute You If You're A Big Campaign Funder
This drives me nuts. As if leaving them intact hasn't hurt our economy?
Look at the last 5 years. Unemployment and underemployment drags onward, climbing slowly higher. They say we're in a "recovery," but all the shuttered stores along Main Street and empty storefronts at the local mall tell a different story.
A pernicious debt bubble began to pop, and instead of letting it happen and working to clear out bad debt so we could reset and get back to normal, the government has doubled down on it, stepping in when it was only halfway finished with the full might of the Federal Reserve behind moronic efforts to reinflate it! And we've all seen the results with our own eyes. The stock market is rallying, but ordinary Americans are getting ground down by the millions.
The systemic problems remain in place exactly as they have been, and only when we stop propping them up and allow nature to take its course will we get back to real propserity. If we continue on this path... well, just look at Japan over the last couple decades. They had the same problems in the 90s that we had in 2008, and we've responded the same way they did. Do we really want to end up with their economy?
On the post: NCAA Found To Violate Antitrust Laws In Preventing Schools From Sharing Licensing Revenue With Student Athletes
Re: mixed feelings...
There's something really wrong with that.
On the post: New Report Challenges The Whole 'IP Intensive Industries Are Doing Well Because Of Strong IP' Myth
Thank you, report authors! People need to realize that this is a real thing. Next time you hear people say that Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the USA, remember that every place where a Wal-Mart shows up, it wreaks economic havoc on local stores and businesses, driving far more people out of business than it employs. And if they employ more people than any other company, by simple arithmetic that means they are, on balance, a truly massive job destroyer and ought to be regarded as the dangerous societal parasites they are, and not as some sort of benefactors.
On the post: About Freaking Time: New York Times Will Finally Start Calling CIA Torture Practices 'Torture'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: And this is (another reason) why the "war on terror" has been lost the moment it was started
Before the nation of Israel was established, there were a handful of groups in that area that went by the name "Palestinian." They were all Jewish groups. Aside from Jerusalem itself, which is holy to Muslims, Arabs did not want to live there because it was such an inhospitable desert that even inhospitable-desert-dwellers found it hostile.
But that all changed when some of the more powerful nations finally saw sense and said "nobody but Jews are living here anyway, and it's their ancestral homeland, so we really should just make it official." A bunch of Jews moved in and started turning Israel into a beautiful place... and that's when it all hit the fan. A bunch of Jordanians moved in and illegally colonized some of the nicest bits of Israel, and then tried to retcon history itself and claim it was actually their home when it never had been.
In the USA, we've got an illegal immigration problem, and we mostly don't do much about it because the illegal immigrants mostly keep their heads down. But imagine if they all started claiming that the states along the southern border belonged to them now, and that oh, seriously, it really always had, and they started murdering and blowing up anyone who said otherwise? Yeah, you'd better believe we'd be responding exactly the way Israel is responding to their illegal immigration problem!
On the post: Former Top FISA Judge Insists USA Freedom Act Is Dangerous Because It Might Mean FISA Court Can't Rubberstamp So Fast
Seems to me that that right there is direct evidence that the guy is compromised and unfit to continue to hold this position. Limiting the ability of the intelligence community to spy on people is not a problem; it is literally the entire reason the FISA court exists, and if he doesn't get that, he doesn't belong anywhere near the decision-making process.
On the post: Reagan Biographer Claims 'Copyright Infringement' Because Another Biographer Used The Same Facts
"I am serious, and don't ca... argh!"
On the post: Angry Lawyer Sues Wordpress Because Someone Set Up A Website Mocking Him
But this is Internet Law. The quaint notion of Presumption of Innocence went out the window the moment the DMCA was signed into law. Now an accusation is evidence of guilt, and the burden is on the accused to prove they're innocent... unless the accuser says "no, I really do think he did it," in which case you're guilty, case closed.
On the post: DailyDirt: Living In The Future... Now
Re: Re:
On the post: DailyDirt: Living In The Future... Now
Be very careful conflating "treatment" with "cure". A whole lot of R&D these days is going in to the development of cancer treatments, specifically for stuff that will turn deadly cancers into "manageable chronic conditions." A cure is the last thing most pharmaceutical companies want to produce, not when they can instead come up with a product that the person becomes dependent on taking (and continuing to purchase) for the rest of their life.
By the strictest, original sense of the word, they are actively trying to turn patients into drug addicts--people for whom loss of access to the drug would result in severe or even life-threatening medical problems--rather than curing them.
On the post: CFAA: Still Broken And Congress Is Unlikely To Fix It Any Time Soon
Patents were supposed to have done away with trade secrets. This is literally the purpose that patents were created for: to give tradesmen a strong incentive to publish their discoveries, rather than keeping them secret and then the secret all too often ends up dying with them. But somewhere along the line, things went sideways, and we ended up enshrining protection for trade secrets in law instead of working to stamp them out, and time and time again we see the harm that that causes.
On the post: NJ Supreme Court Says Rap Lyrics Can't Be Introduced As Evidence Unless Directly Linked To Criminal Actions
However, there's a long and sordid history of rappers actually being involved in the sort of horrific gang violence that they glorify in their music, and writing their "art" from personal experience. What the court here calls a risk of "poisoning the jury against the defendant" could well be nothing more than showing them the actual truth.
While I agree that in general the creation of art should not be considered as evidence of criminality, a certain level of common sense should apply, and questions such as "is this specific class of art historically known to be strongly correlated with harm to others and actual criminality?" should be taken into consideration.
On the post: Ebola Cure Not Fully Developed Because Big Pharma Not Interested In Saving Lives Of Poor People In Africa
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Ebola Cure Not Fully Developed Because Big Pharma Not Interested In Saving Lives Of Poor People In Africa
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
There is, in fact, a major project of great potential benefit to society that I am directly contributing my time and talents to, but as I'm under NDA, (and as boasting about it would be in direct violation of my moral code,) I don't really have much to say about it at the moment except to be careful with your assumptions.
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