The irony is, countries like China and Antigua would not be able to gain any incentive from pirating if there were no copyright laws to begin with.
We don't need them. Artists can get incentives to fund their works through refundable crowdfunding, plus whatever the free market reckons an artist is worth (people will naturally pay more if it provides more of an innovative incentive, even if the artist ends up filthy rich - we see how that is the situation already).
Once people start funding creativity like this, and once copyright is abandoned, China has nothing to profit from. You heard it correctly: copyright causes piracy, especially overseas piracy and makes morons like Kim Dotcom a modern day Al Capone.
Copyright has to necessarily be aggressive towards physical property rights in order to be enforced. So it is no wonder that it gets abused. It is therefore a slippery slope, and I cannot imagine how you restrict that slippery nature legally. You only need to look at the huge number of rationalisations that are added as extensions to the copyright law: "It's okay when you copy to your iPod.. but NOT okay when you sell the CD away afterwards.. but you can make backups.. but, but, but etc." These are classic signs of multi-layered rationalisation and ambiguities, which corporations will obviously take advantage of. Occam's Razor surely has to be stated here: the simplest explanation is that copyright cannot keep up with the real world.
There is also a cultural slippery slope as well as a legal one. Culturally, everybody will seek to support extending copyright laws in order to enforce monopolies on their own works, but do not realise that this makes them prisoners of their own actions because they deny themselves the right to make derivative works of others for profit. That is why Disney always seeks to extend the copyright laws and is, importantly, never satisfied with the latest extension - they always call for more. We need to culturally discredit copyright, and I choose that word because the best way of doing so is to allow the freedom of derivative creative works to flourish (crowdfunding incentives empower both original and derivative works). When they grow, and we make copyright unthinkable in the face of all the numerous derivative artists' economic survival, it will be hard to undo and fall back into the trap of never-ending-extending copyright.
Discredit it, and make it instinctively avoidable based on historical justification. With copyright, you only have originals. Without it, you have many originals and many derivatives.
In a world where it is ridiculously easy to get multimedia off of the internet for free, multimedia industries have never before been more profitable. So much for the effectiveness of copyright law.
But according to copyright believers, there is no circle that cannot be squared.
"Your property is our property."
"Yes, the first-sale doctrine is acceptable collateral damage in a Capitalistic society."
"The Government subsidising the destruction of markets is necessary, and those who DISAGREE are the Communists."
"Guilty until proven innocent if you use a storage locker for ANY reason.. but WE are innocent until proven guilty when it comes to stealing data from users when we shut down storage lockers."
"Copyright's unfalsifiable nature is further proof that it is the only way to obtain incentives. Crowdfunding websites are the enemies of copyright law since they disprove copyright law as a sole incentive."
"Look at all the piracy in China! But isn't their Great Firewall a great idea? Let's adopt it for ourselves and call it SOPA - that is SURE to sent the piracy rates plummeting! Also, let's adopt their ideology of trade restrictions by banning copyrighted material being imported from abroad! THAT will surely help to kill the piracy even more!"
"We can DRM-lock-down your legitimately purchased games at any time, and if you disagree with us it is YOU who is the thief!"
"We as publishers go against the wishes of artists, prevent them from having a say in their very own works, all in the name of protecting their rights!"
"You have the right to put your works into the public domain... so that we can buy it right back out again!"
"You have a right to protect yourself from libel and plagiarism... unless your works are in the public domain... or a higher publisher has your rights."
"How dare those under the Soviet Union pirate copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in order to hide from the secret police! What, just because the Soviets have heavy trade restrictions? Excuse makers! Communists! Anyway, back to work on our trade restrictions and SOPA-style secret policing..."
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, comrades.
What people like this really wish is that the internet was just never invented, never mind the DVD Disc Reader and Hard Drive, and we didn't have to think about the implications of these things and we ought to bury our heads in the sand about the fact that copyright is not the utopian solve-everything solution that we all thought it was.
The internet is basically a giant copying machine, and they will have to get over it.
You have not really attempted to answer the questions I've put forward.
"Or just don't ban them to begin with" is not really an argument, while "we already jail a larger percentage of our population than China" is... for me. So much for a nation that has more guns than people.
Then again, it is only now that I am using your argument in my favour that you are now probably seeing how jail percentages is not a very good indicator of anything. Especially with the war on drugs and the disgracefulness of the U.S. criminal justice system in general.
Here is the sort of indicator I would use.
The militia is no doubt ineffective against the massive standing army at the moment, but that is no doubt because of the army's ability to possess military equipment that is far more powerful than the gun: fighter jets, tanks, nuclear silos, etc. It is too much to expect the founding fathers to foresee these things, and even if they COULD, there is very little they can do about it. How do you equip each layman with a fighter jet? Or a battleship? Or a nuke? And how do you stop the accumulation of power into the hands of a state not competent to have it? It is hard to keep a government small and unequipped without noticing that its inaction may also constitute aiding an enemy. When I see a foreign state standing by idly while genocides take place in Iraq, I treat their inaction as an act of imperialism. Yes. It is possible for a government to NOT use military might and be doing the wrong thing.
But yet, despite the government's accumulation of military might that can crush the layman with a puny gun at any moment, the U.S. still has a far, far greater standard of living and democracy than a lot of other nations. And so does the U.K. I might add, even with its outright gun ban. Sometimes people in democratic countries forget what it is like to live even a day under really nasty regimes in the world. And what they lack is free speech, liberation of minorities, secularism, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, etc. These are really the things that are the indicators of a strong democracy. Guns are just inanimate objects, and will only ever be as good as the politics behind them. And given that we have many democratic nations that can hold each other to account without guns, have a greater standard of living than lets say China, AND can hold each other accountable on an international scale, I would say that my perspective is much more likely to be correct.
There are scenarios where supporting the citizen's right to build and own guns is justified. If a totalitarian state made its way into office, we can safely say that global humanity is now at war with it. I uphold this principle against regimes such as Saddam Hussein's.
But when it comes to democratic societies, mentalities start to vary.
The whole idea of a democratic government being afraid of citizens with guns has to depend on the following: the citizen needs to have access to buy a gun, has to afford to buy a gun, has to actually have the gun, has to keep the gun loaded, has to be able to shoot the gun more accurately than trained soldiers of the state military, and has to have the WILL to shoot the gun which is surely asking a lot from someone who has never killed anybody.
In order for you to be consistent, you would have to justify the compulsory possession of guns as well as compulsory gun training and psychological repression of guilt in relation to killing. Otherwise, what have trained governments and trained soldiers got to fear? Never mind the arsenal the military have that are much, much more powerful than the gun.
Perhaps the founding fathers could not see this on the count of the "first hand knowledge" you talked about. I'd prefer to say "first hand bias", as they assumed the average layman would supposedly having the same degree of bravery that they had. Also, what would their answer be to the government's self-granted permission to have missiles and bombs on planes? No gun can shoot a plane high enough that can still drop bombs. And it would be unrealistic to expect the layman to have his own plane and bombs, let alone a pilot's licence.
The question of "who do you call against the police?" can be best understood by realising that there are other police stations to call. And if the ENTIRE police are corrupt in a fascist manner, fair enough you would be in a rouge-state scenario which probably means war. Although, the government would be in possession of too many bomb-dropping planes for any 2nd amendment law to matter. Here, you need help from abroad, not within. Just as democracies can hold each citizen interdependently accountable, so too can all democracies in the world hold each other to account. And it is here where you can call upon outside support in the form of fighter jets and the like.
The cliché is probably true that "guns don't kill people". However, I have a corollary: "nuclear bombs don't kill people". What I want to know is what is it about the 2nd amendment that permits guns but not anything else, such as flame throwers, grenades, cluster bombs, turrets in your gardens, mines, chemical weapons, biological viruses, etc. They are all "arms", too. What makes the gun so special? I am sure if everybody possessed a nuclear bomb, no government would dare oppress its citizens, yet you would be hard pushed to see how this is justified. But what we do have is a United States where there are more guns than people, yet the government continues to trespass on freedoms for fear of bugger all.
It is often said that if somebody had a gun during the Dark Knight Rises premier, fewer people could have died since somebody would have put the killer down. But again, putting the burden on a probably youthful person to start killing halfway through a good time at the movies even in order to save the lives of others is no doubt asking too much for it to be realistically expected. And what if others in the audience who also had guns to defend themselves ended up mistaking the first defending shooter as the psycho and shot HIM instead? Cinemas are fairly dark: it is quite possible to get confused. I have never really heard Libertarians answer these kinds of questions before.
Sure, knives can be weapons too. But they can also be butter spreaders and scissors, just like a rock can be blunt enough to kill people but act as an efficient paperweight. The thing about the gun is that its only purpose seems to be killing organisms, which brings it into moral question in a different way.
Even although what would solve this issue is the uninvention of the gun, I would not want it to happen nor block anybody from knowing how to build one. It is a matter of principle that knowledge is always liberating in this way (if we know how to build nuclear bombs, we can stop malicious people getting their hands on uranium and possibly use nuclear bombs to stop incoming asteroids heading towards Earth). And that is what I would say needs to be acknowledged as the true emancipator. A government will never be oppressive enough to uninvent the gun, and as long as that is the case we can fight totalitarian regimes off in different circumstances other than continued, unnecessary proliferation of guns where it is not required.
If fascism occurs, build your own guns and buy them abroad. Oppressive states cannot monitor every inch of every border. If not, do not allow useless objects to commit harmful actions by taking them out of circulation. I highly doubt the U.K., where I live, will turn into an oppressive state any time soon with its ban on guns. We like to state the nastiness of knife crime more than gun crime to be honest. However if it does turn oppressive, I'll know that countries who are willing to defend democracy will be willing to give me guns. And grenades.
It is possible for even the founding fathers of America to be wrong. In fact, since they came from an Enlightenment tradition, they would be the first to tell you that they are not infallible. Jefferson supported slavery, but that is not what we take from him. "History is a tragedy, not a melodrama" as Christopher Hitchens used to say. There were also people around that time also saying that in order for America to stay free from corruption there would have to be a revolution every 20 years...
So it is quite possible for them to be wrong about guns, just as it is possible for them to be wrong about copyright. The whole point about humanity's progression is that you correct the mistakes of the previous generations. There will be generations ahead of US who will look back at the awful things WE have done, such as our cruelty towards animals, the nasty treatment of drug users by locking them up, the futility of hunting down file sharers as well as the unjustness of copyright, and many more that I myself am not even aware of.
I'm not really anti-war on "terror" or fascism... but I still have to make this joke.
America does not just declare war on the public domain in its own country... it exports its declaration of war on public domains all over the world.
Copyright makes me physically sick.
By the way, 6 is nowhere near enough situations to consider when you throw in multiple countries and multiple relays using proxies and VPNs, never mind TOR. Never mind having a friend from Australia send you a PDF of The Great Gatsby over post.
By the way, it counts as an irony of history, but the way you stop pirates from selling copied DVDs is to get rid of the copyright laws.
Mainstream movies turn to crowdfunding... end up putting the movie on YouTube because they've already got their incentives (and can still sell "official copies" online which no pirate can ever duplicate, as well as take all the advertising revenue and fees for "officialism" approval as I've said before). Once that is done, and people start realising they can see all the pre-paid work on YouTube, why would it ever enter anybody's head to buy a DVD for even £1 if it is floating around freely on the internet?
If someone were to come up to you, pull out a spade, dig up a pile of dirt right in front of you, and then say "I'll sell you this dirt for £50" you would laugh, and quite rightly. This is the attitude we need to have towards pirates, and we can get it if videos go on free streaming services after getting crowdfunded incentives to pay for all the labour.
If someone buys the dirt, we should not say in that case "well then I guess we have to make it illegal to sell dirt", we should say "the person who bought the dirt is an idiot!" which is the simplest explanation.
I saw this sign by the side of the road that said 'Dirt for sale.' Wow. What a country we live in, eh? 'DIRT... for sale!' Boy, how'd you like to get inside this guy's mind and look around for a while, huh? 'Oh my God! HONEEEYYY! Honey quit servin' waffles and come here baby! I'm gonna sell DIRT! Look! It's everywhere!' - Bill Hicks
I refuse to believe in a law that claims to protect artists by giving them exclusive rights to their works, but in practice forbids artists from having a say in their own works.
At least remix culture recognises the need to make beloved artists famous in ways publishers are so backwards on. How can increased popularity not be in the interests of the artists? We can make laws to stop libel and plagiarism, perhaps a BBFC-like rating for derivative or unofficial copies, and give artists the rights of "officialism" which would allow them to officially approve and/or endorse of deviating works or advertising opportunities... for a well deserved fee. If cutting a brand label off of some designer clothes can dramatically reduce the sale value of those clothes, then we can safely gather that people will flock towards the official artists, not the knock-offs... and if the knock-offs are doing well, they can become official, and the artist gets more profit.
Ohhhh, right, they need the incentives to actually do the creativity? No. We have Kickstarter for that. Stop your excuse making. If a small relatively unknown indie company can start a challenger console called Ouya and get $8.5 million, just imagine what the next big Batman movie could make on Kickstarter... or the next Half Life... or the next James Bond movie... For God's sake, am I the only one who sees a potential goldmine, here? And no copyright needed! There's no excuse for copyright anymore.
I hoped from the all-too-coincidental match in price of $233.95 that people would work out I was making a reference to this spider.
And the irony that he could have paid off his debt at the bank by charging whatever price he wanted for his image... since copyright allowed him to do that.
Hmm, gonna draw a picture of a spider with 7 legs, upload it to my computer, put up copies of said spider for sale on the internet worth $233.95 each, email copies to everyone everywhere using a spambot under an anonymous email account, and claim copyright infringement on all email recipients for stealing a copy of my spider.
There was a slogan on the Left during the 30s that said "fascism means war" which is a good way of describing it. This is why I keep emphasising that calling it a "war on terror" is a huge mistake since it invites silly amateur-psychoanalysis as to the "root causes of terror", and people end up pointing to things like civilian's perception of the morality of super state powers - regardless of whether the perception is right or not, it supposedly needs to be "acknowledged as a factor" in what causes people to join Al Qaeda. But what wouldn't be justified on that basis? Another cause of grievances among them is the unveiling of women in Western societies, the reading of literature, allowing the wrong kind of Muslim to go to Mosques, the fact that people like Salman Rushdie – gasp – get to live, allowing illustrated satire of Islam just like any other religion. The U.S. is likewise guilty of "causing terrorism” in these situations. Did Denmark really deserve the attacks it got for showing a few mildly provocative cartoons? If you understand all of this, it becomes easier to see where I am coming from.
There are situations where military intervention is not warranted and that proportional force is required, such as withholding aid or imposing sanctions. Anti-humanitarianism on its own won't do, support for international criminals on its own won't do, etc. That is obvious enough, and limits can be set quite well without creating a “shoot first” slippery slope that you claim. In the current cases, Afghan society is under attack itself by a movement that gives Al Qaeda a safe haven and unless both the United States and Afghanistan are not entitled to defend themselves from attacks the country cannot be left to rot under Taliban rule (Afghanistan likewise had a right to defend itself from aggressive invasion from a super-power in the form of the Soviet Union). As I have said below, allowing that to happen could also be considered an act of unjust brute force in the passive sense.
And Saddam Hussein committed just about every international crime we have a law for. We are in the middle of an age where international justice is becoming more prevalent, and where actions involving temporary breaches of a nation’s sovereignty are necessary in order to preserve their sovereignty of the future. A big indicator that a regime needs taken out is if it commits genocidal acts. Saddam Hussein lost all sovereignty the moment he carried out the al-Anfal campaign during the 80s, and anything that happened to his regime from that point on he had coming. It was a huge disgrace that the U.S. did not take him out in the First Gulf War let alone support him in the 80s, and the fact that it was put off for so long is the only thing you can really consider when looking at the bad state of Iraq as it is now. It is a country that did not deserve Saddam, and was entitled to be emancipated from him. Indeed, there are many people who quite rightly say that Hitler would have not gained so much power had fascism not been allowed to spread in Europe along with Mussolini and Franco. The general rule of thumb is the longer you leave it, the worse it is going to get.
Fascism does not necessarily need the components of poverty and war in order to breed (you could possibly point to Bosnia and Kosovo as examples), and when it does, it causes these components to be imposed on others. If the United State’s use of force in preventing the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims somehow causes further murders of those Muslims, which is hard to acknowledge since things began to clear up the moment force was mobilised, that logic at least has to apply to those actually committing the genocide. And if you know anything about psychopaths/religious nutcases, they cannot be reasoned with or negotiated diplomatically... otherwise there would be no psychopaths or religious nutcases.
Humanity is overrated, as the great Dr House said. We tend to fail in understanding how some people can be so evil since their brains operate without the concept of altruism – something that is biologically incomprehensible to decent people. Indeed, if you put psychopaths under MRI machines, parts of the brain that are supposed to light up in response to thoughts of kindness just do not do so. This ultimately means less room for Psychological explanation and more room for biological explanation.
The fact that defending nations can commit war crimes does not necessarily mean that the war itself is a crime. In fact, can you name one just war where a war crime was not committed? Even in World War 2, atrocious unjust bombings of innocent Germans living in poverty occurred, and killed part of a force that could have helped commit to a great cause. I support the prosecution of these crimes, but that is quite different from saying that the war should not have gone ahead.
Once again, the rhetoric applies the other way. If the U.S. commits imperialist crimes in the world, does that give a movement the right to start inflicting Sharia totalitarian states on innocent people? No. Should both of these things be stopped by force? Yes.
On the post: US Still 'Warning' Antigua That It Better Not Set Up Piracy Hub, Even As WTO Gives Approval
We don't need them. Artists can get incentives to fund their works through refundable crowdfunding, plus whatever the free market reckons an artist is worth (people will naturally pay more if it provides more of an innovative incentive, even if the artist ends up filthy rich - we see how that is the situation already).
Once people start funding creativity like this, and once copyright is abandoned, China has nothing to profit from. You heard it correctly: copyright causes piracy, especially overseas piracy and makes morons like Kim Dotcom a modern day Al Capone.
On the post: The Unintended Consequences Of The Copyright Alerts System
But anything is justified in the name of copyright law, right?
On the post: YouTube Stars Fighting YouTube Networks Over Their Contracts
On the post: Announcing: Our New Sky Is Rising Report!
Re: Re: Nothing left to rationalise.
Copyright has to necessarily be aggressive towards physical property rights in order to be enforced. So it is no wonder that it gets abused. It is therefore a slippery slope, and I cannot imagine how you restrict that slippery nature legally. You only need to look at the huge number of rationalisations that are added as extensions to the copyright law: "It's okay when you copy to your iPod.. but NOT okay when you sell the CD away afterwards.. but you can make backups.. but, but, but etc." These are classic signs of multi-layered rationalisation and ambiguities, which corporations will obviously take advantage of. Occam's Razor surely has to be stated here: the simplest explanation is that copyright cannot keep up with the real world.
There is also a cultural slippery slope as well as a legal one. Culturally, everybody will seek to support extending copyright laws in order to enforce monopolies on their own works, but do not realise that this makes them prisoners of their own actions because they deny themselves the right to make derivative works of others for profit. That is why Disney always seeks to extend the copyright laws and is, importantly, never satisfied with the latest extension - they always call for more. We need to culturally discredit copyright, and I choose that word because the best way of doing so is to allow the freedom of derivative creative works to flourish (crowdfunding incentives empower both original and derivative works). When they grow, and we make copyright unthinkable in the face of all the numerous derivative artists' economic survival, it will be hard to undo and fall back into the trap of never-ending-extending copyright.
Discredit it, and make it instinctively avoidable based on historical justification. With copyright, you only have originals. Without it, you have many originals and many derivatives.
On the post: Announcing: Our New Sky Is Rising Report!
Nothing left to rationalise.
But according to copyright believers, there is no circle that cannot be squared.
"Your property is our property."
"Yes, the first-sale doctrine is acceptable collateral damage in a Capitalistic society."
"The Government subsidising the destruction of markets is necessary, and those who DISAGREE are the Communists."
"Guilty until proven innocent if you use a storage locker for ANY reason.. but WE are innocent until proven guilty when it comes to stealing data from users when we shut down storage lockers."
"Copyright's unfalsifiable nature is further proof that it is the only way to obtain incentives. Crowdfunding websites are the enemies of copyright law since they disprove copyright law as a sole incentive."
"Look at all the piracy in China! But isn't their Great Firewall a great idea? Let's adopt it for ourselves and call it SOPA - that is SURE to sent the piracy rates plummeting! Also, let's adopt their ideology of trade restrictions by banning copyrighted material being imported from abroad! THAT will surely help to kill the piracy even more!"
"We can DRM-lock-down your legitimately purchased games at any time, and if you disagree with us it is YOU who is the thief!"
"We as publishers go against the wishes of artists, prevent them from having a say in their very own works, all in the name of protecting their rights!"
"You have the right to put your works into the public domain... so that we can buy it right back out again!"
"You have a right to protect yourself from libel and plagiarism... unless your works are in the public domain... or a higher publisher has your rights."
"How dare those under the Soviet Union pirate copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in order to hide from the secret police! What, just because the Soviets have heavy trade restrictions? Excuse makers! Communists! Anyway, back to work on our trade restrictions and SOPA-style secret policing..."
I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, comrades.
On the post: Anti-Piracy Group Already Demanding That Kim Dotcom's New Mega Service Be Shut Down
Re:
What people like this really wish is that the internet was just never invented, never mind the DVD Disc Reader and Hard Drive, and we didn't have to think about the implications of these things and we ought to bury our heads in the sand about the fact that copyright is not the utopian solve-everything solution that we all thought it was.
The internet is basically a giant copying machine, and they will have to get over it.
On the post: Six Strikes Administrator: Loss Of Open WiFi Access At Cafes Is Acceptable Collateral Damage
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Fair trial or GTFO.
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On the post: Six Strikes Administrator: Loss Of Open WiFi Access At Cafes Is Acceptable Collateral Damage
Re:
Seriously, are you listening to your fucking tone of voice at all?
On the post: NRA: Games To Blame For Violence! Also, Here's A Shooting Game For 4-Year-Olds!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: This blog amazes me
"Or just don't ban them to begin with" is not really an argument, while "we already jail a larger percentage of our population than China" is... for me. So much for a nation that has more guns than people.
Then again, it is only now that I am using your argument in my favour that you are now probably seeing how jail percentages is not a very good indicator of anything. Especially with the war on drugs and the disgracefulness of the U.S. criminal justice system in general.
Here is the sort of indicator I would use.
The militia is no doubt ineffective against the massive standing army at the moment, but that is no doubt because of the army's ability to possess military equipment that is far more powerful than the gun: fighter jets, tanks, nuclear silos, etc. It is too much to expect the founding fathers to foresee these things, and even if they COULD, there is very little they can do about it. How do you equip each layman with a fighter jet? Or a battleship? Or a nuke? And how do you stop the accumulation of power into the hands of a state not competent to have it? It is hard to keep a government small and unequipped without noticing that its inaction may also constitute aiding an enemy. When I see a foreign state standing by idly while genocides take place in Iraq, I treat their inaction as an act of imperialism. Yes. It is possible for a government to NOT use military might and be doing the wrong thing.
But yet, despite the government's accumulation of military might that can crush the layman with a puny gun at any moment, the U.S. still has a far, far greater standard of living and democracy than a lot of other nations. And so does the U.K. I might add, even with its outright gun ban. Sometimes people in democratic countries forget what it is like to live even a day under really nasty regimes in the world. And what they lack is free speech, liberation of minorities, secularism, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, etc. These are really the things that are the indicators of a strong democracy. Guns are just inanimate objects, and will only ever be as good as the politics behind them. And given that we have many democratic nations that can hold each other to account without guns, have a greater standard of living than lets say China, AND can hold each other accountable on an international scale, I would say that my perspective is much more likely to be correct.
On the post: NRA: Games To Blame For Violence! Also, Here's A Shooting Game For 4-Year-Olds!
Re: Re: Re: This blog amazes me
But when it comes to democratic societies, mentalities start to vary.
The whole idea of a democratic government being afraid of citizens with guns has to depend on the following: the citizen needs to have access to buy a gun, has to afford to buy a gun, has to actually have the gun, has to keep the gun loaded, has to be able to shoot the gun more accurately than trained soldiers of the state military, and has to have the WILL to shoot the gun which is surely asking a lot from someone who has never killed anybody.
In order for you to be consistent, you would have to justify the compulsory possession of guns as well as compulsory gun training and psychological repression of guilt in relation to killing. Otherwise, what have trained governments and trained soldiers got to fear? Never mind the arsenal the military have that are much, much more powerful than the gun.
Perhaps the founding fathers could not see this on the count of the "first hand knowledge" you talked about. I'd prefer to say "first hand bias", as they assumed the average layman would supposedly having the same degree of bravery that they had. Also, what would their answer be to the government's self-granted permission to have missiles and bombs on planes? No gun can shoot a plane high enough that can still drop bombs. And it would be unrealistic to expect the layman to have his own plane and bombs, let alone a pilot's licence.
The question of "who do you call against the police?" can be best understood by realising that there are other police stations to call. And if the ENTIRE police are corrupt in a fascist manner, fair enough you would be in a rouge-state scenario which probably means war. Although, the government would be in possession of too many bomb-dropping planes for any 2nd amendment law to matter. Here, you need help from abroad, not within. Just as democracies can hold each citizen interdependently accountable, so too can all democracies in the world hold each other to account. And it is here where you can call upon outside support in the form of fighter jets and the like.
The cliché is probably true that "guns don't kill people". However, I have a corollary: "nuclear bombs don't kill people". What I want to know is what is it about the 2nd amendment that permits guns but not anything else, such as flame throwers, grenades, cluster bombs, turrets in your gardens, mines, chemical weapons, biological viruses, etc. They are all "arms", too. What makes the gun so special? I am sure if everybody possessed a nuclear bomb, no government would dare oppress its citizens, yet you would be hard pushed to see how this is justified. But what we do have is a United States where there are more guns than people, yet the government continues to trespass on freedoms for fear of bugger all.
It is often said that if somebody had a gun during the Dark Knight Rises premier, fewer people could have died since somebody would have put the killer down. But again, putting the burden on a probably youthful person to start killing halfway through a good time at the movies even in order to save the lives of others is no doubt asking too much for it to be realistically expected. And what if others in the audience who also had guns to defend themselves ended up mistaking the first defending shooter as the psycho and shot HIM instead? Cinemas are fairly dark: it is quite possible to get confused. I have never really heard Libertarians answer these kinds of questions before.
Sure, knives can be weapons too. But they can also be butter spreaders and scissors, just like a rock can be blunt enough to kill people but act as an efficient paperweight. The thing about the gun is that its only purpose seems to be killing organisms, which brings it into moral question in a different way.
Even although what would solve this issue is the uninvention of the gun, I would not want it to happen nor block anybody from knowing how to build one. It is a matter of principle that knowledge is always liberating in this way (if we know how to build nuclear bombs, we can stop malicious people getting their hands on uranium and possibly use nuclear bombs to stop incoming asteroids heading towards Earth). And that is what I would say needs to be acknowledged as the true emancipator. A government will never be oppressive enough to uninvent the gun, and as long as that is the case we can fight totalitarian regimes off in different circumstances other than continued, unnecessary proliferation of guns where it is not required.
If fascism occurs, build your own guns and buy them abroad. Oppressive states cannot monitor every inch of every border. If not, do not allow useless objects to commit harmful actions by taking them out of circulation. I highly doubt the U.K., where I live, will turn into an oppressive state any time soon with its ban on guns. We like to state the nastiness of knife crime more than gun crime to be honest. However if it does turn oppressive, I'll know that countries who are willing to defend democracy will be willing to give me guns. And grenades.
On the post: NRA: Games To Blame For Violence! Also, Here's A Shooting Game For 4-Year-Olds!
Re: This blog amazes me
So it is quite possible for them to be wrong about guns, just as it is possible for them to be wrong about copyright. The whole point about humanity's progression is that you correct the mistakes of the previous generations. There will be generations ahead of US who will look back at the awful things WE have done, such as our cruelty towards animals, the nasty treatment of drug users by locking them up, the futility of hunting down file sharers as well as the unjustness of copyright, and many more that I myself am not even aware of.
On the post: 'Quantum Copyright:' At What Point Does A Legal Copy Become Infringement?
America does not just declare war on the public domain in its own country... it exports its declaration of war on public domains all over the world.
Copyright makes me physically sick.
By the way, 6 is nowhere near enough situations to consider when you throw in multiple countries and multiple relays using proxies and VPNs, never mind TOR. Never mind having a friend from Australia send you a PDF of The Great Gatsby over post.
On the post: GEMA Vs. YouTube Hits The Three Year Mark As Rate Negotiations Fall Through Again
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Mainstream movies turn to crowdfunding... end up putting the movie on YouTube because they've already got their incentives (and can still sell "official copies" online which no pirate can ever duplicate, as well as take all the advertising revenue and fees for "officialism" approval as I've said before). Once that is done, and people start realising they can see all the pre-paid work on YouTube, why would it ever enter anybody's head to buy a DVD for even £1 if it is floating around freely on the internet?
If someone were to come up to you, pull out a spade, dig up a pile of dirt right in front of you, and then say "I'll sell you this dirt for £50" you would laugh, and quite rightly. This is the attitude we need to have towards pirates, and we can get it if videos go on free streaming services after getting crowdfunded incentives to pay for all the labour.
If someone buys the dirt, we should not say in that case "well then I guess we have to make it illegal to sell dirt", we should say "the person who bought the dirt is an idiot!" which is the simplest explanation.
I saw this sign by the side of the road that said 'Dirt for sale.' Wow. What a country we live in, eh? 'DIRT... for sale!' Boy, how'd you like to get inside this guy's mind and look around for a while, huh? 'Oh my God! HONEEEYYY! Honey quit servin' waffles and come here baby! I'm gonna sell DIRT! Look! It's everywhere!' - Bill Hicks
On the post: GEMA Vs. YouTube Hits The Three Year Mark As Rate Negotiations Fall Through Again
At least remix culture recognises the need to make beloved artists famous in ways publishers are so backwards on. How can increased popularity not be in the interests of the artists? We can make laws to stop libel and plagiarism, perhaps a BBFC-like rating for derivative or unofficial copies, and give artists the rights of "officialism" which would allow them to officially approve and/or endorse of deviating works or advertising opportunities... for a well deserved fee. If cutting a brand label off of some designer clothes can dramatically reduce the sale value of those clothes, then we can safely gather that people will flock towards the official artists, not the knock-offs... and if the knock-offs are doing well, they can become official, and the artist gets more profit.
Ohhhh, right, they need the incentives to actually do the creativity? No. We have Kickstarter for that. Stop your excuse making. If a small relatively unknown indie company can start a challenger console called Ouya and get $8.5 million, just imagine what the next big Batman movie could make on Kickstarter... or the next Half Life... or the next James Bond movie... For God's sake, am I the only one who sees a potential goldmine, here? And no copyright needed! There's no excuse for copyright anymore.
On the post: Details Of Various Six Strikes Plans Revealed; May Create Serious Problems For Free WiFi
Re: Re: Fucking love added value.
And the irony that he could have paid off his debt at the bank by charging whatever price he wanted for his image... since copyright allowed him to do that.
On the post: Details Of Various Six Strikes Plans Revealed; May Create Serious Problems For Free WiFi
Re: Fucking love added value.
On the post: Details Of Various Six Strikes Plans Revealed; May Create Serious Problems For Free WiFi
Fucking love added value.
BRB.
On the post: There Is No End In Sight For The Self-Perpetuating 'War On Terror'
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There are situations where military intervention is not warranted and that proportional force is required, such as withholding aid or imposing sanctions. Anti-humanitarianism on its own won't do, support for international criminals on its own won't do, etc. That is obvious enough, and limits can be set quite well without creating a “shoot first” slippery slope that you claim. In the current cases, Afghan society is under attack itself by a movement that gives Al Qaeda a safe haven and unless both the United States and Afghanistan are not entitled to defend themselves from attacks the country cannot be left to rot under Taliban rule (Afghanistan likewise had a right to defend itself from aggressive invasion from a super-power in the form of the Soviet Union). As I have said below, allowing that to happen could also be considered an act of unjust brute force in the passive sense.
And Saddam Hussein committed just about every international crime we have a law for. We are in the middle of an age where international justice is becoming more prevalent, and where actions involving temporary breaches of a nation’s sovereignty are necessary in order to preserve their sovereignty of the future. A big indicator that a regime needs taken out is if it commits genocidal acts. Saddam Hussein lost all sovereignty the moment he carried out the al-Anfal campaign during the 80s, and anything that happened to his regime from that point on he had coming. It was a huge disgrace that the U.S. did not take him out in the First Gulf War let alone support him in the 80s, and the fact that it was put off for so long is the only thing you can really consider when looking at the bad state of Iraq as it is now. It is a country that did not deserve Saddam, and was entitled to be emancipated from him. Indeed, there are many people who quite rightly say that Hitler would have not gained so much power had fascism not been allowed to spread in Europe along with Mussolini and Franco. The general rule of thumb is the longer you leave it, the worse it is going to get.
Fascism does not necessarily need the components of poverty and war in order to breed (you could possibly point to Bosnia and Kosovo as examples), and when it does, it causes these components to be imposed on others. If the United State’s use of force in preventing the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims somehow causes further murders of those Muslims, which is hard to acknowledge since things began to clear up the moment force was mobilised, that logic at least has to apply to those actually committing the genocide. And if you know anything about psychopaths/religious nutcases, they cannot be reasoned with or negotiated diplomatically... otherwise there would be no psychopaths or religious nutcases.
Humanity is overrated, as the great Dr House said. We tend to fail in understanding how some people can be so evil since their brains operate without the concept of altruism – something that is biologically incomprehensible to decent people. Indeed, if you put psychopaths under MRI machines, parts of the brain that are supposed to light up in response to thoughts of kindness just do not do so. This ultimately means less room for Psychological explanation and more room for biological explanation.
On the post: There Is No End In Sight For The Self-Perpetuating 'War On Terror'
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Once again, the rhetoric applies the other way. If the U.S. commits imperialist crimes in the world, does that give a movement the right to start inflicting Sharia totalitarian states on innocent people? No. Should both of these things be stopped by force? Yes.
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