793 karma · joined December 8, 2013
Manufacturing spacecraft capable of traveling between the stars in any reasonable amount of time, if possible at all, would be an immense industrial undertaking, the pinnacle of not just scientific knowledge but societal complexity in order to coordinate the resources involved. Any alien race capable of doing these things must have also committed the sins that they're smugly damning us for, and to a far greater degree than we have.
I will guarantee you that ninety-five percent of the population would just stare at you in bafflement if you hit them with this Adbusters-style rhetoric. You want those things, which is fine: more power you! But most people don't care. They are using adblockers because the ads are intrusive and slow down their devices or burn up the battery. If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.
That "we want to be free of proxy wars" comment is especially wrong. People love proxy wars! It's no different from rooting for your local sports team. You have a thing you like for whatever trivial reason, it's entertaining to watch that thing fight with another thing. It's a standard element of human behavior.
Not really. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars together cost something on the order of $750 billion, which was less than one year of stimulus spending at the beginning of the current administration.
But that being said... the bit about how this will simply encourage piracy is spot on. Perhaps Netflix themselves have no choice but to do this if they want to keep their contracts, but as usual content industries are shooting themselves in the foot by thinking that people on the wrong side of a national border will just politely give up rather than find another way to get the thing they want.
Who will decide what class a corporation falls into?
I get the uneasy feeling that, practically speaking, corporations expressing certain approved political opinions or supporting approved political candidates will have the least constraints.
Corporations such as -- to pick an example completely at random -- the New York Times?
One of the many, many problems with advocating limiting corporate speech is that virtually everything larger than complaining on a blog or tacking a sign to an electrical pole is done by a corporate organization. If the New York Times can say what it pleases using its vast financial resources and nationwide distribution networks, it's very hard to argue coherently that, say, General Electric can't.
What made me raise an eyebrow was the bit about how if things changed, it might be in Israel's interests to be expansionist. That's obviously true, one could say that about any country, of course, but... well, in the end that's probably on me being oversensitive, and it was uncalled for to go after it.
This really is a good example of how toxic outrage culture gets in the way of solving problems. Maybe this guy was self-centered talking only about how much trouble the homeless cause him. Okay, say he was. And? If he's cowed into silence by the great armies of Twitter, has that put one more street person into an apartment or methadone clinic?
I'm reminded of that flap about a British business that had homeless people sleeping on the benches on their property, and switched them out for benches it was not possible to sleep on, and was lambasted for it. It really is a singularity of modern awfulness: we won't do anything to make people not be homeless, but we'll yell at (some other) hapless person across the city until they surrender and make sure the homeless have cold metal benches in front of their building to freeze to death on, as is their human right.
If Israel was "hell bent on using nuclear weapons" why haven't they used their nuclear weapons? You are so choked with hatred you can't even assemble a consistent argument. You need to step back and think about things for a while. Ask yourself why you hate so much, and who put this poison in your head, and why they did it.
"But Israelis have bought our corruptible political system to the point where all our politicians fight each other to prove who is more of a "friend" to Israel. If the US where acting in its real best interest it would keep Israel at much more of an arm's length. In a way Israel is much more of a dangerous enemy to American democracy than Iran, Russia, China or any other country."
That's a lot more serious than dispassionately noting how one nation among many that has an influential lobby in the United States.
But one other point that is worth considering: American public opinion of Israel is generally around 60% positive, 30% neutral, and 10% negative (source: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/poally...). Is it particularly shocking that politicians go where the votes are? No conspiracy theory required.
Eh, there's no reason to be surprised. There is no strategic benefit to Israel in "grabbing" arbitrary chunks of Syria just because they happen to be undefended at the moment. It is in an excellent position right now to not just defend itself against any attacks from Syria but indeed deter them, and military overextension would weaken that.
How would we tell the difference between "people have always been angry, this just exposes it" and "the pathological design of social networks like Twitter makes people angry when they wouldn't have otherwise been"?
It only has the power that we give it. Which is to say, right now it has enormous power, because employers fall over themselves to defuse any hint of controversy by firing anyone who becomes the target of a mob. And conferences un-invite people, and et cetera, et cetera.
If, going way back to 2009 or so, employers had stood firm and said "no, we're not going to waste our time policing what our employees say in their off hours, now go away" to the perpetually offended of whatever stripe, none of this would be happening. But they didn't, and it is. We need to reverse this state of affairs before we can afford to sit back and dismiss it as irrelevant bickering.
Was this also the case when Democrats blocked George W. Bush's judicial nominees for years, or shut down the government half a dozen time under Reagan? You can't have it both ways.