Posts by David Dylan

Wall Street shudders under Lehman collapse

Stockmarket owl... (Yes, a LOLcat)

http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=2016281

EU security agency warns over insecure printing

Nothing new

Nothing new... at a former employer me and a co-worker made it a hobby to google for certain terms in printer status pages, figuring out their IP address from the hits, telnetting into them and mucking with settings.

AFAIK there's still a printer over at MIT that speaks french.

Doohan's last landing party missing in mountains

The terrain is interfering with the tricorders

...says it all, really.

The Pirate Bay admits links with right-wing benefactor

Lies, damn lies and slogans

"Let's see, silly or disingenuous?"

Let's see: Ad hominem or ... let's stick with Ad hominem.

"This one is silly. I can only assume that you misunderstood his point, and probably not deliberately either."

If I misunderstood his point, then he should use more than one line to make it. But on the whole, I think I did get the point.

"He didn't say that nations should be done away with. He was arguing that nationalism, the idea that your nation is somehow better than all other nations, is a bad thing, because nations are inherently racist. This is clearly, to him, something to guard against. I would agree."

You get all that from that one line? Wow. All I got was: "Nation states are bad, mmmkay."

Anyway; If nations are inherently racist, which is far fetched but debatable, then either we do away with them or we accept this racism and by implication agree that not all racism is bad.

Given the context of the remark, I'm forced to conclude that he is proposing the former, not the latter.

"And this is either disingenuous or you have no understanding of how markets work."

Let us assume that I do know how markets work. Let us also assume that an Appeal to Ridicule sortof annoys me.

"Totally unregulated (no patents, no copyright, no government protection of any kind) capitalism"

a) The "no patents, no copyright" bit applies only to a portion of Libertarians, certainly not all.

b) Yes, there would be government protection of some kind; against agression and fraud. (At least, according to the majority opinion amongst Libertarians.) Agression meaning the whole gamut from theft to murder.

I hope you will forgive me for not debating a Straw Man.

"of the kind that the libertarian fringe worship, leads almost immediately to huge monopolies. Any large company can, by and large, produce things cheaper than a small one, and thus any product created by a small business can be freely copied (verbatim, in this scenario) by any large business. Plus, of course, without various 'anticompetitive' (according to libertarians) laws and practices, large companies can very easily force smaller ones out of business. ('You may not sell raw materials to anyone without asking us first, or you'll lose us as a customer.' And so forth.)"

You are begging the question here, big time. While there is some merit to your assertions, they are a gross simplification of economic theory, one conveniently geared towards proving your point. If this was all that it took, then why do corporations today resort to government aid such as having indigenous peoples removed from promising oil fields by the military or lobbying for stricter laws on file sharing? I would think they would have all this great power to simply outcompete their opposers, right?

It's going too far to debate a few centuries worth of economic and philosophical thought here, suffices to say that things are not as simple as you put them. Who would have thought, economics is just like any other field of science in this regard.

But to get back on track here; I never actually defended the free market, I pointed out inaccuracies and contradictions in statements. I will admit to being a free-market advocate, but that is not the point here. No matter how much you are trying to make this debate about me, I merely pointed out that the RIAA and such are not possible without a nation state (or simmilar construct) to back them up; no courts == no lawsuits.

"There's your "free" market."

I never proposed a "free" market. If I would propose any type of market, it would be a free market; without the superfluous punctuation.

David.

Lies, damn lies, statistics and Antifa

While witholding judgement about the parties involved, I would caution against believing too much of what the Antifa posts. They are a politically (Left-wing) motivated group with a thinly-veiled socialist agenda. Try, if you are so inclined, to join them in their fight against Fascism and state your motivations to be of a Libertarian nature... You will find out quickly that to them being a non-racist, non-fascist (just for those who dont know their political movements) Libertarian s paramount to being a racist and fascist in disguise, Capitalism, to them, equates to all those things and they will grapple at any straw to find links and connections.

In the past their reporting has cost people their jobs (in some cases because they chose the very narrow medium of the employer's telephone connection as their avenue of choice for said reporting) while it was fairly easy to figure out that the accusations levelled were actually baseless.

An example; Performing in the same line-up at a three-day festival with a band that has printed a quote by Julius Evola in their liner notes was enough to get a gig cancelled using threats of violence.

Not a credible source, therefore.

But even liars get it right sometimes, so, like I said: I am witholding judgement.

Meanwhile: Stealing deffinitely is NOT in line with Libertarian beliefs, anmd Libertarians who support thefth are misguided. (Just to counter some remark earlyer on this forum.)

I think the Pirate Bay is on thin ice, morally. But hey; sweet sweet warez, right? (sarcasm intended.)

Extremists?

"@ Graham: Nation states are intrinsically racist. Unregulated market economies (what you refer to as "free"-market) leads to monopolies and beasts such as the RIAA. Aren't all you 'libertarian' right wingers supposed to be hiding in your survival bunkers?"

While I can see the point, albeit very far-fetched, you make about nation states, I am left wondering how you propose regulating any market without them. Sure, you could argue that the whole world should fall under one government (Trotzkist, by any chance, are you?) but this would only mean that there's now but one nation state and it has full monopoly, probably with the abuses to match.

How a free market would lead to government-mandated and supported "beasts" to regulate the market is beyond me. Perpaps that is why you used parentheses around "free", in which case however you are using a straw man argument; Libertarians do not propose a "free" market but a free market.

As for survival bunkers; since I live three meters below sea-level, I have given up on the idea of living in a hole in the ground. I would reccommend you do the same.