Hiro Antagonist

I'm so Ronery / So ronery / So ronery and sadry arone / There's no one / Just me onry / Sitting on my rittle throne / I work rearry hard and make up get prans / but, nobody listens, no one understands / Seems rike no one takes me serirousry / And so I got some nukes / now everyone is listening / ronery no more!


So north Korea has a long history of making threats. In the past though, it's only been just enough to push countries into giving it aid, as there's no other way it'd survive in the long term.

Lately? Lately though, the threats haven't been so idle. Aside from blowing up a nuke or two to show they mean business, they've also withdrawn from the 1953 armistice, something they've never done before.

Perhaps they're in such a hard corner that they have no other choice but to start a fight. Who can say? But it looks like they might actually carry through with the implied threats and go to war against South Korea and Japan. Possibly with nukes.

In the past, China has been a strong ally of North Korea, so no one could push North Korea around too much. Whether China sticks by N. Korea as it seemingly goes off the deep end will be an interesting question. If it doesn't, N. Korea runs the risk of getting a preemptive nuking. If it does, odds are that conventional war isn't far off.

I'm waiting to see what happens next...

"I don't use P2P but for everyone else I say go for it. Rob those bastards blind. Why? One sentence: Steamboat Willie is still under copyright. Think about that for a minute. That man has been worm food (or a Popsicle depending on who you believe) for a half a fricking century and yet his first work, one made when cars were started with a crank and antibiotics were just a crazy dream, is STILL under copyright.

Copyrights were a CONTRACT, nothing more. In return for a LIMITED copyright We, The People got a richer Public Domain. Instead they used outright bribery to corrupt our politicians and buy our laws away from us. So I say screw the thieving bastards. Let them rot. They used their money to steal our public domain away from us so if someone wants to steal from the thieves I say more power to them. I just can't be bothered because I honestly think their product is shit and isn't even worth stealing. But frankly expecting us to feel so sorry for those thieving bastards is just pushing it too far. Put the copyrights back to the way they were for over a century and quit robbing our public domain!"
-hairyfeet


Certainly raises a few interesting points. Especially one that's usually forgotten in the US - what is legal is not always right, and what is right is not always legal. Just because you do something does not mean you can demand compensation for it.

Music used to only be something one could get money for by performing live (pre-1800's). It's actually still that way today for artists, just not the parasitic companies that represent them.

One thing that troubles me about the US legal system as it currently stands is the fact that someone can be sued on groundless charges and still loose.

Large corporations and wealthy individuals don't have to win a suit against an enemy, they simple have to run up the clock in court to bankrupt their target with lawyer's fees.

Why in the world haven't we patched the legal system to fix this 'sploit?


If legislators know that people can be sued for something they're not guilty of, but still be ruined when they have to pay the vast fees for defending themselves against a lawsuit that doesn't result in a guilty verdict, why not change the law?

A simple fix would seem to be 'Accuser pays defendant's legal fees if defendant is found not guilty'.


Besides running up the fees with suits that won't result in guilty verdict, but can be dragged out to financially ruin someone, suits can be dragged out to take up an individual's time to the point where it ruins them. For example, a business owner who can't run a business if they're constantly in court fighting a groundless suit.

All the way back to the democratic nominee race, I'd set my hopes on Obama. Frankly, I expected the worst while silently hoping for the best. The odds seemed nearly insurmountable. The fear-mongering and not entirely subtle current of racism made me think that the American populace would never vote for a black candidate.

I lost faith in humanity over a decade ago. While I hope for the best from people, mediocrity is generally what happens, and the depths that humanity can sink to were never made better by the heights. Reading Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno probably didn't help either heh.

Today, however, I was surprised. And almost overwhelmed to tears. I felt like somehow instead of waking up from the most wonderful dream to grim reality, the opposite had happened. I'd stepped out of grim reality into some strange dream realm where everything was better and the worst fears could not exist.

( Read more... )

My original closing paragraph was essentially 'well, anyway, it's not as if the President ever changes the reality of the nation that much'. Then I thought back for a second to JFK. FDR. Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln. You know what? Some times they do.

America. Fuck yeah.

Browsing the internets, as I do, I notice strange trends every now and then. One that's had me somewhat puzzled lately is the amount of foreign interest in the American presidential election.

From every country, large and small, there seems to be quite a few non-Americans that actually care about who the next US president will be. Why?

Britain has a prime minister. Britain rocks, but I honestly couldn't tell you who the contenders for the position were. I remember the French presidential race, but only because I listen to NPR. Germany? Japan? No idea. I'm just a random Joe, not a political wonk or fanboy.

Yet look at an international website like Rlslog (only 20% of their traffic is from America), and look at the comments on a post about the latest US presidential debate. They're hardly alone in this trend.

Weird, huh?

So why the massive foreign interest?

Aside from being a hilarious if extremely crude movie, Team America: World Police is an astute observation on the state of American foreign relations, and what Americans in general perceive as the purpose of their military.

The world is a rough place. Wars start all the time, and people die horribly for all sorts of preventable reasons. It's enough to cause any civilized person heartache. If you had the power to stop it from happening, shouldn't you? 'With great power comes great responsibility', right?


Well, yes and no. There's a right way to go about it, and a wrong way. Unfortunately, over the years, Americans have confused their military with their police to horrific effect. The distinction between the military and the police is very simple. The main purpose of the first is to kill people, and the main purpose of the second is to protect people. The real life effect is much akin to a building owner confusing a demolition company with a renovation company. Sure they'll both fix the problem, but you really don't want to use the first unless you wanted to destroy the building in the first place.

Aside from the equivalent of confusing the person who blows up a building with the person who renovates it, Americans have confused foreign conflicts with domestic disputes. War hasn't touched America in a long, long, long time. No one alive today remembers the American Civil War, and every war after that never made much of an impact, as it was always 'elsewhere' to the average American. Without a proper frame of reference, people try to classify something in relation to the most similar thing they know.

A domestic dispute.

If you hear screaming, yelling and fighting from your neighbors down the street, you call the police. They come over and take care of the situation. Problem solved! Yay!

The Bosnian-Serbian conflict was perceived in exactly the same light, as far as I could tell. At the time, people lamented what a horrible situation it was, and how it was the duty of America to help stop it. Like it was some kind of fucking domestic dispute that *could* be stopped by a policeman. Yeah, that turned out well.

But the average American never learned anything from that. After all, they were never faced with the consequences of that conflict. It happened 'somewhere else'. The reality of it never became apparent to them. And so now every time there's some other conflict that 'CRIES OUT FOR OUR HELP!', public opinion supports the military being sent to 'FIX THE PROBLEM!' And politicians are elected by the same population, and 'being a heartless bastard' isn't a viable premise for re-election.

Consequently, the rest of the world sees it as 'Team America: World Bully' or worse. But hey, Americans don't have to deal with world opinion! What the rest of the world thinks isn't going to have one iota of impact on the life of the average American. And so the cycle continues.

I fucking hate ignorance.

One of the problems with politics in general, and certainly in specific with regards to the United States is that:

A.) You're electing people who collectively have a vast amount of influence over your life and that of your fellow citizens, but

B.) You have little to no idea what they do, how well they do it, and what the results of their actions are.

Put it this way. With great power comes great oversight. Political oversight is generally relegated to self-policing (hah!) and political watchdog groups that are generally issue-specific and can't watch everyone all the time. The potential for abuse is high and the odds of getting caught are low.

All in all, not a happy scenario.


So how to fix it? How can things be made more transparent to the populace at large? Internet access is fairly widespread, and websites can be designed to allow users to sift through vast amounts of data and still have a clear overview of what is happening. Not to mention the ability to drill down to view specific things in great detail. So there's a good way to present the information. How to gather it though?

The vast majority of public policy in the US is a matter of public record. Getting it, and then making sense of it might be another matter altogether, but it can be gotten to begin with.

Bills that are signed into law often go through quite a few revisions, and various politicians add bits on to serve their various desires, so you'll find things like farm bills with pork barrel style funding added on for something completely different, like bridge building. The bridge never gets built, but where does the money go? You have no idea.

Wikipedia has a fairly decent system that allows users to track changes to pages, and see a version by version history that shows changes, differences and deletions by users. Such a concept could easily be adapted to things like bills that are signed into law.

It's just a rough concept that would need a huge amount of work to become viable, but it's also a very workable idea, which is its best selling point. It seems like something that would function well in the Real World (TM), but as usual, the only way to find out for sure is to give it a shot.

One of the reasons I can no longer claim to be a Libertarian, let alone a libertarian (small 'l', that is) is that I do not see the free market as being the best arbiter for all financial and economic decisions.

However, I'm not as informed as I could be. While a heavy background in math theory and philosophy helps point out many troubling things with the notion of the 'Free Market' being the best solution to all our woes, a lack of specific economic knowledge keeps me from being able to pinpoint what's wrong with this idea.

For instance, I know enough to say 'the free market is not the ideal free market many mistake it for' (ie, it's only mostly free, it can be gamed for the profit of the individual, and it does not exist in a vacuum free of real world restraints), but that's about all I feel I can say with any authority.


Markets are regulated to keep people from gaming the system to the detriment of all the other players. There's a certain level of regulation that is needed, but on the same hand, it's easy to have so much regulation that it does more harm than good.


In the end, I suppose what separates me from my libertarian brethren is that I'm not an idealist. When it comes to things like government and financial markets, I'm a distrustful pessimist. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. If it can be manipulated, it will be. Especially if it's to the detriment of others. Trust is not something that can be given in such arenas.

"Deregulate! Trust entirely in the Free Market to decide!" they cry. I say "No. Do not trust the Free Market. Some regulation is better than no regulation. Human beings are not inherently trustworthy."

The vast majority of the hullabaloo about Iran and North Korea seems to be linked to their desire to become a nuclear power. Truthfully? I can't blame them.

There's two types of countries; those with nukes and those without.

If you've got nukes, people take you seriously. If you don't? Anyone with nukes has you over a barrel. Anyone without nukes has much less to worry about if they attack you. Simply put, if you've got nukes, you never have to worry about being invaded.


Given all that, I can't fault North Korea and Iran in their attempts to become nuclear powers.

Of course, if you're a nuclear power, it's in your best interests, as a country, to keep other countries from becoming nuclear powers. So I can't fault the attempts of the US and other nuclear powers to try and stop North Korea and Iran.

I feel like I'm sitting on the philosophical equivalent of a fence rail. It's not terribly comfortable either.

The political scene in the United States of America is fraught with the buying and selling of political power, and politicians themselves.

The system is what is truly at fault though, as human beings can only react as well as their circumstances and nature allow. In other words, if you put a steak in front of a starving man, and tell him not to eat it, well... Don't hold out much hope for that steak sticking around.

If human beings are corruptible by nature, the solution does not lie in electing a better politician, but rather in fixing the system that elects them and rules on what they can and cannot do.

Part of the problem is that lobbying is allowed. Another part of the problem is that it's legal to give gifts and money to politicians, and politicians need money to get into office, and when re-election comes around, to stay in office.

If someone contributes money, they'll have influence proportional to the amount of money they contribute. Some have tried to restrict donations to a level that the average citizen can compete with - ie, no donations over what a well off person could manage, but there's always ways around that. The best and simplest solution is simply to make donations illegal, and to have campaigns funded by the state.


Another part of the problem is "Who do politicians listen to?". Lobbyists tend to be very good at chatting up politicians. How do you prevent lobbyists from having undue influence on politicians? If they can't buy them, they'll buy people who specialize in being friends with politicians, and politicians will suddenly have no lack of friends who have well thought out views on certain issues.

Joe Smith at home can't compete with that. Nor should he have to.

How to solve the second of these two problems, I don't know yet. I'm going to be thinking about it though. It's time for a second American Revolution, a bloodless reform of a corrupted political system. Government doesn't have to suck. It can be better. It will be better.

Freedom. It's a personal obsession. I do not gladly suffer any master, endure is perhaps the kindest description.

In life, it is rare that we do not serve someone. From birth to death, parents, teachers, company boss, politician, government and so on. One can renounce all of this and live in the wilderness, subject to no man and no law. However, as man is a social animal, it is rare that this is a suitable option.

How does one gain ascendancy over all other mortal masters?

I've contemplated this question long and hard, and the short answer is 'via the accumulation and exercise of power'. In many cases, money. But even the richest man is subject to the laws of the nation in which he lives. While perhaps not as subject to those with less clout, subject nonetheless. Most heads of state are also subject to the laws of their nations.

So what is left? Well, to be honest, the only position a human can have that escapes all mortal masters is that of a despot, a dictator. Plato went on about how the perfect ruler was an enlightened dictator, but given human nature, that doesn't really happen.

There isn't much territory in the world that's worth something left unclaimed. Even if you could gain territory to dictate, money, subjects, power, material resources, you find your self subject to the game of 'he with the biggest army wins'. Well, in this day and age, it's really 'he with nukes, the ability to use them and the appearance of being willing to'.

Frankly, that's a lot of requirements for absolute freedom. I have serious doubts as to even the minority of them being achievable. You can dream big, but unless you're young, talented and charismatic and in the midst of a great revolution, it ain't gonna happen.

That said, I'll be sure to keep my eye out for the next one!