13thLetter

> Before anyone goes on a "Gawker is a terrible site, they deserve it" tangent, keep in mind that this does set precedent for other individuals to sue other media companies for massive amounts of money, which could be another problem for an already-struggling ecosystem.

In the case of this particular ecosystem, I'm still not seeing the downside.

You just have to count up how much time the UN spends focusing on Israel as opposed to every other country in the world to realize that it not merely broken, but genuinely in the hands of the bad guys.

Don't know if you're serious, but there's a problem here: an enormous rent, in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, is now being extracted from the students sent in for "socialization" -- both in direct costs to the college, and indirectly in the reduction of their earning potential during those years. Furthermore, it is being extracted specifically from a class of people who probably have a hard time laying their hands on that money, and being paid to already upper-class people. We managed to socialize ourselves in the past just fine without doing this.

"Free" college, by the way, does not solve this problem; all it does is slightly improve the lot of the poor by instead spreading the rent over the class of all taxpayers, while making the payouts to an unproductive administrative class even bigger. I suspect the second part explains the popularity of this idea among the administrative class, though.

> No. I'm saying every country has its problems, and that to say one specific problem must be focused on before any of the problems can be solved is disingenuous. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

So why is it that we must focus on the problem of NSA wiretapping before we are even allowed to talk about the problem of millions of people being oppressed by a Communist dictatorship?

> I am, but I live in the US: we have illegal drone strikes against US citizens, NSA wiretapping against US citizens, and so on (the glasses are rose colored for some me thinks)

Are you seriously claiming that a government which has been ruled by a strongman for decade and which regularly throws people in jail for criticizing the regime is morally equivalent to the US government in its treatment of its own citizens?

Allowing political dissent would be a good start. (Are you really not aware that Cuba is a dictatorship?)

> may have a profound impact on millions of Cuban lives in a very short period of time.

I can think of some things Raul Castro could do which would improve millions of Cuban lives in a very short period of time.

> I just don't think that being "horrified" at the excesses of only one extreme on the ideological spectrum -- whilst remaining indifferent (or willfully oblivious) to the skeletons in one's own ideological basement -- makes for a particularly useful or instructive view of the world.

But the opposite, shrugging one's shoulders in the face of the explicit, obvious failure of a mode of governance and saying "well, who are we to judge really, these other guys did something bad once too," has its own faults. Namely, if we can't point at how Chavismo has played out so disastrously in Venezuela without getting uselessly entangled in whataboutery, what rhetorical tools do we have left to use the next time a charismatic socialist with an authoritarian streak starts getting close to political power in a democracy?

(Any comparison with the current political situation in a large nation whose name rhymes with "Bunited Bates of Bamerica" is, of course, left as an exercise for the reader.)

If it was Condoleeza Rice who had made this request a lot of people in this comments section would be singing a different tune.

The Secretary of State calls up and asks you to take down a video and that's an "informal request"?

That's what the stimulus package of 2009 was sold as. Then it turned out that seven-eighths of it went to various government cronies or to allow states to put off their pension obligations one more year. There were also, as I recall, complaints that spending on infrastructure projects would unequally benefit men over women.

If you really want to count up the number of corpses created by "radical libertarianism" and authoritarian socialism, we can just go right ahead and do that. I don't think you'll like the result, though.

Of course, no example of people enjoying themselves would be complete without online "journalists" telling us how racist it is.

Except for the small detail that these guys' project swiftly disintegrated due to personality conflicts, zoning issues, and possible fraud before it ever started, and the most damage it did was that a couple of contractors didn't get paid. Meanwhile, Chavismo has immiserated millions of people and imposed a corrupt authoritarian government on a whole nation. So the parallels aren't really very close at all.

That's the equivalent of someone who sees a bunch of broken windows in the neighborhood and therefore figures it's okay to toss a beer bottle out the window of their car.

Mind you, I could see that being her thought process, it's very human. But it is hardly a ringing endorsement of her behavior and principles, to say the least.

I would hope you'd also agree that if the people who didn't give Secretary Clinton the specific mobile device she wanted should be removed from security-related work, then so also should Secretary Clinton.

Just to be clear, in this case "getting shit done" meant recklessly creating a massive security breach at the highest levels of the government.

"That said, now I'm worried that an actual defense contractor will get those robots."

Why is this worrying?

If you're afraid that the military will do something evil with the robots, you're going to be dismayed to learn that they already have automatic rifles, tanks, and atomic bombs.

If you want everyone in the world to agree it's not going to happen. If you want enough people in the world to agree to move things a little towards what you want, it's possible.

> Mansplaining is gender neutral if it is used in a gender neutral way.

I'm just imagining the furor if someone said that about, say, "harpy" or "hysterical."

"It's foolish, and, honestly, kind of offensive, to imply that pushing diversity and at the same time pushing business success are somehow at odds with each other."

Offensive? We're not even allowed to disagree with you about meta-level issues now? Nobody is being insulted or harassed, no one is being subjected to prejudicial remarks about any facet of their being -- and yet it's still, somehow, offensive?

Unfortunately, having wise thought leaders globally optimize people has a terrible track record.

> We can't even agree on carbon. There's no way we can agree on something like that.

Not with that attitude.

It's not so much that we "can't agree" but more that the main argumentative mode these days is sneering and insults, occasionally backed up by mob violence. No wonder people get stubborn about sticking to their positions.

You could say the same thing about gay marriage, of course.

> So, we should all be allowed to own bazookas and nukes and aircraft carriers?

I can't think of any reason why someone couldn't own an aircraft carrier today, other than that they cost four billion dollars of course. You can own your own tank, as long as the weapons are nonfunctional and you just drive it on your own property.

How many of the people objecting to this now will obediently line up to vote Obama's Secretary of State into the presidency this November? That's the point where we'll learn how important the issue actually is to them.

Or imagine if the USA had sophisticated military aircraft that could just drop a bomb on his office!

You'd have the same problem identifying the source of a sniper's bullet, in the context of a world where the government is willing to take people out like this.

Again, if the government is willing to use a mosquito drone full of neurotoxin to assassinate someone, why wouldn't they be willing to just send a man round with a pistol? The problem (in this example) is a government willing to assassinate political opponents, not that they have access to some fancy cyberpunk way of carrying out the hit.

> If you thought political opposition was dangerous now, imagine the ease of a State aiming a single drone at an a singularly unpopular voice leading the the crowd. Holy shit--that person just dropped dead on the stage! What happened? Drone.

If the evil, cackling villains running the US government (did you vote for the ruling party last election, by the way? Are you planning on voting to re-elect the same party this November?) are willing to have a drone float down out of the sky and spray a political opposition figure with nerve gas in front of a thousand people, why wouldn't they be willing to just have some thugs kick in their door in the middle of the night?

I don't know what's worse about this attitude, the paranoia or the inconsistency. The only reason the government hasn't given in completely to its evil impulses is because they're waiting to develop and deploy some fancy bleeding-edge cyberpunk technology that's going to be less effective, less cheap, and less deniable than a couple of dudes with lead pipes... that viewpoint baffles me.