Bah, seriously, these comments were made six or so hours after the original story was posted. Who really expects to get modded up after that amount of time? Chide me if you want on my fast-and-loose use of rhetorical terminology (I still think strawman was a legitimate term in this case), but let's not get into wild speculation as to my motivations.

As to the core argument, I'm not the only one who thinks that. Look at Stardock - they know their games are going to be heavily pirated, but they design games for the people *who are willing to pay*. Blizzard seems to be taking a different tact. And now, I think, fewer people than before are going to be willing to pay. And I truly am not passing any sort of moral judgement on piracy (you can't really say that and then condemn it in the next breath). I am saying that the result of very vocal anti-piracy measures, especially when it reduces the functionality of the game, is sort of like throwing down a gauntlet. Again, look at Spore. A successful game, no argument on that, but also a heavily pirated one.

Let's not be pedantic. Insure and ensure are synonyms.

And despite your strawman where piracy is concerned, a number of people (myself included) are more than willing to pay for good games. All the games I play regularly I've paid for. But nowadays it's just as easy for someone to download a pirated copy as it is to buy it. The question is, "Do I feel like compensating people for this game?" Without LAN, and Blizzard's attitude towards the issue, I think a lot of people that were looking forward to purchasing the game have shifted.

Whenever a company does something that hurts the consumer in the name of "fighting piracy", it seems to me to be taken by the community as an open invitation to pirate their game. Given the choice between pirating and buying the game, frequently the reason the individual consumer chooses to pay money for the game is the impression one has of the company. Sure, no one is going to pay for a crappy game, but look at the difference between Spore and Starcraft. Spore was seen as a slap in the face of the consumer and consequently was one of the most pirated games in history. The original Starcraft, despite the fact it is easily pirated, is still profitable enough to be sold for $20 in stores.

You want to insure piracy? Piss off your users. Removing LAN and telling LAN users they're nothing but pirates seems to be going down that road pretty nicely.

Well, yes, which would include a good chunk of the Presidents of the 20th century. But people single out Bush for behavior antithetical to their idea of America, but what if their idea pf America runs counter to the actual history?

That isn't to necessarily say that Bush is right, but rather that the issues are more complex. The Church committee didn't exist in a vacuum, but was a product of a number of political trends. This was after the Democratic Convention of '68, the McGovern candidacy and during the Watergate era. Internal Democratic politics had shifted and the Republicans were politically gutted. The Church committee fit into all this.

Again, this isn't to say that the Church committee was some sort of left-wing plot, nor that the security services didn't need reform. I do, however, think that one needs to realize that the Church committee isn't some definitive statement on right and wrong, but rather a product of the ascendancy of political forces that sought to constrain those agencies. Realize that other "liberal" nations had powers similar to those that were condemned by the Church committee. Indeed, there has been a lively debate as to whether or not the Church committee went too far.

I think the best way of looking at it isn't that Bush was somehow unique or part of a small minority of bad Presidents, but represents a shift back to the state of things prior to the Church committee. Frequently, political trends come in cycles, and this isn't any different. Wilson had a strong security apparatus (even before the war), which was torn down by the Republicans of the 1920's. FDR built up a strong security aparatus that existed until the Church committee. Now we are in the strong cycle again. Obama doesn't look interested in dismantling it, so it looks like this strong cycle will continue a while.

But most people can't be bothered to really look at political history past the last fifteen or so years. With that myopic an outlook, everything tends to get exaggerated, which explains kdawson's hard-on for all things anti-Bush.

All new levels? It's a well known fact that the NSA used to collect all international telegraph traffic from the major telecoms for decades after WWII under the argument of national security, and killed all inquiries into the fact using that argument. And let's not forget that the FBI was run by Hoover, who wasn't exactly the most circumspect person when it came to individual liberties. I really don't think that Bush was any more secret than most of the administrations of the 20th century up until the Church committee. The only real difference is the amount of information that's available to the general public.

I keep hearing about the evils of deregulation. The thing was that there were a *lot* of financial regulations passed after 1929, and not all of them were good - not by a long shot. A lot of those regulations (NRA, for instance) were dismantled *during* FDR's time. Others were dismantled following WWII.

Fast forward ahead to the 1990s. Regulations regarding the merger of banks were relaxed, allowing for the very large banks such as Bank of America to form. But new, tougher enforcement and interpretation of existing regulation (namely the Community Reinvestment Act) encouraged bad lending practices. In this case the problem was overregulation.

Additionally, the most devestating argument that deregulation wasn't the problem is SOX - Sarbanes-Oxley. After the fall of Enron, extremely tough reporting laws were passed (compliance was frequently cited as costing several percentage points of the gross income of corporations). They'd been in force for about five years before the market meltdown. If they weren't strong enough regulation, then the problem isn't simply "deregulation".

While Strauss was influential on the neo-conservative movement, linking the concept of the "noble lie" inherently to neo-conservatism is a bit disingenuous. After all, the idea was central to Georges Sorel (who predates Strauss by quite a bit) and his "energizing myth" of the worker's strike as well. The workers-movement is not exactly at the center of neo-conservatism.

What you're talking about isn't "directly out of the playbook" of "neoconservatives" any less than it's out of the playbook of "liberals". It was a smart man deciding to manipulate people because he thinks it's for their own good. That kind of thinking isn't inherent to any side of the political spectrum - it's just hubris - a concept the predates left and right by a good margin.

But the atomic bomb was a scientific inquiry none the less. The point wasn't to equate that with stem-cell research but to illustrate the fact that there can be legitimate ethical dilemmas raised by scientific research. We could use GM crops or cloning as an example if you'd like.

To you, an embryo might be a microscopic group of cells that in no way can be considered "human", at which point the destruction of embryos in the process of research carries no ethical dilemmas, but the pro-life side sees it differently. At that point, you have a legitimate ethical problem with the destruction of embryos, especially if it appears there are alternatives available. You might disagree with their basic assumption about the nature of human life, but the ethical argument made based upon that starting point is no more anti-science than those who opposed the scientific development of nuclear weapons crops for ethical reasons.

I think you're being a bit unfairly dismissive of the pro-life side (and most pro-lifers I know of do have objections to fertility methods that result in destruction of embryos). Science may want to know things, but most people accept that there are ethical limits on where science should go and how it gets there. Rejecting, out of hand, the ethical concerns of the pro-life movement as "want[ing] to stay ignorant" also condemns those scientists who had moral objections to the development of the atom bomb as wishing for ignorance. I might disagree with them, but that doesn't mean that I consider them luddites.

Given the deep moral objection a significant part of the community has to the use of embryonic stem cells, and given that it looks like there have been large advances in the use of adult and other stem cells, why lift the funding ban? I mean, all other things being equal, wouldn't it be better to not wander into a moral gray area?

As I understand it, one of the major points of the ban was to discourage the field from becoming reliant on stem cells that required further destruction of embryos. I might be wrong, but from my understanding great leaps have been doing just that - that adult and other non-destructive forms of stem cell research have been fruitful. If that's the case, I don't understand the point of lifting the ban other than for purely political purposes.