You're a bit naive there.
NOTHING happens in US politics without a billionaire backing it. Nothing at all. No matter how badly the public wants it.

On those rare occasions when something happens that the public wants - it's because there happened to be a billionaire whose personal self-interest was temporarily (and quite coincidentally) aligned with the interests of the public.
I merely posited that this is slightly more common on the left side of the spectrum because the interests of liberal billionaires are slightly closer to the public interest in the first place.

I have no delusions that Soros does anything except to line his own pocket, it's just much more likely that what lines his pocket won't actually KILL you.

You realize that the ideologue here was you ?

I was the one arguing for pragmatism and an open-minded solution-seeking approach to economics that doesn't approve or reject something by the label it falls under by it's unique and specific attributes and success-rate for the specific problem.

It is therefore flat out bullshit in my mind to give exclusive credit to any particular ideology when it comes to social progress. Frankly, that was the NICE way of putting it.

>And have you noticed any particular changes in western civilisation since then?
Nothing that wouldn't have happened either way. Except of course for the child mortality rate in the 19th century being the highest it was at any point in human history either before or since - and that was BECAUSE of said revolution.

>but by any rational measure western civilisation is the most advanced set of countries on the planet.
Flat out bullshit.

>science
An inherently socialist and defiantly anti-capitalist concept - and far more important than capitalism in the advances made by society over the past hundred-odd years.

> I mean that computer you're typing on is another excellent example of capitalism in action.
Except of course that plenty of great strides in computer progress were made outside capitalism and under completely different economic systems.

>So yes I'd say that capitalism had and has a great deal to do with the growth of western civilisation.
But that's because you're cherry-picking data and ignoring everything else that contributed, and worse, when you are unable to exclude something pretending that it WAS capitalism regardless of whether this statement holds true.

>So, the US had atomic bombs first.
Only because it happened to be where Einstein fled from the Nazi's - in a world without Hitler, Germany or Austria had them first.

The history of the Soviet Union could not be LESS relevant to this discussion. This is not a discussion on whether Capitalism is better than Communism - it's a discussion on whether it's better than ALL other systems ever devised, and THAT's what I said it's not.
There are also MANY forms of Marxism that could avoid (at least in theory) the problems that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union - you haven't proven that the problems were in the idea rather than the implementation of the idea.
A great idea, badly implemented will fail but this doesn't mean the idea is bad.
There are REAL problems I have with Marxism but they have NOTHING to do with economics and everything to do with political freedom.

And there we have it in your final paragraph - I made a statement about the grand multitude of economic philosophies and how we should be more open to ideas from ALL of them and a MORON on the right goes and tries to split into a capitalism versus socialism thing AND then it just HAD to be one of the REALLY stupid ones who think American style leftism has ANY RESEMBLENCE WHATSOEVER with Marxism.
Hint: Marxism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, while there are HUNDREDS of economic philosophies which are compatible with democracy and are NOT Marxism even if some of them may include elements of it.

Here I am saying we should be pragmatic and be open to good ideas regardless of where they come from - and YOU make it about left versus right - EXACTLY the false dichotomy I was arguing we should not fall into !

With 25-odd years of public internet as precedent on what "Internet Service" means -if your router is NOT neutral then you are NOT selling what the public thinks you're selling, which makes you guilty of outright fraud.

A myth- Western civilization embraced and was built on literally dozens of different economic systems, capitalism didn't take over until the industrial revolution.

Try reading up on it a bit. Hell anarcho-socialism was still a major political force as late as the 1920s in Europe and the 1960s in the USA !
The May Day New York riots of 1895 was effectively the oppression of anarcho-communists who, at that stage, were the majority of New Yorkers !
Capitalism had nothing to do with the growth of Western civilization, which in any event, is no more civilized or advanced than Eastern civilization or Balcan civilization.
Remember - those commie Russians got to space BEFORE the USA did, and it was only by adopting THEIR tactics that the USA beat them to the moon.
Not with capitalism but with 10 years of the most massively communist project in United States history.

I didn't insert the "not" like you did - have you considered that perhaps he really DOES have it completely backwards ?

That having to insert a "not" to make his description resemble reality could mean that he is just ignorant, as I read it.
I guess you're more charitable than I - but in our conversation thus far the GP has not at any time suggested that his original wording contained a typo - or given any reason to presume he didn't mean the backwards statement he wrote.

Net neutrality is a bad name let's call it what it is: fraudulent or honest trading.

There is nothing Marxist, about honest trading - indeed it's anticapitalist to support fraudulent trading. Net Neutrality is simply an attempt to legally enforce honest trading- which is the single most important purpose of government in a capitalist state.

You declared that Marxist would love net neutrality which proves a complete lack of understanding of both.
A Marxist would have no opinion on net neutrality at all. A Leninist would - and the Leninist would OPPOSE net neutrality on the basis that it still has private ISPs, to the Leninist the entire internet infrastructure would be run by the state only.
To an anarcho-socialist it would be ideally run by a consensus system with specialists appointed to manage things who are instantly recallable and can be replaced at any second if they no longer have the support of the vast majority of the people relying on it.
To a Stalinist the internet would be something to destroy as it's too hard to control what would be said.

And Marxism - the way a Marxist internet would work would entirely preclude the very idea of net neutrality. The internet would be a public commons (which is VERY different from a utility) managed more like a public park or a public library than an infrastructure in which private enterprise sells access, with no ISPs there would be no neutrality or lack thereoff to debate.

Now you can argue whether running the internet that way would work well, what sort of quality and innovation could or could not happen and there are valid debates to be had - but that changes nothing about the fact that Marxists CANNOT as you claim "love" net neutrality since to them - the idea is EQUALLY as anathema as it's absence.
They would oppose BOTH sides of the argument.

Oh -and the idea that you are obligated to sell a customer that which he actually paid for and keep the promises you made is the very foundation of Capitalism, attempts to do otherwise is known as fraud.

Even the most libertarian systems of thought still hold that one of the government's LEGITIMATE jobs is the prevention of fraudulent trade.

The entire concept has literally nothing to do with Marxism, which is NOT by the way the opposite of Capitalism, both are just two theories out of a gigantic spectrum of economic philosophies that exist, some of which have been tried over the years with varying degrees of success.
Ultimately the current success of capitalism is much more a political victory than a statement about it's success - it's no more successful than many of the abandoned ones and in some ways, much worse. It certainly is NOT any better than Marxism was - it fails equally spectacularly and in almost identical ways.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

You know nothing about Marxism. First learn what it ACTUALLY says, THEN you can try to critique it.

Net Neutrality bears no RESEMBLENCE to what you are describing in your post: it is simply an injunction that customers should get what they are PAYING for - which is unfettered access to the ENTIRE internet. Painting it as anything else is a lie.

Wow, in your entire post, literally the ONLY thing that isn't a complete falsehood is "This is the same entity that gave us the Broadcast Flag".

You have no idea what net neutrality is about, you have no idea what it means, and you clearly haven't got the foggiest IDEA what Marxism means.

>I can find plenty of astroturfing groups that are soros backed and do the same thing, but that doesn't make it "front page news."

Maybe it's because, mostly when liberal organisations fund something, it's something the majority of voters wanted anyway ?

Only if you can figure out what they are. Not all OS's used file extensions, not all extensions are easily recognizable today. And once you do you still need a legal copy of the software to put in that virtual machine. That may not be so easy to obtain if it hasn't been sold in decades.

I don't think this was the original story - but it's a pretty good example of the same thing:
http://www.sro.wa.gov.au/blogs...

I remember it was a slashdot story at the time. It sort of kick started the whole open data movement so we're talking early 2000's sometime.