"Some people somewhere are consensually doing something that offends my sensitive sensibilities, so it has to stop even though it's a private matter that I have no part in and no business sticking my nose into!"

The behavior of corporations -- artificial persons created by state fiat -- is not a "private matter".

So, that I know of, no ISP has a program where they police what you do.

My ISP is Sprint/Clearwire. (Complicated corporate and branding relationship.) I got a nastygram from them about peer-to-peer downloads. They didn't care that I was downloads GNU/Linux distros, they didn't want me using PtP at all. (So I got a VPN account and flipped them the bird.)

What separates the left, especially the European version of left, from the American concept of left/liberal?

Left=pro-worker=socialist, though that word has been poisoned by a century of Red Scares here.

Right=pro-aristocrat=capitalist. (When you have a hereditary class of state-backed "owners" who control the economic resources, that's an aristocracy.)

Left/right has nothing to do with social issues like abortion rights, gay marriage, etc., nor does it have to do with the size of government. It's about who the economic system should benefit.

The Democratic party is thoroughly capitalist, with only a relatively minor disagreement with the Republican party as to what degree of exploitation of the proles by their feudal lords is best.

They ignore the letter because a letter from the NSA to someone outside the US has no legal significance.

A letter from the NSA to someone inside the US has no legal significance either. That doesn't stop the U.S. government from acting illegally.

...rent seeking - where somebody is able to shave some of the economic profit from an activity without doing much of anything.

I.e., the highest and most pure form of capitalism -- a system in which the state-backed "owner" of capital extracts profit from laborers (physically and intellectual) without actually creating anything themselves.

The number of men who actually carry out rapes is relatively small, so long as you only define rape as a violent act that occurs in dimly lit alleyways. Once you open it out it becomes substantially larger.

No, not really, as the research of people like David Lisak shows. Rape is the act of a small percentage of repeat predators.

The "rape culture" model is finally being laid by the wayside; as RAINN's recent memo to the White House task force notes, "Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime."

But that isn't the fault of the system, capitalism. That's the fault of corrupt "leaders".

If your system is vulnerable to attack by corrupt "leaders", that's the system's fault. It's the problem with Marxism and it's also the problem with capitalism: when people get power, via state-backed control of capital or via a "dictatorship of the proletariat", these use that power in their own interests.

Men, if you want something in life, whether that "something" is a job, a house or a relationship, you have to earn it.

Stop. A relationship is not something that you earn. You can argue to your boss that you've earned a promotion with your job performance, you can argue to the bank that you've earned a mortgage with your credit history, but if you argue to a woman that you've earned a relationship with her, that's sexist bullshit.

That said, if you want to have more friends, including the type of friends who go to bed with you, self-cultivation is a good idea. Clean yourself up, get some exercise and eat real food, practice social skills. Hack yourself. But you don't get to collect experience points and say "ok, now I've earned this sort of relationship with this person."

Not everything is about you. As a man, you should not be offended when those who do rape get called on it, just because they are also men.

Consider: African-American men are, statistically, far more likely to commit murder than Caucasian men are. Does an African-American man have a right to call racist bullshit if you tell him to stop murdering? Of course he does, and that in no way implies that he doesn't want those who do murder to get called on it.

In exactly the same way, men are, statistically, far more likely to commit rape than women are. Does a man have a right to call misandrist bullshit if you tell him to stop raping? Of course he does, and that in no way implies that he doesn't want those who do rape to get called on it.

I'm not saying you will, but it's possible you may surprise yourself one day.

You're just illustrated a huge part of the problem: a belief that ordinary men somehow, to their surprise, suddenly turn rapist someday. This myth is at odds with what we know about rapists: they are deliberate repeat predators with a pattern of offending from a young age and a high probably of cross-offending.

It's why the whole notion of "rape culture" around which so much of this discussion revolves is a distraction: rape is not the result of ordinary guys made confused by their culture about consent, it's the result of deliberate acts by violent assholes who know quite well what they are doing, and all the hashtags in the world won't change them.

If we actually want to stop rape, rather than have a feel-good self righteous flamewar, we need personal safety and bystander intervention training.

"Why is it not helpful to say 'not all men are like that'? For lots of reasons. For one, women know this.

Most women probably do, though there are handful of misandrist dingbats out there. It would be useful for women who are not misandrist dingbats to disassociate themselves from that group. You don't get points for making prejudiced statements about Group X and then saying "Oh, I know not all members of Group X are like that."

And men know that rape is wrong, except for a vile handful of predators who are not going to change because of some internet discussion. It would be useful for men who are not vile predators to disassociate themselves from that group.

(I am assuming all present are familiar with and will not fall into the fallacy of the extended analogy, and will not think I am saying that misandrist statements are comparable to rape.)

Women, if you want to end the phenomenon of men saying "Not all men are misogynist," don't make statements that imply all men are misogynist.

Men, if you want to end the phenomenon of women saying "All men are misogynist," don't make statements that imply you are misogynist.

All, if you don't want people to respond defensively, don't makes statements that imply you are attacking them.

No, what's needed is an infinite supply of money, of course.

Infinite, no, but adequate. If we restored taxes on the wealthy to the rates they were in, say, the Eisenhower administration, that'd help a lot.

then why are they using rising CO2 as the gauge instead of the much more relevant declining O2 levels?

Your body measures CO2 levels, not O2 levels, to know when to breathe. Your brain will go into full scale psychedelic freakout mode if CO2 levels are high even in there's plenty of O2. CO2 is incredibly relevant.

So what's the point in making more? Either TV or books. The amount we have seems to be sufficient for our needs

And what are our needs? If it's merely "something to put in front of our eyes for momentary distraction", sure, there's more than enough. If it's "something that speaks to the human condition as it exists today, that evokes an aesthetic experience, that's a different matter.

Also, of course, there is the joy and reward of having created something. I hope to sell a lot of copies of my book, but even if it never sells more that 100 copies I learned a tremendous amount in the process of writing it.

If Facebook chooses to hire an all "white" staff, it is none of your damn business.

Facebook is a corporation, an entity created by government fiat. I don't think the government should create racists.

I am pretty sure the problem can be traced all the way back to the inequality in public schools.

Of course there's no inequality in private schools. Right.

I don;t think Google and other companies like Google would be begging for more H1B visas to hire more minorities from other countries if they were racist.

Non sequitur. American slaver owners were racist but were happy to have more Africans imported into the country to enslave.

Any unnecessary discrimination would be cutting into their bottom line.

Not at all. In a racist and sexist environment, where folks who are not white males are generally underpaid compared to us white guys, a company maximizes profits by continuing that underpayment, perhaps just doing it slightly less than their competition. ("The industry average is that Group A are underpaid by X%. Amalgamated Profits Inc. only underpays Group A by (0.9*X)%, so as a member of Group A boy am I glad to have a job here.")