I can't believe you're putting the economic 'freedom' of health care providers on par with: The PATRIOT Act, Extended DMCA, Secret Trials, Rendition, the DHS. That you are being modded as 'insightful' is indicative of how brutal the echo chamber in your country has become. Up here in the Great White North all we can do is shudder at the madness and wonder when it will spread.

It is clear that the petit bourgeois of the developing world are having difficulty. How are they to manage their bank accounts or find the lowest cost maid service? They live lives that lack basic necessities like online shopping and right-wing blogs! It is vital that we act to improve the lives of those whom we have so much in common with!

This is an interesting stat when combined with a piece in the Journal of Forensic Identification which stated that 1/5 people were sentenced based on inadequate or manufactured evidence. At the time I read that there were 2 million people in the US prison system. Therefore are 400,000 people in prison who shouldn't be, according to this article, another 160,000 who are in prison for longer than they should be (some intersection with the previous group) and thats from a system that is trying to be more 'objective' and not mete out race or class justice. In places without 'objective' scoring I wonder how many over-long sentences there really are.

Oh, that's so deja vu: George Orwell said the same thing about capitalism after the Spanish Revolution.

This is utterly naive and ignores the fact that capitalists profit is defined by (cost_I_can_rip_you_off_for - cost_it_actually_takes_to_produce)

To act as if open source software's cost and freedom are a result of capitalism or the free market is so abysmally ignorant or free software history and capitalist market relations that it makes me think that you are a troll.

The professor seems surprisingly disappointed by the scorn heaped on his not-mainstream behaviour. He tries to liken it to cliques in high school, but the reality is he didn't just not follow rules, but he actively tried to destroy an existing social fabric and actively molested participants. He tries to paint his behaviour as 'following the rules, but independent' without the most important piece of information 'also, I actively antagonised people.' This is akin to painting himself a geek when really he's a bully (to follow on his high school example)

#1 "Right and wrong are determined by culture and society" which is correct. It is a subjective quality. Glad we started this on a good note.

In a culture where goods are communally managed you will only live in a shack if everyone lives in a shack. If there is enough for everyone to live in a house, then everyone lives in a house. I would really like for you people who do not want to accept communal good as a (perhaps subjective) moral imperative to at least stop making idiotic straw man arguments. You have far better ones at your disposal, as you show in the rest of your post.

Legally a business has a duty to generate profit. But a business isn't a person so most of the normal moral brakes aren't there. Specifically the businesses duty can (will?) lead it to *deliberately* exploiting individuals, doing environmental damage that is hazardous to nearby residents, or lobbying for modification of legislation to benefit their fiscal duty at the expense of common good.

You can also argue that monopolization of resources both raw, material, and productive means that collectively businesses actively exclude public participation in providing cheaper goods and services (since they do not include the markup) that benefit more people. You can see this in all the Municipal Wi-Fi projects that are under attack.

In fact it is arguable that businesses or enterprises owned and controlled by a fraction of the population are inherently undemocratic because they control the actual production of goods and services and are actively opposed to the democratization of that production (ie unions of the early 1900s who demanded a lot more than just wages). Meanwhile when the actual democratic state tries to intervene and impose moral/ethical restrictions on businesses they are actively rebuffed and campaigns are made by employees specifically paid to undermine the decisions of a democratic body elected by the people.

I think I've listed some good points. Corporations aren't evil, they're just victims of their legal duty and apathy of a people. But that doesn't mean that the moral/ethical standard they maintain is somehow acceptable.

http://www.roadsideattractions.ca/egg.htm

More accurately what it requires is overwhelming opposition to existing security forces. That's really the difficulty here, in Seattle N30 the anti-globalization movement managed to pull it off - primarily by surprise. But as seen at the Miami FTAA protests, the government wised up and thanks to 'homeland security' initiatives has significantly beefed up its numbers.

The lacking ingredient here is not so much training or arms, its commitment. Mark Rudd put it best when he said that the state has claimed a monopoly on violence, and any violence NOT sanctioned by the state is considered criminal or insane. If you have that viewpoint it doesn't matter how many guns you own.

Anyways, Battle of Athens linksies because it is a REALLY cool story: http://www.constitution.org/mil/tn/batathen.htm