You've never read Atlas Shrugged.

If you think Rand was advocating anything 'collectivist' at all, perfect or otherwise, then you could not have read the same 'Atlas Shrugged' that the rest of the planet has. Rand railed against the sort of collectivist/socialist policies & programs etc she saw gradually taking root in the West that she and her family suffered through while in the USSR.

I'm convinced you got fed your opinions on AS and Rand from your teachers/professors and/or your political/ideological peers.

Try actually reading a work before you try to take it apart, or else you risk looking the fool.

Strat

Government power can be "weak" without being powerless. There are degrees and scopes of power.

Nice straw man. I never said anything about "perfect" anything, nor is perfection required. I'm not talking about some fantasy society in your head. I'm talking about the US and the ideas and concepts the authors of the DoI/Constitution brought to life.

If you truly want to understand what I'm talking about, I suggest you read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers as a good starting point to understanding these concepts.

If your take-away from Atlas Shrugged is truly as you've indicated through your comments here, then either your education or your critical thinking abilities are in serious doubt.

Of course, it could easily be the case that you understand fully the concepts presented in AS and you simply don't believe men can rule themselves and build a free and open society and must have a King or ruling elites in charge and making all decisions, and so are being intentionally obtuse in railing against these concepts and ideas.

Whatever the case, this article & discussion are about to go to the archives, so I'm done here. I'm sure there will be many opportunities in future article discussions to further this discussion.

Strat

Nothing magical at all. It, however, does require citizens who are willing to do their homework and make informed and reasoned voting choices.

Thanks to the decades of destruction I've watched being waged upon the US education system by the government and their teacher union accomplices, educated and informed citizens are most definitely the exception rather than the rule these days. Your take-away from 'Atlas Shrugged' proves the point.

To have a government powerful enough to provide all the social 'safety nets' and giveaways means having a government that is a ripe target for corruption both from within and without.

Nobody bribes a politician or political body that does not have the power to accomplish their goals. Same principle applies to computer networks. Better a network of stand-alone machines each with their own security systems, than a server/dumb terminal system where an attacker needs only compromise 1 machine to control the entire network.

Freedom is a zero-sum game in that the only way government gains power is by taking power away from States and citizens respectively.

Strat

Wow, are you trolling here?

Point was that the people who actually produce will stop producing if/when government takes away too much of the fruits of their labor and/or tries to assume control of their business.

Strat

You've still completely missed the entire point of AS.

It's not capitalism Rand rails against in AS, it's those who would destroy capitalism and individual liberty by creating a crony-capitalist oligarchy.

You know, like what is happening currently in the US, and being carried out by both major political parties.

Strat

LOLwut!? You must not have done well with reading & comprehension in school. Either that, or you're too lazy to do your own reading and simply accept what others tell you.

AS rails against exactly the kind of authoritarian oligarchy that is now on the verge of doing what all the foreign enemies of the US could not accomplish in over 200 years: The destruction of the US as a prosperous and relatively free & open society.

Strat

Why should we believe that things that occurred before humans existed and continue to occur today are suddenly *NOW*, specifically and to a significant degree, the result of humans and their activities?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You want to convince people to make major sweeping changes that would negatively impact the standard of living of large populations (or as in the case of China, keep them from reaching a comparable standard of living to Western nations), you'd better have some damned convincing and overwhelming evidence to back it up, as well as a damned convincing solution.

"Hockey sticks" and carbon-credit exchanges (the Roman Catholic Church used to call these permission-slips to break the rules "indulgences") are neither.

Also keep in mind that increasing energy prices affect the poorest the most. Reducing some CO2 statistic by an amount too small to measure is "cold" comfort to freezing children in winter.

I believe in general that humans shouldn't crap in their own nest, so to speak, as much as is practical, given that the goal is to advance the standard of living for as many people as possible while increasing our scientific knowledge and technical/industrial capability to eventually move the harmful/polluting/dangerous industrial/technical activities off of Earth almost entirely.

An industrial civilization doesn't reach the stars without burning some fossil fuel and splitting some atoms along the way. I can't imagine an agrarian non-industrial civilization ever reaching the stars, more likely some planet-wide catastrophe will wipe them out or they'll become extinct as essential resources are eventually exhausted.

"The secret is to keep banging the rocks together, kids!" --HHGTTG

Strat

"They" have said many things in the past, and were flat out wrong. I see no reason to treat this any differently.

FTFY

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So far, scientists can't even get their climate models to match previous known conditions and outcomes. I think more proof is required before radically lowering standards of living and destroying national and world economies while plunging the poorest into even deeper levels of Hell.

Of course, for those to whom such results empower themselves and their ideological/political ends and objectives, any excuse that furthers attaining those results are "...settled science, now STFU and GTFO! Lalalala! I can't hear you!"

How much of a change are we actually seeing and how much of a factor CO2 actually is and how much is due to humans are wide-open questions and far, far from settled. I'm not sure what it is you're advocating, but it's not a discussion if you demand main points of opposition be conceded before any talk begins. It's more like "elections" in N. Korea or Iran.

Strat

Not necessarily true. Droughts also occur because precipitation cycles move location due to geological or other natural causes, not necessarily because of a change in air/ground temperature or drop in average frequency or quantity, the rainfall location(s) just move(s).

The present-day Kalahari Desert in Africa used to be a mega-lake named Lake Makgadikgadi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Other prehistoric lakes here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Significant changes in climate patterns have happened over relatively short periods of time in the past, and massive changes have occurred with some regularity over longer time periods. None of these occurrences were influenced in any significant & meaningful way by mankind. The scale and amounts of energy expended over the time periods that any of those changes took are far beyond the capability of humans for the foreseeable future

To even theoretically cause a measurable and statistically-meaningful change would require a Borg-like singularity and concentration of effort & purpose of the entire human race at current and foreseeable near-future technology levels/abilities our species is capable of.

The amount of inertia in a planetary size system (and that's if we exclude Solar variability induced changes and gravitational forces from other bodies, etc) in motion over such long geologic periods with such massive forces already steering it are many orders of magnitude too large for mankind to be able to cause any truly meaningful long term changes in any direction over a time-frame of only 200-300 years.

And as long as I'm already posting in a thread about AGW and will naturally be down-modded by group SlashThink for having the 'wrong' views, for those who love to trumpet "settled science! consensus! denier!", remember that "Big Bang Theory" and how those who thought the universe was eternal were crackpot nutjobs because it was "settled science"? Seems that bit of "settled science!" may be in serious doubt.

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-b...

Beware anyone who tries to shut down discussion or silence opposing viewpoints, whether it be by arresting journalists and smashing printing presses or through propaganda campaigns of malicious ridicule and personal destruction.

Strat

One step at a time.

Actually, after the legal groundwork and precedents are created for establishing the ability for the US government to do just that, they will be mostly left alone if they willingly cooperate with spying on their users for the NSA etc and maintain a relatively low profile.

The more people they can collect evidence of criminal activity on, the more people they have leverage over. Just as they threatened this guy with prosecution for watching one of the copyrighted movies unless he caved, this will be used on others.

There's nothing to prevent it being used in totally unrelated investigations. "Either inform/work/cooperate for/with us to get dirt on these political targets or we bust you on felony copyright infringement charge!s, and if you've ever coded anything that facilitates infringement in any way, with additional felony copyright infringement facilitation charges!"

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Strat

This term, I do not think it means what you think it means.

A Primary User in radio spectrum jargon means the entity(s)/group(s) primarily licensed to use a specific piece of the radio spectrum. As such, the FBI is most definitely not a Primary User of the spectrum assigned to cellphones.

To argue otherwise would be to argue against 80 years of FCC regulatory terms and definitions, including their interpretation and implementation to date.

Seeing as your primary premise is incorrect, the rest of your argument is moot.

Strat

Doesn't that sound a whole lot like a list of addresses the police would love to have?

Why, are you worried that the police will come arrest you in the middle of the night just because you don't want amateur pilots sending drones over your house?

All the recent scandals involving the government violating civil rights (IRS political targeting, NSA/parallel construction, refusal to come clean on 'stingray' cellphone interception, etc etc) give legitimate and logical reason for serious concerns by law-abiding citizens concerning how and for what purposes government will employ this technology against them.

Strat

A Libertarian like myself would point out, the government has no business banning drugs, because a free citizen ought to remain free to kill/harm himself in any fashion he chooses.

I'm quite sure that there were numerous reasons to prosecute 'El Chapo' [wikipedia.org] for things other than illegal drug dealing. Browsing the wiki page we have murder, torture, bribery, and everything else you'd expect from a drug cartel leader.

The point being that there would be no illegal drug cartels if there were no illegal drug markets to exploit. "El Chapo" would be just another petty street hoodlum. The US experiment with Prohibition and the rise & fall of the numerous alcohol-smuggling-related gangs during that period and after would seem to bear this out.

Strat

Just to go farther out there 'where no bureaucrat has gone before' so to speak, how about government not collecting and storing so much data of such personal and sensitive nature in the first damned place? Maybe if the government were not involved as deeply and in as many areas as they currently are, this would not be as much of a problem to begin with.

Strat