March 20, 2012

Indeed, corps are extreme statist institutions.

The big corps as presently constituted cannot exist without the state.

Many of them lobby actively for wars by the state. (Not all.)

They need and expect the state to enforce their property rights, including titles, patents, copyrights and trademarks.

They need the state to maintain conditions of law and order, especially with regard to property rights.

On the other hand, they expect the state to evict people from foreclosed properties for them, even when they can't show title!

They need and have often used the state to crush workers movements and other rebellions.

They commandeer the state every way they can: for investment, for technological development, for subsidies, for providing an educated workforce, and, possibly in the most significant way to their bottom line, as contractors.

They are constantly lobbying the state to get their way. They're not calling for an end to politicians, they love politicians because they can buy politicians.

Just because they want to be above the law and never be prevented from doing anything they like, doesn't mean they are anti-statist. They are extreme pro-statists and part of the state policymaking elite, but they are also outlaws whenever it suits them. No contradiction.

In no philosophical sense whatsoever are conventional corporations anarchist.

A few coops are, however. Credit unions can be.

March 17, 2012

Depends on etymology, no? (use of "niggardly")

Apparently first use in 14th c. Britain and unlikely to have any realation to negro, an adoption from the Spanish word for black in the 16th c.

Points for Hitchens in the below...

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=niggard&searchmode=none

niggard
mid-14c., nygart, of uncertain origin. The suffix suggests French origin (cf. -ard), but the root word is probably related to O.N. hnøggr "stingy," from P.Gmc. *khnauwjaz (cf. Swed. njugg "close, careful," Ger. genau "precise, exact&quot , and to O.E. hneaw "stingy, niggardly," which did not survive in Middle English.

niggardly
1560s, from niggard + -ly (2).
It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved — having felt the word hanging in the air a bit — to say "parsimonious" from then on. (Christopher Hitchens, "The Pernicious Effects of Banning Words," Slate.com, Dec. 4, 2006)

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1725/is-niggardly-a-racist-word

Sure, the origin of "niggard" is unclear, but not its timeline, which predates the N-word in the English language by a couple hundred years at least. "Niggard" comes up as early as Chaucer, late 14th century. The most commonly speculated origin is Scandanavian nig/Old Norse hnoggr, meaning miserly. Don't know how much faith you want to put in Indo-European roots, but one meaning of the root ken- is conjectured to relate a family of words with a connotation implying closing, tightening, or pinching (the family of related words is hypothesized to include such n-words as nap, nibble, nod, nosh, neap, nip). The racial slur "nigger," on the other hand, doesn't enter the lexicon until the 1500's, first as "neger" or "neeger," obviously from the same root as the French negre and Spanish negro, words for the color black, which are derived from the Latin niger.

There's nothing you can do about homonyms and associations, however. And who knows, maybe the two words have become associated in people's minds through the centuries, so that 200 years ago people started thinking one had to be related to the other. Now of course, no one even knows the first word any more, possibly because of the way it sounds. So when someone uses it, you see what happens. So this word is probably on the way out, but you can't blame old folk for happening to use it.

March 12, 2012

Perhaps you prefer not to see it, but the evidence is unquestionable

It's a shame you wish to buy into the myths shrouding and protecting the crimes of the Bush regime, but as a well-informed observer 11 years later, it's your decision to make.

However, it is well known internationally that the US was preparing to attack Afghanistan (with plans, deployments, intent and schedules, not just contingency planning) in mid-October 2001, and the orders for go-ahead were placed on Bush's desk for signing two days prior to September 11th (according to reports in Newsweek).

Plans for the offensive were coordinated during the prior summer with India and Russia (and Russia did actually help out the real invasion that followed in the fall).

After back-channel talks with the Taliban had been suspended under Clinton, the Bush regime in its early months resumed the negotiations, attempting to pressure them into a peace with the Northern Alliance and a gas pipeline deal with Unocal. (Argentinean Bridas was also competing for a pipeline deal.)

In June 2001, in Germany, at negotiations involving India, Pakistan, Russia and Germany, the US negotiator threatened the Taliban with a "carpet of gold, or a carpet of bombs" if the Taliban did not comply. The US gave $125 million in aid to Afghanistan through May. The last aid payment of $43 million was ostensibly to support the end of poppy growing (which the Taliban actually enforced).

Nevertheless, the Taliban broke off the talks in June and Jane's and other industry publications published about the preparations for an Afghan incursion that summer.

As the WaPo later reported, the CIA had agents in place talking with Afghan warlords already two years before. The invasion met its initial success largely thanks to the effectiveness of CIA payoffs to the warlords, in the context of their having lost the all-important poppy revenue. (The post-invasion poppy harvest set a record.)

To summarize: The Afghan war was intended and prepared prior to September 11th. All that was missing was a casus belli.

March 11, 2012

Tony 2012

If only!

March 11, 2012

Basically I agree with the idea of "Mundane Science Fiction"

although in some ways it's like the death of a god to accept it. A kind of planetary sobering up. Also, it means Mad Max is a lot likelier than Star Trek (by a factor in the quadrillions).

I think the time will come when large round arks are built, or whole asteroids are turned into expeditionary craft and sent on their way with a few hundred colonists (and rafts full of DNA for clones) to take trips over several thousand years to likely candidate planets, like Kepler, and establish colonies there. Given many millennia, thousands of such projects can be launched. Given a few million years (peanuts in space-time), the human bubble can spread out over a larger swath of this galaxy.

Ah, scratch that.

Because you know it ain't going to be humans. It's going to be our fucking machine successors. They can potentially take such conditions for thousands of years and arrive ready to build more of themselves and colonize (god help any species that might be on the target planet). We can't.

If only it was as easy as the Jaunte in Stars My Destination, eh?

March 11, 2012

I don't mind warp drive.

It's the Newtonian universe assumed when the post-Einsteinian FTL travelers return to where they started and it's still the same year there. Or when they communicate in simultaneity with all other points in the universe, as though there is a single "now" frame for the whole thing.

March 5, 2012

Distraction. Chipping around at the edges.

Everyone's seen the ads and Google has just had a big coming out party as your friendly big brother with the new unified "privacy" policy. (Apple is the next-closest octopus.) They track you through 60 different services and for many of these like search they've achieved near-monopoly status* -- thanks to the consumer, but that doesn't justify the surveillance profiles they now have on every user.

This is typical politician self-profiling by pointing to some peanuts violation (strictly alleged) instead of the elephant in the room. It's easy to come up with rules for some bullshit like this, very hard to figure out how to really protect privacy rights in this age when all sites track you on behalf of multiple entities and almost everyone has been trained to help (including to help track those who might be less willing to help themselves).

--

( * notwithstanding the joke "search" services offered by the higher profile competitors like MS, or the existence of genuine search alternatives.)