All-American copyleft flag.
Bravo, David! Now what you need is a nice recording of the national anthem if the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1812 had existed.
Um, no. Ben Franklin's brand of fire insurance worked on the principle that if your building displayed a paid-for "fire mark," certain fire companies (which were paid for this service by the insurance company) would try to put out fires on the premises. No fire mark, no service.
Right, which is the point I was trying to make, thus the oppositional of community involvement (by which I meant both volunteer F.D.s and the modern professional model). "Paid fire fighters" was not the way to phrase it, however. Bad humor on my part, but I think bad humor leading to potential misunderstanding
This discussion reminds me of the people at Downhill Battle, who I think I generally agree with but whose rhetoric I find dangerously bad; their whole "let's blow up the RIAA" stance is dandy from the point of view of someone who would pay to hear Shellac put "The Problem with Music" to music but seems very unlikely to convince the vast number of people who are ignorant of the argument altogether; Jenny Toomey's the Future of Music Coalition doesn't have quite the same policy goals, but I think stating your question as "how can fix the system while making sure musicians can still earn a living?" is more likely to get results. Nobody is sympathetic to record executives, but nobody likes college kids downloading Ludacris singles either. Such is life.
Not to delve too deeply into Boing Boing Kremlinology, but I think the sites ongoing discussion of "This Land is My Land" copyright last year would have been a useful piece of meme-chucking: those grasping bastards are trying to put the screws to some poor schmuck animator, even though Woody Guthrie explicitly invited them to! Seize on the tactics used by the people pushing tort reform -- where there are real abuses, inflate them mercilessly, turn them into jokes, and make sure everyone knows about them. (Doing this with the RIAA's suit against 14-year-olds and computer illiterate grandmothers would work, I think.) When there are real substantive questions where the opposition has a point, steer them back to the caricature you've set up in step one. At no point has the tort reform lobby made amusing drawings of themselves as sinister puppetmasters pulling the strings of the Bush administration while killing off children and pets with lousy products, even though I'm sure you can find some rhetoric out there that defines them as such.
(Sorry for being longwinded, Patrick.)
The word 'Communism' still has the power to chill people to their very core. Even in Bush II's America, is this still the case? Now, if Bill had compared intellectual property reformers to Liberals then maybe we should start worrying...
And yet, as Groklaw's regular updates on the business world's reporting of the SCO/IBM Linux case demonstrate, this sort of nonsense still gets regularly trotted out. Why do you think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institue gets grants to write their nonsense? It's to create a veneer of respectability for the idea that volunteer efforts competing against for-profit companies are somehow un-American. (This is, of course, why Benjamin Franklin's paid fire departments are still around, crushing the specter haunting our nation, the specter of community involvement.) Why cede that argument, even as a joke?
Seeing as how I can just barely remember Wallace getting shot, I was going to have been impressed with my memory. (To say nothing of my perspicacity.) —Ah, well.
The Laurel Shopping Center is still there. You, too, can visit the parking lot where George Wallace was shot! Bring the kids!
That is a . . . somewhat unusual . . . use of "canoodling," unless the specific implication is that Teresa is the one to be persuaded to set up TypeKey.
Umm. Errr. Well. Yes, I suppose it is. I don't know what I word I meant, but that is certainly. Ah.
...
LOOK! OVER THERE! A DRUNK BEAR! And even drunk bears don't like Busch.
This isn't a huge issue and I'd really like to avoid having a giant pissing match over it, but I do find myself bemused and sometimes uncomfortable about being a public figure in conversations with people who wholly or partly withhold their identity, particularly when I have reason to suspect (as in the case of "Calimac," and who knows, maybe "sturgeonslawyer") that I actually do know them.
Patrick, with a little canoodling (and if you were willing to force all your readers to go through the Typekey registration process my friends at Six Apart have set up, something I'm not currently willing to do), you could probably force your commentors to give you a (non-revealed) actual name. I think that's probably a bad solution, but it may be out there if you ever want to turn to it.
Will, I was a Nader voter in 2000 (I live in a decided state and it was that or Libertarian, since I have a visceral and unpleasant response to Joe Lieberman), and I was a Clark guy in the primaries. I'm no huge fan of Kerry's. But I'm frankly appalled by Nader's decision to torpedo the Green Party this year (in particular by trying to get the California Green Party to nominate him, rather than the candidate selected at the Green's national convention); it puts to lie everything he said about his candidacy in 1996 and 2000 being part of an attempt to build a strong and progressive third party and, frankly, makes me wish I had voted Libertarian. Nader has every right to run if he wants, but that, rather than the decision to simply run, is the egoism that seems a sort of willful madness to me.
Wow, that's outstanding. Me sign up with them right away.
It's good to see an immigrant's business make good; I'm sure the Bizarro-American community is very proud of Prime Publishing.
Even in the open-source movement; once I realized that Eric Raymond *supported* the war (for the most specious of reasons, dismaying for someone I thought was intelligent) -- that kind of ruined a lot of things for me.
What, you didn't realize that ESR was... ummm... a personality... before that?
Patrick, the "slans are fans" thing has always freaked me out; the idea of any group of people as a race apart, cut off from the great mass of the marching morons by their unappreciated (but breathtakingly apparent to the initiated) vast mental powers, who should one day rule over them is just hideous. It's the dark side of the picked-last-in-high-school-gym-class stereotype. Throw in a few references to people being too dumb to recognize what's good for them and the word "sheeple" and you have all signifiers of modern political wingnuttery, brewed up in the finest paranoid style. Yuck.
And yet I love Mencken to death. Go figure.
You're the number one scientific doctor of tiromancy on the web, Patrick.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 7 |
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