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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (117131)	10/19/2003 1:35:43 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, yes, of course. Nobody owes anybody a platform. < isn't it true that a person's right to think and express certain ideas and values ends where they begin to infringe upon other people's rights? After all, your analogy should permit me to heckle bad acting, use my cell phone to gossip with friends, to to be generally loud whenever I go to the theater? > Noisy, intrusive obnoxious people who stop other people's quiet enjoyment of things should be arrested and shot at dawn. Free speech means free to talk in one's own media, not somebody else's. Hence, for example, SI owes none of us free speech. We are here with contractual rights only. Free speech, as with so many other rights, is a misunderstood concept. People think they have the right to other people's property, which is absurd. They vote for taking other people's stuff anyway. Including air time. Heckling poor performance when the contract was for good performance might be reasonable, though the average Kiwi tends to be too polite and reserved for noisy complaint. On the elected representatives, they can't represent all their constituents because each constitutent has their own interests. There is no national will. There are only individual wills and the president at any time has to fit his will with that of the elected Congressional crowd and the Senate. Perpetual discussion is built in because there is on single national will. You only get that in dictatorships. That's the great thing about the USA [among other great things]. Even dealing with animals, who reciprocate in no way, we adopt our own ethical standards. Even if Al Qaeda are vicious, cruel barbarians, we don't necessarily reduce ourselves to their standards [unless some sensible purpose is served, such as making them stop, which I doubt would work in their case and would contribute to their support]. < So maybe I would be more inclined to listen to Utopian philosophical banter were I not currently engaged in trying to figure out how to change the socio-economic and political landscape for several hundred million muslims on the verge of becoming subjects of a militant Islamic heresy. > While I haven't actually written the NUN constitution, I've already outlined how to deal with the problem [and a lot more besides]. You might call a NUN Utopian, but so was the idea of flying to the moon when H G Wells was first writing about it [I think he wrote about it]. CDMA even breached the laws of physics according to a Stanford physics professor, until QUALCOMM invented new physics which enabled CDMA to work, contrary to the prof's false idea about what physics allowed. In fact, it's a lot easier to figure out a NUN constitution than it is to invent CDMA or fly to the moon, both of which have been done decades ago. Putting engineers in charge of the NUN and constitution might actually get the job done better than leaving it to the usual reprobates. Engineers might be boring, but they tend to be ethical and also pragmatic and also systematic and mathematic and designing a NUN should be a doddle compared with designing Twin Towers to resist aircraft flying at around 600 kph full of fuel. Better to stop the problem at the design level of the NUN than the yield point level of steel. Mqurice