Lurker > red sox 777

You are not Ron Paul, Ulti. After reading that first post it makes so much sense. You are the establishment here, and you flip flop a lot, just like Romney!

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if the vast majority of society suddenly believes that marriage can actually be between two homosexuals, then so be it

Whoa there. We've always agreed this could be the case. A homosexual man and a homosexual woman have always been able to marry each other.

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Let them have a referendum.

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Romney needs to start running attack ads calling Gingrich and Santorum closet socialists. Play what they've said side by side with speeches by President Obama.

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No, I just oppose salary caps on principle.

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AFC teams representing the Super Bowl since 2003:

New England
New England
Pittsburgh
Indianapolis
New England
Pittsburgh
Indianapolis
Pittsburgh
New England

Take that salary cap! Salary cap getting what it deserves.

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..............Haha, what a way to win.

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I don't know, I just thought they were all majority positions. By more religion in schools I mean more freedom, not forcing anything.

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I thought the south was supposed to be conservative. Wouldn't they like his super-conservatism? Or does the fact that he's not all AMERKUH all the time hurt him?

The South isn't really conservative. They keep calling us not conservative, but we're not the ones who voted for Democrats for 100 years! That shows what they really care about.

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On the other hand, if everyone else drops out and it becomes Paul/Romney, it forces the debate to a much greater extent and allows a clearer and sharper contrast between those who believe in freedom and neocons.

That's not going to happen after tonight. Gingrich isn't going to drop out for a long time, and if Santorum drops out, that makes it worse for Paul because he's going to get last by a large margin in all but the bluest states. Better to keep it a 4-way race at least for now.

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I was expecting/hoping that the Republican tendency to fall in line would result in the Santorum voters defecting to Gingrich and Paul getting 3rd. But while the falling in line did happen pretty well, Santorum still held onto 3rd.

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People of Texas, you need to get working on voting this guy out of office. He's anti-freedom, and as a Christian Scientist (the religion, not a scientist who is Christian), he's not even Christian. Doesn't that make him the antithesis of what Texas stands for?

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Last place is definitely a disappointment.

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overrule courts to allow more religion in schools.
off shore drilling.
make a giant pipeline from canada to texas

Those are all popular positions with the general electorate, much less the Republican one.

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Wow, Gingrich crushed this one. No problem, onto blue states we go where Gingrich and Santorum will fail.

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Theoretically yes, but of course that requires you to believe in efficient markets and capitalism working and all that crazy cooky right-wing stuff everyone on this board denies!

Well that's obviously true, and I'm sure large companies who are actually doing business are quite well aware of it. Er....whether or not markets are 100% efficient, most people (and definitely large companies) can agree they are efficient to a pretty high level.

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I'm not entirely sure about all these attorneys fees you're referring to. Wouldn't these industry behemoths have salaried attorneys already on staff anyway? And if not, don't most attorneys charge a commission rather than a flat fee?

Attorneys are not going to agree to work on a contingency fee on a case like this, because they know the defendant doesn't have the money to pay up. That's the problem in suing a person who is not rich for large sums of money. Even if you win you don't win.

They probably do have salaried lawyers on staff, yeah, and that's probably cheaper than hiring an outside law firm, but it's still expensive because they've still got to put in the same hours on the case. Why would a lawyer work for the RIAA or MPAA if he can get paid more at a law firm? The RIAA/MPAA gets to save themselves their contribution to a law firm's profits by hiring salaried lawyers directly, but it's still pretty expensive- note that they would hire fewer attorneys if they weren't litigating all these piracy cases.

I find this discussion pretty interesting, because there are workarounds for the more common situation, where the roles are flipped. Individuals suing a large company can bring one case together as a class, saving a lot of litigation costs. (Or at least could.....the Supreme Court's latest ruling that people can waive their right to be part of a class action by contract is rather disturbing for this reason). And, because the large company has money, the lawyers will probably agree to be paid a percentage of the damages awarded.

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No, that's not how the RIAA worked; they basically sent you a letter notifying you that if you didn't pay them like $15000 or something, they would sue the s*** out of you; I'm fairly certain they didn't sit down and settle with the people individually. I've never heard of them losing a case; I imagine most of the letters they sent out resulted in payment with little expense on their part.

A lot like a shakedown IMO.

Well the thing is they probably lose several hundred thousand dollars on every case that does go to trial. They get a $1M+ verdict, which is useless because the defendant can't pay it, and they're stuck paying very high attorney fees. High because these were high profile cases, which they could not afford to lose or get a low amount of damages on, because that would open to floodgates to more piracy.

There are also probably plenty of people who initially refuse to settle but ultimately do settle before trial for something in the single digit thousands. They lose money on these cases too because they've spent more on litigating it by the time they reach the settlement than they get in settlement. And then you have people who receive their letter in the mail and send back a check. Those people they do make money on, although even there it's offset in the expenses incurred in finding out who they are and getting enough info to think they are going to have a good chance of winning a case.

They really really want you to settle, that's why they offer settlements in the single digit thousands when all the cases that have gone to trial have resulted in damages in the hundreds of thousands to millions. And they try to make you settle by using the only weapon they have here- albeit a very powerful weapon- that you can't afford to lose a million dollars taking this case to trial, while they can.

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Personally, I've always thought a fair punishment is "twice the value of what was stolen." In other words, if you stole like five movies, you have to pay the full retail price of those five movies, times two (once to replace what you stole, and once more for the purposes of punishment).

I think people have been hit with big damages for uploading, not downloading. They don't go after people who only download, because it's obvious they're not going to get an amount worth their time. But if you upload, thousands of people can download what you uploaded, and that's where they get the insane damage calculations. Like, retail price x number of times downloaded. That assumes that each person who downloaded would have bought the item otherwise, which is flatly untrue.

The criminal fines are of course disproportionate to the crime, but their purpose is pretty clearly to be a deterrent. That's not what's supposed to happen in a civil trial, legally.

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Now that I think about it, SOPA sounds like a response to jurors not awarding enough damages, making the entertainment industry feel like they can't protect their IP through the civil justice system. I was thinking about what I'd do if I were in their place and jurors did start awarding lower sums.

Now that I think of it, they probably have lost money overall suing people. For every million dollar verdict, they have hundreds of cases settled for a few thousand, and they probably paid their lawyers more than that on them. (Costs them $500-$1000 an hour, as they are probably hiring top, expensive, law firms) And I doubt they actually got anywhere near a million dollars from so much as a single defendant so far, because they don't have that much money.

So, basically, the industry hasn't been using its lawsuits to actually make back losses from pirating. They couldn't hope to manage that, because they have to sue each defendant separately and it costs them $500+/hr to sue a defendant. They've been using the lawsuits as a way of making people stop pirating out of fear of being sued. SOPA basically has the same goal, only it gets the government to take legal action instead of the RIAA/MPAA, saving them from having to pay attorney's fees.

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Keep in mind though, must jurors are still probably old people who have no idea how the Internet works.

As the "Internet generation" grows up, you're going to see it get much harder to convict people on these things. Jury nullification anyone?

Well, I'm not talking about jury nullification here, but just using basic sense in deciding what damages are. How much does uploading a song hurt the company? Maybe a few cents per download. Free songs and bought songs aren't substitutes.

Though I guess if jurors do act that way, people would have pretty much carte blanche to upload/download as much as they like, because the RIAA/MPAA will have to just stop litigating the cases. They're not going to spend upwards of 100k paying lawyers to sue someone and end up getting less than $1000 in damages. It's a weird sort of reverse class action.

I wonder if that's what the jurors that have awarded these massive damages are thinking- that they need to protect the industry. May be giving them too much credit.

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So, the government is about to to attempt to enforce American laws overseas. But no, don't worry, I'm sure Obama absolutely doesn't support this *rolls eyes*

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/us-drug-policy-war-congress_n_998993.html

So....conspiracy not to commit a crime, is what they'll be charging people with? Or thoughtcrime. I'm fairly confident this would get struck down as unconstitutional.

Also, apparently Newt Gingrich proposed a bill to give the death penalty for marijuana back in the 1990s.

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With regards to the RIAA/MPAA though, I'm pretty shocked by the astronomically high jury verdicts. Do people on these juries have no idea how the market works? Like, the RIAA probably tries to select jurors who never ever listen to music, but how is it they can succeed when the defense gets to screen out jurors too?

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And red sox, it seems that you've now changed your argument. You were saying nothing bad would happen because people in government were too moral. Now you're saying that it won't happen because it takes awhile and is inefficient.

Oh no, I always meant it would take time. Individuals being moral just slows the thing down.

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Well, you guys lived under the patriot act for a while, which was more or less functionally identical and didn't implode. Which is not to say the patriot act was good legislation in any way, shape, or form (they're both god awful), but there's also the annoying functional problem of this being legislation that includes budget implementation so doesn't like, no one in the military get paid unless the NDAA is signed? (like, I dunno how it works, so yeah)

Yeah, but Obama or congressmen opposed to the bill could have called the supporters' bluff and said: if you don't pass a military spending bill without this, and the troops don't get paid, it's your own fault. And you will pay at the next elections.

There's also the thing where the track record of the US Govt, while pretty poor on that front is nothing compared to the RIAA/MPAA record for suing everyone, their granny, and their kids into oblivion. You could be reasonably certain the govt won't immediately start jailing and executing everyone they suspect of terrorism once the NDAA went into effect. In contrast, you can be reasonably certain that the RIAA/MPAA would shut down everything they could reasonably make a claim for at the first possible opportunity available to them.

With the RIAA/MPAA, you have a court system protecting you at least. They can't sue you into oblivion unless you actually did something wrong.

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Meanwhile, the people making the decisions that lead to the immoral outcome are so far removed from witnessing the outcome that they don't have to deal with the psychological ramifications of it either.

They do have to deal with it. Ultimately for the bad outcome to happen the leader(s) have to either want it to happen, or rationalize it by believing that it's for the greater good. Granted, it's not that hard for that to happen, but it's still true that the more checks and balances are in place, the longer it takes.

And I'd argue that the longer it takes, the less likely it is to happen in the end. Why? Because time changes the situation very, very, quickly. Other countries interfere. Economics interferes. New technology interferes. Moreover, as we get closer and closer to the bad outcome, we necessarily have more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Or else we will never reach the bottom. But that means it becomes easier for someone in a position of power to break the chain. We just need to luck out and have someone in there who wants to do it, whereas before, when we were dealing with a huge bureaucracy, no one was in charge and no one could stop it.

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Here's the thing though, bureaucracy KNOWS how this works and has already put in a lot of failsafes designed to circumvent this. It's not as if there's some Judge Dredd figure running around getting to be judge, jury, and executioner on these matters. They use the separation of duties to obtain an immoral result, while each person in the chain gets to pretend that they aren't being all that immoral at all.

Separation of powers slows this down, not speeds it up. That's why our system of government with its checks and balances has worked for so long.

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President Coolidge would not stand for this socialized healthcare. Obamacare, Romneycare, Medicare, it's all the same, all creeping tendrils of Marxist-Leninist Communism that deny healthcare to fine, upstanding, corporate persons and confer it upon wasteful non-corporate persons.

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*Imagines living room sized console*

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No Coolidge fans here?

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Can we have an up or down vote on this in Congress? I liked it better when it was actually possible for a bill to be voted down in Congress, instead of the current system of never voting on anything until it's guaranteed to pass.

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If Ron Paul actually supports SOPA, but he says he opposes it, there's no source that's going to tell you about that, at least until it actually comes up for a vote. So if you don't take his word for it, you're stuck looking at his past voting record on other bills. That's public record, and you can find it pretty easily all over the place.

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"The man who works there worships there."

Calvin Coolidge 2012
The True Conservative

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What about when it's Ulti and he's pulling conspiracy theories

Ulti doesn't make statements of fact though. He states conclusions as fact, which is totally different. Example:

Barack Obama proposed raising taxes on people earning more than 250k a year: a statement of fact.

Barack Obama's policies will lead us to communism: a statement of conclusion.

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i don't see how it's insulting unless you are hyper defensive. maybe because most of the people on board 8 are incapable of critical thinking you guys are just used to not ever having to back up what you say but in the real world nobody is going to believe you without proof. honestly I'd be more insulted if I went around making outrageous claims and people believed me without questioning my sources.

I was being a bit hyperbolic, which was uncalled for. Anyway, critical thinking is actually what you use to evaluate the facts and form a conclusion, backed by an argument. Looking up the facts requires little to no thought. I generally don't question statements of fact (not statements of conclusion) from people I trust, or from people with no reason to lie. Unless the fact seems unbelievable to me, which this one clearly doesn't.

I mean, this is a message board discussion and not an academic paper.

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It's fairly insulting to question someone's statement of facts. It's the same as accusing them of lying. Argue all you want about the reasoning and conclusions.

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I'd like to hear why Obama is the most immoral president ever. I know you consider him the worst president ever and Bush the 2nd worst, and that makes sense if you judge presidents by the deficits they run up, since Obama is 1st in that and Bush is 2nd, but I'm not sure what Obama did that is so immoral.

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Reagan = Governor of California
Bush = VP of the most popular president in decades
Clinton = Governor of Arkansas
Bush = Governor of Texas, definitely appeared to be an outsider despite his elite family connections
Obama = Gave the appearance of being an outsider

I'd say all of those except Bush 41 came off as being from outside the establishment.

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Ron Paul consistently votes against everything, so Smuffin's word should be enough on that.

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Well, there's competence in addition to intelligence, and Gingrich doesn't feel like a candidate who can get a broad base of support in the general election on that. He's also twice divorced and converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. Worst of all, people really want an outsider to Washington. That's been the thing voters have wanted ever since Reagan, and Gingrich is the consummate Washington insider. When he says he's been working in Washington since 1978, that just makes people want to bail.

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It took three years

This. It took 3.5 years for us to win World War II. It took the British like 34 minutes or something to win their war with Zanzibar. Obama promised a much shorter timespan than 3 years in his campaign.

Also, Guantanamo Bay still is not closed, and there are no signs that it is going to be closed anytime soon or ever.

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Because he's smarter and more competent than Santorum or Gingrich, and this is clear to a large part of the electorate, especially moderates. I don't know if he'd do better than Bush against Gore (I chose those two because that election was a statistical tie, so if he does better, he wins; if not, he loses). Obama has a decent chance of winning of course.

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I don't see what you're basing this on. It's the SAME government bureaucracy we're talking about here. If we don't trust the government to make good decisions about which sites are really hotbeds for distributing pirated goods, why do we trust them to make good decisions about which people really are violent terrorists?

Because there are real people in government, and they are not necessarily evil. Often what a bureaucracy does is not what the people in it intend, but they do have some say. It takes more time for us to fall down the slope to what people think are truly horrible things than to what people think are less horrible things. We agree that death is worse than internet censorship, so it'll be harder for death to be implemented.

Remember, each step down the slope is not inevitable, so being further away from the bottom means both that we are further from it in time, and also in probability that we will finally arrive there.

I want to say if it wasn't clear that I do not think the NDAA is less bad than SOPA. The bottom is worse to a great enough extent that it's a worse bill, even if the bottom outcome is less likely and further away. But many people do not think that way.

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Well, that's because people on the left call themselves moderates because they don't want to call themselves liberal. It's a moot point in any case; Romney doesn't have to outright win moderates, just win more of them than, say, Bush did against Gore.

Romney is a great example of the Wall Street elite (to be better, he'd need to have worked for a firm actually based on Wall Street/Lower Manhattan). But the thing is......so is Obama. They're both multimillionaire Harvard Law grads who received loads of campaign contributions from big banks and favor policies that help big banks a lot. Where's the difference?

You can say that Romney will have an image problem with this more, but remember that Republicans have done a very good job of painting Democrats as "liberal elites" over the years. This one will hurt Romney, but it doesn't kill his chances. He just has to make the campaign about Obama, not himself. And Obama will be trying to make the debate about the Republican candidate, too. Unless Ron Paul wins, of course, because Ron Paul is the only candidate people actually like, as opposed to considering the lesser evil.

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If you were really a libertarian, you'd admit that the difference between Obama, Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum is essentially nothing. Statistically insignificant, if you will.

On economic issues, yes. On social issues, Obama and Romney are a bit better. But the reason I'd vote for Obama/Romney over Gingrich/Santorum is not their positions or beliefs on the issues, but their competence to be our country's leader. Obama and Romney are very smart people, I'm not convinced that Gingrich and Santorum are.

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Racist elements in Ron Paul Newsletters+Obama being black=gg Paul, even if they weren't written by him. The media will massacre him for them if he's nominated.

Doubt it. Newt Gingrich's wife just accused him of asking for an open marriage, and it doesn't seem to have hurt him too much. Those newsletters will hurt Ron Paul as much as Jeremiah Wright's sermons hurt Obama.

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Ugh, I don't want CT to face Melee so early. I'm more scared of losing to that game than almost any other.

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Both are horrible bills of course and should be stopped. But people often do not think about events with a low probability and extremely high damage if it happens. For example, take minor property theft crimes like shoplifting. Your gain is low, the probability of being caught is low, the potential damage to lifetime expected income is astronomically high. But people do it.

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Personally, I think the leap of logic between "SOPA will result in Wikipedia being seized by the government" and "the NDAA will result in average citizens being detained" is about equal. SOPA obviously was not created for that intention, people are just worried (and RIGHTFULLY SO) that the government will use it to overreach their authority in unintended ways.

I don't agree. SOPA is much closer to direct censorship of the internet (China style) than NDAA is to average citizens being detained (Stalin USSR style). Obamacare leading to death panels is somewhere in between.

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This election is probably going to be similar to 2000 and 2004- close elections where 1 state or a few states make the difference. If Ron Paul wins the nomination, all bets are off though. I could see that general election going anywhere from an Obama landslide to a Paul landslide.

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