What do you think?87 responses total.
I've met some socialist geeks, and some capitalist geeks.
Idiots.
sj2..you are one lame motherfucker. Why can't you come up with a better topic? You wanna-be geek. What a STUPID question. You must be about 8 years old.
I know some 40-year-old socialist geeks. I don't know any 20-year-old socialist geeks. I'm not sure what that says.
Re #3, Actually I will turn 8 this september. And whats wrong in being a wanna-be geek?? Better than being a foul-mouth atleast. Ok ... in what other profession do people give away their hardwork for free?? Do car designers design a car and give the blueprints for free? Which other industry has such a strong and influential open source movement?
I am a socialist geek
You're someone who should shut the fuck up.
Boy, if that ain't the pot calling the kettle dense...
Re #79: Science and folk music come to mind.
Medical Doctors for another. There was a dude in England that developed a secret method of safely delivering difficult children. He tried to maintain his monopoly by requiring nobody but the mother be in the room and that a drape be placed between him and the mother. He is the inventor of the modern obstetrical forceps but I'll bet you nobody knows his name.
But to address #0. "Geeks" are not socialists. Oh, there are perhaps a few deluded and brilliant who talk the talk of socialism but don't walk the walk. The rest recognize that "a rising tide lifts all boats" and thus cast pearls on the water and see the harvest returned ten-fold. Geeks recoginize that if they have a clever idea that openly publishing it to the masses of other geeks who can actually understand it results in a further refinement of the idea and results in Geeks ability to make a lot more money on the implemetation. Micro$oft is the singular exception and Linux is the example of this. People don't drive cars that they build themselves even though the entire design can be found in any public library. People buy cars based on open source of the tech.
It depends on where you draw the line between capitalism and socialism.
In my experience geeks tend towards libertarianism on monetary issues, and towards liberalism on social issues, but there are plenty of exceptions to the rule. There's also quite a contingent of anarchist geeks, mostly among the ranks of the young and naive.
I think that there are elements in various geeky pursuits, particularly online, that would in another age have been called socialist. I think the term "socialist" is one of those things that have become so overloaded with connotation that the denotation, the literal meaning, is pretty much irrelevant, and the term itself is now pretty much useless except as a reference to the body of connotation. Sort of a primitive googlewashing, if you will. Anyway, I think that the geekish pursuits I'm referring to could perhaps be more accurately described as collectivist. The common idea seems to be that individual people *voluntarily* donating their resources can produce something of significant value to everyone.
Agree entirely wtih Greg. If you define 'geek' and define 'socialist' then I'll tell you whether geeks are socialist. It's definately the case that there are plenty of people who would happily describe themselves as 'geek' and 'socialist'. An awful lot of them live in Europe though. In America, it's pretty unusual to find anyone who defines themselves as a socialist. In America, 'socialist' is a dirty word. Doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people who have opinions pretty close to those of European socialists.
Can't you still be denied citizenship for having been a communist party member?
Heh, you are joking. Right?
No, he's not joking: there are limits on who can be naturalised in the United States. I don't know if that particular limit is (still) in effect. You can't lose your citizenship by joining a Communist party, though.
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I can vouch for the fact that there's a question about whether you were a Communist on the immigration forms.
That seems kind of fucked up
Isn't "anarchist organization" an oxymoron?
Yeah, but even anarchists organise to promote their agenda. Go figure.
Isn't democracy all about having the right to political freedom, amongst other things? In India, communist parties regularly contest elections and participate in all other democratic processes. According to the regulations laid down by the Election commission all parties are even required to conduct internal polls to elect officials.
Except that "Communist" and "Russian" and "Soviet" and "Enemy of the United States" were all seen as pretty much the same thing from the 1940s on.
There is a communist party in the United States. If you are a US citizen, you can join in their political process. That does not mean we have to let Communists from other countries come in and attempt to overthrow our government.
So the goal is to prevent people with "undesirable" opinions from becoming voters?
How fragile is our government anyway? How many dedicated communists would we have to let in before our way of government was in danger of being overthrown?
I don't know? How many mexicans is it going to take to turn the southwest into a mexican state?
re #28: It isn't fragile, but it is highly malleable. The threat is not overthrow, but mutation. Those in power have recognized this and acted upon the knowledge by both instituting their own program of reshaping and creating barriers to the implementation of anyone else's plans emplying the same methodology to differing ends.
Reminds me of "Children of the Revolution". A bunch of fanatics can ooverthrow the US governemnt?? Heh, tell me more about it.
Re #26: How about letting them come here and become good capitalists, which
is what they actually want to do?
Re #29: I've never been tempted to call you a racist before, but I am now.
Jeez. We managed to absorb the Irish, how hard can Communists and Mexicans be?
After the Soviet Union imploded and its various archives were opened to researchers it was found that American communists were indeed being used to advance Soviet policy, including attempts to undermine and damage the USA. You can consider the starvation of a few million kulaks to be an "internal matter", but it appears that the folks who called US communists traitors were hardly wrong.
The United States paid Russians to do stuff too. The fact that some members of the American Communist Party were in the pay of the Soviets doesn't mean all were. And they weren't astonishingly effective either, were they?
This is just part of the right's current attempt to brainwash us all into thinking McCarthy was a good guy and his tactics were justified. Ann Coulter has nothing but praise for the guy.
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McCarthy a good guy? His tactics justified? Ha! Next they'll be trying to convince us that there is a god, that the free market is a panacaea, and that the "D" in "WMD" stands for "Destruction", not "Disappearance"!
Hang on a minute...
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Re #34: They were if they generalized it to all Communists.
Sorry Joe. Came from reading a report about a woman who encourages mexicans to come for the sole purpose of makeing the southwest a mexican state. It is her agenda, I don't think most mexicans even know who or what she is or wants. But there is a group interested in just that.
Re #35: Effective or not doesn't matter; mens rea is the crime. Re #41: The people who innocently went along were appropriately dubbed "useful idiots" by the Soviet leadership. Re #36: Ahem. Consider the possibility that *both* McCarthy and the American Communist Party were enemies of the Constitution and the people of the USA. Just because they were enemies does not mean that one was wrong and the other was right; McCarthy's use of the issue for witch-hunts and self-aggrandizement would have made him an enemy of liberty no matter what cause he got behind. For other examples of such opponents, see the Spanish civil war and Nazi Germany vs. USSR. (I remember issues of "Soviet Life" floating around the Michigan Union. I suppose that someone could have been misled up to the 40's, but by 1970 anyone who could ignore "The Gulag Archipelago" and the extensive documentation of Soviet human-rights crimes could not possibly have any brain cells functioning.)
Re #42: She's a fringe nut. Her views shouldn't be generalized. Most
Mexicans who come here do it explicitly because we *aren't* a
Mexican state. Why would they want to fuck that up?
Re #43: Who cares what the Soviet leadership called them? You didn't have
to be a traitor to have been a member of the Communist Party in the
30s. Some people joined because they hated Fascism (they later got
nailed for hating Fascism before it was official US policy to do so;
"premature Anti-Fascists," McCarthy's boys called them). Others
joined because it seemed interesting at the time, and drifted away
later.
It's important to remember that there are (or were) two Communisms. The theoretical one that Marx proposed has never been implemented on a larger scale than a commune. It may be impossible to do so, though I wouldn't consider that a proven point. Nobody has really made an honest attempt. This Communism is not in any obvious way incompatible with the US Constitution, as the constitution does not declare a right to private ownership of capital. It is more notably an economic system than a political system. It would not be "unconstitutional". It might well be "unworkable". This is certainly what all the 1930's communists were talking about. They didn't want to overthrow the government, just Standard Oil. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state with a partially communist economic system. This combination is what tends to come to mind when talking about communisism. Creating such a thing, with it's limitations on free speech and such would certainly be unconstitutional. I'd be surprised if this was what was being officially advocated by the American Communist Party at any point in history.
Good point.
Re #42: At this point, I think I'd be in favor of giving them Texas back. I think the Texans would be happier as part of Mexico anyway; they'd finally have the freedom from environmental laws that they've wanted for so long. ;> Re #43: My opinion is that McCarthy did far more damage than the Commies were ever likely to accomplish. Communism is a philosophy with some dedicated followers but with very little appeal to the average American. I don't see that communists are any more likely to influence our government than anarchists are, and no one considers the anarchists a serious threat.
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It is probably fair to say that, more than those of any other individual person, McCarthy's efforts brought about the rebellious culture embodied by the middle to late 1960's.
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One word. Paranoia.
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The moral of the story is that Congress is passing stupid laws, and they should legislate with more focus on the effects of the laws than on the perceptions of the voters. Like that'll happen...
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This is an old law, not something new. And no matter how good the person is or his contribution to this society may be, the law cannot be grant him special interest. To do so would not be fair to people who are effected by the law that are not special. I think we all want the law to treat us the same way, whatever our status in society may be. And don't just blame congress. The State department is responsible for most of the rules regarding visas.
This is a perfect example of why a rigid rule of law no more guarantees justice than does the absence of it. A well-formed system would be based on the rule of law but include accountable judges (or other arbiters) empowered to overrule when the core goals behind the regulations are not compromised.
So it is all right with you if some rich dude gets away with murder cause he has freinds in all the right places, but some poor kid gets taken out cause he doesn't?
No, it's all right with him if judges have the ability to exercise discretion based upon the circumstances of the case. Which is what judges are *for*; otherwise we might as well not have them.
Usually, I'm pretty impressed by the US legal system. It's occasionally mistaken, but it doesn't typically hang people on technicalities. Immigration law is one of the great exceptions. Lots of rigid bureaucracy that frequently makes decisions that make no sense, or inserts absurd loops to jump through in their procedures. They all talk about how they have no flexibility, and when a newspaper starts investigating the case, they waive a manditory notification period to shuffle the guy out of the country faster. Apparantly room for flexibility can magically appear when some ass-covering is needed.
#59 is the point, #58 is abuse of the system. And frankly, I'd FAR rather live under a system which allows a little abuse than one which allows none, because the latter will result in far more abuse of justice.
I believe in a one man dictatorship....as long as the dictator is ME!
Immigration law is especially harsh because (1) resident aliens don't vote, and (2) a substantial minority of the US population would like to throttle immigration way down from current levels. So they don't have to placate the people the law affects the most, and they feel they need to appear harsh so the Buchanan types don't get enough momentum to shut the doors entirely. It often seems arbitrary, and you don't get the same kind of due process you get elsewhere in the legal system. And penalties for minor misconduct (e.g. overstaying a visa by a month) can be obscenely harsh (you're banned from the country for ten years).
In #56, Bruce says he thinks we all want the law to treat us the same way. That would make me happy. The problem here is that immigrants aren't being treated anywhere close to the same way as the rest of us. Even if we accept that this guy failed to sufficiently honor Bruce's bureaucracy, and should thus not be allowed in the US, he was on his way out. If the goal was to make him leave the US, he was taking care of that on his own. Instead, we have this strange system where those who have overstayed their visas and are attempting to leave get arrested and forced to stay longer, and those who show up at land border crossings missing some piece of immigration paperwork don't get turned back, but rather get arrested and put through hell. Among people I've known who have had this problem, what makes this case unusual is that he really didn't have a valid visa. Most of the similar stories I've heard have come from people who had done everything according to the instructions, but whose cases had somehow confused the INS.
The way I see it, the US has never before faced terrorism in a manner as grotesque as 9/11. So lots of reaction to it has been knee-jerk, both, from the government and the citizens. This is just a part of it.
No, the problems with the treatment of immigrants and foreign visitors existed well before 9/11. 9/11 aggravated them severely, but it didn't create them. Trust me; when I studied Immigration Law in (I think) 1997, we heard a lot of horror stories.
I heard a lot of horror stories when I took this job. Most of them have not panned out, or are regulatted to the distant past. (we don't arbitrarily take cars apart and leave them disassembled for the pwner to have put back together.) There is a lot of confusion in Immigration and Customs law. And inspectors discuss them nearly every day in order to become more capable in our knowledge and our skills. Many problems occur because of language barriers. We do not have someone who speaks every language at every border 24/7, nor do we have them on call. So if someone comes in and does not speak english, there is plenty of room for miscommunication. Whose job is it to facilitate said communication? Obviously it is up to the person entering the country to facilitate a means of communication. So do they bring an interpreter? NO! You also get immigrants trying to tell you your job. We had three kids today under the age of 21 who each bought a bottle of booze in canada, and said they had the right to bring it in because they bought it legally in Canada. WRONG! Had a well educated Indian woman arguing about how she did not have to pay duty to import her car because her husband had originally had a visa that allowed him to stay in the US and work, and now they were changing it by becoming legal residents so they did not have to pay duty. WRONG! I believe more firmly than ever that anyone seeking to become a US Citizen should be required to learn English so they can at least talk to other americans. I doubt it will happen, but it should. And laws change. Hundreds of Canadian hunters passed thru the state of michigan last year thru the port of detroit enroute to hunting ground in northern Ontario. They took their rifles with them by presenting a valid hunting permit. New rules now say that is not good enough. They must get a permit from the State department. How many do you think are going to show up at the border this year an get turned back because they do not know of the rule change or do not have time to get a permit from the state department? I would be willing to bet most of them won't have the new correct documentation, and will have to take the long route back thru canada. How many know we won't be allowing Deer, Elk, amd moose into the country this year because of the mad cow scare? Wanna guess? We still have people trying to bring BEEF across, adn everyone should know that isn't allowed by now. (we will allow skinned hides and antlers adn skulls across, but no meat) There are over 20 pages of rules dealing with the student VISA, and the lawyers are still arguing over rules with regards to what has more impact, Shall or must. All you immigration lawyer wannabes out there tell me which word has more impact. The applicant "shall" be required... or The applicant "must" be required... Adn what happens with a sentence like The applicant "may" be required... These are just a few of the problems that make immigration and customs so convaluted at times, adn why one answer does not fit every situation. Why one doctor "may" be sent back to his country of origin, and why another may not under similar situations. Blame it on the lawyers.
What do you blame your weight on, fatty?
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It totally baffles me how anyone reading #51 can fail to reach the conclusion that an ethical person *must* occasionally break rules in order to do the right thing.
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You misunderstand me. The unethical part of the process is his continued detainment and the refusal to allow him to leave voluntarily.
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Yes, he is responsible for violating the law. However, that doesnt mean that there isnt a problem with the law. Clearly, it is too harsh.
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Re #67: Blame it on the legislature. And the INS staff themselves. I saw
a publication from the Detroit INS office (a photocopied thing they
hand out to people) that told applicants to do something that's
actually illegal. I think it was making photocopies of their green
card or something like that.
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How many do I need to speak? There are probably over 50 different languages that cross the border ibn detroit every day, and while we have a number of inspectors who speak Russian, German, Spanish and a little french, where do we find the interpreters for the others so they don't make mistakes when told they have 90 days to return their I-94 or be permenantly banned for 10 yerars if they fail?
You hire them to write up leaflets with some FAQs. Duh.
Whenever Bruce starts talking about his job I get this sick feeling that there is too much authorized power for the amount of intelligence on board.
I'm not sure why it requires a lot of funds to deport remove somebody who is in the process of removing himself from the US, from the US. Presumably if they just let the guy cross the border out of the US, he would have done so. As far as Bruce's language attitude, I can say that I've crossed a lot of borders into a lot of countries, many of which had national languages I didn't speak, and I've never encountered an immigration of customs agent who didn't cheerfully attempt to communicate with me in English. The only place I've ever seen anything like the level of security that exists coming into the US from Mexico was in East Berlin in 1986. What I saw in East Berlin convinced me that communist governments were firmly evil. Having never been detained for 10 days anywhere, I would certainly be very angry, and feel quite violated, if such a thing were to happen. How many of the people here who think being detained for "only" ten days is an appropriate administrative measure would be willing to quietly let that happen to themselves? I did once ride my bike up to the French-Spanish border and got waved through into Spain before realizing that my passport was still in France. I wonder what Bruce thinks should have happened to me. As it happened, I biked back up to the border an hour or two later assuming they were unlikely to stop a kid on a bike, and to my surprise found the border post completely deserted, so my lack of documentation was a complete non-issue.
That used to be the case on the northern border. WE had post equipped with remote cameras to let people in, posts that closed down at 6 oclock and told you to come back when they were open, posts that told you to report back in the morning when an inspector was on duty to manifest your cargo. Thse days are gone. I doubt very much any similarity between the Southern border and the berlin wall. I have talked to people who crossed that border and have heard horror stories that dwarf anything UI have ever heard about customs. Detention is an extreme case. Most people are just refused entry and sent back to the country they came from. An administrative hearing is usually done in a few hours at most, but if you want to fight expulsion, we have to lock you up so you don't disappear. And keep in mind these cases are very rare, which is why they make news. And while I might agree that I think the decision was right, keep in mind I am NOT an immigration officer adn do not normally send people back. Immigrration does that. I look at cargo. I protect the economy. I look for drugs, and bombs. If I think someone does not belong here, I turn them over to Immigration to make the final decision.
Most of the complaints I hear are about INS, not customs. But I don't think the cases are rare. Find me an immigrant without an INS horror story.
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Detention is rare in the sense that only a very small percentage of people trying to enter the US get detained, but most detention cases don't make news.
Re #33: The Irish aren't known for wanting to overturn the American way of life, unlike revolutionary/Soviet-style Communists. Euro-communists (who believe in evolution and communism thru democracy [not capitalism, though, obviously] would be different.
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