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Criticize my speech to OWS

AvalonXQ said:
Privately-owned roads, electric grids, buildings etc. aren't maintained?

"We use taxes to maintain infrastructure" is not equivalent to "without taxes, we cannot maintain infrastructure".
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We actually maintain a private road. We keep a gate across it to keep others out.

If we opened it up to others, it would require more maintenance, so we'd charge a toll and hope for a profit, since there would be no incentive to bother, without a profit.

Therefore, it would cost people more to use our private road (maintenance cost + profit) than a public road paid for with taxes (maintenance cost alone).

Eliminating tax-funded infrastructure would be a great way to reward capitalists and make those who can afford to invest in property richer.
 
NoahFence said:
Secret internment camps?
Police answer to no one?

If you plan on addressing a group of people you may want to drop in a bit of accuracy from time to time.
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September 6, 2006

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Wednesday for the first time acknowledged the use of secret CIA prisons outside U.S. borders to hold top suspects captured in the war on terrorism.

In a speech at the White House, Bush said captured terror suspects have been the best intelligence source in efforts to stop new attacks and listed attacks blocked because of this intelligence.

The CIA program has "saved innocent lives," the president said.

Bush said torture was not part of the program and he had not authorized any form of torture, saying American law forbids it.

Bush said locations of the prisons will remain secret.

...and of course with (countless) stories like this:

"A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.
Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.."

where no cop is held accountable for this man's death reinforce that the police are answerable to no one.
 
atr0p1s said:
...and of course with (countless) stories like this:

"A police officer killed an elderly, deaf and mentally disabled man riding his bicycle by shooting him with a Taser stun gun after he failed to obey instructions to stop.
Roger Anthony, 61, was killed as he made his way home in Scotland Neck, South Carolina, after officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had fallen off his bicycle in a car park.."

where no cop is held accountable for this man's death reinforce that the police are answerable to no one.
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Evidence?
 
kevsta said:
Video of men in costume shooting another man to death
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"The letter cites the shooting of John T. Williams, a First Nations woodcarver and public inebriate who was killed by Officer Ian Birk in August 2010. The department eventually determined the shooting was unjustified, and Birk resigned."

Murder someone and go to jail. Unless you're a cop, then you can just resign, no biggie.
 
Pup said:
We actually maintain a private road. We keep a gate across it to keep others out.

If we opened it up to others, it would require more maintenance, so we'd charge a toll and hope for a profit, since there would be no incentive to bother, without a profit.
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You're maintaining it now without a profit, because you use it yourself.

Therefore, it would cost people more to use our private road (maintenance cost + profit) than a public road paid for with taxes (maintenance cost alone).
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Perhaps for a given road that we know we should maintain, this may be true.
The problem is, the government is going to maintain a lot of public roads that aren't valuable enough to pay for themselves. Additionally, the government isn't self-correcting when it comes to making unwise financial moves and finding ways to cut costs.
So, in practice, even if the profit motive makes each valuable road slightly more expensive to maintain, we may still save a lot of money over the blanket government-sponsorship approach.

Eliminating tax-funded infrastructure would be a great way to reward capitalists and make those who can afford to invest in property richer.
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Perhaps. It would also help us more easily correlate infrastructure value with infrastructure expenditure. Again, the infrastructure won't get built/maintained unless it's sufficiently valuable to have it. I consider this to be a significant feature.
 
The case in South Carolina, with a bit of research, reveals that the mayor of the town thinks his own police department should be sued.
That's answering to no-one?

And as far as the internment camps are concerned, the way you people portray them will NEVER happen.

Period. Otherwise Zuccoti Park would have been surrounded by a chain link fence while all you people were inside.
 
NoahFence said:
The case in South Carolina, with a bit of research, reveals that the mayor of the town thinks his own police department should be sued.
That's answering to no-one?

And as far as the internment camps are concerned, the way you people portray them will NEVER happen.

Period. Otherwise Zuccoti Park would have been surrounded by a chain link fence while all you people were inside.
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Internment camps? In the US? Never happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
 
not murder, but this mob-handed tazering puts the recent pepper gassings in perspective

http://youtu.be/ErNdbVLOYLU

what's really difficult to grasp is how these brainboxes apparently forget they're filming themselves doing this stuff too. I think every policeman should be fitted with a helmet cam they have to wear at all times, and that could go live on network TV at any point.
 
atr0p1s said:
"The letter cites the shooting of John T. Williams, a First Nations woodcarver and public inebriate who was killed by Officer Ian Birk in August 2010. The department eventually determined the shooting was unjustified, and Birk resigned."

Murder someone and go to jail. Unless you're a cop, then you can just resign, no biggie.
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False.
 
Congratulations. You've managed to get people who normally wouldn't agree on the colour of an orange to agree that you're talking absolute unadulterated nonsense.


Which is true, you are.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
Congratulations. You've managed to get people who normally wouldn't agree on the colour of an orange to agree that you're talking absolute unadulterated nonsense.


Which is true, you are.
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Thank you sir for your nuanced critique.
 
AvalonXQ said:
You're maintaining it now without a profit, because you use it yourself.
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Exactly. It's only 1/4 mile long, to reach another part of our own property, so keeping it up is like keeping up our own house.

Though every person could theoretically maintain his or her own house, it's less practical for every person to maintain his or her own road from Chicago to Baltimore.

The problem is, the government is going to maintain a lot of public roads that aren't valuable enough to pay for themselves.
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I don't see that that's a bad thing, because it's a fair way to prevent non-competitive monopolies and to encourage more competition between businesses, while providing real work, not charity, for the laborers who keep up the roads.

Otherwise, the few people who lived and communited on lightly-used roads would have to share an exhorbitant cost to maintain them, and in the end, would probably decide to move where transportation was cheaper.

So, the capitalists with the best locations would continue to get richer, as more people paid to use their roads or rent/buy their houses or business locations nearby. Few people could afford to pay the high tolls to drive to the little stores on the expensive, lightly-used roads, or to commute there to work, so the little businesses and factories would wither away.

It might be a good way to increase efficiency overall, but it would be an even better way enhance the wealth of the .1% who owned the best locations. I like to see wealthy people succeed, but even I think it would be a bit much.

If I already owned, or was rich enough to buy, a strip of flat land between New York and Washington, I'd probably feel differently.
 
Segnosaur said:
Ummm... I know the OWS people are pretty unfocused, but I doubt the issue of the 'gold standard' is something any of them care about.
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A surprising number of them demand an end to the federal reserve system, which can only mean a gold standard.
 
atr0p1s said:
where no cop is held accountable for this man's death reinforce that the police are answerable to no one.
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Blame Washington law for that one:
Washington law (RCW 9A.16.040) lists 10 different ways in which a peace officer can legally kill someone--one of which states that an officer can do so if he or she has "probable cause to believe that the suspect, if not apprehended, poses a threat of serious physical harm to the officer or a threat of serious physical harm to others."

Birk has long argued that he believed Birk posed a threat as he stood nine feet away giving him dirty looks while holding a dull carving blade. And that is pretty much that.

But to further this point, the law also says: "A public officer or peace officer shall not be held criminally liable for using deadly force without malice and with a good faith belief that such act is justifiable pursuant to this section."

In other words, Satterberg would have had to prove that Birk didn't actually believe Williams posed a threat and that he shot him with the direct intention of committing a crime.

Proving what anyone believes is a nearly impossible legal task. Thus, it's the law itself, more than anything else, that's keeping Birk from being held criminally liable for Williams' death.
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http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/02/spd_officer_ian_birk_escapes_c.php
 
WildCat said:
A surprising number of them demand an end to the federal reserve system, which can only mean a gold standard.
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Not following that logic. I think quite a few would love to end the Fed and continue to use the money in circulation. They are just against the devaluation though counterfeiting.
 
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