It’s For Your Own Good! by Cass R. Sunstein Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism by Sarah Conly Cambridge University Press, 206 pp., $95.00 In the United States, as in many other countries, obesity is a serious problem. Many people were outraged by what they saw as an egregious illustration of the nanny state in action. But self-interested industries were not the only source of ridicule. Many Americans abhor paternalism. the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. A lot of Americans agree. Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, Mill wrote, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.”
The National Security Archive Aaron Swartz Prosecutors Weighed 'Guerilla' Manifesto, Justice Official Tells Congressional Committee A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post. Swartz's 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a "moral imperative" and advocated for "civil disobedience" against copyright laws pushed by corporations "blinded by greed" that led to the "privatization of knowledge." "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive," Swartz wrote in the manifesto. "We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. The "Manifesto," Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz's malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale. Swartz was 26 when he killed himself in January. Rep.
Register to Vote | USAGov If you need to register to vote, visit Vote.USA.gov. Depending on your state’s voter registration rules, the site can help you: Register online. This is available for 31 states plus the District of Columbia.Download the National Mail Voter Registration Form (PDF, Download Adobe Reader). You can fill it out onscreen and print the completed form, or print the blank form and fill it out by hand. Remember to sign the form before mailing it to the location listed for your state.Find guidance for states and territories with different registration procedures. Start Your Voter Registration Register to Vote in Person You may be able to register to vote at public facilities. Overseas Voters If you are outside the U.S., you can get information online from the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) or call an international FVAP hotline. Register to Vote in Other Languages Back to Top Basic Requirements You are eligible to vote in U.S. federal elections if: Voter Registration Deadlines General Election
Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship Random meta-political noodling here ... For a while I've had the unwelcome feeling that we're living under occupation by Martian invaders. (Not just here in the UK, but everyone, everywhere on the planet.) Something has gone wrong with our political processes, on a global scale. Here's a hypothesis: Representative democracy is what's happening. Representative democratic government is theoretically supposed to deliver certain benefits: Firstly, it legitimizes principled, peaceful opposition within the constitutional framework; we have multiple parties, and the party in power doesn't simply round up the opposition and have them thrown in a GULAG. But. What if the channels through which concerned people of goodwill who want to make things better enter the political process and run for election are fundamentally flawed? Our representative systems almost all run on a party system; even pure PR systems like that of Israel rely on a party list. So, here's my hypothesis: Thoughts?
Candidates on the Issues Noam Chomsky, Why It's "Legal" When the U.S. Does It Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it’s clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won’t end soon. If, from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria and Libya, the Arab Spring was a series of popular uprisings, it was also a series of unravelings. Two decades late, the Cold War system of great power control in the Middle East, in which the U.S. was the dominant partner and the Soviet Union the lesser one, is finally disintegrating. In any case, when you see what’s happening these days, first thank the American unilateralists of the 1990s, our own financial . They dreamed of organizing a planet subservient to American financial power and ended up, in 2008, blowing a hole in it instead. Yes.
Spinsanity - Countering rhetoric with reason Dr. Martin Luther King assassinated by US govt: King Family civil trial verdict - National Nonpartisan from my 6-part series: Occupy This: US History exposes the 1%’s crimes then and now “What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.” - Napoleon Bonaparte [69] Anyone who wants the most important history of the Vietnam war, and American history, must be briefed of this stunning and game-changing “current event”: Dr. The King family’s attempts for a criminal trial were denied, as suspect James Ray’s recant of what he claimed was a false confession was denied. The US government also denied the King family’s requests for independent investigation of the assassination. Therefore, and importantly, the US government has never presented any evidence subject to challenge that substantiates their claim that Mr. US corporate media did not cover the trial, interview the King family, and textbooks omit this information. For comparison, please consider the media coverage of O.J. “Media coverage of the Simpson trial, which began in January 1995, was unlike any other.
The US Offfice of Government Ethics