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FredLeonard
Guest
Why? Have you lived in Cuba?
Maybe you should live in Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Finland and see how wrong you are. If the NDP wins the next election, you could even try Canada.
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FCC to kill sports blackout rule
- Thread starter mvcg66b3r
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Why? Have you lived in Cuba?
Maybe you should live in Sweden, Norway, Denmark or Finland and see how wrong you are. If the NDP wins the next election, you could even try Canada.
No, he didn't say Communism.... he said Socialism. Part of the problem in our public discourse is that we cling to the cold war era conversation where Communism = Socialism, and Socialism = Communism.
China has demonstrated to us that you can have a Capitalist business and economic model and a Communist government model, and several Northern European countries have demonstrated that you can have a Socialist business and economic model and a democratic government model.
Life in Cuba simply demonstrates the disaster of getting the mixture badly wrong.
Few countries have a pure form governance that is fully to one side or the other, and few countries have a pure form of economic model that is fully to one side or the other. A lot of countries including our own are trying to find a reasonable formula of blending that works for the geography, that works for the people and that works for the economy. And what may have worked well and been fine-tuned 50 years ago may be a bit discordant today.
When Fred, other posting participants, or myself refer to "the Tea Party types" in less than supportive language sometimes it is because they are so locked into "It Has to be OUR way, the PURE format way, or we will work to kill it!" And a lot of us who post here who pick-and-poke at broadcasting are disappointed that media in general do not do much to help the population understand that there is no one perfect and permanent mixture of governance models and economic modes. Adjustments and modification has been a work in process since the beginning of time.
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Avid Listener
Guest
Communism is a system of socialism that assumes power by the proletariat seizing power through a revolution. Socialism describes all types of planned economies where the means of production are owned and/or controlled by the central government. There are many forms of socialism, such as "national socialism", where the means of production remain the property of private individuals, but the central government makes all of the important decisions regarding what and how much to produce. Regardless of how a nation descends into the abyss of socialism, whether it's stupid voters being tricked into surrendering their liberty, a violent revolution, or some other method, the end result is the forced redistribution of wealth from the producers to everyone else, with an eventual degradation into equal poverty for all but the nomenklatura.
Here in America, we have the government manipulated and controlled mass media, especially broadcast media, to thank for spreading the kind of propaganda needed to hoodwink the voters into believing a liar who promises "hope and change".
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FredLeonard
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Apparently, you never bothered to read Karl Marx.
No, you can live in Sweeden or Norway and you can own your own capitalist business. Other northern European countries also get involved in the following "scheme" that makes them a particular form of socialism.
Whether you own your own business, work for a privately owned business, or work for some philatrophic organization or some government organization like a school, a police department, or other non-privately-owned enterprise, you pay a rather high tax rate. It may be an income tax, it may be a value added tax, or whatever. We think of them as a socialist nation or culture because you then expect/assume that a government entity will provide education for your children (we do that here), a government entity will be responsible for organizing and providing the facility and staff for your medical care (we do that for the poor and the elderly), and that the government will create the mechanism for financing your retirement. (We split the responsibility in this country- we are expected to save for part of our retirement, and we expect Social Security to provide the other part of our retirement.
In some nations the operation of broadcast television and radio is a government owned and operated function. Apparently our Canadian friends have a combination of publicly owned and operated broadcast and privately owned broadcast.
There is no revolution involved. There is no proletariat seizing power.
What I find amazingly stupid about our American system in our generation is how my state will tax me to pay a subsidy to a private corporation to bribe them to leave another state where my brother lives causing him to lose his job, but the company then comes to my state and the governor can then brag about how many jobs he created. No. No jobs were created in the production of the drama. We moved a job from one state to another... greased and lubricated with tax many taken out of my pocket, and then we have the cajones to criticize how other countries choose to govern themselves.
So we sit around in this thread and argue over who owns the broadcast rights to a sporting event thinking that act of debate somehow or another makes us pure and the inheritors of eternal life in the hereafter because we aren't socialists.
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Avid Listener
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This debate has come down to one person advocating intense government control over micromanaging how broadcast networks decide what to air and when. One of the main identifying principles of socialism is excessive central government control over things the central government has no business controlling. Whether it's the government forcing TV networks to stick to published time schedules or the government dictating to a fast food company how many pickle slices they must put on a hamburger, such central micromanagement by the Federal government is an indication of a journey on the path towards socialism. Except for when governments become communist/socialist suddenly because of a revolution, they normal path to degeneration into socialism is a rather gradual process. The various steps along the way as that process plays out are all warning signs of the ultimate doom that a nation faces.
America hasn't descended into the pit of socialism yet, but it's on the move in that direction. The various socialist states of Europe are farther along, but most of them still haven't crossed that inevitable line into the abyss. The worst thing about socialism is that in small doses, it gives the false appearance of being a desirable condition.
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FredLeonard
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As long as the one per cent and their corporations control the government, you don't have anything to worry about - although you should.
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FredLeonard
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How about this: Ballgames are public events held mostly in publicly-funded stadia. Anybody should be able to show up with cameras and cover them, as they do any bona fide news event.
Let my try and re-frame your observation.
On a non-crowded earth, humans who want a life without outside control relocate to isolated parts of the earth and create their own life-style. It may be one person living in a cabin somewhere in the Rockies, or a modest sized tribe with religious scruples that find a place in the vast stretches of Australia.
When you live in a crowded society... the kind where maybe 80% of the American people now live, SOMEONE is going to intrude into your personal space and mess with your life. If can be a rude-and-crude capitalist who wants to ring your phone with unwanted robo-calls trying to sell you something, or a capitalist who uses some poorly defined eminent domain law to take real estate from you that you really don't want to sell... or it can be an overly parental government that wants to dictate how many pickles should be on a fast food hamburger.
As long as you choose to live in a civilized collection of people, somebody is going to constantly be trying to screw with your life.
We have one group of extremists in this country who seem to believe that unfettered, unregulated capitalists can NEVER do anything wrong. They will always do the right thing. (This group seems to dominate what we call Talk Radio in our land.)
We have another group of extremists in this country who seem to believe that unfettered, unregulated citizens can NEVER do anything right and government must be our nanny every hour of the day, every day of the week. (I've never met one of these extremists, but they must exist because Talk Radio is obsessed with finding a way to apply genocide to them, so they must exist.)
Is there some reason why we cannot accept a concept that works in the middle... somewhere between these to extremes? I would point out to you that when you have government-centric overly-nanny issues that are a problem, you can always hope that with the next election we can change the cast of characters. Those of us who would debate with you on this topic have yet to figure out what mechanism is available to us to create a "change in the cast of characters" when we find capitalists are hammering our lives!!!!
Being the naive soul that I am, I have fond memories of the days when I worked in radio, and I worked for station owners who understood this balance, and they participated with community groups and community organizations that had a beef with government, and those that had a beef with capitalist enterprises that were making hamburger out of their lives.
The games are not news events. They are performances. People pay to get in to watch them; nobody charges admission to city council meetings or 10-car pileups on the expressway. Media outlets pay to broadcast the games and, in turn, charge advertisers to sell their wares during breaks in the action. This is how everyone involved, from the parking lot attendants to the ushers to the coaches to the players to the announcers to the engineers, gets paid. You do approve of making a living, don't you? If the games can be shown live on the Internet by a bunch of people whose only payment to the people who make the game possible is the $40 they paid to get in, how long do you think the television networks will keep paying meaningful money for the rights to those games? Put your elitist attitude about sports aside for a second and remember that it's not just the "overpaid" players whose livings are at stake. In your personal utopia, nothing would have any value because everyone would have the unfettered right to copy, broadcast, telecast, stream, distribute, etc., just about anything.
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FredLeonard
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They are not news events because lawyers and lobbyists got a law passed making them "performances." Pass another making them public events. Team owners are nasty SOBs who have too much money anyway. If a handful of players didn't make inflated salaries, then maybe thousands of kids would study instead of thinking they can win the lottery of big time sports. Why do you care about rich people so much? They don't care about you.
Because I'm not in business for myself and I depend on rich people to cut me a paycheck every two weeks so I can do silly bourgeois things like go to ballgames, travel, pay the electric bill and eat. I was downsized out of a job by one rich person a year ago. I now work for another rich person. I want these rich people to do well because, if they don't, their businesses falter or fail and I am out of a job again. You still haven't explained why athletic contests are news events, like meetings and accidents, rather than performances, like concerts and plays. The baseball games I go to are being played for the entertainment of the spectators. Public policy isn't being decided at Yankee Stadium. A war isn't taking place at Fenway Park. Athletes are playing a game and there'll be a winner and a loser and everyone will come back and do the same thing tomorrow for a different audience -- entertainment, pure and simple, not news.
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Avid Listener
Guest
So, we do our best to keep that to the bare minimum necessary, and struggle against those who attempt to get carried away and engage in excessive screwing with our lives.
Such as, maybe, let the government regulate the technical aspects of use of the public airwaves, regulating frequency used, transmission power, and other technical aspects, but keep the government's dirty paws out of micromanaging content? That strikes me as being a fair place in the middle of two extremes.
We're trying to have a conversation but our problem is you are focused a a little bitty picture: "Does the government have any business deciding whether a ball game gets broadcast" which in the big scheme of things is somewhere south of "small potatoes" issues... but you want to prove your point by applying "big sky pictures" of bedrock government philosophy.
If you are going to try to talk about being true to what our forefathers intended when they wrote our Constitution and help a great nation "set sail into the future".... then you have to look at how your opinions affect the whole kit-and-kiboodle.
We have to be willing to talk about what your philosophy of government and wealth does if we apply to medicine, or apply it to immigration, or apply it to education, or apply it to public infrastructure such as roads, rails and navigable water systems. Does your version of "Conservative Views" work well when applied to how we tax the American public, how we deal with the use of energy, how we deal with environmental issues, how we hold and finance elections.
AND, we have to be willing to apply my philosophy of government and wealth to all those activities of our culture and see where my philosophy runs off the rails when we look at medicine, education, transportation, energy, environment and the political process.
Taking the second paragraph in your response: How can government set and change technical aspects of the airwaves, if someone else is going to totally decide content. If government has no involvement with the content creators, then government has no clude what the technical aspects (for the future) need to be.
Broadcasting is like a scrambled egg. We broke open the shell and we put the egg white and the yoke into a big bowl and we created scrambled eggs and called in broadcasting. How do you produce, store and serve scrambled eggs in you demand that one entity has absolute control of the egg whites and must never ever pretend it has anything to do with the yolk, while the other entity has absolute control of the yolks and must never ever pretend it has anything to do with the egg white.
Maybe that the problem I had the other day. I got a lousy breakfast of eggs. The restaurant must be using operating instructions inherited from the broadcast industry.
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Avid Listener
Guest
No, it isn't like a scrambled egg. When you start with a mistaken analogy to begin making a point, your point will not be made.
Instead of an analogy that doesn't work, just consider that broadcasting is an activity that can be regulated to one degree or another. Some regulation is needed, but too much regulation is not beneficial, and could even be harmful. Laws and regulations can be passed, and they can be repealed. If there are too many bad laws and/or regulations, those bad ones can be repealed. Eggs cannot be unscrambled, but laws and regulations aren't eggs.
That used to be true back when you and I had waists that were thin and hair that was thick. Our elected representatives spent their weekends in Washington playing golf and playing cards with each other in bi-partisan social happenings. Today we live in the bifurcated world where our representatives work 1 or 2 days a week and spend the balance of their time kissing the hineys of rich campaign donors instead of kissing babies during campaign seasons. Thus we live in an era where law cannot be made... and law cannot be repealed. We must not upset those big-time campaign donors. We get a rather steady diet of scrambled eggs.
And who can we thank for this new way that our world works? We can thank Talk Radio and the talking heads on Cable News/Talk channels. They have convinced the un-rich with the un-kissed hineys that all of this is good for them. What a con-job.
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Avid Listener
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You give Talk Radio far too much credit. At best, one or two out of every 100 citizens listen to Talk Radio. And most of them are already in agreement, so that talk radio hosts are mostly only preaching to the choir.
The biggest problem is voter apathy on the part of the few who do vote, and massive voter fraud on the part of dead Democrats.
In a republic that elects the government democratically, the people get the government that they deserve. If we want to take the government back, we simply have to elect better people. If we want better radio and television, we simply have to let the broadcaster know that if they broadcast crap, we'll find a better alternative. Maybe there are some suits working in radio or television who lurk in here and actually read what really listeners and viewers have to say.
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FredLeonard
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Avid, you keep flogging the word "Republic." Yet, you tea types insist of voting out representatives who do anything other than take your orders and vote exactly as you all say. The essence of a Republic was described by Edmund Burke"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." That is a Republic. And that is the last thing you tea trolls and ditto heads want.
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