Sunday, March 15, 2009

Slow response time

I have received a late comment on one of my earlier posts about the filtering issue by websinthe.

I really get irked by people who object to my ocassional typo (more often typos than spelling errors). He wants me to use Firefox as my browser because it has an inbuilt spell checker - but then again I could always compose in a wordprocessor and cut and paste.

I object even more to people who use the gratuitous sign-off that implies the whole piece fails on grammar, logic and research.

Now to the substance. Apparently my comment that certain concepts on which capitalism is founded weren't self-created was both insulting and wrong. Firstly when I claim "an argument ignores X" I am not actually claiming "the person who is making this argument is ignorant of X". I can't infer the latter from the argument made, I can infer the former, which is all I did.

As to whether the concepts were made by Government either through courts or legislation it is not sufficient to claim something pre-dates the concept of legislation (as in a Bill introduced to a Parliament) to refute that. The context includes any action made by the representation of the State including a monarch. Yes, diffrent kinds of money flourished without central control. The only money that anyone ever relies on is the money that comes with the various levels of security created by the Government's role in money. Similarly the concept of a contract only required the two people entering into it to agree they wre agreeing, but the idea of contract as expressed in market theory requires all the elements that were created by judge-made law.

(Oh - and if anyone cares the following is not a grammatical sentence "You claiming that I am ignorant of the legislative and judicial origins of the three frameworks you mentioned when only one of them was a creation of common law and none of them were created by legislation. " )

Now as to the references to the Whirlpool action. The story is that ACMA issued a notice that one of the posts on Whirlpool included a link to prohibited content. The concern seems to be over the responsibility of the site hoster.

The bad news for Whirlpool and anything like it is that they aren't a mere conduit and that the site's owner has the same responsibilities as a newspaper. If a defamation action is brought then the site owner can be included.

Is that fair? Well, yes actually. You see the site owner has made the concious decision to have "unmoderated" comments - just like I have.

No comments:

Post a Comment