Archive talk:Targeted Advocacy

=What this page is about=

One thing I realized from reading Lessig's Free Culture is that the argument we're pushing is just common sense. Common sense that appeals to the right and left.

Lessig was talking about Democrats (free speech) and Republicans (get the government out of my face). I figured we can try to make convincing and involved arguments from various philosophical points of view, not just confined to the major players in the American political spectrum: voila, Targeted Advocacy.

(There is no such thing as a 'bad' philosophy. Hence rather than spending time attacking other points of view on this page it's best to add free culture arguments from the perspective we personally support.)

--Firas 22:39, 4 May 2004 (PDT)

Your categories are all screwy
As a libertarian, I'm iffy of being lumped in with "Liberalism", since that has so many different meanings depending on who you talk to. I dunno... your political categories are just weird, I would organize things differently somehow. Check out http://politicalcompass.org or http://lp.org for the 2-d "Nolan Chart" they use to categorize political groups and which makes a lot of sense to me. Or Nolan chart. -- Nelson 07:33, 5 May 2004 (PDT)


 * Oh, I dunno. Both the libertarians and the far-left want the government to just fade away, don't they? Libertarianism was born of classical liberalism, the notion that we don't need a king, humans can self-govern. Modern liberalism says wait a minute, we can't, let's get the state involved to fix inherent prejudices. The end result for both is less government interventionism. (PS. Ok, it's not. I'm just adding this note so I'm not archived with a clueless viewpoint :) --Firas 21:26, 5 Jul 2004 (PDT)) But yeah, I was thinking about politicalcompass.org.. I'll see if there's a better way to do this. Anyway, it was late and I'm no political scientist. Anyone's welcome to reorganize it or just make it an alphabetized list free of heirarchy. What I'm interested in is in the end, producing a powerful argument from each point of view, like a collection of essays. However we get there. --Firas 07:52, 5 May 2004 (PDT)


 * The flatter political hierarchy is a bit better, though it'd be nice if whoever did that would set up an account so we'd know whom to credit/blame. ;-)  I could argue about splitting economics and politics, but as long as the basic angles for each are right that would be splitting hairs. --mjg 12:12, 10 May 2004 (PDT)


 * 'Twas I. The reason I split economics and politics is that I wanted to add things like philosophy (self vs. society) and the whole thing can be listed under deep hierarchies like philosophy > politics > capitalism or we could've had philosophy > whatever : politics > libertarianism : economics > capitalism. It's just that deep heirarchies are hard to reorganize so I chose the latter. I'd encourage anyone who thinks that another organization makes sense to try it out--it would be great if this stuff became so long that it spilled over into other pages (like Targeted_Advocacy_Capitalism). Who knows, we could compile it into a digital publication of sorts when it's decent; a way to show that collaborative authoring works. --Firas 13:39, 10 May 2004 (PDT)

Moved here for further discussion
"Of course, from a capitalist viewpoint, such a sitaution is not intrinsicly problematic: the artists have freely chosen to sign such contracts for employment and the companies have legally become dominant players. But it is a problem when aided by government. And the permission culture is based on government-given protections: copyright and the DMCA."

I think that the above is just opening a can of worms without really explaining the issue and is not quite insightful enough to be included; I'm a bit wary of the capitalist approach of "well, if they aren't happy why did they sign a contract with us?". Maybe because capitalism only works that way in a free market and that's not what we have; because 1) right now these companies have the monopoly on "making it big/reaching lots of people" (few and rare exceptions), so it's not as if these contracts were signed with an equal amount of bargaining power on each side, also 2) what is legal or not and what the government does or doesn't do doesn't amount to what is right and what is fair. The record industry's position might have been gained legally, and once upon a time it might've been the best that could be hoped for, but not anymore. So the questions we have to ask ourselves is: "what is best for artists and their public?" The problem here is not that the government is helping the record industry; the problem is that the business model of the record industry is outdated. MikeCapone 21:55, 12 May 2004 (PDT)


 * I think capitalist theory argues that if a business model is outdated the company will just go out of business and stop being a problem. How can we convince a capitalist that (a) this won't happen with the current status quo and/or (b) a free culture would fit in better with the capitalist worldview? Maybe (b) is just unarguable, so we'd best stick to saying how the current system goes against the ideals of capitalism? I'm no economist but my understanding is that capitalism rests on two basics: (1) freedom to do whatever you want. (2) right to own what you've created from that freedom. --Firas 23:50, 12 May 2004 (PDT)