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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the freedom-of-the-press dept.

Amy Goodman, host of the New York City-based leftist news programme Democracy Now! was charged with criminal trespass by the North Dakota state's attorney (prosecutor). The charge was changed to riot, then was dismissed due to lack of evidence when Goodman appeared in court on Monday. The charges stemmed from her presence at a protest in September against construction of the Dakota Access (Bakken) oil pipeline, after the protest was reported on her show.

Coverage:


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:18PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:18PM (#416380) Journal
    Funny how you and the author aren't selling Honduras very hard as a libertarian paradise. Mysteriously, I couldn't find anyone else [mises.ca] who has either.

    Now at this point, you might be surprised. Have you ever heard any libertarian claiming that Honduras is a paradise, or an experiment in the philosophy? I sure haven’t.

    For example, the Fraser Institute’s most recent Freedom index [freetheworld.com] ranks Honduras as the 55th freest country in the world (as of 2012), right behind Botswana and just ahead of Uganda. To be fair, there are other notable countries like Israel and France right next to Honduras in the rankings, so I’m not claiming that it’s a socialist nightmare. But 55th in the world is hardly a libertarian experiment, and most progressives don’t point to France as a Ron Paul ideal.

    To get more specific numbers, we can consult the Heritage Foundation’s ranking. In its 2015 Index [heritage.org], Heritage puts Honduras as 116th in the world in terms of economic freedom. It shows that Honduras has government expenditures of 27% of domestic output, and government debt of 40% of GDP. The overall tax burden is 16% of domestic income. The consumer price inflation rate is 5.2%. It’s not North Korea, granted, but it’s hardly the stuff of Atlas Shrugged either.

    And the high point:

    For example, the very next sentences say: “In Honduras, the police ride around in pickup trucks with machine guns, but they aren’t there to protect most people. They are scary to locals and travelers alike.” So if the government has been disbanded with no taxes and expenditures, and full privatization, then how can there be government police riding around?

    What’s happening here is that the author is conflating “libertarians don’t like government doing anything” with “a government doing things badly.” So for example, if (say) North Korean soldiers lined up a bunch of students who were caught plotting against the regime and executed them, our Salon writer would think, “This is applied libertarianism, because Murray Rothbard didn’t like government schools.” But let’s go back to the piece, to the single most absurd paragraph:

    The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation.

    The cognitive dissonance here is astounding. The guy types out that the government “won’t fix the roads,” that private entrepreneurs do the best they can to fix the government’s mess, and then ask for voluntary donations, rather than shaking people down. And this is taken as an indictment of capitalism, rather than the State. Let me ask the author: What would the world need to look like, for the author to think the State had failed in its duties?

    OriginalOwner, you keep that flame burning. Maybe some day we can all escape to the libertarian paradise of Honduras!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:25PM (#416382)

    It is interesting how you claim to not use the karma bonus, yet every single post you make has one upmod... statistically the least likely event to ever occur, unless you have multiple shill accounts. Better write a script that logs in your other accounts to post all the time so we can't analyze post history to find out which accounts are likely tied together.

    You're an idealistically naive person BTW.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:58PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 19 2016, @10:58PM (#416394) Journal
      I always start at score 1 because I'm a logged in user. If I had the karma bonus it would start at 2. If you actually look at my posting history [soylentnews.org], you'll see that I have collected somewhere around four mod points in the current pile of posts. That's relatively low for me, but I've been ranting pretty bad over the past few days.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:25PM (#416679)

      SN shares the default karma values from the green site. Posts by ACs default to zero, registered users (with at least zero or positive account karma) default to one, and registered users with high (30+?) karma have the option to set their default post karma to two. khallow's post you replied to has (at time of this writing) no moderation applied to it at all. The score of "1" is the default for a registered user with non-negative karma.

      So I guess this all makes you an ignorant person...?