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>Seriously though, isn't it amazing how readily available flags of Nordic Countries seems to be down there?

Capitalism saves the day for outraged fundies!

When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn. Reuters

Can you imagine the uproar if the roles were reversed and it was a caricature of Christ depicted in the newspapers?

This kind of thing happens once in awhile. Leaving aside the notorious Piss Christ, there are usually cartoons about Jesus every Christmas and Easter. Just go check out The Onion's archive for "Easter fun for kids". But while people might protest it as tasteless, no one's tried to blow up the offices of that fine publication.

Face it, the Middle East is full of savages who do not operate as civilized people in the West or East do. The more they protest and kill, the more scared of them I am. And the more scared of them I get, the more I support killing every single one of them, just to make my family and me stay safe. What I hope and pray those people realize is that I'm not the only American/Westerner who feels this way and that we have the ability to make that happen, they do not! So the sooner they start acting like civilized people (note: not Christian, just civilized), the better their chances of continuing as a culture and people.

I'm not in favor of genocide just for the sake of it, but if their culture teaches it's ok to kill people who disagree with you, that makes their culture too dangerous to keep around. If it comes down to us or them, I'll vote for "us", thank you for very much.

There's nothing spontaneus about any of this. Imams who want to instigate hatred against the west (and especially nations of the west which was not previously hated) took the pictures from JP, rounded it out by adding some they found in right-wing neo-nazi propaganda, and went down to the middle east with a extra-large pack of Danish flags and a bag full of hatred.

Oddly enough I have not seen any journalist dig into islamic press to see what caricatures they've printed over the years. Sure there aren't any "Jews with hugh noses" in there?

The real problem is that these clowns believe their religion and its icons enjoy a special elevated standing. It does not. It and its followers deserve all the ridicule in the world.

"It's been 10 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"

Can you imagine the uproar if the roles were reversed and it was a caricature of Christ depicted in the newspapers?

What, you mean like Kanye West dressed up like Jesus in thorns? Or the near daily jabs at Christianity in Southpark?

Funny how all those crazy Christians aren't rioting, murdering, and terrorizing this country...

Also, correct me if i'm wrong, but they are angry cause they cartoons are depicting Muhammad as a terrorist among one of the cartoons correct?

Correct. The caricatures depict Islam as a hateful, intolerant and violent religion.

Of course, they (the vocal, radical few) protest by burning buildings, killing and issuing bounties on people, and generally cause riot.

The problem is that while Islam as practised by the majority of Muslims is peaceful and tolerant, countries like Iran - which has been governed by radical priests for too long - have been brainwashed and now live in a cultural age resembling our middle ages.

They have stayed like this for so long, I don't think they even understand the concept of free speech and why it's such a great thing. They retaliate with action, not words, because of this. It's all about showing strength in numbers and loudness.

Can you imagine the uproar if the roles were reversed and it was a caricature of Christ depicted in the newspapers?

Most Americans wouldn't be too pleased.

Perhaps American citizens wouldn't resort to blowing up buildings, but that's what the US government is for!!

(1) People get edgy with all those hormones and fight for no reason at all. [...] Democracies, by and large, don't have this kind of structure.

I'm not sure I agree. As caricatures go, "hormonal" isn't a bad description of the First World War's origins. Germany was a stroppy adolescent and wanted the respect it saw as its due; France wanted payback for the humiliation of 1870; Britain was afraid of losing its naval preeminence. The general populations of these powers, democracies all, were ardently militaristic and absolutely thrilled at the prospect of a good war.

And that was probably just the most egregious example. Modern history is littered with democratically elected leaders taking their countries into wars which were neither just nor generally beneficial to that country's citizens, often to bolster their own support at home.

Here's a current modern day example. Iran has at its head a group of people whose purpose is to start a world war. They want a new piece of technology --- nuclear weapons --- because they think it will give them power enough to stand up to the US. It's really not certain if nuclear weapons are powerful enough to convince the American democracy to cower in fear. (They may well be!) So Iran is more bold in moving towards aggression and making threats.

There's a significant difference between "stand up to the US" and "start a world war". Iran aspires to regional dominance; it is not liked by the US; it has an awful lot of oil and a limited window of opportunity while the US is tied down in Iraq. It looks at North Korea and sees that possession of WMD, however rudimentary, does indeed confer a significant level of security and can be played effectively even with an otherwise weak diplomatic hand. It looks at Iraq and notes that non-possession of WMD (especially when combined with possession of oil) does not confer any kind of security. It draws the obvious conclusions and acts accordingly. Regrettable, but in no way indicative of the slavering insanity you portray.

Already, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have pledged to help with the invasion of Iran.

Source? Speaking as a UK citizen this comes as news to me, and I suspect it comes as news to France, Germany and Russia as well.

The Vietnam war, likewise, wasn't caused by a bunch of military industrialists. It was caused by communist aggression. They tried to turn a sovereign, democratic country into a wing of the Communist empire by force.

South Vietnam wasn't really sovereign; the '54 Geneva partition was explicitly only a temporary one. Calling it democratic is highly contentious as well, but I don't really have the energy to get into that one. And "wing of the Communist empire"? Really, where do you get this stuff? "Communism" was never, ever a monolithic bloc, any more than "the West" or "the Third World" was.

Ho hum. I suspect IH probably BT, but never mind.

Step down from what? The FSF? He created it, he runs it, and it is his baby.

Yes, but it's time for him to move on. The best thing he could do for the Free Software movement is to step down. If he's a reasonable person with his ego under control, he'll realize that. Right now, he's become a caricature and his mere presence in any sort of official role hurts the movement. See the other post (sibling to yours, I believe) which describes the time he put on a robe and halo during a lecture to businessmen.

And the alternative? Mediocrity? Let me ask you this... Who is pushing back from the other side?

There are two ways to accomplish change: incrementally, or via revolution. Given that copyright never, ever registers in the top ten list of things voters care about, the chance of a revolution at the polls is almost zero. The odds of slashdotters leaving their basements, grabbing their pitchforks, and storming the RIAA are even smaller. Stallman doesn't get this, but the only option left to us is incremental change, and that requires pushing at the edge of the mainstream.

Being the most reasonable person in a public debate is often the way to victory. With the RIAA suing grandmothers, this shouldn't be hard, but Stallman is blowing it for us.

No, the environmentalist movement largely did this to itself.

Of course they were the whole story! If they weren't, then there was another species in the "temperature rainforest ecosystem", as you call it, which would have been put forth as endangered. But no, it was the spotted owl that was at issue.

More importantly, it was not even that the spotted owl was endangered in old growth forests, thus putting a roadblock to logging there. It was that they were found to live in second and third growth forests, too, and rather than sensibly taking this to mean that we could now go back and log old growth forests responsibly without endangering the spotted owl, it led to the shutting down of logging in the newer forests as well, thus killing the logging industry and putting tens of thousands of people into poverty. No wonder the Democrats like this; the more jobs they eliminate with their "caring" lesgislation, the more poor people they create whom they can then turn around and court for votes in return for federal aid dollars, which they just steal from rich people.

That's because environmentalists ARE wacky people who want to ruin entire industries and send mankind back to the stone age. Perhaps you don't feel that way, and I sympathize with you and other moderates of your movement who simply want reasonable conservation measure. But the "leaders" of the environmentalist movement, the ones getting on TV and running organizations like Greenpeace and PETA and so on, really DO want to eliminate entire industries, free all animals from any human involvement, ban the eating of meat and fish, etc. And so long as you keep supporting such extremeists in order to further your cause, you'll be ridiculed like the crazy whackjobs you are.

If you don't believe me, you should check out a few episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit. It'll set you straight.

Teddy Roosevelt, while respecting the environment, nevertheless participated in expeditions that killed THOUSANDS of animals, including endangered ones. Your fellow environmentalists wouldn't like his kind of conservation any more than current Republicans. Do you seriously think Teddy wouldn't want to drill in ANWR?

Bruce

Swear to God, the folks who think "environmentalists" are irritating luddites who want to return humanity to the stone age have already long since had the thought: "If these 'near extinction' species can be found in a place like this, then they don't need to be protected quite so much. What was all the stink about? Can the island of Komodo put out licenses on dragons yet?..."

Those people bend any environmental issue into a caricature. Spotted owls were just a representative of the entire temperate rainforest ecosystem they lived in, they weren't the whole story. It still took no time for the stereotype of the whacky environmentalist who wants to ruin a whole industry to protect the spotted owl to spring up.

Even convincing that sort of person to preserve "hot spots" like this one is an uphill battle, leaving alone general conservation issues. In the US, the Republican Party that produced Teddy Roosevelt is long gone, having been split in the 1910s...

ANKARA, Turkey -- A teenage boy shot and killed the Italian Roman Catholic priest of a church in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon on Sunday, shouting "God is great" as he escaped, according to police and witnesses.

Officers were searching for the boy aged around 14 or 15, according to a police official who declined to be identified because of rules that bar Turkish civil servants from speaking to journalists without prior authorization.

The police official would not say if the attack might be linked to the printing in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which has caused anger in Muslim countries. Earlier Sunday, hundreds of Turks protested in Istanbul against the cartoons.

"Whether the killing is linked to the caricatures will emerge when the culprit has been caught," Trabzon's Gov. Huseyin Yavuzdemir said.

The priest, 60-year-old Andrea Santoro, was shot hours after Mass at Santa Maria Church.

A woman who answered the telephone at the church said the priest was inside when he was attacked, and prosecutor Burhan Cobanoglu said he was shot twice from behind, with bullets ripping through his heart and liver.

Pope Benedict XVI's envoy in Turkey, Monsignor Antonio Lucibello, said he had spoken by telephone with a witness who said she saw the attacker fleeing and "heard the young man shout 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great).'"

Lucibello declined to speculate on the motive for the killing, but said there were "no elements" to link the attack with the protests over the newspaper cartoons.

Turkey's government denounced the attack.

"We condemn with hatred the fact that the murder was committed in a house of worship against a man of religion," said Justice Minister Cemil Cicek.

Yay! So you decide to derride people for being bigots with sexuality, and end up being racist. :rolls eyes:

Great job there with the sweeping generalizations and comical caricatures of "the United States of America". I need to make a php script that posts comments on slashdot...

a tauren going by the moniker admiral ackbar protested a guild whose website featured caricatures of the prophet mohammad. he threatened to use his flamestrike scroll to call down a pillar of fire, burning all infidels within the area for 58 to 74 fire damage and an addition 48 damage over 8 sec unless the offending caricature of the prophet mohammad, as a mad bomber, was removed (oh, the irony)

in all seriousness folks, that online life should mirror real life, in terms of some of the more inflammatory and intractable issues we face in the real world in our time, should be expected

don't expect an easy resolution to this, and don't expect issues like this to be any less controversial online. as real life goes, so will online life toe the line. online life is no escape from offline ideology, however maddening, silly, or serious you take any given controversy

"The point of the post is that Adobe has always used Apple's transitions to screw over customer."

Oh yes, I'm quite sure Adobe is printing out fat wads of cash by telling their customers they can't use the latest and greatest hardware.

BTW, some people (like me) actually do make a living using Photoshop. When I say "Make a living", I mean "it puts food on the table". It's hardly crying or being an 'asshat' to say "If this configuration don't work, I can't use it." Non-issue, indeed. The earliest I can reasonably be a Mac user is 2007. You can paint Yosemite Sam'ish caricatures of Adobe if you like, but the reality is that CPU migrations suck. Adobe didn't make that decision.

> OwnedByTwoCats wasn't making a logical argument

I'd agree there, but you seem to be attempting to, and yet you appear to fall into the same vapidity.

> Anti-abortionists are opposed to the recognition of the fundamental human right of self determination and control of one's medical affairs for women

No, "they" just believe that the right of self-determination vests a bit earlier than you do. I.E. while that pre-sentient homo sapien organism is a much smaller and less viable clump of cells than its mother is.

> Many anti-war people, while they may not be opposed to particular individual soldiers, are, in general, opposed to the institution of soldiering: that is to say, they are anti-military

You changed the definition of the word "solider" on him. You might want to learn more about the word "amphiboly" and why it's illogical. It's very common in rhetoric.

> Unlike the anti-abortion crowd, the pro-abortion crowd, in general, supports life in other situations that do not conflict with the fundamental human right to controls one's medical affairs

This is only true if you believe that they all fit some anti-evolution, pro-fundamentalism, anti-science, pro-war, conservative stereotype you now use to divide the world into "us" and "them" so that you don't have to deal with those ideas which make you uncomfortable.

For the record, I can name at least one person who opposes killing *anyone* whether it be for criminal acts or whether it is merely because they are unwanted. Their beliefs don't fit into tiny boxes, either. I'd mention the others who went about terminating "undesirables" but I'd rather not go on such a tangent.

> This isn't a matter of logic or rhetoric

Indeed. These are vapid labels we use to create an "identity" (which scarcely be called that, being so far removed from actual individuality) from the ultimately meaningless approval or disapproval of society. Inherent in your post is that one should reason from the population to the individual who must necessarily be a hypocrite because some of their beliefs corrolate with incompatible ones, irrespective of how many individuals actually hold incompatible beliefs and utterly ignorant of any nuance in their belief that might not so easily fit into the little boxes of "pro-X" or "anti-Y."

I will not swallow one line of reasoning merely because the "only" alternative is more even abhorrent. I will swallow neither. The "left" and "right" have become like teams, wherein if one is on one side they become a "traitor" (perhaps in a very real sense, given some of the US laws) should they adopt a view contrary to the team they "should" belong to, or especially if the wrong team comes to power.

As long as you believe things merely because your "team" does, you have no mind of your own. The fact that your characterization of your ideological opponents are blatant caricatures without any form of subtlety does not speak well on this point.

Well, first, by definition "controversial stuff" is less likely to survive review. That's how Schon got his stuff through: it looked very, very plausible; it was just not reproducible in any way (heck, it was fake). I have no doubt Dr Batmanghelidj believed his results reproducible - and from what I've read, his assertions are not only based on his own trials, but are easily tested.

Secondly, it is odd that you would use the construction "what makes him stand out as a scientist". Is that your own phrase? It seems an odd one to use, when you are saying that he does not pass conventional criteria for accepted "standing": being published widely but not too widely - and don't, whatever you do, put any non-reviewed papers on your site or they will conclude you're a kook!

Knocking the peer review process generally earns you some kook points as well.

Judging by the trajectory of my post's moderation this evening, I am going to earn more kook points than karma points by citing the late Dr F.B. I'm okay with that.

don't you think you'd be seeing more whistle blowers

Don't you think there are very powerful mechanisms to suppress them? I read an aphorism recently along the lines, "Control a man's support and you control the man." We know that the first effective restraint on people is financial, for instance. One does not have to get fully melodramatic and invoke Lynchian Cowboy chats or late night telephone calls here.

Sometimes when nobody agrees with you, you're just wrong.

I'd be thrilled if somebody would investigate the possibility that he might be right about something. You don't seem at all inclined to do that. Your energy is devoted to sitting on the fence, discounting iconoclasts as kooks without a trial (on circumstance alone); and awarding "kook points" to their defenders. A harmless hobby but not very helpful.

little more than anecdotal evidence

I believe Dr Batmanghelidj tested his theories clinically throughout his career. However my understanding is purely based on his book; I have not read the papers.

legions of experts are convinced that he does not

I have not seen a single opinion that contradicts Dr Batmanghelidj on the issue of dehydration. When I said "medical answers", I meant those that concern the human body's need for water, and dehydration as an unacknowledged cause of mistreated symptoms.

If you are referring to AIDS: What do you do when you have experts on both sides of the question? Easy! Discredit the ones whose views you don't like. Can you be certain this has not occurred on this issue? Can you be certain that you are not yourself constructing a subjective system of innuendo around this man? If you can, please explain the source of this certitude.

As for the non-experts: You can stop one thousand people on the street and 997 of them will happily lynch you for telling them you hold an opinion about AIDS that differs from what they heard on TV. It's that kind of hot-button issue.

I would assert to you that they are not. They have a hard time making it past rigiorous peer review because they tend to be wrong.

I disagree.

I put people like Batmanghelidj, Dembski, Behe, and anybody else who shuns peer review

I have not seen any evidence that Dr Batmanghelidj "shuns peer review"! You're trying to construct your own caricature of the man that can hardly be based on the facts you've gained from his web site - as far as I know, you haven't read his books.

They claim to be a persecuted minority when, in reality, they have more press and more clout than much of the scientific establishment.

In the same vein: That is absurd. What clout does Dr B have? You hadn't heard of him until this post. What effect has he had on m

What is with the lack of reading comprehension today?

I didn't say OSS was "doomed." GCC is still here, Linux is still here, none of this is going away. Perl, etc., etc.

The parent was claiming that two, and presumably only two, things were standing in the way of the Linux steamroller, and as soon as Google makes those two things go away, bye-bye Windows.

I point out that there is a third, crucially important barrier to widespread replacement of Windows, and suddenly I am an ignoramus, who should just try Gentoo or Ubuntu, and download all my software, or just switch to Open Office, spouting flamebait or bullshit.

If anybody wants Free Software (or Open Source) to actually replace anything, they should understand the reality behind the thing being replaced, not some geeky caricature of how things *might be*.

Is realism too much to ask for?

You are putting words in my mouth and making very widely incorrect assumptions about my motives.

I have made no presumptions, nor did I say or imply anything disparaging abou the scientists who have been studying this phenomenon. What I said was that I have not yet seen any studies that took those factors I mentioned into account and still showed clear indication that human action causes global warming. I asked for links to them and said that I would very much like to read them.

I fail to see how on earth you derived your bizarre caricature of me from those statements and requests. How precisely does asking for studies to read demonstrate that I "don't care about any logic or facts"? I would have thought it demonstrated quite the opposite.

If you know where I can find the studies that show the correlations you mention, please link me to them or point me to a citation I can follow. But please refrain from making any further unwarranted generalizations about me.

Seriously, if they wanted to do an actually funny RPG nerd bit, they should've done more research. Take a video camera to OrcCon, or GenCon, or even find a local RPG store that has the traditional "tables in the back" and go watch those guys. I can think of half a dozen real life RPG nerd incidents that, if simply reenacted, would be three times as funny as some ham actor dork spasmodically lifting his shirt and rubbing his chest in a poorly simulated homoerotic frenzy.

The irony is that you'd make a wonderful "fundamentalist". You read the scriptural text in black and white terms. (I say read, but it's doubtful you've read more than a few phrases). You're understanding is devoid of nuance. You interpret the phrase without considering the language it was written in, the surrounding texual context, the culture it was written in and to or anything else except the literal meaning of a few English words of a translation.

And to top it all off, you paint your opponents as caricatures. It's wonderful!