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A creationist tends to take the view that "God" has control over everything. Ergo, no act is so stupid as to be life threatening, since "God" will surely save you.

So, do you sit on a stool in the marketplace and offer these verbal caricatures to passersby in exchange for cash?

When I was in college, the local cable company's public access station stayed on the air every weekend by running, in a continuous loop, 6-hour tapes of "Cartoon Control Room with Sloucho Barx," basically an unmoving camera shot of a guy in an ill-fitting Groucho mask sitting at the switcher and cueing up tape after tape from his extensive cartoon collection.

One week, Sloucho ran an entire show with the theme of censored, racist, or otherwise inappropriate cartoons. There were some doozies - all of it WB and MGM stuff - but in its defence everything he aired was first shown on the big screen during Saturday matinees in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Moreover, between every cartoon he offered disclaimers and deprecations, stating the show was meant to illustrate the mindset of the past, neither he nor the cable company supported these views, if you're letting your kids watch this you'd better be talking to them about what they're seeing, I can't believe what an awful joke that was, etc. etc.

Of course the complaints poured in anyway, and needless to say it was Sloucho's last show.

Back to the main topic... aside from Sloucho's fondness for the early-30s WB cartoon "Freddy the Freshman," which he played on every one of his shows, he also clued me in on another obscure one, Chuck Jones' 1940 "The Dover Boys." In it, Jones experimented with a sort of visual shorthand, with fast swooshing movements punctuated by stylised poses. The characters move across the screen as colourful blurs, saving the animators from having to draw a complete figure with every frame. Nowadays it's a common thing - such as the Road Runner's spinning legs - but this was the cartoon where it all began.

"The Dover Boys" is included on WB's Looney Tunes Vol. 2, and I fear what they might have done to action frames that could be construed as being nothing but noise.

It galls the geek in me to say so, but there were too many special effects. Too much shit flying around for anything to have meaning or pathos. Give it a rest, George.

And there was nothing fun.

They say Spielburg cried at the end of an adance screening. Obviously tears of frustration. The muddled end of what should have been a brilliant epic.

Heh. I walked out of Episode III asking the same question about droids. In the original trilogy, they never did much, and I could overlook their relatively humanish styles of speech and interaction because it was just surface stuff.

But droids leading revolutions and commanding armies (with voice commands and 'hand' gestures, no less!)? Oh, right, General Grievous (was he a Jamaican caricature? I forget what flavor of racism we're having this week) had a meat heart. For no damned reason, just that it looked kinda neat, and gave Obi-Wan something to shoot.

And droid armies? Why the fuck would anyone use human armies? Why wouldn't the Trade Federation or, y'know, anyone, just drop a von Neumann device on a planet with good energy sources, and convert its mass into armies and ships and whatnot. Why are droid pilots not pulling moves involving hundreds of Gs of force, that would make any meat-based pilot into a pancake? Why do the droids have reflexes no faster than a human, and why do they seem fragile enough that a stiff breeze could knock their heads off?

Then I remind myself that it's fantasy, and all of these things happen Because It Looks Nifty.

But still, even within the hastily thrown-together cosmology that Lucas has... are droids in tune with the Force? Are clones? What is their moral status? Are cloneburgers okay to eat? Are they a vast underclass of sophonts, and what does it say about the Jedi that they discriminate on the basis of Force-sensitivity?

I don't think droids can really fit into the Lucasverse and make any sort of good sense. Bah.

--grendel drago

Trouble is, I just resusitated my trusty old v3.0 machine which has been dormant for 2 years after the PSU let the magic smoke out. For some reason networking's not happy talking to the new LAN, so I can't archive the bits I want to keep*, so I can't vape it with 3.7 ... but... must... run... newest... CODE!!!

* There's no CD burner - it's a Compaq Deskpro P166, c.1996, FFS! - and I only have one (CRT) monitor - & no KVM - switching the cable is a PITA and stressign the VGA socket on the back of my main computer, a relatuively-speaking gleaming new P2/233 from 1997.

I have not yet tried booting the Sun SS2 yet , since you ask.

I always that Watto sounded more like Stromboli in Pinnochio. He's (Stromboli) been thought to be a caricatured Jew, Gypsy or even Armenian.

"In April of 1969, driving past the Three Penny Cinema on Lincoln Avenue, I saw a crowd lined up under umbrellas on the sidewalk, waiting in the rain to get into the next screening of Godard's "Weekend." Today you couldn't pay most Chicago moviegoers to see a film by Godard, but at that moment, the year after the Battle of Grant Park, at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, it was all part of the same alignment."

Actually, the book never mentions Christopher's condition explicitly. One of the "I loved it" quotes inside the front cover suggested that it was an interesting look inside an autistic mind.

I have discussed this book at length with my friends at www.wrongplanet.net, and we pretty much agreed (I think) that the character Christopher is a somewhat distorted representation of all facets of the autism spectrum, in that he seems to have low-functioning autism one moment and high-functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome the next. Like "Rainman", he is both an amalgam and a caricature.

Like the other Aspies who read the book, I closely identified with some of his experiences and thought "WTF?" about others.

Every now and then, someone around here makes a prick of themselves caricaturing people with Asperger's. I try to give them a taste of a successful individual with it.

I may not have had friends up to high school, but there were people I could get along with there. My condition was finally diagnosed in high school, giving social workers a decent therapy angle. And I turned out OK. I've learned to recognize body language and social nuance. I'm not perfect at it, but most of it is second-nature by now.

At Grand Rapids Community College, where I work and study, I've made dozens of friends. My teachers like me, my boss likes me, my coworkers like me, most of my classmates like me, and I'm Vice President of the Computer Club.

Together with a friend, I organized an end-of-semester bowling party that took place this past Friday. All my coworkers and their friends and family were invited. We had 15 people show up, including people who would refuse to bowl under any circumstances. (One way I got people to show up was by promising them they couldn't do any worse on the lanes than I did. And I was almost right...one person tied my score.)

For a Computer Club event, I've taken the lead in organizing a LAN Party to take place July 14. I'm going to meet with one of managers in IT in order to address security concerns and see about using campus machines for people who don't want to bring their own. (Slashdotters welcome...there will be non-student parking.)

And I'm hoping to transfer to Michigan Tech next fall.

In summary: I may be a geek, but I'm a popular geek. With a lot of work and support, some people with Asperger's can be successful on the conventional route. We don't all have to drop out and make our millions by coming up with the Next Big Thing.

I can't imagine a more perfect satirical caricature. Even the parallel between the intelligent but unappealing opponent, who highlighted Zaphod's stupidity in the campaign, was dead on. Perfect.

The neocons' power base is not that small, especially in financial terms, since it consists of 'Corporate America'.

No, the "neo-cons" does not consist of "Corporate America". I know it's a hot buzz-word these days but "neoconservative" has a meaning beyond "people who's politics I disagree with". There is a perfectly good term for "Corporate America": "Corporate America". "Neoconservative" are something entirely different. Very few neoconservatives are known for their corporate ties. They are almost entirely academics and intellectuals that cycle between various univeristies, think tanks and mid-level government positions. There are sympathetic businessmen that fund their think tanks and foundations but that makes them no more synonomous with "Corporate America" than Moveon.org is for being funded by George Soros.

Neo-conservative traditionally refers to a particular group of formerly hard-left intellectualls that gradually moved to the right in their thinking from the early-60's to the mid-80's. Most were members of the Socialist or Communist parties. They grew disillusioned with communism: "Mugged by reality" as Irving Kristol (the classic example of a "neo-conservative" and the one who popularized the term) put it. They moved steadily rightward with various detours into Trotskyism, Schatmannism, the Social Democrats USA, Anti-communist Trade Unions and the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party.

It's a much more fascinating bit of history than the bland over-use of the term would suggest. It may also be a bit more instructive about their actual motivations and the potential dangers of the thinking than simplistic caricatures of *other* political movements misleadingly applied to people that are NOTHING like the caricature. In many ways they are still liberals (as any Paleo-con will quickly point out) They are *idealists* they still have the same utopian zeal that they brought to the Fourth Socialist International. *THAT* is what the danger is, NOT the venal corruption you are accusing them of. Sincerity and idealism are good things, but these guys have often gotten things very wrong in their zeal to bring about the liberal democratic world order they invision... getting things wrong on the scale that these guys are trying to operate is a very dangerous thing.

That's one of the more frightening posts I've read on Slashdot. You do realize that the point of Revelation (singular, not plural) was not to give a play-by-play of the End Times, but rather to give Christians at the time hope for the future, as their present wasn't so good? Metaphor plays a huge role in the book, which is natural since it's a transcription of a vision. Visions are rarely taken at face value in the rest of the Bible, so why should this one be different? Or will Christ truly have a sword sticking out of his mouth, too?

>Christ isn't going to pull any punches and will slaughter millions and millions of non-believers.

I would like to know how you can reconcile the idea of an all-good all-loving God who individually created each person on this planet and cared enough to die for them and your statement about his slaughtering of those selfsame people. This inconsistency alone should give you a clue that something about your beliefs doesn't line up.

>Christ tells us to treat each other fairly. Christ taught us to love each other. However he is the final Judge and fair isn't going to enter into the picture.

If I were not a Christian reading this, the statement above would give me even less of a reason to listen to those who are. Why would I want to follow a god who acts as a final judge and throws fairness out the window? You seem to be referring to the God of Chaos or something...

I realize this is supposed to be about games, but statements like those in your post reflect exactly what's wrong with Christians today - Christ taught a doctrine of love and we've replaced it with bigotry, exclusivism, and hate.

I can handle the ridicule and mockery that the Slashdot crowd heaps upon Christians because I know that most of it doesn't apply to me. What I can't handle is other Christians acting out the horrible caricatures that they are continually compared to.

Please revisit the Gospels and concentrate on Jesus' teachings. They're the most central to the faith, and yet they always seem to be overshadowed by a lust for death and self-righteousness.

I have read the article and I wish to make two criticisms of it. Then I wish to point out the absolute lack of well-reasoned dialogue on this point.

1. benna writes:

The premise of Intelligent Design is that the universe is so unimaginably complex and perfect that it must have been created by an intelligent designer.

2. benna also cites a lack of ID articles in peer-reviewed journals as evidence that nobody in the "real" scientific community believes in ID.

This is a trifle circular. The tools used by those who oppose theistic explanations for the world (including ID) include belittling, caricaturizing, marginalizing, black-listing, not to mention monopolizing money and prestige to the exclusion of all other options from serious consideration. Faced with the scientistic forces arrayed these bodies of ideas, is it any wonder that nobody who wants to be taken seriously later will give articles with an ID point of view serious attention? This is less about ideas "winning or losing" in the scientific marketplace and more about ideas being sand-bagged and informally kept from being heard in that marketplace.

If you don't believe this possible, look at what happened in a slightly different field to Immanuel Velikovsky when what he said didn't line up with accepted scientific orthodoxy in the fields Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos speak to -- whether or not you accept the contents of his books as reasonable alternative explanations.

As to my subject line: it seems that very few people can make a dispassionate, deal-with-the-facts comment on this subject either in favour of or in opposition to Intelligent Design. It struck me that there are more than one kind of fundamentalism and many slashdotters who would sooner die than be called fundamentalists merely suffer from fundamentalism in a different direction.

cheers...ank

>>The burden of proof isn't on me.

>Look, it's not gonna be worth anyone's time to correspond with you if that's your attitude.

>1) What would you have God do with people like..

2) The word "ETERNAL" does not appear in the passages you cited. YOU inserted it.

It seems to me that the relevant portions of the bible are overwhelming concerned [by orders of magnitude] not with the sentence of eternal damnation, but rather with the offer of eternal life.

All that touchy-feely stuff about loving your neighbors is FUN!!

Why are you blue-staters so damned intent on being miserable for your entire lives?

I notice a false dichotomy at play in far, far too many of these comments. The assumption would seem to be either that one accepts evolutionary theory or one is a caricatured raving fundamentalist who thinks that every word of the Bible is meant to be read as a 19th Century work of science. That is not the case, as a person who wishes to investigate the question for himself may easily ascertain (or, for a simpler example: I myself hold to neither position). Whether or not a person agrees with their conclusions about evolutionary theory, many of the leading figures in the Intelligent Design movement do not hold to flatly literal readings of the creation narratives.

I don't disagree that the show has become better, nor do I disagree with you about the other series, but I think it's largely too late. I think Enterprise had to be strong out of the gate after the debacle that was Voyager. Problem is that now not many are giving Enterprise a chance.

The thing is, the older Star Treks were about people in space, they were not about space. With Voyager and Enterprise, none of the characters seemed to connect with viewers. They were caricatures of people in the trek universe. Awfully hard to warm up to them. I liked the mirror epsiodes for example, but when Archer got worked up and got ranting about "the ship", he sounded to me like Daffy Duck.

I mean, did you ever really care about the people in Voyager or Enterprise.

Unfortunately, your assertion that science fiction must depict a technological utopia is disheartening. You are definitely a core-worlder/first-worlder. You've never seen the technological inadequacies in the fringes of the third-world, and so you think that high technology must suffuse the world.

As for the characters, we were really being given a small glimpse into their nature. Had the series continued, Joss would have fleshed out their character quite readily. It's a much more realistic method for depicting a rich and multifaceted character. This is in stark contrast to the unoriginal caricature characters from B5, which need less than 5 minutes of screen time to fully reveal their entire raison d'etre.

Every "good" must have its "evil." If it doesn't, it must create one.

This is exactly what the secular progressives do to the conservatives, they villify them and distort them into caricatures of Stalin, Mussolini, et cetera. Note that I didn't say the Democrats do that. The Democrats are politicians and want to win elections. There are, however, groups like Moveon.org and more extreme groups who have no qualms about calling Republicans fascists.

I just hope that, in the end, they can do away with the hamhanded security kludges like the Local Machine Lockdown and its contingent fixes like the ridiculous "Mark of the Web" and such.

It's one thing to try to secure your browser. It's another to become a paranoia caricature.

"So why was it ignored? Graphic designer Greg Storey thinks part of the reason is poor design."

The implication that the gov't ignored a dangerous warning because the formatting of the doc wasn't pretty doesn't sound like a Dilbertian caricature of the US gov't?

It's criticizing the format used for a single document, not making a caricature of the entire government! How would you have summarized the article? Do you think the original memo shows good design? Think to how much information and email you get thrown at you. Now imagine how many orders of magnitude more the president must get. Do you think you're both served well by the same format?

Maybe you should spend some time meta-moderating. It'll give you a clearer view of what I'm talking about, here. Lots of mod-points are spent every day supporting popular opinion, and typically that opinion involves criticizing the US.

I hate Bush, mod me up.

Maybe, maybe not, but this post really wasn't an example deep anti-US sentiment.

What I also see a lot of during meta-modertion are people who get cricitized for not being patriotically correct. If I can't suggest a new document format without being accused of being anti-US, well, that's just scary.