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LOL Did you notice who put the roundtable together ? John Shirley. The man might as well be a communist. If you read the his song Called Youth Trilogy (the eclipse books, highly recommended by the way). He does nothing but trash what could be called mainstream american values, as he has a caricature of America destroy Europe. He Selected on the norman spinrad who felt that a working missile defense would be bad thing, Kim Stanley Robinson whose first round of books turned america into a dystopia in 3 different ways (each one he seemed to applaud) and Ken Wharton who had the amazing epiphany that news organizations manipulate the news (or in his case just right wing news organizations (Dan rather or james carville hardly come to mind on the left)

Current conservative philosophys have a fundamental hopefull cornerstone that free people can make their lives better. So you select a panel with a moderator and 4 out 5 members who regularly conjure dystopias and bemoan the world is going to heck in a handbasket yes you get a very left leaning presentation. Cory Doctorow is the only one of the panelists who sees technology as an empowering and positive force.

As to Rightwing sciencefiction writers if you look to science fiction writers who are actually technologists you find plenty of them. This is not to say all but more than enough. Jerry Pournelle wasn't there, Marc Steigler wasn't there, nor F Paul Wilson, Heck he didn't even get Vernor Vinge or John barnes. While he is no longer with us I give you probably the greatest of all time Robert A Heinlein.

What you saw in that forum was a typical problem with know it ails of both the left and the right. You got a preselected group of people together so they could engage in groupthink. There wasn't room for dissent and they knew they were right/

Bill O'Reilly ... like him because he walks both sides of the fence by making logical decisions ... Good show, people should watch it, even if they don't like it. You'll change your opinion of the show after a month or two, I guarantee it.

Watched it for over a year, it's one of the worst shows on news. You must be thinking of a different Bill O'Reilly than the one on Fox News. He shouts down his guests, refuses to let them speak (in particular when they disagree with them), turns off their mics when he disagrees with them, and thinks with one of the most emotionally based irrational minds possible.

Bill O'Reilly is just Wally George without the peanut gallery (which frankly, was the only thing that made Wally George worth watching).

Interesting that it is the conservative talk-hosts who find it necessary (and appropriate, apparently) to cut off those they disagree with-- apparently unable to muster effective counterarguments. Rush on the other hand, doesn't even have enough confidence in his arguments to put himself in a position of having to defend them in the face of a live person-- instead preferring to caricature, misrepresent and take out-of-context sound bytes and video clips and argue against them. It's easy to win arguments when you get to invent your opponent's opinions.

How anyone can see any of these guys as anything but complete buffoons is probably the most serious indictment of our educational system that anyone could possibly make. Too bad such mass buffoonery is going to make all our kids have to cover the multi-trillion dollar debt we're building up at breakneck speed, no doubt either in raised taxes or reduced social programs (probably both).

And yeah, so Saddam Hussein was a real asshole, but a tin dictator that really wasn't worth 100+billion and 1000+ lives (so far) to take out. Now our military is far more stretched thin than ever, and more vulnerable to any real threats-- if an enemy wanted a good time to go after us when they know we're struggling to find the manpower and money to cover the mess we're in, we'd be hard pressed to give them a better opportunity.

After the election, no matter WHO wins, I expect the economy is going to take some serious hits. Right now the conservatives are doing everything they can to keep things propped up so it doesn't make Bush look bad. They've got their gut sucked in so hard they're turning blue, trying to look sexy for that babe, the electorate. After the election though, all hell is liable to break loose. The real hard decisions are ahead-- how to keep the debt from killing the country (hmm... maybe that's been Osama's plan all along) and where to find the manpower to staff the Iraq effort (can you spell D-R-A-F-T?), both which are likely to kick our economy in the privates, and no amount of Viagra is gonna fix it...

Either Bush knew there were no WMDs and he misled us, or he SHOULD have known and is incompetent. But liar or incompetent, we really like him because his heart's in the right place...

the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists, and to remove the growing, but not yet imminent threat Saddam was posing to America.

The threat was growing, but not imminent, you say -- but in your previous post you've claimed he had the WMDs, and that they must be somewhere, and that it really scares you. How baldly, and badly, have you just contradicted yourself? Um, utterly?

And again, even on your own terms: "the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists"?? Gee, uh... Sure has worked great. Oops, time to resort to "We made Iraq a honey pot for terrorists so as to fight them there rather than at home, that's the 'front line' now." You seem incapable of tracking just how mutually contradictory your own statements are, so I'm sure you can trot that one out and not see how completely it vitiates everything else you've said. (I guess there's no need to mention how the war was fought in ways that didn't seem to keep Ansar al-Islam in Iraq anyway. Yeah, they sure were worried about those terrorists. So worried that the terrorists seem to have neatly skipped the country while we were conducting an armored assault on Baghdad.)

Definition:"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position." You, friend, substituted a ridiculous version of the parent's post, claiming that he was saying Saddam had changed his ways. This wasn't the claim being made. That's what's called a straw man. Maybe you think it was ironic, but golly, you sure seem to have promptly argued against the caricature, so how were you using it again? As a straw man. You might have wanted to look that up.

Just for good measure, you explain how thoughtfully Reagan undertook a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" forgeign policy -- the results of which we are currently dealing with. You do a truly execrable job of defending these policies. Now, think hard... Think about Pakistan: nuclear power, huge radicalized muslim population, repeated assassination attempts against Musharraf, Bush in 2000 saying that he thought the coup that brought Musharraf to power was "good for stability in the region" despite its having overthrown an elected regime. Longtime supporters of the Taliban. Does this remind you of any whose names have four letters and start with "Ira"? Oh, well -- the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I guess.

Try looking at my sig. Eisenhower's among my favorite Presidents, and you're accusing me of being a Democratic propagandist. Unreal.

As far as I know, there have been -no- cases tried (except for the very recent one, in which, the case was tried because the soldier was suspected of being a spy...) for adultry. Ms Lewinsky made no ploy that Clinton was abusing his power. It might be noted that Clinton admited that he did not want to go to war, and didn't have his family get him out and then pretend he -did- serve. In my opinion, thats a whole lot better than covering it up after you got out of serving anyhoww and attempt to maintain your position... along with this he didn't attack persons with military history. Clinton's "I didn't inhale" comment was a statement of his generation (60's)... bush did inhale, or snort, however you want to put it. Clinton also didn't drive drunk into a hedge... And while getting head may cause some issues in the domestic front, it doesn't endanger anyone else (I am assuming that, from what I've seen of Hillary, it did endanger himself! :) Do I think Kerry is the right man for the job? I don't know, I only know 2 things... bush is not the man for the job, and kerry makes a damn good caricature... it makes my choice easier.

Loser pays works great in theory

Loser-pays works in practice. It's the horror stories that are purely theoretical.

Loser-pays is in force in the State of Alaska and the countries of Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand. That's one U.S. state, and five industrialized democracies that use the same basic English Common Law system as the U.S., and couple it with the Loser-Pays principle.

And yet, with six jursidictions covering over a hundred million people to draw examples from, opponents of loser-pays can only present theoretical problems based on caricatures. If it really had such horrible consequences, why aren't there any examples from Alaska, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, or New Zealand?

Loser-pays has been thouroughly tested, and it unquestionably works. All else is FUD.

I think you miss the point of both the game and the fairytales. They were caricatures of real life, not necessarily depictions of actual events.

The fact that this game doesn't choose to depict a perfectly realistic world but instead chooses to draw upon a fairytale like mythos deepens the fictional world it depicts. It isn't supposed to be confused with real life.

As the title "Fable" suggests, the contrasts of good and bad, light and dark are all going to be exaggerated and if it's written well maybe it'll actually have a "moral" at the end to be drawn from this world of sharper contrast than our own.

Remember that physical theories are just a
caricature of nature and have limited
applicability. Quantum physics was formulated long
time ago, but 78 years is apparently not enough
time to explore all of its consequences and
discover its faults. Adopting a phylosophical
position about the statistical or deterministic
behaviour of nature is entering metaphysics,
pursuing the ultimate consequence of a limited
theory is nonsense. One, as a physicist, should
keep a critical and skeptical attitude, but
nobody taughts students about this, we suppose
they catch it by osmosis as Richard Feynman
says in his well know talk "cargo cult science".

Would we even want to be contacted? Given that the probability of finding someone within even a few thousand years of our level of civilization is very remote given the age of the universe, isn't sending out signals advertising our presence to the universe potentially careless?

I mean, I don't subscribe to the B-movie caricature of evil conquering aliens, but I think any contact with a civilization that is like to be millions of years ahead of us will cause enormous cultural shock.

Roget's Thesaurus: Entry 19 (Imitation) - [snipped down to a list of words I felt were most applicable]

copying, duplication, reproduction, xerox, facsimile, simulation, impersonation, personation, semblance, parody, take-off, lampoon, caricature, plagiarism, forgery, counterfeit, imitator, echo, parrot, mime, imitate, copy, mirror, reflect, reproduce, repeat, do like, match, mimic, simulate, impersonate, follow suit, follow the example of, walk in the shoes of, take a leaf out of another's book, strike in with, follow suit, take after, model after, emulate, mimic.

Finally, in the words of Wordsworth, "like - but oh! how different! "

Thanks to the Project Gutenberg thesaurus

Tarantino wrote the scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, but he disowned the second after Oliver Stone pissed all over it.

Also, you're forgetting Jackie Brown, a film that I really liked; definitely better than Pulp Fiction. Probably the most personal and "human" of his films, mostly steering clear of caricature, something he and Smith are both prone to.

Even if there's the law, during the last presidential campaign, that didn't stop a very popular caricatural (?) show to design the actual president as "SuperMenteur" ("SuperLiar"). Try to do that now in the states ;)

And it didn't stop either all the scandals that led to that. In fact, especially for the Elf bribery, at least one past influent member of the government got judged.

You confuse the term of "liberal" with "knowledgeable" and mix a buch of half facts to make your points in a rather hald-ass way.
Yahoo! is a private company, they want to be able to sell or allow companies to distribute or sell stuff to French people, using a .fr site, in French, that is not legal in France.
If you think that Nazi crap should be legal and promotes brotherly love, by all means, stay in the US, move to Montana, and go shave your head. But leave people with a tiny bit more understanding of things and less clear convinction and caricatural vision of the world alone.

1. The "bankers" (i.e. Jews) are accussed of controlling the government from behind the scenes.
2. The "bankers" are accused of manipulating the economy through moneylending in order to avoid ever having to work. (This is the most persistent anti-Semitic stereotypes.)
3. "Fabian and his friends purchased most of the newspapers, T.V. and radio stations and he carefully selected people to operate them." (This is another of the most presistent anti-Semitic stereotypes.)
4. The "bankers" are quoted as saying to each other, "It is our right and duty to rule. The masses don't know what is good for them. They need to be rallied and organised. To rule is our birthright." This is straight out of any piece of Nazi propoganda that you care to pick up.
5. An angry Jewish-looking man is portrayed sitting at a desk inscribed with dollar signs and "eye in the pyramid" symbols (another favorite of conspiracy loonies).
6. The Federal Reserve system is portrayed as being a front for "private lenders", which is in turn portrayed as being a front for an obscured building with a quesiton mark on it that looks a lot like a Jewish temple.
7. The story then descends into standard Christian fundamentalist "New World Order" paranoia, implying at the end of it all that our Jewish-banker protagonist is actually the Anti-Christ himself... a favorite theory of the racist Christian Identity movement. At the end of the story, he's seized complete control of the world (through the standard method of tattooing "666" on everyone's hand) all because we didn't listen to the rantings and ravings of the violent racists who tried to "warn" us of the "great Zionist conspiracy."

Okay, so the story starts with sound economic truths and then starts to blend in racism and hatred through misleading assumptions, half-truths, and outright lies. This is hardly out of the ordinary for hate groups that want to be racist without admitting to being racist. I'll admit, the story isn't as

Cryptonomicon was fantastic, but I couldn't get halfway through Quicksilver. The characters are inconsistent and incoherent, particularly the protagonist - who only remembers his religious views when it's convenient for the plot, but otherwise is just a random dude meeting famous peoplem having deep conversations with them and never expresses his own opinions. The view of european history presented is also a caricature, extremely americanised and at times very silly. In addition, alhtough interesting, Stephenson's descriptions present London from the viewpoint of a modern tourist who wants to understand where it all came from. It feels like reading the Lonely Planet guide. And he clearly does not understand Cambridge. Although he talks a lot about Trinity. I doubt he's ever even visited it. 99% crap. Big disappointment.

He's always got bigoted caricatures of ethnic stereotypes in his movies. I'm waiting for the credit-lending character, Moneelovin-Jeau.

??? What's this? First you write a reasonable post. To that post someone replies with a reasonable reply. Then you freak out completely, and basically make a caricature of yourself. You are upset at the poster because you feel that he portrays you and your beliefs in some unfair manner, and then you go on and worsen your own image much more than anyone could do for you?

About the "conservatives would automatically think.." -- so it was an overgeneralization. But what was your original post but the worst overgeneralization? Your behavior is quite erratic, and you contradict yourself. You are an embarrassment to conservatives everywhere, me included.

I came off as really angry because I was. When you say that "The conservatives will automatically think, "They are attacking our soldiers! And disruptin' our brave leader Bush's plan for giving Iraq democracy! They are bad for killing American soldiers!" you portary conseratives as flat out iditos; slobbering morons who do nothing but obey their 'brave leader' regardless of what's going on in the world around them. And that made me angry. I'm not a slobbering idiot, and I don't particularly like Bush. But I do consider myself a conservative, and I don't like being portrayed as a moron. Maybe you were attempting you make a caricature of conservative viewpoints and I should have taken it a bit more lightly. It seemed more likely to me that you were attempting to show what you beleived to be a converstive viewpoint - a stupid, slavish adherence to the president. I really don't like being talked down to and considered a fool, and I felt as if you were doing just that.

I'm sure that the al-sadr militia is highly trained and all that sort of thing, but I highly doubt that they represent the views of most Iraqis. I think your link to the movie 'braveheart' is entirely valid. The men who sold out their countrymen for titles were cowards and traitors. They didn't represent the views of the majority of the people in Ireland; they represented their own selfish interests. The same is true of muqtada al-sadr - he doesn't seem to be concerned with the best interests of the iraqi people but with his own particular group. Most iraqis, I think, want to have their own democratic government. I'm sure they're not too happy about having american troops all over the place in their country, but I sincerely doubt they'd prefer a bunch of clans fighting for control over a democractic government.

As for CNN international showing a different picture of what's going on in Iraq, I don't doubt it at all. Most europeans watch state-run televsion news stations, which are inredibly liberal, - so if CNN is going to have any traction at all, they're going to have to show the same sort of things going on. As for American TV not showing any fighting, I've seen plenty of videos of americans shooting at iraqis on Fox.

But in the trailer, there's a long list of names, (presented as though they are actors) followed by "...are all going to be really, really mad when they see..." George W. Bush is one of those names. While it's possible that Bush will not be directly caricatured, the movie must contain something that would make him really, really mad...or it would violate all of those laws against false advertising that...oh, wait. Nevermind.

And as for a "Strawman" - what? Please, quite clearly and directly explain why you think I was misrepresenting your standpoint. Your premise was that to be competetive in gaming the primary barrier was financial - I rebutted, saying that skill and training were just as important in professional gaming as in professional sports. The one and only point where I possibly caricatured your position was by saying you grossly underestimated the skills required to be a pro gamer; considering some of your previous wording, I still think that was a fair statement and will stand by it. Please correct me if you feel it's necessary.

Now, would you be so kind as to state where you preemptively countered my point that playing games requires actual skill, not just a nice credit line? Ah yes, that's right - you haven't. Now please, back to my post and attack my argument, rather than using pathetic ad hominem attack.

I believe you're the one with the foot/mouth interface issues. Considering you're being A,C, I'm not sure why I'm even bothering with a rebuttal; I suspect I've been trolled. Well done.

This is actually a fair point. Many -- perhaps even most -- of those advocating abortion rights don't have anything to personally gain. But those who actually have or have had abortions certainly DO have something to gain -- that is, after all, why they have abortions in the first place.

In contrast, it's hard to see what abortion foes have to gain, especially since they are fighting for restrictions that would legally apply to them just as much as anyone.

So my point was in how these latter people get caricatured. The only sinister motive their opposition can think of to tar them with is "They want to control women's bodies," which sounds good at first but is cartoonishly ludicrous when you actually think about it. I mean, really, who actually thinks like that? If you're a woman, and you want to do anything you want to your own body, hey, knock yourself out. 99.99999999999999 percent of abortion opponents are against it not because they have any desire whatsoever to "control women's bodies," because because they oppose the deliberate killing of any innocent people. But the pro-abortion movement will never admit that obvious fact, because it makes their opponents sound like decent and compassionate people.

- Alaska Jack