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Pullman may have been _trying_ to condemn those who seek power, but Asriel is a decidedly heroic figure. Asriel's fate seemed to me to be very much in line with Pagan ideas on action and reaction - he finds redemption in his Phyrric victory, and this is heroic.

He is certainly given more sympathy than the church, which strikes me as a flaw. If the church leadership had been presented in a similarly complex manner, I don't think it would have bothered me as much. Yes, I am a Christian, but not of the kind that you seem to expect - I also enjoyed the Narnia books, but I am not blind or stupid and I would agree with some of Pullman's criticisms of the series while debating others.

Pullman's portrayal of heaven and hell is nothing I haven't seen before, but it is also a caricature and I object to it on _literary_ grounds - if he wants to use aspects of christian authoritarianism to condemn tyranny (which as an anarchist I can definitely see the logic of) he should do a better job of it. That is all.

A caricaturization of reality. This is a complicated 50 year old conflict that is not as simple as the comic book worldview you propose.

You obviously know nothing of the true history of the Arabic/Isreali(Jewish) conflict, do you? Both sides claim Abraham (from the Genesis account in the Bible) as their forefather, except he had two sons, one out of wedlock, one with his wife... It's commonly accepted his truly first-born, Ishmael (bloodline wise from Abraham) is the ancestor of all Arabic peoples, whereas the "God-appointed" heir of all of God's promises to Abraham came through the second-born son, Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews.

No, I'm afraid this conflict has been going on for thousands of years, not just 50. You're localizing this current conflict to a narrow space of fifty years, when in reality, you should be taking the whole thing in the proper context of why the Arabs hate the Jews so much (Hint: They (the Jews) "stole" the God-given birthright, so to speak, from the Arabs - a big generalization of all of the details, but close enough without writing another 30 pages of info).

I'm not going to look it up right now, but I do believe the Khoran would verify this 'bloodline' argument.

As a young 17yr old you should probably be doing a little more learning about the world at large, the good, the bad, and the ugly about it. Ever wonder why you've heard the phrase: "Respect your elders."? It's because they've lived through more, learned more, and seen more than you have, and therefore, have a much better insight into how the world works. Please don't presume to have all the answers at this stage of life.

As an older person you shouldn't presume that your age makes everything you say to a younger person correct.

You do remember the events of Sept 11, 2001, correct? Good.

And you might not get modded down as Flamebait if you weren't so arrogant.

19 psycho's gave their lives to kill thousands of people...probably even more than a handful of people that could've sympathized with their struggle.

Gee, you should have told the hijackers that. I'm sure they would have changed their minds. :P

Just look at the death rates for Palestinians vs Isreali's... sure the suicide bombers take out a few people or more with each suicide, but so many more die in Isreal's retaliation against those random attacks that it makes suicide absolutely pointless! Statistically, the Arabs get their butts kicked every time they've tried to beat on Isreal. It would behoove them to rethink their strategies about how best to conquer their enemy, because guranteeing the loss of one "soldier" with every suicide attack is a pretty poor tactical, and strategic, decision when trying to run a country.

I would expect such shallow logic from someone younger than a wise sage such as yourself. If you just bean-count lost lives, it does look like the Israelis are winning (400 dead Israelis, 1200 dead Palestinians). What you fail to grasp is the political leverage that Israel is losing. Pressure from the rest of the world is building on this issue. American interests worldwide are threatened because of it. Friendly but shaky Arab governments are being threatened by rage from below. Israel may end up losing the territories that it gained in the 1967 war. Not bad for just a couple thousand casualties.

In fact, Japan sent hundreds of kamikaze pilots towards American warships late in World War II, and look what that got 'em: Two nukes that killed hundres of thousands of people.

Yeah, that's a typical historical development relevant to this situation. If Israel were to nuke Palestine, it would mean serious blowback for Israel and us too.

But then again, the Islamic nations aren't interested in co-existence and peace, just the complete irradication of the Jews.

A caricaturization of reality. This is a complicated 50 year old conflict that is not as simple as the comic book worldview you propose.

Hmmm... Sounds a lot like Hitler, doesn't it? And that regime didn't go over too well with the rest of the world...

Oh, here we go again, with the inevitable comparison to Hitler. I call Godwin.

I say the 17 year old whooped your ass!

Throughout history, the Jews have ALWAYS been persecuted, villified and spat upon. From the racist caricature of Shylock in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" to the grotesque demons portrayed in Nazi propaganda, the cycle of abuse never ends.

This can only lead to one conclusion. The Jews MUST be doing something to deserve all of this.

They bring it on themselves.

A portrait of the Mandrake user from a collection of Linux User Caricatures:
This chap (baby) is the new distro on the market(compared to the others anyway). He is always seen as a new lunix user hence the baby look, and the distro is regarded as one best for beginners to learn who might be migrating from windows to linux.

As much as you tried to dance around it, no one objects to deterrence.

The principle of no questions asked nuclear retaliation is a good one. This NPR advocates far more creative uses for nukes than this.

The only other sensical argument that's made which you mostly hinted at, is that if we try to simply appear to be the deranged lunatic nuclear cowboy caricature that is made of us, we dominate our opponents because they will cower to our presumptively depraved tyranny.

The downside to this is that it legitimizes all attacks on us, because we officially endorse the pricinple that "if there is no conventional means, our policy is to use extreme ones."

So first strike nuclear attacks against us, and using civilian aircraft as bombs, are according to our principles, entirely valid within our war morality. Plus, now there is a new justification of pre-emptive retaliation. A first strike against us as a retaliation for our supposedly impending first strike.

You can only trademark names, symbols, and logos. I believe that Disney has trademarked "Mickey Mouse" and stylized Disney mouse head, with the circle/half-circle for the head, and the two circles for the ears. A mouse that looks just like Mickey does in the cartoons would be fair game once Mickey fell into public domain.

In reality, they could probably keep this from happening with trademarks.

funny, i didn't think caricatures had the power to quickly erode hundreds of years of constitutional guarantees (like the 4th amendment), but the republican controlled (i.e., christian right-wing controlled fanatical) government has.

Most of the stuff the Republican party (and parts of the Democrats) come out with would be labelled "extreme-right"/"neo-nazi" if a German party dared voice such views.


I think what you really mean is that the caricature of the Republican party that you enjoy trotting out would be considered as such.

The reality of the situation is, of course, very different.

• Eisner (Disney) : Without adequate protection of our intellectual property we will make so much less money that we will have to make severe cutbacks in our democratic outreach programs (campaign contributions) We would be forced to develop new properties to provide quality entertainment for America and the world (shows example of "Corrupt Congresscritter" - an obvious caricature of Hollings - as the proposed replacement for The Mouse)
• Chernin (News Corporation): Without adequate protection of our intellectual property, we will be unable to prevent the digital manipulation of news stories by terrorists (plays video clip - subtitled "digitally manipulated" of Ken Lays testimony befre Congress, but rather than taking the fifth, he is passing out money to CongressCritters - including "Corrupt Congresscritter")
• Vadasz (Intel Corporation): We have the technology to provide this level of protection (and hold the patents on some of it). But it will require national leadership in the form of very strict laws requiring the adoption of this technology.
• Bechtolsheim (Cisco Systems): We also have developed technology to provide adequate protection for intellectual property and identification of those whgo would steal what is not rightfully theirs, but the existing network infrastructure will need to be replaced before these protections can be implemented. As this will be a very expensive proposition, I beleive that we will need national leadership in the form of financial assistance to all those firms who will need to replace their existing routers with our latest technology that we developed for thespecial problems then faced by the People's Republic of China, but as you can see now face us in America as well.
• Meyer (Thomson Multimedia) As the recent experiences of the music industry clearly proves, the lack of adequate protection for intellectual property will indeed be the death knell for the entire entertainment industry.
• Perry (Mitsubishi): As Mr Bechtosheim has already testified, we do indeed have the technolgy, but all the older technolgy must be forcefully removed from circulation and replaced with new equipment which respects the rigtsof creators to profit from their work. But we see no reason for a massive government program to assist those scofflaws who purchased equipment with the obvious intent of pirating copyrighted materials.
• Valenti (MPAA): Just this week we are now seeing over 350,000 movies being illegally copied over the internet every single day. When broadband is fully available, the number of pirated films will rise to over seven million per day if nothing is done. This threat to the American People will do far more damage than the VCR ever did. ANd further, I have asked some friends at the IRS to prepare a little chart showing just how much tax revenue is escaping the government at that rate of piracy: 7 million movies at 5 people per copy at ten dollars per ticket is 350 million dollars a day in lost ticket sales, and that is also over 35 billion dollars per year in untaxed income. So, not only will this new law keep America entertained with quality movies, but it will help strengthen the government and bring in much needed additional tax revenues in these trying economic times.

With bare-minimum graphics like Ultima III on C64 all the action took place in your own mind -- the best virtual reality/graphics engine ever developed.

When the series moved onto a sort of 3d graphics in Ultima VI the whole atmosphere changed. Suddenly you had these STUPID, squeaky-clean looking characters on the screen instead of the rough bunch of veterans you always had imagined. All the monsters were pitiful caricatures of the nightmares I had fought in the earlier Ultima episodes. In short, the whole game was fucked up because you were being forcefed the (annoying) vision of the game developers.

game graphics will be indistinguishable from real life

Sigh. And what's the point in that when the purpose of the games is to help you to spend some time away from the reality!?

The Emperor's New Clothes is great alternative to the media.

I think the best way to describe the site is by telling more about its name. "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Anderson. A group of swindlers hustle an emperor into paying an exorbitant amount for magical clothes that are ostensibly magnificant; simpletons and people unfit for their office cannot see the clothes. In reality there are no clothes and everyone pretends they can see the clothes lest they be rendered unfit or simple.

This is a great metaphor for what goes on in America. Most Americans are incredulous to believe in anything other than the moralizing of the media; moralizing of the worst kind. Every country, or foreign head of state who is our enemy is evil, and we are self evidently good. This is a vile and simplistic caricature, yet so few even question it, the truth no longer matters. There is no moral reasoning behind America's actions but most Americans only see the media's illusion. The emperor really has no clothes. If you go to the site it will contradict a lot of the media and government's lies and unlike the New York Times, BBC, CNN, etc., they cite their sources for you to check.

No kidding, it's hard to believe whoever wrote that has a PhD in anything. For instance:

Fiction #1: Microsoft is a "monopoly." There is no such thing as a private monopoly. Only the government can forcibly prevent competitors from entering a market.

I guess the Government-enforced copyright monopoly doesn't count? And in my economics classes, I learned that a monopoly is a company with concentrated market power, which may or may not be harmful to society. Any RATIONAL thinker would agree: of course Microsoft is a monopoly in the PC operating systems market, their product is used on a vast majority of PCs. A is A., and Microsoft is a Monopoly.

This economic power, the power of voluntary trade, is fundamentally different from political power, the power of the gun.

To quote George Will (was it George Will?) Capitalism is a government program. Let's say hardware Company X decides they don't like to pay microsoft for machines that don't have Windows installed. IE, they break their contract and sell their own machines without Windows, but don't pay Microsoft. Guess what types of weapons will be carried when their headquarters are raided after Microsoft sues them for breach of contract? That's right! Guns! Or maybe the company should just blow up their unsold PCs, Howard Roark style.

Ayn Rand took the valid and noble concept of rational self-interest and turned it into a sophomoric caricature, an unrealistic and simplified viewpoint that applies to everything yet is completely irrelevant here in the "real world".

Kindof like how this post has nothing to do with Microsoft, oops..whatever..

moral of the story

Matt Groening said long ago that a defining moment of The Simpsons, in his mind, was in the Bart Gets an F episode, when Bart prays to pass his test. He says it made Bart a character, not just an icon of trouble-making. It showed he had soul and wasn't simply a caricature of naughty boys. Whatever people think the Simpsons is supposed to be like, Groening intended them to be realistic characters. While the nonsequitur, zany episodes are often hilarious, I personally find character-driven episodes to be the best, and the jokes that play off of the characters' personalities are often the funniest. So I liked the corpse episode, and the Buddhism episode, and even the Manjula episodes (well, the original one. Subsequent ones were kind of off-the-wall).

If you want South Park, *watch* South Park.

I mean, the idea that RMS thinks he speaks for the open source community

I would imagine that RMS would be pretty upset if you accused him of thinking he spoke for Open Source instead of for Free Software!!!

to the extent that he can ask someone to explain their decisions on matters that have NOTHING AT ALL to do with RMS or the so-called community, and that he actually expects and answer, seems fairly arrogant on Stallman's part

This is all becoming very silly. RMS was asked a question about this! He didn't volunteer an opinion. I think you are reacting to a /. created caricature of RMS

Maybe I've misunderstood something, but I don't believe that Miguel works for Stallman, uses any of Stallman's intellecutal or physical assets, or has any real obligation to him. So why does Stallman think Miguel owes anything to him or to anyone else?

Ummm...that GNOME thingy..what does that stand for I wonder? www.gnome.org says "GNOME is part of the GNU project and is free software [...]". Now, I wonder who started the GNU project? (This last question left as an exercise for the reader).

It's time that Linux people realize that hating MS

Ummmm, who's hating them? Sure there's a lot of posting from people on /. saying "I realize I'm in the minority that doesn't have MS" or "MS hating zealots have to realize", but I think that you'll find that anyone that actually does anything besides post to /. merely sees MS as an unreliable, irritating company that is great at making a profit. And there's the problem. It is, as is so boringly, and often pointed out on /. , a business and they exist for one purpose and one only: to make money.

Many of us prefer Free Software because it is made not to make money as a primary objective, but to perform a function. It is frequently more reliable and useful as a result of this different orientation.

is going no where and is completely unproductive

Even if "hate" were the prevalent motivating factor that you claim it hardly seems accurate to say that its supposed results are going nowhwere: I have a very functional desktop system and my servers are working just peachy thank you!

RMS needs to be hit with a cluebat

It all depends on what he actually means as opposed to the crazy, hate-filled, zealous caricature that you've made of him. If he is questioning what exactly Miguel means when he says Gnome4.0 should be based on .NET as opposed to it being based on Mono then there is nothing knee-jerk or reactionary about his query. He was delivered an incomplete and confusing quote/question and it is all being spun into a debate solely for the amusement of CmdrTaco and the /. trolls.

I, for one, have yet to hear a compelling version of the Chinese Room argument. The version I have heard has a non-Chinese speaking human in a room, with a list of rules (in a language the human understands) for processing Chinese characters, which he uses to generate additional Chinese characters. The human dutifully does this, and in the process, ends up reading a story in Chinese and then answering questions (also in Chinese) about it, all unknowingly. Searle (or his caricatures, anyways) then point triumphantly to the man, proclaim "but he doesn't know Chinese!!!", and then sit back smugly as though they had refuted something important.

It is totally obvious to me, anyways, that the man is not required to know Chinese any more than my Pentium III is required to know LISP -- the man is the one component of a system which, as a whole, evidently does understand Chinese.

As for the mind/brain connection, this seems to be the same misunderstanding -- the mind is software, and one of the open questions is the degree to which this software is platform-dependent. Searle (again, perhaps only Searle's caricatures) seems to think, more or less axiomatically, that the mind can only run on the meat-machine, but seems to offer no evidence.

I welcome more sophisticated versions of Searle's arguments, if you've got 'em.

-- A.

But the heart and soul of STAR WARS is undeniably the characters: rakish Han Solo the rogue with a heart of gold, trading insults with spunky Princess Leia, so beautiful and so brave; gung-ho Luke Skywalker, the hero right out of Joseph Campbell, who manages to be annoying and inspiring at the same time; even characters like R2-D2 and Chewbacca, who don't have a coherent line in the script, are developed as recognizable personalities! A cast straight out of Shakespeare or Dickens is what makes Lucas' film an immortal classic.

Don't get me wrong, Space battles and lightsaber duels are great, but let's hope Lucas is able to inject some life into the two-dimensional caricatures who pranced around onscreen during Episode I (name three differences between Obi-Wan and Kwi-Gon-Jinn's personalities, or for that matter, between Obi-Wan and Queen Amidiala), otherwise those of us for whom the STAR WARS flame burns bright in our hearts may be in for another ho-hum prequel.

But in cinematography, it's possible to underlight and underexpose to let black faces fall out of detail so that their features become unresolvable. Check out the first shots when the captured aide sits across from the general in the bunker. He's a dark skinned man, but he's photographed as if he's an oil slick. Not so for our fearless white heroes under the sun. The legendary Conrad Hall (who lit American Beauty) even discussed this problem openly in notes he wrote on cinematography in the 60s, by showing how the cinematographer and the makeup artist should take care to present black skin as it truly is.

There is a great history of how traditional Hollywood lighting was discriminatory against black skin in order to make people look caricatured so that they were jet black; take a look at pickaninnies or performers in blackface in old school vaudeville films. Black skin back then had no shades - only the darkest of the dark, and if you do even more historical research you'll find that caricaturized illustration and propaganda pamphlets from the time and around the time of slavery liked to do the same thing. Equations in language and literature likened the darker the skin to the weaker and more savage the character. Take a look at Lord of the Rings; where every human supporter of Sauron is decked out in black, dark skinned, swarthy, brown skinned, hailing from deserts in the south, and barbaric with guttural language. It's the same old same old.

You'll dismiss this as lunacy, but those are actual fact. Talk all you want, but all one has to do is watch movies from the 30s and 40s and note the respect given to black actors back then. Apparently it lives on. I'm sure you can see that Blackhawk Down isn't racist - but what I'm saying is that it isn't the content - those were the skin colors of the real people involved. It's the context and the presentation, which to me makes Africans look like simple minded barabarians who act depraved rather than human beings, some good, some bad - as history tells us were present that day.