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Thanks. I'm a woman and I'm not that way either. I don't even have an engagement ring - the idea of being proposed to made me sick, instead we decided to get married together like an adult couple making an adult decision together. I wasn't going to sit around idly while he was deciding when/if WE were getting married - that's something we should decide on together. We don't care to buy each other presents or anything like that - neither of us are into material objects and rarely want anything plus we don't need to buy each other crap to prove we love each other.

I swear /. is full of idiots whose idea of a all women is a caricature that doesn't even exist. They also somehow don't recognize that their entire caricature falls on its head when you consider lesbians and bisexuals exist.

Bad example, this was written just before the collapse of the Athenian empire, so the guy had a point.

It is a bad example, but for a different reason: Socrates never said it. The quote is actually from Aristophanes, who was writing a caricature of Socrates.

Socrates himself was tried and executed by the invading forces.

No, Socrates was executed by the Athenians themselves, not by the Spartan alliance.

Surprised to see you rewarded with 3 virginal Insightful remarks on this.

Firstly, there was no intrusion into a mosque to
Secondly, grill some pork meat there.

Thirdly, I am astonished that you give away your freedom that easily. Are you American citizen, if I may ask?

While I feel that decency is often missing, and I would argue against a caricature of some believe-group being posted on bill-boards, I will insist that they may (if not should) be shown closed-circuit. Because, if I know I'd be offended, I can simply decide not to attend.
But these people can not be satisfied with not attending. They will go, deliberately, to feel offended and use this feeling to cut down on civil liberties.
Think hard, please, before continuing with this chain of arguments of yours!

That last sentence was supposed to be a hint to the fact that you don't know what you are talking about when you speak for "the liberals".

What you hear on Fox and talk radio is not what "the liberals" actually believe or want. It's a caricature that they can more easily attack.

He was caricatured because he strongly disagreed with Darwin on evolution and was portrayed as a bible thumper. But Darwin owes much to his old Captain for long chats over the voyages and the extra mile he went to accommodate Darwin, who was a bit of a spoiled son of a rich indulgent father at that time. Darwin had quit college, quit the seminary when he got on Beagle. Darwin was quite sick later in life. Darwin had spent 1000 pounds during the voyage to collect the specimens, probably worth quarter of a million dollars today. There was nothing to stop Darwin from calling it quits and catching a ship home at any port of call. It is entirely due to Fitzroy's help and understanding Darwin stayed on board for the entire 5 years.

Most environmentalists already support nuclear at least as a bridge technology. It has issues: fuel mining for it is terrible, it causes localised oceanic heating that massively disrupts the ecology (when you cool a reactor the heat has to go somewhere ) and more. But it's far better than coal. Environmentalists are rarely misanthropes and the vast majority are far more rational than the caricature you imply. Actually the greatest problem for nuclear has never been environmentalist opposition but rather it is nimbyism. That said it's got another huge problem. My country just signed a deal for a dozen new reactors... and I'm against it. Not because we don't need the power or I oppose nuclear (hell I lived in sight of a nuclear plant) but because it won't help us. It will take 15 years to get the first plant online (in the impossible best case scenario where it's finished on time)... we have brownouts now. We don't have time for nuclear. On the other hand we have among the most sun of any country in the world. Solar plants of the same output as that first nuclear can be online in two years for a quarter of the cost. Ironically we already have an entirely privately funded (in fact non-profit-making funded) molten salt plant about to come online with about a quarter of the power the nuclear plants can put out. Completed ahead of schedule and under budget. Solar is simply more economical and it's available fast.

misattributed to Socrates.
a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes' Clouds, (see w:The Clouds,) a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates.

From http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Y...

Im sure some dogs DO detect drugs

Thousands of them, trained by some very serious, very passionate people who don't even begin to fit the cartoon caricature description of cops who fake drug busts

but the above scenario has been reported a number of times

How many is a "number," relative to the all day, every day work these dogs and their handlers do?

Swatting is our warm colloquialism for the unintended consequences of the slow but progressive militarization of our local and regional police forces. forty years ago, the war on drugs and whats known in our nation as 'tough on crime' policies began to take the form of whatever our politicians fever-dreamed the nature of crime to be. California came out with 3 strike laws that relegated everything from bounced checks to jaywalking third offences to a minimum life sentence in prison, and the idea of civil forfeiture became a smart way to enact real-world consequences for movie-screen criminal caricatures. In america as it stands, thanks to the policies of carter, reagan, nixon, bush, and johnson, police officers can now purchase surplus military equipment for free, less shipping. And since america's chief export is war these days, we have a lot of surplus military equipment waiting to be used. This program ramped up after 9/11 and before we knew it, sleepy towns like Dothan Alabama owned tanks, mine resistent personnel vehicles, and millions of dollars in tactical military hardware such as night vision and machine guns with no realistic opportunity or purpose to utilize them.

So without real use, these systems degrade and deteriorate and the cost to maintain them is, well, very expensive. as a result, police departments found themselves shoehorning equipment requesitioned from hand-me-down government transfer projects and knee-jerk terrorism overfunding into everything. Warrant service for taxes? SWAT and a 40 ton tank can handle that. peaceful parade against planned parenthood? sounds like a job for machineguns and nightvision. And finally, the SWATting. Its an innocuous situation where some crank-yanker calls in an odious situation that requires immediate action. Hostage situations and school shootings arent oustide the american experience, but our response is nothing short of lethal interception no matter how far fetched it seems that a hostage situation in the Dugal county truck stop mens room is taking place.

Cops are baked in it. Theyve spend 30 years growing into this nonsense, that everything that isnt pulling over minorities in classic cars should be handled like a van damme movie. Their defense is often pretty good, noting that america is relatively unique in that citizenry can openly and easily procure weapons capable of quickly defeating both their body armor and their general defensive capability. But municipalities have no excuse for continuing to perpetuate this police-state response other than the obvious: theyre run by boomers and the elderly. People who have direct influence over the tactics and policy used by our police are obviously easily frightened. 24 hour news and internet forwards from grandma have reduced what should be a responsible, level-headed committee to a clamouring rats nest of assholes hovering somewhere between religious nationalism and dictatorial rule of law. the bottom line: cops arent soldiers, but we liketo pretend they are to make sure theyre ready to fight our boogeymen.

Somehow Lucas took good actors and made them wooden and caricatured, and THAT is why Natalie et al were worse off after it. Bugger all to do with the contract, or the original trilogy (Mark didn't want to do more Luke, Carrie went into directing), everything to do with Lucas being shite at directing. But he's powerful therefore he can't be dissed, so they make up some nonsensical bollocks to "explain" the problem.

The problem is Lucas shouldn't be anywhere near film.

dunno, you kind of sound like you have no idea what the law was used for. you think it was used for banning muslim caricatures? noooope. it wasn't for that. it was more for banning you from whistleblowing that the local mayor is an asshole.

Given that we're both common law systems, I see no reason why it's not going to go progress beyond that point.

dunno, you kind of sound like you have no idea what the law was used for. you think it was used for banning muslim caricatures? noooope. it wasn't for that. it was more for banning you from whistleblowing that the local mayor is an asshole.

first, it wasn't even about offensive, just being annoying was enough. even if you were speaking the truth. so it was too broad of a law and used mainly for politics.

and really pakistan has enough problems of it's own without doing anything - furthermore if you were going to ban everything that's potentially offensive or blasphemous in the pakistan/indian/myanmar region - you would need to ban everything and even banning everything would be offensive to some fuck in the region.

images of buddha? sure, offensive. have a buddhist monk selling images of buddha? yeah sure, whatever, so it's not offensive. unless you ask some other guy who says that it is offensive. saying that beef tastes good? yeah offensive, no wait it's not, no wait it's saying that pork is good that's offensive... and majority of these nations have majority of the people living - up until this point in history - in a little bubble world of their own covering 20 kilometers where they live, with their grandparents having raised them to think that their way is the only true way.

Yes, it is a simplistic caricature. That's what makes it pretty accurate.

To all conservatives, more government regulation is uniformly bad.

To all liberals, more government regulation is uniformly good.

What a simplistic caricature of the positions.

That's a common misattribution. As that link notes, however, it is aa paraphrasing of a comedic play from 400 BC in which Socrates was caricatured:

I will, therefore, describe the ancient system of education, how it was ordered, when I flourished in the advocacy of justice, and temperance was the fashion. In the first place it was incumbent that no one should hear the voice of a boy uttering a syllable; and next, that those from the same quarter of the town should march in good order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either “pallada persepolin deinan” or “teleporon ti boama” raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner of Phrynis, he used to be thrashed, being beaten with many blows, as banishing the Muses. And it behooved the boys, while sitting in the school of the Gymnastic-master, to cover the thigh, so that they might exhibit nothing indecent to those outside; then again, after rising from the ground, to sweep the sand together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers. And no boy used in those days to anoint himself below the navel; so that their bodies wore the appearance of blooming health. Nor used he to go to his lover, having made up his voice in an effeminate tone, prostituting himself with his eyes. Nor used it to be allowed when one was dining to take the head of the radish, or to snatch from their seniors dill or parsley, or to eat fish, or to giggle, or to keep the legs crossed.

I'm particularly amused about the reference to dutifully marching to school, naked, in the snow. That the joke should be 2400 years old speaks to the truth of how the old perceive the young.

There are two parties, experts claim and I concur, because of the nature of US voting. The candidate with the most votes is elected. A bloc of voters will have more success trying to get their favorite sort of candidate elected as the nominee of one of the two dominant parties, than by starting a new political party. Typically. If a new party starts to get too successful to suit the two dominant parties of the era, one or both will adopt that issue, and the new party's voters will abandon it for candidates that have a better shot at getting elected.

There are occasional exceptions. The last major exception to this occurred in the 1850s, when anti-slavery voters could not get either the Democrats or the Whigs to take on slavery. That opened up an opportunity for a new party to form around that issue. The Republicans went from nothing to winning seats in the Congress and eventually the presidency in about a decade. The Whigs disappeared.

That's why there are two. But why those two?

Because laws, that's why.

In the late 19th century, there was a push in the states for government-printed ballots (among other bad ideas). Once that happened, government decides who is and who is not a "real" candidate, and which political parties are the "real" ones. Unsurprisingly, the laws passed by Democrats and Republicans made it very hard to start new political parties. (Well, it's unsurprising now.)

This had the effect of reducing participation in the political process -- you would simply not believe what Americans did for fun and civic involvement in the 19th century -- and election competitiveness. Voting is the limit for most people, and only about half even do that in the "big" elections. Few elections are close, which further makes voting unappealing.

This is documented in "Why America Stopped Voting" by Mark Lawrence Kornbluh. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... The statistical analysis parts are rather dry, but the descriptions of the political clubs of the 19th century more than make up for it. They were positively European in their zest for political constructions and group activities. (No giant puppet caricatures of political figures, though. I think.)

So when they blur the faces on Google Street view (which many people are happy they do) it doesn't also blur out the common Colonel Sanders caricature found on the popular chicken joint.

.... dummy?

JK. Alluding to the oft-overlooked red mash-button, which often contains wifely criticism. Is this a fake caricature of your wife? I picture two possibilities, either she doesn't know about the red button, (doesn't care) or is truly light-hearted about it.

They have also killed off flying cars about 20 times, friend. Ever wonder why air travel looks like a dystopian caricature of what it was in the 60's? It's because of the FAA stifling innovation that falls outside its box.

The Luddites weren't Amish. Even that would be a caricature of Amish beliefs. What the Luddites were against were -new- technologies taking over jobs. They were fine with the technology they already had, not so fine with shifting tides making them obsolete.

That's not so different from the Amish then, after all.