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I disagree with girlintraining, just on principle. That will get me modded up.

This post has no useful content, so it will be modded down.

It is, however, very informative as to what kind of useless content it has, so it will be modded up.

None of this has anything to do with the hivemind effect the article's discussing, so I will be modded down.

The writing style, however, illustrates an indecisive caricature which some mod may find funny, so it will be modded up.

That's three up mods and only two down for an otherwise uninteresting post, so it will be considered overrated, and modded down.

I predict this post will be forgotten quickly and accomplish nothing... much like our Congress!

Political joke... it'll be modded up.

After the Cold War ended his writing turned into right-wing polemics, where the villians of every story were revealed to be some hilariously overwrought caricature of something that the Republican Party was angry about at the time -- environmentialists, the anti-war movement, Japanese car imports, etc.

It's a shame because aside from that little tendency, the writing was fairly good.

I really don't see it, except maybe for Romney himself who is famous for taking both sides of almost every issue (abortion, immigration, TARP bailout, auto industry bailouts, taxes, gay rights). The rest of the GOP is pretty much anti-ObamaCare top to bottom. Yeah, the whole idea of the individual mandate for health care came out of conservative think tanks, specifically Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation (there may have been others), but Butler and Heritage now both vehemently deny that ObamaCare was anything but a monstrous caricature of their proposals, and besides, they don't necessarily support their own proposals any more.

If you really believed all that about Obama then you were incredibly naive or horribly uninformed. Everything about Obama's background indicates that he is a duplicitous snake who has been steeped in authoritarian ideology and trained in deceitful political tactics his entire life. Obama abuses of power, nearly incessant violations of the law and deliberate efforts to damage the US economy shouldn't have come as a surprise. It sounds as if you bought into the caricature of Bush that the left created as well. Bush was a lousy President, but he was not the ogre that his enemies portrayed him as.

McCain was also a terrible choice so I voted third party as a protest. Unfortunately, once the Bush admin crashed the stock market when TreasSec Hank Paulson gave his press conference warning of the impending doom of the US financial system, it didn't matter who the nominees were. The candidate for the party not in the Presidency, i.e. Obama, was a shoo-in to win in the ensuing voter panic.

There are a lot narratives as to why Obama won, but if one examines the timeline and the tracking polls, it's clear that the stock market crash determined the election outcome, not the candidates themselves.

I'm guessing that the reason you think she understands logic is because you've only heard about her, rather than having actually heard her. She is a straight moron who jumps to conclusions based on zero facts and then uses them to form psuedo-logical conclusions based upon pure rationalizations. I have never seen a more ridiculous person who could best be described as a bad caricature of herself in all my life.

Classic "Chewbacca defense". When all else fails, confuse them. First, you state that I'm being purposefully deceptive by not telling people what my religious beliefs are. I don't think that knowing my religious beliefs strengthens, weakens, or changes the argument. My statement that people who disagree with the majority often are censored and hated upon should stand regardless if I'm a Christian, atheist, or whatever. I provided two examples and one of them did deal with religion, so you got hung up on that. If you must know, I am a Christian, but I only reveal that to dismiss your personal attacks against me.

First you use weasel words like "most", "many", etc... You use these words to attribute your facts to me with an escape route in case I come back and say, "Well actually..." So I wouldn't suggest crying about deception while being deceptive. But since your are talking about me when you use those words, I will reject each one of them.

1.) I haven't thought long and hard about the claims Christianity, I have never checked, etc....

I would beg to differ. I'm not going to turn this into a debate about whether or not God is real so I won't present the evidence here, but I have thought and continue to think long and hard about the claims of religion. Influences that have lead me to this conclusion include Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Hugh Ross, C. S. Lewis, etc... Yes, I purposely left a few more controversial names off in order to not distract from my original point that dissenting opinions beget hate. I put in my homework.

2.) I believe in the 'god' of the family I was raised in.

Seriously? I was not raised in a Christian home, but rather a messed up broken home. I don't believe in the god that says it's okay to beat your spouse and abuse her. I don't believe in the god that says it's okay to engage in destructive behavior that ruins lives. I don't believe in whatever god they followed. And even if I did, this is a textbook example of the genetic fallacy.

3.) I've never seen an exorcist. The Bible mentions exorcism. Therefore the Bible is obviously wrong.

Better question - Have I ever seen manna? The Bible mentions manna. Why hasn't manna been seen since the Exodus? Obviously it never existed, right? This is exactly the same kind of nonintellectual argument that some Christians make when they say, "We can't find the missing gap therefore evolution isn't real." It doesn't work for the Christian and it doesn't work for you. I could go on this long tangent about the doctrine of angels, but again that deviates from my point.

The point is, is that you cannot make these kinds of assumptions about people and then respond with hate or ignorance. Yes I'd rather not see any religious or political talk on Slashdot, but I'm going to step in and correct ignorant comments such as, "Christians all believe X" or "Religion is the cause of all wars" since they simply aren't true. And why defend bad arguments anyway? If you want to convince someone of an idea, wouldn't you want to argue against what they actually believe rather than a distorted caricature?

And fuck your foreign nosiness. If you don't like our Constitution and/or our laws then stay the hell away from us. We don't give a shit what you think about the way we run our country.

If you don't give a shit then why the flaming response? Your reply is almost a caricature of the attitude I'm talking about, so you could be a troll. Sadly though, I doubt it.

I was wondering whether it was indeed a good example -- it certainly went over the top. (I don't have any sizeable Jewish minorities near me so the caricature was somewhat lost on me.) But fragments of that sort are in fact found in many of the posts I was referring to.

Right, because I wrote that it will get modded down. If I say that it will then it typically won't. So basically they're trying to prove me wrong by modding up instead of down. I simply don't buy the idea of the "no substance" argument and here's why. This is how Slashdot typically is IMHO (and yes, I'm exaggerating a bit):

Christians are dumb (Score:6, amazing!!!)
Flying Spaghetti Monster! Woo! Turtles all the way down!! Yeah!
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:-72, religious moron)
That's just a caricature of Christians. Many Christians such as ____ and ____ feel differently. Here's what they actually think...
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:9001, over nine-thousand)
Ur stupid. You think that's a valid proof of god
Re: Christians are dumb (Score:-pi x infinity, why does he bother)
I wasn't trying to prove God. I just was saying that this isn't what Christians actually believe.

Other than the scores, I'm actually not far off. I once was told that my proofs for God was so full of logical fallacies when in fact I wasn't trying to prove God, but rather correct a misconception. The poster went on to explain how sad it was that ignorant people like me exists. If that isn't hate, I don't know what is.

AC that you linked to was obviously trolling to make a point. He was just promoting the caricature of religious people that sites like Slashdot tend to promote. This is exactly the kind of hate that I'm talking about. He pretends to be a conservative making anti-semitic remarks to "prove" that religious people are all ignorant hateful people. The irony is that rather than proving this lame caricature, he proves to anyone who can discern that the obvious troll was being obvious that this kind hate and bigotry exists on sites like this.

Texans can't help themselves. They have to pick a side, and when they do they support it all the way.

Texans choose sides in ALL aspects of their lives. Ford vs. Chevy. Big Mac vs. the Whopper. Citizens vs. Illegals. Cattlemen vs. Farmers. Evolution vs. Creationism. Whatever the issue, no matter how weighty or how trivial, Texans can figure out a way to polarize it and turn it into a contest. And if it has team jerseys, all the better.

The only way to resolve this conflict is to understand Texas and embrace its stubborn, contentious, headstrong culture. Ignoring it will only make the issue worse. The sooner people realize this, the better off we'll all be. Texas, as much as we hate to admit it East of the Mississippi, isn't all that different from the rest of the country.

Parent -1 Troll?

I am 25, born and raised in a small town about halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Lived in Texas my whole life (I'd like to travel but have had personal reasons not to).

I have met *a handlful* of people who are the 'merica F yeah type (ie favor Mustangs, war, other --varies by person). I have never met anyone, not a single person, that would arbitrary pick a team mentality *in all or many* aspects of their life.

There is a popular radio station here, 101x, with two hosts Jason (native texan, longhorns fan) and Deb (British, couldn't care less about sports). Amusingly a week or so ago as Jason goes on about fantasy football stuff, how he thinks actual teams will rank, etc. he starts talking about the longhorns and problems he sees with them and ranks them less than a "True fan might" and how he made some monetary bet based on that. It was *Deb* criticizing him for this and saying he should support his team anyway, and still bet on them.

Some camaraderie is part of every human culture, you probably couldn't have society without it, but its almost always quite subdued in any given person. The vast majority of people don't act with this caricature of thought you described, and its such a small minority that do I don't understand how anyone bothers to even talk about it. This Texas culture bullshit you describe is an absurd stereotype, why not say we all wear cowboy hats and ride horses to work?

You are either insane or completely devoid of common sense or social intelligence.

That's only a slightly less extreme caricature than that of "Creationists" who insist that there is no form of evolution in existence and that God created in 144 earth hours. Yeah, there are some like that, but it's not most. And with your detailed stereotyping and labeling and generalizing, you obscure the middle ground. That doesn't help us find or understand the truth.

That analogy seems to imply that people who waffle new-agey platitudes are somehow experts. I can't say they're wrong, but I wouldn't defer to their judgement anyway. When people talk about "higher realities" and "deeper truths" and the like, they're forcing the assumption that these unmeasurable subjective experiences are more fundamental to the universe than the laws of physics, and anyone is within their rights to call bullshit on that.

People who waffle new-agey platitudes may or may not understand much of anything, and I wouldn't defer to their judgment in any case.

But if you want to know what you're talking about when calling bullshit, you need an adequate understanding of the ostensibly "unmeasurable subjective experiences" in question. How unmeasurable and subjective are they really? Are they in agreement with the remarkably successful model commonly thought of as "laws of physics", or do they contradict it, or do they fall outside of that scope? You're guessing that your knowledge is adequate to make a reasonably informed judgment that the new-agey claims are all bullshit. My assertion, based on my experience with a subject I've devoted much of my life to studying, is that your knowledge is not adequate.

You're right that the new-agey claims are mostly bullshit. But there's stuff that's true and that can be understood to matter mixed in with the bullshit. If you don't want to hassle with trying to separate the two, and just want to ignore all of it, that's a reasonable stance in my view. Not everyone has time for this stuff. But then if you make strong assertions about other people's beliefs and experiences, very often you'll just be wrong.

Many scientific subjects require a lot of effort to understand to more than a superficial degree also. The physics of physics journalism, for instance, or even undergraduate physics, is typically a sketchy caricature of real physics. Most of what seems "counter-intuitive" to people about 20th century physics seems that way because its described in a way that's actually wrong. Understanding dreaming doesn't require the same type of kind of logical rigor as physics, and the abstractions are different, but takes a lot of work to sort out what's real from what's not.

When I first had astral projection experiences in the mid 90's, I messed around with it, figured out what I was doing with my senses, and dismissed it as meaningless. It took me ten years to discover that there was more going on than the more superficial aspects of the experience, even though I was mostly right about the part that I thought I understood. And if I'd put less effort into it, or my luck had been a bit different, I never would have figured that out. I'm not claiming intellectual superiority, I'm just sharing what I can see from where I am now, that if you put a fair degree of effort into understanding dreaming, you find that there's a lot there that's not what it seemed at the outset. I'm not even expecting you to take my word for it: I don't think that putting that kind of faith in other people's claims is a good idea. But I think if you relax your judgment a little bit, leaving the door open a little wider to the possibility that people like myself are not just blowing smoke, then you'll be 'forcing assumptions' a bit less yourself.

Despite being the one who got the ball rolling with the vexatious litigation and absurd threats in the first place, he appears to have learned absolutely nothing from the experience, blaming his failure on the fact that he doesn't have sufficient 'legal remedy' against people calling his idiocy idiotic online, and even manages to drop in a self-pitying line about how lawsuits are just occupying too much of his time.

Guy is so dense and immutable that he could probably be sliced into thin layers and used as armor plate.

(And, since he is a master of good taste and his wife is even crazier, they've given the world http://rapeutation.com/ complete with caricatures (and the guy complains that there aren't enough laws against saying mean things on the internet?) of their enemies. Class act guys, class act.)

Patents are a way of earning back your investment

You made a whole bunch of assumptions with that start. If the patent isn't for something obvious, perhaps so obvious that no investment at all was required to develop it, and if it wasn't actually someone else's invention and investment for which the patent holder did not pay, and if it doesn't cover something that shouldn't be patentable at all, such as a mathematical formula or other fact of nature, and if the patent isn't overly broad, and if there isn't prior art, then perhaps "earning back your investment" is a fair statement.

In that way the system works

Fantasy. The patent system isn't working as intended. It simply has too many built in incorrect assumptions about the processes by which inventions are created. The mythical lone genius inventor toiling away in a garage in obscurity is just one of the figures distorted and caricatured by powerful interests that think stronger patent law is to their advantage.

The whole legal process is the problem

Yes, that is certainly a big part of the problem. The legal profession has a vested interest in opposing any reforms that clean the system up and lead to fewer lawsuits and less work for them. They encouraged the patent office to go ahead with the idea of kicking the can down the road. Instead of the patent office doing their job of screening out the obvious and overly broad, they grant the patent, collect the fees, and let the courts and lawyers figure out later whether the patent is valid or applicable. They're also happy to ally themselves with any tech firms that think that patents, while costly, are still worth having for such purposes as litigating small competitors into the ground. In short, these big tech companies think monopolies are worth having so long as it is they who have the monopolies.

Not only that, the first people to call themselves libertarians were also anarcho-syndicalist socialists. In the USA where people have been conditioned to think of socialism as a big-scary-government thing, a minimally hierarchic socialism has been excised from most thought and language. Libertarians in the USA don't even know their roots. So, TFA has some pretty shallow caricatures to work with from the start.

I know, it's a struggle but as with most posts in Slashdot, one is rarely replying to the individual, but speaking to the cloud.

The fact is that people with an inherently statist viewpoint (and beyond that, federalist viewpoint) have overwhelmed US society, mainly as a result of deliberate indoctrination on the "joy of government" by the (statist) educational establishment.

Therefore, libertarians are often caricatured as desiring naked Mogadishu-like anarchy, without that even being recognized as hyperbolic.

Men have to be extra careful and guarded when talking around female co-workers because we have no idea how they might react and what will be taken as offensive.

This is an example of one of the most absurd corollaries to "feminism is the radical notion that women are people" that I've encountered. In one sentence, you've expressed essentially a perfect caricature of the modern butthurt reactionary antifeminist. Let's unpack it, in order:

- I speak for all men.
- The presence of women as peers is dangerous.
- All women behave identically.
- Everything every man says or does is beyond reproach.
- Women are emotionally capricious.
- No woman's feelings are valid.
- Men are incapable of understanding and learning from reactions to their behavior.
- Women's expressions of their experiences are equivalent to assault on the men who caused those experiences in the first place.
- Men are defenseless.

Actually, that was eye-opening. Honestly. And in a weird way, I now kind of agree with at least part of the "men's rights" movement: entitled men, afraid their undeserved privilege is at risk of society leaving them behind, have raised a generation of terrified emasculated man-babies who have forgotten how to be strong. For thousands of years, women have been subjected to torture, rape and slavery so that men could create a society of children who crumble at the first sign of back talk!

Man up and treat women like people! It takes far more strength, courage and—dare I say—balls to experience empathy than to exhibit this sort of whiny flailing half-formed emotional outburst.

(Note: I apologize for my use of ageist language in this rant. It was only for impact to the intended audience. Most children are far more emotionally secure and mature than that audience.)

This is precisely what the citizens of Germany thought in the early 1930s. That worked out well for them. It's also how citizens of North Korea used to think. Now, if you're kid or grand child does something, you go to jail, after watching them get executed for something as mild as having sex. I certainly hope you don't buy garden gnomes that appear to look like a caricature of the president of 2025....

All during the cold war, when somebody would criticize violations of human rights in America, our leaders would point to the USSR and tell us that in Russia it was even worse.

Most of our cold-war propaganda was based on making Russia's lack of freedom a caricature of our own lack of freedom.

For example, our propagandists said that in Russia, people weren't free to travel. (Not true. I've met people who grew up in the Soviet Block and traveled all over the Soviet Block. East Germany was a popular vacation spot.)

But there was a bitch in the passport office who took it upon herself to decide who was a good American who had a right to travel and who was a bad American and couldn't get a passport.

One of the people who couldn't get a passport was Linus Pauling. He was a great scientist, but he came to the conclusion that the world couldn't survive a nuclear war and we had to disarm. As a result, the passport office wouldn't let him travel -- when it was important for him to get to scientific meetings in England and Europe to exchange ideas with other scientists. Some people think he Pauling would have discovered the double helix before Crick and Watson if he could have travelled.

But that's what happens when you disagree with the government in America.