Slashdot Mirror

The liberals most certainly throw around poorly defined crap like "fair share,"

As part of a psych course, I went around to 12 different people (6 conservatives, 6 liberals), and asked them all the same questions about what they think should be done on certain policy issues. I also asked them what the typical liberal would say, and what the typical conservative would say.

Turns out (and this is a very robust result in literature), that most everybody agrees on everything. AND, most everybody believes that conservatives and liberals are polarized on the issues.

The moral of the story is, that if you think "liberals think this and conservatives think that", then you are almost certainly talking about a caricature in your head, and not what liberals and conservatives really think. This is such a common mistake it is shocking when you try it for yourself.

And I invite you to try it for yourself, and learn something about the nature of political discourse.

Jews are famous for their self-deprecating humor but Catholics too have mercilessly made fun of their own faith. It was a great liberator because it was not always thus. Once, religion was deadly serious and to question let alone make fun off, that is heresy and that gets you killed.

A joke might not seem like much but it forces you to not take things to serious, it was essential in tearing down the ivory towers of religion and force it to become accountable. And this was not something that has stopped. The chaos in the Catholic church now people are talking about its abuses is just part of process. For decade, no, centuries, people knew and did not nothing.

For evil to triumph all that is needed is for good men to do nothing.

The so called moderate muslim, does nothing. This leaves a tiny handful of reformers who are often prosecuted or killed (Pakistan can't even protect its ministers, what hope does a normal civilian have) fighting the extreme elements who have the backing of countless hangers on, protected behind the veil of silence. Moderates might not agree with all the extremists do but you stick up for your own, regardless what.

A very recent case in Holland has a man under arrest for having had sexual encounters with over 200 boys. How did he manage to go undetected with so many victims? Well, people knew, but didn't speak out. The community is a closed one and they keep their troubles to themselves...

There are countless such cases in history and far bigger ones, hidden behind walls of silence and false respect. But humor has created cracks in this facade. In holland, the catholics created the 8 may movement, which basically told the pope to mind his own business. It allowed people to ignore the church doctrine and make up their own minds on birth-control, on politics, on marriage. On everything.

For modern free youth, it is hard to realize just how controlled religious communities are. In certain place, if a young couple is married and has not produced a kid after the first your, the pastor comes by to have a talk.

This control is not nice control, it is to make sure everyone walks the line, no dissenters, no free-thinkers. It is very effective. If you don't question, you don't challenge to status quo and those in charge like that.

Read up on some of the practices of popes, these weren't devout people, they were depraved men who craved power above all else. And they got away with it, because they were beyond question.

But humor, that challenges everything, breaks down the most powerful with a simple line or drawing. Don't believe me?

How tall was Napoleon? He was in reality above average height for french men of that age. It was a cartoon drawing that started the idea that he was a small power crazed war monger. A British cartoon made at a time Napoleon was kicking limey ass.

Spitting Image, a British satire puppet show, ripped politicians and others in power to shreds, and changed politics forever. People remembered the caricature better then the real person.

In my life time, the same joke has been done twice. The pope speaking and having underwear thrown at him as if he was a popstar. Caused mild affront but was considered part of a free society. The same joke was done off the Ayatollah (the previous one) in Germany. It caused a crisis, the comedian had to be protected and politicians fell over themselves to try to a peace Muslims.

It wasn't always allowed to joke about the pope, the christian faith. And the Muslim leaders KNOW what humor lead to and they don't want the same to happen. So anyone who dares to question, make humor, challenge, is silenced. Silenced most of all by moderates who do nothing but silently support the extremists by their inactivity. If you donate to your mosque even when you know the money goes to extremist, turning a blind eye to does, still makes you a supported of these extremists.

Western leaders are at a loss about how to deal with it. In the west, the crumbling of organized religion just seem

You violently hate reality. You hate it because it does not contain any of the "Space Nutters" over whom you obsess. This is proven by your habit of constantly lying about other people and their statements in order to pretend they are actually the people you invented. You insist on seeing "Space Nutters" everywhere because you want them to be there.

He has several times made fake pro-space nut posts, "to illustrate how crazy space nutters are," then acts all surprised that people call out the ideas within the fake post as stupid. There seems to be a much larger disconnect from reality here, in the sense he thinks he alone can see space nutters' folly, and doesn't know how to react when it turns out most people, even pro-space exploration types, see his caricatures of space nutters as stupid too. At the time he will admit he faked the posts as part of expressing this surprise and disbelief at people not falling head over heals to surprise his fake nuttery. Later on, of course, if you bring it up, he denies it and demands proof. But with it being such a pain in the ass to track down AC posts that are voted down, it definitely is not worth it, as he just stops responding to a thread when someone actually links to examples.

If he see this, he'll make all sorts of claims about me having fantasies of space travel etc., but that is just part of the delusion. I couldn't care less about space exploration, and think a fair amount of it may be an inefficient waste of money (excluding observations of Earth and Sun that have some rather direct economic benefits). Maybe he'll try to convince me I'm a space nutter and don't realize it again, which is entertaining but sad.

However, if I had had a camera in my car recording everything, I would have had pictures of the person who did it, and they would be responsible for all of that. Hence, the victim of a crime, and a hit and run is a crime, has a very good reason for wanting a police state. They forget the little things they did to others, and remember only their own distress that someone robbed them of their property. As long as Americans, and I am specifically talking about the US here, are criminals, there is going to be a continual clamoring for more security, as long as everyone is personally responsible for everything. Every so often someone will find some deep pockets to go after, which leads to one of those silly sounding law suits –which sometimes are silly, but are often not as facile as their caricature.

So that's the reality, as long as people who are taking every precaution get screwed by the wild westers out there, they will demand more protection, more security, and hence, fewer rights for all. Because real liberty comes with the price of responsibility, and Americans have long since decided they just don't want the responsibility, and would, instead, rather steal from each other.

As for me, while this loss is annoying, it doesn't seem to me to be a good argument for more spy cams. But I'm not most people, having visited some unfree countries, where there is little crime, because the criminals are all wearing nice blue and green uniforms, and carrying automatic weapons.

I find it revealing that my rather mild comment that "it is not known whether chronic fatigue syndrome is immune related" has morphed in your mind into a "claim" that "there was no connection between CFS and the immune system." I've noticed this same behavior in climate "skeptics," where instead of engaging with what climate scientists actually say, they instead attack a caricature that exists only in their own minds. I've often seen such "skeptics" insist that climatologists claim that "CO2 is the only driver of climate," even though no climatologist has ever made such an assertion (and they frequently say the exact opposite).

Again, you are ignoring data points because they do not fit your preconceived expectations. That is a much bigger scientific fallacy than the fundamental limitations I was operating under in performing my observations.

The plural of anecdote is not "data." I have no particular preconceived expectations; I don't pretend to know what the cause of CFS is. I suspect that your recollection of your doctor telling you, "You can't be right, because it conflicts with what I've been taught" is probably no more reliable than your recollection of what I told you just a couple of posts back. I think that it is far more likely that your doctor gave little weight to your attempts at self-diagnosis because his own experience had shown him that patients' rationalizations of the source of their illness is not a reliable aid to diagnosis. And if the kind of "evidence" you offered him was similar to what you have offered here, I think that he was probably right to do so.

He became a caricature of himself, an iron-fisted evil dictator who's trying so hard people laugh at him.

Can't be all bad if you're allowed to laugh at him in public. Personally I would like to see a cage match between Putin and Palin, the cage should be mounted on an iceberg in the middle of the barring straight so that both nations can see it.

Wait. These articles are able to glorify Putin in anyone's eyes? I thought by now every new piece about how he saved a puppy from a burning house serves only to further ridicule him and make fun of him. He tries so hard that it became a kind of comedy performance. With a lot of these articles, couple years ago, you could mistake them from something from Onion.com. He became a caricature of himself, an iron-fisted evil dictator who's trying so hard people laugh at him.

The concept of corporate "personhood" is a legal interface with traditional government-run courts that is too technical for most people to understand

Fairly simple when I took law. What difficulty were you having?

I'm not the one having difficulty, but the number of people claiming that people somehow stop being people when they form corporations suggests there is wide-spread confusion. Various propaganda shows on Commie-dy Central, for example, take this confusion to ever-greater heights, building ever-more-ridiculous strawmen - for their own political benefit.

I'd also like to point out that it's good that you "took law", but a distinction must be made between understanding of rational legal philosophy and knowledge of legal trivia. The former is akin to knowledge of evolutionary biology, and the latter to knowledge of ecumenical councils and various historical church edicts on the origin of humanity. (Religions tend to eventually recognize the possibility of evolution, when backed into a corner, just as governmental legal monopolies tend to slowly become less irrational out of necessity.) The latter would be of little help to you in arguing in pursuit of Truth. I suggest that you keep studying, and include capitalist philosophy on your reading list.

A contractual agreement can exist in perpetuity as original founders sell out, die, etc

This is useful, but legal personhood is a disproportionate response to the need.

No one is arguing for "corporate personhood" - except the incomprehensible caricatures of "evil capitalists" in the socialists' wild imaginations. It brings to mind Dr Frankenstein shouting "it's alive, it's alive" - which is why it was invented as a socialist talking point, or perhaps as an inversion of the socialist's very real delusions about personifying "society" (or the various nationalist personifications, or "mother earth", etc). What rational people are actually arguing for is individual negative Rights, period. Those rights don't disappear when individuals form groups.

but ultimately a corporation exists based on the Rights of the contemporary shareholders / parties to contract.

No. A corporation exists based on the "rights" [...] of contemporary shareholders not to be fully responsible for what they do.

Obviously there can be no "right" to dodge responsibility - that is completely antithetical to the epistemological reasoning upon which the philosophy of Rights is based! Akin to the first law of thermodynamics, you cannot get more rights out of a corporation than were put into it!

Corporate liability limitations are a problem of government, and the proponents of free market capitalism are fighting against them. Without the "divine right of governments" delusion, avoiding liability in plain sight would be as unthinkable. It takes a special "magical" entity, a coercive monopoly on force, to come in and do those things which us mere mortals cannot do!

As scientific and technological progress make this delusion ever-more-difficult to maintain, it will begin to gradually phase out, and everyone will end up on the same playing field, with no "divine rights" or "responsibility vacuums" of any kind.

They get full enjoyment of profits but can, when shit and fan are in alignment, socialise their losses.

That is a very shallow lie. Corporations (that is groups of people who are party to a corporation, as per the specifics of their contracts) get partial "enjoyment" of the fruits of their labor - the rest is stolen by the government. (The government can't steal it all and expect more production next year.) Individuals get to "

> and then the senior manager goes "Wow, that's great, lets drop the delivery date from 6 months from now to 2 months!"
Well, it is your job as developer (or actually, the project manager's job) to show the work plan you have and point out what has yet to be done. It is mostly a matter of education such folks, and of course, planning (you do develop and maintain a work plan, yeah?). Just because they are senior and a manager doesn't mean you can't patiently explain why they can't arbitrarily move dates - it is in both your interests to politely explain how the project needs to stick to your original budgeted time.

Sucking it up silently without explaining the features you'd have to cut is not professional - in fact, that is really where developer "experience" comes in, old timers know when a fight cannot be won (which is actually, most of the time), and will politely point out when changes to a schedule or feature-set are risking the success of the project. Project timelines can be shortened successfully but features/scope are always cut/deferred for this to happen.

I feel that your scenarios are caricatures of how development used to work, rather than what happens when the team has any experience (which is more common now than in the early days of mass software development).

This is a joke, right? I see what you did there....serving as a caricature of the typically ignorant and brainwashed American, repeating the rote "lessons" he memorized in school. Very clever.

Who said anything about the Middle Ages? There's nothing referencing the Middle Ages in my post. You seem to believe in a caricature of the geeks on slashdot who go around with misconceptions of the Middle Ages from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Hold still, I have to place the leech in just the right spot to suck the evil spirit out.

Who said that leeches were ever intended for sucking "evil spirits"?

You seem to believe in a caricature of the Middle Ages; like those people who think learned Europeans affirmed the Earth to be flat (this never happened).

AC we both "summarized" as you might see above. But did we actually read the same "debate"? Especially #14 and #2? Its almost as if we read two different debates... I got a whole different vibe off 'bama's #2 answer and especially Rmoney's #7 answer.

I don't think an attempt at neutrality makes any sense. 'Bama is a pretty good left of center pre-neo-conservative takeover republican and Rmoney is a caricature of Gordon Gekko from the movie. There is no representation of anywhere left of "traditional lefty-republican" and no representation of middle class interests. A portrayal of both as rightwing corporate pawns is not being slanted, its being accurate.

No, my opinion based upon reading much of the evidence that was reported as the trial proceeded is that the jury would not have ruled in favor of Apple if it were true that Apple's case turned on nothing more than "rectangular with rounded corners" (as Apple's case has sometimes been inaccurately caricatured) -- and indeed, that was not the case. There is nothing about the ruling that prevents other companies from producing cell phones with that form factor -- but if they do, they should not (as Samsung did) slavishly imitate numerous other aspects of the look and feel of Apple's products, ranging from fine details of how touch control works on Apple's products to the design of the icons and even the design of the packaging.

Seriously?

Yes. Since you obviously have neither knowledge nor experience of publicly funded healthcare in the real world, only the paranoiac right-wing caricature of it, you're just going to have to trust me when I tell you how it actually works.

With government medicine, you get what the bureaucrats allow.

So just like only getting the care the bureaucrats in your insurance company allow, then ?

(That's assuming you have health insurance in the first place, of course, which in America is not a reasonable assumption.)

With private medicine, you can also get what you pay for.

Ah, I see, you're talking about the rich. Well, since there's nothing stopping you going out and getting your own private care in countries with public care, when you're rich, your choice is identical in either location - whatever you can afford (which is usually going to be more in the publicly-funded country, anyway, since their healthcare systems are typically more efficient).

Why not? American journalism is already a caricature of the profession.

I'll freely admit that I'm unfamiliar with trickle down economics, but this is slashdot so I feel completely entitled to chime in.

Trickle down says that you should give money to rich people first, so that eventually it finds its way to poorer people.

It seems to me you are vastly mis-characterizing trickle down economics. A better way to put it would be:

Trickle down says that you should let very productive individuals keep the wealth they earn so that they will be motivated and empowered continue to be productive and generate wealth or provide services that benefit others as well.

There's no giving of money to anyone. I'm not sure if you're familiar with a hard day's work, but that's what free market economics rewards. The idea is to let people keep what they earned through their own sweat instead of coming to take it at gunpoint by mob rule.

Of course you could go back to your illogical caricature if it's more comforting to you.

The problem is that you only get one vote for which party governs you. Come election time everyone's main priority is the economy and who is going to fuck it up the least. Pretty much everything is dependent on you having a job and money in your pocket. Issues like liberty and not being fascist bastards come lower down the scale.

Unfortunately people are too dumb to even get that decision right. They tend to vote based on newspaper headlines and the caricatures of the politicians that the media presents, while not understanding even basic economics. I keep hearing people talk about how the UK's national debt is like a credit card and the only way to pay it off is not spend any money... My mind just boggles at how uninformed they can be, and despairs that they will apparently vote for their own ruin because of it.

Or you could say Napoleon took over the government because he could gain control of it when it was in absolute chaos. The French then attempted to spread their version of a society where "Liberty, Equality and Freedom" were the watchwords of the day and there was no room for a Noble Class and a Peasant Class who were dominated by them.
All of the other countries in Europe (dominated by Nobility who still wielded very considerable power) immediately ganged up on the French to destroy this idea that having a Nobility rule over you was morally wrong. The French attempted to expand the territory they control and to introduce a new type of government.

In the process they introduced a detailed and arguably fair legal code (although the English code is preferable IMHO), the metric system, high speed communications (for the time of course: news of a victory in Austria could be in Paris in about 18 hours), they revolutionized the warfare of the time and forcing every other army in Europe to reorganize and revamp their units in reaction.
They attempted to spread a new way of thinking about government and society and to eliminate the class system that dominated all politics at the national level in Europe.

History has been written by the supporters of those Nobles who defeated Napoleon. For 20+ years, he was the most brilliant commander of military forces in Europe, and only seldom was he bested. The rest of the time he often made his enemies look like inept buffoons. He overstepped his reach in Russia of course, but that seems to be a common fate for those who attempt to cross the steppes. Note that the French did better than the Germans in WWII although the results were the same in the end. Napoleon is too easy to caricature and dismiss, and of course since he is French, every American out there will dismiss him out of hand almost automatically - since everything French must be dismissed these days *simply* because the French were unwilling to participate in the Iraq war (which was of course based on lies anyways).

Before anyone asks, no I am not French, don't live in France etc.

If you honestly can't understand the distinctions, you aren't trying very hard. Liberals, as a group, do not want to embrace "all religions except Christianity". The idea is respecting others, not adopting other beliefs or accepting all other cultural tenets, no matter how offensive. If you think that's what liberals are about, all you've done is adopt a demonized and ludicrous caricature of "liberals".