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Seriously, what's with /. this week? I can't read a discussion without a mountain of trolls appearing out of nowhere.

And these sudden attempts to tie libertarians to positions completely at odds with themselves? I mean, I know it's election year, so paid political pundits are beating the bushes for anyone they can use as a caricature to try and rally some support from their constituency, but come on.

Here, have a seat. Libertarians are neither Republicans, nor extremest Republicans, nor Democrats. No, no, I know what your "friends" told you, but no. Give it a rest while you're ahead, champ. Why don't you wander over to the Green Party website for a while, and troll them about how you support their initiatives for "cleaner power." Go on, they'll buy that, they always do...

You'd have to make their lives a living hell, for sure. Probably have to take their land away from them, do all sorts of nasty stuff,

lets see, for hundreds of years longer, we have been doing this to the native americans ('indians').

when was the last time you saw an american indian suicide bomber, other than some caricature on tv? maybe an old western movie? but IRL? not really.

through out history, people have conquored others and land has shifted ownership. why is this somehow different? and if you go back farther in time, that land certainly has had many owners. to whom do you give it, then?

why stop there? so many other places in the world where X has taken Y. no matter what country you are from, in your history someone has taken someone's land or there is a dispute about its ownership in some way.

I fail to see how 'palestinian' is any more special and why this argument applies to them and not every other people who fought and lost?

israel fought many defensive battles, gained land and then gave it back. but that's still not enough, is it?

Ayn Rand would disapprove - if you have some economic means to rape somebody and bleed them dry, it is not only your right but your moral obligation to do so. ~

Naw. A sophomoric understanding of her works based on reading reviews written by her opponents might lead you to believe that. Though I'm not exactly a huge fan of Rand, I still have to object to such a ridiculous caricaturization of her ideology. All of her work is based on the idea of "rational self-interest". Only a deranged mind would equate "rape somebody and bleed them dry" with "rational self-interest". It's akin to the theistic nitwits who constantly claim that without god we'd have no compassion or cooperation; it demonstrates a complete ignorance of subjects like games theory and the evolutionary advantages of cooperative behavior. I don't think it's possible to read Atlas Shrugged and come away with the impression that she's advocating exploitation.

This is why discussions about economics and social ideologies are rarely productive - too many people are intent on demonizing the opposition rather than having a frank exchange of ideas. Sometimes it's deliberate, but more often it's a simple lack of understanding caused by only listening to the talking-heads that share your own political bubble.

While eating less saturated fat is a good step it is not a solution and eating lots of any oil is bad, and not a serious issue unless you have high cholesterol(which can also be controlled with exercise). Eating whole grain bread and other goods as a substitute for white-bread and processed carbohydrates does spread out the sugar release and help to control hunger pangs and chocolate cravings, but you are supposed to swap them in as a substitute not eat "lots" because they are healthy which is counter-productive. I have in short never heard a real expert advocating the diet you are proposing it is an oversimplified caricature, but one oftern peddled by semi uniformed "nutritionists".

I'd try Gormenghast again, you may just have tried it two quickly after reading another dense work. If you're not flying through them after the first fifty pages you're doing it wrong :-) It is quite satirical, some of the characters deliberate caricatures, but the story and world he creates is a wonderful one. I'd quite happily read the trilogy again, and if it was a choice between that and LOTR then it would win easily.

Many of the authors you listed there, such as Tolstoy and Twain, certainly deserve high praise for their literary accomplishments. But Capek's R.U.R. was absolute dreck, to be quite frank. It was nothing but overacting, gaping plot-holes and general absurdity. The characters seemed like bizarre inhuman caricatures who engage in nonsensical behavior.

Readers are introduced to "Helena" at the beginning of the play, who all the male characters immediately fall in love with at first sight. In Capek's surreal vision of the world, this is not even a source of any drama, and all the men are perfectly happy to let her pass them over in favor of Domin, who she marries. From there, the play jumps immediately into a robot uprising several years later, most of which occurs off-stage, and ends with the off-stage eradication of humanity. The robots discover that they cannot reproduce without the aid of their human creators, but this dilemma is solved when two robots fall in love with one another. A ham-fisted reference to Adam and Eve glosses over the unsolved reproductive issue, and all the robots presumably live happily ever after.

I cannot speak for the rest of Capek's work, or whether these issues were merely a result of a poor translation, but I cannot call R.U.R. a great piece of literature from my own personal experience.

Nope, hello protected speech in the form of parody likenesses.

Where is it poking fun at Steve Jobs? What's the parody? To qualify as a parody, it must be immediately obvious that it is a parody. See, e.g., the Hillary Clinton Nutcracker, the Obama "package-stimulating" doll, etc. It's not even a giant bobblehead caricature.

Honestly? Because that $1,800 / year will never make it so far as to pay off the deficit. They'll institute the new tax, like they always do, then something else of political importance will capture the populace's attention, and a decision will be made to divert the funds to deal with this new problem. Some people will cry out, like they always do, that the funds are being diverted, that these funds are not being used for the stated purpose that they were collected, and other people will say that the immediate crisis outweighs the danger of a growing deficit.

So, in this way, the deficit will never be paid off, yet taxes will continuously be increased, and the ever-present (and sometimes realized) threat of currency devaluation / government bankruptcy remains. The people's income will continuously be decreased, until they are returned to their natural habitat, as serfs, living off the land that their lords provide for them to work on. The trick, of course, is ensuring that people have an interest in keeping things going, as opposed to stopping them, even though they may be better off with stopping them.

Look forward to a new tax, in 5-10 years time, to help pay off the deficit, if this one manages to pass. The same, sad caricatures will be trotted out again to shake down the populace for even more money, with more rhetoric that if the rich / wealthy / everyone would just contribute a little more, we could pay it off in 2 / 5 / 10 / 20 years.

Just look at your phone bill, next time you receive it. Look at how much you pay in taxes, then look up the taxes themselves, when they were passed, and what that money was supposed to pay for. Wars that have long since ended, yet the tax for munitions for them still remain. And so on.

Reminds me of the Ferengi saying (from ST:DS9) for when dealing with people -> "Once you have their money, never give it back!"

1984 occurred in 1948. It was a caricature of the postwar British life experience. The Russians went from allies to enemies overnight, there was rationing until the early 50s, and the British class system was alive and well, notwithstanding the veneer of democracy and populism. Even propaganda via TV and Big Brother was already historical, as Germany's Goebbels had pioneered something like it (Germany was arguably a more modern country than Britain before the war).

With all due respect, I think what you're seeing has nothing to do with layman's expectations of medicine. It's that a lot of people, when they see a loved one is dying or at risk of dying and they have someone to turn to beg for that life, they'll do a lot of pleading and demanding because they're so focused on that person being gone in their life they're not really thinking rationally about the situation*. And the cruel truth is, medicine generally overreaches their actual expectations: for a person they're told to otherwise expect to die any minute, modern medicine may be able to keep them alive for days, weeks, or maybe even months.

*This, btw, is the focus of a lot of legislation. What are politicians good at? Hearing complaints and "[doing] something", even if that something really has no net effect on fixing the problem. Obviously, physicians like you are in a much worse situation since you're subject to lawsuits and there's medical licencing boards that can confirm that you didn't actual follow a known procedure; meanwhile, obviously, the worst a politician general has to fear is not being reelected. Oh, and from what you've said, I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir about the need to change those medical licensing boards so "follow a known procedure" can include the "let them die peacefully even over the family's objections" so individual physicians, not the almost caricature "death panels", can decide with some confidence that doing the right thing is also the legal thing and will be properly covered under malpractice insurance if it comes to that. That alone would probably stop a lot of the lawsuits before they're even filed.

Well that depends: who are the tax cuts for? If they are for the poor, then of course it is evil. If they are for the rich, then it will spur job growth and our economy -- at least, this is what FOX would like us to believe...

Uh. Normally it's the Democrats saying tax cuts are evil. The GOP is all for tax cuts, of any size, for any group, even when operating at a deficit (They'll clean that up later, with handwaving and "economic stimulation", which I'm convinced is code for their 'escorts' to meet them that night).

If you're going to grossly caricaturize the two groups and their moronic 'ideals', at least get them plausible.

Chibi may refer to:

        Chibi City, Hubei, China
                Red Cliff (film), a 2009 movie about the battle at Chibi
        Chibi (term), a Japanese word for diminutive person
        Super deformed, a style of anime caricature
        The lead singer of the band The Birthday Massacre

Sorry, joke not understood...

As amusing as that would be, hell I would love to see a scorched earth campaign where it basically becomes a caricature of its self, it still would be the BS that seems to have too much sway over elections. Now all we would need is an American Idol setup where people can vote off each candidate for the party's nomination each week all culminating in the finally show which would be the general election with the results show the following day. It might actually be less crooked this way.

On a side note last week I saw a discussion in the British Parliament between PM Gordon Brown and the opposition coalition on BBC World and it was hilarious. They really go after each other even on a personal level.

I've got karma to burn so sorry if my sense of humour doesn't gell with yours. I thought it was pretty bloody obvious that I was caricaturing, which is a form of exaggeration. Comedians do it all the time (not that I claim to be a comedian). But honestly I'm having a real hard time determining which of the posts in this off-topic thread are serious and which are tongue-in-cheek.

BTW there's plenty of evidence that Newton was a complete bastard who took credit for everything produced by his underlings. Much like both academia and the corporate world today.

Taking a brutal dictator seriously is exactly the wrong approach. I'd rather remember him as a supporting character in a lowbrow puppet comedy.

That's nice, as long as neither you nor your family or friends can be touched by the ridiculous little man's army or secret police. If you lived in NK though, you'd take him much more seriously.
 
Please understand - I'm not trying to criticize you; I just personally feel uneasy dismissing Kim with a laugh or a shrug from the safety of the USA, even though sometimes he seemed to make a special effort to build himself into a caricature. But then I remember some footage I saw on the BBC a few years ago, supposedly smuggled from NK, showing the summary executions of a few people from a small village and I don't really feel like laughing anymore.

Person 1: There are bad aspects to X. Person 2: No! Here is a good aspect to X!

That's really a caricature of the argument. The hard-care atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins aren't arguing that religion has bad aspects to it, they're arguing that religion has no good aspects to it, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean, Hitchens did not title his book, "Is God Great? Maybe We Should Think Carefully About This Religion Thing", he titled the book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" so its pretty clear where he's coming from.

What I find rather striking is not the thesis, but rather, the unwavering commitment to the idea. Hitchens had, like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, a deeply held belief that religion was fundamentally bad, and was unwilling to question this belief. His atheism was unshakable, and he was unable to listen with an open mind to any evidence or argument that contradicted that belief, to concede that perhaps once in a while, people found solace or guidance in religion, or that faith or the guiding principles of the Judeo-Christian religions had in some way contributed to our civilization. He argued with the ferocity of the True Believer who tolerated no dissent. In other words, he was guilty of precisely the narrow-minded, dogmatic, zealous, self-righteous thinking that he condemned religious people for. He didn't just disbelieve in God, he disbelieved in God with a righteous passion, and then went to the masses to spread the word and convert other people to his way of thinking. He was a fundamentalist atheist. He was an evangelical disbeliever. In other words, he was a hypocrite. I'm an atheist, and I think Hitchens was a disgrace to atheism. It's possible to be an atheist but to be open minded and to respect other people, Hitchens did neither.

"What, our multimillion dollar RC aeroplane with super special awesome shooty bits on it got STOLEN? I thought those people were a bunch of camel riding nomads that didn't even have electricity! How did they spoof our GPS and jam our command and control feeds!?"

"Well sir, yes, the drone was actually stolen and not shot down. As for their offensive technical abilities sir, they *are* developing nuclear weapons, and most of their population is not comprised of nomadic camel riders, sir."

"Are you mockin' me son?! I've served in this god-blessed nation's armed forces muh entire life! And now you intend to tell me, that some turban wearin camel humpers not only defeated state of the art tactical surveylance like it was child's play, and didn't knock it down with rocks or summat', but that their so called nuclear program is actually viable, AND that my assessment of their "society" is plain and simply 'wrong'?!"

"No sir, I am not mocking you sir, but the rest of what you said is true sir."

"Get out of here private! I don't know who assigned you to technical liason, but they obviously picked a mo-ron. If I could demote you any lower than private, rest assured the orders would go through expediently!"

[I am probably (hopefully) wrong about this caricature, but this sure looks like how things are being run.]

How was this modded up?

Probably have something to do with the other stuff that's contained within the post besides the caricatures

Throwing caricatures around alone is not insightful, but putting forth an argument along with caricatures makes it eligible to be modded as insightful

This is true even when those arguments can be debated. I mean, if you want to, you can debate him on whether EPA, FAA, department of energy and all those departments are necessary. But the fact that he's willing to put forth an argument puts him above simply throwing caricatures and insults around.

If you do a good job arguing against his points, you yourself may get modded insightful. For that to happen you probably have to do more than just ask how did the other guy got modded insightful.

(somewhat simplified, idealistic description of the "other side")

Wrong. (Biased caricature of "other side").

(Biased caricature of "my side")

Wrong. (Insult for using biased caricature of "my side"). (More biased caricature of "other side").

How was this modded up?

I don't see what's so "not-protest" about opposing what another entity has expressly stated a desire to do. Consider SOPA, for example: it has not actually been enacted, but some elements are actively trying to do so, and people protest against that. What makes the Tea Party different, other than that you disagree with a caricature of their position that you have projected onto them?