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Filesharing is terrorism!
Huh? Well, we needed a new strawman. The old one has been reduced to a source for caricature and ridicule.
President Barack Obama - Law
Vice President Joe Biden - Law
Speaker of House John Boehner - Business
President pro tempore Daniel Inouye - Law
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - Law
Secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner) - Asian Studies/Economics
Secretary of Defense (Robert Gates) - History
Attorney General (Eric Holder) - Law
Secretary of the Interior (Ken Salazar) - Law
Secretary of Agriculture (Tom Vilsack) - Law
Secretary of Commerce (Gary Locke) - Law
Secretary of Labor (Hilda Solis) - Public Policy
Secretary of Health and Human Services (Kathleen Sebelius) - Public Policy
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Shaun Donovan) - Public Policy
Secretary of Transportation (Ray LaHood) - Education/Sociology
Secretary of Energy (Steven Chu) - Physics
Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan) - Sociology
Secretary of Veterans Affairs (Eric Shinseki) - Science/Literature
Secretary of Homeland Security (Janet Napolitano) - Law
The top posts are held by those who have been educated in law, and Cabinet members mostly educated in fields related to their positions.
You want to talk about the decay of culture and values? That's nothing new, every aging generation in every society in the history of humanity has fretted, writhed, and screamed about it.
The fact that American media prefers a self-deprecating sense of humor doesn't mean we embody those caricatures of ourselves.
"In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers"
Well, those politicians, like my father, were born, raised, and educated in a system that made that decision for them - they were assigned to study engineering by the government to fulfill quotas demanded by the planned economy. It was only in the 80's when the planned economy was abolished and economic reforms were instituted that this practice came to an end. Scientists at the time were indeed looked up to for their intelligence and social contributions, but so too were they looked up to because graduating from a top science school and joining the Communist Party was the only path to political power and thus wealth in those days. Nowadays in China, people no longer have such respect for scientists because they see that even middle school drop-outs can start factories or businesses and strike immense fortunes. They have greater respect (and disgust) for those who wield guile and personal connections, like everyone else in the world.
You're talking about the aliens as if they were all the same, you racist.
That's, what, the fourth time you've accused me of being a racist in this thread? You said that the aliens had no initiative (i.e. you made a sweeping statement about all of them). I replied that there were lots of examples of them (i.e. individuals from the drone class - which you claim exists in spite of there being nothing in the film to back this up - demonstrated this characteristic) showing initiative. And your reply is that I'm a racist? Okay...
Then they rewrote the lock in the machine to fit the DNA of their own caste, you'll excuse me if I have the details of a flick I saw a year an a half ago a bit fuzzy.
I see. And I suppose that they were just talking about needing the liquid to power it to confuse anyone who might have been listening? And I suppose that the other bits of alien technology that worked for all of the aliens were also hacked in the same way by other 'initiative-lacking' aliens at some point off screen?
Your version of the plot might almost make sense, but it was not the one that was actually in the film.
You mean you're stupid because your mother was a whore?
I see, this is what passes for intelligent discussion on your planet?
You do know those are made up aliens we're talking about, right? Not earth bees? We're talking about a movie where a human was turned into one of those aliens, aaaaand now you're talking as if that believing that is stupid. WTF is wrong with you?
Royal jelly is the closest analogue in Earth biology to the liquid in the film (or, rather, to what you claim in spite of dialog to the contrary, the liquid was). It turns a drone into a queen. It has absolutely no effect (other than to provide some nutrients) if any other species eats it - and this is other species that evolved on the same planet and have a common evolutionary heritage.
Expecting an alien equivalent to have a similar effect on humans that it has on its own species does not make sense. It was just a contrived way of making him have to experience the other side of prejudice. Another heavy-handed, overdone way of preaching at the audience.
Like I said, compare this with how pretty much any other film that has looked at prejudice has worked. District 9 lacked any subtlety at all. It was an overly moralistic B movie. The plot was severely compromised to convey the 'racism is bad' message, and it didn't even do that very well, because it was overly preachy and ended up just making the racists into caricatures of evil, rather than believable characters - very few people disagree that comic-book villain racists are evil, but films like Alien Nation (again, not a particularly good film, but the one that District 9 stole its premise from) managed to convey the idea that racism is destructive when it comes from ordinary people.
To the performers of this study:
Do you ever spend a large amount of time performing studies to try to prove that playing video games is bad for people rather than spending time socializing with friends and family?
Have you ever continued analyzing children playing video games when you knew that you should be finishing your PhD thesis?
Have you ever been banned from performing law in a state due to filing too many frivolous lawsuits?
Has a video game developer ever written a caricature of you into a video game due to your anti-video game behavior?
They were sick and had lost their learder. Those aren't humans, they're drones, they have no initiative.
They seemed to be displaying a lot of initiative during the film. You know, finding the fuel, powering the ship, all that stuff...
And the liquid is a hack to the genetic lock on their technology, like royal jelly, it turns a worker into a pilot
I'm pretty sure you're making that up. They put the liquid in the machine, not on the people who flew the ship. Their technology worked for all of them, not just for some pilot caste.
it turns a worker into a pilot, which is why exposure to it turned the guy into an alien
You mean just like how if a human eats royal jelly they turn into a queen bee? Yes, that made a lot of sense. Suspending disbelief is one thing, suspending basic knowledge of biology is another.
If you had been less busy being angry at being told that racism is bad and that the powerful exploit the weak, you might have noticed
A good film conveys its message in a subtle way. District 9 felt the need to bludgeon you over the head with it repeatedly. Compare it to Moon, which (as I said) conveyed exactly this message but without the need to beat you to death with it. Or even Alien Nation, which wasn't exactly a great film or series, but managed to be subtle about it.
Had there been no Nigerians you would have bitched and moaned that the movie was limited to South African characters, you know it.
What? That doesn't make any sense at all.
The basic premise of District 9 was taken completely from Alien Nation. They moved it to South Africa, where it could have been used as a subtle metaphor for apartheid, but instead just had caricature racists because the audience was assumed to be too stupid to understand any subtlety. The story of getting the magic liquid was added, but it was the bit of the film that made no sense, so they stated with a stolen premise and made it worse. Great writing.
The Nigerians were almost the only black people in the film, and the were universally portrayed as evil, spiteful, and superstitious. A film that makes such an effort to tell you that racism is bad (as if most of the audience can't work that out themselves, or even infer it from subtle hints), having all of the black people members of a criminal underclass was astonishingly hypocritical.
As I said in my original post, the ham-fisted message of the film seemed to be 'racism is bad, unless it's against Nigerians because they're all criminals'. The terms 'nigerian' and 'criminal' were used interchangeably and no one in the film seemed to notice or mind this. It was a perfect example of the kind of racism that's really harmful - where it's so institutionalised that people don't even notice it.
Wikiquote to the resque:
Socrates - misattributions
"Children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Apparently dates from 1953: see Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service, Edited by Suzy Platt, 1989, number 195.
Actually a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes' Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates (w:The Clouds)
I think you missed my point. The story had a really heavy-handed 'racism is bad' message. Alien Nation managed to do this really well, for example by having black Americans repeating exactly the same 'separate but equal' slogans that were used against them just a few decades earlier, only this time against the aliens. District 9 lacked any subtlety and hammered it right into your face, to the extent that it distracted you from the plot. All of the racists were evil caricatures. There was none of the insidious racism that is far more dangerous, and the characters were completely unbelievable.
The entire message was somewhat spoiled by the fact that all through the film they used the word 'nigerian' as if it were interchangeable with 'criminal' and all of the nigerians we saw throughout were superstitious criminals (and black). A film overloaded with overtly anti-racist messages while carrying an institutionalised racist undertone may be accurate social commentary about South Africa, but that doesn't make it a good film.
Oh, and the anti-military message (soldiers are all stupid evil racists) was equally overdone. As was the anti-corporate message (CEOs are all clever, scheming, evil racists).
Somewhere in the middle was a story about the aliens trying to find enough of a chemical that's in their technology to power their ship and escape, and a lot of racism and explosions to try to distract you from the fact that this didn't even make a little tiny bit of sense (how did the shuttle get underground without anyone seeing it land? Why didn't they extract the liquid while they were on the ship, when it would have been more abundant? Why, if they have such powerful weapons, are they in some kind of ghetto in the first place?)
Compare it with something like Moon, which had no explosions at all, but managed a gripping plot with a much smaller budget and still covered the same core issue (having a group that prejudice lets you treat as subhuman).
I expected it to read that way. But for me, it didn't:
The embrace of what will result in more intuitive software? Open-source technology.
Who will be providing fewer guarantees about security and privacy? Companies.
Tycoons and hippies (to use opposite caricatures) have something in common - distrust of government. That sentiment does pervade the article, but it's getting harder to find anybody who will take issue with it.
Perhaps you should stop indulging your fantasies about what 'the left' and 'liberals' think and engage your brain in grappling with the questions raised. While you are wrestling with straw men of your one creation ( che Guevara supporting, Chavez hugging Mugabe supporter), other people live their life under socialism quite happily.
Just FYI democratic socialism is practised in many European countries, it is not some evil dictatorship of the proletariat's representatives, it is merely a recognition that capitalism works best when tempered with humanity. You appear to have mixed it up with extreme forms of communism, though I'm sure you can find some crazy political grouping with socialist in it's name (e.g. National socialists), it is not a synonym of communism.
The world is not black and white and you are doing yourself and others a disservice by painting it in lurid caricatures, particularly so as the post you responded to attempted to find common ground, which you rejected with an irrelevant rant. Please deal with your real opponents and the arguments they present, and you'll find they're not so different from you and not as rabid as your imaginings.
In lieu of a thoughtful reply (which would be lost on you anyway), I will instead respond in caricature of my favorite Muppet, Beaker. You two appear to have a lot in common, so perhaps you will understand.
Meep meemeee, meep mee-meep. Meep meep meep.
You'll forgive my poor Muppetese, but I think he told you to, *ahem*, "meep off"? How dreadful! I wouldn't have thought him capable of such profanity.
You make some good points, but I disagree at least in part with your assertion that the Native American genocide and the Jewish Holocaust are not comparable.
Well into the '50s the Indians were depicted as the "primitive savages", or as racially inferior to the whites by even the mainstream media - similar to the caricaturization of the Jews by the Nazi regime. I would argue the reason why there was no centralized campaign to eradicate the Native Americans as a racial group was that they were not concentrated well enough, and did not stand in the way of, American industrial progress. But when they did, measures to eliminate them were taken swiftly - Andrew Jackson in Florida will provide illustrative examples.
That Native Americans were able to prosecute military action against the United States is largely a factor of their geographic distribution and the fact that they were trained to fight as a part of their way of life - unlike the Jewish citizens of Germany. This ability does not alter the attitude of the United States toward them.
It is, I freely admit, something of a stretch to suggest that the U.S. and Nazi Germany are identical in their treatment of their respective "racial questions". Nevertheless, a genocide was committed in both instances. This fact certainly permits the appropriate parallels to be drawn - I feel it is disingenuous to suggest that the two events are "entirely" unlike each other. Finally, the Native American wars were still taking place even into the late 1800s - certainly an industrial-enough era, and the final American-Indian wars are regarded as ending in 1918. Is that really that far from 1933?
The racist caricatures of Powerful Pierre and Crazy Coyote will be edited out of Huckleberry Hound cartoons and replaced with a multicultural selection of the characters from Captain Planet series and a "feminine positive" version of Cheetara from The Thundercats.
...well. I think I had a subtle point in there, but too subtle. So here's what I'm getting at: Many slashdotters create caricatures of groups, call it identity politics, call it condemnation/praise by association, call it whatever, it's wrong.
If I describe people who vote Democratic as socialistic, tree-spiking, magic crystal wearing, bootlickers ...and at the same time, I don't know any people who vote Democratic, I'm really painting a false picture based on my imagination, perhaps inpsired by foxnews, colored by ignorance, or a variety of other things. And of course, it would be wrong.
I happen to think that my friends, family and associates, are quite diverse. They all appear to be thoughtful well adjusted people. Some are apolitical, some are heavy left leaning, some are heavy right leaning, some are country folk, some urban to the bone. The differences extend to the cultural and economic levels as well. And while all can be ignorant at times, and make mistakes, by and large, most make reasonable real life choices.
I wonder how many real home schoolers the GP actually knows? It seems that he has fallen into the trap of figuring out people via MSNBC or FOX. Whole swathes of people.
The media and politics in general have convinced large parts of the population that half the citizens are morons, intent on destroying the country, and that the other half are saints. Which half is which, depends on which part of the media spectrum you regularly digest.
The GP not only learns to view/discuss people/groups in that manner, he perpetuates/teaches others to view people and groups in that manner.
I'd describe a lot of adult vegans as "passive-aggressive" in their stance. I respect vegetarianism and veganism in theory: in practice, a lot of Western vegans strike me almost as caricatures of Nietzsche's "politics of ressentiment," in their elevation of empathy and compassion over all other possible values. Perhaps that is the value of veganism: it is the mechanism by which that value devalues itself, when it becomes an impossibility.
When the same perception is repeated over and over again all over Europe, and outside of it too for that matter, it might eventually occur to the observer that the common factor of all of these perceptions is Islam. This is further reinforced by noting that Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccas, etc. haven't gotten this kind of reputation.
And let's be honest here: if you draw a cartoon caricature of Christ, will someone try to kill you? Or Buddha? Or Amaterasu? Yet draw one of Mohammed and you need police protection. Islam is not a nice religion, and totally incompatible with Western values, at least in its current form. We Finns refused to surrender our freedom to Stalin, we refuse to surrender it to Muhammed's fanclub either.
As it happens, it's become somewhat of a running joke that the ethnicity of the criminal is only mentioned when it's Finnish. That's a large part of the problem: there's a (likely correct) perception that our leaders and media are siding with foreigners against Finns. And it doesn't help either that the average Finn is getting poorer each year while the government keeps on bringing in more immigrants and giving them priority in everything, from financial aid to apartment queues. Any attempt to bring up any of these problems gets shot down with cries of "racism!", with the consequence that people are slowly being weaned off of feeling any shame over such identification, even when it's actually justified.
As you can imagine, this is pretty much the ideal conditions for the growth of extremely nasty movements. If we're lucky, Finland will turn to a more nationalistic direction and fixes its problems; if we're unlucky, the powers-that-be will keep the lid on the mounting pressure until it explodes violently. Things could get pretty nasty.
And the same is happening all over Europe. I wonder if the muslims mistake niceness as weakness or imagine that Allah will bail them out once shit hits the fan; or maybe they really are just a bunch of idiotic rabble doing things for shits and giggles and not thinking of consequences; but no matter what the reason is, if something isn't done soon, people will start pushing back. They already are, but haven't yet crossed into violence; but when they will... it will be ugly.
Believe me, it can. You might not have noticed it, but when Bush became Prez, the general esteem of the US sank internationally by some margin. When he was reelected, the general view of the US was that of dumb, dimwitted hicks unable to find their ass with both hands and only still not laughed at whenever they show their head internationally is 'cause they always have a gun at their hands. I am not kidding here, in political caricatures, the US was always some gun wielding redneck.
With Obama, who is seen as the "black Kennedy" by some people, the general esteem went back up a bit, even though a lot of his shine went down the drain by now since he's not the black messiah that he was expected to be. I kinda assumed as much, the expectation were insanely high and nearly impossible to fulfill, especially in the light of his very limited leeway given the economic situation the Bush administration left him with. It's like chewing out the new CEO for a bad cash flow after the old CEO drove the company into the ground.
Palin doesn't surface a lot in European caricatures yet. In general, she's not taken too seriously, but her views are generally seen as completely nuts, more fitting to some African tinpot dictator. If she gets elected, do not expect anyone in the world to consider the average US voter in dire need of being put under tutelage.
This is one meme I am sick and bloody tired of hearing repeated: "fanatical Obama supporters".
Yes ... yes, for chrissakes they DID exist ... a hand full of them. Not that any objective analysis could be done, but from my experience I'd estimate that there were about as many of them as there were Tea Partiers who showed up to Glenn Beck's shindig on the National Mall.
And of course, just like the Tea Baggin' dickweeds, this crew of drooling nitwits are a convenient caricature into which we can easily cast ALL Obama supporters ... because Jesus Christ Almighty, seeing the world at a greater than 1 bit color depth just takes TOO MUCH HORSEPOWER.
Yeah Obama's rhetoric was damn good. Perhaps a little over the top, but all things considered ... not terribly so by contemporary political campaign standards.
I could be wrong, but I just have a real hard time believing that Obama's undoing will be hoards of brainwashed masses who thought he was the messiah and are dissapointed.
It'll probably be more like this: the economy still sucks, and by 2012 it'll be blatantly obvious that America really is a fading world power, and that shit is just not popular and the president is an easy target. That being said, Obama is WAY slicker than Willy ever was, and America LOVES slick. If the Repubs wanna win they're gonna have to find someone incredibly good.
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets..
The problem is that Randian/Rothbardian libertarians have made Adam Smith into a caricature. They are interpreting his work through a modern lens, and not placing it in an historic context. Those of us who have read The Wealth of Nations (and I have) realise he was largely railing against mercantilism, not governmental regulation of the economy per se.
Aren't all caricature action figures big-headed?
Well, yes, but aren't all caricatures parodies? Isn't that an inherent quality... you can't render someone's likeness by exaggerating their most recognizable features without creating a parody.
But "big-headed" is not a "most recognizable feature" of a specific person, if all caricatures have the same "big-headed" feature. Instead, it becomes merely a feature of the medium, like "charcoal drawings are black". As such, a caricature that merely has a big head isn't really a parody of anything.
Aren't all caricature action figures big-headed?
Well, yes, but aren't all caricatures parodies? Isn't that an inherent quality... you can't render someone's likeness by exaggerating their most recognizable features without creating a parody.