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This.

Trump is a caricature of a human being. Clinton should have won. The left is blinding itself to the cold hard truth: Trump didn't win the election, Clinton LOST the election. It was hers to lose and she lost it.

The left needs to do some soul searching and figure out why they lost, not try to conjure up some meta-fictional scenario of social media manipulation by evil Russian spies.

You just described America for at least the last 100 years. Nothing has changed except you finally see what has been there all along.

I'm surrounded by sleeping fools who use emotion to perceive the world. The only reason many of you now see the writing that has been on the wall is because the person occupying the White House has made himself into a outre caricature of yourselves. He feeds you your own shit and you can't stand it. He shows you a mirror and you recoil in horror. He apes you and you damn him for acting...just...like...you.

Here is a German caricature following the Helsinki summit. I think it's even clear what it says without translation of the caption "His connection to Putin".

Wow, the A.C. just paints a caricature. Sounds exactly like a racist troll talking about how "all blacks" are, excpet substitute "conservatives". Shame on you.

Maybe that attitude is why American politicians have never been able to negotiate a decent health-care system.
(except Romney in Massachusetts made a good effort?)

The massive numbers of humanity reduced themselves into caricatures. We're merely remarking on our observations of them.

It's great that you've managed to reduce massive numbers of humanity into broad caricatures which you can hate unreservedly. Such attitudes never turn out badly.

"Social Justice Warriors"
"Social Junkie Whales"
"Social Junkpile Wanker"

---c6gunner

It's great that you've managed to reduce massive numbers of humanity into broad caricatures which you can hate unreservedly. Such attitudes never turn out badly.

This message brought to you by the Committee To Elect Hillary! In 2020. Remember - Republicans are crude, churlish caricatures of traditional values.

I believe you're acting in good faith. Some of the responses APK gets show a lack of civility, and some of those also address his mental health. While the reaction is understandable, responding to a lack of civility with more of the same is not helpful. It's obvious that quite a lot of people respond to Kowalski anonymously for a variety of reasons.

My understanding is that creimer left Slashdot several months ago due to persistent harassment. This included photoshopping him into pornographic images, then distributing those publicly. That's a level of harassment that's never warranted. Make no mistake, creimer is unique and eccentric, but nobody deserves that harassment. Now that he's left Slashdot and the target is gone, the individuals responsible for the harassment are posting as AC and pretending to be him. Those posts are then answered by the same individuals, making personal attacks against creimer, even though he never actually posted. They have impersonated people like Richard Bigelow and Silvia Bunge, the latter of whom is a faculty member in UC-Berkeley's psychology department. If creimer were a patient receiving treatment from her, it would be seriously unethical to discuss his mental health on a public forum like Slashdot. In journal case studies that discuss individual patients, careful steps are taken to protect the identity of the subject. If UCB's administration became aware of those posts, it could be damaging to her career. As far as I can tell, she is a victim who has no knowledge that these trolls are using her name as part of a campaign of harassment. Not only are they harassing creimer, but they're potentially damaging the career of someone who seems to be an innocent bystander. There is no justification for their behavior.

As for Kowalski, I believe there's a decent human being underneath whatever rage, frustration, or other issues are on the surface. He's been engaging in this behavior so long that it's probably comfortable for him and hard for him to imagine anything else. However, I've looked up his history of posting on forums and some of the content from the late 1990s is downright civil and reasonable. Something happened along the way to turn him into the Kowalski we see today and that's a damned shame.

I believe Kowalski genuinely wants to make a useful contribution by writing software and content about security. That alone is far more those harassing creimer contribute. We can pity Mr. Kowalski but we should treat him with respect.

I believe some of the posts about Kowalski that impersonate him are caricatures, deliberately exaggerating his behavior to try to get through to him. I believe they're well-intentioned, though the wrong way to do things. I believe your posts about his mental health are well-intentioned and I have no issue with you. You have a distinctive style to your posts, so I can tell when you're replying to Kowalski anonymously as opposed to someone else doing so. I have no issue with you.

My concern is that I started to see posts about Kowalski getting mixed in with creimer harassment threads. I wonder if the same individuals who have been relentlessly harassing creimer for what seems like at least a year are now also targeting Kowalski. There is nothing well-intentioned or justifiable about those who are harassing creimer. However, a campaign of harassment from these individuals will only worsen Kowalski's issues and drive him farther from the help he needs.

If I didn't express myself clearly, I'm sorry. Kowalski still has a level of decency that simply does not exist in those harassing creimer. He deserves better.

What you call impersonation, I call parody. You've brought this upon yourself. You can drop the sanctimonious and hypocritical bullshit about stalking and impersonation. Parody is protected speech, and those posts are obvious parodies of you.

You treat your fellow users with contempt, demanding to know what software they've written. You show a lack of regard that they contribute to society in other areas. You say that you're one of the few people who actually does anything useful, which is supremely arrogant.

Calling other users rotten bastards and proclaiming to be God's gift to Slashdot is a caricature of you. Yes, it's exaggerated, but it's based on your behavior.

It gets reposted repeatedly, even when it's offtopic, because you do the same thing. Your posts are generally considered offtopic, despite your insistence otherwise. And when you're moderated as such, you repost over and over until the moderators move on to other articles. That's why you're considered a spammer. You've made it clear that you're going to spam your posts to somehow prove your superiority over the owner of this site. You are a spammer.

Oh, you don't like the parody? Good. Most of us don't like your behavior, yet you haven't changed it. If you won't change, why should anyone else?

You love to attack others, but you can't take it when the favor is returned. Too bad. You should have thought of that before choosing to be an asshole.

I found a whole bunch of those violent anti-fascist assholes. They're under white marble crosses all over Europe.

No you did not. Because the allied soldier under white crosses did not believe in beating up people over words. When the Nazis marched in Illinois in the 1970s the WW2 vets opposed them with words not violence.

It is only the comic book caricature of WW2 soldiers that antifa likens themselves to as they indulge in their own little soldierly fantasies. The immature entitled kid in black north face clothing and balaclava is far far different than the real soldiers who destroyed real fascists. Similar story for the other side of the same idiotic delusions, the neonazi wearing an armband and speaking insulting words is nothing like the real fascists. Both the violent wing of antifa and the neonazis are all posers, little more than asshole cosplayers both.

Now the peaceful wing of antifa, that is an entirely different story. That is where one might find actual WW2 vets.

Speaking as someone who had the privilege to grow up around family who were actual WW2 combat vets, and who had teachers who were actual WW2 combat vets.

Well it's easy to make caricatures of both methodologies. While the W manager may get the budget I've certainly met projects that follow the 90-90 rule:

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

The project progress report tend to follow the first 90% and then the shit show starts with everything that's not working the way somebody thought it would and a whole lot of wrangling about how the spec is to be understood and how supposedly done code doesn't actually work the way they wanted it. That's why it's gotten a lot more iterative and agile-like in that the customer wants proof you're actually progressing and that they're getting what they want. The caricature of manager A only cares about the highest priority for the next sprint, but you want high level estimates for the backlog items. You need good enough estimates for a go-no go decision at every level, whether it's products, features, enhancements or tiny tweaks. But if you think the feature will get done quicker by having someone report a "percent complete" all the time, well... it doesn't work that way.

It doesn't take an enormous amount of genius to know that a degree in [insert half-assed caricature here] is not going to pay off.

STEM grads are as screwed as much as people who took Underwater Basket Weaving or whatever other stereotype you Old Economy Steve's dredge up.

An Anonymous Coward sneered:

Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.

Nice conflation there, troll boy.

Overpriced, overhyped, gold-plated connectors and high-quality (NOT "artisan") vacuum tubes are two entirely different things.

While anyone who's actually A-B tested Monster cables knows they're crap, quality tubes (or "valves" in Brit-speak) are a whole different matter. Most of the tubes that modern manufacturers employ in audio amplifiers are made In China, and suffer from the same lack of concern for quality control and focus on quantity over quality for which everything else made in the PRC is infamous. That systematic disregard for quality results in audio that sounds harsh and peaky, and that lacks both warmth and detail. (Western companies, like Apple, who install their own quality-control supervisors at Chinese factories to oversee production can and do establish and maintain excellent, consistent quality standards - but only at the cost of paying Western salaries for those supervisors - a cost which, naturally enough, gets passed along to their customers.)

(I own five all-tube guitar amps and four hybrid ones. I've been recording multitrack audio for almost 50 years now, and my ears are therefore pretty well-trained. I say this to establish that I'm not appealing to false authority here, because I actually am a real-world, no-shit authority in this regard.)

And I'm telling you that quality vacuum tubes make a significant, and easily audible, difference in sound quality, for both production and reproduction. Every guitarist who uses tube-based amplifiers will tell you exactly the same thing, as will every audio engineer who employs tube-based microphone preamplifiers or signal processing gear.

Every flinkin' one of us.

Monster cables are a waste of money, but stick a set of JJ Electronics matched tubes in a new guitar amp - even a very expensive guitar amp - and the quality of the sound immediately improves. Sometimes incredibly so (which, again, is directly related to the particular manufacturer's focus on quality control).

Guitarists, producers, and audio engineers will argue about which manufacturer produces the best replacement tubes, of course. Electro-harmonix, Grove Tubes, JJ, and Sovtek all have their partisans - but everyone agrees that ANY of those manufacturer's products is a vast improvement over the garbage with which tube ampmakers ship their products by default.

So, why do high-end manufacturers choose to use such shitty tubes in the first place?

MBAs, of course. They run every company of any appreciable size nowadays. None of them gives a flying fuck about anything except "maximizing shareholder return" - and they consider quality control a cost center, rather than a competitive advantage ...

Cool story bro. The rest of us like properly mixed multi channel audio.

Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.

Can you guys even think in in more than "Hitler VS Stalin" patterns anymore?

No, Hitler wasn't alright just because Stalin was even worse.
No, those are not the only choices.
Apart from shifting the discussion to exclude sane standpoints, forcing every view into an extreme caricature of itself, and being entirely one-dimensional, sharp, static and rigid...

They are not "like" a caricature of evil. They are evil.

Well, to be fair, it's not like people are starving because they can't afford diamonds.

No kidding. De Beers is like the worst caricatures of evil capitalists.

...

They are not "like" a caricature of evil. They are evil. The very essence of violent, monopolistic corruption. They do not tolerate competition. They invented the modern perception of diamonds as rare, valuable objects synonymous with "love" and they mean to guard that perception like a saber-tooth mother hen. It's a crystallized piece of carbon. DeBeers has huge warehouses filled with raw diamonds. They restrict the supply to keep prices high.

No kidding. De Beers is like the worst caricatures of evil capitalists. They have no interest in anything aside from their bottom line, they will and have done nearly anything and everything rotten and immoral to maintain their monopoly.

      The EU is seemingly hell-bent to extort money from every other big business, they should turn their ire in De Beers and wipe it out, they richly deserve it.

Europe 'as a whole' did not exist.

I should have used the term "at large".

This is trivially false as France was not a monarchy at the time. It was a republic. Like you know, the US. The real reason is below.

Yes, and at large would have been a better term. But France still actually fits here, namely because even though they've technically been a Republic almost as long as the US has been, even during the first republic they never really cared much for individual rights, and they pretty much still don't. France always has had this populist feel to it, IMO, including having leaders that were basically dictators from the very start and reoccurring throughout the history of their republic. During France's revolution:

You weren't totally enthusiastic about the revolution one particular day? That's a gillotine'in
Somebody suspected you were rich? That's a gillotine'in (never mind that most of the leaders were actually quite well off)
A "hero of the people" didn't like you? That's a gillotine'in
You thought too many innocent people were going to the guillotine? Ohh you better believe that's a guillotine'in.

This was mostly overseen by Robespierre, who even sent his own Lieutenants to the gillotine simply because they disagreed with him on some topic. Basically North Korea type stuff. Even postwar, France was the sole cause of the mess that was Vietnam; the Hanoi Hilton was originally built by France as a place to torture Vietnamese who woulnd't submit to what was basically slavery, prior to that Vietnam actually admired the west, including Ho Chi Minh himself. As for today, France actively works to eradicate French co-cultures from existence if they aren't French enough, including making huge efforts to prevent the French language from changing at all by making it illegal to use certain words, among other things (by the way, banning everyday words that aren't part of the official language is something that happens in many European countries; are you Europeans ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have freedom of speech? Because if so, I have some connections to a certain Nigerian Prince that will prove quite lucrative for you.)

So.. Let me slightly twist your words into this: "practically the only reason a [...] country would take action during this period was after they were already [attacked]"
It's okay, we all did that.

I did intend to use the word "invaded", and while that can be argued as semantics in a way, it wasn't the point. The point is, the stupid of the Europeans always name and shame the US for not taking action, but they never bothered to look in the mirror first. (One of the reasons behind my "dog feces under the rug" analogy.) It also occurs to me in all of this (and I was first told this by a Polish guy after I asked him if he thought we were a racist country) that Europe is more racist than the US, just the US looks particularly bad at it because we're the only ones who try to do something about it, so we keep detailed records of who did what to whom, and who said what to whom. Compare that to Germany for example, who doesn't record anything at all about race in their crime statistics, so it really is impossible to know in their case. That, and while I don't remember which countries all did this, but some scandinavian regions have this annual parade where they have caricatures of black people depicted as looking kind of dumb and/or silly while they're wearing something akin to a maid's clothing while they're cleaning something. If somebody did something even close to this in the US, even if it was supposed to be chimney sweepers that got black from the soot, (which is what some people claim that is what is going on in this parade) the mass media would be pointing out racial overtones, and it would make international headlines, meanwhile it's relatively unheard of while it happens openly in Europe.

Yes, let's describe WW2 as "Europe deciding to blow themsel