Slashdot Mirror

"Frankly, the idea that Muslims are being portrayed as irrational, murderous, religious fanatics is more disturbing than any insult SP might offer. Muslims should be pissed that everyone thinks they'll flare up into terrorism at every sideways glance at their faith."

Why is it so disturbing? Any Muslims saying we shouldn't portray them as terrorists should go convince the rest of the Muslims instead.

The Muslims prove it by their actions. The sheer irony of very many Muslims actually performing violent actions because of the cartoons showed how true the cartoons were.

In contrast if you had tried to caricature Buddha as a terrorist, only a few Sri Lankans might see something to it. Of course if you were unlucky a bunch of Muslims might still think you were trying to draw Mohammad (albeit badly) and start threatening to kill you ;).

The main people to blame for making Islam look bad are the Muslims themselves. If those bunch are really following Islam, then Islam is bad, QED. If it isn't then, perhaps they should do something about it rather than keep making Islam look bad. Perhaps they could do more good works and stop killing, hurting or threatening people?

Judge them by their actions. I'm not saying all muslims are like that, but just go look up the statistics yourself.

I heard one hindu guy say to the effect: Muslims having problems with Christians, Muslims having problems with Hindus, Muslims having problems with Sikhs, seems to be a pattern somewhere...

There, fixed it.

You, moron, deprived of any sense of style, irony, subtlety, or even originality, witless and blabbering your pathetic attempts at "humor", which fall flat in a deadening silence of the startled audience unable to comprehend, how that seemingly able body of yours could possibly house such a cruel caricature of intelligence.

Go away, hide, and don't come back until you are through all of your summer reading assignments and have written "I will not use the word `shit' in a joke again" in foot-tall letters on the highway. In bright crayons. 200 times...

The worst thing about this comment is that it's not even all that much of a caricature.

As apposed to today's age where people think the physical universe just created itself from thin air one day.

That would be stupid. Good thing that's not even close to what the Big Bang theory states.

Also, physics (so far) can only describe the events a very small time after the initial singularity and thenceforth. Our analytical tools are insufficiently advanced at the moment to model the singularity itself. As a stopgap, what we do is simplicity itself. Metaphorically speaking, extrapolate backward (in time? well, some time-like parameter that is only vaguely what we call time today) to see what the singularity might have looked like. In reality, there may never have been 'a moment of creation' as is popularly believed (we just don't know how gravity and the quantum nature of matter/energy work together at those scales to say anything definite - check back in a decade - we might know more). The Big bang picture in the popular consciousness is a sadly out of date caricature of a very active (and evolving) field of research.

While 3rd grade science textbooks are no doubt good places to finally begin a secular education (one must start somewhere), they do not address such things as zero point energy or energy-time uncertainty, or pair production - all examples of 'something out of nothing'. Your problem (and it's a legitimate one and understandable one) is an inability to see the distinction between technical terms that have precise meanings and the same terms used in wishy-washy popsci-babble fashion.

Finally, thank you for getting the action verb right - " ... people think the physical ...". It is so much superior to its deformed cousin 'believe'.

The dev agreement from day one has said no on political satire apps.

IMHO the rejection of this app seems consistent with prior rejections I've heard of.

I recall seeing an app that was a directory of contact information for members of both houses of congress rejected by Apple some time ago (many months or even longer) for similar reasons. What got the app rejected, if I recall correctly, was that it made use of caricatures of the congresspersons. It was a bi-partisan app and the caricatures were not derogatory or satirical, just ordinary, run-of-the-mill facial caricatures.

Seems to me like Apple just wants to avoid politics in the app store, which really doesn't strike me as a bad thing.

Whatever they do now seems to be a pale caricature of reality... why is this the case?
Were they always this clueless?

It's sad... so much talent.

Did you ask anyone in the South (capitalize that, by the way; it's a cultural region and not just a direction on the compass) if they appreciate the humor of Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy, both of whom are extremely popular comedians whose material largely revolves around a caricature of Southern rednecks? Most of the people I know from the South have enough of a sense of humor about the stereotypes that apply to their roots (which do not rise to the level of bigotry and prejudice just because someone makes a joke about them).

I've pointed out elsewhere that I am really entertained by this thread for the reason that it has drawn out a lot of the biases people hold, demonstrating them by how they react to the simple, succinct joke that I told about Arkadelphia. That's one of the reasons I like jokes so much, both telling them and hearing them: For every joke ever told, somebody out there will find it offensive. Jokes, then, are a litmus test for people's attitudes and biases. Tell enough jokes and record a person's reactions to them all, and you will be able to understand how he thinks better than you ever could just by asking him what's on his mind.

I'm from a place where people tell jokes, some people laugh at them, and some other people get offended by them because they heard the joke through the lens of their own prejudices and intolerance. Same as where you're from and same as where you live now.

I suppose you also get offended whenever Jeff Foxworthy starts a joke with "You may be a redneck if..." or when Larry the Cable Guy portrays a caricatured stereotype of a Southern hick. You may want to inform their millions of fans in Arkansas that they should stop laughing because these jokes aren't funny and their laughter demonstrates a lack of good genetics on their part.

Incidentally, I do notice that you said inbreeding isn't a problem anymore, but nothing about the illiteracy. I suppose it would take two generations of you and other outsiders before that one goes away? I honestly wish I could mod your comment +1 Funny because it is either a subtle, well-played joke or just plain stupid, and I'm optimistic enough to think the former. Simply put, the stereotype that you suggest I'm not allowed to joke about is reinforced by nearly your entire comment.

You're not alone in your reaction, whether it qualifies as overreacting or not. It was a joke, as I pointed out in the earliest response I posted to it (oddly, that one is currently modded down to 0 points for being offtopic). I also wasn't nearly as general in the telling of it as the people who are offended by it seem to think. It was a joke about, as I also have joked in this thread, "the city of brotherly boats" - and nothing else.

It is the nature of jokes that virtually all of them can be taken in an offensive way. It is the nature of people that a few of them are virtually guaranteed to take every joke in an offensive way. I do not bow to political correctness (which I consider to be a form of laziness and dishonesty - changing how you refer to something to pretend that problems associated with that thing no longer exist) and I do not generally conform my jokes to the ideals of a few.

Joking is also squarely outside the definition of bigotry, which is an absolute hatred and intolerance of members of a group or at least intolerant devotion to your own prejudices or opinions. The simple fact is that I am an American in general and a "hick" in particular. You may be missing some of the humor because you are neither, but there's a reason that Jeff Foxworthy is so famous for his "You might be a redneck if..." joke meme and Larry the Cable Guy is so popular as portraying a stereotype of Southern hicks - and it's not simply prejudice against hicks by other Americans. It's because drawing out and making caricatures of stereotypes that are at least partially true about hicks is funny to every hick in the audience, and most of us in the USA have at least a little hick in us.

But, again, hicks and Southerners are not the target of my joke. The most interesting part of this entire thread has been watching it draw out the prejudices of others in how they interpret what I said. One guy thought it was racist, for instance. You thought it was anti-hick. I'm sure that someone, somewhere will read it and think it's offensive to autistic children. We all read things through the lens of our own biases.

To which Science interjects and says: See this is why you and I aren't friends anymore. You keep expecting me to pick sides and I won't, it's not my argument. But I will say that your much heralded Pink Unicorn Proof stinks as a proof for your own beliefs, because it is at best a caricature, and at worst an attempt to prove a generalised theorem by 'proving' a singular instance: i.e. "Everybody knows that Invisible Pink Unicorns don't exist therefore nothing exists that we cannot see" My son mathematics and my dad Logic would like a word with you....

If they were concerned what it looked like on people, they would have average people as the medium, not 6 foot, 90 lb caricatures of women shaking their hips down a runway.

These are artists, not engineers. Logic and accuracy need not apply.

I doubt that he remembers using Java or things written in it fifteen years ago when kids with mohawks routinely brought computers to a halt with their buggy AWT GUIs and applets.

Personally, I prefer my software to come from disciplined engineers and not some caricature listening to a Prodigy mix-tape, chugging Jolt Cola straight out of a two-liter bottle and admiring the reflection of his cyan colored hair in the flicker of his amber terminal that he salvaged from an unsecured dumpster in an industrial park.

The built-in speaker gets fairly loud and provides decent sound. There's no bass response, but the small grille houses both a left and right speaker.

Since the disco era, there has been this constant push for more bass, to the point where the drive to get lower has become a caricature of itself in places like Miami and Los Angeles. True audio lovers know bass is only one aspect of a rich audio experience.

So when I hear that Apple is turning bass way back, I know they are answering the prayers of audiophiles. Finally a company with the balls to do the right thing.

Thank you Apple!

It's a caricature; a nostalgic harkening back to the simpler days acoustic modems, which actually could "type in" line noise while being cut off. It's similar to the bowling ball-shaped bomb icon, depictions of telephones with huge handsets and rotary dials, and use of colloquial phrases like "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey".

Don't make caricatures out of my argument. I was merely providing evidence that race is not entirely based on phenotypical traits.

To be very clear, so that you can "grok" it, my argument (and the consensus in modern anthropology, which is assuredly a science) is that systems of race are socially constructed, and don't represent valid biological categorizations of people.

To whit, please investigate the racial system in Brazil. It is drastically different from the American racial system, yet both are inheritors of the Enlightenment-era European thought which gave birth to the early conception of scientific race. This was well before genetics. Two different racial systems, both started in the same time, have developed in drastically different ways.

Neither of them are rooted in genetics, but in changing social conditions and expedient political decisions. I am not suggesting that biological variation does not exist. I am suggesting that our categorizations of that variation is not based in biology. That is what I mean by "social construct."

Item A is the only one that really matters. It doesn't matter if it is (C) made in the UK, by (D) EEA employees, if the end product is just an imitation of US culture. Item B is meant to prevent it from just being an non-diverse outsiders caricature of British culture, which is what a game about warm beer, bad cooking and drinking tea would be.

Republicans were presenting limited change, one bill at a time, that were very much non-sausage.

I don't accept the truth of that statement, particularly inasmuch as it implies that the "limited change" presented would have achieved the required result. Unless you're looking to make an extended defense of that implied claim, however, let's agree to disagree at least somewhat and move on to the meat.

As a political reality, important and essential elements of the bill could not have been passed in bite-sized pieces.

You can't provide universal access without regard to preexisting conditions without an individual mandate. Splitting apart the components that cost money from the components that pay for them is also a loser -- the inevitable result being the bread-and-circuses components passing easily and the parts that actually fund them being endlessly mired in controversy over whether that funding should have been done differently. At that point, you've got a massive piece of legislation regardless, and all massive legislation is sausage regardless of the party in power by the time it gets passed. Remember the amount of pork in the initial stimulus bill passed by a Republican government and signed by a Republican president, or for that matter the pork in the Patriot Act?

(It's an interesting factoid that the origin of the comparison between legislation and sausage dates back to Otto von Bismarck -- a staunch conservative who, among other things, was responsible for introducing Germany's Health Insurance Act of 1883 as a measure designed to reduce the public appeal of socialism; it's also notable that Germany's system has both public and private insurance funds available, and that the public ones have neither driven the private ones out of business nor bankrupted the country).

And again -- without the Republicans willing to get into the fray and agree to compromise on less-unacceptable legislation, the only folks the Democratic leadership had to compromise with to get it passed were... *drumroll* other Democrats. No wonder that the concessions made it passed were ones that Republicans didn't much care for -- if they'd been willing to play, the market for votes would presumably have had some "less expensive" compromises on the table simply by virtue of the set of available votes being less scarce. Simple economics -- by virtue of the Republicans staying out of the sellers' market for compromises, the price went up, and it's being paid for by we the people. Moreover, by going as far as they did in campaigning against the bill (flatly lying to the public on "socialist takeovers", death panels, roads to fascism and such), they made even the compromises needed to get even Democratic votes more expensive than would have been the case otherwise.

I still think this bill is worth it, even as it is... but it would have been better, perhaps considerably better, if the Republicans had been willing to play ball. Maybe we'd have tort reform instead of a few individual states getting sweetheart deals. Maybe we'd be paying for it differently. We don't know, because the Republicans decided to play the role the Dems have been caricaturing them in, as the "Party of No".

China's version of capitalism is the caricature of capitalism they painted in the pre-Deng era; capitalism as unrestrained rapacity. There's an element of truth in that, but capitalism can't be unrestrained in a democratic country with a free press. American capitalism would be everything China said it was, except for business ethics, which would not exist if it were not for fear of shame and public retaliation.

You mean like free trade?

The Chinese government *wants* American values, but cafeteria style. They want free exchange of information so long as it is information leaving America and entering China. They don't want information leaving China or worse yet circulating within China. The Chinese government wants America to be open and pursue classical liberal trade policy while it remains closed and pursues mercantilist policies. It wants America to be true to its respect of sovereign nations, but to forget about every individual's sovereignty over his own opinions. It demands the American not interfere in free markets while the Peoples Liberation Army operates businesses and party official parlay their connections into business wealth.

China has rejected the extreme form of socialism it was founded on, but it has not adopted the enlightened capitalism of Europe and America. It has recreatd the caricature of American capitalism portrayed in its own propaganda: a system in which corrupt wealthy men pull the strings of corrupt government.

It's no wonder they don't want American values: those values empower the working class.

It's because people here are stupid. They are so desperate to avoid any trappings of Socialism that they'd rather die because they can't get medical care than to let Big Evil Government help them out.

So, I'm stupid because I have a world view that I, not Obaman, own my body. Thank you, Mr. Sheep, but, yes, I would rather die than let "Big Evil Government" help me out. You see, in order to let BEG help me out, I will have to turn control of my life over to them...a fate worse than death.

The truth is that we desperately need a single-payer system, just like every industrialized country in the world that realized a long time ago that health care is a basic infrastructure need for a productive, thriving population.

Yes, because people are dropping dead left and right around me. It's a picture straight out of "Zombieland"

But the American people are collectively so scared, stupid, and easily swayed, even by outright lies ("Death panels! Federally funded abortion! Rampant costs! Elderly care cuts!") posted on bumper stickers, they they would literally show up with torches and pitchforks in Washington if Congress actually did what is right.

Only half of us are scared of that. The other half run screaming for their mothers if you whisper "Pay your own damn way" in their ears.

The funny thing to me is that these stupid people who are so quick to bash Socialism are usually fanboys of one of the most huge, expensive Socialist organizations in the entire world: the U.S. military.

When we set up this country, you know, with that silly "Constitution" and all, they enumerated some things that the government would be responsible for. Things that made sense. A federal military to protect the federation made sense. A federal bureaucracy to direct individual health care is nonsense in an American context.

Now, I'm not bashing the military, I have a lot of respect for it, Socialist as it is and everything. But it's just kind of funny how when George Bush sunk trillions of dollars into it, you didn't see these idiots showing up in Washington with caricatures of him as Hitler.

Ahem....http://semiskimmed.net/bushhitler.html...now you have.

But consider this. The U.S. is the only country, other than Myanmar, that still has not converted to the metric system. If this country is so stubborn and stupid as to not do things the right way just to spite those damn commies in Europe (and not have to buy a new set of wrenches), seriously, what hope do we ever have of really moving to a single-payer health care system?

And now, you demonstrate what a simpleton you are. It isn't just some lone mechanic having to buy a new set of wrenches. It is about replacing trillions of dollars worth of machine tools, trillions of dollars worth of machines, and trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of supporting infrastructure. You're willingness to slur others over your academic concept of replacing a massively entrenched system overnight with something that works better in your mind belies your inexperience and ignorance. Come back and talk to us when you grow up.