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with caricatures of Darl McBride, Jack Thompson, and Fred Phelps.

For some reason, if you suggest that anything ought to be done for the common good, even if it's not directly profitable

You ignore here that you are suggesting using Other Peoples' Money (OPM) for your pet moral projects.

I've studied US history and I've studied some of the same political philosophers the "founding fathers" did. Still, I don't know where this idea came from, that benefitting the public good was morally evil. I feel like something must have happened to make everyone so angry and frightened.

You never heard of a very thick book called "Atlas Shrugged"? That book by Ayn Rand has to the point of caricature that very moral argument you find so mysterious. But to save you hours of pain, I'll point out the high points: 1) the good guys win, and 2) the phrase "benefiting the public good" really means feeding the parasites of society which for some reason, Rand felt was a truly evil act.

I love how conservatives and libertarians always put themselves in their place.

Truth be told, they don't deserve civility. After nearly a decade of their bullshit and all the damage they've done to this country, they don't even deserve to fucking vote. It's not enough that conservatives are wrong. They're the wild boars of the American underclass, charging anything in sight that doesn't jive with their dysfunctional worldview. The left isn't perfect, but the right is wrong. Send these fuckers back to the south and put a fence around it. According to them, that's good enough for Mexico, probably because they're too dumb to know how to get through one.

By the way, I love how these stupids always pick 'strong' names, or names with the word 'man' in them. Falcon; renowned bird of prey. Pretty empowering, not to mention grandiose. This must be why they like the letter 'R' and the color red. Grrr, manly, aggressive! Strrrong! The conservative movement practically draws caricatures of itself. These cavemen went obsolete some time before the last glacial period.

I couldn't resist the temptation to quote Bill Hicks:

I always thought Hudson was a lot more memorable... "That's it, man! Game over, man, game over!"

One of the frustrating things about that movie was that they killed off all the likable characters right away and left us with all the caricatures...

Which was owned by a Ferengie who were not part of the Federation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Reception

Some have accused the portrayal of the Ferengi of being antisemitic. In the book Religions of Star Trek, Ross S. Kraemer wrote that "Ferengi religion seems almost a parody of traditional Judaism... Critics have pointed out a disturbing correlation between Ferengi attributes (love of profit that overrides communal decency; the large, sexualized head feature, in this case ears) and negative Jewish stereotypes." Commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote that Ferengi were portrayed in The Next Generation as "runaway capitalists with bullwhips who looked like a mix between Nazi caricatures of Jews and the original Nosferatu." The fact that the four most notable Ferengi characters, Quark, Nog, Rom and Zek, are played by Jewish actors Armin Shimerman, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik and Wallace Shawn contributes to this theory.

Actually the first episode I saw them in the first thing that popped in my mind was that they were bashing republicans or capitalists in general. I guess I wasn't too far off.

You shit out the following piece of verbal diarrhea:

A more apt metaphor than you realize, as you are an intellectual toilet.

If you could have named a single instance where anybody has ever purchased anything against their will due to advertising, you would have done so, period. You didn't. Instead you bragged about how you (want to think you) live free of advertising's influence, hoping that it would cover up the fact that you so loudly broadcast your crippling fear of personal responsibility that a stranger on the Internet could analyze you with perfect accuracy.

By refusing to even attempt to support your patently stupid claim, you admitted that I completely shut it down. You're shrieking a desperate denial of that fact right now, but it's not even convincing yourself, let alone anyone with a functioning brain.

I don't see ads, ever. I filter them on the Internet, skip them on my Tivo, flip the page in magazines, and look away from signs. I take the free things that advertising provides and I spit in the advertisers face.

Some people (myself included) block some forms of advertising (and other content) because they are intrusive. You hide from ads because you fear them. You fear them because you lack the critical thinking skills to deal with them. And by hiding from them you give them more control over you than they seek.

They are fucking evil, manipulative con men.

Some techniques used by some advertisers are. Were you honest and intelligent, that is what you would have said. Painting the entire profession that way is a cartoonish fantasy, one whose only possible purpose is to provide you with a scapegoat on whom you can blame your own shortcomings.

My question to you is, if you are right, why do people pay for advertising? Of what use is it?

It facilitates commerce. There are a variety of ways it can accomplish this, some of which are good (ex: informing), some of which are bad (ex: misinforming), some of which are benign (ex: entertaining).

Why, if it is only to tell us what is available so that we may make rational choices, do advertisers employ techniques that appeal to emotions, and not to logic?

Bolded portion is not anything I said, nor a logical consequence of anything I said. It is a strawman (that is, a lie) that you made up and assigned to me. You were trying to trick me through into defending a position I never asserted. This makes you identical to the retarded caricature of advertisers that you cling to. It proves that you hate them because you see yourself in them. That's why you keep screeching about appeal to emotion; you yourself have done little else.

I think you know why. In fact, you probably went to school to learn all about it, didn't you?

No, I didn't. I'm not in marketing or advertising. That's another lie you try to comfort yourself with; since I rattled you so badly (you'll claim I didn't but that's another lie), I must be one of those horrible marketers. No, sorry, I'm a software dev. But while I didn't study advertising in school, I do know this about it: People like you who proclaim themselves untouchable by advertising are their favorites. You're the easiest marks of all.

You're actually offensively ignorant. I think British people are far worse about this than Americans - that is, when British people are offensively ignorant it makes me feel much angrier and ashamed of my country than when Americans do it. Americans do it more often.

But anyway. Fuck you, do some research, this country is going down the fucking shithole. America is too, a bit, but less than Britain, and it certainly isn't anywhere near as bad as your pathetic caricature. Go away and put your xenophobic cock back in your trousers. Or at least engage in a less shameful pissing match.

No, it was clearly meant to be a Caricature of a model to attract attention (it worked, didn't it). No one would believe that's what she really looked like.

Right after he adds a whiny child and an annoyingly stereotyped rastafarian caricature as the sidekick.

Sword of Truth? Seriously? It started out okay. Then it went into a weird bdsm fantasy, which, okay, that's fine if that's what you're into, but it kept. On. Happening.

That fucking chicken for the first 80 pages or so of that one book was one of the most artless attempts at stylism of all time.

The characters are repetitive in their attitueds, and their shallow moralizing soliloquies against incompetent straw people just got ever preachier. I cannot stand how every last prediction of every "good guy" character came to pass. Every time. If somebody makes a prediction and it doesn't come true, you'll find out that they aren't a good person (or weren't at the time). You can also tell the good guys because the speak at great length and repeat themselves. The bad guys seem kind of human, which might be why Terry feels the need to have them commit another rape or take a shit on some corpses or enslave uniformly beautiful women, so we know not to sympathize with them.

The descriptions of the bad guys in the order are of a legion of caricatures.

The one good book past the first one was the one where Richard was stuck in Altur'Rang, even as I chafed at the blatant and inexpert communism analogy with absolutely no nuance to the analysis. I think it's possible to make a book with a libertarian undercurrent instead of a libertarian tsunami. At that book and afterward it just became a slog through the endless repetition of Richard loving Kahlan combined with Communism is wrong and denying Richard's fascism is EVIL and completely different from denying Jagang's fascism, because nobody in the New World rapes, not like those nasty Old Worlders.

The gimmick of a Wizard's Rule per book couldn't hold up past "there is magic in forgiveness". Beyond saccharine. It also seemed like people were amazed that Richard had subtractive magic in the first book, but as we go on we find out more and more people who had been using subtractive for ages.

At least after a few books he got past the "princess is in another castle" stage.

It ended with the evil rapists founding Earth, and the Order was basically Christianity. Which I can appreciate and all, but Wizard's Fourteenth Rule: There is magic in subtlety.

The endings to most of the books were pretty...stupid. "Oh I already love you so your brainwashing power doesn't work on me and I'm the only person to ever think of that". "O hai, I'm in ur hometown, buildin' a statue, and now all your base are belong to us".

I read every friggin' book of the series because I'm far too stubborn for my own good. Same reason I finished the Silmarillion. The incredible pedantry of the book reminds me of...well, of a lot of Objectivist writings. I wonder what's up with that.

Although, to be fair, it prompted me to essentially give an essay outline right here, unbidden. There really is philosophy here to debate about, but I would hope that students on all sides could do better. The man spend thousands of pages elaborating a false battle between his blind ideal and incredibly naive pastiches of any other choice.

This is the same kind of math used by proponents of President Obama's healthcare socialization package. If you will, it's also the same math used to justify the Soviet command economy.

Right, because everyone who doesn't agree with you is a Stalinist. Any system of organisation differing from your conception of unrestrained capitalism is the fucking Soviet Union. This is what us non-retarded people call a 'false dichotomy'

On paper, eliminating profits saves money for the hypothetical society. In reality, however, eliminating profit also eliminates self-interest, which very effectively stagnates or degrades the enterprise... be it at the level of a single supermarket, or the economy of the wealthiest country on Earth.

And this little gem is called a 'non sequitur' in a language that it is nearly impossible to make money by learning. The idea that profit=self-interest=motivation is a pathetically simplistic view of humankind, only held by economists, psychopaths, and teenage boys.

The reason why this doesn't work, is because you need several things to get something accomplished. You need the WILL to start it... the RESPONSIBILITY to see it through, and the MEANS to get it done. Socialism helps with the means... but not the will. Capitalism helps with the will, by accepting man as the egotistical bastard he is, and appealing to the basest of desires: greed.

YOU might be an egotistical bastard, however scientific study of the human race doesn't indicate there is any factual basis whatsoever to your teenage misanthropy.

But nothing helps with responsibility. For as long as clerks with 1-inch fingernails will 1-finger-type endless requisition forms to get anything done in large organizations (which includes companies as well as governments) with zero interest or concern for what they are doing, waste will reign supreme.

This is called a 'straw man' - drawing a caricature of what you think everybody who isn't in your objectivist book club must believe and strive for. It is idiotic. Also, its quite sexist - but from a randroid that is not at all surprising. Yes I know Ayn Rand was a women. No that doesn't stop her having contempt for women.

At least in private enterprise, this is somewhat moderated by the need for more profit. A government bureaucracy, on the other hand, is like entropy. It spontaneously expands, and this can only be reversed locally, at an even greater cost to the entire system.

And we finish off with an appeal to authority - the authority of science. By making a cringeworthy attempt to link your stupid ideas to thermodynamics, you attempt to imply that the bullshit you spew is some kind of natural law. It is not. Its just the opinions of a small, sad little boy.

The idea that the private sector is more efficient is not taken seriously by anyone who understands how its ruined every public service it has touched. How its externalised its losses to make itself look like it actually gets things done. How it has buried technologies such as manned interplantery travel and civilian supersonic flight. How it fucked up the banking system and then milked the public purse and went back to business as usually, paying off the greed sociopaths who caused the mess in the first place to the tune of billions.

The Florida Supreme Court already did. He's pretty harmless these days. All he can do now are "give me attention" tricks. Like this Facebook thing. Anyone with a half an ounce of sense knows it's not going anywhere. He's more like a Jack Thompson caricature these days.

As for me, I think these little public humiliations he sets himself up for are endlessly entertaining. It's fascinating to know that this guy was a lawyer at one time when he obviously knows very very little about what's legal and what isn't.

Perhaps the variety of bullshit crap they pull has eroded the public trust in the department. Many of the police in the jurisdictions around Austin end up on the poop list of most of the civil rights organizations for a reason.

Damned right. Many years ago in San Francisco, sheriff "Dick" Hongisto had his minions run around and strip all the S.F.Weekly (alternative, free newspaper) newsracks after he found that there was an unflattering front page caricature of him holding his baton in a suggestive way.

The prick contended that it was perfectly legal as the papers were "free" and there was no legal limit on the number anyone could take at one time.

Can you imagine what The Dick would have done if someone was caught scooping up all of a free newspaper with a long, laudatory article about him?

While a photograph might run afoul due to copyright issues, this case is different. It would be like you drawing a caricature of someone, and more specifically a public figure. While it is undeniably a use of their likeness, it is still created entirely by you, and therefor a protected artistic work.

1. Being an anarchist has nothing to do with wearing a mask;
2. Wearing a mask has nothing to do with committing vandalism;
3. Committing vandalism has nothing to do with violence;
4. The violence in question was committed by the state, not those resisting the state.

The violence in Pittsburgh began when police began using "less lethal" weapons against a Constitutionally protected (and morally defensible) public demonstration in the form of a march. Police declared this march an "unlawful assembly" in order to justify their assault, but never cited any legislation to this effect, nor how it interfaces with the relevant Constitutional law. The context is that the march organizers did not seek a police-granted "parade permit", which many jurisdictions have begun to require since the Seattle WTO protests. These "parade permit" restrictions have been struck down by many courts (including those concerning Seattle) as unconstitutional. All of this is relevant only if you consider state violence the appropriate response to an "unlawful assembly" which is causing no harm.

Further, it's wrong to blame victims of state violence for "inciting" their victimization by engaging in perfectly reasonable actionsâ"just as it's wrong to blame victims of parental violence for "inciting" their victimization by similarly questioning the authority's actions. It's even more wrong to blame some of the victims, who are in principle opposed to the state violence, when those who are not in principle opposed to the state violence become "collateral damage". It is the state, not the anarchists, wielding weapons and committing acts of violence.

But don't take my word for it. I'm an anarchist and clearly can't contribute to a "serious debate", the framing of which you've set with phantoms of wily black bloc coyotes, not much different from the caricatures of "bomb throwing anarchists" used to justify mass imprisonments and deportations of radical European Jews and Slavs in the early 20th century. And that caricature, too, had no basis in reality.

When discussing the "thoughtful arguments against much of what goes on in the G20 conferences", dismissing those who take their opposition to the level of principle and apply those principles consistently, referring to them as a "lunatic fringe", is the surest way to prevent any meaningful dialogue about the "thoughtful arguments" you think are being obscured by those advancing them. It may be helpful to keep in mind that the protestors in the streets in Pittsburgh, or Seattle, or whereverâ"and here I'm excluding myself, as I find these huge conferences and the trendy "tourist activism" of attending them strategically unsoundâ"don't vanish when the streets are cleared. The serious debate you don't consider them capable of engaging in... they helped to open it in the first place.

You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just cant keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they dont realize that the stuff that theyre promoting is too hard for us.

Sorry, but multithreading is not "faddish". And COM is just an antiquated example that makes him sound like it's a very long time since he did any programming if he's using it as an example of what 'trendy' people are doing. His argument is that this theory stuff is - and I directly quote from the above - "too hard for us". The whole article just sounds like he's got a massive chip on his shoulder. It's a massive rant about some hypothetical programmers that produce wonderful code without getting bogged down "design patterns" and such. It's weird to be the one defending this, because a lot of the time, I fall into what he would call a "duct tape programmer". I get thrown into work with too little time to do things by the book and yes - I do bang out code without formal specifications or unit tests because someone comes into my office and says "actually we want it to do X right now". BUT that's because I have to. And though I'm usually the first to rant about hype in the world of programming, I can't feel anything but disgust for the wrong thinking in this article. I've seen a number of methodologies and technologies go through their over-hyped bubbles. When I started programming it was all Yourden and SSADM (kids - Google it). I watched UML appear and get frantically added to everyone's CVs, I saw XML appear with all its over-fat text books straining the bookshop shelves (people still just about needed text-books back then). More recently I've had people charging around shouting Agile and Scrum. And I decried the hype at each stage, but I didn't and I don't think these are all stupid things and I certainly don't write web-articles proudly boasting about my ignorance of them and exalting programmers who don't understand them.

Let's take Design Patterns which he mocks people for "all being at conferences on". Well firstly, I dislike argument through mockery. I don't know anyone who has gone to a conference on design patterns - that tends to be the area of academics. But I do know people (and I am one) who have taken the time to read up on the subject. Like many things, it's not something radically new, just a slightly more dressed up and formalized consolidation of a lot of existing knowledge. So it may not deserve a great deal of hype but people (particularly less-experienced programmers) can and have benefited from reading up on it.

"Duct Tape Programmer" sounds like a derogatory term to me. If you find yourself improvising functionality on the fly, that should be because you need to, not because you have an aversion to planning. If you choose not to use multithreading, that should be because it's not applicable to your work, not because you think (and again I directly quote) "that stuff is too hard for us". I tell you, when I watch one of my four cores maxed out by a MySQL for several minutes whilst the other three do nothing, I don't sit there thinking, "Wow! I'm glad they had some Duct Tape Programmers working on this who were real programmers, not those pussy faddish types with their parallel programming theories".

The whole article is nothing but laughing and mockery of some caricature of "architecture astronauts". It's the laughter of the kid in the bottom maths set deriding those getting A's for being good at it. The caricature is doubly stupid seeing as astronauts are actually very skilled people

I don't think there's anything stopping you from mounting your own take on, say, on Snow White or Cinderella. The problem is that Disney managed to get something of a stranglehold on the imagery.

What I despise about Disney is singing animals. Every fucking feature length cartoon of even a story like Pocahontas (which was so obnoxiusly inaccurate in every other respect) requires singing fucking animals. In the Hunchback of Notre Dame, they altered the rule slightly and had singing fucking gargoyles, but the effect is the same.

Disney degrades everything it touches. It's run by some of the most vile, cynical bastards the entertainment industry ever produced (and that's saying something). It isn't the public domain these repugnant monsters rape, it's cultures. I quite frankly shiver at the thought of them taking any more popular stories from the fables and myths any more cultures and twisting them by their sheer hatred of anything that doesn't have singing fucking animals into grotesque caricatures.

Maybe in the early days there was a great artistic impulse, but even ol' Walt himself pretty much gave up the ghost after Pinocchio and it all turned into unforgivable pap, endlessly recycling the inventiveness of the early years.

Unfortunately, given the current socio-economic state that the US and it's allies are in, Iranian leaders -- very possibly not being the caricatures many americans would assume them to be -- may be making a large bluff in this and other moves it has made. The US can ill-afford a continued string of wars in smaller powers that do not offer a consumer incentive; i.e. any war that doesn't have us retooling our auto companies to make tanks, telling our people that if they ride alone they ride with the ayatollah. If we're to go to war, it needs to be a manufacturer's war, not a war of attrition fought by a people that have sufficient stores of it's most important tactical resource (people) to not care about when it "wins".

Iranian leaders, if they have any semblance of intelligence, knows that we cannot call their bluff unless a larger ally steps in and makes the war "interesting". For now, despite the horrible situation in Iran, the best thing that we can do is encourate the Iranian people, and let them know that their voices are being heard, that they have the power to revolt and change their own destinies. Most of all, that if they take the initiative, we will respect any free government they impliment in the aftermath.

But we cannot help them with guns. We cannot help them with bullets. We cannot help them with manpower. Any fight we make on their behalf, is fighting their cause. Every bullet we fire at an oppressive Iranian government, we fire at Democracy. If we have learned anything from Iraq-ganistan, it is that a policy of policing the world leads to later generations of peoples turned from ally to staunch enemy with the memory of american guns killing their people outweighing the memory of american guns killing their enemies.

May God and Allah see eye to eye in this conflict.

Yes we wouldn't want anyone to color anyone's perception of any facts, of law or of the circumstances of the case, would we?

No, we wouldn't. You don't want public opinion and emotion getting in the way of the facts.

No wait, that is what the attorneys are doing and I expect news bans and Google bans are lawyers attempting to protect their income streams.

You really believe it would be better if trials were left to popular public opinion?

You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone. That is why Hammurabi had the thing carved in stone and placed at public squares, so that "ignorance of the law" was not an excuse for breaking it.

That's a great example, but not in the way that you think. The Hammurabi code didn't really work that well in practice. It turns out, it's really not that simple. You can't just build a state machine, input what happened, and output punishment. For example, do you see the difference between a woman that kills her abusive husband in the heat of the moment, and someone that abducts, tortures, and murders a random person. Our modern system is designed to deal with things like degree and severity, and adapt as times change. Lot's of laws have subjective terminology, like "reasonable", that's designed to change as people change. That's why we have lawyers.

The moment however when the "law" becomes so complicated and ambiguous that it requires someone to "interpret it" (i.e. twist it to whatever whim of the moment is fanciful) the whole concept breaks. In short a society which needs lawyers, is by definition lawless, as "law" has morphed from the universal code of conduct to a byzantine, convoluted, religious scripture which requires a career priesthood to worship, massage, "interpret" and twist to the needs of whatever power caste is running the place at the time. The average denizen then simply becomes hapless prey for this caste of parasites with no recourse but to prostate himself/herself before the high-priests of "law" who hold the strings of the citizen's life or death in their hands.

You're being hypocritical here. You're pontificating about the law being turned into a religion. You need people to interpret and argue because things are never as simple as you'd like them to be. You need to be able to balance contradictory ideals. A great example of this is defamation law. To balance first amendment rights and the public's "right to know", there is a different standard for public figures than there is for everyone else. In order to win a defamation case, the public figure must prove actual malice, that the person knew what they were saying wasn't true, and said it to hurt the public figure, maliciously. You need to be able to argue, and then have an impartial group of people, not swayed by public opinion, weight the arguments and make a decision.

Ultimately, in a country of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers, the laws become such a sick caricature of the original idea that no one knows the "law" to its full extent, including all of its priests. One can test this simple supposition by simply asking any one of them to recite the "law" of the land from memory. In the USA, not only no lawyer, judge or politician could do it (even though the "law" is supposedly binding everyone and its ignorance is "no excuse") but they would not be able to tell you what the current definitive law is at all, even when given the ability to use books and databases to do it, as the code has become so byzantine that its successive layers upon layers of modifications and arcane religious language are so completely unmanageable that pretty much any "legal" decision needs an arbitrary "interp

Yes we wouldn't want anyone to color anyone's perception of any facts, of law or of the circumstances of the case, would we?

No wait, that is what the attorneys are doing and I expect news bans and Google bans are lawyers attempting to protect their income streams.

You see, the whole idea of "law" was supposed to be for a code to bind a society together by making every member capable of some action affecting others to follow a simple set of clear rules, which, again by definition, were to be simple enough to be memorized in entirety by everyone. That is why Hammurabi had the thing carved in stone and placed at public squares, so that "ignorance of the law" was not an excuse for breaking it.

The moment however when the "law" becomes so complicated and ambiguous that it requires someone to "interpret it" (i.e. twist it to whatever whim of the moment is fanciful) the whole concept breaks. In short a society which needs lawyers, is by definition lawless, as "law" has morphed from the universal code of conduct to a byzantine, convoluted, religious scripture which requires a career priesthood to worship, massage, "interpret" and twist to the needs of whatever power caste is running the place at the time. The average denizen then simply becomes hapless prey for this caste of parasites with no recourse but to prostate himself/herself before the high-priests of "law" who hold the strings of the citizen's life or death in their hands.

Ultimately, in a country of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers, the laws become such a sick caricature of the original idea that no one knows the "law" to its full extent, including all of its priests. One can test this simple supposition by simply asking any one of them to recite the "law" of the land from memory. In the USA, not only no lawyer, judge or politician could do it (even though the "law" is supposedly binding everyone and its ignorance is "no excuse") but they would not be able to tell you what the current definitive law is at all, even when given the ability to use books and databases to do it, as the code has become so byzantine that its successive layers upon layers of modifications and arcane religious language are so completely unmanageable that pretty much any "legal" decision needs an arbitrary "interpretation" by a cabal of priests.

And this is why the majority of people instinctively hates lawyers, as even if most people cannot vocalize it, an average person's intrinsic moral compass is able to detect that something is profoundly wrong with the very idea of a lawyer.