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China Rewards Porn Snitches
MinimeMongo writes that the "Associated Press reports that China's police ministry on Sunday handed out rewards of up to $240 to people who reported pornographic Web sites in a campaign to stamp out online smut...The online crackdown is part of a sweeping official morality campaign launched this year on orders from communist leaders."
Report: Christopher Reeve is dead
Thanks to the net, as an American am acutely aware of some heinous problems with our government and our economy. The worst of the dangers (govt spin pro-war 1984-style, Patriot Act, outsourcing, horrific public education system) are largely ignored or spinfully reported by mainstream media and these crooks, but I can see for myself online. Hopefully there is a trend here towards more awareness, even though so much is still hidden from us.
What the Chinese govt seems to understand, and what I fear most for their subjects, is that sniffing, blocking, filtering, and controlling the Internet is the most important means of keeping power from the people in the future. How will they do it? Is it possible? I fear that it IS possible. If you control all the fiber coming into the country, and you control everything published inside the country, then you can just keep on governing the old-fashioned way.
You can't legislate morality. As long as there's a demand, it'll be there. It's like "The War on Drugs" in the US.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Could be a good thing if it ultimately puts another thorn in the side of spammers who promote those pr0n web sites.
You can host porn legally in many many countries, and still spam from China.
go to prison for visiting those illegal websites.
Porn is an accessory to masturbation, the safest sex: no STDs, no conception. With China facing ongoing crises in both those human conditions, isn't porn the State's best comrade?
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Who knew that a communist regime could be moral
So, in order to collect the reward, do you have to answer any questions? Like "How do you happen to know about this pornographic web site?"
But the fact that this story contains the magic words porn, internet, & communist is likely to generate 1,000 responses. Sigh.
For something truly fun and interesting along the same lines, recently the Chinese had a brilliant spin on "citizen crime busters", offering bounties for people with camcorders who caught drivers breaking the law! Now there is a great idea!
Do many porn spammers use Chinese web hosting, or do they just relay through there? This could work out well for the rest of us, even if it's a(nother) kick in the goolies freedom-wise for the Chinese people.
$240 per webpage?
That's more than most web coders get per webpage. This could give rise to a new phenomina
"pr0n site farms"
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
Think about it: You get to see a porn site, and you get $240!!!
Wankers of the World, UNITE!!!!
... what authority do they have? Is all pornography illegal for everyone in China? While they might be disagreeable to some, most porn sites are legitimate businesses. Is the Chinese government so far-reaching?
This is the best evidence yet against those who accuse Open Source people as being communists. As is known, we Open Source people are very much into porn.
Oops... did I say we?
...because as history has shown us, the best way to keep people from doing the things they want has been to make those things illegal.
This'll work out great in the long run, I'm sure.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Could be a good thing if it ultimately puts another thorn in the side of spammers who promote those pr0n web sites. Could be a bad thing if it is nothing but pure censorship.
A government that excuses its actions by acting as a sort of parental figure, is a corrupt government indeed. Human beings are critical thinkers, thank you very much, and it is an insult to the intelligence of a Billion+ Chinese if China's government thinks it should "protect" them from "harmful content" so that they don't "harm" themselves.
I know that's not the real reason, but seriously, who does China think it's fooling?
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Step 1. Make porn site (and cover your tracks
Step 2. Report porn site
Step 3. PROFIT!!!! and making porn
I quit my job. I can make a fortune!
The government doesn't seem to realize that without pornography, they will have no driving force behind technology.
Granted I don't know much about the chineese government or economy, but don't they have something that somewhat resembles a free market, at least enough that this could actually have an effect.
On a side note, I wonder what effect this will have on society and on sex crimes.
A lot of people would have the public believe that wide availability of pornographic material leads to an increase of sex crimes, but I would venture to guess that it actually cuts down on the number of sex crimes by offering an alternate, quasi legal, and more or less harmless outlet for sexuality.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just because a society is different, don't necessarily mean that its peoples are oppressed (and need 'liberating'). It's a big planet, there's nothing wrong with a little diversity.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Abstaining, or voting for a certain-to-lose candidate, means tacitly accepting whichever crook the rest of the electorate chooses for you.
It is precisely that line of thinking that kept Ross Perot from winning. If we thought he had a chance, it would have been a landslide! Don't waste your vote. Vote for the right candidate, whether R/D/whatever. Even if your guy only gets 0.001%, at least you've made a statement. Simply picking the lesser of two evils does a grave disservice to democracy IMHO.
You cannot legislate morality
If people want smut, they'll get smut, despite the legal framework attempting to prevent it.
Same with any other behaviour deemed 'antisocial' whether it's porn, drugs, prostitution or [laughs] fireworks, people will find a way to do what they want to do, hence the emergence of black markets. Governments could be profiting from taxing the crap out of this stuff, but instead they drive it underground.
As for rewarding snitches, well, I think you can guess what I think of that too. One big waste of money.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Are they publishing their list of sites somewhere ;)
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Where will the Chinse get their porn now? Where? Oh god, it's too painful to think about. Why God, why!!??
-sig removed for tax purposes-
For a second, I thought this meant 'pay to poke'.
Slashdot is a respectable news site? LOL!
You cry for censorship. How unsurprising of you.
How is pornography contrary to Communist ideology?
So, if they are collecting this list of porn sites, presumably to filter out the outside ones, are they going to publish the list for the rest of us?
Learn to love Alaska
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just returned from China, where I travelled with my PowerBook and used both dial-up and ethernet connections at many places, including internet cafes and people's homes. After hearing all about the authoritarian firewall and net filtering I was a little surprised to see absolutely no firewall or filtering of any kind in effect. I was able to connect back to my home using SSH, use https to web sites in the U.S. and get to arbitrary places, news sites, and web based email every where I tried.
I could find no evidence of a firewall of any kind. I read about the google results, but what else are people talking about?
Pat
"Is it possible? I fear that it IS possible. If you control all the fiber coming into the country, and you control everything published inside the country, then you can just keep on governing the old-fashioned way."
Welcome to North Korea.
... someone in the Chinese government finally saw Tubgirl
Vote libertarian, then. Badnarick is about as different from the two major parties as Nader, and he's shown he's willing to stand up for his beliefs.
I am glad to these guys getting busted. Let's hope that law enforcement doesn't lose their momentum.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
I knew I was sitting on a gold mine!! *now where is that bookmark file?*
You do realize that there's a real vagina and penis (assuming that's what you're into) on the other end of the camera right? STDs, conception, rape, and abuse go on in the porn industry, so by these ppls logic, stopping the immoral demand will stop the immoral side-effects as well.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
Does it strike anyone else that that sounds similar to stopping spam, except less easy?
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Yes, you can legislate morality. The question is how effective is that legislation? Murder is immoral, and we have laws against it. Yet murder still occurs. That doesn't mean that laws against murder are wrong or completely useless. So, just because a law doesn't stop all occurrences of an offence doesn't mean we should get rid of the law.
So, what does you can't legislate morality mean? It would seem that it means you shouldn't pass laws that are designed to suppress behaviors that should be personal choices or are part of an individual religious doctrine and don't rise to the level that should be considered a crime
However, we are supposed to be the people in a free society so I hope that John Ashcroft is currently prosecuting people for distributing sexually explicit adult only material and has promised that nobody is safe from prosecution, not even cable companies, I hope Ashcroft doesn't get any ideas...
"...because as history has shown us, the best way to keep people from doing the things they want has been to make those things illegal."
I hereby make bathing illegal!.
If it were Japanese pornographic content, their economy would collapse and hundreds of thousands of greasy teenage boys and overweight teenage girls across America will get a check in the mail or at the very least an I.O.U. for a consumer electronic product.
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"pain is weakness leaving the body."Holy manchurian candidates, batman! Perot went out like a bitch. If we'd had that lying dwarf running the country "like a business" the way he sucked his billions from the government with EDS (administering Texas Medicare, etc), the 1990s would have looked a lot like the 2000s. If a voter makes a statement in an election and the fascist wins, does anyone care? Don't waste your time on empty statements that make you feel better when you cast the ballot, but let someone else's winner make you feel worse for the next four years. Or vote for me, Doc Ruby - only I can set you free :P.
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http://freenet-china.org/
.. porn pays you.
... the irony of communist leaders having a sense of morality. Next they'll be offering to pay for for the bullets for your execution just to show that 'they really do care'
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I wouldn't know, Anonymous loser Coward, I've never tried. It's probably pretty cool to be the Democrat who wins the 2004 election, though. FWIW, it must suck to be a Republican, because all the stupidest responses I get from them are signed "Anonymous Coward". Yella Republicans.
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I'm packing off to China to make my fortune.
You know, the stereotypical politician is meant to be a Used-Car salesman. And frankly, I'd rather have a whore for president than somebody who is as naive as Bush...yes you heard me correctly - I'd rather have a sell-out like Kerry than somebody who actually stands for what they believe in - like Bush. I believe that ruling the most powerful country in the world means that you have demonstrate some flexibility. This is isn't frikkin' Little League, where there is Good and Bad, Right & Wrong. There are lots of shades of grey, and they all need to be dealt with in their own way. Most Americans don't want to look into the causes behind the 9/11 butchers, but the fact is that they were idealists too - true believers to their cause and look what they accomplished. The same goes for Lenin, Mao, e.t.c. When your politicians are selling out to the highest bidder, that's when you know everything's ok in the world. If they start taking up causes, and preaching The Right Way & The Wrong Way or With Us or Against Us policies, that's when it's time to be afraid.
My Favourite Meme
I'm guessing President Hu Jintao got Goatse'd.
who was reminded by this to exercise one of their rights as an american?
...China is probably moving toward a capitalist republic at a slow pace. Having had the chance to observe the mistakes made by the Soviets, they may be trying to convert slowly to avoid some of the hardships.
Or, I could be wrong.
That's it, I'm heading to China right now and reporting slashdot.
[o]_O
I think it is more proper to say that one cannot legislate sexual morality. Legislating against something which has a clear and direct interpersonal effect such as murder is different. (Yes, you can argue that drugs, porn, etc have these effects but it is neither inherent nor direct).
Indeed, legislating sexual morality is a great tool of dictators.... Which is what I find so interesting about the politics of sexuality in this country....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hold your nose and vote for one of these two crooks; you're going to get one of them, so you might as well at least mitigate the damage a little.
How is Kerry a crook? He's done more to stop government thievery and corruption then most people. (speaking out against 'Nam, busting up BCCI and discovering the Iran Contra affair)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It is precisely that line of thinking that kept Ross Perot from winning. If we thought he had a chance, it would have been a landslide!
That, and the fact that he's a psycho. Would you really have prefered Perot to Bill Clinton?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Is anybody worried about looking at voilence and death? Is anybody worried about public brain-washing propaganda?
We live in strange times! War and soldiers and stylised to glory and heros, while sex and other fun and is somehow dirty and should be avoided. A strange so called "Morality", indeed!
In Body Pleasure And The Originbs Of Violence James W. Prescott relates the tendency towards violence to general sexual opression. It's worth a read.
(James W. Prescott was employed at the US Public Health Department and layed off five years after he published this document (in 1980), because he wanted to conduct more studies in the area of child abuse and neglect.)
I don't get it.
??? There's a good and bad in Little League?
You know, the original "you can't legislate morality" quote comes from someone arguing against racial desegregation. Obviously, that person was wrong (in the quote and in general). Why do people keep repeating it?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Show us those porn sites you've found and get $$$!!!"
Also....I've got to say....if there's one straw that will break the camel's back, or in this case Communist China's back...its porn. Thou shalt NOT deprive a man of porn. Although they haven't really put an effort to kill their sex industry, so who knows.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Stuff like KRGKGE.com or 3495ww43.com, etc.
Once the site is up and functioning, I contact a "citizen" in China, who reports the site to the authorities. We split the difference. I keep him fed with pr0n sites, and he sends me money for "finding" them.
Stupid fucking commie bastards. I could set up 50 sites a day. At $125 per, that's a nice piece of green...
RS
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Here's a reality check just a few weeks before we have possibly our last chance to keep our republic from descending into an unsustainable empire. Bush has actually lied us into war, through the recession, into the Patriot Act, the Medicare Prescription Drug Industry Welfare Act, the destruction of the environment through oil, coal, nuclear and every other lucrative pollution, has divided the nation more than since the Civil War... the list just goes on and on. And in every case, he has lied throughout - from his 2000 campaign, through his continuous spin, through his coverups, rigging investigations, and even through the debates. Kerry has been telling the hard truth, and has even risked alienating millions of denial addicts with his truth.
Bush Sr had a lot of faults, including backing Saddam in the 1980s, and apparently (to Saddam, at least) giving Saddam the go-ahead for invading Kuwait without resistance in 1990. But he at least understood that if we crushed Saddam's regime in 1991, we'd have to keep that frankencountry (created to be unstable by the retreating British) under control, a task so far manageable only under Saddam's intolerable tyranny. Bush was loathe to upset the Turks by backing Kurds in a revolt that would have not only created a federal Iraqi state full of Shi'ites ripe for annexation by Iran, but also a momentum towards greater Kurdistan. Including not only SE Turkey, but also eastern Syria and NW Iran, guaranteeing war in the region on shifting fronts much like the "Vietnam" war through Southeast Asia, which consumed Laos and Cambodia (and several million people), without even the threat of nuclear war from neighboring Israel and Iran, to say nothing of the oil, gas and pipelines. Bush Sr chickened out, leaving that unsolvable puzzle for someone else. Perhaps someone might have unraveled it, but now Bush Jr has burned every bridge, and is burning out every chance at any stability at all. We'll need years, decades, generations, just to get back to equilibrium, let alone justice or democracy.
As for JFK, his refusal to cut a deal with the Soviets has been shown, in 20/20 hindsight, to have been the right call. If only some of these Republicans could gamble with the same steel balls as the most famous liberal Democrat of the 20th Century.
Vote for Kerry. Don't let the past 4 years of fearmongering and devastation extinguish your capacity for hope. One step at a time, starting with removing the malignant cancer from the White House. Then, if you're still unhappy with Kerry, at least you'll have a chance to choose something else. With Bush, democracy itself is on the outsource list.
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Why the hell are they so terribly concerned with the porn "problem" and not in the least bit concerned with the [blink]SPAM PROBLEM[/blink]?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
"Wankers of the World, UNITE!!!!"
So that's what they mean by sticking together?
Here in the US people pay for being able to see pornographic sites...
Over there they pay for people to find the sites to exterminate them?
Part of our system of voting requires us to think about the candidates that we think has a chance. It is a clear side-effect of a first-past-the-post voting system. As explained there:
...
First-past-the-post encourages the tactical voting technique known as "compromising": voters are encouraged to vote for one of the two options most likely to win, even if it is not their most preferred option.
If enough voters vote using this tactic, the first-past-the-post system becomes a form of runoff voting where the first round is held in the court of public opinion. This can give substantial power to the media as voters will tend to believe their viewpoint on who the leading contenders are likely to be in the election and use that viewpoint to decide where a "tactical" vote would be (in the voter's opinion) best used. This can also become a system promoting votes against more so than votes for.
If you go on and read about tactical voting, you'll see it says that "Duverger's law suggests that, for this reason, first-past-the-post election systems will lead to two party systems in most cases." Quite discouraging if you ask me; I'd love to see more parties involved.
I just read some of these articles yesterday trying to learn about the British election system. It's very interesting stuff. Sometimes I wish I was a political science major...
The space unintentionally left unblank.
Oh the irony!
Good = your team
Bad = their team
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In Communist China, Porno bans you!
Christianity.
For a 50% cut I can set up thousands of porns sites if someone in china can claim that $240 per url...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Isn't it true that the percentage of votes a candidate's party gets determines their likelyhood of getting taken somewhat more seriously in the next election? I remember hearing that somewhere. If this is true, it's something to think about, especially in the longer term, as your 3rd party might benefit, even if they lose this time around.
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
i'm never moving to china ;-)
I should point out a typo: I don't "hope that hope that John Ashcroft is currently prosecuting people." That should read, "I hope that John Ashcroft,**who is** currently prosecuting people...doesn't get any ideas..."
you're supposed to save that post for when china blocks political dissent. for this article, they're just trying to block images of vaginsas.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because those Chinese chicks are so hot.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Maybe this just is a way for the powers-that-be to avoid all the subsriptions and build a really cool collection.
I'm proud to be an American! I mean, who is going to fund innovation when there's no pr0n? Must be why those Swedes are so smart ;)
Help cure cancer! Fold for slashdot: http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=
Well it would be easy to do this with the current administration. Just say that pr0n sites are means of distributing WMD (Ways to Masturbate Desperately) and that they are supported by the UN and the French. See how quickly the govt. moves to take 'em down!
I say good luck to them. A society has a right to govern moral law and try and limit the accessibility of corrupting information.
:-)
Bear in mind that as China races towards being a superpower (huge oil wars ahead unless China invent some really cool thingTM that replaces it) they might actually increase their prosperity and thier societies performance by removing such a tempting way to while away a few hours at night.
Or is that just me?
On the other hand, increased access to all the asian oriented (pun intended) porn, or the delectible other varieties of ethinic porn available, they might stem thier mad population grow, and increase tissue sales instead!
Appendix:
- Salt (one pinch of)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Before I read this post, I used to think that you could only find this much crap at Wal-Mart.
Here's a reality check just a few weeks before we have possibly our last chance to keep our republic from descending into an unsustainable empire.
Do you honestly think that the US has become an "empire" since Bush took office? I fear that you have strayed to far to the left and fallen off the earth. Who has the US conquered or taken control of? Iraq you say? Wrong. We have not conquered Iraq, we have liberated it. For now the US helps their new government off it's feet.
Bush has actually lied us into war
Unless he somehow managed to trick the entire CIA and Congress, they all saw the same info he did and came to the same conclusion. So maybe they all lied to get us into war?
through the recession
You mean the one he inherited from Clinton? And how did he lie to get us through it? By making predictions that weren't 100% accurate? Not even the best on wallstreet can do that. Sorry.
the destruction of the environment through oil, coal, nuclear and every other lucrative pollution
Actually the water/air has actually become cleaner since Bush took office.
And if you don't like pollution...stop driving your car, turn off the lights, and recycle. It's going to do a whole lot more good than bitching about the President.
Kerry has been telling the hard truth, and has even risked alienating millions of denial addicts with his truth.
You can't be serious. The guy can't even get the story about if and when he was in Cambodia right. I haven't heard him mention the hard truth about how his words were used to demoralize captured US soldiers. I haven't heard him talk about meeting with N. Vietnamese officials during a time of war. He hasn't talked about how he rarely actually does his job in Washington, or how he has more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
Bush Sr had a lot of faults
Being a Conservative/Republican was probably the first one on your list.
If only some of these Republicans could gamble with the same steel balls as the most famous liberal Democrat of the 20th Century.
Uh, what do you call liberating Iraq? If Iraq stabilizes, we have a big ally in the Middle East. If it doesn't, well, good try anyway. If JFK had been wrong, on the other hand, we could have had straight up nuclear war.
Don't let the past 4 years of fearmongering and devastation extinguish your capacity for hope.
Yes, don't listen the the doom and gloom Democrats. Things are not as bad as you seem. Mr. Partiot Act is not waiting in the bushes to rape you. There won't be a draft. Iraq is so far a success. The economy is still going up. (If you'd like to see it stay that way, go invest!) The sky is not falling.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
You guys remember that movie (okay it was horrible)? But there was a scene in the movie where Sandra Bullock says lets have sex, and Sly thinks hes doing the real thing but instead she pulls out that machine that simulates it in the brain. I think thats where China is going to go these days. They'll just use in-vitro to have children.
Unless they equally ban the channels aired via
satellites etc. And totally ban all forms of porn.
Link all thier sitched websites to a googleable (what is the 'official' spelling for all stems of google?) site that is inaccessible from .cn but ives is .westerners a chance to have lots of free porn listed! They can be the worlds biggest benefactor from Google ads.
1 billion porn hunters!
It is like google, but better! (unless Chinese have some other interesting fetishes that haven't been absorbed into the western conscience.)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
enought said!
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If you go on and read about tactical voting, you'll see it says that "Duverger's law suggests that, for this reason, first-past-the-post election systems will lead to two party systems in most cases." Quite discouraging if you ask me; I'd love to see more parties involved.
You could say Perot cost Bush the election, or that Nader's votes came right out of a Gore's pocket - that's hard to refute if you look at how those voters would otherwise have leaned. But would we have been that much worse off, in either case, had it gone the other way between the two leading candidates?
I suspect the tactical voting phenomenon becomes less certain to prevail as the two leading candiates become less distinguishable from each other. It seems to me that with every passing election, the "middle" becomes more clearly defined by those two.
This relieves voters from worrying if tweedle-dee|dum will "accidentally" win if they "waste" their vote.
Yeah, Kerry keeps repeating the simple outlines of his plan, though somehow the media (and many opponents) keep ignoring it, and claiming he has none. As I (not a part of the Kerry campaign or his policy staff) understand it:
1> Accept that we are still at war
2> Add enough properly supplied troops to the level necessary for tactical victories, and control the entire country (not just the parts on camera)
3> Bring our allies back to help, like in 1990, when it cost us only about $5B (instead of the $200B so far this time) and we all bore the casualties. That will also remove lots of recruiting propaganda about "Iraq vs. America". Our allies include, first and foremost, Iraqis.
4> Rebuild infrastructure to keep Iraqis vested interest in peace, rather than keeping them with nothing to lose
Their plan is detailed more at their website.
You'll hear Bush (and company) say that Kerry has no plan, that his plan is wrong, and that his plan is the same as theirs, depending on which audience Karl Rove thinks is listening. Bush obviously has no plan - the man himself has never had a plan, other than to stay close to his father - and is just hoping to keep the game rigged long enough to keep his job through the election, so he can forget about it for awhile, work on some other ripoffs. Kerry is making his own decisions, and needs to close the book successfully on Iraq, like Clinton did on the Bush Sr deficit and recession, to get reelected in 2008. Let's get someone in there with accountability. Enough of this media hero worship claptrap about "better character": they're both in the "compromise business" (politics); I want the guy who can get caught and stopped when he does wrong. Kerry is much more accountable, while Bush is incapable of even admitting he's ever made even a single mistake. He doesn't know how. Let's give him a few decades to figure out who screwed up his reelection, where he can't hurt anyone any more.
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It is always interesting to see how far extremes end up touching each other. This example of moral censorship is quite similar to that the Spanish Inquisition used to perform centuries ago, although the former is communist and the later was christian fundamentalism.
To do list for Windows
Seems to me that that's what many politicians are working towards in the US. When they complain about China, are they perhaps just jealous that the Chinese leadership has achieved what they haven't (yet)?
i don't care if you're american or dutch (where prostitution is legal) both democracies claiming no interference in people's morals and separation of church and state. laws are made/changed by the people of a country; where these laws represent their morals.
example: in the US, why is gay marriage becoming 'ok' while (hetero..) polygamy has such a bad stigma?! i would imagine polygamy being ok first, then as attitudes change gay marriage being ok. i guess it's just what people want to happen..that's all.
yes, china isn't a democracy. but if the gov. were SO out of line with the people, i'd think they wouldn't exist anymore. to me, the differences in the forms of gov. is just how easily (elasticity) they react to the demands of the people.
oh, my comment is just a comment. i haven't argued for or against any particular side.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
This is an important development in many ways for the internet community. Having a higher level of internet censorship in china will result in a lower level of child porn etc.
Recently there was a report published that outlined the large and growing problem of child porn sources from asian countries. One of the issues within that report was the chinese security issues resulting in a large volume of child porn being stored on "cracked" servvers.
Hopefully this will help reduce SOME of the problem. Every little bit helps. Obviously its not just aimed at this type of content.
When I first saw the headline, my first thought was: you know, in this country full of busybodies, I'm certain if such a thing were enacted we'd see quite a bit shut down. I've seen too damned many people too damned interested in other people's lives and bedrooms.
You know, if the sodomy laws were re-instated and the police paid $200 per "tip leading to the arrest of," the phones would be ringing off the hook from the fuckers.
Pisses me off just thinking about it.
How do I get a postcard of the great firewall of China?
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
You are right that as long as there's a demand, it'll be there - but even if that demand is met, it will always be there... just in a different form.
If the US were to legalize drugs, controlled by the government, the "demand" from the consumer is now being met and the users will no longer have to buy it illegally. However, now the criminals are no longer making money. So, the criminals will then take to selling other drugs - or other illegal activity. Likewise, if China were to "legalize" porn, controlled by the government, the consumers demand is being met - but the "criminal" will turn to something else which the government has outlawed.
So, demand or not - the illegal activity will always be there. As laws and times change, so do the "illegal" things.
parent needs to work on his chinese
Your parroted lies from the Bush camp are almost not worth replying to. But let's cut to the chase, instead of parsing words:
Iraq is a disaster. Everyone can see that the country is degenerating from catastrophe to chaos. What happened to "cakewalk" and "the end of major combat"? Come on - saying "Iraq is a success" only makes it true in the minds of true believers like you.
The economy? Even after you've cooked it as much as you could, and given TRILLIONS away, mostly to rich people, it's still mismanaged into incoherence. Americans are greedy, but we haven't been investing: the stock market is THE SAME as it was years ago, after a decade of unprecendented growth. Because the endless fear spewing from the White House keeps Americans, and others, investing in foreign economies that make a little sense. Again, everyone can tell this, especially those who remember just 5 years ago when jobs were all over the place. And I'm not talking about jobs filled by replacing one of the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of Americans now stationed overseas in Iraq.
All those SUVs getting 12MPG are spewing vast amounts of pollution into the air, because under Bush the EPA limits don't apply to them, as "trucks", but tax credits and subsidized car loans have made them "family cars". He's forcing Nevada to build a nuclear dump on an unstable groundwater dump. He's opened national parks to oil and other mining, as well as threatening the Alaskan wilderness for a maximum few months, delivered years from now. ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON ENRON.
"If Iraq doesn't stabilize, good try anyway"? You sick fool, you're playing with millions of lives, including mine, with that moronic disregard for safety. You repeat prattle like "Kerry's words to end the war were used to torture American POWs in Vietnam", without recognizing that Kerry helped end the war, bring back POW/MIAs, or even that you're somehow excusing Vietnamese torturers, who stop at nothing, from torturing Americans, and instead blame the man bringing that war to a halt, despite the Republican Nixon reneging on his campaign promises to end the war. You sick bastard, you probably even buy that "elder statesman" and "misunderstood greatness" propaganda the Republicans cranked out to recover from the last monomaniacal tyrant they installed in the White House.
If you don't believe the sky is falling, you should check the Homeland Security index: Yellow/elevated. I don't believe it either, but I want to fire all the clowns who keep scaring us with BS labels and nonsense designed in a focus group. We need some grownups back in Washington, to grab the wheel from yammering fools sending us towards the cliff with rosy words and diabolical deeds.
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make install -not war
It's possible that banning porn is popular in China. But given that their leaders are not elected, it's hard to say. All we know is that the leadership wants to ban porn. There's no information that I can find on whether the society itself thinks that's a good idea. If it doesn't, it'll just drive things underground.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The system is broken and guarantees that either a Democrat or a Republican is going to be president. It's tragic, but your only real choice is to decide who is the lesser of two evils. A vote for an alternate party candidate is a vote for the candidate whose politics is opposite of your guy because it siphons votes from the other.
As you say, don't waste your vote. Save the alternate party voting for Congress where an independent or alternate party candidate has a real chance. Get enough of those in Congress and maybe they can fix that broken system so Naderites can vote for Nader with a clear conscience.
Only on
OK, now give me my $240.
Random stuff like CNN usually isn't blocked, but I'm guessing that you may have found it difficult to pull up the site of the Government of Tibet in Exile, for example. The Chinese-language Wikipedia has also been blocked on and off.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
1) Put up a porn site,
2) Report it to Chinese officials,
3) Profit!
Hmm, where to start...Let's take this one:
Unless he somehow managed to trick the entire CIA and Congress, they all saw the same info he did and came to the same conclusion. So maybe they all lied to get us into war?
Its strange, you hear the accusations of "lies", and the response is something like the above. But let's just look a little further back, say to when Bush was running for the presidency in 2000.
Look at what he campaigned on and what he promised then, and look at what he has done in four years.
A simple example: his position was that America should not be in the business of "nation building", that America shouldn't be the world's policeman, and that under his adminstration, America wouldn't be. Remember? That was a big part of his foreign policy platform. Look at where we are now. Anyone who believed him on that, fell for a huge lie.
He ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility. Gee, I guess that didn't work out...
Donald Rumsfeld claiming that this war would pay for itself out of oil revenues, what do you know, that was a lie too! Funny thing is, that was ridiculous on the face of it, but nobody called him on it at the time.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
All those SUVs getting 12MPG are spewing vast amounts of pollution into the air, because under Bush the EPA limits don't apply to them, as "trucks",
You gotta be kidding. The fuel economy exemptions for "trucks" long predates the current president. You can't blame that one on Bush jr.
Because, you know, we should ban all power sources that produce enough energy to be useful.
But I'm sure the computer you're using to share this knowledge with us is powered by a bike pedal operated generator.
Guys. This is/was never about porn. China is starting it's Jin Dun (Golden Shield) Project, which gives National Security Bureau sweeping powers to track every internet cafe, every connection, every dial-up call. The porn blocking is just a ruse to take down bbses and public forums.
Already, popular forums such as ytht.net are taken down, machines confiscated and scanned for violations of thought-crimes. Porn sites are still alive and well; but the forums are gone. The timing? The finalization on the grasp of power by the new leadership. Jiang Ze-min just handed over his chair on the Party's Military Comittee on the 16th Congress.
Long live Big Brother folks.
And am I the only one worried that the Chinese cracked MD5?
And that's just not fair.
Does anyone think it is silly that they limit the number of kids that you can have, yet are blocking internet porn? I mean those people have to be majorly repressing their natural instincts, otherwise they'd be consuming a whole lot more condoms.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
In China, porn sites pay you!
1> Accept that we are still at war
Most lefty types simply insist "we should not have gone to war" and have no thought beyond that. Presumably, most of them want to pull out tomorrow, neverminding the chaos and bloodbath that would follow. Apparently, in their minds, backward error recovery will instantly follow from a convincing a majority of voters that "we should not have gone to war" and all people will be un-killed, all butterfly wings will be un-flapped, and all dictators will be restored to tryranical power. Unfortunately, in reality, there is only forward error recovery in human affairs and Kerry's likely voters don't have much patience for that. For all they rhetoric about fixing the world and helping the poor, they have no will to actually do it; they prefer giving hand-outs.
2> Add enough properly supplied troops to the level necessary for tactical victories, and control the entire country (not just the parts on camera)
Absolutely. By allowing the terrorists to fester in uncontested parts of the country, Bush is only encouraging them. There must be no part of Iraq that is not controlled by the Iraq/Coalition authorities.
3> Bring our allies back to help, like in 1990, when it cost us only about $5B (instead of the $200B so far this time) and we all bore the casualties. That will also remove lots of recruiting propaganda about "Iraq vs. America". Our allies include, first and foremost, Iraqis.
This will not happen under any president's leadership. The UN and International Community, despite whatever rosy language they choose to use, don't give a shit about Iraq or Iraqis and will never give more than token help out of spite to the world's superpower.
4> Rebuild infrastructure to keep Iraqis vested interest in peace, rather than keeping them with nothing to lose
#3 seems to be a sticking point for making #4 work.
plus it was recommended to me by a friendly policeman.
They allow warez and rampant copyright infringement but find pr0n immoral.
Hey China!
If you really want to prevent your people from watching pr0n , then simply 'vaccinate' ur men with ' anti sex drug' so that they lose all interest in sex....
[For Best results , give 2 doses , every 3 months after baby is born.]
Why does yahoo do this
Before Bush, trucks were a small part of the American fleet, so their emissions exemptions weren't as big a problem for the environment. Under Bush, their use has exploded, helped by the tax deduction of their purchase, as well as the extremely low interest on Federal loans to car companies that they pass on to consumers buying them. All these issues are questions of management as conditions change. Bush is a miserable manager, who sticks to his guns when conditions change. We can blame him for not rebalancing the finance and pollution systems when SUV pollution started to become a problem on his watch. But of course we're not surprised that he protects double the gas consumption per mile while oil costs twice as much per gallon, because he's a Texas oil baron cowboy. Lack of surprise doesn't excuse his mismanagement, it underscores it.
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make install -not war
Actually the water/air has actually become cleaner since Bush took office.
- George Orwell, 1984
Drop the strawman crap propositions. You're the only one talking about banning anything. That's the only arguments we get when talking about sane management of our natural resources: insane denials from clueless people who don't really care, but want to rap out a snappy answer, no matter how insipid. Cutting pollution doesn't mean banning power supplies - of course that goes without saying, among people actually interested in discourse. But you're just trying to say something to keep the wheel turning.
.sig
Then again, you're selling your vote for an iPod:
"GOP but will vote Kerry if you help a kid get an iPod"
- your
so you don't care about politics, or you're just a crooked liar. Why do you hate America?
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make install -not war
Truly an evil empire :(
I figured it out, they're just knocking off the competition so the the Chinese Govt will assume control of the porn industry. Soon their population will be in the salty, sweaty palm of the chinese government porno-ganda. Doctored pictures of Mao's inspiring pillar, impregnating the female population with his values shall re-inforce the peoples belief in the communist system.2 .htm
wouldn't be the first time in chinese history, check out the legend of King Chou-hsin.http://www.world-sex-records.com/sex-10
Instead of regulating...why not try innovating? Build cars/trucks that use less gas, or don't even use gas. Promote deisel vehicles. Donate to research. Do something more productive other than bitch about what politians are or aren't doing.
And, there isn't any concrete proof yet that emmissions from cars are causing any noticeable damage to the environment. (I'm assuming you are talking about global warming.)
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
They'll just hack dumb American DSL and cable subscribers and setup their porn there. Much safer, let a dumb American take the fall instead of one of their own.
Everyone cares about getting Iraqi oil back into the global economy, especially as China's demand keeps the price per barrel at or near $50 indefinitely - while Russia, Germany and France are eager for Iraq to resume payments of its Saddam debt to them. And every democracy, including several in North Africa and the Pacific, care about keeping SE Iraq out of the control of a nuclear Iran. Then there's the humanitarian and lucrative contracting motivations. Once we get diplomacy back into the game, instead of wasting people like Colin Powell in a shellgame to invade and reelect, we'll be back in the lead of our cooperating/competing neighbors: business as usual for the lone superpower.
As for the "liberals" looking for a handout - that's some kind of bugbear you keep using to scare the children. The 2000 Bush states are getting their outstretched hands filled with Federal welfare, at the expense of the 2000 Gore states, so even that old con is as preposterous as "$2T/2005 Bush" heading the "party of fiscal responsibility".
Democrats backed Kerry, rather than, say, Dean, or Kucinich, because Kerry has military strategy credibility. Americans saw what happened the last time Rumsfeld ran the Pentagon (under Ford): we created a quagmire, pulled out to cut political losses, and sent Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into genocide from which they haven't recovered, a generation later. Not to mention the extreme damage to American interests, political, economic and moral. Do you want the next 4 years of terrorism to look like 1972-1976 did for Communism?
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make install -not war
The UN and International Community, despite whatever rosy language they choose to use, don't give a shit about Iraq or Iraqis and will never give more than token help out of spite to the world's superpower.
Damn straight! The UN and International Community should be on-hand constantly to clean up America's messes!
I've been talking about pollution, which is universally understood to be bad - after the nightmare of the 1960s, when the filth was too much for even Nixon to countenance. I might as well talk about the Greenhouse - you apparently missed the news that the workweek causes climate fluctuations.
Lots of people are innovating alternative energy, including for transportation. A good start, after dropping the unhealthy and expensive denials of pollution damage, would be dropping the subsidies for petro fuels that keep so much R&D budgets and talent tied up in that deadend industry. I personally do my part in the equity analysis of alternative energy corporations, and promote wisdom in energy every chance I get. What do *you* do, other than chide Slashdotters with pollyanna pollution apologies?
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make install -not war
Do you honestly think that the US has become an "empire" since Bush took office?
Become an empire? No.
But two countries invaded in four years is certainly a step in the right direction, if that's the direction you want to be going in.
We have not conquered Iraq, we have liberated it.
But at what cost? The situation there is much worse now (at least for the Iraqi people) than it was before we went in.
For now the US helps their new government off it's feet.
Nice Freudian slip there; from where I'm sat, it does look a lot like the "coallition of the willing" has kicked the Iraqi government's feet out from under them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
#3 isn't as far-fetched as you could imagine - many countries (e.g. India & China ) were willing to commit their troops if the Iraq war got UN Approval (ok so they knew it wouldn't...). However, let's theoretically assume that it DID get UN approval - India, at least is obligated to provide a certain number of troops as UN peacekeepers. Initially USA had asked India & China to help in the Iraq war (Because China has the world's 2nd/3rd-largest standing army and India has the world's 4th/5th-largest). Can't speak for China, but India had to refuse because of the large amount of public opinion against the war - it was considered America's war. However, had it been UN-Approved (I know that sounds like a meaningless term to Americans, but it holds weight elsewhere), then it would have been a different story althogether. India and China both helped out in the Afghan War because the Taliban was a direct threat to both of them, but Iraq is not so clear-cut.
My Favourite Meme
Your parroted lies from the Bush camp are almost not worth replying to. But let's cut to the chase, instead of parsing words:
.... those people represented the conscience of America .... part of it's war- making capability, and we turning that power in our favor."
Your parroted lies from tke Kerry camp are almost not worth replying to. Bet let's cut to the chase, instead of parsing words:
The economy? Even after you've cooked it as much as you could, and given TRILLIONS away, mostly to rich people, it's still mismanaged into incoherence
Just who do you think provides the jobs to the rest of us? Am I on my 40k a year job going to hire anyone other than a kid to mow my lawn? These people get TRILLIONS back because A. They pay the MOST tax already. B. They are the ones who create jobs.
He's opened national parks to oil and other mining, as well as threatening the Alaskan wilderness for a maximum few months, delivered years from now.
Oh good God, not the Alaskan wilderness! Not only is it a frozen tundra up there where not a whole lot lives, the oil exploration would impact 1% of it altogether. Remember the pipeline that was supposed to be so bad for the carbou? They're thriving because the pipeline provides warm areas to breed next to.
And once again, instead of whining about it, you should be promoting ways of doing it cleanly, because we ought to be exploring these areas.
You sick fool, you're playing with millions of lives, including mine, with that moronic disregard for safety.
My comment was in response to you saying that JFK was brave for stading up to the Soviets, who could have killed A HELL OF A LOT MORE PEOPLE than teh current conflict in Iraq. Try keeping your standards to your side too.
Iraq is a success. Saddam is gone. Elections are scheduled. Once the insurgents are crushed, or give up, Iraq will be well on it's way to becoming a new free country.
Kerry helped end the war
You're right he did. He demoralized our troops and rallied the Vietnamese. Let me give you a quote from Colonel Bui Tin of the N. Vietnamese army:
"Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9AM to follow the growth of the antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and would struggle along with us
http://www.vwam.com/vets/buitin.html
Kerry and his antiwar buddies sure helped the war end--by helping our enemies.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Voting for Bush or Kerry is throwing away your vote. Neither of them are fit to lead the country at this time. If you really want to make your vote count write in the person you believe should be president.
I am writing in Colin Powell. I believe him to be a good and honest man with the leadership skills and knowledge to lead. His extensive military experience give him the skills to effectively lead the military while he has shown himself to be a man of peace and diplomacy.
Coding Blog
1) Make dummy porn site
2) Tell someone in China
3) Split reward 50-50
4) Profit!
repeat..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
As humans, if you are lucky, you live in a society that is generous in deciding how we would like to be treated and how we should treat others but there is no inherent right to exist, to be well fed and sheltered, or even to be happy. If their was, the planet and all governments would be in contempt of that right.
Some will argue that only god can provide a moral framework, but since the world cannot agree on who god is and what god's will is, god's will as we know it is decided by men just as if god did not exist, only with more blind certainty.
So, there is no fundamental right to porn and no fundamental right for governments to ban it. But most of us on the forum live in the US where we get to decide what our rights are and that we should mostly be left to our own devices, but only if we don't let the secretive, moralistic, blind-faith inspired Bush administration back into office.
It also doesn't mean that that societie's people are free. Just because the planet is big and the oppressed people are far away doesn't mean that we shouldn't want them to have human rights as we see them. Unfortunately, there is just no getting around the fact that societies have to judge one another based on a provincial moral relativism. We can only judge them on what we think is right.
As for myself, I think that living in a police state is bad for individuals. Just imagine living in an oppressive contry where people can be secretly arrested and held secretly in jail indefinitely without being charged or be tried in a secret trial. That would be awful. I can't imagine how horrible that would be...Oh, wait, never mind...
now it they would hand out bountis for spamer web sites and spamers in China I might actually let my mail server recive email from CN IP space.
I think it's naive to assume that Mao et al. were true believers. They were just dictators that said whatever was required to become all-powerful.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
China has long since ceased to be a 'communist' state. Communism is about how wealth is shared out and it doesn't take a genius to see that the new billionaires in China are more a product of capitalism than communism.
I know US citizens are trained from birth to have a knee jerk reaction to the word 'communism' and that the use of that word provides a convienient scapegoat for anything which seems threatening but you really have to see that there has been a corporate take over in China and that is where much western investment is headed now.
If the wealth created in China was shared out more equitably then you could maybe blame that on communism. The rest you'll have to blame on something else.
Read Animal Farm by George Orwell and you will see how the Chinese pigs are even now transforming.
Not a troll, read the book.
Instead of selling out to the opressive government, why not list the good chinese porn sites here for your fellow slashdotters. We may not have $250 to give you, but we'll appreciate it more and at least you can feel good about doing something positive for your fellow man.
-except in name. In practice, most of the central political tenets of communism are gone from the way China is run. Modern China is better described as a fascist country.
Kryten (reading poster on the wall): "Be a government informer! Betray your family and friends! Fabulous prizes to be won!...?"
Politics requires pragmatism. Principles kill.
[Grandparent Message]: "Morality" has always been an important aspect of Chinese culture
[Parent Message]: Wow, what a fat lot you know about China and the CCP. I think what you say is mostly bullshit. Morality is actually important to most Chinese
Can I point out the bleeding obvious, which is that this is what he actually said?
Anyway, in response to the rest of your message: I didn't see Autopr0n extol the virtues of Christianity in his post.
In addition, I should point out that most fanatical (relatively speaking) Christians would support the censorship and supression of porn (whilst probably jerking off to it in private); you seem to have made the mistake of assuming Autopr0n shared the views of all fellow Americans, and (to some extent) that all Americans shared his views.
(*) IIRC Autopr0n *seemed* to be American, but I wouldn't bet my life on this.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Well... I'm kinda mixed on that statement. They didn't just 'say' whatever was required to become all-powerful, they went out and did it too. They were leaders after all, not the ones who swayed with the wind (Kerry-style)...at least AFAIK anyway...
My Favourite Meme
'I'm gonna post me a new minivan!!!'
Post your favourite porn sites!
To start with:
http://www.thehun.com/
I was in China recently.
The number and availability of prostitutes in the country is quite simply staggering. In Beijing you can't turn a corner without seeing a "barber shop" (indicated by the striped pole) with a girl smoking in the window. Need a haircut? Don't bother.
I'm scared silly about the impact of AIDs in the country once it gets going (if it hasn't already).
is this:
1. Surf for porn
2. ??? (Just make sure you wipe up after you.)
3. Profit!
porn and prostitution are often NOT victimless crimes: 3 million people a year (according to National Geographic) are sold in to slavery to feed these "industries".
porn and prostitution have more victims than just about any other crimes in the world. Even in countries where such questionable activities are legal!
Everytime you get this fallacy in your head you should cruise the streets in some thrird world country and count the CHILDREN that are selling themselves in the streets for prostitution.
Porn and prostitution are a great cause of decay in society and both should be illegal. It's not about "just" about morality. It's about crime. And as another poster said, morality IS legislated.
Porn fucks you!
*ducks*
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
"Murderous psychos against porn!"
I guess that was the gist of the movement all along. No surprise here. Of course we're still dealing with those sort of people here in the US who want everyone to go to Hell if they're not deathly afraid of their bodies.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
It is precisely that line of thinking that kept Ross Perot from winning.
Ross Perot is what kept Ross Perot from winning.
Chris knew he had no choice. He kneeled in front of the leader..
That was a fucking good trick, no matter how you look at it.
Any takers?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Now maybe the sites will load faster... Er... Wait a minute...
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
btw, can anyone can tell me what makes GW so much worse than other past presidents? Just as some examples, I think his dad was MUCH worse by pulling out of Iraq, and John F Kennedy nearly annihilated the entire planet because he wouldn't just make a deal with the russians (sure it would be a small sign of weakness, but jesus christ, the alternative is crazy).
I have no idea if you are asking a rhetorical question or not. I was going to flame the shit out of you but now that I have calmed down I will try to be helpful. Others might find this useful as well. Consider getting your information about current events from sources other than CNN and FOX News. Does anybody fucking read anymore (not necessarily directed at you)?
A short reading list:
when someone explains a concept by likening it to cellular function within a living organism. :)
feh. stuff.
My comment was in response to you saying that JFK was brave for stading up to the Soviets, who could have killed A HELL OF A LOT MORE PEOPLE than teh current conflict in Iraq. Try keeping your standards to your side too.
Did you know that a nuclear war was only averted because a single Russian submarine commander decided not to fire a missile. JFK very, very nearly destroyed the entire world.
Of course Kerry's actions may have given some "comfort to the enemy", but that's missing the point. The invasion of Vietnam was wrong, and any decent person would have been supporting VC guerillas (at least on the assumption that people have the right to defend their own country). Blind patriotism is immoral.
IIRC in China they don't execute children or the mentally disabled, unlike in the USA.
This ``morality campaign'' to eliminate pornography has just as much to do with morality as...well, as much as the People's Republic of China has to do with the people.
In other words, zilch.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
heh i remember that the usa put up some websites at the fbi, cia and all those new gov/feds places to report stuff about joe avarage who lives next door to you and your neighbourhood.
accuse your neighbour of terrorism, put him to jail and all that shit.
now i call that more scary or more powerful, whatever you might call it.
the usa invented it first, and perverted it.
they could just google for porn, and take a couple of the first hits.
Gods. I'm replying to this.
2 families with $40k/yr disposable income going up to $45k/yr disposable income will spend more (and thus have a greater impact upon the economy) than one family going from $80k/yr to $90k/yr. What happens when the family with larger amount of money receives a tax cut (and thus a bump in their disposable income) is often an indirect bump to the economy; a stock price going up will not directly increase jobs, especially when one of the biggest problems in the financial markets today is too much money circulating there, not too little. However, when a middle-class income family receives a tax cut, they often end up paying outstanding bills with it or they outright spend it on luxury goods, directly pumping moneys into the economy. The ratio of people earning $60k/yr to $110k/yr (yes, $110k/yr -- we're talking disposable income) is about 2:1 to 3:1. From these economic theories, it is clear that cutting personal taxes for the greater masses provide a bigger economic impact than the wealthiest.
As for your rhetoric that these wealthiest few create jobs, where do you think they received their money? They are often in the upper eschelon of companies who sell to the masses. The largest companies in the world, whether they are retail sector like Wal-Mart or financial services company like Citicorp, cater to the middle class.
Hear, hear!
If I meet one more libertarian who's not voting libertarian (again) because they want to vote for a candidate with 'a chance to win' I'm going to scream. Perhaps if you people voted for the candidate whose platform best represents your views instead of one you think will win, third-party candidates would have a chance. Sure, the money and power aren't there for them right now. Sure, it will take time to effect change. However, if we keep putting off the hard work and compromising our views just to be on the 'winning team', it will NEVER happen. Why the hell do you belong to a third party if you're just going to vote Republican or Democrat anyway? Kinda defeats the purpose of a third party. Since the 1850s, no third party candidate has received a single electoral college vote*. We could change that.
*That I could find. I know for sure that Ross Perot did not receive any, despite getting about 20% of the popular vote, the largest amount for a third-party candidate since the 1850s.
http://xkcd.com/386/
This sort of thinking was exposed during the whole Janet Jackson thing, anyway. People claimed that free speech was threatened, but it's fairly obvious that that sort of thing has never been acceptable. Despite that we've maintained a thriving democracy with some of the best free speech protection in the world for more than 300 years nevertheless.
Only on slashdot could a story about the chinese communists cracking down on porn turn into a condemnation of american democracy.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
when they start doing it for spam. Shows that they can censor effectively, which proves the PRC government complicit in the torrent of spam rushing from their borders.
If you want people not to question things around them, make sure there isnt much free time for them.
If i were chinese gov i would make lots of noise but do nothing to cut down on pr0n. Tianmmmen(sp?)happened because a lot of young people , with lots of energy , had lots of free time.
Make sure the people are too busy watching pron and there wont be a problem.
Dont make people's life drab, make them colorful and they wont worry about lack of political freedoms.
Hong Kong and Singapore are both excellent examples.
I will bet even money that if US became a military dictatorship tomorrow , there will be about 3 protesters . The rest will be watching cable TV, and wondering which SUV to buy next.
Wanted : A Signature.
I have seen a lot of Americans wishing for a different electoral system. I guess the theory is that if it was only this way or that it would be perfect. Its not so, I'm told that you can prove this fact but I have no idea.
The issues with the American electoral system stem from several facts.
1) The presidency is a directly elected (mostly) post. Only one person can be president, and he is selected by the electoral college. This tends to shape the way the large parties act and cast themselves.
2) The Small parties have no clue. The various small parties (Libertarian, Green etc) insist on acting like small versions of the big parties, and failing at it rather badly. (I define sucess in politics as getting your people elected and your ideas in effect). If the small parties would act like small parties do in the rest of the world they would probably have much more luck.
I live in Israel, land of many many parties. The small parties know that they will never get their guy to be Prime Minister, but if they get a few seats in the Kenesset (Our parlament) they may be able to get some of the things they want done.
If the US Libertarian party would take their resources and spend them running people for county commisioner and the state legislator etc they may be able to get a few people elected. If things are split between the 2 main parties they may even be able to use a few seats to get some of the things they want pushed threw. Not all of what they want, and not every time. Some of the things that they want some of the time. Yes it means playing the horse trading game, but thats democracy for you. I'll support you on X, you support me on Y.
I wish the parties in the USA would figure this out.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Good thing we have freedom in the U.S.A. and that political sites aren't being taken down under false pretenses, cough, Indymedia, cough.
Why is this ironic, you might ask?
The answer is simple -- if you read the Communist Manifesto, you'll see that Marx was an ardent advocate of sexual immorality, and immorality in general.
yes, clinton was a moron. i would have prefered nearly any psycho to clinton. and to make matters worse he was reelected a second term!
don't forget clinton signed the dmca into law.
i don't know if perot ever had a chance, but he f'd up which completely destroyed any chance he ever had.
A simple example: his position was that America should not be in the business of "nation building", that America shouldn't be the world's policeman, and that under his adminstration, America wouldn't be. Remember? That was a big part of his foreign policy platform. Look at where we are now. Anyone who believed him on that, fell for a huge lie.
For once, no, this is not a lie. He accomplished that, the US is no longer viewed as the worlds policeman, but exactly the opposite.
Aggressor, criminal, killer, pick your favorite.
China is simply an example of a country that is dying slower than the USA.
You cannot successfully restrict man's base nature. While not advocating legalized violence, I am a proponent of adopting mature views of sex and drugs.
Has Holland descended into anarchy because prostitution and drugs are legal? No. Remember, you can only plug the dike for so long before cracks cause the wall to fall.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Presidential order 13233. Dub called it an "implementation" of a law passed by congress. The law says that 12 years after you leave office your presidential records are to be made public. The "implementation" is bastardized citing a Nixon-related court decision to implement the following: wait 12 years then you can have information if and only if I say you can. So the question is: what did Dub do during Daddy's term that had to be hidden?
Historian's have nearly always been able to do a post-mortem on a presidency -- we're never going to know what the hell happend from 2000-2004.
Looks like Britney Spears just lost 1 billion fans.
...I would imagine that the primary meaning is "liberty" as opposed to "slavery". Everyone have the right to exist as an independent person, not as property.
Anyway, ask the UN. I'm sure you'll get a lot of different answers. Mysteriously, each country will fall under their own definition of "liberty".
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can you please give an example? If not, and you seem to back off from your charge, why do you base your opinion on an impression that you admit is false? That just makes no sense to me.
Personally I started out luke-warm towards Kerry, but the more I hear him speak the more I realize that a) the man is very intelligent and knowledgeable, b) the man thinks very deeply about issues in front of him, c) he did a good job leading and taking care of his crew in the Mekong delta, and d) he volunteered to risk his life out of a sense of duty to his nation. That has to speak to his character.
The more I see Bush the more I realize that he's just plain out of his depth. He doesn't belong anywhere near the big red button.
btw, can anyone can tell me what makes GW so much worse than other past presidents? Just as some examples, I think his dad was MUCH worse by pulling out of Iraq,
41 was smart enough to realize what a disaster he'd have on his hands if he took Baghdad; the U.S. wasn't and isn't prepared to deal with the aftermath of destroying a country like Iraq. That should be obvious by now.
and John F Kennedy nearly annihilated the entire planet because he wouldn't just make a deal with the russians (sure it would be a small sign of weakness, but jesus christ, the alternative is crazy).
Where do you get the quaint notion that Kennedy didn't make a deal? At the time of the crisis we had 25 Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey, a threat that nicely mirrored placing missles in Cuba. Within six months of the crisis those missiles had been decommissioned, ostensibly because they were no longer needed. But we did not have our first wing of Minuteman I missiles fully operational for a couple years after that, so I'm not sure that argument holds.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Are dogs required to wear pants in public?
Honestly, if I was running China, I'd be stamping out pr0n. Or at least, pass some mandatory "trim" law. Grass on the field, and all that. But hire a lawn service or something, you know what I'm sayin'?
Trucks didn't just explode under Bush. They've been exploding since the 80's. And it's because the goverment tried to force everyone to drive tiny plastic boxes. Most people don't want to drive tiny plastic boxes and no amount of legislation is going to change that. The only thing you could do is tax gas until it's $3 a gallon which is extremely regressive, and pretty much guaranteed to get you voted out.
America is a nation where killing can be shown on any broadcast television, but nudity is banned.
...I agree with your nuclear solution with one addition. As we find out the names of the people involved, we hunt down and kill every son, daughter, aunt, uncle, and every other relative they have on the entire planet right on out to the 8th cousin.
America is a nation where a thirteen-year-old schoolchild can be let in to watch a movie starring action hero becoming a vigilante and gunning down and knifing all the bad guys that have been trying to get in his way, but where that same thirteen-year-old cannot watch a movie where two people are making love.
America is a nation where exchanging money for sex is illegal everywhere but in parts of a single state of the fifty, but exchanging money to kill, becoming a corporate mercenary working in Iraq, is considered laudable and encouraged.
America is a nation where up until one year ago, thirteen states had laws banning consentual anal sex. Forty years ago, *every* state made consentual anal sex illegal. Fifty years ago, sodomy could widely be (and was) punished by "corrective actions", such as forced lobotomies. For those of you unfamiliar with lobotomies, they are commonly performed by inserting an ice pick through a patient's skull and swirling it around in certain areas of the brain in hopes of destroying portions of the brain that induce "deviant behavior".
America is a nation where (well, with the exception of San Francisco), being in public showing bare breasts (unless one is nursing an infant), genitalia, or one's rear end is grounds for lewdness arrest, but carrying a loaded gun visibily on one's hip is legal and acceptable.
America is a nation where a seventeen-year-old who convinces his seventeen-year-old girlfriend to send him a nude picture of herself has committed a felony (United States Code Title 18, Part I, 2251).
America is a nation where it is perfectly legal for an Olympic swimmer and lifeguard to stand by a pool and point, yelling insults and mocking, as someone drowns.
America is a nation where we cannot expose nipples, but we cheer on invading Afghanistan to "free women from the burka" and promote other human rights.
America is a nation that values free political speech, as long as it isn't:
(a) in Iraq and in opposition to the invasion (freedom of press was one of the first things removed from Iraqis, and newspapers and the only available television station were shut down for being critical of the invasion).
(b) Involving presidential candidates debating other than Bush or Kerry.
(c) Involve any Islamic advocacy. A student volunteer forum webmaster visiting the United States was charged with terrorist activities for running Islamic websites. The other side is well represented and permitted to operate, however -- consider the following quotes from this single forum thread:
My vote is that if they nuke us, we don't bother asking exactly where the bomb came from. Instead we turn ALL the likely sponsor nations into radioactive parking lots. The we tell the rest of the Islamic nations that if they don't get rid of their own terrorists, they will face the same thing.
***
Payback isn't payback unless they continue to hurt for a long, long time. As each father, mother, and child is assasinated, it will be very hard for anyone to celebrate the conspirators as martyrs.
The message would be, "We won't only roast your damned nation. We will kill every last person on earth you ever cared about."
***
I take it one step further - desroy Mecca and Media. That's right nuke their holy lands - get rid of them and than start destroying the mosques. Sprinkle their lands with pig blood. We might as well face it - this is a holy war against us supported by Muslims (look at the
May we never see th
I apologize for being so harsh, but do you know anything about how campaign financing works? Part of your Federal tax dollars go towards the various political parties for campaigning. There a magic number of 5% of votes that qualifies parties for additional campaign funds. By voting for the third party, no chance to win candidate that you really want in office, you're helping to ensure that they get more campaign dollars the next time.
Please educate yourself as to how the political systems in America works before advising others.
Egads, man, if you can't stomach Nader isn't there someone else you can vote for? What about Badnarik, Cobb, Peroutka...there's got to be someone closer to your beliefs. Sacrificing your conscience just to make a point doesn't seem like an equitable trade, IMO.
Constitutionally Correct
Anyone with interest on the subject owes it to themselves to read this paper, which examines Japan's case. Pornography, Rape, and Sex Crimes in Japan
Japan underwent a massive swing from one of the most conservative nations with respect to pornography to one of the most liberal, and extremely accepting of fetishes. There was a corresponding *decrease* in sex crimes.
May we never see th
Umm, how about pointing out specific lies that Kerry has told? Please do not regurgitate what you hear on Fox news...and while you are at it, please explain how Bush has not "mislead" or better yet, make the argument that Bush has been completely honest with the american people.
Your sense of Kerry as a used car salesman is exactly the effect that Bush's Spin wants you to have...YOU, have been influenced without even knowing it.
Remember in all of this, that government isn't an inherently bad thing. Government, when it works right, is the collective will of the people. Of course, when it doesn't work right it can become an oppression of one segment of the population by another. All governments, even democracies, are located somewhere in this continuum. I kind of like the idea of using an economic incentive for enforcement because it is a proxy for the will and motivation to succeed. The Chinese government is putting its money where its mouth is. If they really don't want pornography, they're going to have to pay for it an amount proportionate to how much the public wants, or doesn't want, to go along with the policy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Uh huh. Bush thought Saddam had WMDs. So did Kerry, both Clintons, and just about everyone else on both sides. So either this was a giant bipartisan scheme to lie to everyone, or they simply made a mistake. Do you call the weatherman a liar when he predicts rain and it doesn't happen?
Kerry has been telling the hard truth
What truth would that be? That we could have resolved Iraq with diplomacy, when we now know that Saddam was bribing our would-be diplomatic partners? That the recession is Bush's fault, when it was caused by the bubble bursting, corporate fraud that began in the prior administration, and the 9/11 attacks? That only the "richest 1%" benefited from the tax cuts, when in fact they made the tax code more progressive?
into the Patriot Act
I don't like the Patriot Act either, but can you honestly say that Al ("Clipper") Gore wouldn't have done the same thing? Isn't it amazing that this huge bill materialized out of nowhere right after 9/11? It was a wish list of policies law enforcement had always wanted but couldn't get passed through rational debate, including Clinton-supported policies like "know your customer". This is not a Democrat/Republican issue. The party in power is lousy on civil liberties, and the opposition party pretends to care so they can use it to attack the other guys. Here's Kerry on the Patriot Act:In other words, the only problem with excessive government power is that he isn't the one who gets to use it. Kerry will not be an improvement in this regard; in fact he could easily be worse, since liberals won't be as willing to criticize him. (In the same way that many conservatives, not including myself, won't criticize Bush for running up the deficit with huge spending increases).
With Bush, democracy itself is on the outsource list.
Yes, the stormtroopers will be arriving at your door shortly. This is as silly as the wackos on the right who were convinced Clinton was going to use Y2K to cancel the elections and institute a dictatorship.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Ok, This is political not a flame. "John F Kennedy nearly annihilated the entire planet because he wouldn't just make a deal with the russians (sure it would be a small sign of weakness, but jesus christ, the alternative is crazy)." You must be talking about the cuban missle crisis. When someone parks alot of nukes 100 miles away from your country on a small little island who's economy consists of rum and cigars you better be ready to drop everything and fight for you life, because once nukes are in place there is nothing you can do about it. I want a president to be prepared to go all the way 100 times out of a 100 in that same situation. "I'd rather have a whore for president than somebody who is as naive as Bush...yes you heard me correctly - I'd rather have a sell-out like Kerry than somebody who actually stands for what they believe in - like Bush." I thought that not voting was the worst waste of democracy. However Voting against someone who stands for what they believe in and supporting someone who has no beliefs. That takes the cake. I work underneath people like you all day long. You loot and feed off other people because you support the worst in people and reject the quality in others. For the record (IMHO). People shout "Anybody but Bush". Im not a huge fan of Bush, but if Kerry wasn't a credible cannidate I would not support him. A sell-out whore is not better. Both Bush and Kerry stand for what they believe in. Bush is right about one thing. Once you make a decision you have to continue on that path without flopping. Sure we went alone against the UN, sure we invaded the wrong country, sure he pissed off the world. But the world knows without a doubt that when he says something he means it. For better or for worse. Kerry is a true civil servant of the United States. Look at his story. He fought in Vietnam. When he came home he got involved in the anti-war movement. Ever since then he has been involved in politics. This guy is rich, Beverly Hill Billies rich. The realist in me tells me that he is involved in politics because he truly wants to help out. Whoever you vote for, vote for them because you think they will improve this great nation of ours, not because they will pay you for telling them about porn sites.
Bush has been trying to do #4 since the "Mission Accomplished" banner was hung. As a matter of fact, that seems to have been his entire strategy: rebuild it so the population will welcome us as rescuers from the Evil Saddam. But I know people on the ground in Iraq (as I'm sure we all do) that have been involved in reconstruction projects. They repair or rebuild a generator plant, and it's attacked by insurgents. They repair pipelines, and other pumping stations are sabotaged. A year and a half of rebuilding, and Iraq is currently in exactly the same poor state of disrepair it was in after the fall of Saddam. The average citizen of Baghdad still has electricity maybe 4-8 hours a day. Water service is sporadic, and is only available by truck in many parts of the cities. There has literally been no improvement whatsoever in the lives of the Iraqi people.
What I'm saying is that all the reconstruction projects are just pissing away money as fast as they can spend it. There is no actual progress being made, and the insurgents are determined to keep the population miserable. Without a functioning free press (American provided news is seen as biased propaganda in much the same way we view Al Jazeera,) more information is interpreted and distributed by sympathetic local leaders, who find it easy to blame the American occupiers as the cause of the misery. The general population has pretty much had it with the Americans, even though they're vaguely aware the insurgents are causing the small bits of damage.
The solutions I've heard are all tough:
- Walk away and let Iraqis duke it out amongst themselves. With all the weapons available in that country, hundreds of thousands will perish, and they'll end up with three constantly warring factions as the "most stable" result.
- We could also keep doing what we're doing, which is accomplishing absolutely nothing except adding the deaths of more kids to this quagmire.
- We could drop our "U.S.A. Only" signs, invite the U.N. to share in the pacification and see if the Iraqi insurgents respect the blue helmets any more than they respect the U.S. Army. That's assuming the U.N. doesn't tell us to go fornicate ourselves under the Pottery Barn rules: "you broke it, you pay for it." (They might not; being as corrupt as they are, I can imagine many of their member states wanting to get involved for a share of the spOILs of war.)
- We can ship in two or three times as many troops as we already have, and see if we can violently but dramatically put down the insurgents (at an unknown cost of U.S. lives.)
Those are all pretty crappy solutions to a war we were lied into starting. And yes, what Bush says about Kerry is absolutely true: we (the U.S.) would have been far safer leaving Saddam in power. We would have lost 1000 fewer soldiers lives, and we would not have pissed away every last drop of goodwill that Americans have been building up internationally for the last 80 years. Saddam was no threat to us or anyone, as the UN sanctions had been working remarkably well. He would have fallen sooner or later, probably from within, leaving Iraq in a much more stable state than they are today.John
Did you know that a nuclear war was only averted because a single Russian submarine commander decided not to fire a missile. JFK very, very nearly destroyed the entire world.
To be honest, I had no idea about it. Could you please provide some links to read more about it, preferably on Wikipædia? Because, quite frankly, until then, I call bullshit. Thanks.
You have that backward son, or is genocide in Africa the US's fault?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
and John F Kennedy nearly annihilated the entire planet because he wouldn't just make a deal with the russians (sure it would be a small sign of weakness, but jesus christ, the alternative is crazy).
That's speculation. Like WMDs. Though the WMDs were really produced somewhere...
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
How this got a +4 insightful is beyond me.
I guess trolling with what's popular gets you karma.
This sheds no insight into anything!
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
This sounds really good, From now on I'll find out where all those porn-servers in my spams are located.
1) receive spam.
2) locate server.
3) PROFIT!
Privacy is terrorism.
1. Put a little soft-core on yahoo.com.
2. Report it.
3. Park a new domain pointing to your site
4. Report it.
5. Go to 3.
It never ceases to amuse me how people try to derive pre-arranged moral conclusions from "reasonable" arguments. Take this one:
Attempts to externally enforce sexual morality are similarly founded on the survival of society.
What is society? Either it's just a bunch of people together, in which case its "survival" just kinda happens; or it's "the Society" of people who adhere to a rigid set of moral laws and tend to exclude people who don't - in which case, why give a hoot about its survival? Bring it down!
It used to be the principle on which premarital sex was sanctioned - it tends to create children in need of a home. It is also the principle on which gay marriage should not be allowed.
Excuse me? Gay marriage tends to create children in need of a home? Or do you mean that gay couples adopting children tend to create children in need of a home?
The government is basically designed to prevent 'slippery slopes' by being able to correct trends in other parts of the government. It isn't fool-proof, of course, but it is ever-present on the minds of many politicians and especially the judiciary. That's a big reason, IMO, why the US has had such a stable government for such a long period of time.
Perot lost becasue he wanted to loose.
Did everyone forget he dropped out of the election, lost all credibility and then came back.
Get paid by the Chinese government to look at pr0n all day? There is more than enough porn sites to make a decent living at this.
796F75617265616E65726400
He would have fallen sooner or later, probably from within, leaving Iraq in a much more stable state than they are today.
I don't know about that. I could see all of the factions in Iraq rushing to fill the power vacuum, leaving the country in a state similar to what it is in today. The only difference would be that the US wouldn't be blamed directly for the troubles.
Wow, this is scary. No wonder the country is
screwed up if people have given up on the concept of absolutes all together.
Sure Lenin, Mao, etc. all believed in what they
did, but so did Martin Luther King and Harriet
Tubman. Effective change has never come by people
who only believe in shades of grey. Why would
they bother?
actually if you understand english, "creates children in need of a home" goes with the sentence about premarital sex. it has nothing to do with the sentence about gay marriages.
"Give me porn, or give me death!"
Table-ized A.I.
At least you're honest in your sleazy committment to the lies that are destroying us. Another poster has handily schooled you on discredited "supply side" voodoo economics, which you have conveniently forgotten from the 1980s. I'll just point out that you are greedy to destroy Alaskan wilderness because *you* don't want to visit it. Just as the Prudhoe Bay drilling has annihilated an area the size of Connecticut, many times the promised "limited area", once it got past Congress and American sensibility. I'm sure you're slavering for the Greenhouse to warm it right up, so you can go to the beach.
As for JFK, he took a calculated risk, and his calculations were *correct*: we needed to stop the Russians from terrorizing us with Cuban nukes, and keep our advantage in terrorizing them with European nukes, to win the game we'd constructed in the Cold War. Carp like a crying child about how scary it is for you in retrospect, but Kennedy faced that fear in realtime, and delivered victory without bloodshed. Your boy has us in the Iraqmire: he has a lot more in common with JFK on Vietnam, and really with Johnson, who wouldn't fold a losing hand built on a lie. Speaking of lies, you somehow twist history into a Vietnamese military victory that ended the war, enlisting a Communist propagandist to contrive your point. In fact, patriotic Americans ended the war by wresting control of it away from the unaccountable warmongers in power. Sound familiar? But you probably want to go back into Vietnam, too, with guns blazing. You should go to hell - I'm sure you'll love the atmosphere.
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>>and the fact that he's a psycho
It's a fact that Ross Perot was/is a psycho? I've heard this many times, but nobody has ever offered an expanation as to exactly what was so insane about Perot.
I'll ask again: what makes you think Perot is insane? What idea did Perot propose that are so crazy?
Thank you.
Powell can afford to pose as an adult in the Bush nursery, especially when his agenda can't be tested in reality while they castrate it. You might want to look into this career whitewasher's roots denying massacres in Vietnam for a living, before you subscribe to his slick public image. Read about how he covered for the My Lai massacre, as even his fans admit.
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Heck, if you were planning on buying a huge house and a sports car, and then lost your job, you'd be stupid to go ahead with those plans and risk losing it all, right? So why is that smart, but when President Bush changes directions because of mass murder on American soil, that's deceitful?
Bush loves the tax credit that subsidizes SUV purchases, despite the arrival on his watch of huge CO2 jumps, $50 oil barrels, and catastrophic wars over oil dependence. If we'd taxed gas to $2:gallon, and used that money to get free of foreign oil, we'd be rid of Bush and his parasites by now, and prices could be heading lower, instead of higher, with that extra money going to American engineers, rather than foreign terrorists.
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Yet another Anonymous obtuse Coward posting half-bright prattle in this thread. Those 5% thresholds are part of the system for drawing pressure off the "winner takes all" system that's strangling our democracy. 6% parties can't muster a win, but divert pressure from both winning parties and the system itself. A party that gets 10% or more can fund itself. The real reform is discarding the rules that protect the party duopoly from any threat, including those that nurture inconsequential parties which can't get into a real race. If you want diversity, organize pressure on a Democrat or Republican to organize reforms that open up the power to more takers. It sounds like a catch-22, but with so much abuse of power by those who have it, and threatened permanent minority status for those who don't have enough, that is rewardingly fertile ground to tend. Ignore the scorched earth Republicans at your peril, because their victory is a defeat for any kind of political progress, except corporatism.
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Bush knew there were no WMDs then, and invented fake intelligence to support his committment to war in Iraq. He and Cheney are still insisting on the WMD threat, though it's completely discredited. That doesn't faze you, because you are yourself committed to Bush, despite intelligence and evidence.
Bush is the one turning the Patriot Act into exactly those stormtroopers you trivialize. Ask the thousands of Muslims in Guantanamo, grabbed in America, about the stormtroopers. Ask the Iraqis rounded up (95% "by mistake") into Abu Ghraib - and the rest of the American gulags - about the stormtroopers. Ask the old black Floridians being intimidated into staying away from the voting booths this November about the stormtroopers. While you're at it, find an old German to ask about the stormtroopers they thought would never come for *them* in the 1940s, because they weren't Jewish, or Communist, or homosexual, or Catholic, or Gypsy - but who came nevertheless. They'll tell you that it *can* happen here, that the beginnings have already arrived.
As for Kerry, things are so bad in America that even his weak opposition to the Patriot Act is better than Bush's hunger for more. What's the real alternative? And don't give me that "third party" jive - they're all certainly going to lose, taking votes with them that could get rid of Bush's abuse of democracy.
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Why would powerful male atheists trying to limit human reproduction (one child per family) try to stop people from obtaining masturbation aids ?
1. They are powerful, this can not possibly affect their own personal happines level. If they just want an excuse to keep people down there are surely plenty of better alternatives.
2. They are male and thus understand the male drive. Some women are against pornography because they just don't understand the male requirement for release.
3. They are atheists, so there is no holy book or religious dictum to make them act stupid.
4. China is DEAD serious about limiting its population. Shouldn't they be PROMOTING masturbation?????
No, this is not a riddle. And don't tell me the Chinese leadership is dumb or ignorant or some such thing - they are not.
Is traditional Chinese family values THAT powerful on mainland China??? Do you have a better guess as to why??
Now Iran will pluck the ripe fruit they've watched.
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For Christians, true morality begins when God changes the heart, and transforms from the inside, and finally manifests itself in external behaviour. World peace will never be achieved until Christ returns to destroy this universe and move all those who have been internally transformed to a new heavens and a new earth. (In some interpretations, there is first a period of 1000 years of externally enforced peace on this Earth with Christ as the ruler - which ultimately fails, proving the need to destroy this world and start over).
Christians who think that true morality can be externally imposed are heretics. The heresy is called "legalism" or "phariseeism" after the Jewish sect prominent in the New Testament. A more subtle mistake Christians make is to think that they, as an individual, can transform their own lives by imposing a set of rules on themselves. This is no more effective than having the government do it - the result is an annoying "holier than thou" attitude. In Christian doctrine, the process of becoming truly righteous must begin with a supernatural internal change initiated by God Himself.
Bravo !! This is the Christianity I was raised to believe (American Protestant independent). I am now an Atheist as I no longer believe in a God of any kind. But there is a lot of wisdom in the Bible and in religion, and its a darned shame that VALUES are not taught in American public schools (and either prayer or meditation - each child should learn and do one or the other or both).
How "Crazy" is he?
Comedians and Perot's critics routinely brand him as "crazy", and Ross himself acknowledged the charges, rather gracefully, by dancing with his wife to the tune of Patsy Cline's song "Crazy" in the last election. It's such a broad term as to mean nothing; no one is saying he belongs in a mental institution.
So IS he crazy? And what does that mean? None of us are psychiatrists, but a close look at Perot shows four traits that do in fact alienate him from reality. He is obsessive, delusional, paranoid and never wrong (in his own mind.) Like many conspiracy fans, he can explain away any unpleasant facts with "secret information" or conspiracies by his enemies.
His
obsessiveness
is evident in his focus on American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War. He became concerned about them in the late 1960s, as a sincere and fervent supporter of the Vietnam War. He led a quixotic mission with food and other goods for American POWs in North Vietnam, which failed due to opposition from that country, Moscow and even Washington (after Perot refused to go along with Nixon Administration PR goals.) Fair enough.
But Perot has remained convinced ever since that large numbers of POWs are being hidden in Asia, despite massive evidence to the contrary. (In fact, there is strong evidence that most of the MIAs weren't even missing; they were shot down while flying illegal missions over Cambodia, Laos, etc. and the government called them MIAs rather than admit the missions.)
The Reagan Administration even gave him access to top secret classified documents in an attempt to answer his relentless criticism of them for not bringing the MIAs back, but Perot only saw what he wanted to, and remains unconvinced. In fact, this was the origin of his feud with George Bush; as VP Bush drew the unpleasant job of telling Perot they were cutting off his top secret clearance, and Perot typically started a no-holds-barred feud with Bush, which in part led to Bill Clinton's election.
Delusional
One of Ross' most dangerous traits is his unwillingness to admit facts he doesn't want to believe. If someone does this in an argument, but they know they are not right, we call them a liar. Ross does not seem to be a liar, though he says untruths. Instead, he refuses to believe the information he doesn't like. He changes his perception, not the reality, and this is the most "crazy" of his well known traits.
His own son, Ross Jr., says "If he thinks he is right, that's all that matters." (Posner, p128). There are many examples. Perot has his company's headquarter's grass spray-painted green during Dallas' dry spells. (p91) When some employees who had won the company's "Recruiter of the Year" award left EDS, Perot wanted to erase their names from the engraved plaque.
EDS briefly lost their biggest contract to a competitor, Bradford, at one point. Perot told his board "They are crooks! They bribed someone and we will find out who!" EDS's president, Mort Myerson, replied "I know one of their executive vice-presidents, and it's on the up and up." Perot's response was "That's the kind of soft-headed thinking that makes EDS lose business." (The company won the contract back with an effort combining political pressure, lawsuits, and an attack team that followed Bradford executives and the state officials who awarded the contract, dug up dirt on them, videotaped some Bradford officials with prostitutes, etc.) (Posner, p127-138).
Paranoia
Perot's paranoia is pretty well known, due to his announcement in 1992 that he was quitting the presidential race (in which he was a very strong contender) because Republican's were planning to disrupt his daughters wedding (by forging photos of phony lesbian sex.) But it has long been typical of him.
He thinks he lost his 1993 debate to Al Gore because Gore had a hidden earpiece, through which he was being fed answers, or possibly questions. (Posner, p330). While he was serving on a Texas anti-drug commission in the early 1980s,
Wow, this is scary. No wonder the country is
screwed up if people have given up on the concept of absolutes all together.
Sure Lenin, Mao, etc. all believed in what they
did, but so did Martin Luther King and Harriet
Tubman. Effective change has never come by people
who only believe in shades of grey. Why would
they bother?
Idealists and the unreasonable CHANGE THE WORLD.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
The USA could do the same thing to stop kiddie porn, pay people to report it!
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
1. He invested a lot of money in NeXT at a share price that was very disadvantageous to himself.
2. He exited the presidential race and then got back in, claiming the reason was that republicans had threatened to ruin his daughter's wedding.
3. Appearing on Larry King wearing the tin foil hat.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
but you wouldnt listen
1. set up porn site.
2. turn yourself in for reward.
3. ??? profit???
4. prison
a slut did tulsa
I find it sad that people have not discovered the fact that the internet is a massive opportunity to break down and replace the old restrictive layers (companies, countries, religions, races, etc.) which separate human experience. It seems that entities desperate to maintain their identity have reacted to the free flow of information on the internet with mostly scorn, anger, and even fear. They either try to pretend that the internet is no different then the way things were done before in the real world, or they enforce their own, selfish barriers. Instead of embracing new ways for content to be distributed and authors connect with their fans, corporations/media pass laws to restrict and control their "intellectual property". Profit before freedom. Instead of discovering the vast variety of ideas/information on the internet, which allows a person to change and grow, countries restrict control so that they can keep their population constrained in whatever perfect little moral bubble they see fit to describe. Socialism/brainwashing before freedom.
I'm NOT saying the internet is some kind of utopia that requires that things like property, identity, and category go away. What I am saying is that the internet is a kind of mirror into how much confusion and pain we've created in the world by unnecessarily trying to seperate people into different groups, groups which have no basis in reality, and which blind us to how connected we all really are.
Unfortunate it seems, that those in power would do everything possible to stop the internet from giving the power of information to normal people.
Now, go crawl back into your whole.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Schools teach tons of values. With a particular emphasis on Multiculturalism, Drug free living, and soforth.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"It is has been discovered that these communist leaders are financially backed by Bush's Moral Majority League, and the Porn Site operators feel particularly duped by a fellow named Oral Roberts..."
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
I don't find it hard to believe that one could find intelligence to back up any claim, if one looked hard enough. Isn't it obvious that Bush decided to go to war with Iraq before they had any 'smoking guns'? Everyone may have received the same intelligence, but nobody was told how uncredible it was, or that they got it from a bubble gum machine in Qatar.
If this intelligence was truly credible, the CIA wouldn't have stated that Iraq was NOT a threat just after 9/11.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
sorry, he hasn't been heard of since 'the incident'.
On China, the news item of 2 kids run down by a train, the party blamed online gaming (fatigue).
This was used to help justify the crackdown on wayward internet cafe's.
Does anyone else wonder what games the kids were playing for so long? Or even if there weren't playing games at all, that the train was no accident? Not that I'm suggesting suicide at all, but the party must have found the kids at some stage (after or before the time of death).
But the argument against gay marriage was drawn in analogy to something else: It is also the principle on which gay marriage should not be allowed. Unless the principle in question refers to the previous sententce, as I assumed, I think it can only refer to The healthy growth and development of children is best promoted by a stable two parent family. Which has exactly the same bearing on the issue of gay marriage as the premarital sex sentence.
So my point stands - pro-child arguments are either irrelevant to the issue of gay marriage or actually support it if thought out logically; and dumping all your favorite values into a vague pro-society pro-child ramble heap, while trying to make it look like a reasonable argument, is confused.
Why is Slashdot so eager to publish stories of censorship in China whilst ominously ignoring those in the west.7 18.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3732
"that's hard to refute if you look at how those voters would otherwise have leaned."
No it isn't. In both cases, exit polls showed that the third party candidate drew roughly equally from both parties. In general, most voters who strongly preferred Gore to Bush or Bush to Clinton voted for Gore or Bush Sr. What was left were a bunch of people who didn't really care.
Nader might possibly have cost Gore the Florida vote. The overall margin was so small that even a small change could have made a difference. However, most voters who would have voted for Gore if Nader weren't in the race did vote for Gore (since Nader wasn't an effective candidate). It is just as likely that Nader voters would have not voted as have voted for Gore (or Bush).
To get back to the previous point, once Perot re-entered the race, he never had a shot. At best, he was the first choice of around 25% of voters. He would have lost handily in IRV voting, as he would have been eliminated in favor of Bush and Clinton (both of whom had more first place votes). He might have won in Condorcet voting, as he was probably the second choice of most voters for the other candidates; he was a relatively centrist candidate.
In no way did Perot lose because voters did not take him seriously. Perot lost because he abandoned the election in the middle. Until then, he had been in a dead heat with the other candidates.
In a two candidate election, both candidates will race for the middle. That way, each voter counts twice, once for the candidate and once for not voting for the opponent. This is not a bad thing. It causes policy to maintain a relatively constant path. If anything, the bad part is the primary system, which puts forth more partisan candidates.
Just bring the, so called, "Leaders" the real live (POOR) teenagers for a dinner and a "date". Right!!
Of course, similar observations of the actual behaviour of self proclaimed Christians by other posters in this thread have led them to conclude that Christianity is a similarly legalistic system despite explicit doctrine to the contrary in Old and New Testament and formal statements of doctrine from both Catholics and Protestants.
Are you claiming, like President Bush, that the Islam requiring forced submission of the whole world to an Islamic state is an aberration? And that the true Islam is one of internal submission to God alone? Can you quote an Islamic cleric that supports your view?
OK, maybe "only I can set you free :P" is a Troll :P.
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make install -not war
Is that the only example you could come up with? And the answer is probably yes anyway, it certainly wouldn't be the first time the CIA has interfered in African politics.
And, there isn't any concrete proof yet that emmissions from cars are causing any noticeable damage to the environment. (I'm assuming you are talking about global warming.)
I propose a mental experiment then... if you had a choice between sucking on the exhaust pipe of an SUV or a honda Civic for 5 minutes, which would you choose?
Not Quite... If gas was taxed $2 a gallon, government would find other programs to spend it on...the $2/gal tax would stay forever as a way to "spread the wealth" (i.e. pay off voters)
Plenty of laws have "sunset provisions". This one would be perfect. Make the tax proportional to the amount of imported petro fuel, starting at $2, designated as the budget for a DOE "independence programme". And make it sunset hard by 2040. If we don't get the independence and efficiency by then, the petro will be running out anyway.
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make install -not war