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US Government Sets Up Online "App Store"
krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."
federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress
Maybe this means Joe Wilson can troll 4chan instead.
I wonder how this is related to a recent announcement of Wave System, OpenID, Google, PayPal, etc into an initiative to have a single sign-on for e-government?
What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.marketwatch.com/m/story/25fdbe85-c490-42a4-9fea-50984f155661/0
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10474750/1/obamas-it-guru-returns-to-work.html
i always found it weird from a European perspective, that the American government were so behind when it comes to transparency. we are also more trusting towards government, compared to what i know of America.
...they'll be too important to fail?
Since when did the term 'App Store' come to describe any server offering applications for download? I swear, once the marketers get their hands on a new tech term, what comes out the other end is pure and unadulterated bullshit. Soon the term 'App Store' will have about as much meaning as 'The Cloud' and the marketers will have moved on to their next buzzword kill.
..With transparency? Hell the federal government can't account for the money it's spending (by knowing where it's being spent), much less keep track of many of its records. I'm curious to see how spewing them all over the Internet is going to help us track on everything.
There's an app for that.
#DeleteChrome
The first link is about Obama staffer's former colleague being investigated for crime. I don't even know what or whose fault are you trying to imply with that.
The second link is about the said staffer having committed a crime before. He shoplifted as a lot younger man, over a decade (13 years, to be exact) ago. He pleaded guilty and paid the fine... The "once a thief, always a thief" doesn't really apply to stuff like that. I myself shoplifted a few times when I was a teenager. I can understand a young man getting the small rush of doing something wrong there, with immediate risk of getting caught... It doesn't even imply that 13 years later one would have tendency to become corrupted or something.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
I think this is a great idea, as long as the programs the government will use will encrypt the data properly before storing it outside their servers. (though even that won't be necessary. I'm sure they won't use gmail for "top secret documents ;) )
Fantastic. An App Store puts democracy back into the hands of the ordinary citizen.
In fact, I think open an account right now, and buy myself a congressman.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
private servers but this is cloud computing rolf. I dont know which term is worse. Cloud computing or web 2.0.
So if I run my own private server and I access the app over the internet I guess this is cloud computing? A personal web page is called a blog and a glorified comments blog is called a tweet. old is new all over again.
According to a comment over at NASA Watch, this is going to be at least conceptually based on the NEBULA cloud computing platform developed by NASA Ames. It seems pretty cool and potentially quite useful. Calling it an "app store" is a really dumb analogy though, and gives absolutely no idea of what it actually entails:
http://nebula.nasa.gov/
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/09/ames_will_help.html
I am the Project Coordinator for Nebula, the cloud computing pilot at NASA Ames. Nebula has been in R&D and under development for well over a year. There are many reasons that a large organization, such as NASA, would explore cloud. The Nebula team did an extensive trade study to see what public clouds out there could meet NASA's needs. None did. Either they were not fast and powerful enough to handle NASA's massive data sets or they did not comply with security requirements. NASA needed its own cloud. I won't go into technical specifics (you can read about them at http://nebula.nasa.gov/ but the Nebula team ended up creating something that is smart, powerful, and incredibly energy-efficient to boot.
NASA was approached by the Feds because Nebula solves some cloud problems that are common among other Government Agencies. It is wicked fast, complies with FISMA and can scale to Government-sized demands. It is also rather forward-thinking in that it is built using open-source components and is incredibly energy efficient. Again, Nebula was created with NASA - not the Feds - in mind, but when they caught wind, they were interested too.
I suggest that people spend some time reading about what is actually going on before they jump to conclusions. To my knowledge there have been no announcements that Ames will orchestrate the Fed's move to cloud computing or develop any new systems or technologies that were not already under development. NASA has been responsible for a number of innovative new technologies over the years. Memory foam, for example. NASA invented it, but are they out there selling mattresses? :) Some people seem so caught up in the politics that they have completely missed the point.
Posted by: Gretchen at September 16, 2009 8:42 PM
I don't know. I thought keeping data on old clunky servers is kind of necessary for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act and this whole "transparency" idea. They are going to start storing data in gmail and youtube accounts? Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't feel right.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
*blinks*
You're... comparing Barrak Obama to... Hitler?
Wow.
Why?
Its one thing for FOIA, but companies hosting this data must be doing some kinda mining on it. Else whats in it for them? Bait and switch a free model, for a pay model later on. Why don't they just start up a wiki and let the people run the country, or wait is that too much like socialism?
However, it is possible to lose the rights to your trademark if it falls into common use. That's why so many companies defend their marks so vigorously.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
And that's a bad thing?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Huh.
So - do you think Canada, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Australia, and Britian, to name a few, are the equivalent to or worse than Hitler's Nazi Germany?
Personally, I think you're just ignorant of both recent and long-term history. Fortunatly, that can be cured by education, if you're willing to make the effort. You seem ignorant of both Nazi history, as well as the histories of nations in general, especially those called 'socialist' by those who don't know what the word means.
I understand that you believe the ideals you hold, but I don't think you've ever examined them. I hope you're willing to educate yourself, someday - you seem like an intelligent person, but you're missing quite a few (objective, verifiable) facts as to the reality of the world you life in.
YouTube, GMail, and Wordpress are not designed for official government business. What's more the technology of today is not made to facilitate people interacting with their government. Being created by commercial interests It's made to do two things:
Well done, you've woken up at last. Unfortunately, you're about 50 years too late. This has been going on for a very long time with each of your dictatorial leaders chipping away more than the last.
It's not JUST Obama. Look at Bush's reign - there were many similarities to Nazi German politics too. From invading foreign nations on false pretexts through to implementing stricter and stricter laws governing the people at home. Don't forget it was the Nazi German's who created a 'Department of Fatherland Security' which went further than your DHS does of course, but those TSA agents are particularly brown-shirted in their attitude.
People around the world think Bush's legacy of mass murder by the US war machine is bad, but they really should look at Clinton before him and what he unleashed in the former Yugoslavia (and you can go back further through each successive dictator/president to find their illegal invassions and bombings - South America, South East Asia. But I digress). The biggest difference in humanitarian terms between Clinton and Bush was the PR skill. Clinton gave good 'face', Bush came across as an idiot. But it's Clinton's ability to look good to the world that allowed him to get away with so much and hence be so dangerous. And now Obama is getting the same treatment. Worrying times and most people are sleep-walking their way into oblivion.
None of these people work for you. They RULE you. Welcome to Corporatism, the ultimate destination for Captialism. Like Communism the ideology is corrupted by the greedy and they have remodeled it into a form of fascism.
1. Assuming I'm uneducated is, well, uneducated.
2. I never mentioned socialism or socialist nations.
3. I've been to almost all the nations you cite, none are like Nazi Germany and I have no problem with modern socialism.
4. The comments I made ARE verifiable and objective. Hitler and Obama were both "Men of the Year", they both support leftist, progressive, and fringe-science ideas and their fundamentals were/are rooted in fascism. Look it up.
The fact that you call me "ignorant" for typing a post containing facts that any undergrad could cite leads me to believe that you are offended by my statements in some way. That wasn't my objective. I was simply pointing out parallels in two world leader's political profiles.
My economics textbook reads: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a societyâ(TM)s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the âoenational interestââ"that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace."
This actually does sound a lot like what the Obama administration is doing with healthcare reform, the economy, and the auto industry to a limited extent.
4. The comments I made ARE verifiable and objective. Hitler and Obama were both "Men of the Year", they both support leftist, progressive, and fringe-science ideas and their fundamentals were/are rooted in fascism. Look it up.
Also, they both eat bread and breath air!!! oO OBAMA MUST BE HITLERS REINCARNATION!!!!!
captcha is "imature" gnihihihi
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
Volkswagen.
I'm intrested in how they will stay section 508 compliant using youtube.
Please, Vivek, explain away:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
*blinks*
You're... comparing Barrak Obama to... Hitler?
Wow.
Why?
It's obviously because they're both black.
So, I was in DC last week at an event where all of the administration poobahs spoke and the big topics were data.gov and cloud services. When Apps.gov was announced, I assumed like other sites that it would have a citizen component to it. So, I wandered over and registered as a "visitor" (should have read the fine print on the page footer about only for federal employees / agencies part). Anyhow, I put a "free" social media app or two in my cart, just to see how the gub'ment would handle check-out (would I get a coupon to visit my Congressman? maybe an invitation to donate $3 to next federal election? etc.). Instead, I got a much more noticeable "reminder" message that Apps.gov is for federales, but that if I had any questions as a "visitor", they had assigned me a specific person in the bureaucracy with whom to follow-up. Pretty interesting. If you spend any time on the site (unregistered or otherwise), it is also interesting to see what social apps they chose or didn't (facebook yes, twitter no?). And you can definitely get a sense of their vendor bias: salesforce.com and google dominate.
All this really is is welfare for all the tech cronies that supported the Obama campaign. Yahoo, Google, all were big Obama supporters, so much that even some righties wonder if right wing content is page ranked lower on Google. Now they get their share of the taxpayer trough.
This is my sig.
I watched the presentation at NASA TV, it was given at NASA Ames Research Center.
They have archive of it at Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=eND7hT8JdwA&user=NASAtelevision
That is the guy presenting the idea himself. It was interesting enough to watch it at 4 AM my local time. The numbers guy gives, like the 20% of capacity used, everyone having their own data center, it may take $600.000 (yes, 600K) to setup a weblog in certain circumstances while it is free on blogger.com like services are amazing.
As listeners are full of govt. guys, guy repeated 4-5 times that secret/critical things won't be on cloud, outside USA etc. What matters is, they will be forcing very strict privacy and security rules to vendors.
he should fit in with the rest of them I guess.
People who are shaking at the knees about google and the federal government obviously are not aware that the government has been outsourcing data processing to offsite contractors for decades.
Sheesh. Google is no different than ANY other contractor when it comes to the Federal government and has to abide by the same contracting rules as everybody else.
Does this mean that it's any SAFER than at EDS, Booze Allen, Perot Systems, HP, IBM, etc? No. But it's not any less either.
Would someone please explain the difference between good old-fashioned corruption and "public-private partnerships" (of the sort that excites Bill Clinton and, apparently, the Obama administration)?
But why single out Obama? All voting Americans share those traits. We've been voting for fascism in every single election, arguably starting even before the Germans did.
If you're going to call out Obama instead of republicrat voters (where the responsibility really lies) then tell me what trait he has that say, the last 4 or 5 president's didn't.
The Aconynm Elimination Mandate (AEM) was signed by the President's APP, and will be over seen by the OMB. The PTG is the TLA category to be followed by the FLA groups. The GOP oppoosition to the AEM headed by the OMB states that if the AEM is successful, millions of OGD (Official Government Documents) will be rendered unreadable.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
This site sure is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They want someone to ensure that the WH's use of Youtube and Facebook complies with the Presidential Records act.
Good luck with all of that.
When are U.S. citizens going to realize they voted in an administration bent on destroying the U.S.
Your post (Troll, -1) is well modded, and I shouldn't feed you but what the hell. I'm sure some neocon with mod points will mod me down, but I can take a downmod once in a while.
It was the previous administration hell bent on destroying the US, and they did a pretty damned good job of it, too. Under the previous administration we were attacked, despite the fact that there were dire warnings of Al Quaida from the administration before, which were completely ignored. FBI agents warned about the terrorists taking commercial pilot courses and they, too, were ignored. 9-11 would not have happened had we a competent President.
We went to war against our attackers (IMO a good thing), then went to war because of bad intelligence (the intelligence agencies are part of the executive branch) with a country who had threatened the President's dad.
Gasoling was $1.05 per gallon here when he took office, before he left office it was over $4.50. No wonder people couldn't make their mortgage payments, and no wonder the economy collapsed. We had a recession in the '70s because of the Vietnam war in the '60s and the Arab oil embargo in 1974, but either the Bush administration didn't learn from history or care about it. Considering that both Bush and Cheney are oil men, they made millions on the high price of gasoline that ruined the economy.
Before he left office he rewarded the very banks that helped cause the economic meltdown with tax funds and no accountability.
When he came into office there was a budget surplus. He left the biggest defecit in US history.
During natural disasters (earthquakes and hurricanes) FEMA, with the incompenent crony he hired to head it, dropped the ball every time. It was worst with Katrina, because the state and local governments weren't any more competent than the feds. We were lucky here in Springfield when the tornados hit in 2006, as the city government WAS competent, unlike the state and federals (Blago was exectly like Bush, except he was a Democrat).
Obama would have a damned hard time doing any worse than his predecessor. I do worry, however. I never thought I'd see a worse President than Carter, but Bush proved me wrong.
When will you people realize that when you put people in charge of government who think government is always the problem you're going to get bad government? Have you no power of reason or logic?
Free Martian Whores!
I am sorry, you seem to be unaware of the fact that the Nazi Party was the National Socialist Party. The main difference between the Nazis and the Communists in pre-World War II Germany was that the Nazis were nationalists and the Communists were internationalists.
While comparing Obama to Hitler is inappropriate (Hitler openly called for genocide even before he was elected), Obama is closer on the political spectrum to Hitler than Bush or Cheney were/are. You seem to think that Hitler and Stalin were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, they weren't, they were right next to each other. Both of them were totalitarian and supported government dominance of all economic activity. A true political spectrum runs from libertarian-anarchy on the far right to absolute totalitarian on the far left.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
Did you read the whole thread? Sitarlo is not saying that Obama is the second coming of Hitler, he's pointing out political similarities. See "I don't think Obama is a evil person like Hitler obviously was, but they share startling political traits." Now, it's hard to reconcile that with his opening post declaring that Obama's administration is "bent on destroying the U.S." but the inflammatory statement doesn't nullify the valid comparison, which was further illuminated by this AC.
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left -
Oh, I don't know about that. Obama is still fighting Bush's wars, still keeping Bush's secrets, still using secret prisons, still doling out money to businesses with strings attached, and also trying to push a socialist health care agenda. If anything, he takes Bush's fascist policies and mixes in some socialism.
- but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something.
And this is the root of the problem. There's an automatic connection between "fascism" and "Nazis" and all the baggage they bring. It's nearly impossible to talk about policies without getting tangled up in connotations. This is due both to Republicans using the word for scare tactics rather than honest discussion and to constant conditioning in all of us to equate the two--I think this is unintentional, but those inclined towards tinfoil-hattery may claim otherwise. Whatever the cause, without stepping back and looking at exactly what "fascism" and "socialism" mean, as done by the AC above, the issues cannot be discussed. Whether or not Obama's policies fall under either category is certainly open to debate, but talk of genocide only clouds the issue. It's like saying that the US is a democracy and had slavery and a civil war, so discussing whether or not a nation has democratic aspects must always mean talk of slavery and civil war.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
I protested. I called my congressmen. I ranted to family and friends, and even had some success convincing former True Believers that the PATRIOT act was bad for us. I didn't vote at all in 2000 because at the time I didn't think politics mattered. 9/11, or rather the reaction to it, was my wake-up call that my desire to simply be allowed to live my life how I wish is not a concern to those in power. I voted 3rd party in '04 and Ron Paul in '08 because I reject both faces of the two-party system. The opportunity to keep some of our waning civil liberties may have been missed, but I did my damnedest and will continue to fight for (re)gaining freedom until it's no longer necessary.
Your brain is not a computer.
It's interesting how the government is portraying data centers as the problem. The video Kundra showed is like a bad political ad: when the data centers appear, the music turns ominous and the background grows dark. But when cloud computing is mentioned, the music turns happy and the landscape becomes green. I'm all for eliminating redundant technology spending, but where does Kundra believe these "clouds" actually live?
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Ah, I see what the misunderstanding is, you got left and right confused. Anarchy is usually considered extreme left and absolute totalitarian regimes can be both, but are right if they are fascist and/or nationalistic. Since you won't believe me, allow me to cite Wikipedia (I know, not an official source but it'll have to do for now):
While I agree with you there is not much difference between dictators who consider themselves right as opposed to regimes who are supposedly on the left, in this case you can hopefully see why your reasoning is problematic because you turned the definitions of "left" and "right" on their heads. The right-left categorization as a concept is certainly severely flawed, but there can be no doubt that the Nazis were decidedly on the Right! Drawing parallels to Obama's borderline leftish politics doesn't make sense whichever way you turn it.
A finer point of debate could be whether absolutist regimes can even be correctly categorized as "left", because the whole idea of an oppressor state is a "right" concept to begin with. Of course, every implementation of Communism (and even Socialism) can only end up becoming a totalitarian state, but the ideology itself is tragically incompatible with the inevitable political outcome. I'm not trying to be polemic towards right-wingers here, I'm just talking about the original definition and meaning of the words we're using. It is a tragedy that certain influential elements in the US have succeeded in redefining huge parts of the political and social vocabulary, thereby making it virtually impossible for people to have a meaningful conversation without getting mired in intentionally corrupted semantics. (Compare Orwell's 1984 for more info on how exactly that works)
In the context of what I explained above, it becomes clear that the Nazis were not in fact real socialists but first and foremost fascists and, consequently, were to the far right and not the left.
Oh, it went a lot deeper than that. But at the end of the day, both Stalin and Hitler were monstrous dictators responsible for atrocities beyond description. However, one could argue that Hitler's ideology lines up very well with what he was actually doing, whereas Stalin was preaching one thing while doing something completely different.
Dude, Sitarlo said things like:
I don't know much but even I know that ain't right. Just take a moment and _read_ that. How can anyone just let that hang there?
Uneducated.... You did talk about socialism. Nazi stands for 'National Sozialismus'.
It's not about right or left. It is about the Third Way. If you knew anything about economic policy, you'd understand my posts. Fascism does not, by default, equal nazism.
I find it interesting that I'm presenting a very simple and clear idea without attacking anyone, but I'm being attacked and called ignorant or uneducated. To me, that kind of communication is both ignorant and uneducated. I went to college, I got good grades, I also knew better than to believe everything my stoned, pseudo-liberal professors told me.
no, the bigger question is:
Where are all the fart apps?
mod me funny
Yes, but I didn't equate Nazism with current socialist movements. And, thank you for pointing out that Nazism indeed involves leftist thinking.
I never said Bush was a Saint or even a good leader. My post isn't well modded either. I was making a joke and pointing out easily verifiable similarities between two world leaders. I honestly didn't expect anyone to respond to the original post.
Fuck you. I'm no Obama fan, and you've got some good points, but your overall comparison is bunk without qualification.
Nazi = Nationalsozialismus = Nationalist Socialism. While this etymology naturally does not encapsulate the entire Nazi platform, it is largely accurate as far as it extends. (The "socialism" bit was taken rather more weakly than in some competing socialism-based ideologies, and must be taken in context, of course.)
By mentioning Germany under the Nazist regime, you are implicitly mentioning "socialism or socialist nations", of some sort.
Now the points where Obama and Hitler would agree (and there are quite a few) run to the fascist/socialist side of increased state control over resources (although, unlike e.g. communism, upholding the institution of private property), which speaks almost exclusively to domestic policy. But Obama is completely lacking on the nationalist/imperialist side, which is what most people today generally think of as Nazism. (Likely this shifted focus is because we fought a war, which is a fundamental matter of foreign policy, but aside from racial atrocities, couldn't care less about Hitler's domestic policy...)
And, of course, the correlation of race with nationality, and therefore the conflation of racism and nationalism, is substantially less evident in the US than in 1930s Germany, so any genuine mainstream Nazi-like party in the US would be lacking the genocidal edge; it would be marked by the republicans' enthusiasm for strong borders and foreign wars, and the democrats' regulation-of-business domestic policies. And although unpatriotism would be a hanging offense, American citizens would see no substantial persecution on a racial basis.
Yeah, I get just as pissed off when people compare Bush (a bit of a nationalist, although with a bizarre fetish for nation-building over genuine imperialism, but pro-big-business and anti-socialist) with Hitler as when they compare Obama (a private-property socialist, but never a nationalist) with him. While the aggregate influence of both parties, alternating control as they do, is arguable an overall nazist slant, both parties (and all leaders they've produced recently) are sufficiently far off in one direction or another as to make the comparisons meaningless at best, and dishonest at worst.
Yeah, I read that, but not very carefully. I'm more focused on the policies at hand, and I wasn't responding to defend the guy. My entry point into the thread was reading the highly-rated AC comment I linked which actually did a good job of rationally outlining the issue of fascist and socialist policy. My reading of the rest of the thread was colored by that initial post, so I missed the import of that last statement.
And yet, everything else in my post--which in my mind is far more important--goes unacknowledged, all because I failed to properly chastise some random Internet person for calling Obama Hitler.
Your brain is not a computer.
You are calling thasmudyen's post an attack? Seriously? That post was civil and informative. Actually, let me correct myself. It would be civil and informative for the Real World; it was amazingly civil and informative for the Internet. And he didn't call you uneducated or ignorant. You were using the terms incorrectly, and he gave you the correct meanings, but he did not insult you in doing so.
You've got some kind of persecution complex going on. Quit it.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
I was not using terms incorrectly at all. To say that I was, is in fact, incorrect. Just because an untruth is popular doesn't make it true. Obama is closer to fascism than he is to conservatism- a plain, simple truth that the indoctrinated simply can't accept because of the social-political ramifications of fascism being related to Nazism. I thought slashdot peeps were supposed to be smart. All I'm seeing here is a regurgitation of wikipedia text and very weak arguments based on liberal rhetoric.
Um, you just validated my entire argument in your fourth paragraph. So why the "Fuck You"?
Look, I wasn't calling Obama a Nazi. That would be ridiculous. I was simply pointing out the possibility of fascist tendencies in current U.S. politics. That is all.
I need to find a good underage immigrant whore in my neighborhood. I hear Obama's community organizer pals at ACORN can help me with this...
Let's see. With the speed at which government moves, when one of the ISPs shuts down and gives a 1 day notice to download your files before they're deleted (if they give a notice), nobody will know what to do or who is supposed to do it and everything in that cloud will be gone forever.
Government is like academics. It experiments in everything new, but unlike academics, government doesn't understand some things are just experiments and doesn't understand the risks or have the where-with-all to deal with them.
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
The fact that you are German does not grant you some special authority with respect to the history of Germany. Funny how your disclaimer of one rhetorical fallacy is followed immediately by the commission of another one.
Your characterization of Hitler, and by extension Fascism and the Nazi movement, as something inherently right-wing is substantively absurd. Now, as is the custom of leftists, you engage in historical revisionism. Hitler was a socialist, and promoted national socialism in his era in both theory and practice. News flash: conservatives (classical liberals) AKA the right-wing are capitalist free-marketers.
Your strong implication that the political right is necessarily "deeply racist", "genocidal", and "totalitarian" is historically unsupported. Unsurprisingly, the history of left-wing politics is littered with subtle and prominent examples of all of the above.
I see that you worship the "progressive" idol, Obama. I also see that you castigate, severely, Dick Cheney. I suppose you don't appreciate the irony. Obama has continued many of the programs and policies of the previous administration, which you seem to believe, rather naively, represent some kind of erosion of our civil liberties.
Now, if you are really interested in education and factual correctness, as opposed to "mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction", than pick up a copy of "Liberal Fascism", by Jonah Goldberg. Read it. You should feel quite stupid afterwards, and rightly so.
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