An anti-Semite used to be someone who hated Jews. Now an anti-Semite is someone hated BY Jews.
A Semite used to be someone from one of the semitic language group, which includes ancient Hebrew and Arabic. An anti-Semite therefore is someone opposed to Semites, someone opposed to (now extinct) Isrealites, Arabs, Babylonians (Iraqi) and more.
In the 19th and 20th centuries the word Semite was corrupted to refer specifically to Jews. Through this corruption anti-Semite became synonymous with anti Jew. In the later half of the twentieth century the term has been corrupted further by European Jews and their descendants who were in fact mostly descended from Khazars, a non Semitic Eurasian group, to mean someone who modern Israelis and Zionists hate.
In reality, if we use the uncorrupted version of the word, most of the aggressive actions of Israel have been genuinely anti-Semitic. They seem quite happy to wipe out Palestine, go to war with Lebanon and Syria and they supported the war with Iraq. These are all anti-Semitic acts.
Carter was criticized by many for suggesting that Israel was akin to Apartheid South Africa. There is no apartheid in Israel.
That's entirely true. Although, while it isn't apartheid, Israel does seem to be one step from forcing Palestinians to wear yellow crescents on their cloths. The already have them locked up in ghettos.
I'd have said Ubuntu's success was due to having little things pop up and ask you if you want to install mp3 codecs when the user tries to play an mp3, or Flash installer helpers, etc.
No. That stuff is pretty recent.
I seem to remember the existence of scripts like EasyUbuntu and the like a while back to get that stuff running, although they were a bit dodgy so the command line was preferred in my case. I think that was for the last LTS release.
I also seem to remember that Ubuntu was already gaining a large share before Dapper was released due to the combination of the Debian package management system, human user focus and shorter release cycle thus more current software.
Of course this is all from memory and I couldn't be bothered finding references.
I tried that and didn't like it as much. I have monitors on the top which auto hides and awn on the bottom which also auto hides and I'm finding that really nice to use. I used to like e16 for real estate, but these days the whole integration of the desktop has me sold on gnome.
Yep. Not a problem on AC, but a biggy on battery. I would like to see a power saving option to disable it on battery. I keep meaning to investigate running a user defined script when the power switches from ac to battery and vice versa. I might just remember to do that today... unless someone here knows where to look...
All that said, the recent 2.6.24-19 generic Ubuntu kernel seems to be running a lot cooler (~10C for both CPUs and gfx) so it's improving.
For me, compiz fusion has become really useful. My widescreen notebook has limited vertical screen real estate, so the ability to get rid of the bottom bar and use window scaling to find running apps is great. The ability to fade windows and look underneath them is also great. Up until recently, I have bought nVidia, because while the drivers are non free blobs, they have tended to just work. Now that's changing and this additional step in promoting Linux support means that the next graphics I buy will ATI.
I don't really play games except occasionally and the games that are available for Linux are more than enough. It's the advertised support for desktop effects and apps like blender that has me sold, but maybe the fact that they are pushing for Tux to be included on the box means that the mindshare has increased to the point where more games will follow.
There have been many cases where people have been held for at least a year after their innocence has been confirmed. Saying someone is lying because you don't want to believe that the propaganda you have swallowed for years is criminal bullshit is no way to contribute to intelligent discussion. The Administration is in breach of US federal and constitutional law in more areas than this and is also in breach of international law, which the administration seems to feel should apply to "rogue states" but not to the US.
I have made a lot of rants on this site which appear on the surface to be anti US. Please be clear that I am not against the US and I do not hate Americans, but when I read the blind and stupid faith that people such as yourself put in the artifice of your infallible government institutions against all evidence of crimes against humanity, it kind of gets my back up. You just don't seem to get the concept of justice or liberty.
Back to the GP. The simplest explanation is the one that was made before 9/11, before the invasion of Afghanistan, before the invasion of Iraq, before GWB's dad was president, before the second world war. There are a large and powerful groups in the US that have used weaknesses in the foundations of the nation to gain power through criminal means for criminal ends. The theft of an election for the theft of land and natural resources in the Middle East is just one recent example. The use of media to illicit support for these criminal actions has been documented in political theory for a long time and is notably a major foundation of neo-conservatism. I know you wont agree just yet, but you have been played and you fell for it. You are a sheep.
I think the fact that innocent people have been held and tortured is now admitted by elements of the US military so attacking it a false is a bit stupid, again showing signs of a weak and malleable mind which has been too easily programmed by propaganda. Perhaps they are running out of room, perhaps the pressure they are encountering from former allies and the commentary on how grave the breaches of law have been have led them to release a few for propaganda purposes, perhaps there are people within the military who are actually interested in justice and genuinely supporting the ideals on which the US was founded and perhaps these people are locked in a tussle with the drones of the criminal administration. Who really knows for sure why the have let some go and not others? All I can say for certain is that you don't need to have a long neck to be a goose.
The speaker made a different noise according to (I think) what instruction was being processed
Wow. I'd love that on my dual core amd64. I wonder if I could arrange integral instructions as base lines, floating point as melody and SIMD as chords? Then again, maybe my co-workers would kill me.
They just don't make them like they used to. This is good.
Actually my last attempt to get a refund failed because I bought a notebook which was clearly labelled as having Vista. The trouble is that even if you never use it, you are still buying it. The fact that they don't offer machines without windows is irrelevant. Kind of like if you buy a car with cruise control and then never use cruise control you don't get a refund.
I am talking about the Australian market here. I did research and the way they advertise and sell machines these days has closed the whole refund loophole - at least according to info I got from the ACCC. The best way I could find to register a protest with the OEM was to get them to buy windows install media for me - given that they supplied an OEM version which is not as capable as the Microsoft installer in breach of the statutory warranty. If enough people do this they will re-assess their contracts with Microsoft.
TFA is about SWEDEN, home of the hot HRH Princess Madeleine, not SWITZERLAND, home of this, which is delicious when hot, particularly with wine and spices as a dip for bread, but very different.
This post brought to you by someone from Australia which happens to be nowhere near Europe.
disclaimer: In Australia it is difficult to get reasonable pre loaded Linux notebooks.
So lets see, I buy a notebook with Vista for around $A 1,500.00, then spend the $A 5,631.12 for Windows Server 2008 Enterprise which I need if I want to make the most of the multimedia capabilities of the notebook.
-OR-
I buy a notebook with Vista for around $A 1,500.00 and install a modern Linux distro on it for $0 (+ download + updates) because I want to make the most of the multimedia capabilities of the notebook.
$A 7,131.12? | $A 1,500.00?
$A 7,131.12? | $A 1,500.00?
Apple gear is even more outlandishly overpriced in Australasia than the rest of the world, and even here a top of the range Macbook Pro is cheaper than $A 7,131.12. Why on Earth would anyone be so stupid?
Actually ripping DVDs is pretty easy. I just managed to get a long time windows user to try ubuntu 8.04 and he's converted. One of the selling points was that, even though you get the nag dialogs about questionable legality, media support is better in his experience than on XP.
I wouldn't know about that specifically because I haven't used windows on a machine I own for at least four years. What I do know is that unless you want to run games or visio, there really is little reason to stick with windows. My mum is certainly happy with it. It's much simpler to use and everything just works. I highly recommend trying out a modern distro. You can always reboot for games until games publishers finally catch up with reality.
I think it's certainly worth a try. We have established that prohibition doesn't work, and in fact makes the problems worse.
There is little evidence that prohibition is a deterrent, in fact there is some evidence that prohibition makes illicit drug use more attractive to some people, in particular risk takers like teenagers and twenty-somethings. So there is a strong case suggesting that legalisation can reduce drug abuse, or at least leave it at unchanged levels.
What is certain is that the associated crime would drop if these drugs were legally available - why shoot people to protect a supply chain that is cheap, legal and unchallenged? Why rob people to support a cheap drug habit, or would that be any worse than alcohol related crime? Also, changing the status from bad illegal drug to legal drug that you're welcome to use but has a long list of side effects is more likely to deter peoples than keeping it illegal and just saying it's bad because it's bad. People will no doubt still abuse drugs, but accurate information is more of a deterrent to abuse than prohibition.
Which brings me to another related point. I firmly believe that prohibition is maintained because it creates an illegal economy. I believe there are people in positions of influence who profit from the illegal drug trade who are outspoken supporters of prohibition, otherwise how could so many people be stupid enough to support a system that so obviously fails to do what it intends and oppose even debate on alternative strategies? To my mind, anyone who supports prohibition must be a drug pusher.
But then again, maybe that's just a paranoid delusion caused by my week and a half stint of criminal THC abuse when I was injured...
My concentration was so bad before I took crystal meth that I couldn't take the rest of the sentence in.
By the way, did you know that self mutilation with a chainsaw can shed weight quicker than any known diet and exercise regime? Oh, and it may cause death or permanent disability.
I wouldn't exactly consider the overly rampant but legal use of opium in China in the late 1800s a positive development.
I didn't say that drugs are good, nor did I suggest anywhere that rampant abuse of drugs is ever positive. This is exactly the kind of brainless knee-jerk non argument I did refer to. You have a position which you seek to support by taking one case that on the surface appears contradict my argument, while in truth it doesn't. Idiots with preconceived notions who half read my post and read your response will have their preconceived idiot notions reinforced. This does nothing to further rational debate.
Drug use is promoted everywhere. Alcohol consumption, for example, is so ingrained in our culture that it forms an important part of some religious observances. Caffeine consumption, particularly amongst./ readers I'll wager, is also incredibly high.
That's the thing that really shits me about the kind of story the NYT has run here. It's a story based on a knee-jerk "OH noes, wired included positive effects of an ILLEGAL drug in an article" approach rather than any semblance rational thought. I'll say it now, knowing full well there are idiots who can't get over this: the legality or otherwise of a drug has a causal relationship with how bad/dangerous it is.
Compare the effects of heavy coffee consumption with equivalent coca consumption and the actual medical side effects start to make coffee look a lot worse. Of course coca is not readily available except as a processed powder with is usually cut with other chemicals and it is associated with criminal activity, but if were not illegal would that be the case? I don't think there is any rational argument that can be made to suggest that criminalisation is not the cause of the majority of the ill effects on society of cocaine.
These articles help perpetuate the myth that all illegal drugs are bad and prescription drugs are good. This has two very detrimental effects on society. Firstly, people tend to trust the latest wonder drug that doctors hand out because it is legal. Then a few years later we find out too late just how many people taking the latest wonder drug are sleep walking off balconies or committing suicide or dying of liver failure.
The second effect is that drugs that are illegal but which can have real benefit are ignored. I don't take drugs usually, but a few years ago I broke my clavicle and a couple of ribs and bruised my spine in a bicycle accident. I could not get up or down without extreme pain and at the time I was single and had to look after myself. The prescribed pain killers where physically addictive and felt unpleasant to me as I tend not to enjoy opiates. The anti-inflammatories had evil side effects. So I ate pot. I hadn't used that since college and never really thought I would again, but as a muscle relaxant, anti-inflammatory and pain killer it was excellent, plus it made lying down and doing nothing a lot less boring. I didn't have to drive a car, there was not a lot of chance of long term mental health issues from a couple of weeks use, all in all it was perfect.
So as far as I'm concerned the whole "illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal" attitude gave me a choice of feeling like shit as a result of drugs that doctors can legally prescribe, or feeling okay physically, but committing a crime or several and taking my chances that the drug I was taking was not laced with something more dangerous. Clinically what I took was more appropriate for my situation, but knee jerk idiots who are incapable of rational debate on drugs made it more dangerous to me than it should have been.
Drugs are bad, mkay, but they are useful and given any health situation where using a particular drug may be beneficial, it should be legally available.
Ho Chi Minh did, and asked the US for help very early on. The US changed sides, siding with the French and Ho Chi Minh was very disappointed. The rest is history. Not widely known, particularly in that the US would love that bit of history to disappearbut true.
As for Isreal, you have bought a bit of bullshit there. Freindly relations between Palestinian Muslims, Jews and Christians was the norm in the 1930s. At least according to older Palestinian Jews I have spoken with. The British were heavily involved, although didn't want to appear to be. Arab terrorism didn't really exist until relatively recently. Zionist terrorism was big in the 20s and 30s. Many Isrealis aren't educated in this, probably because it would make it much harder to sell propaganda to Isrealis.
I don't read the Arab propaganda and a large part of my understanding of the history of Zionism and Isreal is based on writing and conversation with Jews. I also don't buy Isreali propaganda, so me it looks like a bunch of blood thirsty fuckwits invaded a piece of land they had no claim to and have spent the last 40+ years committing crimes that on balance appear to me to exceed what was committed against them in Europe. Not that crimes committed against them is any justification for what has been to Palestinians, mind you. The continued settlement of land, especially strategically important high ground, shows that Isreal has little commitment to peace.
You're not Isreali are you? Your comments about Chile suggested that you think that a country where political opponents are murdered as a matter of course is highly successful as long as they are wealthy. As long as the attrocities are committed by the right side it's okay is it? Could also be neo-con, I suppose.
the toshiba will be filled with crapware that bogs down startup. if its a fresh windows install, this wouldnt be the case.
Don't know about toshiba, but my HP Pavillion is around 10-15 seconds quicker booting Ubuntu than it was when I still had a Vista partition. Both systems clean, bog standard installs of respective OSes. Vista was installed without crapware from replacement media paid for by HP when I told them their OEM Vista wasn't actually Vista;-P
Re:It makes a lot of sense, surprised people notic
on
Acer Bets Big On Linux
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· Score: 1
Yeah and while Avid now finally supports Vista, it is painful because Vista is till the worst suited OS for any content creation thanks to bone headed digital restrictions management. So the choice really is Linux or OSX.
What about the image of an arrogant Aussie yob sucking stubby and telling you you're a wanker.
I didn't actually say anyone was better, just pointed out that the US is not the best. The only point where I made any comparison was expressed as personal opinion. Is the fact that you got so defensive a sign that you fear I am right?
Are they being co-opted by the Soviets, or are they being co-opted by America?
Korea
Might have been as bad if the US hadn't intervened, but who is to know? The whole anti-commie thing the US did in the last century as a way to demonise a socio/political model that is incompatible with it's own is hard to assess, given that all countries that have attempted it have encountered extreme external resistance, led by the US. Look at Cuba - they would not have the poverty if they were not under an embargo. Socialism is extremely popular in central and South America due in large part to resistance to the US, caused by past behaviour of the US. Totalitarian regiems have been common in East Asia, regardless of whether they are communist or capitalist. The question of North or South comes down to oppressed and poor or oppressed and rich.
Vietnam
The US really went against the traditional freedom thing here. They took the side of a colonial power rather than the majority of it's population. They took that side against an ally who had saved the lives of US marines in WW2 and fought against the Japanese. Why? Because defeating communism is more important than promoting democracy. What happened? A group that wanted to head towards a socialist democracy, which European countries have shown can work, turned to larger totalitarian countries for support and were heavily influenced by them.
The US used dangerous chemical warfare, carpet bombing of forests with the latest high tech, mass murder of civilian population because so many of them were supporting the the North that they couldn't tell who was who(democracy anyone?).
I'm from Australia and our army fought there, did a lot better than the US in terms of casualties per soldier sent, and came back to abuse from Australians who were against it. These days it is very hard to find anyone, even amongst ex soldiers who volunteered, who thinks it was the right thing to do. Thankfully for the ex-soldiers the fact that they made the sacrifice they did is now highly respected here.
The US gave up any chance of influence by turning to aggression and fucked up so monumentally that I'm surprised you even mentioned it.
Chile
Whether or not the US directly pushed to install Pinochet, whenever the US has moved to oust a foreign leader and succeeded, the resulting government turns out to be as bad or worse for the population of that country. Again, a pretty strange one to add to your list.
Isreal
A terrorist nation created through a deal between Great Britain and a group with strong links to terrorism in Europe. I wont be fooled into separating Palestine and Egypt as examples because in both cases the root problem was/is the existence of Isreal. Isreal is a country formed in the main by people descended from central Asians who think that because their ancestors converted to a religion they have some holy right to a strip of land they have no historical claim to. They have been supported by Europe because of the shame of what has been done to them over centuries and they have been supported by the US because a large part of US financial power is owned and run by people who funded the European religious terrorists of last century.
How different would things be if the US had sided against religious extremism back then, back when Jews and Muslims happily shared neighbourhoods in Palestine?
It's hard to know how different things would have been if any of these cases had been played differently, but it is fairly evident that the US has abandoned principles on which the nation was founded.
Slashdot Mirror
A Semite used to be someone from one of the semitic language group, which includes ancient Hebrew and Arabic. An anti-Semite therefore is someone opposed to Semites, someone opposed to (now extinct) Isrealites, Arabs, Babylonians (Iraqi) and more.
In the 19th and 20th centuries the word Semite was corrupted to refer specifically to Jews. Through this corruption anti-Semite became synonymous with anti Jew. In the later half of the twentieth century the term has been corrupted further by European Jews and their descendants who were in fact mostly descended from Khazars, a non Semitic Eurasian group, to mean someone who modern Israelis and Zionists hate.
In reality, if we use the uncorrupted version of the word, most of the aggressive actions of Israel have been genuinely anti-Semitic. They seem quite happy to wipe out Palestine, go to war with Lebanon and Syria and they supported the war with Iraq. These are all anti-Semitic acts.
That's entirely true. Although, while it isn't apartheid, Israel does seem to be one step from forcing Palestinians to wear yellow crescents on their cloths. The already have them locked up in ghettos.
Thanks very much. You saved me a hunt.
No. That stuff is pretty recent.
I seem to remember the existence of scripts like EasyUbuntu and the like a while back to get that stuff running, although they were a bit dodgy so the command line was preferred in my case. I think that was for the last LTS release.
I also seem to remember that Ubuntu was already gaining a large share before Dapper was released due to the combination of the Debian package management system, human user focus and shorter release cycle thus more current software.
Of course this is all from memory and I couldn't be bothered finding references.
I tried that and didn't like it as much. I have monitors on the top which auto hides and awn on the bottom which also auto hides and I'm finding that really nice to use. I used to like e16 for real estate, but these days the whole integration of the desktop has me sold on gnome.
Yep. Not a problem on AC, but a biggy on battery. I would like to see a power saving option to disable it on battery. I keep meaning to investigate running a user defined script when the power switches from ac to battery and vice versa. I might just remember to do that today... unless someone here knows where to look...
All that said, the recent 2.6.24-19 generic Ubuntu kernel seems to be running a lot cooler (~10C for both CPUs and gfx) so it's improving.
For me, compiz fusion has become really useful. My widescreen notebook has limited vertical screen real estate, so the ability to get rid of the bottom bar and use window scaling to find running apps is great. The ability to fade windows and look underneath them is also great. Up until recently, I have bought nVidia, because while the drivers are non free blobs, they have tended to just work. Now that's changing and this additional step in promoting Linux support means that the next graphics I buy will ATI.
I don't really play games except occasionally and the games that are available for Linux are more than enough. It's the advertised support for desktop effects and apps like blender that has me sold, but maybe the fact that they are pushing for Tux to be included on the box means that the mindshare has increased to the point where more games will follow.
There have been many cases where people have been held for at least a year after their innocence has been confirmed. Saying someone is lying because you don't want to believe that the propaganda you have swallowed for years is criminal bullshit is no way to contribute to intelligent discussion. The Administration is in breach of US federal and constitutional law in more areas than this and is also in breach of international law, which the administration seems to feel should apply to "rogue states" but not to the US.
I have made a lot of rants on this site which appear on the surface to be anti US. Please be clear that I am not against the US and I do not hate Americans, but when I read the blind and stupid faith that people such as yourself put in the artifice of your infallible government institutions against all evidence of crimes against humanity, it kind of gets my back up. You just don't seem to get the concept of justice or liberty.
Back to the GP. The simplest explanation is the one that was made before 9/11, before the invasion of Afghanistan, before the invasion of Iraq, before GWB's dad was president, before the second world war. There are a large and powerful groups in the US that have used weaknesses in the foundations of the nation to gain power through criminal means for criminal ends. The theft of an election for the theft of land and natural resources in the Middle East is just one recent example. The use of media to illicit support for these criminal actions has been documented in political theory for a long time and is notably a major foundation of neo-conservatism. I know you wont agree just yet, but you have been played and you fell for it. You are a sheep.
I think the fact that innocent people have been held and tortured is now admitted by elements of the US military so attacking it a false is a bit stupid, again showing signs of a weak and malleable mind which has been too easily programmed by propaganda. Perhaps they are running out of room, perhaps the pressure they are encountering from former allies and the commentary on how grave the breaches of law have been have led them to release a few for propaganda purposes, perhaps there are people within the military who are actually interested in justice and genuinely supporting the ideals on which the US was founded and perhaps these people are locked in a tussle with the drones of the criminal administration. Who really knows for sure why the have let some go and not others? All I can say for certain is that you don't need to have a long neck to be a goose.
Wow. I'd love that on my dual core amd64. I wonder if I could arrange integral instructions as base lines, floating point as melody and SIMD as chords? Then again, maybe my co-workers would kill me.
They just don't make them like they used to. This is good.
because someone will surely remove your fingers for typing that question on /. instead of checking somewhere more appropriate...
Actually my last attempt to get a refund failed because I bought a notebook which was clearly labelled as having Vista. The trouble is that even if you never use it, you are still buying it. The fact that they don't offer machines without windows is irrelevant. Kind of like if you buy a car with cruise control and then never use cruise control you don't get a refund.
I am talking about the Australian market here. I did research and the way they advertise and sell machines these days has closed the whole refund loophole - at least according to info I got from the ACCC. The best way I could find to register a protest with the OEM was to get them to buy windows install media for me - given that they supplied an OEM version which is not as capable as the Microsoft installer in breach of the statutory warranty. If enough people do this they will re-assess their contracts with Microsoft.
TFA is about SWEDEN, home of the hot HRH Princess Madeleine, not SWITZERLAND, home of this, which is delicious when hot, particularly with wine and spices as a dip for bread, but very different.
This post brought to you by someone from Australia which happens to be nowhere near Europe.
disclaimer: In Australia it is difficult to get reasonable pre loaded Linux notebooks.
So lets see, I buy a notebook with Vista for around $A 1,500.00, then spend the $A 5,631.12 for Windows Server 2008 Enterprise which I need if I want to make the most of the multimedia capabilities of the notebook.
-OR-
I buy a notebook with Vista for around $A 1,500.00 and install a modern Linux distro on it for $0 (+ download + updates) because I want to make the most of the multimedia capabilities of the notebook.
$A 7,131.12? | $A 1,500.00?
$A 7,131.12? | $A 1,500.00?
Apple gear is even more outlandishly overpriced in Australasia than the rest of the world, and even here a top of the range Macbook Pro is cheaper than $A 7,131.12. Why on Earth would anyone be so stupid?
Actually ripping DVDs is pretty easy. I just managed to get a long time windows user to try ubuntu 8.04 and he's converted. One of the selling points was that, even though you get the nag dialogs about questionable legality, media support is better in his experience than on XP.
I wouldn't know about that specifically because I haven't used windows on a machine I own for at least four years. What I do know is that unless you want to run games or visio, there really is little reason to stick with windows. My mum is certainly happy with it. It's much simpler to use and everything just works. I highly recommend trying out a modern distro. You can always reboot for games until games publishers finally catch up with reality.
Where is the "+/-1 WTF!?!" moderation?
I think it's certainly worth a try. We have established that prohibition doesn't work, and in fact makes the problems worse.
There is little evidence that prohibition is a deterrent, in fact there is some evidence that prohibition makes illicit drug use more attractive to some people, in particular risk takers like teenagers and twenty-somethings. So there is a strong case suggesting that legalisation can reduce drug abuse, or at least leave it at unchanged levels.
What is certain is that the associated crime would drop if these drugs were legally available - why shoot people to protect a supply chain that is cheap, legal and unchallenged? Why rob people to support a cheap drug habit, or would that be any worse than alcohol related crime? Also, changing the status from bad illegal drug to legal drug that you're welcome to use but has a long list of side effects is more likely to deter peoples than keeping it illegal and just saying it's bad because it's bad. People will no doubt still abuse drugs, but accurate information is more of a deterrent to abuse than prohibition.
Which brings me to another related point. I firmly believe that prohibition is maintained because it creates an illegal economy. I believe there are people in positions of influence who profit from the illegal drug trade who are outspoken supporters of prohibition, otherwise how could so many people be stupid enough to support a system that so obviously fails to do what it intends and oppose even debate on alternative strategies? To my mind, anyone who supports prohibition must be a drug pusher.
But then again, maybe that's just a paranoid delusion caused by my week and a half stint of criminal THC abuse when I was injured...
My concentration was so bad before I took crystal meth that I couldn't take the rest of the sentence in.
By the way, did you know that self mutilation with a chainsaw can shed weight quicker than any known diet and exercise regime? Oh, and it may cause death or permanent disability.
My god, what have I done?
It's fabric. The kinks don't get worked out, they get ironed out. Pay attention.
I didn't say that drugs are good, nor did I suggest anywhere that rampant abuse of drugs is ever positive. This is exactly the kind of brainless knee-jerk non argument I did refer to. You have a position which you seek to support by taking one case that on the surface appears contradict my argument, while in truth it doesn't. Idiots with preconceived notions who half read my post and read your response will have their preconceived idiot notions reinforced. This does nothing to further rational debate.
Drug use is promoted everywhere. Alcohol consumption, for example, is so ingrained in our culture that it forms an important part of some religious observances. Caffeine consumption, particularly amongst ./ readers I'll wager, is also incredibly high.
That's the thing that really shits me about the kind of story the NYT has run here. It's a story based on a knee-jerk "OH noes, wired included positive effects of an ILLEGAL drug in an article" approach rather than any semblance rational thought. I'll say it now, knowing full well there are idiots who can't get over this: the legality or otherwise of a drug has a causal relationship with how bad/dangerous it is.
Compare the effects of heavy coffee consumption with equivalent coca consumption and the actual medical side effects start to make coffee look a lot worse. Of course coca is not readily available except as a processed powder with is usually cut with other chemicals and it is associated with criminal activity, but if were not illegal would that be the case? I don't think there is any rational argument that can be made to suggest that criminalisation is not the cause of the majority of the ill effects on society of cocaine.
These articles help perpetuate the myth that all illegal drugs are bad and prescription drugs are good. This has two very detrimental effects on society. Firstly, people tend to trust the latest wonder drug that doctors hand out because it is legal. Then a few years later we find out too late just how many people taking the latest wonder drug are sleep walking off balconies or committing suicide or dying of liver failure.
The second effect is that drugs that are illegal but which can have real benefit are ignored. I don't take drugs usually, but a few years ago I broke my clavicle and a couple of ribs and bruised my spine in a bicycle accident. I could not get up or down without extreme pain and at the time I was single and had to look after myself. The prescribed pain killers where physically addictive and felt unpleasant to me as I tend not to enjoy opiates. The anti-inflammatories had evil side effects. So I ate pot. I hadn't used that since college and never really thought I would again, but as a muscle relaxant, anti-inflammatory and pain killer it was excellent, plus it made lying down and doing nothing a lot less boring. I didn't have to drive a car, there was not a lot of chance of long term mental health issues from a couple of weeks use, all in all it was perfect.
So as far as I'm concerned the whole "illegal drugs are bad because they are illegal" attitude gave me a choice of feeling like shit as a result of drugs that doctors can legally prescribe, or feeling okay physically, but committing a crime or several and taking my chances that the drug I was taking was not laced with something more dangerous. Clinically what I took was more appropriate for my situation, but knee jerk idiots who are incapable of rational debate on drugs made it more dangerous to me than it should have been.
Drugs are bad, mkay, but they are useful and given any health situation where using a particular drug may be beneficial, it should be legally available.
Ho Chi Minh did, and asked the US for help very early on. The US changed sides, siding with the French and Ho Chi Minh was very disappointed. The rest is history. Not widely known, particularly in that the US would love that bit of history to disappearbut true.
As for Isreal, you have bought a bit of bullshit there. Freindly relations between Palestinian Muslims, Jews and Christians was the norm in the 1930s. At least according to older Palestinian Jews I have spoken with. The British were heavily involved, although didn't want to appear to be. Arab terrorism didn't really exist until relatively recently. Zionist terrorism was big in the 20s and 30s. Many Isrealis aren't educated in this, probably because it would make it much harder to sell propaganda to Isrealis.
I don't read the Arab propaganda and a large part of my understanding of the history of Zionism and Isreal is based on writing and conversation with Jews. I also don't buy Isreali propaganda, so me it looks like a bunch of blood thirsty fuckwits invaded a piece of land they had no claim to and have spent the last 40+ years committing crimes that on balance appear to me to exceed what was committed against them in Europe. Not that crimes committed against them is any justification for what has been to Palestinians, mind you. The continued settlement of land, especially strategically important high ground, shows that Isreal has little commitment to peace.
You're not Isreali are you? Your comments about Chile suggested that you think that a country where political opponents are murdered as a matter of course is highly successful as long as they are wealthy. As long as the attrocities are committed by the right side it's okay is it? Could also be neo-con, I suppose.
Don't know about toshiba, but my HP Pavillion is around 10-15 seconds quicker booting Ubuntu than it was when I still had a Vista partition. Both systems clean, bog standard installs of respective OSes. Vista was installed without crapware from replacement media paid for by HP when I told them their OEM Vista wasn't actually Vista ;-P
Yeah and while Avid now finally supports Vista, it is painful because Vista is till the worst suited OS for any content creation thanks to bone headed digital restrictions management. So the choice really is Linux or OSX.
What about the image of an arrogant Aussie yob sucking stubby and telling you you're a wanker.
I didn't actually say anyone was better, just pointed out that the US is not the best. The only point where I made any comparison was expressed as personal opinion. Is the fact that you got so defensive a sign that you fear I am right?
Are they being co-opted by the Soviets, or are they being co-opted by America?
Korea
Might have been as bad if the US hadn't intervened, but who is to know? The whole anti-commie thing the US did in the last century as a way to demonise a socio/political model that is incompatible with it's own is hard to assess, given that all countries that have attempted it have encountered extreme external resistance, led by the US. Look at Cuba - they would not have the poverty if they were not under an embargo. Socialism is extremely popular in central and South America due in large part to resistance to the US, caused by past behaviour of the US. Totalitarian regiems have been common in East Asia, regardless of whether they are communist or capitalist. The question of North or South comes down to oppressed and poor or oppressed and rich.
Vietnam
The US really went against the traditional freedom thing here. They took the side of a colonial power rather than the majority of it's population. They took that side against an ally who had saved the lives of US marines in WW2 and fought against the Japanese. Why? Because defeating communism is more important than promoting democracy. What happened? A group that wanted to head towards a socialist democracy, which European countries have shown can work, turned to larger totalitarian countries for support and were heavily influenced by them.
The US used dangerous chemical warfare, carpet bombing of forests with the latest high tech, mass murder of civilian population because so many of them were supporting the the North that they couldn't tell who was who(democracy anyone?).
I'm from Australia and our army fought there, did a lot better than the US in terms of casualties per soldier sent, and came back to abuse from Australians who were against it. These days it is very hard to find anyone, even amongst ex soldiers who volunteered, who thinks it was the right thing to do. Thankfully for the ex-soldiers the fact that they made the sacrifice they did is now highly respected here.
The US gave up any chance of influence by turning to aggression and fucked up so monumentally that I'm surprised you even mentioned it.
Chile
Whether or not the US directly pushed to install Pinochet, whenever the US has moved to oust a foreign leader and succeeded, the resulting government turns out to be as bad or worse for the population of that country. Again, a pretty strange one to add to your list.
Isreal
A terrorist nation created through a deal between Great Britain and a group with strong links to terrorism in Europe. I wont be fooled into separating Palestine and Egypt as examples because in both cases the root problem was/is the existence of Isreal. Isreal is a country formed in the main by people descended from central Asians who think that because their ancestors converted to a religion they have some holy right to a strip of land they have no historical claim to. They have been supported by Europe because of the shame of what has been done to them over centuries and they have been supported by the US because a large part of US financial power is owned and run by people who funded the European religious terrorists of last century.
How different would things be if the US had sided against religious extremism back then, back when Jews and Muslims happily shared neighbourhoods in Palestine?
It's hard to know how different things would have been if any of these cases had been played differently, but it is fairly evident that the US has abandoned principles on which the nation was founded.