Thank you both for your back-and-forth discussion, it was interesting to read!
Note that I don't take the "United We Stand" rhetoric to be necessarily militant -- standing for freedom and human rights does not necessarily mean killing those who oppose such things, even less-so does it mean killing innocents.
I do hope you, sh_mmer, turn out to be right that these attacks aren't futile. I have much more confidence in the focus on the overall success of the mission to generally defang international terrorism now than I did during the Clinton years, but I still don't see much evidence that the US government as a whole is truly committing itself to its fundamental purpose of defending the US from attack. (I don't question the commitment of the military and organizations such as the FBI, but expect that, as the present levels of concern taper off, activities irrelevant to defense and unnecessary for government to undertake will once again occupy most of the attention of members of Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, who, rather than focusing on defending our nation, tend to prefer playing Santa Claus, or Robin Hood with an Uzi, "nannying" our children in lieu of expecting responsible parenting, and changing the rules of the game of golf.)
What I've long admired about American character (as I perceive it) is the ability of its military and police to focus both effectively and narrowly on a tactical goal without being distracted by hysteria, prejudice, etc. as is more typical of other cultures, especially older ones.
In that sense, an American military or police action is less like a grenade going off, killing anyone in the area, than like a fast-moving train, rolling over anything in its way, but staying on its tracks.
I tend to believe this is the result of the US history of being a society of individual achievement, rights, and responsibility, in which those concerns are typically elevated above those of personal issues such as race, nation of birth, etc.
But this is a challenging time, our military has been through a very challenging time, so I don't assume it will succeed.
For my part, I did publish a proposal for peace that might have made military action unnecessary, but it failed to attract much attention, and I did not propose it as a means to deny the military the support it needed to do its job.
Among the most balanced posts containing that sort of opinion, thanks!
There's something you might not have considered is a reason some say "poverty" or, more precisely, "American success" or "American economic dominance" has much to do with why terrorists attack America.
The terrorists rarely -- whoever they are -- feel "connected" to political or economic power, even if they, themselves, are wealthy.
Americans, and others in the West, are, on the other hand, accustomed to easily accessing political power to a reasonable approximation of their percentage of the pertinent population.
In that view, if the Arab Muslim world had more democratic republics a la the US (perhaps even more "free" than the US presently is, such as a system actually based on the US Constitution), not only would they personally have more freedom to direct their lives, but the economic and political powerhouses their nations would have as a result of permitting their citizens (vs. subjects) vast economic and important political freedoms would allow many present "unresolvable" disputes to be, if not resolvable, less likely to stimulate such extreme violence.
Whether this line of argument holds much merit, I don't myself know, being quite ignorant of the situation in the Middle East, but it stands to reason that if Palestinians demonstrated a long-term commitment to democracy, respect for the rule of law, respect of property rights, and a patient willingness to achieve generation-by-generation leaps of progress as so many other peoples have done (e.g. Jews in the USA), they'd be in a much better position to "earn" their rights vis-a-vis Israel, not so much by throwing rocks or becoming suicide bombers, but by simply buying little pieces of Israel from Israelis happy to sell to fund their retirements (in Florida, California, wherever;-).
I realize this is America-centric thinking perhaps, but, after all, here in the USA, our political and economic system, as screwy as it often is, has often resulted in citizens who are members of "tribe X" willingly fighting against other members of tribe X attacking the USA from the outside. I don't doubt that many Muslims will willingly help the US defend itself against whatever "jihad" is declared, because they've seen for themselves how their rights are deeper and broader here than in many areas, even those which are governed by Islamic fundamentalists (which I distinguish from Islamic extremists or militants).
Personally, I might be killed because I was born in the USA, or because I live here, or because I'm a citizen, or I'm white, but I'm willing to die defending the rights of everyone -- Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, atheist, etc. -- to live together in peace by subscribing to the sort of outlining of human rights as done in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And that is what I believe is under attack by the terrorists, because I don't believe they're truly irrational (people planning suicide attacks for years tend to think things through once or twice), and I don't see them focusing their attacks on those who directly deny them the kind of political and economic power their Muslim counterparts in the USA already -- and increasingly, I hope -- enjoy. And while the USA might complicate their achieving that kind of power by, e.g., supporting Israel, neither the US nor Israel is nearly as directly responsible for such denial as the leaders the terrorists and their neighbors accept for themselves, as far as I can tell.
In essence, many people believe the US is serving as a scapegoat for the inadequacies of other nations, and I think there's some merit to that argument.
If that's true, the bad news is that any changes we (in the USA) make in policy, e.g. less support of Israel, are unlikely to reduce the level of hatred directed towards us. We must therefore balance such supposed improvements in international appreciation against whatever security we might give up (e.g. lose a "good friend" in the Middle East by losing Israel as a friend, if not as a nation and its citizens as a people) by pursuing such improvements. (This reminds me of a quote, something like "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while looking for a rock to throw".)
The good news would be that there's a much more hopeful path to world peace than that outlined by many apologists for terrorists (which usually amounts to "let's leave Israel to either be pushed into the sea or defend itself using nukes") -- one in which Palestinians, as well as Muslims in many other countries, gain for themselves access to economic and political freedoms that already have proven to be a much more peaceful basis for a society here in the USA than what they're presently dealing with.
It is shocking to me that intervention is so obviously right in this case, yet so wrong when we multiply it by the millions of oppressed women and religious minorities in Afghanistan.
In case you're interested, here are my opinions.
Pretty much all the "logic" used to explain why "we" (the West, the US, Bush) shouldn't attack, shouldn't risk killing any innocents, and so on, is based, as far as I can tell, on a misplaced sense of justice and fairness.
In our comfortable societies, we can afford to pursue certain levels of justice and fairness because we have the infrastructure to do so without taking significant risks ourselves.
As an example, many say we are wrong to not show our "evidence" to the Taliban.
For the most part, these people somehow think this whole episode is being carried out in a court of law -- US law, for example -- in which a prosecutor is required to share any and all evidence with the defendent's legal team before the trial starts.
What they're missing is the fact that there's no court of law here that can stop the serious, deadly effects of sharing such evidence. They might see the situation more logically if, e.g., a defendant, married to their own sister, had killed their mother (the defendant's mother-in-law), the evidence proving this came secretly from their sister (the defendant's wife -- putting aside marital issues here), the nature of the evidence itself would immediately identify the sister as its source, and the defendant, exercising his free-speech and defense rights, could easily direct anonymous minions to kill his wife (the sister).
In a case like that, the courts might reasonably choose to agree with the prosecutor that the evidence cannot be shared with the defense, especially if letting the defendant go free meant that it was likely other innocents would be killed by him.
Here, we have no courts that can make those decisions and enforce them reasonably -- no police force that can restrain bin Laden, the US, the Taliban, etc. from taking immediate violent action, and, most importantly, no courts that are even remotely respected by both parties.
In that case, it's indeed true that the "winner" of the case will be the one that wins the violent clash. "Might makes right", not exactly, but it's rarely completely embraced as a principle that the exercise of might necessarily makes the party less "right" than the target. (Consider the collection of taxes by the threat of force, which most supposedly peace-loving people support wholeheartedly.)
There are other similar confusions in discussing these issues, sharing fundamental mistakes, such as treating abstractions (such as governments) as concrete (such as people), comparing morality based on acts without regard to intents and/or alternatives to those acts, and so on.
Note that I took your statement to read "it is strange how some people regard the right of the Taliban to not be oppressed as vastly greater than the right of its people, e.g. women, to not be oppressed by it".
If you instead meant "why didn't the world attack the Taliban before, for its treatment of its people", I suggest that the fundamental answer is that the rest of the world isn't responsible for the women of Afghanistan to nearly the degree the men of Afghanistan are (and, in a gender-neutral sense, they're less responsible than the women themselves).
After all, by "the world" you really mean certain militaries operating on behalf of their governments, and their duties are to protect their respective nations and peoples. Everything else they do flows from this fundamental objective.
Not invading Afghanistan to liberate its women might, in that sense, be a miscalculation on various levels (including the moral dimension), but not nearly as crucial a misstep as failing to defend one's own nation -- the fundamental, original purpose of any government, one which also need not take much regarding morality into account.
If you subtract out the governments and militaries, you'll find that there was, in fact, a sort of "intervention" being conducted to liberate Afghan women, by ordinary citizens of the world as a whole. As individuals, they might well put moral issues ahead of defending their nations, their families, even themselves, and individuals always have the right to do that as they see fit, regardless of what governments and militaries do.
So, for whatever reasons, the US and the West generally having seen 09-11 as an attack requiring some sort of military response, it is not peculiar to me, at all, that they'd respond militarily to a degree well beyond how they responded to learning of the plight of Afghan women.
While the military men put their lives on the line to keep most of us safe and comfy, we can do our job by more carefully understanding the roles we, our societies, our militaries, and our governments play, vis-a-vis others, and thus, perhaps, conduct ourselves so that military action is, in the future, less likely, personal freedom, on the whole, more widely and deeply available.
If such is the case, then shouldn't we encourage all law abiding citizens to buy a handgun, get some training, and get a carry permit?
Probably. Should have done that years, decades, ago.
If we'd have done that, even if the WTC attacks still happened, any idiot racist thinking of attacking somebody because they "look" Arab would have thought twice, on the assumption that he may be packing heat.
Re:Umm, read up on Afghanistan please
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You mean point their AKs and RPGs at them?
They use RPG?? Wow, talk about "geezer tech", that's even worse than COBOL!!
No need. The beautiful thing about non-profit organizations like the FSF, about volunteer groups generally, and that includes corporations, is that we don't have to join them, nor are we forced to choose to either go 100% with them or 100% against them.
For whatever reasons, which none of us outside the FSF can say, the directors of that organization continue to feel RMS is the best choice to lead them, especially as figurehead.
It's easy to say they're making the wrong choice; much harder to say who would be a better choice, especially to collectively agree on one choice.
Though RMS himself and the FSF itself fail to meet whatever standards we set for them, nothing prevents us from taking advantage of the roles they do play in public by looking carefully at what they say, thinking about it, picking just those parts we agree with, and promoting those. We needn't resent not being able to just say "anything said by RMS/FSF is correct", even if being able to do so would save lots of time and energy being expended by adherents to the FSF's free-software philosophy.
So, the answer to your question "who elected [RMS] to speak for anything" is twofold:
The FSF Board of Directors, presumably, elected him to speak for their organization (which RMS founded, of course), and that is their right.
RMS elected himself to speak for himself as well.
Accordingly, we can choose whether to listen to him, and whether to choose to speak for ourselves in response. To the extent he and the FSF are perceived as speaking the truth, they'll be relevant. Else, if they persist in choosing to place goals such as delegitimizing the Bush Presidency and trying to redesign the English language from the ground up over their stated goal of promoting free software for all, they'll be less relevant, and our individual voices will accordingly be stronger and louder.
And that, my friends, is why we have web sites like slashdot.org!
the remark about our 'unelected president' makes your peice look stupid anyways...
Indeed, but you have to realize that, for RMS, this is an improvement.
In a/. interview before last year's Presidential election, RMS, in the midst of his usual calls for everyone to use the "right name" for a certain popular operating system, he chose to stoop to childish name-calling by using the epithet "Shrub" instead of "Bush".
That's not only much worse than the insistence of some in the "journalistic" media to append, and sometimes vocally stress, "Junior" to Bush's name, especially earlier in the campaign, it's frighteningly hypocritical to see such blatant hypocrisy in a single interview.
(FYI, the candidates were "George W. Bush" and "Al Gore, Jr." There were no mistakes made in calling George Bush "Junior"; that was done intentionally.)
Given the progress we've seen here, in another couple of years, RMS will be referring to Bush as merely our "minority president" or "unpopularly elected president", rather than the outright lie he is presently using.
(And, yes, his penchant for muddling what should be a tightly focused message about software-related freedoms with his sociopolitical concerns has infested the FSF, at least in the past.)
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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I also wanted to make the point that despite the wishes of many, all reglions do NOT teach the same basic things
Indeed. Still, I wrestle daily with the distinction between being a "good Christian" and being one who courageously defends the most Christian way of life we have on this planet, which generally operates within Western society or civilization.
The former requires me to be nonviolent, meek, humble, not even seeking to disarm my fellow Christians (any more than Jesus sought to disarm the disciple who cut off someone's ear with his sword), but makes for a difficult cross to bear (e.g. not defending an innocent's life with violence, even when that's the only possible defense).
The latter allows me to use violence to defend lives of innocents of any religion, but makes for some very difficult moral choices.
In the end, most criticism of the USA or practical Christianity seems to amount to situations where we had to choose between two or more evils, we picked what we believed was the least evil choice, often we gave our lives for that choice, and, now, Monday-morning quarterbacks criticize us for "choosing evil", and paint all Americans and/or Christians with a broad brush of that one "evil choice" as if we've always chosen evil every time.
So while I agree with you that there is a substantial difference between the teachings of Christianity and Islam, I observe that, in practice, we who follow these (and Judaism, and maybe other religions) face basically the same choices -- some day in and day out, others (like me) only rarely in life.
It is, for that reason, that I have a great deal of respect for Islam and its followers. Maybe their religion teaches a need for violence at times. But a) that removes one layer of hypocrisy when a follower feels it necessary to resort to violence to preserve a way of life he values, and b) the followers do seem to be very loyal to their idea of God (Allah), and for that I am very grateful, even if I might disagree over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
"A man pushes an elderly woman, injuring her. That's against the law. Should he be jailed?"
Now, if her answer is "yes", ask her whether it makes any difference that he pushed her out of the way of an oncoming truck.
If her answer was "it depends", explain to her that, to some of us, a programmer explaining just how poor security actually is in a widely-distributed app that is advertised as offering security is much more like the man pushing a woman out of the way of an oncoming truck than someone hacking into web sites and shutting them down.
Indeed, Mafiaboy (I gather) did something much more like pushing an elderly woman into the path of an oncoming truck. One can claim that he did this to draw attention to the fact that old ladies and big scary trucks are not a good combination on our roads, but the fact remains that there are many other, valid, ways to illustrate the same thing without shutting somebody's valid business down (the equivalent of shoving unendangered old ladies around in this analogy).
Dmitry, on the other hand, might have had a few alternatives, but he was doing nothing remotely near violating fundamental ethical or moral principles of our society -- unless you're getting moral and ethical guidance from the likes of Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen, that is.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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Thank you for your post. I'd like to highlight one thing in particular that other respondents seem to have misinterpreted:
Islam was spread initially by military conquest. Christianity was spread by word of mouth
I took this as if you'd written "Christianity was [initially] spread...", because that seemed clear to me in context.
If so, you're quite correct. The first 300 years or so, Christians were, by and large, tortured, beaten, probably raped, certainly killed, by the various nations to whose people they preached, whether their gods were pagan, Jewish, or none whatsoever. That indeed was the way Christianity was initially spread. Further, followers of Christianity typically gave up positions of power and/or tyranny over others, one notable example being Saul->Paul. Christianity wasn't then, and I believe never was intended to be, an authorization for tyrannizing anyone else, for any reason, under any circumstances, using any means involving force or the threat of its use.
Others correctly point out that, beginning with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome around 300AD, it was subsequently (which is what I'm stressing here!) spread, too often, via violence, as you say Islam was initially (and I'll have to take your word on that).
In case anyone thinks the others' postings were just minor "oversights", in terms of missing the important element of the context of your post, I'll suggest that, no, they probably didn't care that you said "initially" at all.
I'm an avid reader of The Christian Science Sentinel. Needless to say from the title alone, that's a highly pro-Christian publication.
But, a few months ago, they ran a cover-page article on the so-called "cultural creatives" movement, an interview with the two sociologists who "discovered" this phenomenon.
In that article, when they asked these supposedly highly educated people about Christianity, they responded by talking about 2,000 years (not, I stress, 1,700 -- that is, they included the first 300 years) of a history of fighting, nations (they focused primarily on Western ones) building war machines, and so on.
(I guess maybe those sociologists considered early Christians' preference for being eaten by lions to denouncing Christ and converting to pagan deities to be examples of being "contentious"?)
So, I believe some of the respondents to your post did not miss your point at all -- that they did what those sociologists did, willingly and willfully repeat anti-Christian rhetoric as a "rebut" to a supposedly incorrect statement regarding Christian history.
And, again, your statement was not incorrect.
(To those who truly believe they responded without realizing he was referring to "initial" history, I apologize in advance for inferring that you didn't care. In recognition of the fact that a predominantly Christian nation is recovering from the aftermath of an attack killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, I urge you to immediately apologize for having written a knee-jerk response criticizing Christianity, especially if you used an insulting or condescending tone or if you didn't take care to point out that you were not referring to its first 300 years of existence.)
You claim the US constantly kills innocent citizens, yet repeatedly respond to my pointing out that Reno did exactly that by unnecessarily sending in tanks to Waco by talking about what Koresh did.
At no point have you explained why Reno had to do what she did. At no point have you explained why she should have been allowed to hold onto her job afterwards.
All you seem to want to do is cheer on Clinton and Reno, to try to "equalize" the evil you claim Rush represents, who, okay, maybe for one day was going off the deep end, like so many Americans, ranting about carpet-bombing a country that may have willingly hosted terrorists that had just attacked ours.
I don't deny you might be right about Bush "SR" killing "innocent Iraqi civilians" (which is surely what you said, given your transition from killing "civilians" to blaming Bush for killing "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis"), but my impression is that he did not do that, an entire coalition of nations ordered Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait (where they were already killing plenty of civilians, and looking to invade Saudi Arabia), then, when Iraq decided for itself to fight "the mother of all ground wars", it was their soldiers, not civilians, that got killed by the hundreds of thousands. The civilians actually got killed by tiny numbers by traditional standards of warfare.
Regarding sanctions, my impression is that the international community, what remains of that coalition, decided what would be sufficient to allow Iraq to subsist at least, possibly flourish, without building up its military and shoot down planes patrolling the no-fly zone. They might have the calculations wrong.
Or, just possibly, Saddam Hussein might be diverting so much of the resources being allowed in for military use, willingly denying his own innocent men, women, and children those important foods and medicines, that mindless sheep will go along with his media campaign of blaming US, or Bush Sr (I notice you don't exactly bring up the fact that those sanctions continued, unchanged, under the Clinton/Reno regime, but continue to act as though Bush was solely responsible for them all the way along), always blaming somebody else, for his (Hussein's), and, by going along with it, his nation's, evil, and the comparatively-light sanctions resulting therefrom.
The reality is that the US has a sadly, unprecedented history of giving generously to quickly rebuild nations that it has just defeated in war. (In Iraq's case, willingly keeping the prime perpetrator in power naturally disqualifies them for this treatment -- Iraq has chosen this result by its actions, is how I see it.)
You, of course, willfully ignore that in your rants, paint pretty much all Americans, especially our Presidents, with the same broad brush of your hateful assumptions.
Now, I might indeed have some facts wrong above -- I haven't investigated for myself. Maybe all the reporting from Iraq was wrong. Maybe the US media duped us. Maybe they never even invaded Kuwait. (I recall hearing that the persuasive testimony of some Kuwaiti leader's daughter regarding seeing a pregnant woman stabbed was shown to be a lie. Not a US media lie, but a lie of the sort I find hard to swallow...and, needless to say, I don't find Kuwait's willingness to follow through on promises made vis-a-vis democracy all that persuasive.)
But, I do know that even Janet Reno has not offered anything close to a valid reason for ordering those tanks to roll in, killing those innocent children you keep claiming as so important for Koresh to release.
Based on your moral reasoning about Rush, I call you what you are: an evil, unreasoning, mass murderer. You promote and defend murder of innocent American children, while blaming US Presidents for what international coalitions decide to do to guilty, murderous regimes and the soldiers that willingly sign up for them.
AND GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD, YOU CHILDISH IDIOT: ONCE KORESH'S CAMP WAS INVADED, ALSO UNNECESSARILY, HIS ABILITY TO REASON, ACT NOBLY, WHATEVER LITTLE OF THAT MIGHT HAVE ALREADY EXISTED, WENT OUT THE WINDOW. THAT WAS THE **WHOLE POINT** OF THAT RAID -- TO COMPLETELY DEMORALIZE, DISTRACT, CONFUSE, AND BLIND KORESH AND HIS FOLLOWERS.
Comparing him to Janet Reno, who sat back in Washington calmly drinking tea, who had plenty of opportunity to understand the psychological state of the cult and its leader, and yet STILL SENT IN THOSE TANKS, shows what a complete and utter disregard you really have for innocent human life, compared to evil people who, in their thirst to show their power, undertake unnecessary actions resulting in the the loss of that innocent life.
So, okay, I'll concede your point about Rush's rant for now. Like so many of us, he was furious for a day or so, I'll assume.
Unlike Rush and the rest of us, Reno has never since gotten over her fury, her irrational, possibly insane to devotion to using force (though always against innocent, impoverished right-wing Christians, it seems) again and again...
...and, by choosing to repeatedly avoid defending her by logical argument or making it clear you consider her vastly more culpable for her actions than Rush has ever in his life been for killing any innocents, I claim you are more guilty than Rush of evil, of murdering innocents by proxy, based on your own reasoning.
Lest anyone think you aren't a blind, hating, murderous-in-your-heart racist, they should re-read your own writing, IN THE WAKE OF THE MOST SEVERE LOSS OF AMERICAN LIFE ON OUR SHORES IN OVER A CENTURY, and, frankly, this will likely be the quote, and the timing, for which you will be known for the rest of your life, thanks to your putting it on public record:
He is an american and like all americans he too likes to see people being killed all over the world.
Lovely. Hope you're proud of making that claim about the approximately 20,000 innocent men, women, and children killed some 48 hours ago, including the three or so American men who decided to sacrifice their lives, rush the hijackers, and thus, quite probably, save the lives of many others somewhere in Washington DC.
Thank you, msouth, for saying in so few words what I've too-often tried, and failed, to say in my own highly verbose manner. (Won't even go into how well I do at actually following your advice...sigh.)
Rush did advocate bombing whoever was responsible for the OKC bombing. Once he found out that not only was the perpetrator an American but also a Republican he changed his tune. All of a sudden turning Michigan into a parking lot was not an option. Why is that? Well it's because Rush wanted to see arab civillians killed by the hundreds of thousands but did not want to see American civillians die.
So, let me get this straight: you assume that because Rush wanted to see the perpetrators of the OKC bombing punished, he necessarily was calling for killing hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians??
Wow. In addition to having a sig that's the product of massive self-delusion, you appear to have a very poor grasp of logic.
Again, I've actually been listening to Rush's show for some 10 years now, and he's not exactly anti-Life, nor anti-Muslim, nor anti-Arab.
He certainly believes more in the efficacy of the use of military force than I do, but I don't find it surprising that anyone who advocates the use of military force at all would be more willing to punish a distant enemy in a less-than-perfectly-precise way than a local enemy that way.
Nor is it hypocritical to rationally assess one's ability to more reliably distinguish enemies among one's local neighbors than among people halfway around the world.
Continuing your delusional reasoning, you assume I'm making Koresh and company into martyrs. Of course, I did nothing even remotely like that.
What I was pointing out was that, in your "rush" to tar and feather Rush for supposedly causing violence, you ignore the fact of the hypocrisies of the Left, namely, that we are to unilaterally disarm against sworn enemies of our nation (USSR, China, Cuba, whoever, especially if they're communist or socialist), while aggressively roll tanks into highly confused members of a local cult that posed no significant threat to the safety of our nation. (In this sense, they continued the "great work" undertaken mostly by communist/atheist governments, whether killing members of Falun Gong, Christians, capitalists, and so on, because they fancy that such people pose a threat to their own power base.)
Koresh and his followers had no choice but to surrender. Reno chose to not ensure that they made that choice by simply waiting them out. As with Elian, there was no pressing need to roll in those tanks.
Yet she found plenty of excuses not to investigate Al Gore, despite substantial and credible evidence of campaign-finance violations, and despite her own pledge to undertake such investigations should even the appearance of wrongdoing in high places manifest itself.
I'm not really trying to pick on Reno, or Clinton, or even defend Rush, so much as I'm trying to point out that it's American citizens who had plenty of opportunity to decide whether the people it puts in positions of power -- and, let's face it, Clinton/Reno exercised vastly more power to kill innocent people than Rush ever did -- deserved to remain, after having so spectacularly failed to avoid killing innocent human beings, especially citizens, and offered totally insufficient grounds for their actions. (In that sense, I don't even rule out putting Operation Desert Storm in that general category, but note that a) that was a war against an aggressive nation, at least a "proper" function of government, whether truly necessary or not, and b) Americans voted the victorious President who conducted that war out of office ASAP.)
More to the point, yesterday morning, over half of Congress woke up thinking first not of how best to defend our national borders against sworn enemies of the USA, how to ensure that our military is vibrant, strong, and alert to all manner of potential attack, but how to attack our President, how to force him to cut military spending, how to force him to increase spending on unconstitutional (and, more to the point, militarily irrelevant) activities like our welfare state and federal education, and how to raise taxes back and even further.
The result of the attack has been not to change the "tune", to any significant degree, of Rush and the congresscritters who most closely represent his thinking, but to change the entire mode of conduct of "those on the other side of the aisle" -- those whose prescriptions for our nation's needs, such as federally funding endless destruction of viable human life to do stem cell research, increasing the minimum wage, spending yet more on a failed federal education system, and so on, hold no promise whatsoever for repelling attacks such as yesterday's, and, further, do not require government to implement any of them. (Private funding can meet all those "needs". Unless you're willing to let more crazies like Koresh do whatever they like, the same can't be said for national defense.)
Yet we've so overburdened the government as if it's a big rich sugar daddy, or Santa Claus, passing out goodies that it funds by collecting confiscatory taxes from the populace by force, that we've lost sight of the fact that daddy is driving and needs to concentrate solely on the road -- the defense of our nation.
A government that fails to effectively defend against attack from enemies, especially in so simple and direct a manner, and, in response, fails to jettison everything not directly related to its defensive duties, doesn't deserve to continue existing as such. The people can do better on their own.
The reason we were attacked is because we weren't prepared. And the reason we weren't prepared is because we listen to people like you, who consistently, and willfully, try to shift our national government's focus from its sole duty to defend our national borders and our defensive infrastructure, to fulfilling your personal fantasies about how best to enforce "compassion".
My observation is that Rush's approach -- of having a government that focuses narrowly on defense rather than taking on the job of intruding into every corner of the lives of ordinary Americans -- likely works much better than the approach of people who, like yourself, would rather criticize Rush than the congresscritters who frittered time and our money away in failing to defend against yesterday's attack.
(Am I personally advocating a "strong military", warfare, and so on? Not necessarily. Just pointing out what does and doesn't work, and what is and isn't true.)
BTW: I don't recall mentioning (Randy?) Weaver at all. As I recall, that was the Ruby Ridge incident. How you manage to find such references in my writings is beyond me, especially since Reno had basically nothing to do with Ruby Ridge -- it happened, what, one year before she took over the Dept. of Justice??
P.S. As far as your feelings about Koresh -- frankly, I shared them completely at the time. When I saw those BATF agents taking fire, I was furious, and I'm pretty sure that even when the final raid happened I was still basically supportive of "teaching a lesson" to those crazies and anyone else like them.
That's why I was, and probably still am, unsuitable as a law-enforcement agent, especially a director, and the same goes (and always, apparently, has gone) for Janet Reno, who I also defaulted to admiring greatly for the first year or so she was on the national scene.
But one thing stuck with me, and I can't recall whether it happened during the initial or final raid, and that was Bryant Gumbel muttering something on the CBS Morning News about how that episode "shows the sad state of gun control in this country".
I kept thinking about that. Not being much in favor of gun control at that time, nor strongly opposed to it yet, I could see some logic in what I knew to be his attempt to imply that we need only pass strong-enough laws to prevent this sort of thing ever happening again.
But ultimately I realized that it was the gun-control laws themselves that caused what happened. Without them, there'd have been no initial or subsequent raids, OKC wouldn't have happened, and maybe we'd have even begun getting away from our failed war on drugs, or at least finding a better, less violent, intrusive, and unconstitutional approach to "waging" it.
So, I felt as you appear to, but, in the end, I couldn't find any rational basis for supporting the initial raid, the final raid, nor the keeping of the perpetrator of the final deadly raid in office, any more than the perpetrators of the (much less consciously-conduct) Kent State shootings should have been allowed to remain in office. When it comes to killing innocent citizens by accident in a voluntary police action, officials should be given very little lenience based on their "intentions", IMO.
But I will admit it took a long time for me to get away from the emotion of that situation. I get very angry in such situations, or at least used to, because, like Rush appears to, I tend to "default" to law-and-order mode, even if we disagree on how best to achieve order and what truly constitutes law.
P.P.S. I had an interesting conversation this past summer with a lawyer/teacher (retired, IIRC) who described himself as a "small-business-oriented leftist anarchist" or something like that. He had plenty of interesting viewpoints, including noting that the "right wing" lately went from loving law enforcement to resenting it (to which I offered a couple of answers I think he found persuasive).
But when I pointed out to him, after he defended Reno's acts, that she had willingly and, apparently, unnecessarily assaulted poor right-wing Christians, but failed to properly follow through on her real job of investigating highly-placed, wealthy, left-wing government officials, such as Gore, I swear this guy was totally dumbstruck -- and, interestingly, though I'm only guessing, not because he felt he'd been outargued or anything, but because I think he genuinely found this point persuasive and truly disturbing to contemplate.
In the end, I think he and I, despite having great disagreements on how best to have a peaceful yet prosperous world with full individual freedoms, shared those goals sufficiently to intelligently discuss many of these issues without rancor. He did, as you might imagine, castigate Rush as a "racist", and was probably surprised that I neither capitulated nor desired to argue much, just pointing out that I'd listened to him for many years and completely disagreed.
(In my experience, the willingness of someone to claim Rush Limbaugh is a "racist" or "promotes violence like the OKC bombing" is a sure indicator of someone who is unwilling to listen to him or others, yet willing to unthinkingly repeat whatever vile things they hear about some unpopular figure. So I was quite surprised, after a long conversation, that he made the "racist" claim, yet continued to listen to me, especially since the very views he probably considers Rush to hold that make him "racist" are ones that I, too, hold, though he didn't inquire about any of them specifically. I'm guessing that he probably won't repeat the "Rush is racist" claim without first verifying it for himself and thus being able to back it up with firsthand experience. Some people just refuse to knowingly play the role of mindless sheep, following the herd of a leader who requires them to spew hatred.)
Could you provide quotes or references of Limbaugh actually calling for the killing of Iraqi civilians? In my experience, he typically makes quite clear distinctions between a populace whose government acts with complete disregard for the well-being of its citizens and one whose government is "of the people, by the people, for the people" as ours is supposed to be.
I'm also curious -- do you hold Limbaugh to be more evil for supposedly calling for the killing of innocent civilians, or Clinton and Reno more evil for actually killing them while undertaking actions that were neither necessary nor constitutionally valid?
Or maybe because bombing those responsible might have started with Rush's radio station
You might be right, but I believe you likely support a common fallacy regarding Rush's show.
I actually listen to him, and recall various important elements of the story quite clearly.
For one thing, Rush never, to my knowledge, advocated any such response to the Waco tragedy.
In fact, during hearings involving grilling Janet Reno for her handling of the situation, Rush criticized the way one Congressman (forget who offhand) treated her -- appropriate, since he was rather rude.
In reward for that gallant act, that weekend, President Clinton "humorously" (with nobody laughing, IIRC) claimed Rush defended Reno "only because her attacker was a black man".
Though Clinton tried to spin his way out of that mess later on, Rush pledged to never again defend a member of Clinton's cabinet on his show, and, I believe, stuck with that pledge. (So much for Clinton's ability to make friends.)
And, of course, it goes without saying, to anyone who actually listens to Rush, as compared to blindly accepting the hateful rhetoric directed by the Left towards him, that he's much more of a "law-and-order" person than an "overthrow the government" type. Listeners who thought they heard him advocating a response to Waco like the OKC bombing already had mental problems, IMO -- I never heard him preaching anything remotely like that.
Next, since the liberal media (and liberals generally) love to criticize Rush and make him the whipping-boy for their hatred of right-wingers, those who believe in God, whatever, without bothering to listen to him and decide for themselves, it became fashionable to depict his show as somehow culpable in motivating McVeigh.
For example, a cartoon in a Seattle paper depicted the famous photo of a fireman/paramedic holding a dead child, with the balloon "thought" added, reading, "damn talk radio!", a phrase specifically designed to criticize right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh in particular, being the dominant player in that field.
Turns out, the actual fireman/paramedic who was photographed was a fan of Rush's show. He called in to Rush, they talked for awhile, and, IIRC, he didn't blame Rush one bit for the OKC bombing.
That being said, it is still possible Rush's show played some role in motivating McVeigh to undertake his act. I'll include it in context, along with other things that certainly did play some role, for those who have forgotten, or refused to acknowledge the truth:
If Americans hadn't been so hot-to-trot on gun control, it is unlikely the BATF would have felt so justified conducting a sudden, unnecessary, high-visibility, extreme-force raid on the Branch Davidians over possible arms violations. Perhaps they would have handled it in a more downplayed manner, which we have since learned was easily possible. I believe America motivated them to make a "show of force" on this sort of issue.
(In case anyone thinks I'm blindly pro-Rush or anti-Clinton: this event happened under President Bush, the 41st; further, I've heard Rush incorrectly state that it happened under Clinton several times, causing me to reinvestigate it in case my memory was faulty.)
Of course, if the raid hadn't happened, not only would OKC not have happened, neither would law-enforcement agents have died for the illusion of security Americans call "gun control".
Had Janet Reno been more patient and not sent in tanks based on unsupported assertions that "there was child abuse going on in there" -- the sort of thing on which she built her career, and, later, implicitly used in justifying her armed raid to "unite Elian Gonzalez with his father" -- the Branch Davidians would likely be alive today, or at least not dead as a result of unnecessary use of government force.
In that case, OKC would probably not have happened.
Had Americans responded to the unnecessary deaths of some 76 innocent men, women, and children (and, yes, they were innocent, based on Clinton defenders' claims that he must be "innocent until proved guilty", therefore could not be removed from office, and the Branch Davidians had not been proved guilty) by insisting that Reno and/or Clinton be removed, and especially had Reno been immediately fired, OKC might not have happened.
(I'm basing this on my impressions of the government's case against McVeigh, not on expertise on it.)
It is possible that, had Rush Limbaugh not sought to defend Reno against a rude interrogation by a member of Congress, McVeigh would have taken solace (assuming he had been listening to Rush anyway -- not necessarily likely, given how Rush is viewed by those on the extreme Right) in knowing he had a popular radio host, with some 20 million listeners, who likely agreed that the Waco tragedy was a) one for which average American citizens were somewhat culpable, since it's their (our) government, and b) one for which these same citizens might learn to reduce their willingness to tyrannize their neighbor over unconstitutional laws.
So, yes, Rush may have been partly to blame, but not, in my opinion, because he encouraged any actions remotely close to bombing a federal building. Unlike Clinton and Reno, Rush has played no evident part in killing innocents, either here in America or abroad, and all the self-delusional posturing in the world won't change that fact.
Those who supported keeping Reno and Clinton in office, in my opinion -- whether individual citizens, newspaper editors, politicians -- are much more culpable in terms of encouraging McVeigh to believe there was a need to undertake the bombing. (I heard he was even considering just assassinating Reno, but decided Americans were sufficiently culpable that he had to resort to terrorism.)
In short, Rush is an easy target for the OKC bombing, especially those who blindly adhere to certain sociopolitical views, but the blame rests, beyond on McVeigh and his co-conspirators, directly on the US government and the American people, not so much for what happened at Waco, but for how America responded -- deciding to continue starting to wage a war on guns that would certainly be as successful as its longrunning wars on poverty and on drugs, at least until recently.
That wasn't the end of the story. Clinton, who surely believed his administration could kill anyone "outside the mainstream" (e.g. right-wingers, Muslims) with impunity, went on to kill a few innocent Sudanese in an aspirin factory by bombing it. He claimed it was making chemical weapons; it wasn't, and he apparently knew better than to get full input from all sides in his administration, shutting some of them out of the process. Conveniently, there was going to be some grand jury testimony scheduled for the same time he chose to bomb that building (or maybe it was some other event) -- an event that would have made the front pages, and which related to his scandalous behavior. That he couldn't find at any given time a number of people in his administration urging the bombing of some "chemical plant" somewhere, I find hard to believe, so I tend to believe he chose that building at that time because it was sufficiently convenient to him, not because it was militarily necessary (since it turned out to not be).
To thise day, I don't believe we've heard an apology -- especially a genuine apology -- from him for killing innocent Sudanese as a result of pulling the trigger too quickly.
Reno, who learned the same thing from Waco, went on to send men with guns to remove Elian from the clutches of his religious, presumably right-wing (certainly anti-Castro, anyway) relatives, despite the fact that there was no pressing reason to do so. (Some claimed "abuse", but no charges were ever brought. Some claimed there was a court order, but there wasn't, as far as I can tell -- there was a search warrant, but that's something quite different in a case like this.)
To this day, of the politically active Americans, nearly a majority of them celebrate Reno's use of force against Elian's relatives, hardly any of them insisted on removing Clinton from office merely for the bombing of the aspirin factory, not to mention for all the other things he did, or allowed to be done, on his watch, indicating a sufficient disregard for life, liberty, law, and order to invalidate him for high office...
...and, generally, from an objective point of view, it seems quite clear that Americans do, in fact, embrace the use of force, even deadly force, against those who it finds inconvenient, even when they turn out, later on, to be innocent.
(Yes, I know there are all sorts of accusations about American-perpetrated and American-supported horrors abroad. I don't have personal experience with these, and few Americans do. I also don't know enough about the context -- e.g. how much collateral damage is acceptable when targeting those who are planning and carrying out mass murder of innocents? Further, I don't generally trust those who make claims about such remote actions, and suspect many Americans share that distrust -- too many liars with an axe to grind against America are treated, by the liberal media, as truth-tellers (e.g. "there are 3 million homeless people in the US" during the '80s). So I focus only on events which we all did have an opportunity to view, up close and personal, and affect, especially given Clinton's penchant for reading public polls and acting accordingly.)
So, as much as I admire Newt Gingrich, hearing him on Fox News this morning claiming that Americans were a "peaceable" people struck me as not entirely defensible.
Sure, we like peace -- when it suits our purposes. Some of us even love it. A few of us work to make it.
But too many of us choose to allow people who demonstrate an inability to avoid killing innocent people to continue to hold high political office, wielding weapons of unimaginable destruction, especially when they support the political causes we support (redistribution of wealth, abortion on demand, whatever).
So, today's events I have, in some form, seen coming for several years now. It won't necessarily change the minds of many Americans, any more than Waco, or OKC, convinced many that gun control wasn't worth that loss of life.
But it might bring home to enough Americans the simple fact that nobody should seek to impose their will on somebody else -- whether directly, indirectly (say, by allowing immoral men to remain in positions of public power), or by proxy (say, by supporting government legislation such as gun control or laws restricting free speech) -- without being prepared to accept the consequences.
What today's actions have taught us, among many other things, is that we aren't safe in the sheltering arms of government (whether a federal building or a world trade center); we aren't safe by disarming the law-abiding citizens (were any of the passengers on the jets used as suicide missiles allowed to take their concealed firearms on board? NO!); we aren't safe by bombing remote lands in purported attempts to combat terrorism, conveniently distracting the populace from unsavory domestic scandals; we certainly aren't safe by hiding our heads in the sand when such things happen and not holding elected officials accountable; and we aren't safe simply by electing a new President who doesn't, personally, have a record of directing actions resulting in the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, especially if we haven't, first and foremost, squarely faced our culpability in previous such actions.
Given the willingness of so many Americans to turn their view away from these issues in the past, despite their unprecedented wealth and ability to engage their government, I do not find it surprising that people in other lands, at least feeling very oppressed by great powers, look at us and conclude, like McVeigh did, that it is not the American government so much as the American people that accept the killing of innocents as necessary "collateral damage" to achieve some illusion of security.
Needless to say, I'm very sad for today's victims. The dead have no further opportunity to learn from whatever mistakes they make and announce their apologies to us, which is especially a sad thing, and one more reason to celebrate life.
But Americans do not, at present, appears to have a society, or culture, that truly values life. Whether it's innocent Muslims at the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent Christians caught up in international politics or targeting by gung-ho law enforcement, or children in the womb whom our "fairer sex" kills by the millions every few years, we don't have the high moral ground at present.
In a sense, given that we might well die for our beliefs anyway, we must learn to ask ourselves, which beliefs are worth dying for? Gun control? Redistributing wealth? Protecting the unborn? Protecting our shores against invading forces? Consructing a missile-defense shield?
I'm not advocating answers to these questions, just suggesting that perhaps there's a better, wiser basis for answering them than what has, to me, long appeared to be, for many Americans, "well, I want so-and-so to be made to do such-and-such, and since I know I won't face the consequences for forcing them to do so if I can convince the government to do that for me, it must be my divine right to so impose my will".
The good news is, we can at once change our collective course and do the right things, whatever those might be, while recognizing, and making suitable restitution for, what we've done in the past.
That's not how I recall Limbaugh approaching the OKC bombing.
I was listening to his show regularly then (and still do fairly often now).
Whether he truly called from bombing of "whoever is responsible" -- not an unsurprising, or particularly conservative, response -- he did, quite early on, start telling his listeners that his "contacts", or experts who he trusted, were telling him the culprits were likely not outside the USA; that they were likely to turn out to be domestic terrorists. I believe he was doing that for days before the dominant liberal media came to the same conclusion, but am not sure.
I also remember Bill Clinton coming out right away, blaming Rush Limbaugh (by association -- I think he actually blamed "talk radio") as soon as the domestic angle was finally established.
What I'd like to hear from Rush -- if only our local radio station would stop preempting him! -- are answers to the following questions:
Did our prosecuting and imprisoning the perpetrators of the previous bombing of WTC discourage today's attack?
Did our prosecuting and executing the perpetrator of the OKC bombing discourage today's attack?
What makes you think our prosecuting and punishing or executing the (surviving) perpetrators of today's attack will prevent future attacks, even greater in scope?
I'm asking these questions because I have no "easy" answers, and because I'm genuinely interested in hearing how someone as thoughtful and practical, as Rush generally is, would answer them.
...by bombing an aspirin factory and killing the innocent Sudanese inside. That sort of thing can give potential terrorists even more excuses to attack a nation that allows a President who takes such actions to remain in office.
I'm sure everyone is grateful that you did them this service.
I, too, am grateful, and so, before engaging you in debate any further, insist that you at least make public your true identity, rather than remaining behind the shroud of anonymity, so everyone can appreciate your genius. An update to your "personal page" would be one approach.
A Command-Line Interface (CLI) and a Graphic User Interface (GUI) are both simply interfaces, which, theoretically, should be treated as orthagonal to an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
MS-DOS, for example, has a CLI, but is not an IDE. But while I can't think of any "GUI" that is an IDE, UNIX, which is CLI-based, is indeed an IDE.
Now, I don't think of UNIX (e.g. Linux) as an ideal, out-of-the-box IDE, but it certainly includes the low-level functions necessary to make it into one, as well as some high-level functions.
Certain things that a good IDE would offer programmers happen to map better to the modern ideal of a GUI than to the modern ideal of a CLI.
For example, picking something from a displayed list is, in a typical GUI, a fairly natural thing to do, but not in a CLI.
That is, when you "open" a directory/folder in a GUI, you not only see what is presently there, you can directly select an item for some other action.
Whereas, with CLI's, it's generally assumed that when you enter the "ls" (or "dir") command, what you want is just a scroll-style listing of a snapshot of what is in the directory you've just "opened".
There's no inherent reason a selection couldn't be made directly from that command's output, or that the output itself couldn't be made dynamic (change as the directory contents changes a la MacOS)...
...just as there's no inherent reason a GUI's "open" function couldn't be designed to generate just a single static snapshot of a directory for viewing.
But with the GUI, there's not an obvious way to automate a use of such a viewing, since the rendering is done at such a low level (bitmapped graphics), and since we don't have commonly accepted models, or interactions, for directing such a viewing to be used in some different fashion (e.g. don't display it, pipe it into the GUI equivalent of 'grep' instead), the designers of what could be a conceptually simple function had to make it more complex, by having the display be "live", that is, somewhat real-time and directly manipulatable (is that a word?) by the user.
Whereas, with the CLI, especially a UNIX-like one (which even MS-DOS somewhat copied, unlike some other early DOS-like systems), it's built in that, if a selection is desired, the output of 'ls' can be piped into some selector script; or, if dynamic update is desired, the command can be automatically re-run every few seconds; and so on.
Personally, though "infected" with the delightful experience of having developed a smallish C app using Think C on the Mac around 10-12 years ago, I don't generally look forward to using GUI-based systems to develop code.
Chief among the reasons is the fact that the quality and flexibility of GUI-based apps tends to be noticeably lower than than of CLI-based apps. And I can't have my IDE (however I effectively "define" it via usage) crashing or misbehaving on me while I do my work.
E.g. I'm currently, on this particular notebook, getting "Error saving bookmarks file!" dialogs from Netscape (RH Linux 7.1), though I have no idea why, because there's no error code, no diagnostic message, and endless mucking with bookmark "open", "import", and "save as" menu items doesn't fix anything. (So each time I start up Netscape, I have to manually import my real bookmarks, and must save them manually whenever I add new ones.)
With a CLI, this kind of stupid bug might well be less likely, because instead of mucking about writing code to create a dialog box, a simple "fprintf (stderr,...);" might do, in which case the programmer might have bothered actually reporting the error code, maybe even the corresponding diagnostic message, file name, etc.
That's just one trivial example of the general impression I have, namely, that GUI-based systems are inherently more complex, larger (in terms of memory usage), monolithic, and persistent (hang around when you don't want them to, e.g. when benchmarking or profiling) than their CLI-based counterparts.
Further, I find GUI-based systems tend to be "behind the curve" with respect to CLI-based ones. Journaling or even periodically saving to a temp file of an edit buffer in case of system/app crash? That's been in various versions of Emacs (admittedly a bit of a cross between a CLI and a GUI, but it isn't mouse-dependent after all) for what seems like decades, but, sheesh, Netscape 4.x still doesn't do that for this "comment" box it lets me type this stuff into! (I've lost a few comments-in-progress that way.)
So, aside from not having some state-of-the-art capabilities CLI's tend to, especially those relating to robustness and recoverability, GUI's tend to be less stable, crash more often, etc. (That is, I've lost more "work" due to Netscape crashes than I've ever had to recover due to Emacs crashes. I've been using Emacs variants for some 20 years now, Netscape for maybe two, and pretty much all I've used Netscape for in this sense is entering/. comments.)
Okay, maybe I shouldn't pick on Netscape, since "everyone knows it's buggy", but isn't it somewhat illustrative that one of the most popular, smash-hit GUI-based apps of the 20th century still, in 2001, can't avoid crashing, won't automatically journal edited text, and so on?
(And, yes, I've used IE, it's more stable, until it crashes, which, though comparatively rare, tends to crash the whole Windows environment...another effect of the tightly-integrated-GUI syndrome, as far as I can tell.)
So GUI-based systems are prettier and let me do some things that are awkward under vanilla CLI's, but, for "real work", they're just too much more complicated, less flexible, less robust, and, by the way, less portable than CLI's, and that looks like it'll be the case for at least another 10 years. So while it's nice, in theory, to use an IDE that already has a button, dialog box, or menu item for every combination of two or three CLI-based commands, that doesn't make up for the losses in other areas. After all, if I really want those buttons, I can "bind" function and other keys to each of those combinations myself, in that CLI. And I can easily write other "special" items (scripts and such) to do things like dynamic display of arbitrary text, offer CLI-based selection of arbitrary items in a displayed list, and so on. These binding and scripts might have bugs, of course, but if they crash, they aren't likely to render inoperable the rest of "my" IDE. And when they're not actually in use, they won't necessarily take up system memory and time the way a typical GUI-based IDE does.
Ideally, both CLI and GUI would be so well-designed that there'd be little difference. (E.g. an "echo $?" might make sense in the context of a CLI-based Netscape-like browser, to at least see the error status of trying to save bookmarks -- maybe that'd be a distinct process running in its own subshell, a sort of mini-daemon.)
So, to me, the ability to use the mouse to point, click, draw, drag, and pop up is wonderful, but, given that I currently can't choose both simultaneously without greatly increasing complexity (what I have to memorize plus the complexity, including crashability and likely bugginess, of the software on which I'm depending), and that the features today's CLI's offer are critical, I'm not likely to commit to learning any GUI-based IDE in the near future.
(Naturally, I've been thinking about how to best design "the ultimate CLI" upon which an IDE might be more ideally built, ditto for "the ultimate GUI", and, naturally, it'd be great if the system could be so well-engineered that most of it didn't care whether the interface being used at a given moment was a CLI, a GUI, or some arbitrary interface, such as one designed for use by the blind. But I've been dreaming about all that for well over 10 years now, and about the CLI part of it, well, ever since first using ITS back in the mid-'70s, so it's unlikely I'll actually design my own IDE to replace Unix, whether CLI- or GUI-based, anytime soon. I've got some pretty cool ideas, though!;-)
..."trustware" being my term for software that trusts the end user to make the right decisions for himself regarding how many copies of the software to make, when and how to run it, whether and how to modify it, how best to understand how it works (which necessarily includes being able to look at the source code), and with whom to share it, as well as these same freedoms.
So, when it comes to writing software, which (to me) includes designing as well as implementing it, naturally I want to add to the body of trustware that's out there, so other people will respect my software too. (And I recently read a little note on the G95 website that suggests, hey, maybe some of them do, despite all the faults in g77.)
2) It's "My" Code...
...that is, I wrote it, often designed the app or function myself, so I'd like to be able to use it myself for a variety of reasons, as I progress in life.
Examples of what developing GPL'ed software allows me to do, that developing proprietary software does not allow me to do:
Show the software to friends, potential employers/clients, etc.
Learn from my own past mistakes, even long after finishing the job (or, for a "regular" job, leaving the company), by re-examining my own code
Possibly learn from industry experts how my code is wrong, right, can be improved, etc., without having to first get them to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) with my company (plus get permission from my company to allow it)
Reuse the code in other projects that might have a different general "shape" than the original (e.g. GUI code written for an email program might be useful in a vertical app that includes some form of instant messenging)
Allow anyone, anywhere to find bugs in a variety of ways, from normal ways like running the program, to "advanced" ways like examining the source code, to "esoteric" ways like writing automated tools (other software) that analyze the code and look for oft-committed bugs
There are plenty of other reasons, already given elsewhere, like "making the world a better place" and stuff, but these are items that often don't get mentioned, or valued, in such discussions, and which "young" programmers, such as those just starting out in a proprietary-software company, might not have thought through. (E.g. all that code they wrote the previous few years becomes nearly useless to them the moment they get laid off or quit -- they got paid $$ to write it, but that's pretty much where the relationship ends.)
When it comes to having people know about the software I've written throughout the years, no question that g77 far outranks anything else I've done, since comparatively few people ever, e.g., used the BATCH subsystem under PRIMOS, read the Pr1me "Advanced Programmer's Guide" series, etc.
And when it comes to my occasionally wanting to hack on some software with which I'm familiar, the only software I worked on to which I presently have such free access is g77. It represents probably only 20% of my career output to date, that figure depending somewhat on whether technical docs are included, but it's the only large free software (and documentation) I've written.
All that other software and docs? Swallowed up in failed and/or bought-out-and-then-shut-down companies, and, since I didn't have the rights I have with GPL'ed software, it's basically all gone, regardless of its usefulness.
Free software, on the other hand, is likely to disappear from the face of the earth only if it is truly found to be useless. Even marginally useful free software will likely find a haven in various archives around the world. Authors of really useful free software needn't worry about backups -- as Linus once said, just put your latest hacks up on your website and let the rest of the world mirror it!
Slashdot Mirror
Note that I don't take the "United We Stand" rhetoric to be necessarily militant -- standing for freedom and human rights does not necessarily mean killing those who oppose such things, even less-so does it mean killing innocents.
I do hope you, sh_mmer, turn out to be right that these attacks aren't futile. I have much more confidence in the focus on the overall success of the mission to generally defang international terrorism now than I did during the Clinton years, but I still don't see much evidence that the US government as a whole is truly committing itself to its fundamental purpose of defending the US from attack. (I don't question the commitment of the military and organizations such as the FBI, but expect that, as the present levels of concern taper off, activities irrelevant to defense and unnecessary for government to undertake will once again occupy most of the attention of members of Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, who, rather than focusing on defending our nation, tend to prefer playing Santa Claus, or Robin Hood with an Uzi, "nannying" our children in lieu of expecting responsible parenting, and changing the rules of the game of golf.)
What I've long admired about American character (as I perceive it) is the ability of its military and police to focus both effectively and narrowly on a tactical goal without being distracted by hysteria, prejudice, etc. as is more typical of other cultures, especially older ones.
In that sense, an American military or police action is less like a grenade going off, killing anyone in the area, than like a fast-moving train, rolling over anything in its way, but staying on its tracks.
I tend to believe this is the result of the US history of being a society of individual achievement, rights, and responsibility, in which those concerns are typically elevated above those of personal issues such as race, nation of birth, etc.
But this is a challenging time, our military has been through a very challenging time, so I don't assume it will succeed.
For my part, I did publish a proposal for peace that might have made military action unnecessary, but it failed to attract much attention, and I did not propose it as a means to deny the military the support it needed to do its job.
Thanks again for your thoughtful discussion!
There's something you might not have considered is a reason some say "poverty" or, more precisely, "American success" or "American economic dominance" has much to do with why terrorists attack America.
The terrorists rarely -- whoever they are -- feel "connected" to political or economic power, even if they, themselves, are wealthy.
Americans, and others in the West, are, on the other hand, accustomed to easily accessing political power to a reasonable approximation of their percentage of the pertinent population.
In that view, if the Arab Muslim world had more democratic republics a la the US (perhaps even more "free" than the US presently is, such as a system actually based on the US Constitution), not only would they personally have more freedom to direct their lives, but the economic and political powerhouses their nations would have as a result of permitting their citizens (vs. subjects) vast economic and important political freedoms would allow many present "unresolvable" disputes to be, if not resolvable, less likely to stimulate such extreme violence.
Whether this line of argument holds much merit, I don't myself know, being quite ignorant of the situation in the Middle East, but it stands to reason that if Palestinians demonstrated a long-term commitment to democracy, respect for the rule of law, respect of property rights, and a patient willingness to achieve generation-by-generation leaps of progress as so many other peoples have done (e.g. Jews in the USA), they'd be in a much better position to "earn" their rights vis-a-vis Israel, not so much by throwing rocks or becoming suicide bombers, but by simply buying little pieces of Israel from Israelis happy to sell to fund their retirements (in Florida, California, wherever ;-).
I realize this is America-centric thinking perhaps, but, after all, here in the USA, our political and economic system, as screwy as it often is, has often resulted in citizens who are members of "tribe X" willingly fighting against other members of tribe X attacking the USA from the outside. I don't doubt that many Muslims will willingly help the US defend itself against whatever "jihad" is declared, because they've seen for themselves how their rights are deeper and broader here than in many areas, even those which are governed by Islamic fundamentalists (which I distinguish from Islamic extremists or militants).
Personally, I might be killed because I was born in the USA, or because I live here, or because I'm a citizen, or I'm white, but I'm willing to die defending the rights of everyone -- Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, atheist, etc. -- to live together in peace by subscribing to the sort of outlining of human rights as done in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And that is what I believe is under attack by the terrorists, because I don't believe they're truly irrational (people planning suicide attacks for years tend to think things through once or twice), and I don't see them focusing their attacks on those who directly deny them the kind of political and economic power their Muslim counterparts in the USA already -- and increasingly, I hope -- enjoy. And while the USA might complicate their achieving that kind of power by, e.g., supporting Israel, neither the US nor Israel is nearly as directly responsible for such denial as the leaders the terrorists and their neighbors accept for themselves, as far as I can tell.
In essence, many people believe the US is serving as a scapegoat for the inadequacies of other nations, and I think there's some merit to that argument.
If that's true, the bad news is that any changes we (in the USA) make in policy, e.g. less support of Israel, are unlikely to reduce the level of hatred directed towards us. We must therefore balance such supposed improvements in international appreciation against whatever security we might give up (e.g. lose a "good friend" in the Middle East by losing Israel as a friend, if not as a nation and its citizens as a people) by pursuing such improvements. (This reminds me of a quote, something like "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while looking for a rock to throw".)
The good news would be that there's a much more hopeful path to world peace than that outlined by many apologists for terrorists (which usually amounts to "let's leave Israel to either be pushed into the sea or defend itself using nukes") -- one in which Palestinians, as well as Muslims in many other countries, gain for themselves access to economic and political freedoms that already have proven to be a much more peaceful basis for a society here in the USA than what they're presently dealing with.
In case you're interested, here are my opinions.
Pretty much all the "logic" used to explain why "we" (the West, the US, Bush) shouldn't attack, shouldn't risk killing any innocents, and so on, is based, as far as I can tell, on a misplaced sense of justice and fairness.
In our comfortable societies, we can afford to pursue certain levels of justice and fairness because we have the infrastructure to do so without taking significant risks ourselves.
As an example, many say we are wrong to not show our "evidence" to the Taliban.
For the most part, these people somehow think this whole episode is being carried out in a court of law -- US law, for example -- in which a prosecutor is required to share any and all evidence with the defendent's legal team before the trial starts.
What they're missing is the fact that there's no court of law here that can stop the serious, deadly effects of sharing such evidence. They might see the situation more logically if, e.g., a defendant, married to their own sister, had killed their mother (the defendant's mother-in-law), the evidence proving this came secretly from their sister (the defendant's wife -- putting aside marital issues here), the nature of the evidence itself would immediately identify the sister as its source, and the defendant, exercising his free-speech and defense rights, could easily direct anonymous minions to kill his wife (the sister).
In a case like that, the courts might reasonably choose to agree with the prosecutor that the evidence cannot be shared with the defense, especially if letting the defendant go free meant that it was likely other innocents would be killed by him.
Here, we have no courts that can make those decisions and enforce them reasonably -- no police force that can restrain bin Laden, the US, the Taliban, etc. from taking immediate violent action, and, most importantly, no courts that are even remotely respected by both parties.
In that case, it's indeed true that the "winner" of the case will be the one that wins the violent clash. "Might makes right", not exactly, but it's rarely completely embraced as a principle that the exercise of might necessarily makes the party less "right" than the target. (Consider the collection of taxes by the threat of force, which most supposedly peace-loving people support wholeheartedly.)
There are other similar confusions in discussing these issues, sharing fundamental mistakes, such as treating abstractions (such as governments) as concrete (such as people), comparing morality based on acts without regard to intents and/or alternatives to those acts, and so on.
Note that I took your statement to read "it is strange how some people regard the right of the Taliban to not be oppressed as vastly greater than the right of its people, e.g. women, to not be oppressed by it".
If you instead meant "why didn't the world attack the Taliban before, for its treatment of its people", I suggest that the fundamental answer is that the rest of the world isn't responsible for the women of Afghanistan to nearly the degree the men of Afghanistan are (and, in a gender-neutral sense, they're less responsible than the women themselves).
After all, by "the world" you really mean certain militaries operating on behalf of their governments, and their duties are to protect their respective nations and peoples. Everything else they do flows from this fundamental objective.
Not invading Afghanistan to liberate its women might, in that sense, be a miscalculation on various levels (including the moral dimension), but not nearly as crucial a misstep as failing to defend one's own nation -- the fundamental, original purpose of any government, one which also need not take much regarding morality into account.
If you subtract out the governments and militaries, you'll find that there was, in fact, a sort of "intervention" being conducted to liberate Afghan women, by ordinary citizens of the world as a whole. As individuals, they might well put moral issues ahead of defending their nations, their families, even themselves, and individuals always have the right to do that as they see fit, regardless of what governments and militaries do.
So, for whatever reasons, the US and the West generally having seen 09-11 as an attack requiring some sort of military response, it is not peculiar to me, at all, that they'd respond militarily to a degree well beyond how they responded to learning of the plight of Afghan women.
While the military men put their lives on the line to keep most of us safe and comfy, we can do our job by more carefully understanding the roles we, our societies, our militaries, and our governments play, vis-a-vis others, and thus, perhaps, conduct ourselves so that military action is, in the future, less likely, personal freedom, on the whole, more widely and deeply available.
That's between you and your mom.
Probably. Should have done that years, decades, ago.
If we'd have done that, even if the WTC attacks still happened, any idiot racist thinking of attacking somebody because they "look" Arab would have thought twice, on the assumption that he may be packing heat.
They use RPG?? Wow, talk about "geezer tech", that's even worse than COBOL!!
You forgot to mention Linux! They need Linux!
It's a bit long, about 29K of HTML, but I spent a fair amount of time since Saturday editing it, so it shouldn't be too difficult a read.
No need. The beautiful thing about non-profit organizations like the FSF, about volunteer groups generally, and that includes corporations, is that we don't have to join them, nor are we forced to choose to either go 100% with them or 100% against them.
For whatever reasons, which none of us outside the FSF can say, the directors of that organization continue to feel RMS is the best choice to lead them, especially as figurehead.
It's easy to say they're making the wrong choice; much harder to say who would be a better choice, especially to collectively agree on one choice.
Though RMS himself and the FSF itself fail to meet whatever standards we set for them, nothing prevents us from taking advantage of the roles they do play in public by looking carefully at what they say, thinking about it, picking just those parts we agree with, and promoting those. We needn't resent not being able to just say "anything said by RMS/FSF is correct", even if being able to do so would save lots of time and energy being expended by adherents to the FSF's free-software philosophy.
So, the answer to your question "who elected [RMS] to speak for anything" is twofold:
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Accordingly, we can choose whether to listen to him, and whether to choose to speak for ourselves in response. To the extent he and the FSF are perceived as speaking the truth, they'll be relevant. Else, if they persist in choosing to place goals such as delegitimizing the Bush Presidency and trying to redesign the English language from the ground up over their stated goal of promoting free software for all, they'll be less relevant, and our individual voices will accordingly be stronger and louder.The FSF Board of Directors, presumably, elected him to speak for their organization (which RMS founded, of course), and that is their right.
RMS elected himself to speak for himself as well.
And that, my friends, is why we have web sites like slashdot.org!
Indeed, but you have to realize that, for RMS, this is an improvement.
In a /. interview before last year's Presidential election, RMS, in the midst of his usual calls for everyone to use the "right name" for a certain popular operating system, he chose to stoop to childish name-calling by using the epithet "Shrub" instead of "Bush".
That's not only much worse than the insistence of some in the "journalistic" media to append, and sometimes vocally stress, "Junior" to Bush's name, especially earlier in the campaign, it's frighteningly hypocritical to see such blatant hypocrisy in a single interview.
(FYI, the candidates were "George W. Bush" and "Al Gore, Jr." There were no mistakes made in calling George Bush "Junior"; that was done intentionally.)
Given the progress we've seen here, in another couple of years, RMS will be referring to Bush as merely our "minority president" or "unpopularly elected president", rather than the outright lie he is presently using.
(And, yes, his penchant for muddling what should be a tightly focused message about software-related freedoms with his sociopolitical concerns has infested the FSF, at least in the past.)
Indeed. Still, I wrestle daily with the distinction between being a "good Christian" and being one who courageously defends the most Christian way of life we have on this planet, which generally operates within Western society or civilization.
The former requires me to be nonviolent, meek, humble, not even seeking to disarm my fellow Christians (any more than Jesus sought to disarm the disciple who cut off someone's ear with his sword), but makes for a difficult cross to bear (e.g. not defending an innocent's life with violence, even when that's the only possible defense).
The latter allows me to use violence to defend lives of innocents of any religion, but makes for some very difficult moral choices.
In the end, most criticism of the USA or practical Christianity seems to amount to situations where we had to choose between two or more evils, we picked what we believed was the least evil choice, often we gave our lives for that choice, and, now, Monday-morning quarterbacks criticize us for "choosing evil", and paint all Americans and/or Christians with a broad brush of that one "evil choice" as if we've always chosen evil every time.
So while I agree with you that there is a substantial difference between the teachings of Christianity and Islam, I observe that, in practice, we who follow these (and Judaism, and maybe other religions) face basically the same choices -- some day in and day out, others (like me) only rarely in life.
It is, for that reason, that I have a great deal of respect for Islam and its followers. Maybe their religion teaches a need for violence at times. But a) that removes one layer of hypocrisy when a follower feels it necessary to resort to violence to preserve a way of life he values, and b) the followers do seem to be very loyal to their idea of God (Allah), and for that I am very grateful, even if I might disagree over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
God bless.
Now, if her answer is "yes", ask her whether it makes any difference that he pushed her out of the way of an oncoming truck.
If her answer was "it depends", explain to her that, to some of us, a programmer explaining just how poor security actually is in a widely-distributed app that is advertised as offering security is much more like the man pushing a woman out of the way of an oncoming truck than someone hacking into web sites and shutting them down.
Indeed, Mafiaboy (I gather) did something much more like pushing an elderly woman into the path of an oncoming truck. One can claim that he did this to draw attention to the fact that old ladies and big scary trucks are not a good combination on our roads, but the fact remains that there are many other, valid, ways to illustrate the same thing without shutting somebody's valid business down (the equivalent of shoving unendangered old ladies around in this analogy).
Dmitry, on the other hand, might have had a few alternatives, but he was doing nothing remotely near violating fundamental ethical or moral principles of our society -- unless you're getting moral and ethical guidance from the likes of Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen, that is.
I took this as if you'd written "Christianity was [initially] spread...", because that seemed clear to me in context.
If so, you're quite correct. The first 300 years or so, Christians were, by and large, tortured, beaten, probably raped, certainly killed, by the various nations to whose people they preached, whether their gods were pagan, Jewish, or none whatsoever. That indeed was the way Christianity was initially spread. Further, followers of Christianity typically gave up positions of power and/or tyranny over others, one notable example being Saul->Paul. Christianity wasn't then, and I believe never was intended to be, an authorization for tyrannizing anyone else, for any reason, under any circumstances, using any means involving force or the threat of its use.
Others correctly point out that, beginning with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome around 300AD, it was subsequently (which is what I'm stressing here!) spread, too often, via violence, as you say Islam was initially (and I'll have to take your word on that).
In case anyone thinks the others' postings were just minor "oversights", in terms of missing the important element of the context of your post, I'll suggest that, no, they probably didn't care that you said "initially" at all.
I'm an avid reader of The Christian Science Sentinel. Needless to say from the title alone, that's a highly pro-Christian publication.
But, a few months ago, they ran a cover-page article on the so-called "cultural creatives" movement, an interview with the two sociologists who "discovered" this phenomenon.
In that article, when they asked these supposedly highly educated people about Christianity, they responded by talking about 2,000 years (not, I stress, 1,700 -- that is, they included the first 300 years) of a history of fighting, nations (they focused primarily on Western ones) building war machines, and so on.
(I guess maybe those sociologists considered early Christians' preference for being eaten by lions to denouncing Christ and converting to pagan deities to be examples of being "contentious"?)
So, I believe some of the respondents to your post did not miss your point at all -- that they did what those sociologists did, willingly and willfully repeat anti-Christian rhetoric as a "rebut" to a supposedly incorrect statement regarding Christian history.
And, again, your statement was not incorrect.
(To those who truly believe they responded without realizing he was referring to "initial" history, I apologize in advance for inferring that you didn't care. In recognition of the fact that a predominantly Christian nation is recovering from the aftermath of an attack killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, I urge you to immediately apologize for having written a knee-jerk response criticizing Christianity, especially if you used an insulting or condescending tone or if you didn't take care to point out that you were not referring to its first 300 years of existence.)
At no point have you explained why Reno had to do what she did. At no point have you explained why she should have been allowed to hold onto her job afterwards.
All you seem to want to do is cheer on Clinton and Reno, to try to "equalize" the evil you claim Rush represents, who, okay, maybe for one day was going off the deep end, like so many Americans, ranting about carpet-bombing a country that may have willingly hosted terrorists that had just attacked ours.
I don't deny you might be right about Bush "SR" killing "innocent Iraqi civilians" (which is surely what you said, given your transition from killing "civilians" to blaming Bush for killing "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis"), but my impression is that he did not do that, an entire coalition of nations ordered Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait (where they were already killing plenty of civilians, and looking to invade Saudi Arabia), then, when Iraq decided for itself to fight "the mother of all ground wars", it was their soldiers, not civilians, that got killed by the hundreds of thousands. The civilians actually got killed by tiny numbers by traditional standards of warfare.
Regarding sanctions, my impression is that the international community, what remains of that coalition, decided what would be sufficient to allow Iraq to subsist at least, possibly flourish, without building up its military and shoot down planes patrolling the no-fly zone. They might have the calculations wrong.
Or, just possibly, Saddam Hussein might be diverting so much of the resources being allowed in for military use, willingly denying his own innocent men, women, and children those important foods and medicines, that mindless sheep will go along with his media campaign of blaming US, or Bush Sr (I notice you don't exactly bring up the fact that those sanctions continued, unchanged, under the Clinton/Reno regime, but continue to act as though Bush was solely responsible for them all the way along), always blaming somebody else, for his (Hussein's), and, by going along with it, his nation's, evil, and the comparatively-light sanctions resulting therefrom.
The reality is that the US has a sadly, unprecedented history of giving generously to quickly rebuild nations that it has just defeated in war. (In Iraq's case, willingly keeping the prime perpetrator in power naturally disqualifies them for this treatment -- Iraq has chosen this result by its actions, is how I see it.)
You, of course, willfully ignore that in your rants, paint pretty much all Americans, especially our Presidents, with the same broad brush of your hateful assumptions.
Now, I might indeed have some facts wrong above -- I haven't investigated for myself. Maybe all the reporting from Iraq was wrong. Maybe the US media duped us. Maybe they never even invaded Kuwait. (I recall hearing that the persuasive testimony of some Kuwaiti leader's daughter regarding seeing a pregnant woman stabbed was shown to be a lie. Not a US media lie, but a lie of the sort I find hard to swallow...and, needless to say, I don't find Kuwait's willingness to follow through on promises made vis-a-vis democracy all that persuasive.)
But, I do know that even Janet Reno has not offered anything close to a valid reason for ordering those tanks to roll in, killing those innocent children you keep claiming as so important for Koresh to release.
Based on your moral reasoning about Rush, I call you what you are: an evil, unreasoning, mass murderer. You promote and defend murder of innocent American children, while blaming US Presidents for what international coalitions decide to do to guilty, murderous regimes and the soldiers that willingly sign up for them.
AND GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD, YOU CHILDISH IDIOT: ONCE KORESH'S CAMP WAS INVADED, ALSO UNNECESSARILY, HIS ABILITY TO REASON, ACT NOBLY, WHATEVER LITTLE OF THAT MIGHT HAVE ALREADY EXISTED, WENT OUT THE WINDOW. THAT WAS THE **WHOLE POINT** OF THAT RAID -- TO COMPLETELY DEMORALIZE, DISTRACT, CONFUSE, AND BLIND KORESH AND HIS FOLLOWERS.
Comparing him to Janet Reno, who sat back in Washington calmly drinking tea, who had plenty of opportunity to understand the psychological state of the cult and its leader, and yet STILL SENT IN THOSE TANKS, shows what a complete and utter disregard you really have for innocent human life, compared to evil people who, in their thirst to show their power, undertake unnecessary actions resulting in the the loss of that innocent life.
So, okay, I'll concede your point about Rush's rant for now. Like so many of us, he was furious for a day or so, I'll assume.
Unlike Rush and the rest of us, Reno has never since gotten over her fury, her irrational, possibly insane to devotion to using force (though always against innocent, impoverished right-wing Christians, it seems) again and again...
Lest anyone think you aren't a blind, hating, murderous-in-your-heart racist, they should re-read your own writing, IN THE WAKE OF THE MOST SEVERE LOSS OF AMERICAN LIFE ON OUR SHORES IN OVER A CENTURY, and, frankly, this will likely be the quote, and the timing, for which you will be known for the rest of your life, thanks to your putting it on public record:
Lovely. Hope you're proud of making that claim about the approximately 20,000 innocent men, women, and children killed some 48 hours ago, including the three or so American men who decided to sacrifice their lives, rush the hijackers, and thus, quite probably, save the lives of many others somewhere in Washington DC.
God bless America. And, God bless you.
So, let me get this straight: you assume that because Rush wanted to see the perpetrators of the OKC bombing punished, he necessarily was calling for killing hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians??
Wow. In addition to having a sig that's the product of massive self-delusion, you appear to have a very poor grasp of logic.
Again, I've actually been listening to Rush's show for some 10 years now, and he's not exactly anti-Life, nor anti-Muslim, nor anti-Arab.
He certainly believes more in the efficacy of the use of military force than I do, but I don't find it surprising that anyone who advocates the use of military force at all would be more willing to punish a distant enemy in a less-than-perfectly-precise way than a local enemy that way.
Nor is it hypocritical to rationally assess one's ability to more reliably distinguish enemies among one's local neighbors than among people halfway around the world.
Continuing your delusional reasoning, you assume I'm making Koresh and company into martyrs. Of course, I did nothing even remotely like that.
What I was pointing out was that, in your "rush" to tar and feather Rush for supposedly causing violence, you ignore the fact of the hypocrisies of the Left, namely, that we are to unilaterally disarm against sworn enemies of our nation (USSR, China, Cuba, whoever, especially if they're communist or socialist), while aggressively roll tanks into highly confused members of a local cult that posed no significant threat to the safety of our nation. (In this sense, they continued the "great work" undertaken mostly by communist/atheist governments, whether killing members of Falun Gong, Christians, capitalists, and so on, because they fancy that such people pose a threat to their own power base.)
Koresh and his followers had no choice but to surrender. Reno chose to not ensure that they made that choice by simply waiting them out. As with Elian, there was no pressing need to roll in those tanks.
Yet she found plenty of excuses not to investigate Al Gore, despite substantial and credible evidence of campaign-finance violations, and despite her own pledge to undertake such investigations should even the appearance of wrongdoing in high places manifest itself.
I'm not really trying to pick on Reno, or Clinton, or even defend Rush, so much as I'm trying to point out that it's American citizens who had plenty of opportunity to decide whether the people it puts in positions of power -- and, let's face it, Clinton/Reno exercised vastly more power to kill innocent people than Rush ever did -- deserved to remain, after having so spectacularly failed to avoid killing innocent human beings, especially citizens, and offered totally insufficient grounds for their actions. (In that sense, I don't even rule out putting Operation Desert Storm in that general category, but note that a) that was a war against an aggressive nation, at least a "proper" function of government, whether truly necessary or not, and b) Americans voted the victorious President who conducted that war out of office ASAP.)
More to the point, yesterday morning, over half of Congress woke up thinking first not of how best to defend our national borders against sworn enemies of the USA, how to ensure that our military is vibrant, strong, and alert to all manner of potential attack, but how to attack our President, how to force him to cut military spending, how to force him to increase spending on unconstitutional (and, more to the point, militarily irrelevant) activities like our welfare state and federal education, and how to raise taxes back and even further.
The result of the attack has been not to change the "tune", to any significant degree, of Rush and the congresscritters who most closely represent his thinking, but to change the entire mode of conduct of "those on the other side of the aisle" -- those whose prescriptions for our nation's needs, such as federally funding endless destruction of viable human life to do stem cell research, increasing the minimum wage, spending yet more on a failed federal education system, and so on, hold no promise whatsoever for repelling attacks such as yesterday's, and, further, do not require government to implement any of them. (Private funding can meet all those "needs". Unless you're willing to let more crazies like Koresh do whatever they like, the same can't be said for national defense.)
Yet we've so overburdened the government as if it's a big rich sugar daddy, or Santa Claus, passing out goodies that it funds by collecting confiscatory taxes from the populace by force, that we've lost sight of the fact that daddy is driving and needs to concentrate solely on the road -- the defense of our nation.
A government that fails to effectively defend against attack from enemies, especially in so simple and direct a manner, and, in response, fails to jettison everything not directly related to its defensive duties, doesn't deserve to continue existing as such. The people can do better on their own.
The reason we were attacked is because we weren't prepared. And the reason we weren't prepared is because we listen to people like you, who consistently, and willfully, try to shift our national government's focus from its sole duty to defend our national borders and our defensive infrastructure, to fulfilling your personal fantasies about how best to enforce "compassion".
My observation is that Rush's approach -- of having a government that focuses narrowly on defense rather than taking on the job of intruding into every corner of the lives of ordinary Americans -- likely works much better than the approach of people who, like yourself, would rather criticize Rush than the congresscritters who frittered time and our money away in failing to defend against yesterday's attack.
(Am I personally advocating a "strong military", warfare, and so on? Not necessarily. Just pointing out what does and doesn't work, and what is and isn't true.)
BTW: I don't recall mentioning (Randy?) Weaver at all. As I recall, that was the Ruby Ridge incident. How you manage to find such references in my writings is beyond me, especially since Reno had basically nothing to do with Ruby Ridge -- it happened, what, one year before she took over the Dept. of Justice??
P.S. As far as your feelings about Koresh -- frankly, I shared them completely at the time. When I saw those BATF agents taking fire, I was furious, and I'm pretty sure that even when the final raid happened I was still basically supportive of "teaching a lesson" to those crazies and anyone else like them.
That's why I was, and probably still am, unsuitable as a law-enforcement agent, especially a director, and the same goes (and always, apparently, has gone) for Janet Reno, who I also defaulted to admiring greatly for the first year or so she was on the national scene.
But one thing stuck with me, and I can't recall whether it happened during the initial or final raid, and that was Bryant Gumbel muttering something on the CBS Morning News about how that episode "shows the sad state of gun control in this country".
I kept thinking about that. Not being much in favor of gun control at that time, nor strongly opposed to it yet, I could see some logic in what I knew to be his attempt to imply that we need only pass strong-enough laws to prevent this sort of thing ever happening again.
But ultimately I realized that it was the gun-control laws themselves that caused what happened. Without them, there'd have been no initial or subsequent raids, OKC wouldn't have happened, and maybe we'd have even begun getting away from our failed war on drugs, or at least finding a better, less violent, intrusive, and unconstitutional approach to "waging" it.
So, I felt as you appear to, but, in the end, I couldn't find any rational basis for supporting the initial raid, the final raid, nor the keeping of the perpetrator of the final deadly raid in office, any more than the perpetrators of the (much less consciously-conduct) Kent State shootings should have been allowed to remain in office. When it comes to killing innocent citizens by accident in a voluntary police action, officials should be given very little lenience based on their "intentions", IMO.
But I will admit it took a long time for me to get away from the emotion of that situation. I get very angry in such situations, or at least used to, because, like Rush appears to, I tend to "default" to law-and-order mode, even if we disagree on how best to achieve order and what truly constitutes law.
P.P.S. I had an interesting conversation this past summer with a lawyer/teacher (retired, IIRC) who described himself as a "small-business-oriented leftist anarchist" or something like that. He had plenty of interesting viewpoints, including noting that the "right wing" lately went from loving law enforcement to resenting it (to which I offered a couple of answers I think he found persuasive).
But when I pointed out to him, after he defended Reno's acts, that she had willingly and, apparently, unnecessarily assaulted poor right-wing Christians, but failed to properly follow through on her real job of investigating highly-placed, wealthy, left-wing government officials, such as Gore, I swear this guy was totally dumbstruck -- and, interestingly, though I'm only guessing, not because he felt he'd been outargued or anything, but because I think he genuinely found this point persuasive and truly disturbing to contemplate.
In the end, I think he and I, despite having great disagreements on how best to have a peaceful yet prosperous world with full individual freedoms, shared those goals sufficiently to intelligently discuss many of these issues without rancor. He did, as you might imagine, castigate Rush as a "racist", and was probably surprised that I neither capitulated nor desired to argue much, just pointing out that I'd listened to him for many years and completely disagreed.
(In my experience, the willingness of someone to claim Rush Limbaugh is a "racist" or "promotes violence like the OKC bombing" is a sure indicator of someone who is unwilling to listen to him or others, yet willing to unthinkingly repeat whatever vile things they hear about some unpopular figure. So I was quite surprised, after a long conversation, that he made the "racist" claim, yet continued to listen to me, especially since the very views he probably considers Rush to hold that make him "racist" are ones that I, too, hold, though he didn't inquire about any of them specifically. I'm guessing that he probably won't repeat the "Rush is racist" claim without first verifying it for himself and thus being able to back it up with firsthand experience. Some people just refuse to knowingly play the role of mindless sheep, following the herd of a leader who requires them to spew hatred.)
I'm also curious -- do you hold Limbaugh to be more evil for supposedly calling for the killing of innocent civilians, or Clinton and Reno more evil for actually killing them while undertaking actions that were neither necessary nor constitutionally valid?
You might be right, but I believe you likely support a common fallacy regarding Rush's show.
I actually listen to him, and recall various important elements of the story quite clearly.
For one thing, Rush never, to my knowledge, advocated any such response to the Waco tragedy.
In fact, during hearings involving grilling Janet Reno for her handling of the situation, Rush criticized the way one Congressman (forget who offhand) treated her -- appropriate, since he was rather rude.
In reward for that gallant act, that weekend, President Clinton "humorously" (with nobody laughing, IIRC) claimed Rush defended Reno "only because her attacker was a black man".
Though Clinton tried to spin his way out of that mess later on, Rush pledged to never again defend a member of Clinton's cabinet on his show, and, I believe, stuck with that pledge. (So much for Clinton's ability to make friends.)
And, of course, it goes without saying, to anyone who actually listens to Rush, as compared to blindly accepting the hateful rhetoric directed by the Left towards him, that he's much more of a "law-and-order" person than an "overthrow the government" type. Listeners who thought they heard him advocating a response to Waco like the OKC bombing already had mental problems, IMO -- I never heard him preaching anything remotely like that.
Next, since the liberal media (and liberals generally) love to criticize Rush and make him the whipping-boy for their hatred of right-wingers, those who believe in God, whatever, without bothering to listen to him and decide for themselves, it became fashionable to depict his show as somehow culpable in motivating McVeigh.
For example, a cartoon in a Seattle paper depicted the famous photo of a fireman/paramedic holding a dead child, with the balloon "thought" added, reading, "damn talk radio!", a phrase specifically designed to criticize right-wing talk radio, Rush Limbaugh in particular, being the dominant player in that field.
Turns out, the actual fireman/paramedic who was photographed was a fan of Rush's show. He called in to Rush, they talked for awhile, and, IIRC, he didn't blame Rush one bit for the OKC bombing.
That being said, it is still possible Rush's show played some role in motivating McVeigh to undertake his act. I'll include it in context, along with other things that certainly did play some role, for those who have forgotten, or refused to acknowledge the truth:
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- Had Americans responded to the unnecessary deaths of some 76 innocent men, women, and children (and, yes, they were innocent, based on Clinton defenders' claims that he must be "innocent until proved guilty", therefore could not be removed from office, and the Branch Davidians had not been proved guilty) by insisting that Reno and/or Clinton be removed, and especially had Reno been immediately fired, OKC might not have happened.
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So, yes, Rush may have been partly to blame, but not, in my opinion, because he encouraged any actions remotely close to bombing a federal building. Unlike Clinton and Reno, Rush has played no evident part in killing innocents, either here in America or abroad, and all the self-delusional posturing in the world won't change that fact.If Americans hadn't been so hot-to-trot on gun control, it is unlikely the BATF would have felt so justified conducting a sudden, unnecessary, high-visibility, extreme-force raid on the Branch Davidians over possible arms violations. Perhaps they would have handled it in a more downplayed manner, which we have since learned was easily possible. I believe America motivated them to make a "show of force" on this sort of issue.
(In case anyone thinks I'm blindly pro-Rush or anti-Clinton: this event happened under President Bush, the 41st; further, I've heard Rush incorrectly state that it happened under Clinton several times, causing me to reinvestigate it in case my memory was faulty.)
Of course, if the raid hadn't happened, not only would OKC not have happened, neither would law-enforcement agents have died for the illusion of security Americans call "gun control".
Had Janet Reno been more patient and not sent in tanks based on unsupported assertions that "there was child abuse going on in there" -- the sort of thing on which she built her career, and, later, implicitly used in justifying her armed raid to "unite Elian Gonzalez with his father" -- the Branch Davidians would likely be alive today, or at least not dead as a result of unnecessary use of government force.
In that case, OKC would probably not have happened.
(I'm basing this on my impressions of the government's case against McVeigh, not on expertise on it.)
It is possible that, had Rush Limbaugh not sought to defend Reno against a rude interrogation by a member of Congress, McVeigh would have taken solace (assuming he had been listening to Rush anyway -- not necessarily likely, given how Rush is viewed by those on the extreme Right) in knowing he had a popular radio host, with some 20 million listeners, who likely agreed that the Waco tragedy was a) one for which average American citizens were somewhat culpable, since it's their (our) government, and b) one for which these same citizens might learn to reduce their willingness to tyrannize their neighbor over unconstitutional laws.
Those who supported keeping Reno and Clinton in office, in my opinion -- whether individual citizens, newspaper editors, politicians -- are much more culpable in terms of encouraging McVeigh to believe there was a need to undertake the bombing. (I heard he was even considering just assassinating Reno, but decided Americans were sufficiently culpable that he had to resort to terrorism.)
In short, Rush is an easy target for the OKC bombing, especially those who blindly adhere to certain sociopolitical views, but the blame rests, beyond on McVeigh and his co-conspirators, directly on the US government and the American people, not so much for what happened at Waco, but for how America responded -- deciding to continue starting to wage a war on guns that would certainly be as successful as its longrunning wars on poverty and on drugs, at least until recently.
That wasn't the end of the story. Clinton, who surely believed his administration could kill anyone "outside the mainstream" (e.g. right-wingers, Muslims) with impunity, went on to kill a few innocent Sudanese in an aspirin factory by bombing it. He claimed it was making chemical weapons; it wasn't, and he apparently knew better than to get full input from all sides in his administration, shutting some of them out of the process. Conveniently, there was going to be some grand jury testimony scheduled for the same time he chose to bomb that building (or maybe it was some other event) -- an event that would have made the front pages, and which related to his scandalous behavior. That he couldn't find at any given time a number of people in his administration urging the bombing of some "chemical plant" somewhere, I find hard to believe, so I tend to believe he chose that building at that time because it was sufficiently convenient to him, not because it was militarily necessary (since it turned out to not be).
To thise day, I don't believe we've heard an apology -- especially a genuine apology -- from him for killing innocent Sudanese as a result of pulling the trigger too quickly.
Reno, who learned the same thing from Waco, went on to send men with guns to remove Elian from the clutches of his religious, presumably right-wing (certainly anti-Castro, anyway) relatives, despite the fact that there was no pressing reason to do so. (Some claimed "abuse", but no charges were ever brought. Some claimed there was a court order, but there wasn't, as far as I can tell -- there was a search warrant, but that's something quite different in a case like this.)
To this day, of the politically active Americans, nearly a majority of them celebrate Reno's use of force against Elian's relatives, hardly any of them insisted on removing Clinton from office merely for the bombing of the aspirin factory, not to mention for all the other things he did, or allowed to be done, on his watch, indicating a sufficient disregard for life, liberty, law, and order to invalidate him for high office...
(Yes, I know there are all sorts of accusations about American-perpetrated and American-supported horrors abroad. I don't have personal experience with these, and few Americans do. I also don't know enough about the context -- e.g. how much collateral damage is acceptable when targeting those who are planning and carrying out mass murder of innocents? Further, I don't generally trust those who make claims about such remote actions, and suspect many Americans share that distrust -- too many liars with an axe to grind against America are treated, by the liberal media, as truth-tellers (e.g. "there are 3 million homeless people in the US" during the '80s). So I focus only on events which we all did have an opportunity to view, up close and personal, and affect, especially given Clinton's penchant for reading public polls and acting accordingly.)
So, as much as I admire Newt Gingrich, hearing him on Fox News this morning claiming that Americans were a "peaceable" people struck me as not entirely defensible.
Sure, we like peace -- when it suits our purposes. Some of us even love it. A few of us work to make it.
But too many of us choose to allow people who demonstrate an inability to avoid killing innocent people to continue to hold high political office, wielding weapons of unimaginable destruction, especially when they support the political causes we support (redistribution of wealth, abortion on demand, whatever).
So, today's events I have, in some form, seen coming for several years now. It won't necessarily change the minds of many Americans, any more than Waco, or OKC, convinced many that gun control wasn't worth that loss of life.
But it might bring home to enough Americans the simple fact that nobody should seek to impose their will on somebody else -- whether directly, indirectly (say, by allowing immoral men to remain in positions of public power), or by proxy (say, by supporting government legislation such as gun control or laws restricting free speech) -- without being prepared to accept the consequences.
What today's actions have taught us, among many other things, is that we aren't safe in the sheltering arms of government (whether a federal building or a world trade center); we aren't safe by disarming the law-abiding citizens (were any of the passengers on the jets used as suicide missiles allowed to take their concealed firearms on board? NO!); we aren't safe by bombing remote lands in purported attempts to combat terrorism, conveniently distracting the populace from unsavory domestic scandals; we certainly aren't safe by hiding our heads in the sand when such things happen and not holding elected officials accountable; and we aren't safe simply by electing a new President who doesn't, personally, have a record of directing actions resulting in the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, especially if we haven't, first and foremost, squarely faced our culpability in previous such actions.
Given the willingness of so many Americans to turn their view away from these issues in the past, despite their unprecedented wealth and ability to engage their government, I do not find it surprising that people in other lands, at least feeling very oppressed by great powers, look at us and conclude, like McVeigh did, that it is not the American government so much as the American people that accept the killing of innocents as necessary "collateral damage" to achieve some illusion of security.
Needless to say, I'm very sad for today's victims. The dead have no further opportunity to learn from whatever mistakes they make and announce their apologies to us, which is especially a sad thing, and one more reason to celebrate life.
But Americans do not, at present, appears to have a society, or culture, that truly values life. Whether it's innocent Muslims at the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent Christians caught up in international politics or targeting by gung-ho law enforcement, or children in the womb whom our "fairer sex" kills by the millions every few years, we don't have the high moral ground at present.
In a sense, given that we might well die for our beliefs anyway, we must learn to ask ourselves, which beliefs are worth dying for? Gun control? Redistributing wealth? Protecting the unborn? Protecting our shores against invading forces? Consructing a missile-defense shield?
I'm not advocating answers to these questions, just suggesting that perhaps there's a better, wiser basis for answering them than what has, to me, long appeared to be, for many Americans, "well, I want so-and-so to be made to do such-and-such, and since I know I won't face the consequences for forcing them to do so if I can convince the government to do that for me, it must be my divine right to so impose my will".
The good news is, we can at once change our collective course and do the right things, whatever those might be, while recognizing, and making suitable restitution for, what we've done in the past.
I was listening to his show regularly then (and still do fairly often now).
Whether he truly called from bombing of "whoever is responsible" -- not an unsurprising, or particularly conservative, response -- he did, quite early on, start telling his listeners that his "contacts", or experts who he trusted, were telling him the culprits were likely not outside the USA; that they were likely to turn out to be domestic terrorists. I believe he was doing that for days before the dominant liberal media came to the same conclusion, but am not sure.
I also remember Bill Clinton coming out right away, blaming Rush Limbaugh (by association -- I think he actually blamed "talk radio") as soon as the domestic angle was finally established.
What I'd like to hear from Rush -- if only our local radio station would stop preempting him! -- are answers to the following questions:
I'm asking these questions because I have no "easy" answers, and because I'm genuinely interested in hearing how someone as thoughtful and practical, as Rush generally is, would answer them.
I'm sure everyone is grateful that you did them this service.
I, too, am grateful, and so, before engaging you in debate any further, insist that you at least make public your true identity, rather than remaining behind the shroud of anonymity, so everyone can appreciate your genius. An update to your "personal page" would be one approach.
MS-DOS, for example, has a CLI, but is not an IDE. But while I can't think of any "GUI" that is an IDE, UNIX, which is CLI-based, is indeed an IDE.
Now, I don't think of UNIX (e.g. Linux) as an ideal, out-of-the-box IDE, but it certainly includes the low-level functions necessary to make it into one, as well as some high-level functions.
Certain things that a good IDE would offer programmers happen to map better to the modern ideal of a GUI than to the modern ideal of a CLI.
For example, picking something from a displayed list is, in a typical GUI, a fairly natural thing to do, but not in a CLI.
That is, when you "open" a directory/folder in a GUI, you not only see what is presently there, you can directly select an item for some other action.
Whereas, with CLI's, it's generally assumed that when you enter the "ls" (or "dir") command, what you want is just a scroll-style listing of a snapshot of what is in the directory you've just "opened".
There's no inherent reason a selection couldn't be made directly from that command's output, or that the output itself couldn't be made dynamic (change as the directory contents changes a la MacOS)...
But with the GUI, there's not an obvious way to automate a use of such a viewing, since the rendering is done at such a low level (bitmapped graphics), and since we don't have commonly accepted models, or interactions, for directing such a viewing to be used in some different fashion (e.g. don't display it, pipe it into the GUI equivalent of 'grep' instead), the designers of what could be a conceptually simple function had to make it more complex, by having the display be "live", that is, somewhat real-time and directly manipulatable (is that a word?) by the user.
Whereas, with the CLI, especially a UNIX-like one (which even MS-DOS somewhat copied, unlike some other early DOS-like systems), it's built in that, if a selection is desired, the output of 'ls' can be piped into some selector script; or, if dynamic update is desired, the command can be automatically re-run every few seconds; and so on.
Personally, though "infected" with the delightful experience of having developed a smallish C app using Think C on the Mac around 10-12 years ago, I don't generally look forward to using GUI-based systems to develop code.
Chief among the reasons is the fact that the quality and flexibility of GUI-based apps tends to be noticeably lower than than of CLI-based apps. And I can't have my IDE (however I effectively "define" it via usage) crashing or misbehaving on me while I do my work.
E.g. I'm currently, on this particular notebook, getting "Error saving bookmarks file!" dialogs from Netscape (RH Linux 7.1), though I have no idea why, because there's no error code, no diagnostic message, and endless mucking with bookmark "open", "import", and "save as" menu items doesn't fix anything. (So each time I start up Netscape, I have to manually import my real bookmarks, and must save them manually whenever I add new ones.)
With a CLI, this kind of stupid bug might well be less likely, because instead of mucking about writing code to create a dialog box, a simple "fprintf (stderr, ...);" might do, in which case the programmer might have bothered actually reporting the error code, maybe even the corresponding diagnostic message, file name, etc.
That's just one trivial example of the general impression I have, namely, that GUI-based systems are inherently more complex, larger (in terms of memory usage), monolithic, and persistent (hang around when you don't want them to, e.g. when benchmarking or profiling) than their CLI-based counterparts.
Further, I find GUI-based systems tend to be "behind the curve" with respect to CLI-based ones. Journaling or even periodically saving to a temp file of an edit buffer in case of system/app crash? That's been in various versions of Emacs (admittedly a bit of a cross between a CLI and a GUI, but it isn't mouse-dependent after all) for what seems like decades, but, sheesh, Netscape 4.x still doesn't do that for this "comment" box it lets me type this stuff into! (I've lost a few comments-in-progress that way.)
So, aside from not having some state-of-the-art capabilities CLI's tend to, especially those relating to robustness and recoverability, GUI's tend to be less stable, crash more often, etc. (That is, I've lost more "work" due to Netscape crashes than I've ever had to recover due to Emacs crashes. I've been using Emacs variants for some 20 years now, Netscape for maybe two, and pretty much all I've used Netscape for in this sense is entering /. comments.)
Okay, maybe I shouldn't pick on Netscape, since "everyone knows it's buggy", but isn't it somewhat illustrative that one of the most popular, smash-hit GUI-based apps of the 20th century still, in 2001, can't avoid crashing, won't automatically journal edited text, and so on?
(And, yes, I've used IE, it's more stable, until it crashes, which, though comparatively rare, tends to crash the whole Windows environment...another effect of the tightly-integrated-GUI syndrome, as far as I can tell.)
So GUI-based systems are prettier and let me do some things that are awkward under vanilla CLI's, but, for "real work", they're just too much more complicated, less flexible, less robust, and, by the way, less portable than CLI's, and that looks like it'll be the case for at least another 10 years. So while it's nice, in theory, to use an IDE that already has a button, dialog box, or menu item for every combination of two or three CLI-based commands, that doesn't make up for the losses in other areas. After all, if I really want those buttons, I can "bind" function and other keys to each of those combinations myself, in that CLI. And I can easily write other "special" items (scripts and such) to do things like dynamic display of arbitrary text, offer CLI-based selection of arbitrary items in a displayed list, and so on. These binding and scripts might have bugs, of course, but if they crash, they aren't likely to render inoperable the rest of "my" IDE. And when they're not actually in use, they won't necessarily take up system memory and time the way a typical GUI-based IDE does.
Ideally, both CLI and GUI would be so well-designed that there'd be little difference. (E.g. an "echo $?" might make sense in the context of a CLI-based Netscape-like browser, to at least see the error status of trying to save bookmarks -- maybe that'd be a distinct process running in its own subshell, a sort of mini-daemon.)
So, to me, the ability to use the mouse to point, click, draw, drag, and pop up is wonderful, but, given that I currently can't choose both simultaneously without greatly increasing complexity (what I have to memorize plus the complexity, including crashability and likely bugginess, of the software on which I'm depending), and that the features today's CLI's offer are critical, I'm not likely to commit to learning any GUI-based IDE in the near future.
(Naturally, I've been thinking about how to best design "the ultimate CLI" upon which an IDE might be more ideally built, ditto for "the ultimate GUI", and, naturally, it'd be great if the system could be so well-engineered that most of it didn't care whether the interface being used at a given moment was a CLI, a GUI, or some arbitrary interface, such as one designed for use by the blind. But I've been dreaming about all that for well over 10 years now, and about the CLI part of it, well, ever since first using ITS back in the mid-'70s, so it's unlikely I'll actually design my own IDE to replace Unix, whether CLI- or GUI-based, anytime soon. I've got some pretty cool ideas, though! ;-)
Hey, some of us wish to reproduce.
So, when it comes to writing software, which (to me) includes designing as well as implementing it, naturally I want to add to the body of trustware that's out there, so other people will respect my software too. (And I recently read a little note on the G95 website that suggests, hey, maybe some of them do, despite all the faults in g77.)
2) It's "My" Code...
Examples of what developing GPL'ed software allows me to do, that developing proprietary software does not allow me to do:
There are plenty of other reasons, already given elsewhere, like "making the world a better place" and stuff, but these are items that often don't get mentioned, or valued, in such discussions, and which "young" programmers, such as those just starting out in a proprietary-software company, might not have thought through. (E.g. all that code they wrote the previous few years becomes nearly useless to them the moment they get laid off or quit -- they got paid $$ to write it, but that's pretty much where the relationship ends.)
When it comes to having people know about the software I've written throughout the years, no question that g77 far outranks anything else I've done, since comparatively few people ever, e.g., used the BATCH subsystem under PRIMOS, read the Pr1me "Advanced Programmer's Guide" series, etc.
And when it comes to my occasionally wanting to hack on some software with which I'm familiar, the only software I worked on to which I presently have such free access is g77. It represents probably only 20% of my career output to date, that figure depending somewhat on whether technical docs are included, but it's the only large free software (and documentation) I've written.
All that other software and docs? Swallowed up in failed and/or bought-out-and-then-shut-down companies, and, since I didn't have the rights I have with GPL'ed software, it's basically all gone, regardless of its usefulness.
Free software, on the other hand, is likely to disappear from the face of the earth only if it is truly found to be useless. Even marginally useful free software will likely find a haven in various archives around the world. Authors of really useful free software needn't worry about backups -- as Linus once said, just put your latest hacks up on your website and let the rest of the world mirror it!