It's not so much that people go around wearing body armor in case some evil foreign-seeming type terrorist blows himself up in the local Starbucks. It's that nobody really protests when government officials say that such a scenario is A) actually plausible and B) can be prevented if we throw out just a couple of tiny little freedoms or spend vast amounts of money on whatever it is they're trying to sell. I have quite a few American friends, and except for a few, most tell me "it's worth it if it prevents another 9/11" whenever we discuss things like the TSA's idiocy, or illegal wiretapping, or whatever it is that goes on at Gitmo, etc.
I would call that a form of fear, though I haven't had much sleep so I'm probably just not coming up with whatever the better word for it is.
Meh. You could be saying all sorts of good things about the US and they'd hassle you. If the list of random evil people's names doesn't get you, the poor, uneducated morons on a power trip that run airport security will (imagine Heathrow, only worse). That's just the nature of travelling to (and within?) the USA these days, and likely will remain so until some future president declares victory on terror and gets around to the next big issue (like, say, fixing their economy).
Wait, are you suggesting that a North American diet doesn't make North Americans slow and sluggish? Depends on what we want to define "North American Diet" as, I guess. I'm thinking of a meat/fat/bread-heavy diet that doesn't include a lot of fruits and vegetables, and I know lots of people that get by just fine (and are in fact quite healthy) eating that way. I have to eat significantly less meat (all of it lean, I don't do well with greasy food), way more greens, and more carbohydrates (rice, potatoes) to make up the energy difference from having less meat/fats.
If you're thinking of the heavily processed I-can't-pronounce-half-of-the-ingredients fast/frozen food then, well, yeah... To be honest I don't even consider that to be food (I can't eat it, it makes me sick - though I remember enjoying it as a child).
(I are American) Also a lolcat, apparently. I like that.
You know, the old "Eat every bite.", "You don't get to go to play or bed until that plate is clean.", and that old chestnut, "Don't you know there's children starving in (insert country here)?". Every single family I know where the parents behave this way (including mine) comes from a background where meals were not guaranteed. Impoverished, war-torn, shit hole countries or regions. It's kind of why they emigrated in the first place. Kids were told to eat because their next meal may not arrive when expected, and because they had to learn to waste as little as possible. Not to mention that serving sizes are smaller where they came from (and in their homes). You can argue that doesn't apply on this continent, but given what they were earning at the time you'd be wrong.
None of their kids were fat. The fat kids I knew came from the Nth-generation (N > 2) Canadians that took their kids out to McDonald's twice a week and bought them anything they wanted badly enough to cry about. The ones that were encouraged to watch TV all day, because it made them docile and easier to ignore. The ones that couldn't deny themselves anything later on in life, even to save their lives. Well, them and one kid that had bad genes (history of it on his mom's side) and a couple that got fat after developing some medical problems.
That's just my experience, your mileage has obviously varied.
Even worst are the OLD old world descendants who have a policy of beating the shit out of their kids if there's so much as a pea remaining on their plate. I grew up with one of those in the 70s, and that can be awfully scarring. Interesting. The rule at my house was I could take as long as I like to finish my meal, but not doing so meant forfeiting desert and snacks (excluding fresh fruit) until the next meal.
Question: how is having "too much" muscle a problem? I mean, charts be damned, as a skinny guy that can't put on any kind of weight, I'd kill to have your "problem".
And yes, I completely agree about different people having different dietary needs. A North American diet makes me slow and sluggish, a South-East European diet makes me feel awesome. Friends who's families came from different parts of the world are completely different. I have no idea why this surprises some people.
Basically immediately after becoming a vegan I developed a stamina I could have never believed was possible. I became less tired when I got off meat. It may not be the meat itself but the overall quality of the food you were eating before (well, if meat is the only difference then OK, it is the meat). I noticed a massive difference in my energy level a few years ago when all I did is change the store I buy my food from (Superstore -> Costco). That and everything tastes better now. Apparently the difference is in how often they get shipments of the stuff I eat and how long they keep it in storage before selling it (well, and the cost, but eating better food is well worth it if you can find and afford it).
Bell insisted there was absolutely nothing wrong with the connection. Heh. I know people that have bribed Rogers managers to get their connection fixed. No joke. A friend of mine, who grew up in the USSR, has a saying for this sort of thing; it's something to the effect of, "Each day a little of the old country follows me across the sea."
I hope Bell gets crucified. Me too. In fact, I've got a big, old, rusty, railroad spike I'm going to save for just such an occasion.
pedophile != child abuser. The distinction is between crime and thoughtcrime, and everyone's forgotten it. I don't think most people ever even knew the distinction. And judging by how poorly the current generation is raising the next, even fewer people will understand it in the future. People these days only learn to chase whatever makes them feel good, and to destroy anything that makes them uncomfortable (including the truth). Clear, logical thinking has been uncool for so long it's amazing anyone remembers how to do it any more.
Eventually it will be illegal to think about doing anything illegal. Practice your doublethink. There is no stopping the stupidity that's been unleashed. It will have to run its course and burn itself out on its own.
...Staying out of jail will be just like The Game. No. Staying out of jail will be just like it has been in any other repressive regime - blend in with the crowd, don't annoy the men in power, don't have anything they might covet (and if you must, hide it or make it look unappealing), make sure your neighbors know that you have as much dirt on them as they do on you, etc, etc. Talk to someone that lived in the former USSR and through the lawlessness that followed the collapse for more fun tips. Bring your cynicism, all of it, and be prepared to develop even more.
(which I just lost.) Damn you!
A good argument can be made that ethically-produced child erotica helps pedophiles to live abuse-free lives. Interesting statement. Completely worthless, however, since nobody gives a damn what happens to pedophiles. Given the chance, most people would probably support publicly executing them by crucifixion.
Also the news would run a sound bite saying you want to help pedophiles on the evening news every day for a week straight. The bit where you win the defamation suit would be relegated to a foot note in someone's blog.
This is one of the sad things about the whole THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! bullshit - we can't even begin to discuss constructive solutions to a whole suit of problems because of all the sensationalist bullshit media noise and the largely irrational populace that forgot what ethics means a (or two) generation ago.
In a life and death situation would you chose to save the many or the few? Would you consider your decision to be justified? Why or why not?
China has over a billion people and the local economy (heck, even the local ecosystem) can barely sustain them all. Internal strife can quickly turn into large scale economic disruptions that could leave hundreds of millions dead to disease or starvation. The Chinese people have a lot that they could fight about if given the chance (various ethnicities, histories, economic imbalances, etc). You are the Chinese government.
Do you: A) do everything in your power to avoid a collapse? B) let dissent spread, and the use violent means to control the ensuing riots and uprisings? C) declare that you were entirely wrong, and that freedom is the only way, and hope for something better than what the Russians got?
Like I said, get the fuck over it. If the Chinese people can't handle a little bit of criticism on the World stage then they should go back to a policy of isolationism and abandon free trade and the free flow of ideas. Really? They aren't free to feel offended? Maybe you need to get over that as much as they need to get used to the insults. Keep in mind, words carry a different weight in other cultures. The fact that spoken word is near worthless in the USA and signed legal contracts are stronger than chains doesn't mean it can't be the different (or even the opposite) in other places, or that the people in those places understand you well enough to know that you don't mean it the way they hear it.
I've heard no end of people criticizing my country for various reasons and I'm not stirring up nationalist sentiment as a result. I'm not whining about being treated "like a dog". I'm not empathizing every single negative bit of our history with other nations while whitewashing/ignoring the positive parts of that history. I don't know about you personally, but I've heard a lot of Americans do just that. In fact that seems to be one of the most common replies on/. every time someone posts something negative about the USA - "It's worse in X, we're saints by comparison - stop hating America!!!"
Admit it, if an American was whining about other nations criticizing us for human rights violations they'd be modded troll and ignored in short order. It depends on how the American says it. I've seen lots of calm, rational, well written rebuttals at +5 Insightful.
Why the hell is Chinese whining about criticisms of their own human rights record any more legitimate then an American doing so? Legitimacy, in this case, is a very subjective thing. It depends a lot on which side of the border you're sitting on. That sort of subjective reaction is one thing the US and China (indeed, every nation) have in common.
I suppose... Freedom is for people who have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, and a whack of spare time to ponder philosophy.:) My family comes from Eastern Europe. I end up making that point a lot when discussing the history of Communism or Putin's popularity in Russia with a Westerner. If I had a mod point, I'd bump you up to +5.
Everything else is called "French Toast" and is clearly non-threatening in the greater scheme of things. Congress wanted to define everything else as a pretzel, but fear of the veto pen made them change it.
You must be American. If you were Canadian like me, you'd be wondering how they got their hands on Celine Dion. Meh. She probably got accidentally shipped by the same moron that sent the nuke fuses to Taiwan. I always said we needed to label her more clearly...
I'm all for more educational loan programs, but only if that includes trade schools. Honestly, I'd go a step further and set up a fast track out of high school and straight into a trade school for all the kids that really don't care to be there. Most European countries have (or had - back when the Europeans I know were still in school, things may have changed since then) something similar and it worked well for them. Kids that wanted to just get out of school and into real life got there faster, while the ones that wanted to study got to go to schools that focused on that type of student.
As far as idiots with degrees go, um, what exactly has gone wrong with the universities that this has become not only possible but expected?
And for the mother and welfare, well, yeah. I understand that, and ultimately I'd rather the state keep trying to make them fit for society. Well, except that every time the state touches education it turns into a bloody disaster. The comment about the state preventing parental assistance just struck me as even more nanny-stateish than the GPS tracking (although if the parent is failing that badly to begin with). I don't know what the answer is. Expecting society as a whole to parent everyone's kids isn't it though, I'm sure of that.
To really drive the point home, though, you would need to force them to live on just the wages they earn, with no help from mommy. Meh. I don't give a damn what their mother does. If she's gonna support her precious darling till the day one of them dies that's her right and none of my business. The only help I don't want them getting is the perpetual welfare check. I'd be all for setting up a robust student loans program (even with a provision to have the government assume part of the debt of those who do well - those students will likely be getting better jobs and paying more taxes anyway) so people that see the error of their ways have a chance to correct their mistakes later in life. Beyond that, to hell with them.
Of course. I was talking about the period following the war, after the Germans had knocked some sense into him (he did, after all, eventually stop killing his best generals). But then again, that's a perfect example of what I was saying - when dictators take power they often do a lot of damage solidifying that power before they get on with the task of actually building anything - in this case the USSR was unfortunate to have that first period coincide with the war.
Efficient in the sense that they don't bother working much on a whole heap of areas and just concentrate on oppression. Well, yes and no. Stalin, for example, built Russia back up from the brink of disaster (Soviet losses were staggeringly large during WWII) and into a nation the rest of the world feared for nearly half a century. This was no small task - it involved the reconstruction of the cities the Germans had razed, modernizing many others, rebuilding his military, development of the USSR's nuclear weapons program, etc. That was no small task. He did that and he oppressed the people he ruled over.
I don't think the number of priorities has much to do with efficiency (by any measure) in the long run. Authoritarian regimes can get a lot done in a very short period, and history has proven that time and again (I think we all remember reading about all the kings that inherited a disaster and had built an empire by the time they died in school). The trouble is that they're extremely sensitive to corruption, internal power struggles, and simple human vanity. When the strong leader dies, those who inherit his power often do tremendous damage simply bickering with each other over who gets to rule exactly what. And then when the next great ruler steps up and takes control we find that they first go throughout the country destroying a great many things in order to rebuild them in their own likeness. And in both cases we find that the bottom rung officials are corrupt as all hell since they're not accountable to anyone but their own superiors, who are often at great distance and too indifferent to bother listening to the people's complaints.
Personally I think RIAA should be able to hire mercenaries to rid the earth of such scum. Are you kidding? Comparing them to terrorists?Mere terrorists?! You want us to use mercenaries?! Christ, next thing you'll be wanting us to liberate them from their evil P2P overlords, or reform them, or stop antagonizing them by meddling in their culture, or something.
No, these scum are far worse than terrorists; they are a plague, an infectious disease that destroys all it touches. Unrelenting, incurable. Even the courts are at their mercy. Mercenaries are not enough, here. Entire armies are insufficient. Not even the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects), could handle this. No, they must be wiped out from orbit, with nukes. It's the only way to be sure.
Signed, The RIAA: Creators of the Culture, Bearers of the Truth, Defenders of the Civilization, Champions of Liberty, Dearer than Life Itself, Dread Rulers of the Abyss (in a good way, we assure you), Awesome Enough to Have Many Many Titles, Your Beloved Content-Owning Overlords.
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It's not so much that people go around wearing body armor in case some evil foreign-seeming type terrorist blows himself up in the local Starbucks. It's that nobody really protests when government officials say that such a scenario is A) actually plausible and B) can be prevented if we throw out just a couple of tiny little freedoms or spend vast amounts of money on whatever it is they're trying to sell. I have quite a few American friends, and except for a few, most tell me "it's worth it if it prevents another 9/11" whenever we discuss things like the TSA's idiocy, or illegal wiretapping, or whatever it is that goes on at Gitmo, etc.
I would call that a form of fear, though I haven't had much sleep so I'm probably just not coming up with whatever the better word for it is.
Meh. You could be saying all sorts of good things about the US and they'd hassle you. If the list of random evil people's names doesn't get you, the poor, uneducated morons on a power trip that run airport security will (imagine Heathrow, only worse). That's just the nature of travelling to (and within?) the USA these days, and likely will remain so until some future president declares victory on terror and gets around to the next big issue (like, say, fixing their economy).
If you're thinking of the heavily processed I-can't-pronounce-half-of-the-ingredients fast/frozen food then, well, yeah... To be honest I don't even consider that to be food (I can't eat it, it makes me sick - though I remember enjoying it as a child). (I are American) Also a lolcat, apparently. I like that.
None of their kids were fat. The fat kids I knew came from the Nth-generation (N > 2) Canadians that took their kids out to McDonald's twice a week and bought them anything they wanted badly enough to cry about. The ones that were encouraged to watch TV all day, because it made them docile and easier to ignore. The ones that couldn't deny themselves anything later on in life, even to save their lives. Well, them and one kid that had bad genes (history of it on his mom's side) and a couple that got fat after developing some medical problems.
That's just my experience, your mileage has obviously varied. Even worst are the OLD old world descendants who have a policy of beating the shit out of their kids if there's so much as a pea remaining on their plate. I grew up with one of those in the 70s, and that can be awfully scarring. Interesting. The rule at my house was I could take as long as I like to finish my meal, but not doing so meant forfeiting desert and snacks (excluding fresh fruit) until the next meal.
Question: how is having "too much" muscle a problem? I mean, charts be damned, as a skinny guy that can't put on any kind of weight, I'd kill to have your "problem".
And yes, I completely agree about different people having different dietary needs. A North American diet makes me slow and sluggish, a South-East European diet makes me feel awesome. Friends who's families came from different parts of the world are completely different. I have no idea why this surprises some people.
...Staying out of jail will be just like The Game. No. Staying out of jail will be just like it has been in any other repressive regime - blend in with the crowd, don't annoy the men in power, don't have anything they might covet (and if you must, hide it or make it look unappealing), make sure your neighbors know that you have as much dirt on them as they do on you, etc, etc. Talk to someone that lived in the former USSR and through the lawlessness that followed the collapse for more fun tips. Bring your cynicism, all of it, and be prepared to develop even more. (which I just lost.) Damn you!Also the news would run a sound bite saying you want to help pedophiles on the evening news every day for a week straight. The bit where you win the defamation suit would be relegated to a foot note in someone's blog.
This is one of the sad things about the whole THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!! bullshit - we can't even begin to discuss constructive solutions to a whole suit of problems because of all the sensationalist bullshit media noise and the largely irrational populace that forgot what ethics means a (or two) generation ago.
Don't feed the meta-troll!
There are religions that actually teach that...
In a life and death situation would you chose to save the many or the few? Would you consider your decision to be justified? Why or why not?
China has over a billion people and the local economy (heck, even the local ecosystem) can barely sustain them all. Internal strife can quickly turn into large scale economic disruptions that could leave hundreds of millions dead to disease or starvation. The Chinese people have a lot that they could fight about if given the chance (various ethnicities, histories, economic imbalances, etc). You are the Chinese government.
Do you:
A) do everything in your power to avoid a collapse?
B) let dissent spread, and the use violent means to control the ensuing riots and uprisings?
C) declare that you were entirely wrong, and that freedom is the only way, and hope for something better than what the Russians got?
Discuss.
As far as idiots with degrees go, um, what exactly has gone wrong with the universities that this has become not only possible but expected?
And for the mother and welfare, well, yeah. I understand that, and ultimately I'd rather the state keep trying to make them fit for society. Well, except that every time the state touches education it turns into a bloody disaster. The comment about the state preventing parental assistance just struck me as even more nanny-stateish than the GPS tracking (although if the parent is failing that badly to begin with). I don't know what the answer is. Expecting society as a whole to parent everyone's kids isn't it though, I'm sure of that.
The Army's having enough trouble with PTSD as it is and you want to make the problem worse?!
We're talking about a porn-related venture, and you're concerned about the name?
Tits for the Troops will be just fine.
Heck, it would probably win an award for most tastefully titled porn ever.
Of course. I was talking about the period following the war, after the Germans had knocked some sense into him (he did, after all, eventually stop killing his best generals). But then again, that's a perfect example of what I was saying - when dictators take power they often do a lot of damage solidifying that power before they get on with the task of actually building anything - in this case the USSR was unfortunate to have that first period coincide with the war.
I don't think the number of priorities has much to do with efficiency (by any measure) in the long run. Authoritarian regimes can get a lot done in a very short period, and history has proven that time and again (I think we all remember reading about all the kings that inherited a disaster and had built an empire by the time they died in school). The trouble is that they're extremely sensitive to corruption, internal power struggles, and simple human vanity. When the strong leader dies, those who inherit his power often do tremendous damage simply bickering with each other over who gets to rule exactly what. And then when the next great ruler steps up and takes control we find that they first go throughout the country destroying a great many things in order to rebuild them in their own likeness. And in both cases we find that the bottom rung officials are corrupt as all hell since they're not accountable to anyone but their own superiors, who are often at great distance and too indifferent to bother listening to the people's complaints.
Except in Soviet Russia.
No, these scum are far worse than terrorists; they are a plague, an infectious disease that destroys all it touches. Unrelenting, incurable. Even the courts are at their mercy. Mercenaries are not enough, here. Entire armies are insufficient. Not even the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects), could handle this. No, they must be wiped out from orbit, with nukes. It's the only way to be sure.
Signed,
The RIAA:
Creators of the Culture,
Bearers of the Truth,
Defenders of the Civilization,
Champions of Liberty,
Dearer than Life Itself,
Dread Rulers of the Abyss (in a good way, we assure you),
Awesome Enough to Have Many Many Titles,
Your Beloved Content-Owning Overlords.