I'm not such a big fan of republics as such either, but... buh? You want to solve moral panic-induced stupidity by *removing* constitutional limitations on the power of the mob?
Please keep them away from any form of BASIC. The last thing this world needs is even more programmers who couldn't understand pointers or recursion if their lives depended on it. Start them with C, and then let them try high-level stuff once they understand what's going on under the hood. No, it really isn't too difficult. I did my first non-trivial programming and learned C and x86 assembler around that age.
Meh. That's only actually happened to me once, and the person in question was (probably) joking. Anyway, to extend your list:
Lesbian. Check
Has the exact same geek girl fetish most of the men here have, but would never *admit* to having looked at someone's homepage link for that reason. Check
Involved with someone (who fits most of your list too). Check
Writes code with above-referenced someone. Check
Sometimes gets drawn into Linux vs. OpenBSD arguments with said someone. Check
There are two different types of prosopagnosia: apperceptive prosopagnosia, which is what the OP was describing, and associational prosopagnosia, which is more like not being able to use faces to query one's memory. I have the latter, and if I'm looking at a face I can parse it and work out age, gender, etc., which someone with apperceptive prosopagnosia typically can't do, but I can't make any associations with faces as such at all. I have to explicitly observe and notice features and make associations with those to recognize people. I usually end up going on hairstyles, with a somewhat limited success rate.
I'm pretty bad with voices too, although not as bad as I am with faces or as bad as the woman in the article. For what it's worth, I just had my first bug-fix (a race condition in arch/sparc64/kernel/trampoline.S) accepted into the kernel source a few weeks ago, so I guess I fit your definition of a Real Nerd.
Re:Nerds will be nerds
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Hey, some of us fishnet-and-black-eyeliner-wearing girl thingies *are* the nerds.:)
Well, considering they could easily avoid doing so by just not having any operations in that jurisdiction, and in fact they probably don't, and seem to have cooperated with this just for the sheer glee of censorship, yeah, I'd say that's pretty fucking evil.
Which was a good enough idea when they were writing it, and managed to at least slow down the growth of the state for a while, but even the briefest examination of recent US history will show that a written constitution is not sufficient to prevent tyranny indefinitely. Hence the original poster's point, that a monopoly world state would be more dangerous than any national government ever could be, because when it turns authoritarian, there's nowhere left to run before the mass graves show up.
Fact is that we all would like to take all the child pornographers; round them up into a rather large pit, and set them all on fire until they are nothing but ash.
So do you engage your brain at all when you say things like this, or just regurgitate the fashionable moral panic of the moment? Did the Two Minute Hate start when I wasn't looking?
I've taken more and more to calling myself that too, I think.
Well, there's hierarchy as a particular pattern of social relations, and then there's enforcing any particular pattern. Consider the one big example of voluntary hierarchy in my own life, my job. I'm a software developer for a small-ish internet startup, to be specific. I've never been in a management role and wouldn't really want one. At the same time, I don't think there's anything oppressive or enforced about it. My boss just performs a different role than me, concerned more with planning and resource allocation and such than with directly writing code; it's just division of labor. If the company were organized differently, the same sort of tasks would still have to be performed, and frankly, I don't want them to be evenly distributed. I'd rather just do software; it's what I'm good at. If I'm focused primarily on that, then someone else somewhere in the organization will have to be concerned more with the management-type tasks.
I guess I'd say that preferences for one style of social organization or another really seem to be just that to me: preferences, features of one's individual personality. Thus, it seems oppressive to *force* any one pattern, and that it would be best if a relatively diverse range of styles could co-exist.
As for your links, I do find myself agreeing with an awful lot of what you say, but rather disturbed by some things some other people are saying. For example, from right up at the top in your first link: "Conversely, we have money. In a different thread Devrim said he would support the physical suppression of anyone who starts a bank." 'Physically suppressing' anyone like that strikes me as reprehensible, and if you have the institutional means to carry out such an act against anyone who starts a bank, it's a state whether you call it that or not.
I think I find myself agreeing pretty strongly with you when you say, "On the subject of democracy, where the community forces the individual to submit (without the option of leaving), then that is tyranny of majority, and is just as oppressive as tyranny of the minority....", with the caveat that the idea that this is okay if the community allows an option to leave seems a bit troubling, but I'm not sure how you're imagining it. If you mean it's okay for a community to just refuse to interact with the individual over a disagreement like that, yes. If you mean that you think the community necessarily must have ownership of a certain geographical area in the sense that they may legitimately physically eject the individual over such a thing, I have a bit of a problem with that. At least, I wouldn't be very interested in participating in a community that had such all-encompassing power over me. It's better than claiming the right to imprison or kill me, I suppose, but it's still a bit too much concentration of power to disrupt an individual life in one place.
On the other hand, I am much less inclined to agree when you say, "Individualists are opposed to the accumulation of capital (it is one of the defining characteristics when compared with the fake "anarcho"-capitalists)." If one can acquire property at all, than one can accumulate it, and, while it seems plain that the interaction between the private sector and the state in the present system tends to encourage large concentrations of property to a far greater degree than would be possible without the state, I see no reason to believe that any such accumulation would be impossible without the state or would necessarily involve oppressive means, and being 'opposed' to such seems troubling. Does that mean that it would be ethically acceptable to forcibly expropriate them? That there would be an organized means to do so? I don't quite know what you have in mind there, but a lot of the possible implications seem rather state-like.
Well, thanks for the interesting links, anyway. Was fun talking and you've kept me up rather later than I ought to be. I don't expect I
I'm probably something halfway between your much-reviled anarcho-capitalists and your individualists. In other words, I think the standard A-C set of ideas starts off saying some interesting things, and at one time I was closer to that position, but errs in a few different ways, chiefly by trying to draw a hard distinction between the State and private industry, and localize all the oppressive violence of the present system in the state, and paint a picture of a world without a state but where economics is largely unchanged, when in practice it seems perfectly clear that most large-scale business is perfectly happy to exploit the State's power of institutionalized force for their own benefit, or at the very least to passively collaborate with the state.
At the moment, I'm a good deal more interested in seeing diverse modes of economic oganization than the orthodox A-C position seems to be. At the same time, I'm not so inclined to sign on with your side, since I have a hard time seeing it as a notably bad thing if people voluntarily choose to participate in a capitalistic mode of economic organization, and all the anti-capitalist rhetoric coming from your side makes me rather suspicious of what would happen in that case if you guys had your way. That, and I find the labor theory of value all but incoherent.
In short, I refuse to fit neatly into your dichotomy.:)
This article just blithely assumes personality traits are fixed at birth and then determine political beliefs, and makes essentially arbitrary value judgements on those traits.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school-age kids--and correlate with those children's political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person's startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Now that thing about the startle response is interesting, especially because it's a simple enough trait that one can easily imagine it really is just genetics. On the other hand what's the point in describing personality traits as positive or negative here? Why not just say these traits were more common in liberals, and these over here were more common in conservatives? What purpose is served by mixing value judgements in with the attempted science like that? What kind of messed-up person describes 'dominating' as a positive trait in a political context, anyway?
Since when does a space have to be neat to be functional? I find neat and tidy spaces rather oppressively sterile and unliveable, whereas my messy spaces are comfortable and eminently functional. For what it's worth, I'd call myself libertarian too, but would be even more swift to distance myself from conservatives than from leftists.
Well, my bedroom's dimly lit, but I keep the drugs and drug paraphernalia in my nightstand drawer. The rest of the room is mostly messy, being strewn with several hundred books, assorted laundry, and old-school Sun and SGI hardware.
For what it's worth, my politics would be best described as radical libertarian/anarchist.
Slashdot Mirror
ps- Speaking of not getting laid, anyone know a hot linux-obsessed lesbian?
*raises hand*
Yeah, because we all know how much repressing sexuality makes it go away.
I'm not such a big fan of republics as such either, but ... buh? You want to solve moral panic-induced stupidity by *removing* constitutional limitations on the power of the mob?
Don't you mean gnuke? :)
So do they have a Gamma-ray Screen of Death?
Yes, but don't we already know that the answer is going to be "None, but ... Hey, look over there! A big shiny war!" ?
Please keep them away from any form of BASIC. The last thing this world needs is even more programmers who couldn't understand pointers or recursion if their lives depended on it. Start them with C, and then let them try high-level stuff once they understand what's going on under the hood. No, it really isn't too difficult. I did my first non-trivial programming and learned C and x86 assembler around that age.
Find a way to use a swiss army knife over IP and I'm sure the rest of the us will all tremble in fear. :)
Yeah, because Switzerland is such a notorious source of attacks. I think you meant .cn.
Meh. That's only actually happened to me once, and the person in question was (probably) joking. Anyway, to extend your list:
There are two different types of prosopagnosia: apperceptive prosopagnosia, which is what the OP was describing, and associational prosopagnosia, which is more like not being able to use faces to query one's memory. I have the latter, and if I'm looking at a face I can parse it and work out age, gender, etc., which someone with apperceptive prosopagnosia typically can't do, but I can't make any associations with faces as such at all. I have to explicitly observe and notice features and make associations with those to recognize people. I usually end up going on hairstyles, with a somewhat limited success rate.
I'm pretty bad with voices too, although not as bad as I am with faces or as bad as the woman in the article. For what it's worth, I just had my first bug-fix (a race condition in arch/sparc64/kernel/trampoline.S) accepted into the kernel source a few weeks ago, so I guess I fit your definition of a Real Nerd.
Hey, some of us fishnet-and-black-eyeliner-wearing girl thingies *are* the nerds. :)
Wait, you mean there are non-evil UNIX admins? Even *normal* ones?
Um, one of them would appear to be in possession of such,
Well, considering they could easily avoid doing so by just not having any operations in that jurisdiction, and in fact they probably don't, and seem to have cooperated with this just for the sheer glee of censorship, yeah, I'd say that's pretty fucking evil.
Which was a good enough idea when they were writing it, and managed to at least slow down the growth of the state for a while, but even the briefest examination of recent US history will show that a written constitution is not sufficient to prevent tyranny indefinitely. Hence the original poster's point, that a monopoly world state would be more dangerous than any national government ever could be, because when it turns authoritarian, there's nowhere left to run before the mass graves show up.
Fact is that we all would like to take all the child pornographers; round them up into a rather large pit, and set them all on fire until they are nothing but ash.
15-year-old girl takes nude pictures of herself, is charged with 'illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material,'
So do you engage your brain at all when you say things like this, or just regurgitate the fashionable moral panic of the moment? Did the Two Minute Hate start when I wasn't looking?
I've taken more and more to calling myself that too, I think.
Well, there's hierarchy as a particular pattern of social relations, and then there's enforcing any particular pattern. Consider the one big example of voluntary hierarchy in my own life, my job. I'm a software developer for a small-ish internet startup, to be specific. I've never been in a management role and wouldn't really want one. At the same time, I don't think there's anything oppressive or enforced about it. My boss just performs a different role than me, concerned more with planning and resource allocation and such than with directly writing code; it's just division of labor. If the company were organized differently, the same sort of tasks would still have to be performed, and frankly, I don't want them to be evenly distributed. I'd rather just do software; it's what I'm good at. If I'm focused primarily on that, then someone else somewhere in the organization will have to be concerned more with the management-type tasks.
I guess I'd say that preferences for one style of social organization or another really seem to be just that to me: preferences, features of one's individual personality. Thus, it seems oppressive to *force* any one pattern, and that it would be best if a relatively diverse range of styles could co-exist.
As for your links, I do find myself agreeing with an awful lot of what you say, but rather disturbed by some things some other people are saying. For example, from right up at the top in your first link: "Conversely, we have money. In a different thread Devrim said he would support the physical suppression of anyone who starts a bank." 'Physically suppressing' anyone like that strikes me as reprehensible, and if you have the institutional means to carry out such an act against anyone who starts a bank, it's a state whether you call it that or not.
I think I find myself agreeing pretty strongly with you when you say, "On the subject of democracy, where the community forces the individual to submit (without the option of leaving), then that is tyranny of majority, and is just as oppressive as tyranny of the minority. ...", with the caveat that the idea that this is okay if the community allows an option to leave seems a bit troubling, but I'm not sure how you're imagining it. If you mean it's okay for a community to just refuse to interact with the individual over a disagreement like that, yes. If you mean that you think the community necessarily must have ownership of a certain geographical area in the sense that they may legitimately physically eject the individual over such a thing, I have a bit of a problem with that. At least, I wouldn't be very interested in participating in a community that had such all-encompassing power over me. It's better than claiming the right to imprison or kill me, I suppose, but it's still a bit too much concentration of power to disrupt an individual life in one place.
On the other hand, I am much less inclined to agree when you say, "Individualists are opposed to the accumulation of capital (it is one of the defining characteristics when compared with the fake "anarcho"-capitalists)." If one can acquire property at all, than one can accumulate it, and, while it seems plain that the interaction between the private sector and the state in the present system tends to encourage large concentrations of property to a far greater degree than would be possible without the state, I see no reason to believe that any such accumulation would be impossible without the state or would necessarily involve oppressive means, and being 'opposed' to such seems troubling. Does that mean that it would be ethically acceptable to forcibly expropriate them? That there would be an organized means to do so? I don't quite know what you have in mind there, but a lot of the possible implications seem rather state-like.
Well, thanks for the interesting links, anyway. Was fun talking and you've kept me up rather later than I ought to be. I don't expect I
I'm probably something halfway between your much-reviled anarcho-capitalists and your individualists. In other words, I think the standard A-C set of ideas starts off saying some interesting things, and at one time I was closer to that position, but errs in a few different ways, chiefly by trying to draw a hard distinction between the State and private industry, and localize all the oppressive violence of the present system in the state, and paint a picture of a world without a state but where economics is largely unchanged, when in practice it seems perfectly clear that most large-scale business is perfectly happy to exploit the State's power of institutionalized force for their own benefit, or at the very least to passively collaborate with the state.
At the moment, I'm a good deal more interested in seeing diverse modes of economic oganization than the orthodox A-C position seems to be. At the same time, I'm not so inclined to sign on with your side, since I have a hard time seeing it as a notably bad thing if people voluntarily choose to participate in a capitalistic mode of economic organization, and all the anti-capitalist rhetoric coming from your side makes me rather suspicious of what would happen in that case if you guys had your way. That, and I find the labor theory of value all but incoherent.
In short, I refuse to fit neatly into your dichotomy. :)
This article just blithely assumes personality traits are fixed at birth and then determine political beliefs, and makes essentially arbitrary value judgements on those traits.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school-age kids--and correlate with those children's political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person's startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Now that thing about the startle response is interesting, especially because it's a simple enough trait that one can easily imagine it really is just genetics. On the other hand what's the point in describing personality traits as positive or negative here? Why not just say these traits were more common in liberals, and these over here were more common in conservatives? What purpose is served by mixing value judgements in with the attempted science like that? What kind of messed-up person describes 'dominating' as a positive trait in a political context, anyway?
Since when does a space have to be neat to be functional? I find neat and tidy spaces rather oppressively sterile and unliveable, whereas my messy spaces are comfortable and eminently functional. For what it's worth, I'd call myself libertarian too, but would be even more swift to distance myself from conservatives than from leftists.
Well, my bedroom's dimly lit, but I keep the drugs and drug paraphernalia in my nightstand drawer. The rest of the room is mostly messy, being strewn with several hundred books, assorted laundry, and old-school Sun and SGI hardware.
For what it's worth, my politics would be best described as radical libertarian/anarchist.
It's already way past bad enough for revolution, and no one outside of /. seems to care.
Where are you going to find 500 determined people who each have the bandwidth to send and receive 500 GB a day (= 49.7 Mbit/s non-stop)?
Yeah, but they haven't figured out how to let someone without a brain use a computer yet. McCain will have to wait a bit longer.