Yeah, we need to make state genocide as easy as possible. Just imagine what a terrible world we'd be in if all the millions of victims of Hitler or Stalin or Mao could have fought back? Why, there might not be any totalitarian police states at all! Horrifying!
I'm an atheist, so I'm not going to defend Christians' cognitive dissonance. Suffice to say, if you start arguing about the evils of Christianity based on the Old Testament, they'll try to disown it, usually ignorant of the fact that such abandonment of Old Testament doctrine was ruled heretical by the early church and people like Marcion of Sinope were excommunicated for it by the proto-orthodoxy.
That said, it is best to attack Christianity at its heart, which is the teachings of Christ and his apostles. Besides which, the passage I already cited in Romans is also one that establishes a divine command to hate gay people, so a Christian who knows their Bible (a rarity, actually) doesn't need the Old Testament to be a retrogressive, benighted bigot.
You're assuming that he's basing it on the "current political situation" and not the substance of relative defining texts. Islam is demonstrably more evil because the Quran contains imperatives for violence like "take them and kill them [infidels] wherever ye find them" in surah 4:89 among many. The New Testament (which supersedes the Old thus avoiding all the violent prescriptions therein according to many Christians, despite that the New Testament itself is contradictory on whether it does or doesn't supersede) at its most violent stops short of commanding believers to kill. There are times such as in Romans 1:32 where sinners are called out as 'worthy of death' but it doesn't command believers to kill them. (Though things like that were nonetheless used to justify killings, such as the mob murder of Hypatia.)
I'm running out of time and have to go to work so I will toss out a couple other things in passing: in addition to being demonstrably more evil in imperative prescriptions of violence, the Quran is more evil in its explicit misogyny. I don't have time to dig up the exact surah, but I recall one that gives men an explicit pass on beating their wives. The New Testament treats women as second class citizens, mostly telling them to sit down and shut up, but it never goes as far as saying you can and should beat them up.
Lastly, the Quran is demonstrably more evil in that it has encouraged a culture of child rape since many Muslims still see Muhammad's having a nine year-old wife as not just acceptable, but an example of holiness since everything he ever did is supposed to be holy. So yeah, tell it to all the raped little girls that Islam isn't more evil.
... and predictably some groupthinker mods me 'offtopic' which I would concede to the circumstances of the article if it weren't for the fact that the original posts that started this tangent are *not* being modded offtopic. So of course the only thing off topic is the truth that the green left agenda was what really got people killed during Katrina due to deliberate actions in court. Quick! It doesn't fit the narrative! Suppress the shit out of those facts!
And what of the environmental groups like the Sierra Club who lobbied against renovation/expansion of flood control projects? Do you even know about that? Who's holding them accountable? Where's the "Sierra Club = Hitler" protests and "Sierra Club doesn't care about black people" slogans? Oh, right, leftist groups and agendas get a pass, no blood on their hands when they spent time and money doing whatever they could to prevent infrastructure improvements that could have saved lives. It's all Bush's fault!
That was over half a century ago, and it's funny that while you give the SK troops a pass for a war that ended half a decade before, you neglect to consider that the Chinese were coming fresh off a brutal civil war that only ostensibly "cooled down" some months earlier.
Regardless, it would be absurd to judge the modern PLA on the performance of its first generation who are all retired or dead.
The Chinese have invaded Taiwan several times. Koxinga did it successfully with a relatively small force in 1661, and Chiang Kai Shek did it again in 1949 (and yes, that was an invasion, since the islanders didn't want him there and his forces proceeded to initiate a political persecution rivaling the mainland's in viciousness if not scale that lasted generations). The reasons the communists couldn't immediately invade Taiwan were many, though primarily it was because they first had to consolidate their power on the mainland vs. remaining resistance pockets and they had to rebuild a navy since the KMT had taken as much of it as they could (which they used to harass the nascent PLA navy and merchant marine as much as possible, retarding immediate growth). By the time the communists were ready, geopolitics had shifted such that the US was ready to support Chiang and the KMT for the foreseeable future.
Today the PRC has the capacity to invade Taiwan absolutely, but they don't want to risk war with the US to do it, especially since they've figured out they can just buy people like Ma Ying Jeou to secretly dismantle ROC sovereignty in closed-door meetings. Reunification lies down that road, but it will be on the PRC's terms, by and large.
And you think the Russian Federation would just shrug its shoulders? They and virtually every other nation that borders China, except maybe India, would be wholly complicit in land-based resupply.
You're apparently oblivious to even your own context. You post was a statement of disbelief about the colonists' potential tolerance for corporations, using the Boston Tea Party as an example. This would only make sense if their motivation was significantly based on a distaste for the corporate entity as a (somewhat) private enterprise, and that is not bourne out by contemporary writings that lay the blame entirely at the feet of the Crown, where the Crown Company purveying tea was simply an agent of the real object of their animadversion. Your (false) connotation is that the company was a target of major significance in itself in a dimension inclusive of its (limited) private aspect. That would be revisionist. The whole point is that your analogy's illustration is not parallel.
It's like context doesn't exist to you. The colonists were concerned entirely with the power of the Crown/Parliament to use taxes and tariffs to manipulate and exploit demand for commodities regardless of the detriment to colonial society and without any political accountability or representation. The Crown Companies that profited from the arrangement were merely acting within the framework created by the government. Without the government manipulation, they would have had to compete with other potentially cheaper sources of commodities and the government would have been able to collect less in taxes and duties.
The Boston Tea Party was a political statement, not against merchants, but against unaccountable government regulations that hurt the interests of the governed. Your effort at revisionism is an affront to history.
To do what? The pay version is for, as I understand it, trend analytics. What does that have to do with being a feed reader and replacing Reader/iGoogle?
Considering how shitty their automated transcripts in GoogleVoice are, they didn't run it long enough.
But yeah, Google 411 was awesome, I used it frequently. There is a Bing 411 (believe it or not) which works similarly, though I haven't used it much and couldn't say whether it still exists.
I've been using netvibes.com since the announcement of the 'retirement' of iGoogle. It does most of what iGoogle did as well or better. It's funny ever since the Reader 'retirement' was announced netvibes has frequently put up a message apologizing for slowness because of having to adjust to a huge influx of new users. I bet they're super happy that Reader is dead.
Essentially. They just have bookmarks/favorites and visit sites every day/hour using precious time/bandwidth because they don't know what a 'feed' is.
Granted I didn't really use RSS much either until iGoogle (another killed service, hooray) because I wanted an interface that was customizable and dense. I have since moved to netvibes because it's as good or better than iGoogle (and 100x better than Reader) at tons of dense feeds visible at once.
Really I don't know why reader is being lamented so much. It had a stupid, wasteful interface and wasn't very customizable. I've tried a couple times to make something useful of it but it's always been inferior.
With an attitude like that, I hope you enjoy your next stay in the hospital, jail, or morgue. Whoever initiates violence may find that they can't handle the escalation.
Wow, some magazine's subjective opinion. I'm so impressed, especially considering her official role might be roughly translated (in terms of precedence) as Deputy Secretary of State. That's so much more important than her contemporary, Angela Merkel, eh? In the *most* charitable estimate she would have been #10 in chain of command, still below and outside the politburo's standing committee, as I already highlighted, and that's the most powerful woman in China since Cixi? What does this illustrate again?
Mod parent up for contrary evidence. xevioso is making all sorts of claims based on flawed, agenda-driven methodologies that cherry pick results and ignore contrary evidence. Such is not science, and the whole episode will some day pass into the garbage heap of history.
And why are people so pathetic that they can't see all of this for the show that it is? Why don't we ban mainstream movies if people are so bad at understanding the difference between fantasy and reality? Few people I've ever seen think their life is going to be like a Hollywood movie, why is it reasonable to believe that they are going to think their life is going to be like a Brazzers movie?
I've been a voracious porn consumer since puberty, and I'm happily over five years married (to a woman who not only has no problem with porn but enjoys it herself from time to time) with no illusions that my wife is supposed to be like a pornstar. Neither of us, for all our long exposure, have any particular problem with treating people like objects or what-have-you. I know an anecdote isn't data, but there's no data from the other side either. The problems that society has had with gender dynamics, if that's what you want to call it, predate porn and will continue in some form regardless until we can put aside gender-based antagonism (including feminism) and start cooperating as people.
Understanding is most certainly not going to come from patronizing BOTH sexes as intellectually and emotionally incompetent to understand their own reality vs. fantasy as adults. Whatever problems people might have are simply their responsibility to work through as matters of personal growth.
Yeah, never mind the forced abortions or the trafficking in girls as sex slaves that has been brought on in part by the increasing gender imbalance in a society that prefers males and where most women can only have one child. (In case I have to spell it out, those girls who aren't killed in the womb are just as frequently abandoned and as orphans end up being abused and trafficked.)
Also, the highest echelons of Chinese politics and business are virtually untouched by women. The standing committee has never had a woman on it. Women are given token middle management positions, but there is a hell of a glass ceiling in China.
Yeah, it's especially funny considering that China has some of the highest cancer rates in the world, and rather than address the problem they've spent years hiding 'cancer villages' from the world and the villagers themselves (wherever possible, and jail those who raise concerns). But pay no attention to the elephant of state-sponsored pollution and the abuse of state power to suppress backlash, check out this awesome scapegoat we arbitrarily dug up! It causes cancer like 0.0001% more than usual! Booooo gweilos, amirite?!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we need to make state genocide as easy as possible. Just imagine what a terrible world we'd be in if all the millions of victims of Hitler or Stalin or Mao could have fought back? Why, there might not be any totalitarian police states at all! Horrifying!
I'm an atheist, so I'm not going to defend Christians' cognitive dissonance. Suffice to say, if you start arguing about the evils of Christianity based on the Old Testament, they'll try to disown it, usually ignorant of the fact that such abandonment of Old Testament doctrine was ruled heretical by the early church and people like Marcion of Sinope were excommunicated for it by the proto-orthodoxy.
That said, it is best to attack Christianity at its heart, which is the teachings of Christ and his apostles. Besides which, the passage I already cited in Romans is also one that establishes a divine command to hate gay people, so a Christian who knows their Bible (a rarity, actually) doesn't need the Old Testament to be a retrogressive, benighted bigot.
You're assuming that he's basing it on the "current political situation" and not the substance of relative defining texts. Islam is demonstrably more evil because the Quran contains imperatives for violence like "take them and kill them [infidels] wherever ye find them" in surah 4:89 among many. The New Testament (which supersedes the Old thus avoiding all the violent prescriptions therein according to many Christians, despite that the New Testament itself is contradictory on whether it does or doesn't supersede) at its most violent stops short of commanding believers to kill. There are times such as in Romans 1:32 where sinners are called out as 'worthy of death' but it doesn't command believers to kill them. (Though things like that were nonetheless used to justify killings, such as the mob murder of Hypatia.)
I'm running out of time and have to go to work so I will toss out a couple other things in passing: in addition to being demonstrably more evil in imperative prescriptions of violence, the Quran is more evil in its explicit misogyny. I don't have time to dig up the exact surah, but I recall one that gives men an explicit pass on beating their wives. The New Testament treats women as second class citizens, mostly telling them to sit down and shut up, but it never goes as far as saying you can and should beat them up.
Lastly, the Quran is demonstrably more evil in that it has encouraged a culture of child rape since many Muslims still see Muhammad's having a nine year-old wife as not just acceptable, but an example of holiness since everything he ever did is supposed to be holy. So yeah, tell it to all the raped little girls that Islam isn't more evil.
Disclaimer: I am an atheist.
... and predictably some groupthinker mods me 'offtopic' which I would concede to the circumstances of the article if it weren't for the fact that the original posts that started this tangent are *not* being modded offtopic. So of course the only thing off topic is the truth that the green left agenda was what really got people killed during Katrina due to deliberate actions in court. Quick! It doesn't fit the narrative! Suppress the shit out of those facts!
And what of the environmental groups like the Sierra Club who lobbied against renovation/expansion of flood control projects? Do you even know about that? Who's holding them accountable? Where's the "Sierra Club = Hitler" protests and "Sierra Club doesn't care about black people" slogans? Oh, right, leftist groups and agendas get a pass, no blood on their hands when they spent time and money doing whatever they could to prevent infrastructure improvements that could have saved lives. It's all Bush's fault!
That was over half a century ago, and it's funny that while you give the SK troops a pass for a war that ended half a decade before, you neglect to consider that the Chinese were coming fresh off a brutal civil war that only ostensibly "cooled down" some months earlier.
Regardless, it would be absurd to judge the modern PLA on the performance of its first generation who are all retired or dead.
The Chinese have invaded Taiwan several times. Koxinga did it successfully with a relatively small force in 1661, and Chiang Kai Shek did it again in 1949 (and yes, that was an invasion, since the islanders didn't want him there and his forces proceeded to initiate a political persecution rivaling the mainland's in viciousness if not scale that lasted generations). The reasons the communists couldn't immediately invade Taiwan were many, though primarily it was because they first had to consolidate their power on the mainland vs. remaining resistance pockets and they had to rebuild a navy since the KMT had taken as much of it as they could (which they used to harass the nascent PLA navy and merchant marine as much as possible, retarding immediate growth). By the time the communists were ready, geopolitics had shifted such that the US was ready to support Chiang and the KMT for the foreseeable future.
Today the PRC has the capacity to invade Taiwan absolutely, but they don't want to risk war with the US to do it, especially since they've figured out they can just buy people like Ma Ying Jeou to secretly dismantle ROC sovereignty in closed-door meetings. Reunification lies down that road, but it will be on the PRC's terms, by and large.
And you think the Russian Federation would just shrug its shoulders? They and virtually every other nation that borders China, except maybe India, would be wholly complicit in land-based resupply.
With apologies to George Carlin, why is selling legal, and fucking is legal, but selling fucking is illegal?
You're apparently oblivious to even your own context. You post was a statement of disbelief about the colonists' potential tolerance for corporations, using the Boston Tea Party as an example. This would only make sense if their motivation was significantly based on a distaste for the corporate entity as a (somewhat) private enterprise, and that is not bourne out by contemporary writings that lay the blame entirely at the feet of the Crown, where the Crown Company purveying tea was simply an agent of the real object of their animadversion. Your (false) connotation is that the company was a target of major significance in itself in a dimension inclusive of its (limited) private aspect. That would be revisionist. The whole point is that your analogy's illustration is not parallel.
Ruth Ginsburg is not a "he". Though you might not know it from looking at her.
It's like context doesn't exist to you. The colonists were concerned entirely with the power of the Crown/Parliament to use taxes and tariffs to manipulate and exploit demand for commodities regardless of the detriment to colonial society and without any political accountability or representation. The Crown Companies that profited from the arrangement were merely acting within the framework created by the government. Without the government manipulation, they would have had to compete with other potentially cheaper sources of commodities and the government would have been able to collect less in taxes and duties.
The Boston Tea Party was a political statement, not against merchants, but against unaccountable government regulations that hurt the interests of the governed. Your effort at revisionism is an affront to history.
To do what? The pay version is for, as I understand it, trend analytics. What does that have to do with being a feed reader and replacing Reader/iGoogle?
Considering how shitty their automated transcripts in GoogleVoice are, they didn't run it long enough.
But yeah, Google 411 was awesome, I used it frequently. There is a Bing 411 (believe it or not) which works similarly, though I haven't used it much and couldn't say whether it still exists.
I've been using netvibes.com since the announcement of the 'retirement' of iGoogle. It does most of what iGoogle did as well or better. It's funny ever since the Reader 'retirement' was announced netvibes has frequently put up a message apologizing for slowness because of having to adjust to a huge influx of new users. I bet they're super happy that Reader is dead.
Essentially. They just have bookmarks/favorites and visit sites every day/hour using precious time/bandwidth because they don't know what a 'feed' is.
Granted I didn't really use RSS much either until iGoogle (another killed service, hooray) because I wanted an interface that was customizable and dense. I have since moved to netvibes because it's as good or better than iGoogle (and 100x better than Reader) at tons of dense feeds visible at once.
Really I don't know why reader is being lamented so much. It had a stupid, wasteful interface and wasn't very customizable. I've tried a couple times to make something useful of it but it's always been inferior.
With an attitude like that, I hope you enjoy your next stay in the hospital, jail, or morgue. Whoever initiates violence may find that they can't handle the escalation.
It's just 5 Point, not 5 "Points" ... you're as bad as these people
...and stay out of Seattle you ingrate.
Signed,
Emmett Watson, Stan Boreson, and the cast of Almost Live!
Anything that can be transmitted can be captured and emulated.
Wow, some magazine's subjective opinion. I'm so impressed, especially considering her official role might be roughly translated (in terms of precedence) as Deputy Secretary of State. That's so much more important than her contemporary, Angela Merkel, eh? In the *most* charitable estimate she would have been #10 in chain of command, still below and outside the politburo's standing committee, as I already highlighted, and that's the most powerful woman in China since Cixi? What does this illustrate again?
Mod parent up for contrary evidence. xevioso is making all sorts of claims based on flawed, agenda-driven methodologies that cherry pick results and ignore contrary evidence. Such is not science, and the whole episode will some day pass into the garbage heap of history.
And why are people so pathetic that they can't see all of this for the show that it is? Why don't we ban mainstream movies if people are so bad at understanding the difference between fantasy and reality? Few people I've ever seen think their life is going to be like a Hollywood movie, why is it reasonable to believe that they are going to think their life is going to be like a Brazzers movie?
I've been a voracious porn consumer since puberty, and I'm happily over five years married (to a woman who not only has no problem with porn but enjoys it herself from time to time) with no illusions that my wife is supposed to be like a pornstar. Neither of us, for all our long exposure, have any particular problem with treating people like objects or what-have-you. I know an anecdote isn't data, but there's no data from the other side either. The problems that society has had with gender dynamics, if that's what you want to call it, predate porn and will continue in some form regardless until we can put aside gender-based antagonism (including feminism) and start cooperating as people.
Understanding is most certainly not going to come from patronizing BOTH sexes as intellectually and emotionally incompetent to understand their own reality vs. fantasy as adults. Whatever problems people might have are simply their responsibility to work through as matters of personal growth.
Yeah, never mind the forced abortions or the trafficking in girls as sex slaves that has been brought on in part by the increasing gender imbalance in a society that prefers males and where most women can only have one child. (In case I have to spell it out, those girls who aren't killed in the womb are just as frequently abandoned and as orphans end up being abused and trafficked.)
Also, the highest echelons of Chinese politics and business are virtually untouched by women. The standing committee has never had a woman on it. Women are given token middle management positions, but there is a hell of a glass ceiling in China.
Actually, anybody can kill any animal that they own, so long as it is done in a humane way (e.g. the animal isn't tortured). Animals are property.
Yeah, it's especially funny considering that China has some of the highest cancer rates in the world, and rather than address the problem they've spent years hiding 'cancer villages' from the world and the villagers themselves (wherever possible, and jail those who raise concerns). But pay no attention to the elephant of state-sponsored pollution and the abuse of state power to suppress backlash, check out this awesome scapegoat we arbitrarily dug up! It causes cancer like 0.0001% more than usual! Booooo gweilos, amirite?!