Sorry, no. Our survival instincts, as well as the survival instincts of almost every animal, are what are telling us to stay still. In nature, predators only take down a meal. Wait for them to take the kill and get comfortable that they're not about to fight off other predators or scavengers, then let them get interested in their meal. Once they're eating, they won't take the time to get up when you start running the hell away.
It turns out that instincts built for animals in the forest don't actually give the right answers for psychopaths with rifles. Our instincts aren't missing; they're firing quite uniformly. That's why everyone did the same thing. In the forest, it would have been exactly the right thing to do.
Yeah, that's a great idea if you don't mind losing a few children. Unfortunately, in cases like the VA Tech shooting and the bell tower shooting, and in fact in almost all serial killer shootings, these people plan these things, and give themselves (generally) either wide open spaces or well defended places with only a single route of entry. It's not as easy as it sounds to charge a dude with an assault rifle, and it doesn't exactly sound easy in the first place.
Besides, in this specific case we're talking about little kids. You think a swarm of eleven year olds can stop an adult willing to hurt them even if they don't have a gun?
In my school, it happened so often at one point (read: 20+ days out of every month) that they started covering up smoke alarms to stop it.
Any principal who would choose to turn a blind eye to the fire prevention systems instead of to just let the bad kids smoke in the alley behind the school is far too stupid to be entrusted with the lives of children. Please inform the local school superintendant. That's a serious problem. Also, if that school is in San Diego, please email me.
You propose to run the most important yet most abstract functions of giant nations with unwritten rules? If one tried that with even a tennis tournament, there would be unending strife and turmoil and likely bloodshed.
Unwritten rules only work for a mono-culture. Clear written rules allow cultures to mingle without either destroying each other or being assimilated Borg-style.
Resistance is futile. Thirty-love.
But seriously, I've tried writing that kind of thing you just wrote at least a dozen times. You've now outclassed every single one I wrote. Bravo.
If you aren't intelligent enough to make sense of a jumble of information by identifying meaning, and then sorting and tagging it up as it occurs, a computer can't do that for you.
Less than twenty years ago, they said that about finding things on the Web, too. Then you saw the AliWeb project, then Lycos and InfoSeek, AltaVista and so forth.
Don't confuse "we don't know how yet" with "it can't be done." Somoeone's going to make billions figuring out how.
Why do you believe that a contractor is required to set up a web camera with a hard drive? Hell, my current cell phone would do the job if its storage was a bit larger. These are going to be integrated devices. Setting them up is going to be a question of putting in batteries and pressing the "on" button (which, in fact, is very close to what it is right now, if you just remove the rest of the cell phone interface.)
What this specifically means is that the average contractor would not know how to set it up, and the average consumer would not know how to manage it, so it doesn't get used.
Uh. The average joe is not in the slightest afraid of webcams. I use one to talk to my 70-year-old aunt on a daily basis, and she set it up without help from anyone else (probably because all she had to do was plug the wire into the front of the machine and wait.)
Also, what do microkernels and 64-bit architectures have to do with this?
This puts the burden of proof onto the defendant: they have to explain why they turned off the life recorder.
Under our current legal system, the absence of evidence is not itself evidence. Until the laws change, no, in fact, they don't have to explain why they turned the recorder off, and there's nothing anyone can do to compel them. Innocent until proven guilty may be a human tendency, but the American legal system is expressly designed to forbid that, as are the rules by which a judge lives.
Unlike on Law and Order, a judge will not ignore a jury verdict in contrast with the law (also, that's not how jury nullification works.)
Actually, it's kind of a rite of passage for hard science fiction authors to do this. Egan has done it. So have Niven, Pournelle, Aasimov, Clarke, Pohl, Polk, Dick and so on. Niven did it on stage in front of some science fiction con (he talks about it in one of the prefaces to one of his early short story books, Patchwork Man era.)
It's not arrogance. It's good old fashioned fun. It's kind of like when I make predictions about the future of the console industry. I know that when I get them right, it's mostly luck, but it's fun to see just how close you can get.
Vannevar Bush had a pretty clear view of today from the 1940s. He saw the Net and the Web coming, right down to their commercial and their home-personal usages.
The first time you blow a tire in the desert, your opinion about cell phones will crystallize quickly. Even if annoying, it is a significant and important step to have constant pervasive communication. (We just need to move to expected-no-contact.)
When looking at those numbers, please remember that there are ten times as many gamers today as there were in the Metroid era. Also, if you sum Shigeru's games, he outsells Bungie single-handedly, all the way back to marathon.
It may also be instructive to know that those console statistics sites like vgcharts and vgchartz are estimate numbers. Whereas in these two particular cases they're pretty accurate, please be aware that their numbers are frequently extremely different than the numbers held by the publishers of those games. For example, take a look at the statistics for Spongebob games. I am contractually obligated not to give correct numbers, but I can tell you those American numbers are off by more than 100%, and that sales for those five games in Japan were not zero.
Those sites get their numbers by scumming a local retailer and multiplying. There are bizarre errors in their data. I know, there really aren't other data sources to go by, and those sites are fine for discussion, but a word of advice: don't use their numbers if the numbers matter. Find sales rates on your own.
No! We don't hate you! This is yet another falseness that your media love spreading.
I don't read or watch the local media. It's the impression I get from what's said to me on the internet by Europeans. Granted, I suppose it's a biassed sample; only the people with an axe to grind would bother saying something in the first place.
Your description is heartbreaking, you convey a terrible feeling of loss and despair.
Welcome to America.
However, in spite of everything you say, you're in a far, far better position than were, for example, the citizens of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact before that empire fell.
Yeah, but look. If you get an Ethiopian and a Greek in a room, prevent cannibalism with humorous clear plastic walls and cut off both their food supply, who do you think is gonna starve first? The Greek with the higher body food value, or the Ethiopian who's used to thin times?
We're American. The middle aged people here still remember actual freedom. We have no idea how to deal with a corrupt government. I mean, look, all things equal Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are seriously the least threatening secret prisons in the history of man. There are publically acknowledged prisons all throughout Europe that make our black sites look like country clubs. You ever seen the inside of a portugese prison? They're fucking scary.
And yet, we can't even clean up a half dozen Guantanamæ that aren't even protected by extant territorial law, because we just don't know how. We've never had corruption like this: we're young and we've been lucky.
You have freedom of expression, freedom to create organizations and make campaigns for change, freedom to print leaflets and magazines, freedom to own your own resources and spend them on campaigns, and so on and on and on.
None of those things matter if the vote is rigged.
If the people in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact could change their systems, so can you!
Neither of those happened internally. Both of those required full scale international war. Are you really sure those are comparisons you're prepared to make? In each of those cases you were talking about financially desperate industrial nations dealing with crippling external debt and a poor social opinion of generationally recent war.
You do not want to take on the United States. The reason we haven't taken Iraq yet is because we aren't really dedicated. China and the Soviet Union still prevent very real threats to us, but we could steamroll Europe in a way that'd make the Nazis look languid, and we already have a lot of the hardware in position.
The very, very last thing you want to do is suggest that we undergo revolution due to external war. We have a Bush in office. He'd take you seriously.
You're saying that a significant proportion of your population are heartbroken and feel cheated.
Yep.
This sounds like they'll want change.
Oh yeah.
It sounds like change is possible.
Sorry, you lost me. I've been saying things like "We don't know what to do" and "we feel impotent" and "we don't vote anymore" and "there's nothing we can do." Are you saying you really want the post-war answer?
Of course you'll have to make the changes yourselves.
Yeah, like the Warsaw Pact, which was put into place ten years after the end of WW2 by the rising Soviet Bloc to counter what it thought was the threat of invasion by NATO, which was the direct progenitor of the Cold War. Because, y'see, the Warsaw Pact was between Poland and Germany, but it was essentially forced through the pipes by Russia and France, because of their interest in preventing NATO from becoming a new
But the frustration that made me lash out was not about the US lacking knowledge about capitals, obviously. It was frustration about the US lacking knowledge about human reactions, motivations and backgrounds in the places where the US intervenes.
Mister Peabody, the WABAC machine, if you will.
Seriously though, estonia? Raise your hand if you know where that is.
Spoken like a true American.
It may be that that's what caused it, but I wouldn't go as far as to call that obvious.
It was frustration with the US counteracting its own goals by ignoring readily available information and elementary game theory.
With all due respect, I think you misunderstand. We've been trying, hard. We really do understand that everyone hates us. It's just that there's really nothing we can do about it. We have a warmongering buffoon as a president. We can see the game theory. That's why our generals refused one by one to go to war, why nobody's take the war czar position, et cetera. It took Bush seven tries to find a general who'd enter Iraq in the first place. He just wouldn't listen.
The problem is simple: things were working well under Clinton, we were on the way to repair, then the voting college system caused an enormous public divide over who the president should be, and we got stuck arguin with one another about what the right thing was to do. By the time the second election came around, there were all those "voting irregularities." We're heartbroken. We feel cheated. We feel impotent. There's nothing we can do. It's not a democracy anymore. Our leader hasn't been elected in almost eight years, we're stuck in a war that nobody over here wants, our jackass in chief refuses to accept defeat, and we're all just stunned.
We're going xenophobic again because it's too hard to face who we're becoming, against our will. It's like having a bad king. I'm tearing up just talking about it. You might be surprised to find out just how much of America feels this way. We've lost faith in our system, and our system is just failing. It's awful. We know we've become monsters. We just can't stop it.
There's talk of a Cheney impeachment underway. But, it's too late. Seven years of this. It's going to be decades before anyone trusts us again. Jesus, Clinton was just getting out from under the fucking 'Nam shadow. We're monsters again, and it doesn't matter how much immensely more good we do than bad. You know why Darfur's still going on? Because we're occupied elsewhere, and nobody ever goes but us.
America does everything it can. We give away more money than anyone else. We give away food. We send engineers. We build infrastructure. We forgive debts. When it's nessecary, we send in the troops. And, y'know what? If we had gone into Iraq before 9/11, we'd be the liberators and the heroes and the saviors of thousands and thousands of Iraqis a year. Remember Kuwait? Hell, remember Iraq last time, when it was Iran instead of Saddam?
Except the way we went in, our Commander in Creep tried to play the Iraq war off as related to Osama, when we all know it wasn't. If he'd just been honest about it from the start, this whole thing would have gone very differently. "We're here to stop Saddam from experimenting on you with chemical weapons." "We're here to keep Saddam's son, one of the most prolific non-war murderers in history, from killing people in the street for pissing him off anymore." "We're here to feed the country being starved by the guy whose palace rivals other nation-starving dictators (yummy middle eastern Brunei) and whose Qu'ran was written in human blood." (Really. Look it up.)
We're sick to our stomachs because the war is wrong and needs to end, but it also needed to happen to save way more lives than were lost, and we don't really know how to resolve that the thing we did was right
A big one that encourages open communication so that people don't have to find these things out in person. Honestly, it's better that way; there's someone in my area to whom I would have spoken if she hadn't mentioned a particular opinion with which I disagree strongly (at the level that some people feel about abortion or gay marriage or whatever.) It would have been very disappointing and probably quite uncomfortable to find that out a ways in.
I've had a little over 12,000 people take the test, and I wrote a little scraper after pulling the entire keyword list. Lo and behold, you see some words like "crip" and "piru" show up. It's unfortunate, but at an open site, the crazies get to play too.
Nonsense. You've replied to everything I've said, whether it's to you or not. I find myself wondering how many weeks it's going to be until you stop haunting me. I openly decline to read what you wrote, in the hopes that you'll get it through your head why I stopped replying to you. Stop wasting my time.
I haven't seen a lot of people who can say that someone beat them to the punch for what you wanted to say, thank them for being eloquent, then turn around and claim that everyone else is trying to be civil, when the person you're thanking used the words "I now officially think that you're batshit fucking crazy, and just forgot to take your meds" in the very post you're referring to.
It is clear to me that you and I have a very, very different idea of what being civil is.
where is the reference to back up your position?
And from that, I also know that you're not actually reading what I wrote. Good day. I really don't care what nasty comments you have to make about getting the last word; you can reply to this with any further perspicuous nonsense you like. You don't seem embattled by fact or information here. I see no reason the future should be any different.
A word of advice: don't assume that someone isn't citing things just because the person you're listening to says they aren't. Yes, I saw him claim I only cited two things, just like you did. If you take the time to check the discussion tree, you'll find that isn't true.
It's quite common for people to miss links in long discussions when they aren't actually reading. Given that you aren't, I suggest you look at the page source, move the lead cursor to the beginning of something I say, and search for "<a". It's quite likely you'll find my (currently) eleven citations more quickly that way.
I'm sure you'll insist I'm not re-citing them again because they don't exist. I also really don't care if that's what you believe. The reason I'm not re-citing them again is because people like you who find it more convenient to believe what someone else says instead of to just look for references yourself have also asked me to repeat myself, over and over.
I indulged them half a dozen times, and now I can't make helpful responses to people asking for more information in a different thread.
I'd forgotten why as a policy I don't reply to posts like these. Thank you for reminding me. All I've done is make you angry; if there was merit to what I said it was lost, and if there wasn't it shouldn't have been said at all. It was a waste of your time, a waste of my time, and it cost me the ability to have pleasant, productive conversations with other people.
Yes, I gather your idea of me. I really also don't care. I won't be responding anymore, because until SlashDot gets rid of its asinine post rate filter, the price is just too high.
Seriously though, estonia? Raise your hand if you know where that is.
Spoken like a true American.
I have found an extremely high correlation between people who think Americans don't have a grasp of geography and people who don't know a damned thing about geography outside their own continent.
So, I'd like to ask you a question. Lately I've been thinking about making a quick geography quiz, so that when someone says something like this, I could ask them to take it. I haven't made that quiz; you're safe. Still, I write video games for a living, so I know how to make such a thing fun, and I certainly wouldn't make it easy. Furthermore, I would go to my best effort to make sure it wasn't biassed towards one or another continent to prevent after-the-fail crying of unfairness, though I'm sure whichever continent scored most poorly would insist I'd failed.
My question to you is this. Please answer it honestly, because I'm going to ask several people in similar situations to yours, and use that to determine whether to spend the time making the test.
If someone gave you that test after you said something like "omg no American can find China on a map with both hands and a tutor," and the test was written in such a way that you knew, up front, that you could not hide the score you received if you took it, would you take it?
By the way, if you say yes, I'll have that test ready for you before this story's off the front page, so please consider your answer carefully.
The reason I ask: Indeed, I did make one such test on (ahem) some dating site I'm on, and I took the time to write down scores according to what country they came from (it's a dating site, so it's easy to tell what city they're in.)
I see a bigger variance between different parts of the US than I see between the US and various other first world nations (oddly, Spain is doing very poorly, but then I only have a few Spanish samples, so it's probably just because of the poor data set.) Unsurprisingly, Americans do better at their own continent. So do Europeans. So do Asians. I only have one response from Africa, but she scored excellently - far above the average for any nation in the list, though I expect that's more about the person than anything.
What I do see is a clear correlation between score and age. However, I see something else. Almost every phobe - xenophobe, homophobe, oligophobe, theophobe, whatever - scores significantly poorer than the average. If the word Aryan is in the nick and isn't a first name, the average score is a hair over 30% lower. If the word Nazi is there, nearly 38%. KKK, 27%. Gang members are around 20-25% down, depending as far as I can tell primarily on the age at which they entered the gang.
People who say things like "dumb Americans" and "dumb Europeans," on the other hand, have an average score nearly 43% lower than the norm. Indeed, it appears that xenophobes are, at least at this dating site in my small sample, dumber than any other branch of humanity. (There seems to be an exception with "dumb Canadians," where people who say that are actually smarter than the average, but none of them are being serious; I think it's just that smart people who like to make hate jokes know Canada's essentially the safest possible target. Still, that's guesswork, and it might be a legitimate exception.)
So, really. If I make this test for you, and ask you to take it, will you, without cheating? Nobody would be able to compare you to Americans, since you'd be the first person to take the test, so there would be no embarrassment for a poor score (like I said, it wouldn't be easy.) However, since you seem to be so certain that all us Yanks are clueless buffoons, you would have the ability to look back in a month, and find out whether your stereotype actually held merit.
He said "raise your hand if you know where that is" because Estonia is three steps behind the ass
Please stop saying things like "massive amounts of blah blah." Either cite it or it doesn't exist.
No, I am not going to cite every climate paper that exists.
One appropriate one would do. One which you don't get confused in citing a single paragraph of the exerpt and ignore the rest of what it says. Also, it'd be nice if you'd defend the claims you're being asked to defend, instead of the ones you feel comfortable hiding behind.
And before you waste your time ranting, please remember that what I was talking about was the Sun's magnetic field, not its luminosity. The magnetic field determines the solar wind, which in turn governs cloud cover through the suppression of cosmic rays. Cloud cover comes into solar heating a hell of a long time beore greenhouse gasses do.
Please stop arguing with half-assed guesses about what I meant. Not every impact the sun has on our temperature is about its brightness.
You say that as if it's a different pattern from every other post you've made.
I'll repeat myself: I'm not answering any more of your questions until you learn to answer mine. I have no intent of humoring you in your tirade of obviously false nonsense, under the mechanism of "I'm not wrong if I haven't admitted it."
I'm pleased as punch to see that you haven't cited a single data source.
You begin every one of your personal attacks with this blatantly false claim. I repeatedly cite data. You need to learn to read, and to argue without personal attack.
Your lack of knowledge about basic absorption physics and CO2 data (CO2 levels are way below planetary norms - hah!)
Learn to read - even your own scare sites disagree with you. There's a big difference between fact and what you expect. During the holocene, CO2 levels on Earth were more than ten times higher than today. You're scared of 370? The Mesozoic had >2,000. Indeed, that May 17 issue of Nature (weren't you who kept bringing it up?) says things like
Results from the middle Miocene, a warm period about 10 million years ago, failed to show high CO2 levels. The researchers suggest that the warming may have occurred due to "episodic methane outbursts."
There has been a lot of hand wringing over increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. The increase is relatively small when compared to historic levels. Preindustrial concentrations were about 280 parts per million. Currently concentrations are about 370 ppm. A study in the May 17 issue of Nature shows that CO2 levels were much higher in the past.
indicates you're a basic, clueless troll. Shrug.
I've never seen anyone say that when they themselves were doing something other than desperately scraping to uphold a completely untenable position. Doesn't it embarrass you to act this way, or do you just not have the good sense to realize that nobody is fooled?
Fortunately, you're in the minority now, and won't be able to significantly mess up my planet for me.
Yes, I remember when someone said that exact same sentence to me about Global Cooling. To use your own rhetoric, fortunately you're not a policy maker, and fortunately the policy wonks are starting to look past people like you, and to people who use actual numbers.
Oh right, I forgot, you're pretending I didn't cite evidence. And forgetting that all you've cited is Wikipedia, written by people like you. I tire of you, hypocrite. Find someone else to troll. I get it, you're going to post after everything I say, telling the same lies and making the same tired insults.
Slashdot Mirror
Budget cuts took the Pittsburgh city schools' cameras at the playground offline. Stupidity isn't immortal; you just have to fight fire with fire.
It turns out that instincts built for animals in the forest don't actually give the right answers for psychopaths with rifles. Our instincts aren't missing; they're firing quite uniformly. That's why everyone did the same thing. In the forest, it would have been exactly the right thing to do.
Yeah, that's a great idea if you don't mind losing a few children. Unfortunately, in cases like the VA Tech shooting and the bell tower shooting, and in fact in almost all serial killer shootings, these people plan these things, and give themselves (generally) either wide open spaces or well defended places with only a single route of entry. It's not as easy as it sounds to charge a dude with an assault rifle, and it doesn't exactly sound easy in the first place.
Besides, in this specific case we're talking about little kids. You think a swarm of eleven year olds can stop an adult willing to hurt them even if they don't have a gun?
But seriously, I've tried writing that kind of thing you just wrote at least a dozen times. You've now outclassed every single one I wrote. Bravo.
Don't confuse "we don't know how yet" with "it can't be done." Somoeone's going to make billions figuring out how.
Also, what do microkernels and 64-bit architectures have to do with this?
It's important not to confuse "can't" with "don't have to." When's the last time you chose a card catalog over Google, or AAA maps over MapQuest?
Image editing, your taxes and the dishes.
Unlike on Law and Order, a judge will not ignore a jury verdict in contrast with the law (also, that's not how jury nullification works.)
Actually, it's kind of a rite of passage for hard science fiction authors to do this. Egan has done it. So have Niven, Pournelle, Aasimov, Clarke, Pohl, Polk, Dick and so on. Niven did it on stage in front of some science fiction con (he talks about it in one of the prefaces to one of his early short story books, Patchwork Man era.)
It's not arrogance. It's good old fashioned fun. It's kind of like when I make predictions about the future of the console industry. I know that when I get them right, it's mostly luck, but it's fun to see just how close you can get.
Try it some time. It's quite enjoyable.
Vannevar Bush had a pretty clear view of today from the 1940s. He saw the Net and the Web coming, right down to their commercial and their home-personal usages.
The first time you blow a tire in the desert, your opinion about cell phones will crystallize quickly. Even if annoying, it is a significant and important step to have constant pervasive communication. (We just need to move to expected-no-contact.)
When looking at those numbers, please remember that there are ten times as many gamers today as there were in the Metroid era. Also, if you sum Shigeru's games, he outsells Bungie single-handedly, all the way back to marathon.
It may also be instructive to know that those console statistics sites like vgcharts and vgchartz are estimate numbers. Whereas in these two particular cases they're pretty accurate, please be aware that their numbers are frequently extremely different than the numbers held by the publishers of those games. For example, take a look at the statistics for Spongebob games. I am contractually obligated not to give correct numbers, but I can tell you those American numbers are off by more than 100%, and that sales for those five games in Japan were not zero.
Those sites get their numbers by scumming a local retailer and multiplying. There are bizarre errors in their data. I know, there really aren't other data sources to go by, and those sites are fine for discussion, but a word of advice: don't use their numbers if the numbers matter. Find sales rates on your own.
I don't read or watch the local media. It's the impression I get from what's said to me on the internet by Europeans. Granted, I suppose it's a biassed sample; only the people with an axe to grind would bother saying something in the first place.
Welcome to America.
Yeah, but look. If you get an Ethiopian and a Greek in a room, prevent cannibalism with humorous clear plastic walls and cut off both their food supply, who do you think is gonna starve first? The Greek with the higher body food value, or the Ethiopian who's used to thin times?
We're American. The middle aged people here still remember actual freedom. We have no idea how to deal with a corrupt government. I mean, look, all things equal Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are seriously the least threatening secret prisons in the history of man. There are publically acknowledged prisons all throughout Europe that make our black sites look like country clubs. You ever seen the inside of a portugese prison? They're fucking scary.
And yet, we can't even clean up a half dozen Guantanamæ that aren't even protected by extant territorial law, because we just don't know how. We've never had corruption like this: we're young and we've been lucky.
None of those things matter if the vote is rigged.
Neither of those happened internally. Both of those required full scale international war. Are you really sure those are comparisons you're prepared to make? In each of those cases you were talking about financially desperate industrial nations dealing with crippling external debt and a poor social opinion of generationally recent war.
You do not want to take on the United States. The reason we haven't taken Iraq yet is because we aren't really dedicated. China and the Soviet Union still prevent very real threats to us, but we could steamroll Europe in a way that'd make the Nazis look languid, and we already have a lot of the hardware in position.
The very, very last thing you want to do is suggest that we undergo revolution due to external war. We have a Bush in office. He'd take you seriously.
Yep.
Oh yeah.
Sorry, you lost me. I've been saying things like "We don't know what to do" and "we feel impotent" and "we don't vote anymore" and "there's nothing we can do." Are you saying you really want the post-war answer?
Yeah, like the Warsaw Pact, which was put into place ten years after the end of WW2 by the rising Soviet Bloc to counter what it thought was the threat of invasion by NATO, which was the direct progenitor of the Cold War. Because, y'see, the Warsaw Pact was between Poland and Germany, but it was essentially forced through the pipes by Russia and France, because of their interest in preventing NATO from becoming a new
Mister Peabody, the WABAC machine, if you will.
It may be that that's what caused it, but I wouldn't go as far as to call that obvious.
With all due respect, I think you misunderstand. We've been trying, hard. We really do understand that everyone hates us. It's just that there's really nothing we can do about it. We have a warmongering buffoon as a president. We can see the game theory. That's why our generals refused one by one to go to war, why nobody's take the war czar position, et cetera. It took Bush seven tries to find a general who'd enter Iraq in the first place. He just wouldn't listen.
The problem is simple: things were working well under Clinton, we were on the way to repair, then the voting college system caused an enormous public divide over who the president should be, and we got stuck arguin with one another about what the right thing was to do. By the time the second election came around, there were all those "voting irregularities." We're heartbroken. We feel cheated. We feel impotent. There's nothing we can do. It's not a democracy anymore. Our leader hasn't been elected in almost eight years, we're stuck in a war that nobody over here wants, our jackass in chief refuses to accept defeat, and we're all just stunned.
We're going xenophobic again because it's too hard to face who we're becoming, against our will. It's like having a bad king. I'm tearing up just talking about it. You might be surprised to find out just how much of America feels this way. We've lost faith in our system, and our system is just failing. It's awful. We know we've become monsters. We just can't stop it.
There's talk of a Cheney impeachment underway. But, it's too late. Seven years of this. It's going to be decades before anyone trusts us again. Jesus, Clinton was just getting out from under the fucking 'Nam shadow. We're monsters again, and it doesn't matter how much immensely more good we do than bad. You know why Darfur's still going on? Because we're occupied elsewhere, and nobody ever goes but us.
America does everything it can. We give away more money than anyone else. We give away food. We send engineers. We build infrastructure. We forgive debts. When it's nessecary, we send in the troops. And, y'know what? If we had gone into Iraq before 9/11, we'd be the liberators and the heroes and the saviors of thousands and thousands of Iraqis a year. Remember Kuwait? Hell, remember Iraq last time, when it was Iran instead of Saddam?
Except the way we went in, our Commander in Creep tried to play the Iraq war off as related to Osama, when we all know it wasn't. If he'd just been honest about it from the start, this whole thing would have gone very differently. "We're here to stop Saddam from experimenting on you with chemical weapons." "We're here to keep Saddam's son, one of the most prolific non-war murderers in history, from killing people in the street for pissing him off anymore." "We're here to feed the country being starved by the guy whose palace rivals other nation-starving dictators (yummy middle eastern Brunei) and whose Qu'ran was written in human blood." (Really. Look it up.)
We're sick to our stomachs because the war is wrong and needs to end, but it also needed to happen to save way more lives than were lost, and we don't really know how to resolve that the thing we did was right
A big one that encourages open communication so that people don't have to find these things out in person. Honestly, it's better that way; there's someone in my area to whom I would have spoken if she hadn't mentioned a particular opinion with which I disagree strongly (at the level that some people feel about abortion or gay marriage or whatever.) It would have been very disappointing and probably quite uncomfortable to find that out a ways in.
I've had a little over 12,000 people take the test, and I wrote a little scraper after pulling the entire keyword list. Lo and behold, you see some words like "crip" and "piru" show up. It's unfortunate, but at an open site, the crazies get to play too.
It is clear to me that you and I have a very, very different idea of what being civil is.And from that, I also know that you're not actually reading what I wrote. Good day. I really don't care what nasty comments you have to make about getting the last word; you can reply to this with any further perspicuous nonsense you like. You don't seem embattled by fact or information here. I see no reason the future should be any different.
A word of advice: don't assume that someone isn't citing things just because the person you're listening to says they aren't. Yes, I saw him claim I only cited two things, just like you did. If you take the time to check the discussion tree, you'll find that isn't true.
It's quite common for people to miss links in long discussions when they aren't actually reading. Given that you aren't, I suggest you look at the page source, move the lead cursor to the beginning of something I say, and search for "<a". It's quite likely you'll find my (currently) eleven citations more quickly that way.
I'm sure you'll insist I'm not re-citing them again because they don't exist. I also really don't care if that's what you believe. The reason I'm not re-citing them again is because people like you who find it more convenient to believe what someone else says instead of to just look for references yourself have also asked me to repeat myself, over and over.
I indulged them half a dozen times, and now I can't make helpful responses to people asking for more information in a different thread.
I'd forgotten why as a policy I don't reply to posts like these. Thank you for reminding me. All I've done is make you angry; if there was merit to what I said it was lost, and if there wasn't it shouldn't have been said at all. It was a waste of your time, a waste of my time, and it cost me the ability to have pleasant, productive conversations with other people.
Yes, I gather your idea of me. I really also don't care. I won't be responding anymore, because until SlashDot gets rid of its asinine post rate filter, the price is just too high.
I have found an extremely high correlation between people who think Americans don't have a grasp of geography and people who don't know a damned thing about geography outside their own continent.
So, I'd like to ask you a question. Lately I've been thinking about making a quick geography quiz, so that when someone says something like this, I could ask them to take it. I haven't made that quiz; you're safe. Still, I write video games for a living, so I know how to make such a thing fun, and I certainly wouldn't make it easy. Furthermore, I would go to my best effort to make sure it wasn't biassed towards one or another continent to prevent after-the-fail crying of unfairness, though I'm sure whichever continent scored most poorly would insist I'd failed.
My question to you is this. Please answer it honestly, because I'm going to ask several people in similar situations to yours, and use that to determine whether to spend the time making the test.
If someone gave you that test after you said something like "omg no American can find China on a map with both hands and a tutor," and the test was written in such a way that you knew, up front, that you could not hide the score you received if you took it, would you take it?
By the way, if you say yes, I'll have that test ready for you before this story's off the front page, so please consider your answer carefully.
The reason I ask: Indeed, I did make one such test on (ahem) some dating site I'm on, and I took the time to write down scores according to what country they came from (it's a dating site, so it's easy to tell what city they're in.)
I see a bigger variance between different parts of the US than I see between the US and various other first world nations (oddly, Spain is doing very poorly, but then I only have a few Spanish samples, so it's probably just because of the poor data set.) Unsurprisingly, Americans do better at their own continent. So do Europeans. So do Asians. I only have one response from Africa, but she scored excellently - far above the average for any nation in the list, though I expect that's more about the person than anything.
What I do see is a clear correlation between score and age. However, I see something else. Almost every phobe - xenophobe, homophobe, oligophobe, theophobe, whatever - scores significantly poorer than the average. If the word Aryan is in the nick and isn't a first name, the average score is a hair over 30% lower. If the word Nazi is there, nearly 38%. KKK, 27%. Gang members are around 20-25% down, depending as far as I can tell primarily on the age at which they entered the gang.
People who say things like "dumb Americans" and "dumb Europeans," on the other hand, have an average score nearly 43% lower than the norm. Indeed, it appears that xenophobes are, at least at this dating site in my small sample, dumber than any other branch of humanity. (There seems to be an exception with "dumb Canadians," where people who say that are actually smarter than the average, but none of them are being serious; I think it's just that smart people who like to make hate jokes know Canada's essentially the safest possible target. Still, that's guesswork, and it might be a legitimate exception.)
So, really. If I make this test for you, and ask you to take it, will you, without cheating? Nobody would be able to compare you to Americans, since you'd be the first person to take the test, so there would be no embarrassment for a poor score (like I said, it wouldn't be easy.) However, since you seem to be so certain that all us Yanks are clueless buffoons, you would have the ability to look back in a month, and find out whether your stereotype actually held merit.
He said "raise your hand if you know where that is" because Estonia is three steps behind the ass
One appropriate one would do. One which you don't get confused in citing a single paragraph of the exerpt and ignore the rest of what it says. Also, it'd be nice if you'd defend the claims you're being asked to defend, instead of the ones you feel comfortable hiding behind.
And before you waste your time ranting, please remember that what I was talking about was the Sun's magnetic field, not its luminosity. The magnetic field determines the solar wind, which in turn governs cloud cover through the suppression of cosmic rays. Cloud cover comes into solar heating a hell of a long time beore greenhouse gasses do.
Please stop arguing with half-assed guesses about what I meant. Not every impact the sun has on our temperature is about its brightness.
I'll repeat myself: I'm not answering any more of your questions until you learn to answer mine. I have no intent of humoring you in your tirade of obviously false nonsense, under the mechanism of "I'm not wrong if I haven't admitted it."
- Results from the middle Miocene, a warm period about 10 million years ago, failed to show high CO2 levels. The researchers suggest that the warming may have occurred due to "episodic methane outbursts."
- There has been a lot of hand wringing over increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. The increase is relatively small when compared to historic levels. Preindustrial concentrations were about 280 parts per million. Currently concentrations are about 370 ppm. A study in the May 17 issue of Nature shows that CO2 levels were much higher in the past.
I've never seen anyone say that when they themselves were doing something other than desperately scraping to uphold a completely untenable position. Doesn't it embarrass you to act this way, or do you just not have the good sense to realize that nobody is fooled?Yes, I remember when someone said that exact same sentence to me about Global Cooling. To use your own rhetoric, fortunately you're not a policy maker, and fortunately the policy wonks are starting to look past people like you, and to people who use actual numbers.Oh right, I forgot, you're pretending I didn't cite evidence. And forgetting that all you've cited is Wikipedia, written by people like you. I tire of you, hypocrite. Find someone else to troll. I get it, you're going to post after everything I say, telling the same lies and making the same tired insults.
Shoo. The adults are talking.