>Ugg. "Processed and manufacturered" are too damn vague to be useful in any way. WHAT part of the processing and manufacturing is causing this problem? And how do you know it's the problem, and not modern plastic containers, or pesticides used on crops, or any of a million other things that have changed that might be the root cause of our current epidemic?
Again - like I said in my own post: I don't know that. I specifically ADMITTED I don't have the answer. I wasn't TRYING to give an ANSWER. I even said outright I didn't know if the OP was right or not. I just pointed out that the given reason for DISMISSING the OP's argument was bloody stupid and it was. That doesn't mean I agree with the OP's argument - I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough on the topic to either agree or not agree.
But I can still call out a bloody stupid argument when I see one.
All good points but I deliberately didn't address those because I don't know the answers. I just think dismissing "processed food" on the basis that animals don't eat it when the article is specifically about LAB animals who DO eat processed food is silly.
>And, as we all know, marmosets are among the greatest consumers of manufactured foods.
These are laboratory marmosets which are, if anything, fed MORE on manufactured foods than even pet marmosets (since nobody gives a lab animal treats). These are all animals that eat foods made in large scale commercial operations and poured out of a tin or cardboard box.
There is NO evidence of an obesity rise in WILD stocks of ANY of these animals. What do humans and lab animals have in common ? Diets filled with processed and manufactured foods.
Now I am not saying that this is the cause or even that the GP is right- I am saying your reason for claiming he is wrong is outright idiotic.
This was a response to the mentions about libertarianism and slavery in that conversation. That I also mentioned suicide in it was an example of how small the difference between "employed" and "enslaved" has become for many people - when suicide is actually more attractive than resignation.
As for my position on the main topic: Personally - I don't believe suicide should be illegal per se - but then I also believe that providing those who attempted it with appropriate psychiatric care is a valid burden on society (or if you are so inclined: a sensible investment as many of them could go back to being productive members of society with the right depression treatment) and currently the laws against it is the means by which this is achieved. I think it could be achieved better but I would hesitate to scrap the current laws until this "better" version is already in place because we ARE talking about people dying in the meantime.
Actually a great many American libertarians while claiming to hate slavery and indeed claiming their entire philosophy is built on preventing it- fully support indentured servitude, because apparently if you are truly free you should be free to be allowed to become a slave.
Which is why they oppose any and all regulation or worker-protection laws... you know the only difference BETWEEN most jobs and indentured servitude.
Us more leftist anarchist look at this and wonder how anybody can fail to see that a job you cannot AFFORD to resign from because the only alternative is to starve is no DIFFERENT from slavery on ANY practical level - and that this IS indentured servitude. Indeed... this explains why Foxxcon's workers chose to commit suicide in such numbers that the company put safety nets around the buildings. This didn't solve ANY problems - the workers still hated their jobs so much that they would rather die and still chose a quick death by falling over a slow death by starving (aka - quitting their jobs) - they just couldn't do it on company premisses anymore... Now in a world where business still had any shred of humanity left... if your company was having workers KILL themselves rather than work for you anymore (and genuinely felt that "better" work simply couldn't exist for them) - you would improve your working conditions - EVEN IF that meant making less money yourself.
>So in your opinion terrorists get a pass on murdering civilians because they have a justifiable grievance?
Where do you draw the line between terrorist and freedom fighter ? As it happened the ANC won in South Africa and did so with the full support of the entire international community including the USA.
Are you not a freedom fighter rather than a terrorist if what you are fighting against is a brutal regime that denies you any human rights whatsoever and have removed any and all legal forms of protest ?
Do I agree with targeting civilians ? No - but the reality is America has killed more civilians in Iraq (and that's just the accidental ones) than the ANC in their entire 30 year campaign.
I would argue that the form their armed struggle took actually prevented their revolt from turning into a full-scale civil war, which would have killed far more people (including many more civilian collateral casualties) - and probably have made it impossible to reach the peaceful negotiated settlement we ultimately did. Was it a good thing ? No. Was it justified ? Maybe. Was it the least harmful among a lot of bad choices ? Yes.
If you were referring only to the "share intelligence" bit - then yes, I know. I am sure I didn't intend THAT line to be speculative. If you mean the whole idea - if you have proof that they do I would not be surprised but I haven't seen any conclusive claims to this effect. But then, i'm neither American nor British - I live in a small country in Africa. I cannot be expected to read EVERY American headline.
So pretty much the same stuff that Allied soldiers from the US did in Europe and Japan during World War 2 ? And again in Nicaragua and Vietnam and Korea and Brazil and... oh before 9/11 you had deposed 53 different democratically elected governments and replaced them with puppet dictators in various parts of the world and there has yet to be a single war where American soldiers did not make themselves guilty of crimes like rape. Nothing special about you on the latter part- you put a boatload of young boys together, give them guns and fill them with macho-bravado and extreme "do not dare to have a brain" discipline - you will BREED at least a few mad-ass rapist and cold-blooded killers in the process - every military does.
Since 9/11 you made a refreshing change from the past, just to be different, and to show how much feminism has advanced your society - you had soldiers both male and female committing torture and sexual assault against MALE prisoners of war in places like Abu Ghraib.
Sorry pal - but while there is a LOT wrong with the Saudis and there was plenty wrong with Satan Hussain - you'll do a lot better if you focus on stuff that your own actually do BETTER.
Seriously - you saying that is like if me (a South African white who lived through the 1980's) start complaining because the ANC used to bomb restaurants and ignore the fact that they only started doing that because the NP government liked to arrest anybody who spoke against the apartheid policies and most of those arrested were tortured and killed in prison (which rather removed the desirability of peaceful protest).
It's like pointing out the Church street bomb and forgetting about Steve Biko.
The real simple truth: fundamentalism in all forms is a grave evil: this INCLUDES the fundamentalism of honor, duty and discipline hammered in by EVERY military force ever.
There's no such thing as an honorable army - the very concept is a contradiction in terms - such a thing does not and CANNOT ever exist. The best you ever get in wars is where one REGIME is so evil that whatever atrocities your army commits on the way to destroying theirs and the regime could be considered an acceptable loss because the other side would be so much WORSE if they win. That's what you had in such extremely rare cases as World War 2.
Of course they TELL you that about EVERY war, but in all but the rarest of cases - it's just not true.
In the entire 20th century Carter was your ONLY president who didn't find an excuse to bomb SOMEBODY. That's ONE - in a hundred years !
Here's the way I would do it if I was them - and I would be surprised if they didn't. I'm simplifying a bit but include the pieces like "without a court order" and such for yourself.
MI6 isn't allowed to spy on British citizens. The NSA isn't allowed to spy on Americans. But Britain and America are allies. So MI6 let's the NSA spy in Britain and looks the other way. The NSA lets MI6 spy in America and looks the other way. Afterwards, like good allies, they "share intelligence" and now MI6 has all the surveillance data the NSA gathered in Britain, and the NSA has everything MI6 gathered in the USA.
Repeat for all US allies (and any other government they can strong-arm).
Result: massive world-wide surveillance of all citizens in virtually all countries -all without a single agency every breaking the "do not spy on your own citizens" rules if they have them.
Not to mention the original linux kernel was written in Finland. Many other free software projects are likewise non-American. Hell OpenBSD is developed by a South African living in Canada.
We have a one-time-password generator in our customer machines, so that tech support can get root access but the customers themselves can not (part of the SLA - we agree to keep the boxes up no matter what, they agree not to fuck around with root)
I won't deny that it happens in some places, but it certainly doesn't happen here. In fact we take those default settings and hard-code them to make this even less likely. We even have a bootscript that locks root on every reboot, and another hook in our build-scripts to relock it everytime you build our code, basically - even if people unlock it, it won't be unlocked for long - and if somebody changes that, well git blame means it won't be a secret...
Most desktop Linux distros (the kind most coders who run it use) no longer HAVE a root account enabled, it's generally locked by default, and you would have to forceably go and set one to use it.
I can't speak for other people but I have only ever done this in very specific scenarios on my machine where I CANNOT use sudo (i.e. I want to move my/home to a new larger hard drive - this means I need to be able to unmount it - which means my normal account cannot be logged int)... considering it's "sudo passwd root", move mountpoint, remount, passwd -l root, exit or I have to "THE HORROR" reboot my machine after updating fstab... yeah, I consider that an acceptable risk.
Actually - cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep exist today in far greater numbers than they would have without farming. Conclusion: being tasty to humans is an evolved survival trait (from the point of view of the species, not the individual)
From the original huffington post article we find, among other things, a quote by a veterinarian who handed them a mother cat and her kittens who were perfectly healthy. The PETA representatives said they would be "easy to adopt" and the vet was wanting to find them homes as they were in perfect condition.
The PETA guys killed them in their van mere moments after telling that blatant lie.
Isn't it odd that every other shelter organisation around has far fewer euthanizations and far more adoptions than PETA's shelters do ? That most of them keep animals for several months before considering euthansia while PETA animals rarely make 14 days - even if they are in perfect health ?
That animals coming to PETA with diseases which other shelters routinely treat and cure and then adopt the animals are simply left to die untreated ? Like Parvovirus - average survival rate among infected animals at shelters: 90%, survival rate at PETA shelters: 0%.
You remind me of a debate between Bill O'Reily and Bill Maher, where O'Reily said: "People don't want progressivism, they don't want the country to change, they like the country".
My answer to him is: yes, a lot of people like America, a lot more than 50 years ago actually, much more than 70 years ago and way more (all percentage-wise to population at the time) than a hundred and fifty years ago. The reason each generation has more people who like America is because each generation has fewer groups of people who are not being disenfranchised and having their rights denied by government and the beneficiaries of unequal rights. That philosophy which, with each generation, has recognized and extended basic rights to more and more of those groups who are denied it, that is progressivism. That is what gave the vote to black people, to women, and as recently as 1992 only to people of Romani descent (aka gypsies). We still need to be progressive because, today, there are still many people in the USA whose rights are not truly recognized and who are not truly equal before the law. The gay community for one, the children of illegal immigrants for another (recently a republican congressman suggested denying foodstamps to illegal immigrants, since any child born in the US is automatically a citizen, this would mean - literally - starving American babies because their PARENTS broke the law). We can stop being progressive, when we have nobody left who desperately needs progress to happen."
Bias disclosure: I am not an American, nor do I ever want to be one, but I do follow your news and events (since they directly impact my life - you choose a bad president and I get poorer even though I got no vote, seems rather undemocratic in my view, that's about the only thing I actually AGREE with Ron Paul on - stay the hell out of other people's countries, you do not get to mess with OUR democratic choices to serve YOUR interests).
Dude, if you're going to make the Blackadder joke, then at least get it right. Richard IV ruled for 13 Glorious years before lord Percy's mixup with the wine and poison. At which point, Henry Tudor ascended the throne and rewrote history for a full backdated 13 years, claiming the death of Richard the third, victory at Bosworth and basically denying the very existence of Richard the fourth.
>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Yes, and of course, all politicians since the birth of the United States have held all clauses of the Constitution as sacred and equal. Like when Thomas Jefferson paid heed to those clauses about due process and a fair trial by not shooting an accused traitor on the White House lawn... oh wait.
Slashdot Mirror
>Ugg. "Processed and manufacturered" are too damn vague to be useful in any way. WHAT part of the processing and manufacturing is causing this problem? And how do you know it's the problem, and not modern plastic containers, or pesticides used on crops, or any of a million other things that have changed that might be the root cause of our current epidemic?
Again - like I said in my own post: I don't know that. I specifically ADMITTED I don't have the answer.
I wasn't TRYING to give an ANSWER. I even said outright I didn't know if the OP was right or not.
I just pointed out that the given reason for DISMISSING the OP's argument was bloody stupid and it was.
That doesn't mean I agree with the OP's argument - I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough on the topic to either agree or not agree.
But I can still call out a bloody stupid argument when I see one.
All good points but I deliberately didn't address those because I don't know the answers.
I just think dismissing "processed food" on the basis that animals don't eat it when the article is specifically about LAB animals who DO eat processed food is silly.
becomes corrupted after entering politics.
In other news: fire is hot and water is wet.
>And, as we all know, marmosets are among the greatest consumers of manufactured foods.
These are laboratory marmosets which are, if anything, fed MORE on manufactured foods than even pet marmosets (since nobody gives a lab animal treats).
These are all animals that eat foods made in large scale commercial operations and poured out of a tin or cardboard box.
There is NO evidence of an obesity rise in WILD stocks of ANY of these animals.
What do humans and lab animals have in common ? Diets filled with processed and manufactured foods.
Now I am not saying that this is the cause or even that the GP is right- I am saying your reason for claiming he is wrong is outright idiotic.
This was a response to the mentions about libertarianism and slavery in that conversation. That I also mentioned suicide in it was an example of how small the difference between "employed" and "enslaved" has become for many people - when suicide is actually more attractive than resignation.
As for my position on the main topic:
Personally - I don't believe suicide should be illegal per se - but then I also believe that providing those who attempted it with appropriate psychiatric care is a valid burden on society (or if you are so inclined: a sensible investment as many of them could go back to being productive members of society with the right depression treatment) and currently the laws against it is the means by which this is achieved.
I think it could be achieved better but I would hesitate to scrap the current laws until this "better" version is already in place because we ARE talking about people dying in the meantime.
Actually a great many American libertarians while claiming to hate slavery and indeed claiming their entire philosophy is built on preventing it- fully support indentured servitude, because apparently if you are truly free you should be free to be allowed to become a slave.
Which is why they oppose any and all regulation or worker-protection laws... you know the only difference BETWEEN most jobs and indentured servitude.
Us more leftist anarchist look at this and wonder how anybody can fail to see that a job you cannot AFFORD to resign from because the only alternative is to starve is no DIFFERENT from slavery on ANY practical level - and that this IS indentured servitude.
Indeed... this explains why Foxxcon's workers chose to commit suicide in such numbers that the company put safety nets around the buildings. This didn't solve ANY problems - the workers still hated their jobs so much that they would rather die and still chose a quick death by falling over a slow death by starving (aka - quitting their jobs) - they just couldn't do it on company premisses anymore...
Now in a world where business still had any shred of humanity left... if your company was having workers KILL themselves rather than work for you anymore (and genuinely felt that "better" work simply couldn't exist for them) - you would improve your working conditions - EVEN IF that meant making less money yourself.
>There's no technical reason why something like this can't be done. There's lots of other reasons, though.
You mean like the fact that "submerged floating" is an oxymoron ?
>So in your opinion terrorists get a pass on murdering civilians because they have a justifiable grievance?
Where do you draw the line between terrorist and freedom fighter ? As it happened the ANC won in South Africa and did so with the full support of the entire international community including the USA.
Are you not a freedom fighter rather than a terrorist if what you are fighting against is a brutal regime that denies you any human rights whatsoever and have removed any and all legal forms of protest ?
Do I agree with targeting civilians ? No - but the reality is America has killed more civilians in Iraq (and that's just the accidental ones) than the ANC in their entire 30 year campaign.
I would argue that the form their armed struggle took actually prevented their revolt from turning into a full-scale civil war, which would have killed far more people (including many more civilian collateral casualties) - and probably have made it impossible to reach the peaceful negotiated settlement we ultimately did.
Was it a good thing ? No. Was it justified ? Maybe. Was it the least harmful among a lot of bad choices ? Yes.
If you were referring only to the "share intelligence" bit - then yes, I know. I am sure I didn't intend THAT line to be speculative.
If you mean the whole idea - if you have proof that they do I would not be surprised but I haven't seen any conclusive claims to this effect. But then, i'm neither American nor British - I live in a small country in Africa. I cannot be expected to read EVERY American headline.
So pretty much the same stuff that Allied soldiers from the US did in Europe and Japan during World War 2 ? ... oh before 9/11 you had deposed 53 different democratically elected governments and replaced them with puppet dictators in various parts of the world and there has yet to be a single war where American soldiers did not make themselves guilty of crimes like rape. Nothing special about you on the latter part- you put a boatload of young boys together, give them guns and fill them with macho-bravado and extreme "do not dare to have a brain" discipline - you will BREED at least a few mad-ass rapist and cold-blooded killers in the process - every military does.
And again in Nicaragua and Vietnam and Korea and Brazil and
Since 9/11 you made a refreshing change from the past, just to be different, and to show how much feminism has advanced your society - you had soldiers both male and female committing torture and sexual assault against MALE prisoners of war in places like Abu Ghraib.
Sorry pal - but while there is a LOT wrong with the Saudis and there was plenty wrong with Satan Hussain - you'll do a lot better if you focus on stuff that your own actually do BETTER.
Seriously - you saying that is like if me (a South African white who lived through the 1980's) start complaining because the ANC used to bomb restaurants and ignore the fact that they only started doing that because the NP government liked to arrest anybody who spoke against the apartheid policies and most of those arrested were tortured and killed in prison (which rather removed the desirability of peaceful protest).
It's like pointing out the Church street bomb and forgetting about Steve Biko.
The real simple truth: fundamentalism in all forms is a grave evil: this INCLUDES the fundamentalism of honor, duty and discipline hammered in by EVERY military force ever.
There's no such thing as an honorable army - the very concept is a contradiction in terms - such a thing does not and CANNOT ever exist. The best you ever get in wars is where one REGIME is so evil that whatever atrocities your army commits on the way to destroying theirs and the regime could be considered an acceptable loss because the other side would be so much WORSE if they win. That's what you had in such extremely rare cases as World War 2.
Of course they TELL you that about EVERY war, but in all but the rarest of cases - it's just not true.
In the entire 20th century Carter was your ONLY president who didn't find an excuse to bomb SOMEBODY. That's ONE - in a hundred years !
Here's the way I would do it if I was them - and I would be surprised if they didn't. I'm simplifying a bit but include the pieces like "without a court order" and such for yourself.
MI6 isn't allowed to spy on British citizens.
The NSA isn't allowed to spy on Americans.
But Britain and America are allies.
So MI6 let's the NSA spy in Britain and looks the other way.
The NSA lets MI6 spy in America and looks the other way.
Afterwards, like good allies, they "share intelligence" and now MI6 has all the surveillance data the NSA gathered in Britain, and the NSA has everything MI6 gathered in the USA.
Repeat for all US allies (and any other government they can strong-arm).
Result: massive world-wide surveillance of all citizens in virtually all countries -all without a single agency every breaking the "do not spy on your own citizens" rules if they have them.
I can vouch for this - I'm one of those people.
For some odd reason... I haven't been phoned by a telemarketer in months. I can't imagine why.
Not to mention the original linux kernel was written in Finland.
Many other free software projects are likewise non-American. Hell OpenBSD is developed by a South African living in Canada.
All the time.
In fact - I've seen three different species of them on a regular basis.
Then again - I live in Africa where there are three living wild bovine species that are all doing just fine and in no current danger of extinction.
We have a one-time-password generator in our customer machines, so that tech support can get root access but the customers themselves can not (part of the SLA - we agree to keep the boxes up no matter what, they agree not to fuck around with root)
I won't deny that it happens in some places, but it certainly doesn't happen here. In fact we take those default settings and hard-code them to make this even less likely.
We even have a bootscript that locks root on every reboot, and another hook in our build-scripts to relock it everytime you build our code, basically - even if people unlock it, it won't be unlocked for long - and if somebody changes that, well git blame means it won't be a secret...
Most desktop Linux distros (the kind most coders who run it use) no longer HAVE a root account enabled, it's generally locked by default, and you would have to forceably go and set one to use it.
I can't speak for other people but I have only ever done this in very specific scenarios on my machine where I CANNOT use sudo (i.e. I want to move my /home to a new larger hard drive - this means I need to be able to unmount it - which means my normal account cannot be logged int)... considering it's "sudo passwd root", move mountpoint, remount, passwd -l root, exit or I have to "THE HORROR" reboot my machine after updating fstab ... yeah, I consider that an acceptable risk.
Which is what the parent poster was assuming, and I was trying to disprove.
Actually - cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep exist today in far greater numbers than they would have without farming.
Conclusion: being tasty to humans is an evolved survival trait (from the point of view of the species, not the individual)
Why not just cut out the middleman, do some yoga and shit in your own mouth ?
From the original huffington post article we find, among other things, a quote by a veterinarian who handed them a mother cat and her kittens who were perfectly healthy. The PETA representatives said they would be "easy to adopt" and the vet was wanting to find them homes as they were in perfect condition.
The PETA guys killed them in their van mere moments after telling that blatant lie.
Isn't it odd that every other shelter organisation around has far fewer euthanizations and far more adoptions than PETA's shelters do ? That most of them keep animals for several months before considering euthansia while PETA animals rarely make 14 days - even if they are in perfect health ?
That animals coming to PETA with diseases which other shelters routinely treat and cure and then adopt the animals are simply left to die untreated ? Like Parvovirus - average survival rate among infected animals at shelters: 90%, survival rate at PETA shelters: 0%.
Comedy is serious business :P
You remind me of a debate between Bill O'Reily and Bill Maher, where O'Reily said: "People don't want progressivism, they don't want the country to change, they like the country".
My answer to him is: yes, a lot of people like America, a lot more than 50 years ago actually, much more than 70 years ago and way more (all percentage-wise to population at the time) than a hundred and fifty years ago. The reason each generation has more people who like America is because each generation has fewer groups of people who are not being disenfranchised and having their rights denied by government and the beneficiaries of unequal rights. That philosophy which, with each generation, has recognized and extended basic rights to more and more of those groups who are denied it, that is progressivism. That is what gave the vote to black people, to women, and as recently as 1992 only to people of Romani descent (aka gypsies). We still need to be progressive because, today, there are still many people in the USA whose rights are not truly recognized and who are not truly equal before the law. The gay community for one, the children of illegal immigrants for another (recently a republican congressman suggested denying foodstamps to illegal immigrants, since any child born in the US is automatically a citizen, this would mean - literally - starving American babies because their PARENTS broke the law).
We can stop being progressive, when we have nobody left who desperately needs progress to happen."
Bias disclosure: I am not an American, nor do I ever want to be one, but I do follow your news and events (since they directly impact my life - you choose a bad president and I get poorer even though I got no vote, seems rather undemocratic in my view, that's about the only thing I actually AGREE with Ron Paul on - stay the hell out of other people's countries, you do not get to mess with OUR democratic choices to serve YOUR interests).
Dude, if you're going to make the Blackadder joke, then at least get it right. Richard IV ruled for 13 Glorious years before lord Percy's mixup with the wine and poison. At which point, Henry Tudor ascended the throne and rewrote history for a full backdated 13 years, claiming the death of Richard the third, victory at Bosworth and basically denying the very existence of Richard the fourth.
It's in the opening sequence to the series dude.
>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
Yes, and of course, all politicians since the birth of the United States have held all clauses of the Constitution as sacred and equal. Like when Thomas Jefferson paid heed to those clauses about due process and a fair trial by not shooting an accused traitor on the White House lawn... oh wait.