>- Method and System for Optimal Placement of Advertisements on a Webpage [3 patents]
Wait... they have a patent on this ? Why the hell aren't they USING it then ! Seriously... have you seen what a yahoo site looks like without adblock ?
>>...Things that happen all the time aren't new or news and nobody cares to be informed about them...
>Then why is the news always the same stories with different names?
Because it takes an entire country of millions of people to have those things happen ONCE a day. That's supremely low odds. If the news was reliable measurement of risk then you there wouldn't be time for any other news after they finished reporting motor-vehicle accidents in just your own town.
>Maybe that's one reason why news concentrate on bad issues. (On the other hand, everything on the world is well - the news report just lists the exceptions!)
I'm inclined to Bruce Schneier's point of view. News must be new - and rare. Things that happen all the time aren't new or news and nobody cares to be informed about them - the result is news of things that are rare and infrequent. His conclusion: anything that's on the news is by definition too low a risk to worry about.
>If we have a fundamental aversion to violence, then why are we entertained by it?
So it never occurred to you that humans have the capacity to tell fantasy and reality appart and can in fantasy enjoy the very things that we are averse to in reality without any particular causal link or need for the one to bleed into the other ? Not to do deny that such bleeding over never happens, only that there is no proof nor even any GOOD reasons to believe it's inevitable or that the process is not entirely within the conscious control of the person involved.
We're entertained by fictional violence because they appeal to our flght-or-flight adrenal gland responses without triggering any of the emotions that real violence links to - disgust, fear etc.
This kind of study is actually quite in line with what we can observe all the time - people who are under the influence of drugs like alcohol are far more likely to act violently. That makes sense as natural aversions are reduced by such drugs (the same reason they have a notable reductive effect on sexual inhibitions)
>If you lived in the US, it would be a good thing that you didn't tell your dad until it was to late. He would have tried to have the teacher fired. She would keep her job, and you would have suffered the retaliation. It's not that he would have been fighting the teacher. He would be fighting the bureaucracy and the teacher's union.
I am not entirely sure that's true. If I'd lived in the US I'm quite sure my dad's methods of doing so would have been rather different. If I lived in the US now and it happened to my kid I would approach it thusly:
I'm absolutely certain that a lawsuit for slander and emotional abuse (I'm not sure about there but here emotional abuse of a minor is in fact a criminal offence - even though it's usually almost impossible to prove - this happened in front of 30 child witnesses and one adult witness) would have had at least a possibility of passing. Once suit is filed... I think right now I wouldn't even push very hard for a trial - I'd just get the school board on the back foot with some press reporting the event. Then I'd offer a nice low settlement figure, less than their expecting to pay in a court judgement - but contingent on the teacher being fired with cause and denied a refference.
Well here is your counter story. When I was all over 9 years old I suffered from bad handwriting called by small-muscle coordination problems. I still haven't got great handwriting to this day.
But with teachers lumping me under "doesn't bother to be a neat writer" there came a day when I had to erase something (at that stage we only wrote in pencil). The eraser I used had, unbeknownst to me gotten some pencil soot on it and left a big black mark in my book. Like a good little boy I went to my teacher to ask for advice. Instead of advice I was shouted at for making a mess in my book before I even finished my sentence... then sent to the teacher next door to be further ridiculed. A ridicule process that continued for some time all the way back to my own classroom where she then proceeded for the first time to ask my name. I told her my name... and she said "I think 'varkie' would be a better name for you." (Varkie in my language literally means piglet - but without any of the 'cute' connotations... little swine is a better translation).
The nickname stuck with me until I finally left for highschool - I got into fights all the time against kids calling me that, but nonetheless made it onto the student council in my final year of primary school and ended it as one of the top-scorers - but make no mistake that my social life was irreperably harmed and my ability to make friends suffered greatly.
Like most kids in such a situation, I felt ashamed and didn't tell my family, big mistake, I told my dad some 4 years later (just before I would leave primary school) and then he was furious and told me if I had told him the story on the day he'd have had that teacher fired.
That message changed my life... for the first time I understood that shit happens, but you don't have to be a victim - you can make bad people pay, you can hold people to account for their actions - even if they are authority figures. I went through high school a great deal happier, and made some real friends. I went to University where I was very successful and today I am 32 and I can say that I earn more money in a day than that teacher likely earns in month.
There's a last little tail to the story. Just before I left primary school I bumped into that teacher one day, and she spoke to me, and talked of how "you don't like me because you're afraid of me"... in retrospect, I hadn't fully understood why she chose to stop me and say that, nowadays I would outright have said to her "no, I don't like you because you horribly abused your position of authority and ruined my childhood you fucking bitch" and dared her to do anything about it.
The thing is - your fairytale happened. I'm a happy and successful person. I remember these events, but they didn't define me - except to give me a perpetual soft spot for the underdog. The good guys won - even if the bad guy wasn't punished, it was the LAST teacher who did something wrong to me and didn't get in deep shit. There is a massive culture of power-abuse by teachers who think discipline is their job. I don't agree. Their job is to educate. Discipline is at best an evil they require to do their jobs and should be minimized not maximized. Their power, like that of any authority, should be the LEAST amount with which they can do their jobs, not the most.
But don't think she's doomed. Her parents are doing exactly the right things. She may suffer a while but don't be surprized if she comes out stronger - and with a lifelong belief in being a champion for those who are stepped upon.
>It's also the convention in every language I've ever heard. Why change something that works?
Well in large parts of the world outside the USA (including South Africa) it's quite common to refer to all Americans as "yankees" - and those of us who didn't study advanced history (which included the US civil war, something that in school is glossed over as rather unimportant to our lives compared to our OWN histories) or watch old movies generally have no idea that in the USA "Yankees" only refer to people from the North (indeed - the first I learned it was when I watched Gone with the Wind at age 16).
I totally agree with you. Why change something that works ? I mean what are the odds that somebody from Atlanta is going to hear my tell a joke about stupid redneck yankees in the pub tonight right ?
>Well it's a bit fucking odd that the whole of the rest of the world knew how evil the apartheid regime was, but all you poor white Afrikaaners didn't. Talk about blinkers
1) I said I was 14 when it ended. I had nothing to do with it, nor could I have influenced it. I am speaking of the experiences of the previous generation.
2) Indeed - because the rest of the world was NOT getting our censored media, when somebody from here went overseas and saw some of the news there they would be told "it's just communist propaganda".
3) When that stopped working so well, the government actually banned camera's at protest events.
Blinkers, yes, but not self-imposed. These blinkers were put in place by a government who had absolute control over every single aspect of life. Who literally WROTE every line in every school and university textbook (and wrote history books that matched their own desires over facts for example). Who controlled every single newspaper (what they did not own, they censored) and every television station and the entire radio network.
It was easy among all that to get people to discount discenting voices as "communist propagandists".
4) The rest of the world really wasn't much better. America still had laws that matched appartheid in both structure and intent until the 1950's ! The inspiration for appartheid came at least in part out of a conscience desire NOT to do to the black people in South Africa what Europe had done to the black people in the colonies (at that stage they were just starting to abandon them). Indeed South Africa did nothing the USA didn't do - including ban interracial marriages (though sometimes the USA did it on a state rather than federal level). The only difference from the voter's point of view was that they did it longer.
5) You're wrong anyway. The tortures and massacres were mostly rumors worldwide. There wasn't any prove locally or abroad (you think the secret police was THAT useless ?) the occasional video - but the rest was hush-hush. A lot of rumor but no provable fact. When you control the media, you control which rumors your citizens hear. The rest of the world didn't get confirmation of the real atrocities until the same time WE got it- during the TRC hearings of the late 90's. See despite what you may think - killing or torturing a black man was NEVER legal in South Africa. The people who did those things were breaking the law - even under appartheid they broke them. Indeed if one of them fucked up badly enough for it to become publicly known he would have hanged with a big fanfare - the government would have made an example of him, to prove that such rogue ellements are NOT going to be tolerated. That it was actually a common practice in certain police departments WAS a carefully held secret - because admitting it would have been admitting to being criminals.
The laws were bad, but the cruelty and torture that was done to sustain those laws were NEVER themselves legal. My ancestor were bad, but they weren't quite NAZI's, they never believed in legally sanctioned murder or slavery.
Wrong. Konrad Zuze's computers were the first programmable, Turing-complete computers (particularly the Z3) . They predated the first such computers built in Britain or the USA by over 15 years. The technology got lost during the war but they were rediscovered later and sorry - but they were Von Neumann architecture machines more than a decade before Von Neumann proposed it.
We frequently hear the same thing in South Africa today. Usually phrased by black people as "Ever noticed how you can never find any white person who supported appartheid anywhere ?"
The truth of course, is a bit more subtle than that. In 1977 the University of Potchefstroom (arguably the most conservative university outside of the American South - a University that to this day teaches creationism as science) held an anonymous poll among it's all-white student-body. 87% of respondents voted that appartheid was unjust and should be dismantled. Despite that the National Party remained in power and didn't start the reforms that would ultimately end appartheid until 9 years later with the repeal of several of the worst appartheid laws including the racial classification law and the immorality act in 1986 by P.W. Botha. The last of the appartheid laws were not repealed until February 1989 when De Klerk freed Mandela and repealed them all in his very first speech as president - starting the negotiation process that would ultimately end in the first universal-vote elections of 1994. The date of De Klerk's speech is not a coincidence - it was just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the ANC was communist funded, the majority of white people would not support a complete end to appartheid. When the wall fell, the risk of South Africa becoming a USSR sub-state went away -and they were suddenly much more willing to negotiate. In fact, in 1992 a small group of ultra-right-wing parties made a claim that the NP government had no mandate to end appartheid - leading to the very last whites-only election ever held in the country. The 1992 referendum where whites had to vote on whether to continue negotiations and end appartheid (yes), or revert back to the old system (no). The "yes" vote won by an absolutely overwhelming majority. This is important as it shows that the vast majority of white South Africans in 1992 did not believe in Appartheid as a just or workable system anymore - very much in line with that university poll from 1976.
Then there is the final subtlety: the cruelest parts of apparthed were secret. I remember my dad watching the Truth and Reconciliation Commision hearings with tears in his eyes saying "that wasn't what we voted for ! How could they DO that ?"
People were voting for seperate development out of a sincere (but misguided) belief that it was the best way to guarantee equal rights and freedom to all the people in South Africa, they believed the propaganda. The cruelty, the tortures, the massacre's happening on the ground were very carefully hidden by a propaganda machine that controlled the media very tightly with a very efficient censorship system.
Just one example: South African television in the early 1980's, weather reports. The weather maps used showed all the TBVC states (so-called independent states established by the appartheid government for other races to live in). Except one: the state of Bophutatswana didn't show up at all. Why not ? Well because Bop was about 9 different patches of land that weren't even physically attached to each other. It was a screaming declaration that the theory of "people living in their ancestral land" wasn't working - so it was simply edited out of the official maps.
So considering what I know of the history of the country where I grew up (I'm South African, I'm white, I'm Afrikaans and that first fully democratic election happend just a week after my 14th birthday) - I have a lot of sympathy with the Germans who said they really didn't know.
Perhaps a part of it is "choosing not to see" - but I know how effective a government in the 70's and 80's could control the information citizens had, the propaganda that shaped their thinking, and the German's in the 1940's had much less media-technology to deal with.
It seems to me utterly feasible that the vast majority of people who supported the NAZI party had no concept of the Holocaust happening. Indeed most of the government conferences where i
>I don't know of a country where the constitution is actually followed as law instead of guideline.
I live in one. South Africa. It does help that in this country the government is NOT the highest authority or power-holder. That is the constitutional court which has the right to strike down laws, force the creation of new laws and even force policy implementation changes if policies are found to fall short of the constitutional obligations on government.
So for example - the constitutional court back in the Mbeki-denial years forced government to make antiretroviral's available to HIV-positive mothers. Two years ago they forced the government to make a law legalizing gay marriage.
The restraint on the court is - they can only act if somebody brings a case - meaning ultimately, citizens hold the ultimate power (despite the delusions of grandeur of our politicians).
> It always amazes me how people think they know so much about how inner workings of the intelligence community when the entire point of the IC is that you don't. The real reason why mundane shit is classified is pretty simple:
Then you spend the rest of your post telling us how it does work. So YOU do ? That pretty much brings us to one of two places: 1) You are as factually ignorant as the person you're replying to - and so we should measure your ideas on other merits 2) You work in a security agency of some sort
I believe 2 is very unlikely because if you did you would know that you are treading a very fine line with that post and revealing yourself would surely not be part of your plan.
So in scenario 1, who should I believe ? Well turns out there is more factual support for the counter argument than for yours. There is a pending EFF FOIA case related to documented proof of intelligence spying on US citizens. There are numerous other strong links suggesting harvesting on social network and other means being in use. Corporations use them, what would be stopping government agencies ? Corporations flaunt the law whenever they think they can get away with it (or make more money than the settlement is likely to be), why should government agencies not skirt laws when their very nature makes it highly unlikely they'll be caught ?
The truth is - that the facts we DO have do not support your argument at all. In fact the entire logic of your post appears to be based on Occam's razor - but very missapplied. Occam doesn't say "the simplest thing I can think of is probably true". It says "the simplest explanation of the observed phenomena is probably true". So your "simple explanation" doesn't meet the razor because it doesn't explain the actual observed phenomena (the above-mentioned facts). The poster you responded too actually does cite the simplest explanation for the known facts: that intelligence agencies routinely violate legal restrictions on operating domestically.
...beautiful. I am now making it my official future name for teabaggers, science-deniers, corporate-ass-kissers and pretty much everybody else it can usefully describe.
Considering that actual conspiracies can and do happen - there is absolutely no reason to believe a conspiracy theory that is otherwise supported by the known facts is false. The degree and veracity of said facts are the only measure for it's probability. If one of those facts is "a well-funded lobby group with a 40 year history of politically acting against science that could harm the profitability of the clients*" then a conspiracy theory has an even stronger balance of probability.
Now that doesn't prove it true. It doesn't prove it false. But it does mean that we should consider seriously the possibility that it may be true.
*Perfect summary of heartland: the same group was once the most vocal denialists of the link between smoking and cancer.
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>- Method and System for Optimal Placement of Advertisements on a Webpage [3 patents]
Wait ... they have a patent on this ? Why the hell aren't they USING it then ! Seriously... have you seen what a yahoo site looks like without adblock ?
>>...Things that happen all the time aren't new or news and nobody cares to be informed about them ...
>Then why is the news always the same stories with different names?
Because it takes an entire country of millions of people to have those things happen ONCE a day. That's supremely low odds. If the news was reliable measurement of risk then you there wouldn't be time for any other news after they finished reporting motor-vehicle accidents in just your own town.
>Maybe that's one reason why news concentrate on bad issues. (On the other hand, everything on the world is well - the news report just lists the exceptions!)
I'm inclined to Bruce Schneier's point of view. News must be new - and rare. Things that happen all the time aren't new or news and nobody cares to be informed about them - the result is news of things that are rare and infrequent. His conclusion: anything that's on the news is by definition too low a risk to worry about.
>If we have a fundamental aversion to violence, then why are we entertained by it?
So it never occurred to you that humans have the capacity to tell fantasy and reality appart and can in fantasy enjoy the very things that we are averse to in reality without any particular causal link or need for the one to bleed into the other ?
Not to do deny that such bleeding over never happens, only that there is no proof nor even any GOOD reasons to believe it's inevitable or that the process is not entirely within the conscious control of the person involved.
We're entertained by fictional violence because they appeal to our flght-or-flight adrenal gland responses without triggering any of the emotions that real violence links to - disgust, fear etc.
This kind of study is actually quite in line with what we can observe all the time - people who are under the influence of drugs like alcohol are far more likely to act violently. That makes sense as natural aversions are reduced by such drugs (the same reason they have a notable reductive effect on sexual inhibitions)
>If you lived in the US, it would be a good thing that you didn't tell your dad until it was to late. He would have tried to have the teacher fired. She would keep her job, and you would have suffered the retaliation. It's not that he would have been fighting the teacher. He would be fighting the bureaucracy and the teacher's union.
I am not entirely sure that's true. If I'd lived in the US I'm quite sure my dad's methods of doing so would have been rather different. If I lived in the US now and it happened to my kid I would approach it thusly:
I'm absolutely certain that a lawsuit for slander and emotional abuse (I'm not sure about there but here emotional abuse of a minor is in fact a criminal offence - even though it's usually almost impossible to prove - this happened in front of 30 child witnesses and one adult witness) would have had at least a possibility of passing.
Once suit is filed... I think right now I wouldn't even push very hard for a trial - I'd just get the school board on the back foot with some press reporting the event. Then I'd offer a nice low settlement figure, less than their expecting to pay in a court judgement - but contingent on the teacher being fired with cause and denied a refference.
>And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast
So that would be...everyone in the world who can afford pie ?
Well here is your counter story. When I was all over 9 years old I suffered from bad handwriting called by small-muscle coordination problems. I still haven't got great handwriting to this day.
But with teachers lumping me under "doesn't bother to be a neat writer" there came a day when I had to erase something (at that stage we only wrote in pencil). The eraser I used had, unbeknownst to me gotten some pencil soot on it and left a big black mark in my book. Like a good little boy I went to my teacher to ask for advice. Instead of advice I was shouted at for making a mess in my book before I even finished my sentence... then sent to the teacher next door to be further ridiculed. ... and she said "I think 'varkie' would be a better name for you." (Varkie in my language literally means piglet - but without any of the 'cute' connotations... little swine is a better translation).
A ridicule process that continued for some time all the way back to my own classroom where she then proceeded for the first time to ask my name. I told her my name
The nickname stuck with me until I finally left for highschool - I got into fights all the time against kids calling me that, but nonetheless made it onto the student council in my final year of primary school and ended it as one of the top-scorers - but make no mistake that my social life was irreperably harmed and my ability to make friends suffered greatly.
Like most kids in such a situation, I felt ashamed and didn't tell my family, big mistake, I told my dad some 4 years later (just before I would leave primary school) and then he was furious and told me if I had told him the story on the day he'd have had that teacher fired.
That message changed my life... for the first time I understood that shit happens, but you don't have to be a victim - you can make bad people pay, you can hold people to account for their actions - even if they are authority figures. I went through high school a great deal happier, and made some real friends. I went to University where I was very successful and today I am 32 and I can say that I earn more money in a day than that teacher likely earns in month.
There's a last little tail to the story. Just before I left primary school I bumped into that teacher one day, and she spoke to me, and talked of how "you don't like me because you're afraid of me" ... in retrospect, I hadn't fully understood why she chose to stop me and say that, nowadays I would outright have said to her "no, I don't like you because you horribly abused your position of authority and ruined my childhood you fucking bitch" and dared her to do anything about it.
The thing is - your fairytale happened. I'm a happy and successful person. I remember these events, but they didn't define me - except to give me a perpetual soft spot for the underdog. The good guys won - even if the bad guy wasn't punished, it was the LAST teacher who did something wrong to me and didn't get in deep shit.
There is a massive culture of power-abuse by teachers who think discipline is their job. I don't agree. Their job is to educate. Discipline is at best an evil they require to do their jobs and should be minimized not maximized. Their power, like that of any authority, should be the LEAST amount with which they can do their jobs, not the most.
But don't think she's doomed. Her parents are doing exactly the right things. She may suffer a while but don't be surprized if she comes out stronger - and with a lifelong belief in being a champion for those who are stepped upon.
>Not sure what they're called in Mexican, we were talking English...
*facepalm*...
Seriously ? I live in a third world country on the other side of the world and even I know there's no such language as "Mexican".
>It's also the convention in every language I've ever heard. Why change something that works?
Well in large parts of the world outside the USA (including South Africa) it's quite common to refer to all Americans as "yankees" - and those of us who didn't study advanced history (which included the US civil war, something that in school is glossed over as rather unimportant to our lives compared to our OWN histories) or watch old movies generally have no idea that in the USA "Yankees" only refer to people from the North (indeed - the first I learned it was when I watched Gone with the Wind at age 16).
I totally agree with you. Why change something that works ? I mean what are the odds that somebody from Atlanta is going to hear my tell a joke about stupid redneck yankees in the pub tonight right ?
>like you could actually converse with him in a normal fashion if you were two people who just happen to pass each other on the street.
This metaphor will make absolutely no sense to American readers. He means: "If you were a cute girl he was trying to pick up in a bar."
*Tries to think of any other occasion where Americans are friendly to strangers... nah, drawing a blank here.
>Well it's a bit fucking odd that the whole of the rest of the world knew how evil the apartheid regime was, but all you poor white Afrikaaners didn't. Talk about blinkers
1) I said I was 14 when it ended. I had nothing to do with it, nor could I have influenced it. I am speaking of the experiences of the previous generation.
2) Indeed - because the rest of the world was NOT getting our censored media, when somebody from here went overseas and saw some of the news there they would be told "it's just communist propaganda".
3) When that stopped working so well, the government actually banned camera's at protest events.
Blinkers, yes, but not self-imposed. These blinkers were put in place by a government who had absolute control over every single aspect of life. Who literally WROTE every line in every school and university textbook (and wrote history books that matched their own desires over facts for example). Who controlled every single newspaper (what they did not own, they censored) and every television station and the entire radio network.
It was easy among all that to get people to discount discenting voices as "communist propagandists".
4) The rest of the world really wasn't much better. America still had laws that matched appartheid in both structure and intent until the 1950's ! The inspiration for appartheid came at least in part out of a conscience desire NOT to do to the black people in South Africa what Europe had done to the black people in the colonies (at that stage they were just starting to abandon them).
Indeed South Africa did nothing the USA didn't do - including ban interracial marriages (though sometimes the USA did it on a state rather than federal level). The only difference from the voter's point of view was that they did it longer.
5) You're wrong anyway. The tortures and massacres were mostly rumors worldwide. There wasn't any prove locally or abroad (you think the secret police was THAT useless ?) the occasional video - but the rest was hush-hush. A lot of rumor but no provable fact. When you control the media, you control which rumors your citizens hear.
The rest of the world didn't get confirmation of the real atrocities until the same time WE got it- during the TRC hearings of the late 90's.
See despite what you may think - killing or torturing a black man was NEVER legal in South Africa. The people who did those things were breaking the law - even under appartheid they broke them. Indeed if one of them fucked up badly enough for it to become publicly known he would have hanged with a big fanfare - the government would have made an example of him, to prove that such rogue ellements are NOT going to be tolerated.
That it was actually a common practice in certain police departments WAS a carefully held secret - because admitting it would have been admitting to being criminals.
The laws were bad, but the cruelty and torture that was done to sustain those laws were NEVER themselves legal. My ancestor were bad, but they weren't quite NAZI's, they never believed in legally sanctioned murder or slavery.
Wrong.
Konrad Zuze's computers were the first programmable, Turing-complete computers (particularly the Z3) . They predated the first such computers built in Britain or the USA by over 15 years.
The technology got lost during the war but they were rediscovered later and sorry - but they were Von Neumann architecture machines more than a decade before Von Neumann proposed it.
Oh, did I mention Konrad Zuze was German ?
We frequently hear the same thing in South Africa today. Usually phrased by black people as "Ever noticed how you can never find any white person who supported appartheid anywhere ?"
The truth of course, is a bit more subtle than that. In 1977 the University of Potchefstroom (arguably the most conservative university outside of the American South - a University that to this day teaches creationism as science) held an anonymous poll among it's all-white student-body. 87% of respondents voted that appartheid was unjust and should be dismantled.
Despite that the National Party remained in power and didn't start the reforms that would ultimately end appartheid until 9 years later with the repeal of several of the worst appartheid laws including the racial classification law and the immorality act in 1986 by P.W. Botha.
The last of the appartheid laws were not repealed until February 1989 when De Klerk freed Mandela and repealed them all in his very first speech as president - starting the negotiation process that would ultimately end in the first universal-vote elections of 1994.
The date of De Klerk's speech is not a coincidence - it was just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the ANC was communist funded, the majority of white people would not support a complete end to appartheid. When the wall fell, the risk of South Africa becoming a USSR sub-state went away -and they were suddenly much more willing to negotiate.
In fact, in 1992 a small group of ultra-right-wing parties made a claim that the NP government had no mandate to end appartheid - leading to the very last whites-only election ever held in the country. The 1992 referendum where whites had to vote on whether to continue negotiations and end appartheid (yes), or revert back to the old system (no).
The "yes" vote won by an absolutely overwhelming majority.
This is important as it shows that the vast majority of white South Africans in 1992 did not believe in Appartheid as a just or workable system anymore - very much in line with that university poll from 1976.
Then there is the final subtlety: the cruelest parts of apparthed were secret. I remember my dad watching the Truth and Reconciliation Commision hearings with tears in his eyes saying "that wasn't what we voted for ! How could they DO that ?"
People were voting for seperate development out of a sincere (but misguided) belief that it was the best way to guarantee equal rights and freedom to all the people in South Africa, they believed the propaganda. The cruelty, the tortures, the massacre's happening on the ground were very carefully hidden by a propaganda machine that controlled the media very tightly with a very efficient censorship system.
Just one example: South African television in the early 1980's, weather reports. The weather maps used showed all the TBVC states (so-called independent states established by the appartheid government for other races to live in). Except one: the state of Bophutatswana didn't show up at all.
Why not ? Well because Bop was about 9 different patches of land that weren't even physically attached to each other. It was a screaming declaration that the theory of "people living in their ancestral land" wasn't working - so it was simply edited out of the official maps.
So considering what I know of the history of the country where I grew up (I'm South African, I'm white, I'm Afrikaans and that first fully democratic election happend just a week after my 14th birthday) - I have a lot of sympathy with the Germans who said they really didn't know.
Perhaps a part of it is "choosing not to see" - but I know how effective a government in the 70's and 80's could control the information citizens had, the propaganda that shaped their thinking, and the German's in the 1940's had much less media-technology to deal with.
It seems to me utterly feasible that the vast majority of people who supported the NAZI party had no concept of the Holocaust happening. Indeed most of the government conferences where i
>I don't know of a country where the constitution is actually followed as law instead of guideline.
I live in one. South Africa. It does help that in this country the government is NOT the highest authority or power-holder. That is the constitutional court which has the right to strike down laws, force the creation of new laws and even force policy implementation changes if policies are found to fall short of the constitutional obligations on government.
So for example - the constitutional court back in the Mbeki-denial years forced government to make antiretroviral's available to HIV-positive mothers. Two years ago they forced the government to make a law legalizing gay marriage.
The restraint on the court is - they can only act if somebody brings a case - meaning ultimately, citizens hold the ultimate power (despite the delusions of grandeur of our politicians).
> an hour of being lectured 45 minutes
Wait... what ?
> It always amazes me how people think they know so much about how inner workings of the intelligence community when the entire point of the IC is that you don't. The real reason why mundane shit is classified is pretty simple:
Then you spend the rest of your post telling us how it does work. So YOU do ?
That pretty much brings us to one of two places:
1) You are as factually ignorant as the person you're replying to - and so we should measure your ideas on other merits
2) You work in a security agency of some sort
I believe 2 is very unlikely because if you did you would know that you are treading a very fine line with that post and revealing yourself would surely not be part of your plan.
So in scenario 1, who should I believe ? Well turns out there is more factual support for the counter argument than for yours. There is a pending EFF FOIA case related to documented proof of intelligence spying on US citizens. There are numerous other strong links suggesting harvesting on social network and other means being in use. Corporations use them, what would be stopping government agencies ? Corporations flaunt the law whenever they think they can get away with it (or make more money than the settlement is likely to be), why should government agencies not skirt laws when their very nature makes it highly unlikely they'll be caught ?
The truth is - that the facts we DO have do not support your argument at all. In fact the entire logic of your post appears to be based on Occam's razor - but very missapplied. Occam doesn't say "the simplest thing I can think of is probably true". It says "the simplest explanation of the observed phenomena is probably true".
So your "simple explanation" doesn't meet the razor because it doesn't explain the actual observed phenomena (the above-mentioned facts). The poster you responded too actually does cite the simplest explanation for the known facts: that intelligence agencies routinely violate legal restrictions on operating domestically.
You watched "The Producers", didn't you ?
Not to mention, if you're going to sneak into the office, grab a document that's internal-only, scan it, put it back, and email it out...
Well wouldn't you WANT to do that on a day when the office is as empty as possible ?
>So you have a lot of experience with writing inflammatory documents that are eyes-only?
I don't know... does "hot sex chat e-mails" count as "inflamatory" ?
...beautiful. I am now making it my official future name for teabaggers, science-deniers, corporate-ass-kissers and pretty much everybody else it can usefully describe.
Considering that actual conspiracies can and do happen - there is absolutely no reason to believe a conspiracy theory that is otherwise supported by the known facts is false.
The degree and veracity of said facts are the only measure for it's probability. If one of those facts is "a well-funded lobby group with a 40 year history of politically acting against science that could harm the profitability of the clients*" then a conspiracy theory has an even stronger balance of probability.
Now that doesn't prove it true. It doesn't prove it false. But it does mean that we should consider seriously the possibility that it may be true.
*Perfect summary of heartland: the same group was once the most vocal denialists of the link between smoking and cancer.
If the largest stockpiler of nuclear weapons left in the world managed to turn only itself into a gigantic glass parking lot through an accident ?
>I figured someone should speak up for Pascal's good name.
There is more than enough good name to Pascal that we don't need to defend his biggest logical blunder ever.
How about you learn to recognize a joke ?
*facepalm*
Oh you new kids, coming to linux and bringing you're windows apps with you. Pick up the sysadmin's cookbook and learn the old ways of Unix son.
Now get off my lawn !