That means little when the SCOTUS gets to declare what the constitution actually says or means. Sure, the first amendment reads plain as day, but that doesn't stop the SCOTUS from inventing categories such as protected/unprotected speech.
There's a reason I set you as a "fan," Shakrai. You're the only other person who gets it.
All the clowns going, "well, he's been declared sexually dangerous!" That's nice. This is kind of like the "terrorist watch list"/"no-fly list". Recently I read in my newspaper an argument that people on the list shouldn't be allowed to have guns, because they are "terrorists." Ahem.
Just like not anyone goes to Guantanamo--they also have to be "enemy combatants." Only "enemy combatants" are sent to Guantanamo, right? So it must be OK.
You have a right to free speech, and with that right comes the responsibility to do it in ways that don't offend everyone around you. If you are the minority and those around you are offended, its rather silly to try and argue that you should be allowed to do whatever you want.
Free speech is really just a slogan for people like you. It means nothing. I really hate your type of liberal bullshit. You are a plague, a disease; your type is the college campus dissent-silencing bullshit that fuels the politically-direct disease that is bringing down the free exchange in ideas.
You don't believe in rights. You believe in the mob. You believe in mob justice, of savagery.
The whole notion that there is "protected" and "unprotected" speech is ridiculous. Can you believe that whether speech is protected or not depends mostly on the judge's or jury's gut feelings and opinions about something? That art or communication can be judged by general people for its merits instead of just letting anyone interested in it decide?
This is not a free country, never was and never will be. Free speech is hilariously meaningless if free speech only means certain types of speech--it then becomes simply "allowed" speech. You can't -ever- claim that you have something called free speech if you're going to have committees of some sort vet the speech for content.
The obscenity and profanity issues, often like hate crimes (when the "hate crime" is nonthreatening") are really all the same thing--someone got conditioned to have a negative emotional reaction to some word or image, and thus they throw a hissy fit and start babbling on about "morality" and "greater good" blah blah blah blah.
This isn't a conservative/liberal thing. Both groups are equally fascistic when it comes to freedom of speech. If the ACLU is buying into the "protected speech" meme the courts have arbitrarily generated over time (that's the beauty of precedent, isn't it? You can create legal truths out of thing air!) then they're pretty useless too if they're going to just kowtow and toe the line of the judicial system's own bias and dogmas.
The whole idea of "protected" and "unprotected" speech should overturn in your mind COMPLETELY faith in the legal system as a whole. It shows that the legal system is full of ridiculous, moralistic dogma (often a different sort than your typical liberal/conservative slants, but a dogma nonetheless) and that you can go to jail for a long period of time without harming a single person. Who the fuck are geriatric judges to say what is and is not "offensive," and why should content be filtered by the state for whether it's offensive or not? And why does MY opinion not count, but a bunch of generic suburban imbeciles does? Nobody has the right not to be offended, regarding sex or politics or otherwise. If you find anything offensive enough to silence, the defect is with you, not the person making the speech.
Again, the entire notion of "unprotected" speech should shatter your entire view of the legal system and society in general, because it means you really are nothing more than a serf on some levels. "Free speech"--you're free to say what we say you can say. What a bunch of tripe. The legal system is a fucking cult, filled with priests (judges, in robes no less), dogmas (precedent), meaningless and arbitrary tradition, a holy text to interpret (the law, and just like any holy texts there are tons of interpretations of it), and even their own religious jargon (legalese, that only the priesthood is fit to interpret).
Corporations are potentially democratic too. Hell, both government and corporations are POTENTIALLY anything. Hell, corporations in a sense are democratic as they're run largely by shareholders. And again, you can avoid doing business with a corporation, so whatever kind of "tyranny" it is (what an equivocation!) it's not the same kind that
Also, Chomsky ignores the fact that democracy can be totalitarian. In fact, many features of ours certainly is.
Here's where you go all wrong. It's not the corporations that made the internet better, it's the technology. That corporations control cable in a way that they don't control dial-up (e.g. anyone can talk to anyone else over the phone network) is just a historical accident. Send the government in to force the cable companies to lease bandwidth to smaller isps (after all they built that network with the help of the public.), that way we get all the benefits of the better technology, and the benefits of smaller ISPs.
No, I was turning his logic against him, of course it's the technology.
This is a great myth that liberal thinkers like to expound upon to justify certain policies toward education. The idea is that education is necessary for a properly running democracy, so the people can make educated decisions and keep the government in check... and they can do this, so long as they are educated... by the government.
That's silly, of course. High schools churn out patriotic, unthinking, placated Americans willing to have their rights and property taken away "for the greater good."
And even aside from the questionable premise that a government-provided education works to keep the government in-check, does a democracy really work just because the population are educated in some things? Nobody that spouts this slogan ever asks, "what is it necessary to be educated in?" Nobody, even the most educated of us, has any idea what policy X will do to the economy (apparently not even the politicians), being scientifically literate it one field doesn't mean you'll be literate in another, and how is having an education going to tell you when to go to war or not? These days all that stuff is determined by stuff secret and hidden from the citizenry, through secret intelligence. This certainly allows the government to lie to us like the cattle we are (Bush on Iraq) and there's little we can do.
Greed is the #1 factor. ALL people in a democracy, educated or not, are little piggies trying to get an ever-bigger piece of the pie, and politicians are only happy to oblige as it gets them votes and a position of power.
And no amount of education is going to fix most dyed-in-the-wool idiots. You can send a creationist through all sorts of biology classes but they'll likely still come out a creationist. There are always exceptions but the true believers will keep on believing. No, a democracy doesn't require an educated population to work, because a democracy doesn't work like it's supposed to, no more than communism does as we saw with the Soviet Union. The only difference is that democracy is OUR social myth, our ideological flag to wave, and thus we'll never admit that it's as failed a system as any other.
What a bunch of bullshit. The people moderating this nonsense up are letting their ideology show.
The difference between then and now is huge. For one, websites in general are more secure (you can't fuck up a messageboard anymore just by typing in !). They're much, MUCH more well-designed, just go look through archive.org for evidence of this. Forum softwares are DRASTICALLY better, instead of relying on geocities people register their own.com easily and affordably; e-mail accounts are MUCH easier to get (remember why hotmail got big?). Music, video (youtube, etc) are all easily transferred over the internet when it wasn't possible before. Internet shopping has matured greatly and amazon, newegg, and smaller sites offer great deals--yeah, yeah, ebay went downhill, whatever... So many amazing sites exist now that weren't even imaginable back then.
Yeah, let's just ignore Hulu (oh wait, that's the corporate takeover of the internet according to PopeRatzo), last.fm, all the blogs that have popped up by experts in their fields, the rise of bittorrent, Steam (for gaming), Google and the many peripheral services they provide, oh I could go on and on.
There's not much to whine about other then the death of usenet (although I insist it died because forum softwares improved and became accessible outside websites such as insidetheweb and ezboards) and the rise of spam.
The underlying technology is just vastly superior, if you disagree you can just shut up and go back to dialup and prove me wrong.
Quit painting "corporate" America as the evil and "government" as the good slayer of dragons; they're a two-headed beast, often times the two are indistinguishable. It is government law, after all, that makes the corporation a limited-liability organization. Where men go to jail for, corporations may only get a fine, if that. It's not that corporations are a corrupting influence on good and righteous government, it's that there is no such thing as good and righteous government anymore than communism is a realistic political system. Both "enlightened democracy" and "communism" fail because they simply don't work in practice. It's just part of our social mythos to pretend that one is more feasible than the other. People bitching about corporations using massive amounts of money to "bend" government to its will like to put all the blame on corporations and none on government for ideological reasons, but corporate cash isn't like some magical force. There's a reason it's working, and it's because both groups are pigs. It takes the exact kind of faith in "god" to have faith in "government. (or, corporations, but nobody has faith in those)." Corporations will use government, and government will use corporations for its own ends. A corporation alone, at least, can be avoided in some way without threat of jail/fine (except in the cases of insurance in certain areas, where the government wants you to purchase them to help their insurance lobbyists out, thank Obama for the newest implementation of this).
And I'm not sure what the hell your complaint is even supposed to be. Corporations are offering TV show content over the internet...? That's your idea of oppression, is the presence of that content? I don't think the smaller ISPs or dialup ISPs were really adding great innovations to the internet, either, unless you want to somehow glorify AOL during its heyday, or services like Prodigy that offered rather lame games and cheesy news portals. Maybe you should re-state your complaint, because I'm at a loss how merely offering TV is subjugating the masses. I'm not sure if government controlling the internet is anymore of a solution to whatever the problem is supposed to be, considering corporations can't and don't jail or censor the way the government does (e.g., how governments respond to wikileaks).
I find it "curious" that this corporate takeover happened exactly when slow and shitty dialup died and DSL and Cable became popular. I guess there is something inherent in broadband that let the big mean corporations rise up. Oh, if only we were back in the dialup days.... Yes, I'm being facetious, but the internet then was a lot shittier than the internet now, not in term of content (geocities, shitty message board software, etc) but technology and implementation-wise it's just plain superior. So what am I supposed to conclude from THIS? That the corporations... improved things? (note: most ISPs even then were corporate-owned; I think you just really hate the word "corporate," so I can't be sure what you even mean by it).
Not only are you being extremely and ridiculously selective in the "downsides" of today's internet and its "upsides" then, but you haven't even given a moment's thought to why it could be that telecoms/cable providers control internet access nowadays other than some sort of nefarious evil scheme. Perhaps it's just because they controlled the means to provide faster-than-dialup service from the get-go; dial-up, after all, traveled through the phone lines...
Oh, this is too true, I've seen the Apple fanboys even say that microsdhc expandibility on non-ipod media players only made things more confusing and was unnecessary and thus ipods were better for not including it...!
A good feature, by Apple fanboy criterion, is any feature Apple puts in their products, a bad one is any feature Apple leaves out. So you're wrong by definition to them. You can't argue with them.
I'm sorry, but this is your typical over-analyzed and pretentious lit crit type nonsense. Tribute to video games... because it heavily foreshadows stuff? "Hypertext?" A heavy focus on characters and their relationships is nothing new, that's done in soap operas even. That was also one of the main focuses of Battlestar Galactica up until the end when suddenly it was just some John Zerzan fantasy instead.
There's no tribute to foreshadowing going on. Sure, while there are a lot of flashbacks in LOST, more than many other shows, but that doesn't mean LOST provides a revolutionary new way of storytelling.
Again, this is all just your standard humanities-inspired blahblahblah affair. Throw a bunch of shit out there, see what the readers buy, and use jargon and hope that enough people buy it that you get credited with created a new concept that is actually only marginally different from other concepts already out there. Give me a fucking break.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Come on guys, I hate McAfee as much as you do but "reasonable expenses" makes perfect sense and it's not something you can easily quantify everywhere... but we all know how ridiculous some potential charges are or how some stupid customers are. I can see some stupid, stupid people thinking they need to go out and buy a new 500 dollar computer to fix this problem.
So it's selfish to kill yourself... presumably because other people rely on your emotionally (at the very least).
So, if someone wants to kill themselves, it's wrong because other people might get really upset over it? So if someone is sick of life, in pain, or just plain emotionally damaged, they ought to stick around for others' sakes? Doesn't that make it selfish on the part of the people that rely on them emotionally instead?
Slashdot Mirror
That means little when the SCOTUS gets to declare what the constitution actually says or means. Sure, the first amendment reads plain as day, but that doesn't stop the SCOTUS from inventing categories such as protected/unprotected speech.
There's a reason I set you as a "fan," Shakrai. You're the only other person who gets it.
All the clowns going, "well, he's been declared sexually dangerous!" That's nice. This is kind of like the "terrorist watch list"/"no-fly list". Recently I read in my newspaper an argument that people on the list shouldn't be allowed to have guns, because they are "terrorists." Ahem.
What country do you live in? I'm not familiar with any that actually properly recognizes human rights.
Just like not anyone goes to Guantanamo--they also have to be "enemy combatants." Only "enemy combatants" are sent to Guantanamo, right? So it must be OK.
Now, if only we had a nice, liberal, Democratic judge on the... oh, wait.
Free speech is really just a slogan for people like you. It means nothing. I really hate your type of liberal bullshit. You are a plague, a disease; your type is the college campus dissent-silencing bullshit that fuels the politically-direct disease that is bringing down the free exchange in ideas.
You don't believe in rights. You believe in the mob. You believe in mob justice, of savagery.
You're questioning my age, when you can barely write like an adult?
The whole notion that there is "protected" and "unprotected" speech is ridiculous. Can you believe that whether speech is protected or not depends mostly on the judge's or jury's gut feelings and opinions about something? That art or communication can be judged by general people for its merits instead of just letting anyone interested in it decide?
This is not a free country, never was and never will be. Free speech is hilariously meaningless if free speech only means certain types of speech--it then becomes simply "allowed" speech. You can't -ever- claim that you have something called free speech if you're going to have committees of some sort vet the speech for content.
The obscenity and profanity issues, often like hate crimes (when the "hate crime" is nonthreatening") are really all the same thing--someone got conditioned to have a negative emotional reaction to some word or image, and thus they throw a hissy fit and start babbling on about "morality" and "greater good" blah blah blah blah.
This isn't a conservative/liberal thing. Both groups are equally fascistic when it comes to freedom of speech. If the ACLU is buying into the "protected speech" meme the courts have arbitrarily generated over time (that's the beauty of precedent, isn't it? You can create legal truths out of thing air!) then they're pretty useless too if they're going to just kowtow and toe the line of the judicial system's own bias and dogmas.
The whole idea of "protected" and "unprotected" speech should overturn in your mind COMPLETELY faith in the legal system as a whole. It shows that the legal system is full of ridiculous, moralistic dogma (often a different sort than your typical liberal/conservative slants, but a dogma nonetheless) and that you can go to jail for a long period of time without harming a single person. Who the fuck are geriatric judges to say what is and is not "offensive," and why should content be filtered by the state for whether it's offensive or not? And why does MY opinion not count, but a bunch of generic suburban imbeciles does? Nobody has the right not to be offended, regarding sex or politics or otherwise. If you find anything offensive enough to silence, the defect is with you, not the person making the speech.
Again, the entire notion of "unprotected" speech should shatter your entire view of the legal system and society in general, because it means you really are nothing more than a serf on some levels. "Free speech"--you're free to say what we say you can say. What a bunch of tripe. The legal system is a fucking cult, filled with priests (judges, in robes no less), dogmas (precedent), meaningless and arbitrary tradition, a holy text to interpret (the law, and just like any holy texts there are tons of interpretations of it), and even their own religious jargon (legalese, that only the priesthood is fit to interpret).
Oh? I'm unfamiliar with that, elaborate.
In any case, the .com registering system is entirely flawed, and is a centralized portion of the internet that I wish wasn't as it was.
Oh, great, a CHOMSKY quote.
Corporations are potentially democratic too. Hell, both government and corporations are POTENTIALLY anything. Hell, corporations in a sense are democratic as they're run largely by shareholders. And again, you can avoid doing business with a corporation, so whatever kind of "tyranny" it is (what an equivocation!) it's not the same kind that
Also, Chomsky ignores the fact that democracy can be totalitarian. In fact, many features of ours certainly is.
Here's where you go all wrong. It's not the corporations that made the internet better, it's the technology. That corporations control cable in a way that they don't control dial-up (e.g. anyone can talk to anyone else over the phone network) is just a historical accident. Send the government in to force the cable companies to lease bandwidth to smaller isps (after all they built that network with the help of the public.), that way we get all the benefits of the better technology, and the benefits of smaller ISPs.
No, I was turning his logic against him, of course it's the technology.
This is a great myth that liberal thinkers like to expound upon to justify certain policies toward education. The idea is that education is necessary for a properly running democracy, so the people can make educated decisions and keep the government in check... and they can do this, so long as they are educated... by the government.
That's silly, of course. High schools churn out patriotic, unthinking, placated Americans willing to have their rights and property taken away "for the greater good."
And even aside from the questionable premise that a government-provided education works to keep the government in-check, does a democracy really work just because the population are educated in some things? Nobody that spouts this slogan ever asks, "what is it necessary to be educated in?" Nobody, even the most educated of us, has any idea what policy X will do to the economy (apparently not even the politicians), being scientifically literate it one field doesn't mean you'll be literate in another, and how is having an education going to tell you when to go to war or not? These days all that stuff is determined by stuff secret and hidden from the citizenry, through secret intelligence. This certainly allows the government to lie to us like the cattle we are (Bush on Iraq) and there's little we can do.
Greed is the #1 factor. ALL people in a democracy, educated or not, are little piggies trying to get an ever-bigger piece of the pie, and politicians are only happy to oblige as it gets them votes and a position of power.
And no amount of education is going to fix most dyed-in-the-wool idiots. You can send a creationist through all sorts of biology classes but they'll likely still come out a creationist. There are always exceptions but the true believers will keep on believing. No, a democracy doesn't require an educated population to work, because a democracy doesn't work like it's supposed to, no more than communism does as we saw with the Soviet Union. The only difference is that democracy is OUR social myth, our ideological flag to wave, and thus we'll never admit that it's as failed a system as any other.
What a bunch of bullshit. The people moderating this nonsense up are letting their ideology show.
The difference between then and now is huge. For one, websites in general are more secure (you can't fuck up a messageboard anymore just by typing in !). They're much, MUCH more well-designed, just go look through archive.org for evidence of this. Forum softwares are DRASTICALLY better, instead of relying on geocities people register their own .com easily and affordably; e-mail accounts are MUCH easier to get (remember why hotmail got big?). Music, video (youtube, etc) are all easily transferred over the internet when it wasn't possible before. Internet shopping has matured greatly and amazon, newegg, and smaller sites offer great deals--yeah, yeah, ebay went downhill, whatever... So many amazing sites exist now that weren't even imaginable back then.
Yeah, let's just ignore Hulu (oh wait, that's the corporate takeover of the internet according to PopeRatzo), last.fm, all the blogs that have popped up by experts in their fields, the rise of bittorrent, Steam (for gaming), Google and the many peripheral services they provide, oh I could go on and on.
There's not much to whine about other then the death of usenet (although I insist it died because forum softwares improved and became accessible outside websites such as insidetheweb and ezboards) and the rise of spam.
The underlying technology is just vastly superior, if you disagree you can just shut up and go back to dialup and prove me wrong.
Quit painting "corporate" America as the evil and "government" as the good slayer of dragons; they're a two-headed beast, often times the two are indistinguishable. It is government law, after all, that makes the corporation a limited-liability organization. Where men go to jail for, corporations may only get a fine, if that. It's not that corporations are a corrupting influence on good and righteous government, it's that there is no such thing as good and righteous government anymore than communism is a realistic political system. Both "enlightened democracy" and "communism" fail because they simply don't work in practice. It's just part of our social mythos to pretend that one is more feasible than the other. People bitching about corporations using massive amounts of money to "bend" government to its will like to put all the blame on corporations and none on government for ideological reasons, but corporate cash isn't like some magical force. There's a reason it's working, and it's because both groups are pigs. It takes the exact kind of faith in "god" to have faith in "government. (or, corporations, but nobody has faith in those)." Corporations will use government, and government will use corporations for its own ends. A corporation alone, at least, can be avoided in some way without threat of jail/fine (except in the cases of insurance in certain areas, where the government wants you to purchase them to help their insurance lobbyists out, thank Obama for the newest implementation of this).
And I'm not sure what the hell your complaint is even supposed to be. Corporations are offering TV show content over the internet...? That's your idea of oppression, is the presence of that content? I don't think the smaller ISPs or dialup ISPs were really adding great innovations to the internet, either, unless you want to somehow glorify AOL during its heyday, or services like Prodigy that offered rather lame games and cheesy news portals. Maybe you should re-state your complaint, because I'm at a loss how merely offering TV is subjugating the masses. I'm not sure if government controlling the internet is anymore of a solution to whatever the problem is supposed to be, considering corporations can't and don't jail or censor the way the government does (e.g., how governments respond to wikileaks).
I find it "curious" that this corporate takeover happened exactly when slow and shitty dialup died and DSL and Cable became popular. I guess there is something inherent in broadband that let the big mean corporations rise up. Oh, if only we were back in the dialup days.... Yes, I'm being facetious, but the internet then was a lot shittier than the internet now, not in term of content (geocities, shitty message board software, etc) but technology and implementation-wise it's just plain superior. So what am I supposed to conclude from THIS? That the corporations... improved things? (note: most ISPs even then were corporate-owned; I think you just really hate the word "corporate," so I can't be sure what you even mean by it).
Not only are you being extremely and ridiculously selective in the "downsides" of today's internet and its "upsides" then, but you haven't even given a moment's thought to why it could be that telecoms/cable providers control internet access nowadays other than some sort of nefarious evil scheme. Perhaps it's just because they controlled the means to provide faster-than-dialup service from the get-go; dial-up, after all, traveled through the phone lines...
Oh, this is too true, I've seen the Apple fanboys even say that microsdhc expandibility on non-ipod media players only made things more confusing and was unnecessary and thus ipods were better for not including it...!
A good feature, by Apple fanboy criterion, is any feature Apple puts in their products, a bad one is any feature Apple leaves out. So you're wrong by definition to them. You can't argue with them.
1) Most people don't see it so it's essentially a new post to them;
2) It does wonders for my karma.
I'm sorry, but this is your typical over-analyzed and pretentious lit crit type nonsense. Tribute to video games... because it heavily foreshadows stuff? "Hypertext?" A heavy focus on characters and their relationships is nothing new, that's done in soap operas even. That was also one of the main focuses of Battlestar Galactica up until the end when suddenly it was just some John Zerzan fantasy instead.
There's no tribute to foreshadowing going on. Sure, while there are a lot of flashbacks in LOST, more than many other shows, but that doesn't mean LOST provides a revolutionary new way of storytelling.
Again, this is all just your standard humanities-inspired blahblahblah affair. Throw a bunch of shit out there, see what the readers buy, and use jargon and hope that enough people buy it that you get credited with created a new concept that is actually only marginally different from other concepts already out there. Give me a fucking break.
Or chess camp.
It's ridiculous. More brain-dead do-gooders fucking up the world with their dogmas and nonsense :/
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer.. In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walk among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Come on guys, I hate McAfee as much as you do but "reasonable expenses" makes perfect sense and it's not something you can easily quantify everywhere... but we all know how ridiculous some potential charges are or how some stupid customers are. I can see some stupid, stupid people thinking they need to go out and buy a new 500 dollar computer to fix this problem.
So it's selfish to kill yourself... presumably because other people rely on your emotionally (at the very least).
So, if someone wants to kill themselves, it's wrong because other people might get really upset over it? So if someone is sick of life, in pain, or just plain emotionally damaged, they ought to stick around for others' sakes? Doesn't that make it selfish on the part of the people that rely on them emotionally instead?
Red shift is actually communist, not right wing.
If a cop tickets another cop or a member of his family, you go and see what happens.
Maybe because your statistics are grossly off.
How is that different from being a gangster...?
So they can be sentenced to one month's vacation (with pay)?