Many of us already do take actions beyond writing here. I sure do. Hell, I've published political stuff that I already know was on display in places the police have been watching. And I've done plenty more than that, all of it peaceful, for what it's worth. If you had read the comments you would know that several others here have also taken a more active role.
In no way does bearing witness, which is, by the way, what we're doing here, preclude taking other action. Bearing witness is also a key part of democracy and, for that matter, Christianity.
If you have some factual grounds for *knowing* that "We're all keyboard corporals here", then please share them. Then again, don't bother since, as I already pointed out, I already know that you're wrong.
Close, but from what I've been reading, they had to "send for" a warrant which arrived a few hours later.
But I'm quibbling. Fundamentally, the point of a warrant is to serve as a guide to law enforcement officers to limit and define their actions, to explain those same limits to those whose privacy is being cut into, and to require law enforcement to wait for judicial approval before violating somebody's rights. A warrant is supposed to keep a citizen from ever having to just accept an officer saying "trust me" in a position where they are clearly about to do injury. If the warrant shows up so much as a nanosecond *after* an action is taken, then it's absurd to expect citizens to treat it as valid and it has failed. It's like giving an officer a bulletproof vest *after* a firefight. When you know that the firefight is about to happen. Such an action is contemptible at best and criminal at worst.
This was, in most sense that should matter, a warrantless search. Plain and simple.
SOME Republicans dropped bombs on defenseless civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we should round them all up and imprison them for life so it doesn't happen again.
I'm so sorry. Your logic comes from what exactly?
How can you conclude that the harrassment of possible participants, most of whom, let us note, were planning only to videotape the actions of others, justifies "to make a difference, you need to shed some blood"?
Explain this to me, please. Because to me you sound just like a police plant.
Without doubt, our law enforcement agencies have been even more throughly subverted and are even more corrupted than they used to be. And as we've seen from early retirements if nothing else, our military services are being subverted, too. Take a look at evangelical pressures on service members, most famously within the Air Force academy, if you don't know about this already.
So be it. We need to do something. Quite a few somethings, actually.
Well, speaking as a former workflow consultant, why the frack aren't we looking at our police and service academies with a fine toothed comb? The academies, the promotion system, and the way that duties are assigned are the things that police and military officers cite again and again when asked how to address these problems. They're right.
Just as we would if they were clients with organizational problems, if you are trying to change how things work, you don't just yell at them, you study how they operate, pass commands, train, and compensate.
Protesting is fun and all but if we're serious, then we need to turn a few thousand spotlights on how these organizations run, document and share what we find, and change those things that cause problems. Anything else is pretty much just wanking.
The urine is addressed below. The bows and arrows were less than would be found in the average suburban American house so I'm not impressed. As for a "gun", I saw no "gun". Can you point that out to me?
Hey, old guy, read the articles. Right up front and center was a rep from the National Lawyer's Guild, as usual. Maybe the average lawyer is too much of a wuss or too shortsighted to put in the time (though plenty did in NYC during and after the RNC) but the Lawyers' Guild can be counted on, as predictable as sunrise, to be there in the thick of things, doing what lawyers are supposed to when rights are being violated: serving witness, acting as intermediaries, citing relevant codes, and otherwise doing the hard work of trying to keep this a nation of laws instead of simply one of the powerful.
And yeah, they've been there for me when I needed them.
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?
No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.
I've seen horseshit comments like yours before and they all have one thing in common. I have NEVER seen anybody like you continue to take that attitude when just once those attacks are done to you.
You can disguise it in fancy language all you want but if "it was okay a hundred and fifty years ago so it's fine now" is truly how you see the world, show us your outhouse, your one set of clothes, your coal oil lanterns and lack of electricity. Show us female friends who see no point in tampons. Or that you can't be bothered with painkillers beyond a pint of rotgut.
"Wyatt Earp", huh? Show us, do you walk the walk or do you just talk the talk?
There is no "may" on this. The FBI IS involved in this. They've already announced that they would be playing a key role in this.
As somebody who was right in the middle of the 2004 RNC protests (one of my friends is still helping to process legal work from protesters who were unfairly arrested) I can guarantee that it will eventually come out that the Department of Homeland Security was coordinating this. Just from the reports that I've read so far, there were statements that officers in several kinds of uniform were involved. Eventually it will come out that at least one of those "officers" was actually a fed.
Face it, folks. Under current circumstances, local police departments simply don't have a choice in cases like this. Just like routers at ISPs, local police departments are now required to cede authority to any number of federal authorities any time the feds say so. And just like ISPs, they're forbidden to tell us that they're acting under federal orders. Don't just get mad at Minneapolis-St. Paul police. Stay angry at the feds.
On the other hand, the Minneapolis police have been using Safe Zone and related programs to suppress dissent for a long time now. I was hearing about the rampup when I was there in May and I've been hearing about more and more use of such programs to prevent free speech for a couple of months now.
Minneapolis is under lockdown. If you walk into Arise! or Mayday, assume that you're being photographed, at the very least. This will still be true for a minimum of a few weeks after the RNC leaves town. And we have to assume that they will continue to declare any and everything weapons. Did you look at their pile of "evidence"? Except for the books and a few other things, all of that could be found in the average garage. And none of it is as dangerous as the contents of many a Republican pickup truck. How many "normal American" homes would be so empty of guns, right down to paintguns?
This is what a police state looks like, folks. Chances are it'll get worse from here.
Getting ESA to shoulder more of the burden? Greenhouses? I couldn't agree more. In theory. How do you suggest actually getting that done? How does one get the fractious, miserly, feuding Europeans to actually get that sort of things done? Or, for that matter, Japan?
You show me a battle plan and I'll climb aboard. But for now I'll just continue paying my NSS dues, encourage local kids to get into space-related stuff (spent about fifty bucks and about three hours on that in the past month), and stick to what I can see in front of me.
I don't understand why y'all are accepting the idea that we need to choose between "nothing" and "continue the shuttle" as our only options. Right here on/. a few weeks back we had a thred about options, starting with the ESA crew vehicle and going from there. Add the X-38 to the list and we've got at least half a dozen options beyond that the chowderheaded one of using the shuttle.
Read Mullane's all too articulate book to get some idea of how screwed up NASA's approach is if you haven't studied already. This isn't about spending more money; it's about culture.
The ISS averages about 230 miles up, which is a reachable orbit for any number of possibilities. Just to quote Wikipedia, they list:
Visiting spacecraft
Russian (Roskosmos) Soyuz spacecraft - crew rotation and emergency evacuation, replaced every 6 months
Russian (Roskosmos) Progress spacecraft - resupply vehicle
European (ESA) Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) - resupply vehicle Currently docked
As of 2008-06-11:
Soyuz TMA-12 is at the Pirs nadir port
Jules Verne (ATV-001) is at the Zvezda aft port[39]
Progress M-64 is at the Zarya nadir port Planned
Japanese (JAXA) H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) resupply vehicle for Kibo module (scheduled for 2009)
American (NASA) Orion for possible crew rotation and as resupply transporter (officially scheduled for 2014) Proposed
SpaceX Dragon for NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (Scheduled for 2009)
Russian (Roskosmos) Space Shuttle Kliper for possible crew rotation and as resupply transporter (cancelled)
European-Russian Crew Space Transportation System (Soyuz-derived) crew rotation and resupply spacecraft (scheduled for 2014)
An additional spacecraft, the K-1 Vehicle manufactured by Rocketplane Kistler, was proposed as part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and was scheduled to fly in 2009. On October 18, 2007, NASA discontinued its agreement with Rocketplane Kistler after the company couldn't secure further financing and didn't meet a critical design review for the pressurized cargo module. NASA then announced that the remaining $175 million commitment to the project would be made available to other companies. On 19 February 2008, NASA awarded Orbital Sciences Corporation with the remaining $170 million to develop its Cygnus spacecraft for the COTS program.
If we had our act together, the first thing we would do would be to pump a billion or two into expanding the Rocket Racing people's planned races into more vehicle types, thus effectively funding lots of fast work to develop better technologies without having to manage squat. The next would be to have a thousand people or so taking every possible document about space-related technology, including maintenance protocols that NASA's got and bloody well put them into web-accessable PDFs. Will this mean a few more billion buying rights from aerospace firms? Yes. This is their final payment for many of those technologies; from here on in that tech is being open-sourced. They've been paid enough already and afaic they haven't done any too good a job of it.
We don't need yet another centralized, sixties-style project to develop a vessel. We need just the kind of diverse and open approach that the rest of out here beyond the defense/aerospace sealed up culture use very day.
I don't dispute that getting humans to space and back is serious business, but it's also something we've been doing for decades now.
We have plenty of possibilities. We just need to do a rational job of exploiting them.
Oh, make no mistake, I was only suggesting getting enough skill to cut a core, cut a centered hole in that core, and taper and smooth the resulting very simple band. I've been buying supplies on and around NYC's 46th street for over twenty years now and am well aware of how much skill making a complex ring takes. As for cost, I would say $250 for the drill press, if it's used, and about another $150 for the bits should do fine. We're talking a handful of simple bits and a few grinding stones. Admittedly, though, I'm used to buying my bits and such from places like American Science and Surplus and having had the time to track down the right stuff cheap, so YMMV.
Another approach would be to use some material or object of particular significance to you both, take a few hundred dollars of the typical cost of a ring to buy a precision drill press and some appropriate bits, make a ring yourself out of said material, and when you're done, you'll have a great ring and your own drill press. Maybe a piece of cast iron from a bench from your first date or something like that.
Unusual elements are nice but coming up with a design where you can literally say "I sweated for days to get this just right" would say even more and would certainly be a tale that she would be proud to share.
If, that is, this is what SHE wants. Like everybody else here, I can't help but ask, is this the kind of thing that *she* has in mind?
Boston *is* known for music and art; it just tends to get lost in the shadow of NYC. But by the standards of a normal city, it is just fine. Fwiw, Boston is also close enough to Providence for such an event to have some appeal for folks like the RISD crowd.
Personally, if we're talking about areas with vibrant music and game development scenes, screw California; I would love to see such events done in Orlando and Austin.
Now that we've established that, when will you be converting all seven thousand-plus files from his site, building a front end, populating it, and giving us access to your obviously far superior solution?
It's early in the week. You'll have it ready by Monday or so, right?
All of the huge empires you speak of were considerably further south than U.S. territory. Even long-past empires further north were pretty far south. Trust me, anybody who has read Bernal Diaz twice is all too aware of how not just territorial but flat out imperialist some pre-Columbian native American cultures were. But just about all of them would not apply to a question about the accountability of the U.S. government. The people Cortez fought and allied with were undoubtedly imperialist but they simply weren't on U.S. territory. A better example would be the Iroquois Confederacy, about whom such a question gets a good deal fuzzier. Or even groups like the "Seminoles" who only came into existence as an artifact of white activity. But if you look at the Seminole wars their activities tended to be true to their (mostly) Creek and African antecedents and showed a great reluctance to engage in the kind of sustained, winner-takes-all activity we consider normal for warfare.
None of this addresses the very many cases of Indians attacking settlements from Maine right on down with a clear intent to kill and/or enslave every last man, woman and child they found. But even there, as I've read more books that go into the particulars of given attacks, it starts getting messy to try to define most of them as having been carried out under the leadership of what we would consider a nation-state and they fought against invading groups, not to hold territory.
But, frankly, I'm none too clear about why you think you have grounds to disagree with me in the first place. Ya know, I've been mostly off/. for a few years recently and I've noticed that one thing that has changed is that these days/.ers just flat out insist on reducing every fucking statement to a grotesquely simplified absolute, whether the original post merits it or not. Gawd forbid anybody actually, ya know READ what somebody else wrote with any degree of attention. My original post contained several disclaimers, including "in general" and the one you noted. I never denied that there were exceptions. In fact, I did precisely the opposite. As somebody who has almost certainly "read up" at least ten times what you have on both Pre-Columbian cultures in general and warfare between them and Americans in specific, I am quite well aware of the complexity of the situation and made a point of noting just that. But it feels better to ignore that and then lecture me, doesn't it?
Yeah, tribes fought. And I'm reluctant to make generalizations about what was, in fact, something like several hundred distinct cultures, but in general, they not only didn't fight "over land" the way that whites did, their definition of war was very different from ours indeed. I was just reading a few days ago about how freaky it was for white soldiers to find themselves facing a "warrior" tribe who would run up to them, touch them, and run back, to the roars and approval of their fellow warriors. Search the phrase "counting coup" to learn about this.
Yes, Native American tribes fought each other. Yes, they sometimes killed each other. But what it means when you say that they "fought over territory" is very different indeed from what it means when modern countries go to war. There is no part of that phrase that means what you evidently think it means.
and suggest a craft that uses, say, vaporized iron?
I don't know about you but if I'm designing a device I'm planning to trust with my life, I'll want it to run on something a bit more uniform than regolith.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us already do take actions beyond writing here. I sure do. Hell, I've published political stuff that I already know was on display in places the police have been watching. And I've done plenty more than that, all of it peaceful, for what it's worth. If you had read the comments you would know that several others here have also taken a more active role.
In no way does bearing witness, which is, by the way, what we're doing here, preclude taking other action. Bearing witness is also a key part of democracy and, for that matter, Christianity.
If you have some factual grounds for *knowing* that "We're all keyboard corporals here", then please share them. Then again, don't bother since, as I already pointed out, I already know that you're wrong.
Close, but from what I've been reading, they had to "send for" a warrant which arrived a few hours later.
But I'm quibbling. Fundamentally, the point of a warrant is to serve as a guide to law enforcement officers to limit and define their actions, to explain those same limits to those whose privacy is being cut into, and to require law enforcement to wait for judicial approval before violating somebody's rights. A warrant is supposed to keep a citizen from ever having to just accept an officer saying "trust me" in a position where they are clearly about to do injury. If the warrant shows up so much as a nanosecond *after* an action is taken, then it's absurd to expect citizens to treat it as valid and it has failed.
It's like giving an officer a bulletproof vest *after* a firefight. When you know that the firefight is about to happen. Such an action is contemptible at best and criminal at worst.
This was, in most sense that should matter, a warrantless search. Plain and simple.
SOME Republicans dropped bombs on defenseless civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we should round them all up and imprison them for life so it doesn't happen again.
Works for me ;->
I'm so sorry. Your logic comes from what exactly?
How can you conclude that the harrassment of possible participants, most of whom, let us note, were planning only to videotape the actions of others, justifies "to make a difference, you need to shed some blood"?
Explain this to me, please. Because to me you sound just like a police plant.
The "buckets of urine" are repeatedly addressed above, as they are if you RTFAs to the end. Please do not allow spin to mislead you.
Without doubt, our law enforcement agencies have been even more throughly subverted and are even more corrupted than they used to be. And as we've seen from early retirements if nothing else, our military services are being subverted, too. Take a look at evangelical pressures on service members, most famously within the Air Force academy, if you don't know about this already.
So be it. We need to do something. Quite a few somethings, actually.
Well, speaking as a former workflow consultant, why the frack aren't we looking at our police and service academies with a fine toothed comb? The academies, the promotion system, and the way that duties are assigned are the things that police and military officers cite again and again when asked how to address these problems. They're right.
Just as we would if they were clients with organizational problems, if you are trying to change how things work, you don't just yell at them, you study how they operate, pass commands, train, and compensate.
Protesting is fun and all but if we're serious, then we need to turn a few thousand spotlights on how these organizations run, document and share what we find, and change those things that cause problems. Anything else is pretty much just wanking.
Dude, count the digits. His ID is in the low six figures. His ID is waaay older than yours.
A tin of lighter fluid the size of a, well, pack of ciggies. Some adhesive. A couple dozen rocks.
I love that a small pile of bricks was seized and displayed. OMG! They own BRICKS! OMFG! ThE ENTIRE HOUSE IS BUILT OF WEAPONS!!! Kill them all!!!!!!!!
The urine is addressed below. The bows and arrows were less than would be found in the average suburban American house so I'm not impressed. As for a "gun", I saw no "gun". Can you point that out to me?
Hey, old guy, read the articles. Right up front and center was a rep from the National Lawyer's Guild, as usual. Maybe the average lawyer is too much of a wuss or too shortsighted to put in the time (though plenty did in NYC during and after the RNC) but the Lawyers' Guild can be counted on, as predictable as sunrise, to be there in the thick of things, doing what lawyers are supposed to when rights are being violated: serving witness, acting as intermediaries, citing relevant codes, and otherwise doing the hard work of trying to keep this a nation of laws instead of simply one of the powerful.
And yeah, they've been there for me when I needed them.
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?
No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.
I'm missing this. Who in this thred said that the Civil War was "some little popgun war"?
I've seen horseshit comments like yours before and they all have one thing in common. I have NEVER seen anybody like you continue to take that attitude when just once those attacks are done to you.
You can disguise it in fancy language all you want but if "it was okay a hundred and fifty years ago so it's fine now" is truly how you see the world, show us your outhouse, your one set of clothes, your coal oil lanterns and lack of electricity. Show us female friends who see no point in tampons. Or that you can't be bothered with painkillers beyond a pint of rotgut.
"Wyatt Earp", huh? Show us, do you walk the walk or do you just talk the talk?
There is no "may" on this. The FBI IS involved in this. They've already announced that they would be playing a key role in this.
As somebody who was right in the middle of the 2004 RNC protests (one of my friends is still helping to process legal work from protesters who were unfairly arrested) I can guarantee that it will eventually come out that the Department of Homeland Security was coordinating this. Just from the reports that I've read so far, there were statements that officers in several kinds of uniform were involved. Eventually it will come out that at least one of those "officers" was actually a fed.
Face it, folks. Under current circumstances, local police departments simply don't have a choice in cases like this. Just like routers at ISPs, local police departments are now required to cede authority to any number of federal authorities any time the feds say so. And just like ISPs, they're forbidden to tell us that they're acting under federal orders. Don't just get mad at Minneapolis-St. Paul police. Stay angry at the feds.
On the other hand, the Minneapolis police have been using Safe Zone and related programs to suppress dissent for a long time now. I was hearing about the rampup when I was there in May and I've been hearing about more and more use of such programs to prevent free speech for a couple of months now.
Minneapolis is under lockdown. If you walk into Arise! or Mayday, assume that you're being photographed, at the very least. This will still be true for a minimum of a few weeks after the RNC leaves town. And we have to assume that they will continue to declare any and everything weapons. Did you look at their pile of "evidence"? Except for the books and a few other things, all of that could be found in the average garage. And none of it is as dangerous as the contents of many a Republican pickup truck. How many "normal American" homes would be so empty of guns, right down to paintguns?
This is what a police state looks like, folks. Chances are it'll get worse from here.
Getting ESA to shoulder more of the burden? Greenhouses? I couldn't agree more. In theory. How do you suggest actually getting that done? How does one get the fractious, miserly, feuding Europeans to actually get that sort of things done? Or, for that matter, Japan?
You show me a battle plan and I'll climb aboard. But for now I'll just continue paying my NSS dues, encourage local kids to get into space-related stuff (spent about fifty bucks and about three hours on that in the past month), and stick to what I can see in front of me.
Read Mullane's all too articulate book to get some idea of how screwed up NASA's approach is if you haven't studied already. This isn't about spending more money; it's about culture.
The ISS averages about 230 miles up, which is a reachable orbit for any number of possibilities. Just to quote Wikipedia, they list:
Visiting spacecraft
Russian (Roskosmos) Soyuz spacecraft - crew rotation and emergency evacuation, replaced every 6 months
Russian (Roskosmos) Progress spacecraft - resupply vehicle
European (ESA) Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) - resupply vehicle
Currently docked As of 2008-06-11:
Soyuz TMA-12 is at the Pirs nadir port
Jules Verne (ATV-001) is at the Zvezda aft port[39]
Progress M-64 is at the Zarya nadir port
Planned
Japanese (JAXA) H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) resupply vehicle for Kibo module (scheduled for 2009)
American (NASA) Orion for possible crew rotation and as resupply transporter (officially scheduled for 2014)
Proposed
SpaceX Dragon for NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (Scheduled for 2009)
Russian (Roskosmos) Space Shuttle Kliper for possible crew rotation and as resupply transporter (cancelled)
European-Russian Crew Space Transportation System (Soyuz-derived) crew rotation and resupply spacecraft (scheduled for 2014)
An additional spacecraft, the K-1 Vehicle manufactured by Rocketplane Kistler, was proposed as part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and was scheduled to fly in 2009. On October 18, 2007, NASA discontinued its agreement with Rocketplane Kistler after the company couldn't secure further financing and didn't meet a critical design review for the pressurized cargo module. NASA then announced that the remaining $175 million commitment to the project would be made available to other companies. On 19 February 2008, NASA awarded Orbital Sciences Corporation with the remaining $170 million to develop its Cygnus spacecraft for the COTS program.
If we had our act together, the first thing we would do would be to pump a billion or two into expanding the Rocket Racing people's planned races into more vehicle types, thus effectively funding lots of fast work to develop better technologies without having to manage squat. The next would be to have a thousand people or so taking every possible document about space-related technology, including maintenance protocols that NASA's got and bloody well put them into web-accessable PDFs. Will this mean a few more billion buying rights from aerospace firms? Yes. This is their final payment for many of those technologies; from here on in that tech is being open-sourced. They've been paid enough already and afaic they haven't done any too good a job of it.
We don't need yet another centralized, sixties-style project to develop a vessel. We need just the kind of diverse and open approach that the rest of out here beyond the defense/aerospace sealed up culture use very day.
I don't dispute that getting humans to space and back is serious business, but it's also something we've been doing for decades now.
We have plenty of possibilities. We just need to do a rational job of exploiting them.
Oh, and Drill City is worth a look. But I'm too lazy to do another link.
Oh, make no mistake, I was only suggesting getting enough skill to cut a core, cut a centered hole in that core, and taper and smooth the resulting very simple band. I've been buying supplies on and around NYC's 46th street for over twenty years now and am well aware of how much skill making a complex ring takes. As for cost, I would say $250 for the drill press, if it's used, and about another $150 for the bits should do fine. We're talking a handful of simple bits and a few grinding stones. Admittedly, though, I'm used to buying my bits and such from places like American Science and Surplus and having had the time to track down the right stuff cheap, so YMMV.
Another approach would be to use some material or object of particular significance to you both, take a few hundred dollars of the typical cost of a ring to buy a precision drill press and some appropriate bits, make a ring yourself out of said material, and when you're done, you'll have a great ring and your own drill press. Maybe a piece of cast iron from a bench from your first date or something like that.
Unusual elements are nice but coming up with a design where you can literally say "I sweated for days to get this just right" would say even more and would certainly be a tale that she would be proud to share.
If, that is, this is what SHE wants. Like everybody else here, I can't help but ask, is this the kind of thing that *she* has in mind?
Personally, if we're talking about areas with vibrant music and game development scenes, screw California; I would love to see such events done in Orlando and Austin.
Now that we've established that, when will you be converting all seven thousand-plus files from his site, building a front end, populating it, and giving us access to your obviously far superior solution?
It's early in the week. You'll have it ready by Monday or so, right?
None of this addresses the very many cases of Indians attacking settlements from Maine right on down with a clear intent to kill and/or enslave every last man, woman and child they found. But even there, as I've read more books that go into the particulars of given attacks, it starts getting messy to try to define most of them as having been carried out under the leadership of what we would consider a nation-state and they fought against invading groups, not to hold territory.
But, frankly, I'm none too clear about why you think you have grounds to disagree with me in the first place. Ya know, I've been mostly off /. for a few years recently and I've noticed that one thing that has changed is that these days /.ers just flat out insist on reducing every fucking statement to a grotesquely simplified absolute, whether the original post merits it or not. Gawd forbid anybody actually, ya know READ what somebody else wrote with any degree of attention. My original post contained several disclaimers, including "in general" and the one you noted. I never denied that there were exceptions. In fact, I did precisely the opposite. As somebody who has almost certainly "read up" at least ten times what you have on both Pre-Columbian cultures in general and warfare between them and Americans in specific, I am quite well aware of the complexity of the situation and made a point of noting just that. But it feels better to ignore that and then lecture me, doesn't it?
Yes, Native American tribes fought each other. Yes, they sometimes killed each other. But what it means when you say that they "fought over territory" is very different indeed from what it means when modern countries go to war. There is no part of that phrase that means what you evidently think it means.
So, waddayahthink, should we all buy cases of Red Mars and leave copies sitting around at their nearest gathering spots? Sounds like a plan to me.
I don't know about you but if I'm designing a device I'm planning to trust with my life, I'll want it to run on something a bit more uniform than regolith.
anyway, your idea is dirty! ;->