When you write a program that needs to print the primes up to a certain number, you can easily create a formal proof that your program program is correct.
But when your program is say "apache", that needs to interact with many different browsers on one side, and interpret PHP scripts that interact with databases, this formal proof becomes impossible. Similarly, you cannot write a formal spec for the interaction with the user in for example, a web browser.
While things like the halting problem obviously prevent fully formally proving the correctness of programs, you can go much farther than we generally go today. For example, I participated in an EU project where they constructed a formal model of the PikeOS separation kernel (kind of like an embedded real-time hypervisor). They also generalised this model, which includes support for things like interrupts and context switches.
The general population should just shut their fucking mouths when they feel like spewing an "opinion" about something.
Then why don't you starting by setting a good example?
Science is a process and is hard.
That's why it's perfectly fine for people to voice concerns when they start experimenting in the wild. It's not like we have a perfect overview of how significantly reducing these mosquito populations will affect all other animals that feed on them (and the animals that feed on those, plants that depend on their excrement etc), just to name one potential unintended side effect. Or how it may allow other animals to largely expand their population due to reduced competition for habitats or food sources (mosquitos generally don't survive on blood, that's just what they need for procreation). Or conversely, certain nutrients no longer getting sufficiently removed from the water by mosquito larvae, resulting on too high concentrations of certain substances that then start killing other animals or plants.
TL;DR: Voice educated questions about scientific stuff. Do not broadcast uninformed opinions derived from your safe spot.
If anything is anti-science, it's trying to pre-emptively paint any debate by the general public as uninformed hipster trash. Because that is how you create luddites: by telling people they don't have a say, can't possibly understand anything about the ramifications, and should shut up and defer to some abstract scientists in ivory towers on the authority of some anonymous coward throwing a tantrum.
Oh, the article obviously very biassed, no question about it. But I like the fact that the author doesn't try to pretend she's not biased or writing in a "balanced" way. It makes it all the more believable to me. But again: it could also be completely made up for all I know, although she's dropping a lot of names of people that were present and specifics that should make it easy to debunk things in that case.
If the way that Milo guy is portrayed in the article is in any way accurate, he doesn't appear to espouse any viewpoints at all. He just enjoys trolling, including trolling people into believing that what he writes are actually his viewpoints.
Of course Twitter may, like Facebook, help/hurt/hide/quash certain trending topics etc, but I don't think this person's case a particularly good example of how it's ruled by some kind of elite that does not like any dissent.
Or maybe not, since he appears to quite enjoy the current situation.
Disclaimer: I had never before even heard of this "Milo" (or of the author of that article, for that matter). But maybe that's because I'm not on Twitter.
and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
You forgot that it's the only form of energy that's currently regulated to include all of externalities in its cost.
No, since for nuclear a bunch of externalities are covered by the government at a rate that is below what the market is willing to offer (since the market doesn't want to cover them at all).
For a fair comparison, you'd need to require coal to catch everything (CO2, sulphur, other toxins, more radioactive isotopes than a nuclear plant, etc)
from all chimneys, transport and store that securely for hundreds of years.
I doubt Jill Stein is very much in favour of coal fired plants.
And despite that, nuclear is still competitive and causes many orders of magnitude less deaths.
That seems to be a little simplistic, given that she apparently even got the Green Party to remove all mentions of homeopathy from their platform. That said, pure placebo's (such as homeopathy, VR and even the colour of pills) can have their use either separately from (in case of e.g. a hypochondriac) or in combination with regular treatment.
and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
Furthermore, she wants "a moratorium on GMOs", which wikipedia states, "There is a scientific consensus[147][148][149][150] that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food".
While she indeed argues against it because of safety arguments, there are plenty of other reasons why many people are against GMOs. Just look at the majority of comments on the Slashdot story regarding one of the "GMOs are safe" studies.
I REALLY want to vote third party, but we need some third party candidates who are not anti-science crackpots.
Bashing using arguments that are either easily refuted, or at the very least less clear cut than presented, is anti-science. Name-calling while posting as AC is just silly.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a kickstarter to fund legal action against Fox.
If the video owner can catch them for the copyright infringement they can hammer them for Perjury for the DMCA notice.
The problem is that they did not commit perjury regarding the DMCA notice. In the context of a DMCA notice, the only thing that must be true is that you own the copyright to the material you claim that is being infringed. Whether or not the allegedly infringing material actually infringes (and whether you could/should have known this), is irrelevant as far as the DMCA perjury clause is concerned.
It does make me wonder why there haven't been any public DMCA take down campaigns aimed against big companies yet though.
Until now, everyone living within 20km of a nuclear power plant had to have immediate access to iodine pills. The High Council for Health (a scientific body responsible for giving advice concerning health regulations to the government) has advised to increased this radius to 100km, and the government has followed this advice. Everyone in Belgium lives within 100km of a Belgian, Dutch or French nuclear power plant. Hence, iodine pills for everyone.
I think that's more a matter of others taking advantage of an opportunity than a concerted effort of which he is part. It definitely does seem like a mob is hammering you though.
Probably not, but there's plenty of dislike in the US for Brazil's leftwing government, with plenty of attackingpropaganda by US political pundits. The last time a coup happen in Brazil it was directlysupported by the US. Combine that with the fact that the current president (the one they're trying to impeach) was tortured by US and UK-trained torturers, it's not that far-fetched to assume that some US citizens are also involved in these trolling campaigns (but again, I doubt it's the case for this Igw guy; he's probably just badly informed).
For those not following Brazilian politics, Brazil has been plagued by corruption scandals and economic woes, leading to not a literal coup, but a supermajority vote by the Brazilian House to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, which means it moves to the Senate for confirmation, then an actual trial. It's an emotionally charged issue (some representatives actually burst into song during the impeachment proceedings), but being resolved peacefully.
The funny thing is that you can do exactly the same (it's the first talk in that video) to datamine the CIA, FBI,... and their subcontractors. The resulting project names you find range from scary-but-expected ("Panopticon") to downright disturbing ("Never shake a baby").
Yeah, I already figured that was the kind of non-answer I'd get. You might want to figure out why you are so obsessed with it though (or maybe you already know, and this is your way of dealing with it).
Good. Maybe this will limit the microaggressive behavior some cisgender white males and help keep Reddit a safe place so everyone else can express their more valid opinions. They also need to add a hugcircle feature.
You seem to have a really intense fixation on the terms "hugcircle" and "microaggression". I'm not sure what the problem is with a feature that allows you to hide comments from idiots. Killfiles have been around for ages for usenet and email (long before those words ever were a thing), so why should it be different for a random web based forum?
I see your leftist Slashdot conspiracy and raise the fact that the same often happens when you don't beat the rightwing drums: exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3
Not sure if down-modding pro-homeopathy is really a right-wing type thing to do, probably more of a secular-humanist type thing.
If you click the links I posted in my comments (to other Slashdot stories, e.g. about the use of VR to dull phantom limb pain), you can see it's just about the fact that triggering a placebo effect can be a valid course of therapy in some cases. Homeopathy is, as far as I am concerned, a obvious example of triggering a placebo effect.
I'm pretty sure the downmodding was more because I was countering the attack on Jeremy Corbyn (which that whole story was about), who is the devil incarnate as far as the right wing UK is concerned.
In Exhibit 3, it looked like you might have misunderstood the parent poster but they thought you were being coy. Communicating tone isn't easy on the internet. Yet another reason I don't care about karma.
I'm not sure how I misunderstood him. He claimed, as far as I can see, that only Muslims massacre people for clearly idiotic/nonsense reasons, under a title of "keep saying there's no Islamic terrorist problem". I tried to counter that with an example of how we, the enlightened Westerners with our democracy, just as well use nonsense reasons ("spreading democracy", "destroying WMDs") for justifying massacring people. The arguments used are different but in the end it's just a matter of finetuning the justification to better resonate with the intended target public.
Maybe I should have been more explicit: you can just as easily title a comment as "keep saying there's no Western democracy problem", with as content "I'll believe it when Russia, China, Iran and North Korea start repeated drone bombing of as many other countries as the US, while also triggering the rise of a scourge similar to IS as cherry on the cake.". And such a claim would be equally nonsensical, as far as I'm concerned. Correlation & causation...
Nevermind the NSA, I think slashdot's moderation system probably does a better job at suppressing minority opinions.
Only if you care about/. karma. I don't. I get down-modded quite a bit because I don't beat the leftist drum either.
I see your leftist Slashdot conspiracy and raise the fact that the same often happens when you don't beat the rightwing drums: exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3 (click on the comment score when logged in to see the fight between the flamebait and interesting/insightful mods).
Stupid moderators downmod stuff they don't like as flamebait/troll. There's nothing particularly leftwing or rightwing about it.
Regarding the hospital bombing: you don't need conspiracy theories, you only have to read the ever changing statements put out by the US military in the wake of the attack (from "mistake" to "it was a Taliban hideout from which US troops were attacked" to "mistake" again, and everything in between), combined with the facts that e.g. the attacks continued for 30 minutes after Doctors without Borders got into contact with US military officials, and that only the hospital was hit within the compound.
I think I also finally understand why I'm not getting the point that I wanted to make across to you: you seem to genuinely believe that Bush reason for invading Iraq was "spreading democracy". I naively assumed that pretty much everyone by now understood that was not a goal at all (probably caught in a similar trap as you earlier due to the "many others" that I regularly talk to, read and hear).
I was not in any way talking about moral relativism or about what social form is superior to another or not. Given my (yes, my) assumption that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with democracy and that democracy was just a pretext (ab)used to mobilise public support for committing atrocities, I was trying to point out that this is no different to (ab)using Islam for exactly the same purpose. You seem to argue in favour of take everyone's justifications for committing atrocities mostly at face value.
You may also want to watch The Rise of ISIS by NPR frontline for some background on how the ISIS mess started starting from Al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. If you replace Sunni/Shia with Hutu/Tutsi in the story about the power struggles and repression of certain groups, you get something that's very close to the Hutu/Tutsi situation in Rwanda and (to some lesser extent) Congo. And if you want background about how Al Qaeda started (it's much more complex than "the US gave some weapons to some Afghans to fight the Russians"), you may want to watch the excellent BBC documentary Bitter Lake.
My answer is summarised in the second paragraph of my other answer to you. Apart from, more or less once more, stating that I honestly cannot think of a single reason why blowing up people by abusing the justification of democracy is somehow on a different scale of morality that doing the same in the name of a religion (any religion), I'm not sure what else to say. Well, maybe that it's true that in our generally more secularised Western world, aggressors focus on different arguments that resonate better with the public here (democracy rather than Christianity).
To be clear: I was not trying to prove that Christianity is worse or as bad as Islam or something like that. The answer to that would be (IMO, but of course the "others" you called upon to reinforce your rebuttal won't care about that either) "mu". Just like democracy is not better or worse than either in this context. They're all just tools used to play a particular public's opinion in this context, and to appease one or other conscience. I just wanted to give an example of how, today, Christians (note that the OP talked about Christians, not Christianity) are in fact still committing atrocities, and even explicitly against Muslims (née terrorists). Who cares about what's written on the bombs, or what the drone operators yell when they press the fire button on their joystick, when the justification behind it is rotten to the core anyway? I doubt it matters to the people at the receiving end, scales of morality be damned.
Regarding the innocent bystanders: I was only talking about numbers released by the US army. They themselves, in their own (secret until leaked) statistics, admit they basically have no idea about who is an innocent bystander and who isn't, so they just count everyone they possibly can as an enemy combattant. You and your morality will hopefully see that there is an issue as far as morality is concerned if you keep bombing people in the full knowledge that you don't have even the slightest idea how many innocents you are killing (not even afterwards), and moreover are appeasing the conscience of whoever feels the need by claiming that pretty much everyone you kill was in fact a combatant. Those bombs might as well be recruitment pamphlets for IS (and in fact, they act exactly like that). John Oliver explained all about the insanity of the drone strikes quite well, too.
Finally, drone strikes most certainly are not in the daily news here in Belgium, unlike news about IS attacks. In fact, it's been quite some time since I read anything about drone strikes on the news site of our public broadcaster (even if they pride themselves on their holistic, neutral reporting, and are definitely not US apologists or anything like that).
With "this" I indeed referred to the Brussels attacks, but it equally applies to the whole rhetoric about how Islam lies at the basis of all of this terrorism. I've discussed this more extensively in another comment.
Or, as implied by my comment above: this terrorism is as much inspired by Islam as US drone strikes and bombing doctors-without-borders hospitals is inspired by Western democracy ("one nation under God" and all that jazz). Even more explicitly: I don't see either Islam or Western democracy as causally linked to the atrocities committed by either group, even if they all (purportedly or genuinely) identify with one of them.
When the Christians are in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY -- right now, in 2016 -- shooting innocent civilians, blowing up car bombs, bulldozing and dynamiting the cultural treasures of other religions, raping children, beheading people for drawing pictures of Christ, etc., all in the name of Jesus, and trying to establish a worldwide Christian nation (and telling people that's what they're doing), then I'll agree. And I mean now. Not hundreds of years ago during the Crusades and not during the Inquisition. I might right fucking now in 2016 in the modern, civilized world. Until then, quit trying to equate what these 7th Century barbarians are doing with any other modern religion, because it's complete bullshit.
Drone strikes are not in the news everyday because they don't kill people that are "one of us". Many of them are carried out by Christians though, and by a nation that's one under God or some such.. They hit many innocent civilians too, and often they don't even even know who exactly they've hit. Their number of killed innocent bystanders are reduced by classifying every killed "military-aged male" as an "enemy killed in action". They also hit hospitals, and then just administratively sanction the people that were responsible for it rather than prosecuting them for war crimes.
We turn a blind eye to regimes creating situations that lead to all of the above (thinking they can suppress it before it gets out of hand, and then failing spectacularly), and next join in the narrative that this is just another bunch of insane Muslims that turned violent for no obvious reason. We selectively attack/try to topple regimes if we don't like them, all in the name of human rights but in practice caring little or not at all about the actual human rights of the people in the country at the receiving side of the bombs.
If you read a bit more on any site that goes a bit deeper than "the news of the day", you can find plenty more things. The fact that these acts are not carried out in the name of Christianity (except for possibly in case of Bush Jr), is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. The origin of these acts is not religion, it's just an easily used argument with which people can identify (and the fact that the US self-identifies as a Christian nation is of course abused by IS to claim this is in fact Christian-inspired violence, just like you are doing above w.r.t. Islam). In the West we generally use democracy and human rights as justifications with the same goals, and with just as little relevance.
You can't spell justice without the US And it's called justice because it's just us that's justified in judging just cause, just wars and just evidence Just test this justice and get just iced if you mess with us
And for the record: I count Western Europe pretty much as culpable in all of this as the US, it's not like we ever really took a stand against this (on the contrary, we often join in the context of NATO operations).
If you really think this is about cartoons, you can just as well claim that the Iraq war was about WMDs and spreading democracy (and that Western democracy is a real problem for the rest of the world).
Unfortunately I don't see them succeeding commercially. It's not possible to do fairly what your competitors do by cheating. How could they possibly match the prices per specs of the likes of Samsung but pay more for their inputs? Not possible without government intervention to level the playing field for companies who refuse to use the fruits of exploitation.
They indeed don't/can't compete on price. Nevertheless, until now they're doing pretty well. Keep in mind this is already the second iteration of the Fairphone (they sold about 100k Fairphone 1's), and that the Fairphone 2 required a lot more upfront capital to design and manufacture than the first one (they designed more themselves, are doing larger production runs with more expensive components,...). This means that their business model is, or at least until now has been, financially sustainable and they are growing (they did start with some subsidies and incubator capital, but then again, which business does not). And that is actually the point they are trying to prove: that there is a market for products where the focus is not just on features and price, but also on sustainability in the broadest sense of the word.
Their main goal is not to make or sell phones. Their goal is to change the electronics industry from the inside out by setting an example. I.e., it's the opposite of all of the hipster nonsense being spouted here by probably largely the same people that are whining all the time that their living standard is threatened by cheap H-1Bs. At least the Fairphone people are actually doing things, such as setting up worker representation committees in the factories they use.
It's not so insane when you consider that they have nuclear weapons and are right next to (and hostile towards) another country that has them too. The U.S. will do almost ANYTHING to keep the peace in that region.
I guess you mean that they will do anything to avoid war between India and Pakistan. Peace is not a term I would use for Pakistan.
And they know that it's better to have a corrupt-as-hell extortionist scumbag military in charge, and at least maintaining a status quo peace, than to take their chances with an Arab-Spring type popular radical government that might easily stumble into a regional nuclear war and possibly set off WWIII.
That's pretty much exactly what I said in my sentence that started with "This aid is moreover not entirely voluntarily any more today...".
That doesn't make it any less insane or counter-productive though. It's insane to think that this status quo can be be maintained. It's insane to think that this prevents nuclear proliferation, because as the article mentions, this has already happened in the past from Pakistan and there are no indications that it won't happen again in the future. It's insane to think that by supporting a dictatorship, you will be able to somehow suddenly get lots of friendly people afterwards (as indeed the Arab Spring demonstrated -- note that the Arab Spring did not start with or include Western boycotts against the dictators -- except when some dictators' positions became untenable). It's insane to think that this will not result in more IS-like insanity in the future (or to think that IS-like madmen won't be able to get their hands on dirty bombs or nuke materials in other ways).
I fully agree that there is no easy and quick solution for the situation (which, as the article notes, was actually for a large part created by the US itself, just like in Afghanistan). Just pouring more money into a corrupt dictatorship will however later inevitably result in throwing the hands in the air and more short-sighted people yelling of "look at all those barbaric Muslims that hate our guts for no reason other than that they follow a retarded religion and are incapable of setting up properly functioning governments, and all of that in spite of the billions in aid that we gave them"... As I tried to express in my original message, my point was mainly related to that: these violent reactions to YouTube etc have probably little or nothing to do with fact that they are Muslim. It's just one of the very few ways they have to express their anger such that the military tolerates it (since it's directed against an external entity).
Slashdot Mirror
When you write a program that needs to print the primes up to a certain number, you can easily create a formal proof that your program program is correct.
But when your program is say "apache", that needs to interact with many different browsers on one side, and interpret PHP scripts that interact with databases, this formal proof becomes impossible. Similarly, you cannot write a formal spec for the interaction with the user in for example, a web browser.
While things like the halting problem obviously prevent fully formally proving the correctness of programs, you can go much farther than we generally go today. For example, I participated in an EU project where they constructed a formal model of the PikeOS separation kernel (kind of like an embedded real-time hypervisor). They also generalised this model, which includes support for things like interrupts and context switches.
The general population should just shut their fucking mouths when they feel like spewing an "opinion" about something.
Then why don't you starting by setting a good example?
Science is a process and is hard.
That's why it's perfectly fine for people to voice concerns when they start experimenting in the wild. It's not like we have a perfect overview of how significantly reducing these mosquito populations will affect all other animals that feed on them (and the animals that feed on those, plants that depend on their excrement etc), just to name one potential unintended side effect. Or how it may allow other animals to largely expand their population due to reduced competition for habitats or food sources (mosquitos generally don't survive on blood, that's just what they need for procreation). Or conversely, certain nutrients no longer getting sufficiently removed from the water by mosquito larvae, resulting on too high concentrations of certain substances that then start killing other animals or plants.
TL;DR: Voice educated questions about scientific stuff. Do not broadcast uninformed opinions derived from your safe spot.
If anything is anti-science, it's trying to pre-emptively paint any debate by the general public as uninformed hipster trash. Because that is how you create luddites: by telling people they don't have a say, can't possibly understand anything about the ramifications, and should shut up and defer to some abstract scientists in ivory towers on the authority of some anonymous coward throwing a tantrum.
Oh, the article obviously very biassed, no question about it. But I like the fact that the author doesn't try to pretend she's not biased or writing in a "balanced" way. It makes it all the more believable to me. But again: it could also be completely made up for all I know, although she's dropping a lot of names of people that were present and specifics that should make it easy to debunk things in that case.
If the way that Milo guy is portrayed in the article is in any way accurate, he doesn't appear to espouse any viewpoints at all. He just enjoys trolling, including trolling people into believing that what he writes are actually his viewpoints.
Of course Twitter may, like Facebook, help/hurt/hide/quash certain trending topics etc, but I don't think this person's case a particularly good example of how it's ruled by some kind of elite that does not like any dissent.
#freemilo
Or maybe not, since he appears to quite enjoy the current situation.
Disclaimer: I had never before even heard of this "Milo" (or of the author of that article, for that matter). But maybe that's because I'm not on Twitter.
and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
You forgot that it's the only form of energy that's currently regulated to include all of externalities in its cost.
No, since for nuclear a bunch of externalities are covered by the government at a rate that is below what the market is willing to offer (since the market doesn't want to cover them at all).
For a fair comparison, you'd need to require coal to catch everything (CO2, sulphur, other toxins, more radioactive isotopes than a nuclear plant, etc)
from all chimneys, transport and store that securely for hundreds of years.
I doubt Jill Stein is very much in favour of coal fired plants.
And despite that, nuclear is still competitive and causes many orders of magnitude less deaths.
Competitive with massive government subsidies, yes. Of course, coal also gets lots of subsidies.
She's in favor of "homeopathic medicine",
That seems to be a little simplistic, given that she apparently even got the Green Party to remove all mentions of homeopathy from their platform. That said, pure placebo's (such as homeopathy, VR and even the colour of pills) can have their use either separately from (in case of e.g. a hypochondriac) or in combination with regular treatment.
and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
Furthermore, she wants "a moratorium on GMOs", which wikipedia states, "There is a scientific consensus[147][148][149][150] that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food".
While she indeed argues against it because of safety arguments, there are plenty of other reasons why many people are against GMOs. Just look at the majority of comments on the Slashdot story regarding one of the "GMOs are safe" studies.
I REALLY want to vote third party, but we need some third party candidates who are not anti-science crackpots.
Bashing using arguments that are either easily refuted, or at the very least less clear cut than presented, is anti-science. Name-calling while posting as AC is just silly.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a kickstarter to fund legal action against Fox.
If the video owner can catch them for the copyright infringement they can hammer them for Perjury for the DMCA notice.
The problem is that they did not commit perjury regarding the DMCA notice. In the context of a DMCA notice, the only thing that must be true is that you own the copyright to the material you claim that is being infringed. Whether or not the allegedly infringing material actually infringes (and whether you could/should have known this), is irrelevant as far as the DMCA perjury clause is concerned.
It does make me wonder why there haven't been any public DMCA take down campaigns aimed against big companies yet though.
That's up to their national authorities to decide.
Until now, everyone living within 20km of a nuclear power plant had to have immediate access to iodine pills. The High Council for Health (a scientific body responsible for giving advice concerning health regulations to the government) has advised to increased this radius to 100km, and the government has followed this advice. Everyone in Belgium lives within 100km of a Belgian, Dutch or French nuclear power plant. Hence, iodine pills for everyone.
I think that's more a matter of others taking advantage of an opportunity than a concerted effort of which he is part. It definitely does seem like a mob is hammering you though.
Probably not, but there's plenty of dislike in the US for Brazil's leftwing government, with plenty of attacking propaganda by US political pundits. The last time a coup happen in Brazil it was directly supported by the US. Combine that with the fact that the current president (the one they're trying to impeach) was tortured by US and UK-trained torturers, it's not that far-fetched to assume that some US citizens are also involved in these trolling campaigns (but again, I doubt it's the case for this Igw guy; he's probably just badly informed).
Well played, sir troll.
For those not following Brazilian politics, Brazil has been plagued by corruption scandals and economic woes, leading to not a literal coup, but a supermajority vote by the Brazilian House to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, which means it moves to the Senate for confirmation, then an actual trial. It's an emotionally charged issue (some representatives actually burst into song during the impeachment proceedings), but being resolved peacefully.
It's quite a bit more complicated than that.
The funny thing is that you can do exactly the same (it's the first talk in that video) to datamine the CIA, FBI, ... and their subcontractors. The resulting project names you find range from scary-but-expected ("Panopticon") to downright disturbing ("Never shake a baby").
Yeah, I already figured that was the kind of non-answer I'd get. You might want to figure out why you are so obsessed with it though (or maybe you already know, and this is your way of dealing with it).
Good. Maybe this will limit the microaggressive behavior some cisgender white males and help keep Reddit a safe place so everyone else can express their more valid opinions. They also need to add a hugcircle feature.
You seem to have a really intense fixation on the terms "hugcircle" and "microaggression". I'm not sure what the problem is with a feature that allows you to hide comments from idiots. Killfiles have been around for ages for usenet and email (long before those words ever were a thing), so why should it be different for a random web based forum?
I see your leftist Slashdot conspiracy and raise the fact that the same often happens when you don't beat the rightwing drums: exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3
Not sure if down-modding pro-homeopathy is really a right-wing type thing to do, probably more of a secular-humanist type thing.
If you click the links I posted in my comments (to other Slashdot stories, e.g. about the use of VR to dull phantom limb pain), you can see it's just about the fact that triggering a placebo effect can be a valid course of therapy in some cases. Homeopathy is, as far as I am concerned, a obvious example of triggering a placebo effect.
I'm pretty sure the downmodding was more because I was countering the attack on Jeremy Corbyn (which that whole story was about), who is the devil incarnate as far as the right wing UK is concerned.
In Exhibit 3, it looked like you might have misunderstood the parent poster but they thought you were being coy. Communicating tone isn't easy on the internet. Yet another reason I don't care about karma.
I'm not sure how I misunderstood him. He claimed, as far as I can see, that only Muslims massacre people for clearly idiotic/nonsense reasons, under a title of "keep saying there's no Islamic terrorist problem". I tried to counter that with an example of how we, the enlightened Westerners with our democracy, just as well use nonsense reasons ("spreading democracy", "destroying WMDs") for justifying massacring people. The arguments used are different but in the end it's just a matter of finetuning the justification to better resonate with the intended target public.
Maybe I should have been more explicit: you can just as easily title a comment as "keep saying there's no Western democracy problem", with as content "I'll believe it when Russia, China, Iran and North Korea start repeated drone bombing of as many other countries as the US, while also triggering the rise of a scourge similar to IS as cherry on the cake.". And such a claim would be equally nonsensical, as far as I'm concerned. Correlation & causation...
Nevermind the NSA, I think slashdot's moderation system probably does a better job at suppressing minority opinions.
Only if you care about /. karma. I don't. I get down-modded quite a bit because I don't beat the leftist drum either.
I see your leftist Slashdot conspiracy and raise the fact that the same often happens when you don't beat the rightwing drums: exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3 (click on the comment score when logged in to see the fight between the flamebait and interesting/insightful mods).
Stupid moderators downmod stuff they don't like as flamebait/troll. There's nothing particularly leftwing or rightwing about it.
Regarding the hospital bombing: you don't need conspiracy theories, you only have to read the ever changing statements put out by the US military in the wake of the attack (from "mistake" to "it was a Taliban hideout from which US troops were attacked" to "mistake" again, and everything in between), combined with the facts that e.g. the attacks continued for 30 minutes after Doctors without Borders got into contact with US military officials, and that only the hospital was hit within the compound.
I think I also finally understand why I'm not getting the point that I wanted to make across to you: you seem to genuinely believe that Bush reason for invading Iraq was "spreading democracy". I naively assumed that pretty much everyone by now understood that was not a goal at all (probably caught in a similar trap as you earlier due to the "many others" that I regularly talk to, read and hear).
I was not in any way talking about moral relativism or about what social form is superior to another or not. Given my (yes, my) assumption that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with democracy and that democracy was just a pretext (ab)used to mobilise public support for committing atrocities, I was trying to point out that this is no different to (ab)using Islam for exactly the same purpose. You seem to argue in favour of take everyone's justifications for committing atrocities mostly at face value.
You may also want to watch The Rise of ISIS by NPR frontline for some background on how the ISIS mess started starting from Al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. If you replace Sunni/Shia with Hutu/Tutsi in the story about the power struggles and repression of certain groups, you get something that's very close to the Hutu/Tutsi situation in Rwanda and (to some lesser extent) Congo. And if you want background about how Al Qaeda started (it's much more complex than "the US gave some weapons to some Afghans to fight the Russians"), you may want to watch the excellent BBC documentary Bitter Lake.
My answer is summarised in the second paragraph of my other answer to you. Apart from, more or less once more, stating that I honestly cannot think of a single reason why blowing up people by abusing the justification of democracy is somehow on a different scale of morality that doing the same in the name of a religion (any religion), I'm not sure what else to say. Well, maybe that it's true that in our generally more secularised Western world, aggressors focus on different arguments that resonate better with the public here (democracy rather than Christianity).
To be clear: I was not trying to prove that Christianity is worse or as bad as Islam or something like that. The answer to that would be (IMO, but of course the "others" you called upon to reinforce your rebuttal won't care about that either) "mu". Just like democracy is not better or worse than either in this context. They're all just tools used to play a particular public's opinion in this context, and to appease one or other conscience. I just wanted to give an example of how, today, Christians (note that the OP talked about Christians, not Christianity) are in fact still committing atrocities, and even explicitly against Muslims (née terrorists). Who cares about what's written on the bombs, or what the drone operators yell when they press the fire button on their joystick, when the justification behind it is rotten to the core anyway? I doubt it matters to the people at the receiving end, scales of morality be damned.
Regarding the innocent bystanders: I was only talking about numbers released by the US army. They themselves, in their own (secret until leaked) statistics, admit they basically have no idea about who is an innocent bystander and who isn't, so they just count everyone they possibly can as an enemy combattant. You and your morality will hopefully see that there is an issue as far as morality is concerned if you keep bombing people in the full knowledge that you don't have even the slightest idea how many innocents you are killing (not even afterwards), and moreover are appeasing the conscience of whoever feels the need by claiming that pretty much everyone you kill was in fact a combatant. Those bombs might as well be recruitment pamphlets for IS (and in fact, they act exactly like that). John Oliver explained all about the insanity of the drone strikes quite well, too.
Finally, drone strikes most certainly are not in the daily news here in Belgium, unlike news about IS attacks. In fact, it's been quite some time since I read anything about drone strikes on the news site of our public broadcaster (even if they pride themselves on their holistic, neutral reporting, and are definitely not US apologists or anything like that).
With "this" I indeed referred to the Brussels attacks, but it equally applies to the whole rhetoric about how Islam lies at the basis of all of this terrorism. I've discussed this more extensively in another comment.
Or, as implied by my comment above: this terrorism is as much inspired by Islam as US drone strikes and bombing doctors-without-borders hospitals is inspired by Western democracy ("one nation under God" and all that jazz). Even more explicitly: I don't see either Islam or Western democracy as causally linked to the atrocities committed by either group, even if they all (purportedly or genuinely) identify with one of them.
When the Christians are in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY -- right now, in 2016 -- shooting innocent civilians, blowing up car bombs, bulldozing and dynamiting the cultural treasures of other religions, raping children, beheading people for drawing pictures of Christ, etc., all in the name of Jesus, and trying to establish a worldwide Christian nation (and telling people that's what they're doing), then I'll agree. And I mean now. Not hundreds of years ago during the Crusades and not during the Inquisition. I might right fucking now in 2016 in the modern, civilized world. Until then, quit trying to equate what these 7th Century barbarians are doing with any other modern religion, because it's complete bullshit.
Drone strikes are not in the news everyday because they don't kill people that are "one of us". Many of them are carried out by Christians though, and by a nation that's one under God or some such.. They hit many innocent civilians too, and often they don't even even know who exactly they've hit. Their number of killed innocent bystanders are reduced by classifying every killed "military-aged male" as an "enemy killed in action". They also hit hospitals, and then just administratively sanction the people that were responsible for it rather than prosecuting them for war crimes.
We turn a blind eye to regimes creating situations that lead to all of the above (thinking they can suppress it before it gets out of hand, and then failing spectacularly), and next join in the narrative that this is just another bunch of insane Muslims that turned violent for no obvious reason. We selectively attack/try to topple regimes if we don't like them, all in the name of human rights but in practice caring little or not at all about the actual human rights of the people in the country at the receiving side of the bombs.
If you read a bit more on any site that goes a bit deeper than "the news of the day", you can find plenty more things. The fact that these acts are not carried out in the name of Christianity (except for possibly in case of Bush Jr), is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. The origin of these acts is not religion, it's just an easily used argument with which people can identify (and the fact that the US self-identifies as a Christian nation is of course abused by IS to claim this is in fact Christian-inspired violence, just like you are doing above w.r.t. Islam). In the West we generally use democracy and human rights as justifications with the same goals, and with just as little relevance.
Or, in the words of the inimitable Juice Rap News:
And for the record: I count Western Europe pretty much as culpable in all of this as the US, it's not like we ever really took a stand against this (on the contrary, we often join in the context of NATO operations).
If you really think this is about cartoons, you can just as well claim that the Iraq war was about WMDs and spreading democracy (and that Western democracy is a real problem for the rest of the world).
Unfortunately I don't see them succeeding commercially. It's not possible to do fairly what your competitors do by cheating. How could they possibly match the prices per specs of the likes of Samsung but pay more for their inputs? Not possible without government intervention to level the playing field for companies who refuse to use the fruits of exploitation.
They indeed don't/can't compete on price. Nevertheless, until now they're doing pretty well. Keep in mind this is already the second iteration of the Fairphone (they sold about 100k Fairphone 1's), and that the Fairphone 2 required a lot more upfront capital to design and manufacture than the first one (they designed more themselves, are doing larger production runs with more expensive components, ...). This means that their business model is, or at least until now has been, financially sustainable and they are growing (they did start with some subsidies and incubator capital, but then again, which business does not). And that is actually the point they are trying to prove: that there is a market for products where the focus is not just on features and price, but also on sustainability in the broadest sense of the word.
Their main goal is not to make or sell phones. Their goal is to change the electronics industry from the inside out by setting an example. I.e., it's the opposite of all of the hipster nonsense being spouted here by probably largely the same people that are whining all the time that their living standard is threatened by cheap H-1Bs. At least the Fairphone people are actually doing things, such as setting up worker representation committees in the factories they use.
It's not so insane when you consider that they have nuclear weapons and are right next to (and hostile towards) another country that has them too. The U.S. will do almost ANYTHING to keep the peace in that region.
I guess you mean that they will do anything to avoid war between India and Pakistan. Peace is not a term I would use for Pakistan.
And they know that it's better to have a corrupt-as-hell extortionist scumbag military in charge, and at least maintaining a status quo peace, than to take their chances with an Arab-Spring type popular radical government that might easily stumble into a regional nuclear war and possibly set off WWIII.
That's pretty much exactly what I said in my sentence that started with "This aid is moreover not entirely voluntarily any more today ...".
That doesn't make it any less insane or counter-productive though. It's insane to think that this status quo can be be maintained. It's insane to think that this prevents nuclear proliferation, because as the article mentions, this has already happened in the past from Pakistan and there are no indications that it won't happen again in the future. It's insane to think that by supporting a dictatorship, you will be able to somehow suddenly get lots of friendly people afterwards (as indeed the Arab Spring demonstrated -- note that the Arab Spring did not start with or include Western boycotts against the dictators -- except when some dictators' positions became untenable). It's insane to think that this will not result in more IS-like insanity in the future (or to think that IS-like madmen won't be able to get their hands on dirty bombs or nuke materials in other ways).
I fully agree that there is no easy and quick solution for the situation (which, as the article notes, was actually for a large part created by the US itself, just like in Afghanistan). Just pouring more money into a corrupt dictatorship will however later inevitably result in throwing the hands in the air and more short-sighted people yelling of "look at all those barbaric Muslims that hate our guts for no reason other than that they follow a retarded religion and are incapable of setting up properly functioning governments, and all of that in spite of the billions in aid that we gave them"... As I tried to express in my original message, my point was mainly related to that: these violent reactions to YouTube etc have probably little or nothing to do with fact that they are Muslim. It's just one of the very few ways they have to express their anger such that the military tolerates it (since it's directed against an external entity).