Yeah, I'll second that. Politics, religion, what's the difference. You could say all this kerfluffle with southpark goes back to the Arab people and respecting their culture which makes it a political thing. Or you could tie it back to economics. Religion, economics, culture, and politics are so all-encompassing that ANYTHING can be categorized under ANY of them.
Sorry, but murder has a more narrow definition then that. You cannot murder someone in self defense. You can KILL them, but it's not murder.
Murder is simply not acceptable, unless you consider mercy killing, assisted suicide, or warfare to be murder. There is certainly some gray area in the English language, but there is a distinction between killing and murder.
One of the great joys of reality is that you CAN go up and assassinate someone for a slight. There may be consequences afterward, but no one (other then the police, FBI, and his bodyguards) is stopping you.
"Oh look, it's some of the colorful local characters, let's go say hello"
"Uh, honey, they don't look too happy"
"Nonsense, look, they're waving at us"
"Oh they're waving something alright, now hit the deck dead"
Oh yeah, it's not like CIA agents flew the planes, it's hardly all their fault. And it's likely that a lot of nations had dealings with Afghanistan, but it was the CIA's plan to turn it into Russia's Vietnam. It wasn't their intention, but the extremist they taught asymmetrical warfare to turned against us. But that falls squarely in the definition of blowback. Go read the wiki page on that.
Huh, Wyatt Earp was actually a law-man and not a cowboy, but he's strictly in the cowboy genre.
And I had completely forgotten about the War On Drugs (tm). Since it was such a resounding success I can see why you would want to repeat all that.
Are you denying that the CIA financed, taught, and generally supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan? The sole purpose of this was to suck Russia into a long drawn out bloody and expensive quagmire. It worked, and it fucked over Russia AND Afghanistan. Afghanistan being where Al-queada trained and organized a bunch of Egyptians to fly planes into buildings. That's the blowback. That's not, admittedly, as direct a connection as you would find in a good spy novel, but it's still blowback.
Now, you may be thinking "PFT, with that sort of reasoning, the CIA couldn't do ANY black ops without incurring blowback", and you would be right.
7a. More timber would only be a good thing if they could sell lumber. While it has all sorts of uses, and is fun to work with, the main use is to build houses. If you haven't noticed, there's currently a glut of houses on the market. More timber would only make all the lumberjacks go broke. But planting some trees is usually a good thing.
7b. Likewise, with ranching, you need to sell those delicious walking meatsacks. Since China and India are developing middle classes, there does indeed appear to be a rising demand for beef (and/or pork for India). But you have to make sure that the rise in demand for feed doesn't disrupt any other markets.
(Also, it amuses me that the cowboy thinks ranching is republican)
7c. Mining for what? Because it really depends on what you're going for. Coal is dirty, but it's going to be a good fallback when oil dries up. Overall though, it's a good primary industry as long as you don't rape the land over whatever it is you want.
7d. Drilling, presumably for oil, is going to get more and more expensive. In addition to drilling, we need to ween ourselves off of this resource and establish some viable alternatives. And, of course, you have to make sure that the drillers pay for the land they're using and don't rape the environment.
7. So in general, you want more primary industry (and ranching for the cowboys at heart). This is a good thing, as long as there is a use for the resource and the EPA keeps a close watch.
6. Lowering taxes if fine if you don't want what the government is selling. I really like my roads, postal service, and fire department. The DMV could have some better hours, but I'm not complaining. But the part that makes this a Very Bad Thing (tm) is that part where deficits go up. This is not sustainable. If you think your children can pay for it, then fuck you grandpa. I want to make this explicitly clear: This is in no way a conservative idea. This runs directly against the ideology that the republican party traditionally had. This makes you a "neocon".
5. Bombing deserts? What do you think that would fix? It would sure make everyone hate the jews. Ok, it would make make everyone hate the jews even more. It would really really piss off a lot of otherwise normal people. It would legitimize the nutcases calling for jihad. So from all the victims of 9/11 who died from CIA blowback, fuck you buddy.
4. Actually, yeah, I'm all for alliances. As long as they don't drag us into their shit. But Israel? And Columbia?? Why does a republican think the GOP would ally with Columbia?
3. Ah, fighting unions, now we're back to familiar territory. For a while there I was wondering what sort of pseudo-post-neo-con you were. So blah blah blah, power to the people, damn the man, yay unions. I fear large corporations as I have no control over them past a couple of bucks in my wallet. But I understand the need for criticism against unions, otherwise they would rot with their own power. So go find a corrupt union boss, and we'll talk.
2. Defense spending is retardedly out of control. Now, you're a republican, so supposedly you don't like wasting money on welfare. No imagine you doubled all the welfare money and literally burned it out in the middle of a far away desert in giant pattern spelling out "fuck you" in the native script. That's defense spending for you. We are not nearly powerful enough to be the world police. We don't want that job.
1. You WANT war!? That makes you a war-monger. That is a really good modern day definition of evil. This right here is is the primary reason for this entire post and the reason I suggested we, you know, try and fix a few things on your list. Maybe you're just being argumentative, maybe it was just a lame sarcastic joke. But on it's face, you are pro-war, so fuck you. And if you never served, then double-fuck you.
Actually yeah, we DO have a two-party system here. It's kind of the de-facto standard. It's honestly not the best. If you wanted to advocate a third party it's a good idea to explicitly mention it because it's so rare. It's understandable that he assumed you were advocating the GOP since, you know:
I Hope the Slashbots will Change their votes,
Now, if you had said something along the lines of: "I Hope the Slashbots Ditch their Two-Party System and Vote for Some Real Change", then that would accurately convey your intent. But your terse assumptions, random capitalization, "slashbots", and tone just make you look like a dick.
but happily go to work at one of the corporations.
Actually their own personal experience under the heel of corporations is often one of the reasons people complain about them. Personally, I swore I would never work in a call center, or for the insurance or gambling industries. Well, push comes to shove, and I took what job I could, because it beat the alternative of not taking the job. Sometimes you have to take the lesser of two evils, but that sure as hell doesn't mean you can't complain about how evil it is.
but then despise the legislation or rules that people try to make to get an upper hand to provide more income,
This is a special little strawman you made, but I see where you got it from. Liberals, and come on, that's who you're targeting here, you whiney neocon you. Anyway, liberals despise legislation that would help people make a lot of money by getting an upper hand on other people. That money comes from somewhere you know. If you hand someone a monopoly, sure, they'll make some serious money, but it will be at the expense of others.
So fuck you buddy. Your love with large corporations is misplaced and you should really re-examine why it exists. Perhaps you simply love them because people you hate hate them in turn. The enemy of your enemy is just as likely to stab you in the back because they're greedy bastards who don't have your best interests at heart.
If you've made it this far down, you've waded through a river of bullshit. From the half-cocked fear mongering Luddites, past the post-intellectuals joking about doomsday, over the no-news-is-new crowd that already knew about this, to the same old arguments we have about oil and alternative energy.
So congrats, you owe yourself a beer. Now get back to work.
The Andromeda Strain(movie), was hideously dry as was the standard for hard science fiction. Maybe it's just from a different era, maybe I have ADD, but all the hard sci-fi I've seen is just long drawn out and dull. Perhaps it's Clark's influence. He's a great man, and his ideas are great, but he just can't write characters. And so I think he set the tone for how a hard sci-fi is supposed to be played.
Ah, the biggest problem with book to movie conversions. You can be true to form and simultaneously prosecute all the jews while making them out to be greedy coniving businessmen AND world-wide conspirators. Or you can ignore the multiple plot threads that never intertwine and simply go with one story. Or you can realize that all the characters are simply an excuse to portray a backdrop where Germany won WWII.
And then there's the difficult question of how to end the movie. Self-insertion is tripe and you can't have the climax of the movie hinge on a fortune telling explaining that the world is a. And if you're going to change the ending of the movie, then you're going to have to change a few things leading up to it, and at that point you might as well get a writer to make you something that can be put on the screen.
And shit like this is how we got "Total Recall", which shares about 4 words from the book: "mars" and "inserting false memories".
So what's the point of sending people to space other then for tourism/mad-scientist?
There is that whole "national hero" thing, but unless they actually do something up there, it's not that heroic. I think we're past the stage where simply "being in space" makes you an insta-hero.
Humans are pretty good at that whole generalized mechanical work, but honestly I think their drawbacks and liability make the reduced versatility of a robot look like a better option.
There is the argument that we need to eventually colonize so we might as well learn how to put people in space now. But until we have some serious prospects of having a sustainable colony, I think this is getting ahead of ourselves.
But NASA and the people funding NASA don't control the cost of letting Russia send them up. Russia controls that. So if Russia has learned anything about this cutthroat capitalism, they'll ramp up what they charge us. Since they have a monopoly, they can really charge whatever they want. I imagine they'll charge us a cost equivalent to making our own launch system, or more, and then cut it back down to just less then that when we start up the process of actually doing it.
They've already doubled their price, what's keeping them from increasing it more?
Oh, I get it. You see you quoted the poll that supports my argument rather then quoting the poll that helps yours. Who is selectively ignoring stastitics? And yeah, I questioned the methodology of that poll. It only has two answers, both of which involve the coalition forces leaving.
So are you inferring that 66% of iraqi citizens really do want us there? I guess this would oppose the 78% who oppose our presence. Also, when did you stop beating your wife?
Behold my lord! We have crafted for you the finest lie of the lands.
Ah, but it's a magical lie, my lord. Only the smartest of people can see it! It is invisible to the low and stupid peasants.
They say that given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite about of time, they could break any encryption.
This encrypted video? 12 monkey's, two weeks.
An even better question yet: What were they armed with and was that justification for killing them?
But yeah, they were armed with AK-47s and possibly an RPG. The AKs would be legal, it's a fucking war-zone after all and journalists need protecting. The heli-pilot says he saw one of the initial targets with an RPG, but I can't see it in the video. Eventually an infantryman talks about an RPG under a body though, so there was probably one there. That does indeed, lend itself to say that the rules of engagement were followed by the pilot.
Until he blew away a van full of kids (ok, 2) that arrived later and tried to help the wounded. That's there's a fuckup.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'll second that. Politics, religion, what's the difference. You could say all this kerfluffle with southpark goes back to the Arab people and respecting their culture which makes it a political thing. Or you could tie it back to economics. Religion, economics, culture, and politics are so all-encompassing that ANYTHING can be categorized under ANY of them.
So your distinction is bullshit.
Sorry, but murder has a more narrow definition then that. You cannot murder someone in self defense. You can KILL them, but it's not murder.
Murder is simply not acceptable, unless you consider mercy killing, assisted suicide, or warfare to be murder. There is certainly some gray area in the English language, but there is a distinction between killing and murder.
F that. This is a fantastically move by Google. Open minded and forward thinking, this is the direction that I want the world to go in.
Three Cheers!
HIP HIP...
YES! A legitimate place to plug the Calorie Man books. Although Paolo envisioned gene-altered elephants or something, and not cows.
Wow, I logged in just to foe you as it's such a rare thing to see blatent evil, and I found I already had.
Too bad I can't double-foe you.
One of the great joys of reality is that you CAN go up and assassinate someone for a slight. There may be consequences afterward, but no one (other then the police, FBI, and his bodyguards) is stopping you.
Because a healthy dose of fear is a good thing?
"Oh look, it's some of the colorful local characters, let's go say hello"
"Uh, honey, they don't look too happy"
"Nonsense, look, they're waving at us"
"Oh they're waving something alright, now hit the deck dead"
Yeah, I read the wiki article too.
Oh yeah, it's not like CIA agents flew the planes, it's hardly all their fault. And it's likely that a lot of nations had dealings with Afghanistan, but it was the CIA's plan to turn it into Russia's Vietnam. It wasn't their intention, but the extremist they taught asymmetrical warfare to turned against us. But that falls squarely in the definition of blowback. Go read the wiki page on that.
Huh, Wyatt Earp was actually a law-man and not a cowboy, but he's strictly in the cowboy genre.
And I had completely forgotten about the War On Drugs (tm). Since it was such a resounding success I can see why you would want to repeat all that.
Are you denying that the CIA financed, taught, and generally supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan? The sole purpose of this was to suck Russia into a long drawn out bloody and expensive quagmire. It worked, and it fucked over Russia AND Afghanistan. Afghanistan being where Al-queada trained and organized a bunch of Egyptians to fly planes into buildings. That's the blowback. That's not, admittedly, as direct a connection as you would find in a good spy novel, but it's still blowback.
Now, you may be thinking "PFT, with that sort of reasoning, the CIA couldn't do ANY black ops without incurring blowback", and you would be right.
7a. More timber would only be a good thing if they could sell lumber. While it has all sorts of uses, and is fun to work with, the main use is to build houses. If you haven't noticed, there's currently a glut of houses on the market. More timber would only make all the lumberjacks go broke. But planting some trees is usually a good thing.
7b. Likewise, with ranching, you need to sell those delicious walking meatsacks. Since China and India are developing middle classes, there does indeed appear to be a rising demand for beef (and/or pork for India). But you have to make sure that the rise in demand for feed doesn't disrupt any other markets.
(Also, it amuses me that the cowboy thinks ranching is republican)
7c. Mining for what? Because it really depends on what you're going for. Coal is dirty, but it's going to be a good fallback when oil dries up. Overall though, it's a good primary industry as long as you don't rape the land over whatever it is you want.
7d. Drilling, presumably for oil, is going to get more and more expensive. In addition to drilling, we need to ween ourselves off of this resource and establish some viable alternatives. And, of course, you have to make sure that the drillers pay for the land they're using and don't rape the environment.
7. So in general, you want more primary industry (and ranching for the cowboys at heart). This is a good thing, as long as there is a use for the resource and the EPA keeps a close watch. 6. Lowering taxes if fine if you don't want what the government is selling. I really like my roads, postal service, and fire department. The DMV could have some better hours, but I'm not complaining. But the part that makes this a Very Bad Thing (tm) is that part where deficits go up. This is not sustainable. If you think your children can pay for it, then fuck you grandpa. I want to make this explicitly clear: This is in no way a conservative idea. This runs directly against the ideology that the republican party traditionally had. This makes you a "neocon".
5. Bombing deserts? What do you think that would fix? It would sure make everyone hate the jews. Ok, it would make make everyone hate the jews even more. It would really really piss off a lot of otherwise normal people. It would legitimize the nutcases calling for jihad. So from all the victims of 9/11 who died from CIA blowback, fuck you buddy.
4. Actually, yeah, I'm all for alliances. As long as they don't drag us into their shit. But Israel? And Columbia?? Why does a republican think the GOP would ally with Columbia?
3. Ah, fighting unions, now we're back to familiar territory. For a while there I was wondering what sort of pseudo-post-neo-con you were. So blah blah blah, power to the people, damn the man, yay unions. I fear large corporations as I have no control over them past a couple of bucks in my wallet. But I understand the need for criticism against unions, otherwise they would rot with their own power. So go find a corrupt union boss, and we'll talk.
2. Defense spending is retardedly out of control. Now, you're a republican, so supposedly you don't like wasting money on welfare. No imagine you doubled all the welfare money and literally burned it out in the middle of a far away desert in giant pattern spelling out "fuck you" in the native script. That's defense spending for you. We are not nearly powerful enough to be the world police. We don't want that job.
1. You WANT war!? That makes you a war-monger. That is a really good modern day definition of evil. This right here is is the primary reason for this entire post and the reason I suggested we, you know, try and fix a few things on your list. Maybe you're just being argumentative, maybe it was just a lame sarcastic joke. But on it's face, you are pro-war, so fuck you. And if you never served, then double-fuck you.
I Hope the Slashbots will Change their votes,
Now, if you had said something along the lines of: "I Hope the Slashbots Ditch their Two-Party System and Vote for Some Real Change", then that would accurately convey your intent. But your terse assumptions, random capitalization, "slashbots", and tone just make you look like a dick.
I Hope the Slashbots will Change their votes
portion is telling us that a GOP vote would indeed be better. And then Unity called bullshit.
Now, I guess he could be calling for a third party vote, but that's so rare that it kind of requires explicit statements to that end.
but happily go to work at one of the corporations.
Actually their own personal experience under the heel of corporations is often one of the reasons people complain about them. Personally, I swore I would never work in a call center, or for the insurance or gambling industries. Well, push comes to shove, and I took what job I could, because it beat the alternative of not taking the job. Sometimes you have to take the lesser of two evils, but that sure as hell doesn't mean you can't complain about how evil it is.
but then despise the legislation or rules that people try to make to get an upper hand to provide more income,
This is a special little strawman you made, but I see where you got it from. Liberals, and come on, that's who you're targeting here, you whiney neocon you. Anyway, liberals despise legislation that would help people make a lot of money by getting an upper hand on other people. That money comes from somewhere you know. If you hand someone a monopoly, sure, they'll make some serious money, but it will be at the expense of others.
So fuck you buddy. Your love with large corporations is misplaced and you should really re-examine why it exists. Perhaps you simply love them because people you hate hate them in turn. The enemy of your enemy is just as likely to stab you in the back because they're greedy bastards who don't have your best interests at heart.
Wouldn't it be nice to try and fix some of that?
I double-dog-dare you to go make a buck in space
If you've made it this far down, you've waded through a river of bullshit. From the half-cocked fear mongering Luddites, past the post-intellectuals joking about doomsday, over the no-news-is-new crowd that already knew about this, to the same old arguments we have about oil and alternative energy.
So congrats, you owe yourself a beer. Now get back to work.
The Andromeda Strain(movie), was hideously dry as was the standard for hard science fiction. Maybe it's just from a different era, maybe I have ADD, but all the hard sci-fi I've seen is just long drawn out and dull. Perhaps it's Clark's influence. He's a great man, and his ideas are great, but he just can't write characters. And so I think he set the tone for how a hard sci-fi is supposed to be played.
if done correctly.
Ah, the biggest problem with book to movie conversions. You can be true to form and simultaneously prosecute all the jews while making them out to be greedy coniving businessmen AND world-wide conspirators. Or you can ignore the multiple plot threads that never intertwine and simply go with one story. Or you can realize that all the characters are simply an excuse to portray a backdrop where Germany won WWII.
And then there's the difficult question of how to end the movie. Self-insertion is tripe and you can't have the climax of the movie hinge on a fortune telling explaining that the world is a. And if you're going to change the ending of the movie, then you're going to have to change a few things leading up to it, and at that point you might as well get a writer to make you something that can be put on the screen.
And shit like this is how we got "Total Recall", which shares about 4 words from the book: "mars" and "inserting false memories".
So what's the point of sending people to space other then for tourism/mad-scientist?
There is that whole "national hero" thing, but unless they actually do something up there, it's not that heroic. I think we're past the stage where simply "being in space" makes you an insta-hero.
Humans are pretty good at that whole generalized mechanical work, but honestly I think their drawbacks and liability make the reduced versatility of a robot look like a better option.
There is the argument that we need to eventually colonize so we might as well learn how to put people in space now. But until we have some serious prospects of having a sustainable colony, I think this is getting ahead of ourselves.
But NASA and the people funding NASA don't control the cost of letting Russia send them up. Russia controls that. So if Russia has learned anything about this cutthroat capitalism, they'll ramp up what they charge us. Since they have a monopoly, they can really charge whatever they want. I imagine they'll charge us a cost equivalent to making our own launch system, or more, and then cut it back down to just less then that when we start up the process of actually doing it.
They've already doubled their price, what's keeping them from increasing it more?
It's the same poll.
FINE, you quoted the wrong poll question. Happy?
Are you ignoring or acknowledging that that 78% of the population opposed the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq?
Are you inferring that 66% of iraqi citizens really do want us there?
Oh, I get it. You see you quoted the poll that supports my argument rather then quoting the poll that helps yours. Who is selectively ignoring stastitics? And yeah, I questioned the methodology of that poll. It only has two answers, both of which involve the coalition forces leaving.
So are you inferring that 66% of iraqi citizens really do want us there? I guess this would oppose the 78% who oppose our presence. Also, when did you stop beating your wife?
Behold my lord! We have crafted for you the finest lie of the lands.
Ah, but it's a magical lie, my lord. Only the smartest of people can see it! It is invisible to the low and stupid peasants.
They say that given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite about of time, they could break any encryption.
This encrypted video? 12 monkey's, two weeks.
An even better question yet: What were they armed with and was that justification for killing them?
But yeah, they were armed with AK-47s and possibly an RPG. The AKs would be legal, it's a fucking war-zone after all and journalists need protecting. The heli-pilot says he saw one of the initial targets with an RPG, but I can't see it in the video. Eventually an infantryman talks about an RPG under a body though, so there was probably one there. That does indeed, lend itself to say that the rules of engagement were followed by the pilot.
Until he blew away a van full of kids (ok, 2) that arrived later and tried to help the wounded. That's there's a fuckup.