I would go so far as to say that there are few people who have a wholly self-consistent set of values. However, it's not the lack of understanding of communism or anarchism which is to blame. It's that those who style themselves communists or anarchists tend to ignore the history of their movements in their drive toward some sort of obscene ideological purity. In so doing, they end up contorting themselves in rhetorical knots, or exemplifying congnitive dissonance to an extreme degree.
I am reminded of the OWS protestor who was featured on the Daily Show 11/16/11: (para).
Reporter (Samantha Bee): So you want everyone to have an iPad?
Protestor: Yes. I believe they should have access to the technology.
Reporter: So you would share your iPad with those people who don't have them?
Protestor: No. I don't believe in private property, but this is my personal property.
"Although that preamble indicates the general purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution, it has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the government of the United States, or on any of its departments. Such powers embrace only those expressly granted in the body of the Constitution, and such as may be implied from those so granted."
Therefore, please do not assume that the wordsmithing of the preamble means anything in a legal sense as to the duties of government. Please look into the Constitution proper to determine whether it defines a 'socialist' government.
What is up with this? Has Slashdot become so incestuous that we have to backlink through 5 articles to actually get to a real article which either won't load or doesn't show the pretty pictures?
"THINK FOR YOURSELF. I would have thought Slashdot would even take into account all the controversy regarding 911 and stop just spreading the propaganda that we have been forcefed through all the mainstream sources."
Oddly enough I can think for myself and my conclusion is exactly opposite of yours, because I can contextualize things as separate events, not as one grand conspiracy.
... if you expect that they will produce perfection always.
A lot of people grew up on WoW, and have such rosy memories of vanilla or BC. Cataclysm has been a seriously hit-or-miss expansion. Some things are awesome, and some things are terrible. Here's why:
Blizzard is trying to cater to too many factions in their playerbase. They need to please the maximum number of players in order to keep their subscriber numbers up.
There's one faction that will steamroll through content. They have 7/7 Heroic Firelands done, finished the legendary and are now bored.
There's another faction that doesn't. My guild is 2/7 Firelands -normal-, and my raid group is 0/7 Firelands because after 4 weeks we cannot down Shannox or Beth. (For all people in the previous faction, how do you find that content so easy?)
There's one faction that doesn't care at all, and there's too little for them to do. The same 5-mans all the time are obnoxious, and there seem to be far fewer of them in Cataclysm compared to Wrath.
There's a faction that cares WAY TOO MUCH about PVP. And RAGE on the FORUMS using ALL CAPS because THEIR MAIN IS SO NERFED.
And then there is the faction of players that pine over their childhood and wish that WoW never changed because it's so not cool anymore, 'cause back in the day you had to walk barefoot up Blackrock mountain with 39 friends to get a rare pair of shoes that has a 10% chance to drop off a boss that you might be able to get to after 2 hours.
I mean, how do you please all of those competing interests? You don't. You do your best and sometimes ideas just don't work out so well as you'd hoped.
Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable. Hiding it is dangerous.
The sad part is that a lot of movements of the past few decades have bought into this mantra that truth is somewhow malleable and that reality is merely a construct of how many people believe it to be true. Shades of 1984.
Speaking Truth to Power? More like "Making crap up and calling it truth, then screaming about babykillers to to your Congressperson and buying ads in the New York Times."
Point is that this shouldn't be a problem as big as it is. We shouldn't have to waste time better spent on a "productive" task to argue with people on the talk page of an article about an edit reversion that should not have happened.
Perhaps, maybe, wikipedia editors should be held accountable for their actions. Right now, great power comes with no responsibility. Seeing a few editors get banned from the site forever would help. Lets start with any editor that has posted "Delete: See [WP:Notability]"
Wikipedia went downhill as soon as the Admins got a stick up their butt about "notability"--the Wikipedia definition of notability is so skewed as to be worthless. Very notable historical pages such as Old Man Murray get deleted, well-informed and well written articles on obscure topics get wiped clean, while at the same time there are dozens of stub articles that provide no worth.
The whole of Wikipedia is a disaster nowadays. It's run by petty dictators acting out their dreams of dictatorship. Back in the day, they would be sitting in their parents basement memorizing bus schedules. Today, thanks to the internet, they post those schedules on wikipedia and edit camp them against all the evil people who would even think of editing their masterwork.
I'm pretty sure that what passes for 'debate' in the halls of most western societies is more like "which pressure group can provide me more votes in the fall" vs. "I once took a class in science, so I know everything!"
In a socially conservative area, you at least know what you're going to get, because it's patently obvious that they want to enforce judeo-christian conservative social mores.
In a Liberal place, I'd expect that your lifestyles and personal choices would be tolerated to the hilt, as long as you were responsible for your own actions, and didn't try to shove your beliefs down someone else's throat.
Except thats not true. You simply swap one set of religious morals for another set of religious morals and end up without any freedom whatsoever to simply life free of screaming governmental ninnies with personal issues.
What if the animal has to eat its food alive? Pythons don't typically prosper well if it's been dead and frozen.
These idiots in the animal-rights groups don't understand a single thing about biological requirements for life. They just look at their puppies and wonder how anyone could ever love their free-range puppies as much as daddy loves his snuggie wuggums.
Is this guy so loony that to him "Western mindset" is an indictment of some thought in and of itself? "Oh that's how we think in the UNITED STATES, so obviously that's the dumbest possible mindset." Is that what's going on here? "If we considered them living beings, we would deal with them differently." Yeah, but we don't, so why are you acting like we do or should?
Yes. He is, in fact, that loony.
To his mindset, something that is "western" is imperialist and evil, the source of all suffering in this world. If only those nasty "western" ideas and philosophies would just die out, we could live in a perfect Utopia like I heard in that John Lennon song once.
Until, you know, the guys with guns from the "east" came along to ethnically cleanse you like they did to all the other infidels.
In San Francisco, and other so called 'liberal' bastions, laws are not created to give people the freedoms to live the life that they choose, they are created to radically socially engineer a population according to specific mores that the 'elites' prefer. So if the elites are tree-hugging PETA members, then they want to fashion society in that image, regardless of the hypocracy and stupidity it causes. One could say that all social engineering is applying a first order linear model to a chaotic system and then crying about how the results don't work.
How this is different than theocracy, I don't know.
This is because most, if not all, journalists on the science beat have no scientific training at all. They are the same j-school idiots as everyone else, trained to hype up the bad parts of a story to sell more newspapers.
People only freak out when they find out what 'food additives' are because they are informed about them in a way designed to make them freak out. It's scare tactics - exactly what has been used to control uninformed populations for centuries. It doesn't matter if it's true or false. Once the scare enters the public consciousness, it's impossible to dislodge.
"Do YOU know what THEY put in YOUR food?" "Do YOU know how ANIMALS are SLAUGHTERED?" "Do YOU know that CELL PHONES cause CANCER?"
That's not an invitation to learn more, that's an invitation to your amygdala to go batshit insane.
To the Jihadi, tax-paying westerners are not innocent, because they help to fund wars against those who wish to wage war against them.
To the Jihadi, non-tax-paying westerners are not innocent because their lifestyle is not rightly guided by Sharia, thus their blood is legally spilled.
A fanatic will always find rationalizations to kill people who don't agree with them... unless the fanatic is killed first, or the meme that produces said fanatic(s) is destroyed.
I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.
The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.
European socialism does lead to drastic social stratification, however. Maybe not monetarily, but in terms of class.
There is the mediocre middle class, where everyone's the same. These people have no voice whatsoever. If they speak up, they are racist or fascist nationalists.
There's the slightly more mediocre poor class living on the labor of the middle class's taxes and providing nothing. These folks, typically immigrants from the third world can have a violence veto, and are courted by.. The elites, who control the language and the government bureaucracy, and force the middle class to suffer immobility and slow erasure of their national culture to appease ghettoized immigrant groups who form massive voting blocs that help keep the elites in power.
Safety and security forces, such as police and fire are functions of most conceptions of a 'limited government' state, as are roads and basic infrastructure. The state exists to take care of highly unprofitable yet necessary services. Libertarianism is not equal to Anarchy as some here seem to posit.
What happened here is an unfortunate circumstance that the local government subcontracted out fire protection to another district because it refused to pay for it itself. In a purely libertarian environment, the fire fighters would have charged him a huge bill for the fire service on call, not just stood there like inhuman robots and watched as humans suffered.
All of this is quite obvious if you actually look into what happened, unless of course you're a Chavez lackey.
Or a complete idiot. Unfortunately there's way too many people who put their blinkers on and can't understand how legal systems work. This is especially true amongst the faux-liberals who think that every legal system is exactly like the US ("They can't exile a -president-!!@# That's illegal!!!!#!@111") or who will go to bat to defend an elected leader's power grab to dictatorhood while being virulently anti-Bush ("Bushitler's going to take over the gubment pemanently!!11!! Darth Cheney!!@111!!! Yay Chavez and Ahmadinejad!!)
There was nothing 'coup-like' about the Honduran reaction to Zelaya's power-grab. The only people who still buy into that meme are retards (or the mainstream media, or Obama's government).
Slashdot Mirror
Matt Taibbi is a misogynist idiot. That the objects of his ire are Republican women does not make his anti-female remarks acceptable.
I would go so far as to say that there are few people who have a wholly self-consistent set of values. However, it's not the lack of understanding of communism or anarchism which is to blame. It's that those who style themselves communists or anarchists tend to ignore the history of their movements in their drive toward some sort of obscene ideological purity. In so doing, they end up contorting themselves in rhetorical knots, or exemplifying congnitive dissonance to an extreme degree.
I am reminded of the OWS protestor who was featured on the Daily Show 11/16/11: (para).
Reporter (Samantha Bee): So you want everyone to have an iPad?
Protestor: Yes. I believe they should have access to the technology.
Reporter: So you would share your iPad with those people who don't have them?
Protestor: No. I don't believe in private property, but this is my personal property.
I would beg to differ in the sense that according to the majority opinion in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts (1905):
"Although that preamble indicates the general purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution, it has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the government of the United States, or on any of its departments. Such powers embrace only those expressly granted in the body of the Constitution, and such as may be implied from those so granted."
Therefore, please do not assume that the wordsmithing of the preamble means anything in a legal sense as to the duties of government. Please look into the Constitution proper to determine whether it defines a 'socialist' government.
Throwing poo at police isn't driving down the tone of political discourse, but expressing conservative constitutional principles is?
I think I'll just curl up and hide now.
What is up with this? Has Slashdot become so incestuous that we have to backlink through 5 articles to actually get to a real article which either won't load or doesn't show the pretty pictures?
"THINK FOR YOURSELF. I would have thought Slashdot would even take into account all the controversy regarding 911 and stop just spreading the propaganda that we have been forcefed through all the mainstream sources."
Oddly enough I can think for myself and my conclusion is exactly opposite of yours, because I can contextualize things as separate events, not as one grand conspiracy.
Perhaps you should too.
this 5 eggnogs and cookies as christmas gifts sucks,....bring out the cool weapons instead...help the player along...
"Waa Waa Waa give me free stuff just for playing, I'm entitled to it, I'm a paying customer!"
I forgot that faction in my previous comment.
... if you expect that they will produce perfection always.
A lot of people grew up on WoW, and have such rosy memories of vanilla or BC. Cataclysm has been a seriously hit-or-miss expansion. Some things are awesome, and some things are terrible. Here's why:
Blizzard is trying to cater to too many factions in their playerbase. They need to please the maximum number of players in order to keep their subscriber numbers up.
There's one faction that will steamroll through content. They have 7/7 Heroic Firelands done, finished the legendary and are now bored.
There's another faction that doesn't. My guild is 2/7 Firelands -normal-, and my raid group is 0/7 Firelands because after 4 weeks we cannot down Shannox or Beth. (For all people in the previous faction, how do you find that content so easy?)
There's one faction that doesn't care at all, and there's too little for them to do. The same 5-mans all the time are obnoxious, and there seem to be far fewer of them in Cataclysm compared to Wrath.
There's a faction that cares WAY TOO MUCH about PVP. And RAGE on the FORUMS using ALL CAPS because THEIR MAIN IS SO NERFED.
And then there is the faction of players that pine over their childhood and wish that WoW never changed because it's so not cool anymore, 'cause back in the day you had to walk barefoot up Blackrock mountain with 39 friends to get a rare pair of shoes that has a 10% chance to drop off a boss that you might be able to get to after 2 hours.
I mean, how do you please all of those competing interests? You don't. You do your best and sometimes ideas just don't work out so well as you'd hoped.
Except that "truth" isn't built by consensus.
Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable. Hiding it is dangerous.
The sad part is that a lot of movements of the past few decades have bought into this mantra that truth is somewhow malleable and that reality is merely a construct of how many people believe it to be true. Shades of 1984.
Speaking Truth to Power? More like "Making crap up and calling it truth, then screaming about babykillers to to your Congressperson and buying ads in the New York Times."
Next time this happens, take the revert to the article's talk page.
Point is that this shouldn't be a problem as big as it is. We shouldn't have to waste time better spent on a "productive" task to argue with people on the talk page of an article about an edit reversion that should not have happened.
Perhaps, maybe, wikipedia editors should be held accountable for their actions. Right now, great power comes with no responsibility. Seeing a few editors get banned from the site forever would help. Lets start with any editor that has posted "Delete: See [WP:Notability]"
This this and especially this.
Wikipedia went downhill as soon as the Admins got a stick up their butt about "notability"--the Wikipedia definition of notability is so skewed as to be worthless. Very notable historical pages such as Old Man Murray get deleted, well-informed and well written articles on obscure topics get wiped clean, while at the same time there are dozens of stub articles that provide no worth.
The whole of Wikipedia is a disaster nowadays. It's run by petty dictators acting out their dreams of dictatorship. Back in the day, they would be sitting in their parents basement memorizing bus schedules. Today, thanks to the internet, they post those schedules on wikipedia and edit camp them against all the evil people who would even think of editing their masterwork.
I'm pretty sure that what passes for 'debate' in the halls of most western societies is more like "which pressure group can provide me more votes in the fall" vs. "I once took a class in science, so I know everything!"
Why do you have to resort to 'whataboutery'?
In a socially conservative area, you at least know what you're going to get, because it's patently obvious that they want to enforce judeo-christian conservative social mores.
In a Liberal place, I'd expect that your lifestyles and personal choices would be tolerated to the hilt, as long as you were responsible for your own actions, and didn't try to shove your beliefs down someone else's throat.
Except thats not true. You simply swap one set of religious morals for another set of religious morals and end up without any freedom whatsoever to simply life free of screaming governmental ninnies with personal issues.
What if the animal has to eat its food alive? Pythons don't typically prosper well if it's been dead and frozen.
These idiots in the animal-rights groups don't understand a single thing about biological requirements for life. They just look at their puppies and wonder how anyone could ever love their free-range puppies as much as daddy loves his snuggie wuggums.
Is this guy so loony that to him "Western mindset" is an indictment of some thought in and of itself? "Oh that's how we think in the UNITED STATES, so obviously that's the dumbest possible mindset." Is that what's going on here? "If we considered them living beings, we would deal with them differently." Yeah, but we don't, so why are you acting like we do or should?
Yes. He is, in fact, that loony.
To his mindset, something that is "western" is imperialist and evil, the source of all suffering in this world. If only those nasty "western" ideas and philosophies would just die out, we could live in a perfect Utopia like I heard in that John Lennon song once.
Until, you know, the guys with guns from the "east" came along to ethnically cleanse you like they did to all the other infidels.
In San Francisco, and other so called 'liberal' bastions, laws are not created to give people the freedoms to live the life that they choose, they are created to radically socially engineer a population according to specific mores that the 'elites' prefer. So if the elites are tree-hugging PETA members, then they want to fashion society in that image, regardless of the hypocracy and stupidity it causes. One could say that all social engineering is applying a first order linear model to a chaotic system and then crying about how the results don't work.
How this is different than theocracy, I don't know.
This is because most, if not all, journalists on the science beat have no scientific training at all. They are the same j-school idiots as everyone else, trained to hype up the bad parts of a story to sell more newspapers.
So, apparently according to the WHO, DDT is as dangerous as coffee. I'ma go drink up a nice mosquito-free latte now.
What you should be offended by is that the WHO apparently doesn't classify things well at all.
People only freak out when they find out what 'food additives' are because they are informed about them in a way designed to make them freak out. It's scare tactics - exactly what has been used to control uninformed populations for centuries. It doesn't matter if it's true or false. Once the scare enters the public consciousness, it's impossible to dislodge.
"Do YOU know what THEY put in YOUR food?"
"Do YOU know how ANIMALS are SLAUGHTERED?"
"Do YOU know that CELL PHONES cause CANCER?"
That's not an invitation to learn more, that's an invitation to your amygdala to go batshit insane.
Depends on the definition of 'innocent'.
To the Jihadi, tax-paying westerners are not innocent, because they help to fund wars against those who wish to wage war against them.
To the Jihadi, non-tax-paying westerners are not innocent because their lifestyle is not rightly guided by Sharia, thus their blood is legally spilled.
A fanatic will always find rationalizations to kill people who don't agree with them... unless the fanatic is killed first, or the meme that produces said fanatic(s) is destroyed.
I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.
The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.
European socialism does lead to drastic social stratification, however. Maybe not monetarily, but in terms of class.
There is the mediocre middle class, where everyone's the same. These people have no voice whatsoever. If they speak up, they are racist or fascist nationalists.
There's the slightly more mediocre poor class living on the labor of the middle class's taxes and providing nothing. These folks, typically immigrants from the third world can have a violence veto, and are courted by ..
The elites, who control the language and the government bureaucracy, and force the middle class to suffer immobility and slow erasure of their national culture to appease ghettoized immigrant groups who form massive voting blocs that help keep the elites in power.
Safety and security forces, such as police and fire are functions of most conceptions of a 'limited government' state, as are roads and basic infrastructure. The state exists to take care of highly unprofitable yet necessary services. Libertarianism is not equal to Anarchy as some here seem to posit.
What happened here is an unfortunate circumstance that the local government subcontracted out fire protection to another district because it refused to pay for it itself. In a purely libertarian environment, the fire fighters would have charged him a huge bill for the fire service on call, not just stood there like inhuman robots and watched as humans suffered.
This joke never stops being funny.
Or a complete idiot. Unfortunately there's way too many people who put their blinkers on and can't understand how legal systems work. This is especially true amongst the faux-liberals who think that every legal system is exactly like the US ("They can't exile a -president-!!@# That's illegal!!!!#!@111") or who will go to bat to defend an elected leader's power grab to dictatorhood while being virulently anti-Bush ("Bushitler's going to take over the gubment pemanently!!11!! Darth Cheney!!@111!!! Yay Chavez and Ahmadinejad!!)
There was nothing 'coup-like' about the Honduran reaction to Zelaya's power-grab. The only people who still buy into that meme are retards (or the mainstream media, or Obama's government).