I'll define crazy for you, in this context: encouraging millions of people to act against their own self-interest on the basis of fact-free drivel. That's what Fox does. It is considerably worse than what CNN or MSNBC does because it is so determinedly fact-free, and it causes millions of people to suffer real economic harm.
As for this arse-twattery about feminism doing stuff to men in 'family courts': it will be reasonable for men to complain about this kind of injustice at the point when women are not raped, beaten and abused in their millions in the US by men. I say this as a man. The vast majority of gender-based inequity in US society flows one way, and it ain't against women.
You do realise this is in a closed tunnel, right? I'm preeetty sure it'll be a whole heckuva lot quieter than a train, a plane or a road for that reason alone.
I agree. I often think that if contact lenses hadn't already been invented, armchair theorists would be able to give you a dozen reasons why they couldn't work.
Bzzt, wrong. I am indeed British, but I'm also Jewish. When my compatriots' ancestors were busy colonising, my ancestors were huddled in shtetls in Mittel Europa. But hey, if the inaccurate ad hominem attacks are making you feel better about yourself, go ahead, knock yourself out. They're no more stupid than your original post, and I can see why someone in your position would need the comfort.
This sort of fact-free bollocks and imperialist mindset just drives me nuts. Of course outside interference causes problems.... but this assumption that people in the Middle East have no ability to cause or influence events of their own accord is just, as I say, imperialism by another name. It's also obvious horseshit, which frankly appears to be driven by a desire to pin all the evil in the world onto the US, the West more generally, and corporate power. This simply causes you to turn a blind eye to ideology and fear, as others have said, and leads to wilfully ignoring the capacity of people in the Middle East to commit their own acts of evil (and good!) all by their very own selves.
I think you are mis-reading the phrase "News for nerds" and, specifically, you are missing an important distinction: Slashdot is not a site for tech news. It's a news site for techies. The Venn diagram obviously intersects an awful lot, but the circles aren't concentric.
Given that most anti-gummint types declare themselves pro-business, it's amazing how few seem to comprehend the difference between deficits and debt. It's really not that difficult: you run a surplus if your annual income exceeds your annual expenditure; if it's the other way round, you have a deficit. If a country were a government, this would be profit (or loss). It is possible to be a profitable country and still owe money to others, just as it's possible to be a profitable company and owe money to a bank, or be a solvent individual and owe money to the bank in the form of a mortgage. You can argue about how much debt a country ought to hold, but conflating deficit and debt is just.... stupid.
CBO figures show quite clearly that the Clinton administration ran a surplus in its final three years (and also in 2001 due to momentum): http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43904-Historical%20Budget%20Data-2.xls They also give the lie to your assertion that the national debt went up every year he was in office. In fact, debt fell in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. By 2001, it was down to 3.3tn, having peaked at 3.8tn in 1997. That was a fall from 48.4% of GDP in 1996 to 32.5% of GDP in 2001 -- 16% points in 5 years. I wish I was paying my mortgage off that quickly.
Honestly, I see no point in your deluding yourself about economic history. Get over the cognitive dissonance and learn to accept the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
This truly is a case of US exceptionalism among Western countries, though. There are no other Western nations with a party so overtly religious (not even, ironically, the CDU in Germany).
About your sig....I think you'd be better off sticking with RAH's line from Starship Troopers on this. It's more elegant, less moralistic, and more accurate.
Your errors: - Slavery in the US, not slavery everywhere - I'm struggling to think of a single communist regime that has been defeated in war. Not the USSR or its satellites, obviously. Not communist China, obviously. So who knows what the fuck you're on about.
RAH's line: "My mother said violence never solves anything." "So?" Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. "I'm sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that."
A taxi driver choked and robbed a passenger in a dispute over a tip near San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park early Sunday morning, a police spokesman said today.
Not quite on murder, but licensing does not guarantee safety per se.
1. The plural of anecdote is not data. You need a comparison of licensing vs non-licensing stats 2. Licensing clearly cannot guarantee safety, but the best should not be the enemy of the good. Licensing can cut rates of assault etc.
So, now knowing that cabs operating under ridesharing companies do follow safety regulations, does this change your opinion?
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
In the words of the old cliche, "Don't assume. It makes an ass of u and me."
I didn't know about the Sandusky trial, what with my not being from the US.
If the point bluefoxlucid was making is as you described, it's a bloody stupid point, given that I was responding to an OP which mentioned women and not men: "only if shes hot". It would of course be no better if it were about men. But, to use your phrase, "wilfully ignoring" the fact the vast majority of people who are raped are women is stupid. Or possibly misogynist.
Just as it is it stupid, or possibly misogynist, to ignore the fact that the vast majority of commentards' threats to rape people on the internet are aimed at women. Typically women who have the gall to be prominent, such as Mary Beard, Caroline Criado-Perez or Stella Creasy.
Sometimes I wish the internet was run by Charlie Brooker, I really do.
You appear to be getting just warmed up with your nasty little rape fantasies. At least they don't involve actual living people. At least I hope not.
Honestly, I for the life of me cannot understand why people behave like this on the web. I understand that they enjoy jokes, or winding other people up, but it's the fact that they appear not to have any countervailing force within them saying "actually, I find that funny but it's obviously disgusting so I won't do it" that really astonishes (and saddens) me.
"Any claim that it's unsafe because its unregulated is more or less bullocks."
How do you know this? And what are you claiming? That regulations don't make taxis safer than unregulated alternatives? Or that ridesharing is de facto regulated? The latter appears to have at least some plausibility, as the big rideshare firms are in the process of agreeing terms with the authorities, but as for the former...I just don't know where you would have that evidence from.
Most of the requirements of the SF MTA seem pretty self-evidently good things to me: (1) You must be a legal resident of the United States. GOOD, cuts flight risk if there's a crime or accident (2) Be clean in dress and person. GOOD, although clearly more honoured in the breach than the observance. (3) Be free of any disease, condition, infirmity, or addiction that might render the applicant unable to safely operate a motor vehicle or that otherwise poses a risk to public health and safety. GOOD. I do not want to be driven by someone with a contagious airborne disease. (4) CA Driver's License. GOOD. I obviously want someone who can meet this minimal safe driving standard. (5) Able to Drive 4+ Hours. GOOD. I don't want to be driven by someone who makes errors through exhaustion. (6) Have no prior convictions of a crime that would, in the judgment of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), present a risk to public safety if the permit is granted, including but not limited to convictions involving sexual assault, the use of a vehicle in the commission of a felony, fraud, violence against a person, reckless disregard for public safety, two or more recent convictions of drug-related offenses, or two or more recent convictions of driving under the influence within the previous five years, whether or not such convictions occurred while driving a Motor Vehicle for Hire. GOOD. It's not a perfect filter, but we don't live in a perfect world, and it cuts risks significantly. (7) Have attained the age of 21. GOOD. Younger drivers are more dangerous. (8) Speak, read and write the English language. GOOD. I need to be able to communicate to the driver effectively.
Which of these requirements don't matter to you? Is it really your position that none of them is important (or at least, none bar the possession of a drivers' license?)
The first website you link to is about taxi drivers being murdered by their passengers. For you to make your case effectively, you'd need that page to be about murders of passengers by their taxi drivers.
I can't speak about SF, but I can talk about London, UK. Here, there have been several rapes, assaults and murders carried out by licensed taxi drivers. But the rates are substantially higher in the unregulated (and illegal) world of unlicensed cabs. This is unsurprising, given that to drive a licensed cab you need to have a clean criminal record.
Getting in a car with a stranger carries some risk. Regulations can and do help lower that risk. Not perfectly, and not completely, and there are other ways of lowering the risk as well, but denying an obvious truth is just dumb.
Incidentally, it's pretty unpleasant to joke about sexual coercion. Before shooting off your keyboard at me for having the temerity to point this out, you might reflect on whether you would like the women or girls who are significant in your life to be subject to this -- an environment in which one stranger pushes them to act as sex objects for him for money, while another stranger laughs at them on the internet.
Congrats on the new baby! A moses basket with a sheepskin liner worked really well for us for family movie time.... baby sleeping peacefully while we watched. Happy memories. I can also strongly recommend this excellent book which meant we had a wonderful, calm time with our baby, completely unlike what we had been told to expect.
Bit confused. Are you saying the older generation said your generation was more bigoted than they? Seems unlikely (and not true in developed countries).
On this second point, there are a ton of Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels that involve breaking the rules and sassing the teacher, and they date back to the 40s, 50s and 60s. I'm pretty sure that this is a universal.
I think of myself as having a decent comic imagination, but the idea that someone would try to convince me and everyone else that the younger generation is ruder than the old generation by calling me names....well, let's just say you've conclusively proved that there's at least one American who does irony. Even if they're too stupid to recognise they're doing it.
Now, on to the substance: 1. You are on the internet. The internet consists of more than just America. Talking about the social destruction of America in response to a clearly universalist post is absurd. 2. Just to make my point: Pliny the Younger bemoaned the younger generation 1900 years ago. In Rome. "But in former times (so my elders tell me) no youth, even of the best families, was allowed in unless introduced by some person of consular dignity. As things are now, since every fence of modesty and decorum is broken down, and all distinctions are levelled and confounded, the present young generation, so far from waiting to be introduced, break in of their own free will." 3. I agree that there is no comparison between the America of 60 years ago and the America of today. The America of 60 years ago was a place in which it was unremarkable to beat wives, hate and exclude African Americans (and every other minority you can name), persecute gay people, ridicule divorcees, ostracise atheists. And the people of the day didn't call you "sir" while beating the living shit out of you for being a woman, black, Jewish, gay, etc. They called you vile names instead. In other words, they were rude beyond imagining compared to today -- just about different things.
If you want to remain unchallenged while you romanticise your youth, or refer to the end of any of the disgusting prejudices I outlined above as "the social destruction of America" you're SOL doing it here. You need to go somewhere more bubble-like.
It doesn't make them wrong, but it is self-evidently very unlikely that every generation is a decline from the preceding generation. Occam's Razor suggests there are more credible hypotheses to test, such as "human beings are attached to the social mores of their youth". But if you feel you have some actual rigorous data to back up a hypothesis that human beings have inexorably declined since time immemorial, I'd be interested in your posting it.
I think you'll find it's just a fact-free meme though, along with the companion meme about the march of progress.
Being a pompous prick and using phrases like "antecedent gutteral" in an attempt at intellectual willy-waving is also pretty rude. Unfortunately for you, "gutteral" is actually spelled "guttural".
Are you being dumb on purpose? Why would you read my post and think I don't understand about anti-women violence in Islam? I said, as you appear to be hard of reading, that the problem is pervasive. Ie fixing on Islam is giving the rest of the world a free pass. Seems to me you're more interested in hating on Islam than sorting out violence against women. Which is unsurprising, but depressing nonetheless.
You know, I am absolutely disgusted by domestic violence, which is almost always men beating and killing women. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and plucking out a story about an abusive imam to make an anti-Muslim argument is an excellent way of blinding yourself to the true pervasiveness of this violence. Just look at the terrible story that emerged at the weekend about Nigella Lawson.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll define crazy for you, in this context: encouraging millions of people to act against their own self-interest on the basis of fact-free drivel. That's what Fox does. It is considerably worse than what CNN or MSNBC does because it is so determinedly fact-free, and it causes millions of people to suffer real economic harm.
As for this arse-twattery about feminism doing stuff to men in 'family courts': it will be reasonable for men to complain about this kind of injustice at the point when women are not raped, beaten and abused in their millions in the US by men. I say this as a man. The vast majority of gender-based inequity in US society flows one way, and it ain't against women.
Oooh look! An ad hominem attack, to go with the racism! You appear to have all the vile traits a human being could ask for!
You do realise this is in a closed tunnel, right? I'm preeetty sure it'll be a whole heckuva lot quieter than a train, a plane or a road for that reason alone.
I agree. I often think that if contact lenses hadn't already been invented, armchair theorists would be able to give you a dozen reasons why they couldn't work.
For a stouthearted defender against imperialism you sure do sound a teensy bit racist. Not to mention hypocritical.
Bzzt, wrong. I am indeed British, but I'm also Jewish. When my compatriots' ancestors were busy colonising, my ancestors were huddled in shtetls in Mittel Europa. But hey, if the inaccurate ad hominem attacks are making you feel better about yourself, go ahead, knock yourself out. They're no more stupid than your original post, and I can see why someone in your position would need the comfort.
This sort of fact-free bollocks and imperialist mindset just drives me nuts. Of course outside interference causes problems.... but this assumption that people in the Middle East have no ability to cause or influence events of their own accord is just, as I say, imperialism by another name. It's also obvious horseshit, which frankly appears to be driven by a desire to pin all the evil in the world onto the US, the West more generally, and corporate power. This simply causes you to turn a blind eye to ideology and fear, as others have said, and leads to wilfully ignoring the capacity of people in the Middle East to commit their own acts of evil (and good!) all by their very own selves.
I think you are mis-reading the phrase "News for nerds" and, specifically, you are missing an important distinction: Slashdot is not a site for tech news. It's a news site for techies. The Venn diagram obviously intersects an awful lot, but the circles aren't concentric.
Given that most anti-gummint types declare themselves pro-business, it's amazing how few seem to comprehend the difference between deficits and debt. It's really not that difficult: you run a surplus if your annual income exceeds your annual expenditure; if it's the other way round, you have a deficit. If a country were a government, this would be profit (or loss). It is possible to be a profitable country and still owe money to others, just as it's possible to be a profitable company and owe money to a bank, or be a solvent individual and owe money to the bank in the form of a mortgage. You can argue about how much debt a country ought to hold, but conflating deficit and debt is just .... stupid.
CBO figures show quite clearly that the Clinton administration ran a surplus in its final three years (and also in 2001 due to momentum):
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43904-Historical%20Budget%20Data-2.xls
They also give the lie to your assertion that the national debt went up every year he was in office. In fact, debt fell in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. By 2001, it was down to 3.3tn, having peaked at 3.8tn in 1997. That was a fall from 48.4% of GDP in 1996 to 32.5% of GDP in 2001 -- 16% points in 5 years. I wish I was paying my mortgage off that quickly.
Then Bush came along and fucked it all up. Royally:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/05/the-three-best-charts-on-how-clintons-surpluses-became-bush-and-obamas-deficits/
Honestly, I see no point in your deluding yourself about economic history. Get over the cognitive dissonance and learn to accept the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
This truly is a case of US exceptionalism among Western countries, though. There are no other Western nations with a party so overtly religious (not even, ironically, the CDU in Germany).
About your sig....I think you'd be better off sticking with RAH's line from Starship Troopers on this. It's more elegant, less moralistic, and more accurate.
Your errors:
- Slavery in the US, not slavery everywhere
- I'm struggling to think of a single communist regime that has been defeated in war. Not the USSR or its satellites, obviously. Not communist China, obviously. So who knows what the fuck you're on about.
RAH's line:
"My mother said violence never solves anything." "So?" Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. "I'm sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that."
Mod parent up. This is spot on.
All right. I give you another link S.F. Taxi Driver Chokes Passenger For Not Leaving Tip
Not quite on murder, but licensing does not guarantee safety per se.
1. The plural of anecdote is not data. You need a comparison of licensing vs non-licensing stats
2. Licensing clearly cannot guarantee safety, but the best should not be the enemy of the good. Licensing can cut rates of assault etc.
So, now knowing that cabs operating under ridesharing companies do follow safety regulations, does this change your opinion?
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
In the words of the old cliche, "Don't assume. It makes an ass of u and me."
I didn't know about the Sandusky trial, what with my not being from the US.
If the point bluefoxlucid was making is as you described, it's a bloody stupid point, given that I was responding to an OP which mentioned women and not men: "only if shes hot". It would of course be no better if it were about men. But, to use your phrase, "wilfully ignoring" the fact the vast majority of people who are raped are women is stupid. Or possibly misogynist.
Just as it is it stupid, or possibly misogynist, to ignore the fact that the vast majority of commentards' threats to rape people on the internet are aimed at women. Typically women who have the gall to be prominent, such as Mary Beard, Caroline Criado-Perez or Stella Creasy.
Sometimes I wish the internet was run by Charlie Brooker, I really do.
You appear to be getting just warmed up with your nasty little rape fantasies. At least they don't involve actual living people. At least I hope not.
Honestly, I for the life of me cannot understand why people behave like this on the web. I understand that they enjoy jokes, or winding other people up, but it's the fact that they appear not to have any countervailing force within them saying "actually, I find that funny but it's obviously disgusting so I won't do it" that really astonishes (and saddens) me.
"Any claim that it's unsafe because its unregulated is more or less bullocks."
How do you know this? And what are you claiming? That regulations don't make taxis safer than unregulated alternatives? Or that ridesharing is de facto regulated? The latter appears to have at least some plausibility, as the big rideshare firms are in the process of agreeing terms with the authorities, but as for the former...I just don't know where you would have that evidence from.
Most of the requirements of the SF MTA seem pretty self-evidently good things to me:
(1) You must be a legal resident of the United States. GOOD, cuts flight risk if there's a crime or accident
(2) Be clean in dress and person. GOOD, although clearly more honoured in the breach than the observance.
(3) Be free of any disease, condition, infirmity, or addiction that might render the applicant unable to safely operate a motor vehicle or that otherwise poses a risk to public health and safety. GOOD. I do not want to be driven by someone with a contagious airborne disease.
(4) CA Driver's License. GOOD. I obviously want someone who can meet this minimal safe driving standard.
(5) Able to Drive 4+ Hours. GOOD. I don't want to be driven by someone who makes errors through exhaustion.
(6) Have no prior convictions of a crime that would, in the judgment of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), present a risk to public safety if the permit is granted, including but not limited to convictions involving sexual assault, the use of a vehicle in the commission of a felony, fraud, violence against a person, reckless disregard for public safety, two or more recent convictions of drug-related offenses, or two or more recent convictions of driving under the influence within the previous five years, whether or not such convictions occurred while driving a Motor Vehicle for Hire. GOOD. It's not a perfect filter, but we don't live in a perfect world, and it cuts risks significantly.
(7) Have attained the age of 21. GOOD. Younger drivers are more dangerous.
(8) Speak, read and write the English language. GOOD. I need to be able to communicate to the driver effectively.
Which of these requirements don't matter to you? Is it really your position that none of them is important (or at least, none bar the possession of a drivers' license?)
Erm.
The first website you link to is about taxi drivers being murdered by their passengers. For you to make your case effectively, you'd need that page to be about murders of passengers by their taxi drivers.
I can't speak about SF, but I can talk about London, UK. Here, there have been several rapes, assaults and murders carried out by licensed taxi drivers. But the rates are substantially higher in the unregulated (and illegal) world of unlicensed cabs. This is unsurprising, given that to drive a licensed cab you need to have a clean criminal record.
Getting in a car with a stranger carries some risk. Regulations can and do help lower that risk. Not perfectly, and not completely, and there are other ways of lowering the risk as well, but denying an obvious truth is just dumb.
Incidentally, it's pretty unpleasant to joke about sexual coercion. Before shooting off your keyboard at me for having the temerity to point this out, you might reflect on whether you would like the women or girls who are significant in your life to be subject to this -- an environment in which one stranger pushes them to act as sex objects for him for money, while another stranger laughs at them on the internet.
Congrats on the new baby! A moses basket with a sheepskin liner worked really well for us for family movie time.... baby sleeping peacefully while we watched. Happy memories. I can also strongly recommend this excellent book which meant we had a wonderful, calm time with our baby, completely unlike what we had been told to expect.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Your-Cries-Deborah-Jackson/dp/0340830212
Bit confused. Are you saying the older generation said your generation was more bigoted than they? Seems unlikely (and not true in developed countries).
On this second point, there are a ton of Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels that involve breaking the rules and sassing the teacher, and they date back to the 40s, 50s and 60s. I'm pretty sure that this is a universal.
I *love* this comment.
I think of myself as having a decent comic imagination, but the idea that someone would try to convince me and everyone else that the younger generation is ruder than the old generation by calling me names....well, let's just say you've conclusively proved that there's at least one American who does irony. Even if they're too stupid to recognise they're doing it.
Now, on to the substance:
1. You are on the internet. The internet consists of more than just America. Talking about the social destruction of America in response to a clearly universalist post is absurd.
2. Just to make my point: Pliny the Younger bemoaned the younger generation 1900 years ago. In Rome. "But in former times (so my elders tell me)
no youth, even of the best families, was allowed in unless introduced by some person of consular dignity. As things are now, since every fence of modesty and decorum is broken down, and all distinctions are levelled and confounded, the present young generation, so far from waiting to be introduced, break in of their
own free will."
3. I agree that there is no comparison between the America of 60 years ago and the America of today. The America of 60 years ago was a place in which it was unremarkable to beat wives, hate and exclude African Americans (and every other minority you can name), persecute gay people, ridicule divorcees, ostracise atheists. And the people of the day didn't call you "sir" while beating the living shit out of you for being a woman, black, Jewish, gay, etc. They called you vile names instead. In other words, they were rude beyond imagining compared to today -- just about different things.
If you want to remain unchallenged while you romanticise your youth, or refer to the end of any of the disgusting prejudices I outlined above as "the social destruction of America" you're SOL doing it here. You need to go somewhere more bubble-like.
It doesn't make them wrong, but it is self-evidently very unlikely that every generation is a decline from the preceding generation. Occam's Razor suggests there are more credible hypotheses to test, such as "human beings are attached to the social mores of their youth". But if you feel you have some actual rigorous data to back up a hypothesis that human beings have inexorably declined since time immemorial, I'd be interested in your posting it.
I think you'll find it's just a fact-free meme though, along with the companion meme about the march of progress.
Being a pompous prick and using phrases like "antecedent gutteral" in an attempt at intellectual willy-waving is also pretty rude. Unfortunately for you, "gutteral" is actually spelled "guttural".
You do realise that the older generation has been saying versions of this complaint about the younger generation for all of human history, right?
Are you being dumb on purpose? Why would you read my post and think I don't understand about anti-women violence in Islam? I said, as you appear to be hard of reading, that the problem is pervasive. Ie fixing on Islam is giving the rest of the world a free pass. Seems to me you're more interested in hating on Islam than sorting out violence against women. Which is unsurprising, but depressing nonetheless.
You know, I am absolutely disgusted by domestic violence, which is almost always men beating and killing women. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and plucking out a story about an abusive imam to make an anti-Muslim argument is an excellent way of blinding yourself to the true pervasiveness of this violence. Just look at the terrible story that emerged at the weekend about Nigella Lawson.