Give me Aristophanes any day, the first person to figure out that people liked to laugh when they went to the "move-ies." He also managed to write political satire in the ancient world and not get killed for it (the audience was laughing too hard to try).
And yes, it is better in Attic because you get all the puns.
You're a moron and apparently not a student of history. The ownership of slaves was such a very minor issue in the beginning that it was virtually of no consequence.
It was so inconsequential that Vice President Stephens made the Cornerstone Speech (21 March 1861) in which he said:
..."Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." (And so on for four more paragraphs.)
Slavery was a key issue which divided the nation and the south was wrong on slavery. The north was hardly better on this (the 1863 draft riots spring to mind). Still, slavery was a major issue in the beginning. Lincoln certainly took advantage of the south's dependence on slavery and European abolitionism, but the war was about slavery and the state's right to keep slaves.
Your definition of cause seems very broad. The Korean war can just as easily be explained as another iteration of the Sino-Japanese wars which had been fought over Korea 1894-95, 1937-45 combined with the revolutionary zeal shown by communist revolution (see also Soviet-Polish war 1920). Or as a hegemonic war by China. That the Chinese were "godless" and the UN "godly" was a rhetorical distinction made after the beginning of the war and not a cause.
In God we trust was first added to US currency during the American Civil War, it was adopted as the official motto in 1956. The Korean War ran 1950-1953 (although a peace treaty has not been signed to date). Given this, the idea that the Korean War was motivated by religion is absurd.
Now, if you want to make the case that the American Civil War was between the defenders of the True Faith and those Godless Rebels, I'd love to watch the flame war.
Because there is a large pool of money chasing safety. When there is a high demand with limited supply, the price increases. In the case of fed bonds the price increases causes the interest rate to decrease. This is because the rate is determined by the amount paid at purchase relative the the value returned at maturity. At one point the rate was actually negative (you paid more for the bond than you got at maturity). As lending rates are tied to the fed rates, none of the US rates are going up (i.e. the price for the bond relative to the money at maturity is still close to 1:1 or 0% interest).
I still like my version better. We decided to fawn all over the rich and hope that they would share their largesse, forgetting entirely that like other bullies, they had no incentive to share. We let them keep it in hopes that they would be moved to give back some of it to us.
Sure there were lies, but a lot of them were ones we told ourselves "if I give up prosperity now, I'll get a double helping in the future" and "if I we tax the rich, when I become rich I'll have to pay higher tax."
We could eliminate the entire federal govt. except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and payment on the national debt and we would STILL be paying out more than we bring in. Think of that, no DOD, TSA, DHS, VA, NPS, NFS, BLM etc. nothing. Not even the senators and congresscritters getting paid.
And we'd still have to borrow money to make the nation go.
For the past thirty years we have held up the image of the put upon rich person who would love to invest in the US but can't because of our terrible tax burden. So the tax code has been modified to take the burden off the most wealthy [our top tax rate used to be 50% now it is 35%]. We did this in hopes that the wealthy would let the rest of the economy have more. This has not happened. In fact, the money has become more concentrated at the top while wages have stagnated at the bottom and in the middle. Instead of investing in industry, the Giant Pool of Money at the Top has bought US debt [we don't owe our soul to the Chinese, we owe it to the wealthy] and, because T-bills have had lousy returns for a decade, the money also went to fuel speculative bubbles [including the global housing bubble].
In this situation, where the top earners [about 5% of the population] have over 85% of the wealth, to whine about horrible confiscatory tax and wave the class warfare banner is beyond absurd. In order to have class war you need to have class, is the GOP saying that we still have class in the democratic United States?
Which explains the Soviet soldiers who strapped on satchel charges and threw themselves under German tanks during the fighting in Crimea. Communism is explicitly atheist and by extension a "no afterlife" group.
One could argue that patriotism is religion (they were defending their country from invasion after all) but claiming equivalence between religion and patriotism does make one look a bit of a prat.
Ah, but what do you call the people who were NOT raised by the boomers (Gen-X f'rinstance). Too old to be hipsters, too young (and hopefully, intelligent) to be boomers, born in the smoking ruins of the 60's and coming of age in the era of national impotence (1970's-1980's).
All generations suck in different ways. Boomers just suck harder than other generations and believe that a Happy Face will see us through (they were raised in the 50's, what can we expect?
S&P has a long history of issuing downgrades when default is inevitable (AIG, Enron, Worldcom, & the whole MBS/CDO debacle). If they were the weather service, they'd issue tornado warnings when debris was already hitting your house and the wind was a deafening shriek.
In ten years, the solar panel technology will get better and cheaper.
Yes, and ten years from then they will be even better and cheaper, so what? If you don't do something because it'll be even better in th future, you do nothing today. So, while you could be offsetting some of your energy costs now and for ten years into the future, you are instead paying the same While-U-Wait.
Just because there is no state doesn't mean society will allow...
If society has rules, society will have to enforce those rules or give up on them. Once you have rules and enforcement, you have enforcers. Whether they are a slashdot lynch mob or someone with a badge, they are there to enforce the rules of society.
So the app is a non-issue, you just want to ban Those People. But since you can't actually ban Those People, you'll settle for burning them in effigy, i.e. banning the app.
You think they are nuts. They think you are nuts. I think both of you are nuts and need to stop trying to wipe each other out.
You are wrong also in seeming to think teachers are justified in becoming cynical. You ask "the children could do no wrong?" with sarcasm, yet this is just the philosophy an educator must maintain. Children are not your equals. You are better than they in any measurable regard.
Children are being taught, they are not empowered consumers who are your equal. Children are often wrong and they are generally ignorant, that is why they are being taught. "I am going to be a rock star so I don't need to know history" is not a valid answer.
I agree that teachers are better than the kids and so contempt is out of line, I also know that teachers are treated with contempt from admin, parent, and student. Dumping contempt on a person who is trying to teach you anything is not a good working relationship. Giving a person responsibility without authority is an invitation for disaster.
She is out of line and should have kept her venting private or taken them to someone who could help here with the underlying issue. She should be mentored/tutored/counseled to improve her ability to work. The one question I have to ask, in addition to the above, is 'did the students do anything to earn this contempt?'
Yes, yes, everything is about Julian, there is no spoon there is only Julian. Anonymous!=Julian, Anonymous!=Wikileaks, and Random_Security_Firm!=Intelligence_Services, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
My take: small security firm announces that social engineering works both ways! Film at 11.
Do you have empirical evidence that people who disagree with you are of unsound mind? How did you acquire that information, is it in peer reviewed journals? Or is it just your own biased opinion masquerading as rationality.
Sure creationism should be challenged. However, if we attack it with stupidity, we'll just confirm the opinion that scientists are untrustworthy liars.
There is an organized campaign to discredit Assange. This reporter may not be part of that campaign, but he is doing their work for them by painting Assange as weird and different. It is entirely valid to question the motives of anyone criticizing Assange, because of the very real, very powerful campaign to discredit him.
Asserting a very powerful, organized campaign to discredit doesn't make it so either. Conspiracy is more complicated than a bunch of angry people talking big. It is also very hard to prove unless you have internal documents to demonstrate that it is happening. As these documents have not been brought forward to date, an organized campaign against Assange is only one conjecture.
Other possibilities: Dark Forces are behind Wikileaks and want to have everyone submit their secrets to that website. What better way to catch leakers after all, than to have them leak to you? In order to raise the brand name, they have selected an earnest dupe to act as Martyr to Power and draw public sympathy.
Or, he is a narcissist who wants everything to be about him and we are being duped into supporting him and feeding his ego.
Or, Rather than heros or villains, dark forces or conspiracy, we actually have grandstanding noisemakers who are talking big and posturing, as often happens on playgrounds throughout the world. There is nothing organized or even all that intelligent about this, it's just another part of the ongoing mess that is life, enjoy!
The last option won't have many fans because it means we have to put aside all the heroic meta-narratives we treasure, but it has my vote.
As for your Pharaoh comment: There is not a single piece of archeological evidence that hundreds of thousands of people migrated away from Egypt and wandered through the desert for 40 years. So either the Exodus never happened and the story is just made up or the ancient people of Israel were the cleanest people ever by not leaving any pottery, weapons, etc. behind....
Or perhaps their culture (nomadic shepherds) did not have much to leave behind? Seriously, we have stuff on the scythians because of their burial mounds which we wouldn't have found if they didn't build giant kurgans as markers. Without the graves and military accounts of them we'd have nothing on them either, of course, the old accounts also describe Amazon warriors.
Also, there was significant trade throughout the area and the egyptian styles were pervasive for instance, there were egyptian outposts near the Dead Sea. Trade moved both ways and in order to prove the presence or absence of group A there would have to be a definable style different from the trade. The proto Jews came from an Egyptian context which means that their material culture would be diverging from egyptian and 40 years is not a long time for divergence.
And yes, the hundreds of thousands is hyperbole, but you knew that already.
Or maybe the US could call him a Super Evil Madman of Doom! (After all, if we're going to make up ridiculous scenarios, why stop with the merely silly?)
He certainly doesn't want to go to Sweden for questioning, that we can all see. But if he is worried that going to Sweden will lead to the US extraditing him and dumping him in Gitmo, he's already lost. The scenario is that once he is in custody... But wait, he IS in custody, under manor (rather than house) arrest. Besides, if the US is going to lean on a government to get someone underhandedly shipped west, why wouldn't the UK under a conservative administration be a BETTER bet than Sweden? The Swedes do not have the reputation of being Minions for the US while the UK has a history of at least flirting with the idea.
Here's an alternate theory: the charges are actually true and the lawyers have twigged to the fact that "The bitch is lying. Besides, she asked for it." defense is not winning him any friends. Therefore, as conscienceless slime-weasles who will twist the truth like a pretzel, they are trying "The Evil Overlords will get me!" defense.
Slashdot Mirror
Plato? Aristotle? Morons.
Give me Aristophanes any day, the first person to figure out that people liked to laugh when they went to the "move-ies." He also managed to write political satire in the ancient world and not get killed for it (the audience was laughing too hard to try).
And yes, it is better in Attic because you get all the puns.
You're a moron and apparently not a student of history. The ownership of slaves was such a very minor issue in the beginning that it was virtually of no consequence.
It was so inconsequential that Vice President Stephens made the Cornerstone Speech (21 March 1861) in which he said:
Slavery was a key issue which divided the nation and the south was wrong on slavery. The north was hardly better on this (the 1863 draft riots spring to mind). Still, slavery was a major issue in the beginning. Lincoln certainly took advantage of the south's dependence on slavery and European abolitionism, but the war was about slavery and the state's right to keep slaves.
It seems the Hegemons of Humorlessness are failing to applaud our homophonic hero.
Your definition of cause seems very broad. The Korean war can just as easily be explained as another iteration of the Sino-Japanese wars which had been fought over Korea 1894-95, 1937-45 combined with the revolutionary zeal shown by communist revolution (see also Soviet-Polish war 1920). Or as a hegemonic war by China. That the Chinese were "godless" and the UN "godly" was a rhetorical distinction made after the beginning of the war and not a cause.
In God we trust was first added to US currency during the American Civil War, it was adopted as the official motto in 1956. The Korean War ran 1950-1953 (although a peace treaty has not been signed to date). Given this, the idea that the Korean War was motivated by religion is absurd.
Now, if you want to make the case that the American Civil War was between the defenders of the True Faith and those Godless Rebels, I'd love to watch the flame war.
Because there is a large pool of money chasing safety. When there is a high demand with limited supply, the price increases. In the case of fed bonds the price increases causes the interest rate to decrease. This is because the rate is determined by the amount paid at purchase relative the the value returned at maturity. At one point the rate was actually negative (you paid more for the bond than you got at maturity). As lending rates are tied to the fed rates, none of the US rates are going up (i.e. the price for the bond relative to the money at maturity is still close to 1:1 or 0% interest).
I still like my version better. We decided to fawn all over the rich and hope that they would share their largesse, forgetting entirely that like other bullies, they had no incentive to share. We let them keep it in hopes that they would be moved to give back some of it to us.
Sure there were lies, but a lot of them were ones we told ourselves "if I give up prosperity now, I'll get a double helping in the future" and "if I we tax the rich, when I become rich I'll have to pay higher tax."
We could eliminate the entire federal govt. except Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and payment on the national debt and we would STILL be paying out more than we bring in. Think of that, no DOD, TSA, DHS, VA, NPS, NFS, BLM etc. nothing. Not even the senators and congresscritters getting paid.
And we'd still have to borrow money to make the nation go.
For the past thirty years we have held up the image of the put upon rich person who would love to invest in the US but can't because of our terrible tax burden. So the tax code has been modified to take the burden off the most wealthy [our top tax rate used to be 50% now it is 35%]. We did this in hopes that the wealthy would let the rest of the economy have more. This has not happened. In fact, the money has become more concentrated at the top while wages have stagnated at the bottom and in the middle. Instead of investing in industry, the Giant Pool of Money at the Top has bought US debt [we don't owe our soul to the Chinese, we owe it to the wealthy] and, because T-bills have had lousy returns for a decade, the money also went to fuel speculative bubbles [including the global housing bubble].
In this situation, where the top earners [about 5% of the population] have over 85% of the wealth, to whine about horrible confiscatory tax and wave the class warfare banner is beyond absurd. In order to have class war you need to have class, is the GOP saying that we still have class in the democratic United States?
Which explains the Soviet soldiers who strapped on satchel charges and threw themselves under German tanks during the fighting in Crimea. Communism is explicitly atheist and by extension a "no afterlife" group.
One could argue that patriotism is religion (they were defending their country from invasion after all) but claiming equivalence between religion and patriotism does make one look a bit of a prat.
Ah, but what do you call the people who were NOT raised by the boomers (Gen-X f'rinstance). Too old to be hipsters, too young (and hopefully, intelligent) to be boomers, born in the smoking ruins of the 60's and coming of age in the era of national impotence (1970's-1980's).
All generations suck in different ways. Boomers just suck harder than other generations and believe that a Happy Face will see us through (they were raised in the 50's, what can we expect?
nah, we'd have to give the 'buyer' money to take it off our hands. Not even Mexico would pay us for it.
Exactly.
S&P has a long history of issuing downgrades when default is inevitable (AIG, Enron, Worldcom, & the whole MBS/CDO debacle). If they were the weather service, they'd issue tornado warnings when debris was already hitting your house and the wind was a deafening shriek.
And the surplus was used to buy Treasury Bonds thus it now counts as part of the national debt. Sure, we "owe it to ourselves" but we still owe it.
Consider the irony of paying taxes to contribute to a fund that buys debt we have to pay via taxation.
In ten years, the solar panel technology will get better and cheaper.
Yes, and ten years from then they will be even better and cheaper, so what? If you don't do something because it'll be even better in th future, you do nothing today. So, while you could be offsetting some of your energy costs now and for ten years into the future, you are instead paying the same While-U-Wait.
Just because there is no state doesn't mean society will allow ...
If society has rules, society will have to enforce those rules or give up on them.
Once you have rules and enforcement, you have enforcers. Whether they are a slashdot lynch mob or someone with a badge, they are there to enforce the rules of society.
Congratulations, you have now developed a state.
Welcome to Slashmob, we've got pitchforks, torches, and a burning desire to use them!
Are YOU going to be our Unbeliever Du Jour?
So the app is a non-issue, you just want to ban Those People. But since you can't actually ban Those People, you'll settle for burning them in effigy, i.e. banning the app.
You think they are nuts. They think you are nuts. I think both of you are nuts and need to stop trying to wipe each other out.
You are wrong also in seeming to think teachers are justified in becoming cynical. You ask "the children could do no wrong?" with sarcasm, yet this is just the philosophy an educator must maintain. Children are not your equals. You are better than they in any measurable regard.
Children are being taught, they are not empowered consumers who are your equal. Children are often wrong and they are generally ignorant, that is why they are being taught. "I am going to be a rock star so I don't need to know history" is not a valid answer.
I agree that teachers are better than the kids and so contempt is out of line, I also know that teachers are treated with contempt from admin, parent, and student. Dumping contempt on a person who is trying to teach you anything is not a good working relationship. Giving a person responsibility without authority is an invitation for disaster.
She is out of line and should have kept her venting private or taken them to someone who could help here with the underlying issue. She should be mentored/tutored/counseled to improve her ability to work. The one question I have to ask, in addition to the above, is 'did the students do anything to earn this contempt?'
Yes, yes, everything is about Julian, there is no spoon there is only Julian.
Anonymous!=Julian, Anonymous!=Wikileaks, and Random_Security_Firm!=Intelligence_Services, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
My take: small security firm announces that social engineering works both ways! Film at 11.
Do you have empirical evidence that people who disagree with you are of unsound mind? How did you acquire that information, is it in peer reviewed journals? Or is it just your own biased opinion masquerading as rationality.
Sure creationism should be challenged. However, if we attack it with stupidity, we'll just confirm the opinion that scientists are untrustworthy liars.
There is an organized campaign to discredit Assange. This reporter may not be part of that campaign, but he is doing their work for them by painting Assange as weird and different. It is entirely valid to question the motives of anyone criticizing Assange, because of the very real, very powerful campaign to discredit him.
Asserting a very powerful, organized campaign to discredit doesn't make it so either. Conspiracy is more complicated than a bunch of angry people talking big. It is also very hard to prove unless you have internal documents to demonstrate that it is happening. As these documents have not been brought forward to date, an organized campaign against Assange is only one conjecture.
Other possibilities: Dark Forces are behind Wikileaks and want to have everyone submit their secrets to that website. What better way to catch leakers after all, than to have them leak to you? In order to raise the brand name, they have selected an earnest dupe to act as Martyr to Power and draw public sympathy.
Or, he is a narcissist who wants everything to be about him and we are being duped into supporting him and feeding his ego.
Or, Rather than heros or villains, dark forces or conspiracy, we actually have grandstanding noisemakers who are talking big and posturing, as often happens on playgrounds throughout the world. There is nothing organized or even all that intelligent about this, it's just another part of the ongoing mess that is life, enjoy!
The last option won't have many fans because it means we have to put aside all the heroic meta-narratives we treasure, but it has my vote.
As for your Pharaoh comment: There is not a single piece of archeological evidence that hundreds of thousands of people migrated away from Egypt and wandered through the desert for 40 years.
So either the Exodus never happened and the story is just made up or the ancient people of Israel were the cleanest people ever by not leaving any pottery, weapons, etc. behind....
Or perhaps their culture (nomadic shepherds) did not have much to leave behind? Seriously, we have stuff on the scythians because of their burial mounds which we wouldn't have found if they didn't build giant kurgans as markers. Without the graves and military accounts of them we'd have nothing on them either, of course, the old accounts also describe Amazon warriors.
Also, there was significant trade throughout the area and the egyptian styles were pervasive for instance, there were egyptian outposts near the Dead Sea. Trade moved both ways and in order to prove the presence or absence of group A there would have to be a definable style different from the trade. The proto Jews came from an Egyptian context which means that their material culture would be diverging from egyptian and 40 years is not a long time for divergence.
And yes, the hundreds of thousands is hyperbole, but you knew that already.
Or maybe the US could call him a Super Evil Madman of Doom! (After all, if we're going to make up ridiculous scenarios, why stop with the merely silly?)
He certainly doesn't want to go to Sweden for questioning, that we can all see. But if he is worried that going to Sweden will lead to the US extraditing him and dumping him in Gitmo, he's already lost. The scenario is that once he is in custody... But wait, he IS in custody, under manor (rather than house) arrest. Besides, if the US is going to lean on a government to get someone underhandedly shipped west, why wouldn't the UK under a conservative administration be a BETTER bet than Sweden? The Swedes do not have the reputation of being Minions for the US while the UK has a history of at least flirting with the idea.
Here's an alternate theory: the charges are actually true and the lawyers have twigged to the fact that "The bitch is lying. Besides, she asked for it." defense is not winning him any friends. Therefore, as conscienceless slime-weasles who will twist the truth like a pretzel, they are trying "The Evil Overlords will get me!" defense.
No, No, the new "-gate" is still "Perfect Storm."
"Peak" is just starting out, but we have high hopes for it in the future.