You're trying to approach a simple task with far too complex an array of mathematics and programming skill.
You want to select colors that contrast with each other, yes? Humans are more sensitive to value than anything else. Painters and photographers and designers (well, not so many designers:P) use this in work every day.
Forget about saturation and hue -- if the value of the adjacent colors is 20-30% different, you can be pretty sure that most human beings will be able to see the contrast between them. Note that i'm talking about value in the sense of 0 being black and 100 being white. So you can easily make 3 or 4 colors simultaneously contrast with each other.
Feel free to pick hue and saturation at random, you'll have a pair of colors that contrast and go together. Doing more than 2-3 colors is harder to make the colors work together without someone with design skill stepping in...
As near as I can tell, it only applies to weapons designed to blind people. That's right, folks. You can blow people apart with laser weapons, according to international law, but you can't blind them.
I have a pair of US Army laser-proof cold-weather goggles and i know the Soviets had similar protection. It may be concern over inadvertant exposure -- but there has been a pretty good amount of research done here on the possibility of disabling an opposition force with advanced disco-ball technology. If the blinding was a temporary effect (like an unexpected flare) it would seem to be a pretty humane way of disabling folks.
It is indeed a strange world we live in.
You mean, I'll put down my sword, and you'll put down your rock, and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?
the mainstream creationist; who really only wants to be allowed to believe that God exists and that He created us in His image--without being mocked as lunatics and defectives
But there is nothing in evolution that in any way denies our creation in God's image. Evolution only describes a process, God provides a reason, motivation, and source of power and inspiration.
Evolution only denies that we were created from whole cloth, and even then it is with the caveat that God may well have done so anyways, but he set up all the evidence to indicate otherwise...
I don't see much correlation between degrees and people's careers in the real world.
Most of the really hot-shot computer folks I know have degrees in English, or psychology. Just because that was interesting to them, and then they wound up working in computers.
Myself, i went to art school and have a degree in fine arts. Not useful for computers, but I don't think many poeple "learn" computers in college anyways. I was doing illustration and comic books, then wound up doing a lot of computer graphics (because it pays well) and now here i am working for NASA doing research for medical uses of technology. Each career step was perfectly logical for the choices and opportunities I had available.
This next year I'll be going to Kenya, Brazil, and possibly Afghanistan for work, and there's no way anyone could have pictured this career path back when i was in my first painting class debating what kind of canvas to use.
Don't sweat your major, study what interests you, and get a degree in anything. Having 4 years of focused work is all that a degree means. You're going to learn everything on the job that you need to know -- from your peers, and books in your own time.
I think I see the flaw in your argumentation concerning civil society
Clearly not. I can barely understand what tangent you're going off on -- my point was that the citizenry of the United States has given the government the power to enforce the law, using force when necessary. It is not a power they plucked from the sky and use against us.
We realized, from several thousand years of history, that the best (or perhaps the least worst) situation is to have a police and judiciary that are tasked with that sole responsibility, in the hopes that an objective, professional third party will allow for the most even-handed application of force when necessary. We instituted checks on the various policing agencies (for example all the redundancy and competition over jurisdictions) to attempt to ensure that no one policing agency gets too powerful.
However, you use the term "enforce the law". This demonstrates your government public school education clearer than anything else. The civil power and responsibilities concerning arrest resolve around harm done or direct threat of harm, where "law enforcement" means the initiation of force against people who have done no harm.
i find this curious -- where on earth did you find these wonderfully specific, yet completely ludicrous "definitions"? These are in no dictionary I know of (granted i was clearly brainwashed by my lousy governemnt school education, where we were forced to agree on the meanings of common english phrases, but clearly your education has passed such limitations).
Law enforcement means to enforce the law -- for the executive to uphold the law by whatever means are prescribed by the legislative, in such a manner and process as allowed by the judiciary. Whether that means sending out a speeding ticket or executing a prisoner it is the job of the executive to enforce the laws through the police, the dept of Prisons, etc.
Do you understand
Not at all -- somewhere in there you defined "law enforcement" to mean, essentially, the physical persecution of innocents. I hardly believe that is the generally accepted definition. I think this demonstrates your weird-ass schooling clearer than anything else. The inability to use language as it stands, and redefining words to suit your own arguments is pointless and will never convince anyone of your ideological correctness.
If you want to make an argument against police brutality, feel free, i doubt anyone is going to take the opposite view. If you want to make an argument that police should not exist, or that no branch of the government (or any agency) should have any ability to compel compliance with laws, then say so. if you're arguing that additional agencies should have the ability to compel action through force, then say that.
As it stands, all i ever hear from Libertarians is that "only the government can use force" but I have yet to hear what the specific problem or proposed solution is! Are others to use force? Is government to not use force? Is this an argument for more or less?
Don't try to hide your beliefs behind some semantic shell game of on-the-fly redefinitions. I would expect you to take a little more pride in the ideology you believe will fix the world...
Except that in this case you're talking about a clause which is quite clear in its meaning as written.
As written, the text of the Constitution was ratified by the various states of the union, and thus, as written, they accepted that amount of power.
The federalist (or Anti-federalist) papers were not voted on by anyone. Persuasive as they may or may not be, and educational, they are in no way limiting to the unambiguously broad powers that the interstate commerce clause gives Congress.
I did not claim you invented the notion of constructionism, only that you seek to use it as an excuse to justify your own reinterpretation of the Constituion into your own ideological form. What, after all, is the point of having a written Constitution and going through that messy process of ratification and amendment, if the ultimate legal restraints and responsibilities of governemnt will be defined by whatever one-sheets are published anonymously in New York that given week?...
The government has an exclusive monopoly on physical force. They and only they can put you in jail. They have the big guns. Microsoft only has capital.
Since when has physical force been the sole arbiter of power?
There is precious little land left on earth where you can just set up shop and live on your own initiative. This is why pure libertarianism is ridiculous -- it presumes that you have the option of opting out.
Ask anyone in a hurricane disaster area how much fresh bottled water would sell for if there weren't laws against price gouging. If person X commercially controls all the water left in an area, they have just as much power over life as anyone with a gun. But hey, it would be ethically wrong to force them to sell it for less than the market will bear -- even if there's more than enough to go around! Ahh, the wonder of monopoly!
That would be a libertarians problem with the government
No, that would be their problem with the people. The government didn't give themselves the power of force -- we did. We gave it to some parts of the government, and we even give it to private corporations, too! If MS wants to open a security firm, they have the ability to do so. Then they'll be able to use force in upholding the law, as well. Now, would that make them bad or good? I get all confused by these wonderfully black and white worldviews...
You asked where in the constitution it gave congress the power they exercise. It's right there.
If you want to go outside the Constitution to find the definitions of govt power, and use "strict constructionism" as your excuse, feel free, but you'll understand if a lot of us don't go along for the ride...
Hey, i think its just as idiotic that my post got to 5 as you do. I was just clarifying that MS is in (legal) fact guilty of crimes in the US. Has nothing to do with the USPS, only the original post i was replying to. It may have been rhetorical, but it sure seemed like he was saying they hadn't been proven guilty of anything yet (or that their guilt was being reevaluated, and thus they should be treated as innocent).
My karma is still way above 50, so i can only lose, never gain:(
You could use the Amphipod (the smallest one), and then come up with a strap and velcro, or perhaps a strong armband. I think clipping to the shorts is the best,
May be -- the problem i've always had with the waist things is that the bouncing either drives me nuts or pulls my running shorts down:)
So I started using the armband radios, but would love to take my own music instead -- i'm curious, what about this design makes it not bounce/pull down? It seems like using a clip on shorts would have the same jarring gravity effect with every step that is like tugging on the shorts?
Those prices are very high, and you definately can't lump all satellite communications together.
that's correct -- getting satellite connections in North America isn't that bad financially. But if you wnt to pack your bags and go down the Amazon river, or hop over to the middle east, you have to start paying a couple bucks a minute...
The sound quality is fine for a portable device of this size -- there is a slight hiss at low volume levels, apparently because they have a signal amplifier inline to make it able to reach a pretty loud volume. If you find it annoying (I don't even notice it except when i'm looking for it) you'll hate it, but I don't use a pocket MP3 player for my $800 headphone comparisons. Running or in a plane or wherever, its fine...
thanks for the amphipod link! I've been trying to find a carrying method for small stuff like my NEX II and keys. Do you know of anything that can clip on the arm?
This would be the incisive and totally factual rationale near the debate on boobies, and pass the booger would it?
Have you perchance checked out the government publications mentioned in the independant article?
So what you're saying is that i actually pointed you to a specific location that pointed out errors in this article, and you didn't even bother to go there? Yet you get on a high horse about whether or not I have read the associated documents that the director of "Repo Man" used in his insightful political analysis? The only things he cited were military analyses of racism within the military -- what the hell do they have to do with US foreign policy, or tactical command?
There are very few "facts" in this article at all, aside from a brief history of what led up to the conflict. But 90% of the article is a series of innuendos and diatribes.
From the article:On 3 October 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" - Delta Force Rangers - tried to capture Aideed again, in central Mogadishu. Aideed wasn't there, but the American troops became confused.
For those who haven't cracked a newspaper open in a decade, this is clearly not true. They didn't go that day to capture Aideed, didn't expect him to be there, and weren't "confused" by anything except the shootdown of their helicopters. Now if the entire point of the mission is wrong in this article, how thorough is this guy's understanding of what happened, much less his mind-reading of the motivations of those who did it?
Note that the thread is at least 2/3 full of people against the US actions in Afghanistan and somalia, that doesn't make the article any more accurate.
Allow me to continue:
In the early 1990s, there were various humanitarian disasters also deserving of urgent intervention. For the United States to spearhead a United Nations mission to Somalia was, from a humanitarian viewpoint, capricious.
Um, why? What is capricious about it? The US regularly spearheads UN missions, because we're one of the only military forces in the world capable of moving on short notice. This is part of why the EU is building their own security force, so the US isn't always out there first.
This makes it sound like the US demanded to be allowed to go to Somalia, when in fact 99% of the planet felt intervention was necessary. Glossing over the humanitarian crisis in mootivations is like suggesting Pearl harbor had nothing to do with US involvement in WW2 -- we were just looking for an excuse to kill some japanses folks because we were all racist.
The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the location of the American embassy, established a few days before the US marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound. The Los Angeles Times reported that Bush's special envoy to Somalia had used the Conoco compound as his temporary headquarters.
Clearly written by someone who has never been to a third-world country with no infrastructure. Corporate compounds overseas are not called compounds for nothing -- they are self-sufficient, easily-defended, properly constructed, and adequately supplied with telecomm and other basic infrastructure. It's not like the Ambassador can check into the local Hyatt Regency.
It is interesting to note that Cox went straight from "intervening in the humanitarian mission" to "trying to capture Aideed" while completely glossing over the fact that the US military had pretty much LEFT the country after the initial deployment, and the UN took over the humanitarian mission. Pakistani soldiers were slaughtered by Aideed, and the UN requested that we COME BACK and help get rid of Aideed.
This isn't some minor detail in the history of the events, this is the whole point of what happened! But I guess it doesn't figure into the USA=racists theory, because black africans killing brown pakistanis and the USA coming to HELP afterwards is a tough fit.
And of course he refers to "Delta Force Rangers", which are two completely different groups. There's Delta Force, and there's Army Rangers. More fact-checking that never happened. Anyone with the briefest familiarity of the events or the US military (or even exposure to Chuck Norris films!) could have told you that.
Sorry, i've only made it like 4 paragraphs through this story again and already the corrections are too much. It wouldn't be hard to write an article about the US military or US foreign policy being motivated by the wrong things, but this article is NOT the one...
If you'd take the chip off your shoulder long enough, you'd find plenty of anti-military american films made in the USA. And if you'd read the book you'd see it was distinctly not pro-american involvement in Somalia, either. And of course if you'd study the history of the events there, you'd know that the Independant article is full of gaping errors and pointless innuendo, with very little in the way of facts to back up the POV...
But as it dragged on more and more, oddly enough, it had given me the opposite feeling that it probably should have - I felt ashamed of being an American - of watching us try to fight someone else's war, genocide or not. I'm sure there's some truth that was missing from the movie, but it has to make you wonder...
It definitely did make me sit down and think later on as to why so many other countries in the world dislike us. If this movie was propoganda, it was certainly not pulled off correctly.
Thank you for getting it. This is not a rah-rah movie, I think the reviewers all see the director's name and assume it's Rambo. It's not -- read the book and you see quite clearly that its not a pro-american tale. Even though the movie toned down a lot of the dual nature of the book (as they eliminated a lot of stuff) it still makes the point quite clearly that even had we succeeded in eliminating Aidid, Somalia would still be at war, and people would still be dying.
That said, i didn't think it was a great movie because there were a few spots where they were clearly tugging on heartstrings unnecessarily. The power of the book is that it detailed so meticulously that you couldn't help but feel sorry for everyone caught up in the situation...
Heroism is not a character attribute, its a choice of actions. Read any account of the civil war, and you see that some people were heroes one day and cowards the next. Anyone in battle (or life) for more than a few days has many opportunities to be heroic, cowardly, and in between...
With all due respect, that story is filled with factual errors and meaningless innuendo. The writer had no more than a cursory understanding of what happened. For more detailed analyses, see the thread on fark.com about it -- there are an average of 300 mistakes per sentence in this article (or something like that)...
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying to approach a simple task with far too complex an array of mathematics and programming skill.
:P) use this in work every day.
You want to select colors that contrast with each other, yes? Humans are more sensitive to value than anything else. Painters and photographers and designers (well, not so many designers
Forget about saturation and hue -- if the value of the adjacent colors is 20-30% different, you can be pretty sure that most human beings will be able to see the contrast between them. Note that i'm talking about value in the sense of 0 being black and 100 being white. So you can easily make 3 or 4 colors simultaneously contrast with each other.
Feel free to pick hue and saturation at random, you'll have a pair of colors that contrast and go together. Doing more than 2-3 colors is harder to make the colors work together without someone with design skill stepping in...
As near as I can tell, it only applies to weapons designed to blind people. That's right, folks. You can blow people apart with laser weapons, according to international law, but you can't blind them.
I have a pair of US Army laser-proof cold-weather goggles and i know the Soviets had similar protection. It may be concern over inadvertant exposure -- but there has been a pretty good amount of research done here on the possibility of disabling an opposition force with advanced disco-ball technology. If the blinding was a temporary effect (like an unexpected flare) it would seem to be a pretty humane way of disabling folks.
It is indeed a strange world we live in.
You mean, I'll put down my sword, and you'll put down your rock, and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?
The problem is when you volunteer other peoples' money. You have no right to do that.
We have an elected legislature responsible for taxation and represention. We gave them (fought for) that right.
the mainstream creationist; who really only wants to be allowed to believe that God exists and that He created us in His image--without being mocked as lunatics and defectives
But there is nothing in evolution that in any way denies our creation in God's image. Evolution only describes a process, God provides a reason, motivation, and source of power and inspiration.
Evolution only denies that we were created from whole cloth, and even then it is with the caveat that God may well have done so anyways, but he set up all the evidence to indicate otherwise...
Photoshop over Telnet always seems to give me some sort of error...
They also don't mention it's a great introduction to books for those familiar with perl, biology, and bioinformatics, but not the written word!...
I don't see much correlation between degrees and people's careers in the real world.
Most of the really hot-shot computer folks I know have degrees in English, or psychology. Just because that was interesting to them, and then they wound up working in computers.
Myself, i went to art school and have a degree in fine arts. Not useful for computers, but I don't think many poeple "learn" computers in college anyways. I was doing illustration and comic books, then wound up doing a lot of computer graphics (because it pays well) and now here i am working for NASA doing research for medical uses of technology. Each career step was perfectly logical for the choices and opportunities I had available.
This next year I'll be going to Kenya, Brazil, and possibly Afghanistan for work, and there's no way anyone could have pictured this career path back when i was in my first painting class debating what kind of canvas to use.
Don't sweat your major, study what interests you, and get a degree in anything. Having 4 years of focused work is all that a degree means. You're going to learn everything on the job that you need to know -- from your peers, and books in your own time.
I think I see the flaw in your argumentation concerning civil society
Clearly not. I can barely understand what tangent you're going off on -- my point was that the citizenry of the United States has given the government the power to enforce the law, using force when necessary. It is not a power they plucked from the sky and use against us.
We realized, from several thousand years of history, that the best (or perhaps the least worst) situation is to have a police and judiciary that are tasked with that sole responsibility, in the hopes that an objective, professional third party will allow for the most even-handed application of force when necessary. We instituted checks on the various policing agencies (for example all the redundancy and competition over jurisdictions) to attempt to ensure that no one policing agency gets too powerful.
However, you use the term "enforce the law". This demonstrates your government public school education clearer than anything else. The civil power and responsibilities concerning arrest resolve around harm done or direct threat of harm, where "law enforcement" means the initiation of force against people who have done no harm.
i find this curious -- where on earth did you find these wonderfully specific, yet completely ludicrous "definitions"? These are in no dictionary I know of (granted i was clearly brainwashed by my lousy governemnt school education, where we were forced to agree on the meanings of common english phrases, but clearly your education has passed such limitations).
Law enforcement means to enforce the law -- for the executive to uphold the law by whatever means are prescribed by the legislative, in such a manner and process as allowed by the judiciary. Whether that means sending out a speeding ticket or executing a prisoner it is the job of the executive to enforce the laws through the police, the dept of Prisons, etc.
Do you understand
Not at all -- somewhere in there you defined "law enforcement" to mean, essentially, the physical persecution of innocents. I hardly believe that is the generally accepted definition. I think this demonstrates your weird-ass schooling clearer than anything else. The inability to use language as it stands, and redefining words to suit your own arguments is pointless and will never convince anyone of your ideological correctness.
If you want to make an argument against police brutality, feel free, i doubt anyone is going to take the opposite view. If you want to make an argument that police should not exist, or that no branch of the government (or any agency) should have any ability to compel compliance with laws, then say so. if you're arguing that additional agencies should have the ability to compel action through force, then say that.
As it stands, all i ever hear from Libertarians is that "only the government can use force" but I have yet to hear what the specific problem or proposed solution is! Are others to use force? Is government to not use force? Is this an argument for more or less?
Don't try to hide your beliefs behind some semantic shell game of on-the-fly redefinitions. I would expect you to take a little more pride in the ideology you believe will fix the world...
Except that in this case you're talking about a clause which is quite clear in its meaning as written.
As written, the text of the Constitution was ratified by the various states of the union, and thus, as written, they accepted that amount of power.
The federalist (or Anti-federalist) papers were not voted on by anyone. Persuasive as they may or may not be, and educational, they are in no way limiting to the unambiguously broad powers that the interstate commerce clause gives Congress.
I did not claim you invented the notion of constructionism, only that you seek to use it as an excuse to justify your own reinterpretation of the Constituion into your own ideological form. What, after all, is the point of having a written Constitution and going through that messy process of ratification and amendment, if the ultimate legal restraints and responsibilities of governemnt will be defined by whatever one-sheets are published anonymously in New York that given week?...
The government has an exclusive monopoly on physical force. They and only they can put you in jail. They have the big guns. Microsoft only has capital.
Since when has physical force been the sole arbiter of power?
There is precious little land left on earth where you can just set up shop and live on your own initiative. This is why pure libertarianism is ridiculous -- it presumes that you have the option of opting out.
Ask anyone in a hurricane disaster area how much fresh bottled water would sell for if there weren't laws against price gouging. If person X commercially controls all the water left in an area, they have just as much power over life as anyone with a gun. But hey, it would be ethically wrong to force them to sell it for less than the market will bear -- even if there's more than enough to go around! Ahh, the wonder of monopoly!
That would be a libertarians problem with the government
No, that would be their problem with the people. The government didn't give themselves the power of force -- we did. We gave it to some parts of the government, and we even give it to private corporations, too! If MS wants to open a security firm, they have the ability to do so. Then they'll be able to use force in upholding the law, as well. Now, would that make them bad or good? I get all confused by these wonderfully black and white worldviews...
You asked where in the constitution it gave congress the power they exercise. It's right there.
If you want to go outside the Constitution to find the definitions of govt power, and use "strict constructionism" as your excuse, feel free, but you'll understand if a lot of us don't go along for the ride...
Where in the constitution is power granted to government to violate voluntary contracts?
Congress has the power to regulate interstate (as well as international) commerce. Whether that commerce is voluntary or not...
Hey, i think its just as idiotic that my post got to 5 as you do. I was just clarifying that MS is in (legal) fact guilty of crimes in the US. Has nothing to do with the USPS, only the original post i was replying to. It may have been rhetorical, but it sure seemed like he was saying they hadn't been proven guilty of anything yet (or that their guilt was being reevaluated, and thus they should be treated as innocent).
:(
My karma is still way above 50, so i can only lose, never gain
And what happend to "innocent until proven guilty"?
MS has been proven guilty -- the only thing under review is what the penalty will be.
You could use the Amphipod (the smallest one), and then come up with a strap and velcro, or perhaps a strong armband. I think clipping to the shorts is the best,
:)
May be -- the problem i've always had with the waist things is that the bouncing either drives me nuts or pulls my running shorts down
So I started using the armband radios, but would love to take my own music instead -- i'm curious, what about this design makes it not bounce/pull down? It seems like using a clip on shorts would have the same jarring gravity effect with every step that is like tugging on the shorts?
Those prices are very high, and you definately can't lump all satellite communications together.
that's correct -- getting satellite connections in North America isn't that bad financially. But if you wnt to pack your bags and go down the Amazon river, or hop over to the middle east, you have to start paying a couple bucks a minute...
The only difference is the price. I got mine here for $70 plus $5 shipping.
You can get a NEX II without memory for $90, so there's not as much price difference.
And the big feature difference is that the NEX can take microdrives.
intersting idea about the compactflash>IDE setup. That could be an interesting project!...
So how much is a 1 gig SM? A 512 MB?
The sound quality is fine for a portable device of this size -- there is a slight hiss at low volume levels, apparently because they have a signal amplifier inline to make it able to reach a pretty loud volume. If you find it annoying (I don't even notice it except when i'm looking for it) you'll hate it, but I don't use a pocket MP3 player for my $800 headphone comparisons. Running or in a plane or wherever, its fine...
thanks for the amphipod link! I've been trying to find a carrying method for small stuff like my NEX II and keys. Do you know of anything that can clip on the arm?
This would be the incisive and totally factual rationale near the debate on boobies, and pass the booger would it?
Have you perchance checked out the government publications mentioned in the independant article?
So what you're saying is that i actually pointed you to a specific location that pointed out errors in this article, and you didn't even bother to go there? Yet you get on a high horse about whether or not I have read the associated documents that the director of "Repo Man" used in his insightful political analysis? The only things he cited were military analyses of racism within the military -- what the hell do they have to do with US foreign policy, or tactical command?
There are very few "facts" in this article at all, aside from a brief history of what led up to the conflict. But 90% of the article is a series of innuendos and diatribes.
From the article:On 3 October 1993, a team of so-called "elite troops" - Delta Force Rangers - tried to capture Aideed again, in central Mogadishu. Aideed wasn't there, but the American troops became confused.
For those who haven't cracked a newspaper open in a decade, this is clearly not true. They didn't go that day to capture Aideed, didn't expect him to be there, and weren't "confused" by anything except the shootdown of their helicopters. Now if the entire point of the mission is wrong in this article, how thorough is this guy's understanding of what happened, much less his mind-reading of the motivations of those who did it?
Let me make it easier for those who follow:
this is the thread
Note that the thread is at least 2/3 full of people against the US actions in Afghanistan and somalia, that doesn't make the article any more accurate.
Allow me to continue:
In the early 1990s, there were various humanitarian disasters also deserving of urgent intervention. For the United States to spearhead a United Nations mission to Somalia was, from a humanitarian viewpoint, capricious.
Um, why? What is capricious about it? The US regularly spearheads UN missions, because we're one of the only military forces in the world capable of moving on short notice. This is part of why the EU is building their own security force, so the US isn't always out there first.
This makes it sound like the US demanded to be allowed to go to Somalia, when in fact 99% of the planet felt intervention was necessary. Glossing over the humanitarian crisis in mootivations is like suggesting Pearl harbor had nothing to do with US involvement in WW2 -- we were just looking for an excuse to kill some japanses folks because we were all racist.
The United States meant business in Somalia: this was obvious from the location of the American embassy, established a few days before the US marines arrived in Mogadishu, in the Conoco corporate compound. The Los Angeles Times reported that Bush's special envoy to Somalia had used the Conoco compound as his temporary headquarters.
Clearly written by someone who has never been to a third-world country with no infrastructure. Corporate compounds overseas are not called compounds for nothing -- they are self-sufficient, easily-defended, properly constructed, and adequately supplied with telecomm and other basic infrastructure. It's not like the Ambassador can check into the local Hyatt Regency.
It is interesting to note that Cox went straight from "intervening in the humanitarian mission" to "trying to capture Aideed" while completely glossing over the fact that the US military had pretty much LEFT the country after the initial deployment, and the UN took over the humanitarian mission. Pakistani soldiers were slaughtered by Aideed, and the UN requested that we COME BACK and help get rid of Aideed.
This isn't some minor detail in the history of the events, this is the whole point of what happened! But I guess it doesn't figure into the USA=racists theory, because black africans killing brown pakistanis and the USA coming to HELP afterwards is a tough fit.
And of course he refers to "Delta Force Rangers", which are two completely different groups. There's Delta Force, and there's Army Rangers. More fact-checking that never happened. Anyone with the briefest familiarity of the events or the US military (or even exposure to Chuck Norris films!) could have told you that.
Sorry, i've only made it like 4 paragraphs through this story again and already the corrections are too much. It wouldn't be hard to write an article about the US military or US foreign policy being motivated by the wrong things, but this article is NOT the one...
If you'd take the chip off your shoulder long enough, you'd find plenty of anti-military american films made in the USA. And if you'd read the book you'd see it was distinctly not pro-american involvement in Somalia, either. And of course if you'd study the history of the events there, you'd know that the Independant article is full of gaping errors and pointless innuendo, with very little in the way of facts to back up the POV...
But as it dragged on more and more, oddly enough, it had given me the opposite feeling that it probably should have - I felt ashamed of being an American - of watching us try to fight someone else's war, genocide or not. I'm sure there's some truth that was missing from the movie, but it has to make you wonder...
It definitely did make me sit down and think later on as to why so many other countries in the world dislike us. If this movie was propoganda, it was certainly not pulled off correctly.
Thank you for getting it. This is not a rah-rah movie, I think the reviewers all see the director's name and assume it's Rambo. It's not -- read the book and you see quite clearly that its not a pro-american tale. Even though the movie toned down a lot of the dual nature of the book (as they eliminated a lot of stuff) it still makes the point quite clearly that even had we succeeded in eliminating Aidid, Somalia would still be at war, and people would still be dying.
That said, i didn't think it was a great movie because there were a few spots where they were clearly tugging on heartstrings unnecessarily. The power of the book is that it detailed so meticulously that you couldn't help but feel sorry for everyone caught up in the situation...
Heroism is not a character attribute, its a choice of actions. Read any account of the civil war, and you see that some people were heroes one day and cowards the next. Anyone in battle (or life) for more than a few days has many opportunities to be heroic, cowardly, and in between...
With all due respect, that story is filled with factual errors and meaningless innuendo. The writer had no more than a cursory understanding of what happened. For more detailed analyses, see the thread on fark.com about it -- there are an average of 300 mistakes per sentence in this article (or something like that)...