Johnny Depp's always good, but you have to admit that all he really did with the pirate was Raul Duke with an accent and more "savvy"s.
I may have been a little too high when I watched Fear and Loathing, but I don't think this comparison is valid at all. If you've ever read the book, the movie character is exactly right, someone who has lost almost all touch with society and reality. The pirate is merely somewhat addled. The entire speech patterns are different, their body language is different. . . both are, however, so over the top that I guess this leads people to confuse the two.
You could focus on a few of the key stories, although I think this would still require two movies. One of the central plot points from the Silmarillion that is important in LOTR is the heritage of Aragorn and Elrond, who have the same ancestors (Elrond's parents, Aragorn's very distant ancestors). Sticking to the tales of the human/elf unions would reduce the size and complexity immensely, without losing too much of what makes it important to LOTR as a whole.
A bigger problem, in my opinion, is that the gods digging Morgoth out of Thangorodrim and sinking Beleriand in the process, or Earendil and his flying ship taking out an immense dragon, just doesn't seem like something that translates well to a movie screen.
So the real moral is that there is no significant statistical correlation between quality of movies and the amount of awards they get.
No, the real moral here is that some people have a vastly different conception of good taste. I'm aware that many Slashdotters like to bash LOTR because they think it makes them look cool and different, but I suspect you're the only person here who thinks LOTR sucked but the Matrix sequels were good.
What were you smoking before you saw them that gave you that opinion? And did it make you hungry afterwards?
Funny you should mention this. I was drunk when I saw AOTC in theaters, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. In fact, I remembered liking it so much that I bought the DVD when it came out.
Bill Gates is the greatest philanthropist in the history of the world.
It's also important to remember that people like Carnegie and Rockefeller were even more reviled in their time than Gates, and far outdid him for pure sleaze and avarice. But their principal legacy was a number of magnificent philanthropic works, which arguably did far more to improve society than their business practices did to debase it. Howard Hughes is an even better example; his fortune went towards medical research and is the basis for one of the largest private funding sources in the nation.
I despise Microsoft and refuse to buy, use, or support their products whenever possible, and I don't respect Gates for the way he acquired his money, but I think the fact that he's using his fortune to make the world a better place far is far more important than his past misdeeds. In fifty years, he'll be remembered for helping improve Africa, not for a collection of lousy but ubiquitous software. Larry Ellison, on the other hand, will be known as "that asshole with the yachts."
Yes, because I grew up there, and my parents still live there and got to see what happened in '99. What actually happened is the city was massively unprepared for the protests. The mayor actually greeted the protestors initially, but once things turned bad he and the police overreacted. The police chief did the honorable thing and resigned; the mayor stuck around and got third place in the following election.
People keep trying to spin this like it was some corporate takeover of government, whereas what really happened was the city governmnet shitting all over itself. "Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice."
Honestly, I'm to the point where I wouldn't care more if LaRouche was elected.
Then you don't know enough about him. Go do some reading and come back when you're better informed.
Facism is a governmental system where the state nationalizes all industry.
That's an oversimplification. It's also usually based on some sort of supremacy, typically racial or nationalistic, perhaps class-based. And I'm currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and it's clear that Hitler opposed the Socialism part of National Socialism - support from big business leaders was very important to the rise of the party.
So, which is more nazi-like? White supremacist movements on the kook right? or rabid anti-white put them in the concentration camps WASP haters of the kook left?
I'm as distressed as you are that a lying racist demagogue like Sharpton is still getting attention, but I don't think he's nearly as noxious as the white supremacists, who have several hundred years of history to answer for. (Sharpton has a few ruined lives on his conscience, but not the systematic oppression of an entire ethnic group.) Prominent Republicans are still courting overt racists, like Haley Barbour taking a photo op with the CCC in Mississippi.
Regardless, I don't think either merits comparison the the Nazis, although I consider neo-Confederates to be among the lowest grade of trash this country has to offer.
but there is still no longer a need for the electoral college, which in practice has only been the carrot to attract smaller states to our union.
I'm not so sure I'd disagree with that. America is too diversified along geographical lines, which seems to me justifies a federal republic very well. I lived in CT for five years and now live in the Bay Area, and even though both are solidly Democratic they couldn't be more different. And they're both even more distinct from, say, the deep South. The Electoral College may seem undemocratic, but I'm not so sure that reducing state power is a good idea.
If you really want to make presidential elections more democratic, figure out how to get the current corrupt primary system abolished. How come Iowa and NH get to decide the major candidates for the rest of us? Maybe the initial primaries should rotate among states instead. . . make the candidates pander to Alabama or Oregon for a change.
You exagerate, or you are confusing LaRouche with Charles Manson.
From what I've read about LaRouche, the idea of him as president is almost as scary as Manson as president. The guy is completely apeshit. I've seen a lot of his cultists around the Bay area; until I moved here, I thought he was pretty much defunct.
Under that strategy the party would nominate 'Bush-Lite'
Careful there. Ignoring the war issue for a moment (although there were many liberals who supported it, at least in principle, Clinton being the best example), this sounds a lot like an echo of Ralph Nader's preposterous claim in 2000 that there was no substantive difference between the Dems and the GOP. We've all seen how well that prediction turned out, havent' we? Ralph was just bitter because moderate neoliberal Democrats like Clinton didn't share his antipathy towards capitalism.
At any rate, either of those candidates would have been capable of criticizing Bush on his record - and might have been better insulated against the inevitable RNC smear that they don't care about national security. (Note: I don't think this is a good reason for them to be president, however, nor do I support either candidate, although Lieberman's politics are closest to mine.) Personally, I would like to see a Democrat attack Bush from the right, and point out that we haven't yet captured bin Laden (but started another war anyway), he's ramped up the deficits, and the size of government (and spending) has actually expanded under Republican rule.
But Hillary did not ask for (at least) tens of billions of tax dollars to accomplish his explorations.
Try hundreds of billions, which is what NASA told W's father a Mars mission would cost back in 1989. There's no reason to believe that it would be any cheaper today.
The first argument is capitalism. The second is fascism.
Hmmm. . . I would call the second part "Mercantilism", which is the predecessor to the modern concept of the free-market economic system. Government is intimately involved in commercial ventures and maintains restrictive monopolies by force. Old-school liberals like Adam Smith were opposed to it for a variety of reasons; they saw capitalism free of government intervention as a way to increase human freedom and prosperity rather than enriching a few well-connected merchants. Fascism applies to government, not really to macroeconomics.
In terms of US foreign trade relations, what happens abroad very often resembles something like Mercantilism, updated for a global economy. Again, neoliberals like Thomas Friedman or Clinton support freer markets because they honestly believe it will improve Third World economies, both by encouraging development and by reducing the ability of large megacorps to bully foreign powers.
When American companies are heavily subsidised by the US government, they are able to sell produce in other countries way below the production cost. Local economies, not benefitting from such protectionist support (since their government rarely has deep-enough pockets), are unable to compete, and are driven out of business. That is how American entities affect companies in other countries.
Fair enough, but although this applies very well to all sorts of agricultural products (and is a sad example of the moral bankruptcy of both political parties), it hardly applies to software. One might make this case against commercial products that derive from publically-financed research, but every country in the world accepts this sort of thing. (It's not intended as a way for government to subsidize product development, but as a way for useful innovations of academia to reach consumers.)
Yes, but compare the amount of money spent investigating matters related to the latter quote, and the congressional response to it, with the former quote. The reactions to each seem to have been inversely related to their importance, because Americans seem to care more about blowjobs than national security. (Heh.).
(Actually, for a while I thought Clinton should resign, because I thought the whole mess was generally indicative of mental instability and inability to be trusted - not the personality type I wanted controlling our nuclear arsenal. However, Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, and others should still be in prison. Bush. . . wouldn't have even made it to Texas governor if he didn't have a famous name.)
If you are a Senator/Representative from the state of Washington, well, tough luck.
Funny. Actually, the junior senator in Washington, Maria Cantwell, was a senior executive at Real Networks before running for office (again - she had been in the House before but was bulldozed by the Gingrich revolution). Not the background that would endear her to Bill Gates. On the other hand, the incumbent she beat, Slade Gorton, was known to be very friendly with Microsoft.
It just amazes me how theres always a comment about how Republicans are all for helping out SCO.
Republicans are actually well-known for decrying what they see as abuses of the civil courts by money-grubbing trial lawyers; this is one of their favorite slams on John Edwards. One wouldn't expect them to be sympathetic towards a company that has shifted their entire business model towards filing lawsuits against nearly every successful tech company in the country.
Frankly, I think IBM, RedHat, and the rest should counter with an aggressive pro-capitalism endorsement of the GPL. They should emphasize how collaborative software development and open standards are improving technology for both industry and consumer. Basically, just copy Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" campaign, applied to Linux instead.
How are the Linux drivers for this flavor of ATI? Most new ATI hardware is not supported - never mind support via 64bit drivers. Need a AMD64/NVidia laptop.
I attempted to configure a friend's Gateway M505 for Redhat 9; this has the same Radeon 9600. The XFree86 ATI driver does not support this chipset; the closed-source ATI driver for the desktop 9600 didn't work too well - I guess we finally got it working with acceleration and antialiasing turned off. I've heard some people claim that ATI cards are better supported under Linux, but this has certainly never been my experience, especially where laptops are concerned. . .
Our engineers have reached the conclusion that parts of Linux have almost certainly been copied or derived from AIX or Dynix/ptx. In those cases, confirmation of this opinion would require access to more current versions of AIX and Dynix/ptx.
Note the distinction that is left unsaid but is fairly obvious from their wording (just based on these points - Groklaw is trashed right now).
SCO needs the more recent versions of AIX/Dynix to prove their case. This suggests that they cannot demonstrate direct theft of SVRX code by Linux developers. More specifically, it suggests that
Any of this mystery code from AIX that was added to Linux was never a part of any SVRX release, or any SCO release.
All of this code was developed entirely by IBM
None of this code falls under SCO's copyrights, and thus, contrary to their many assertions, this remains a purely contractual dispute.
SCO does not even know which if any parts have been copied, and is basing its case on pure conjecture based on the fact that Linux got so good so quickly.
None of this is particularly shocking, and people have argued this many times, but it's interesting to see their case collapse, and this is completely contrary to the brazen assertions they've made to the press.
In the meantime, millions upon millions of dollars are being wasted on pseudoscientific programs such as space-based protein crystallography. This is all in order to justify the bloated ISS (and shuttle) budget, since most laymen don't know a thing about protein crystallography and wouldn't understand that it's much better done here on Earth.
My point is, the spinoffs from manned space exploration do not by themselves justify manned space exploration and its absurd budget. Why not try to invent these advanced technologies without spending billions attempting to shoot people into space? If they're useful here on Earth, odds are they'll be available soon anyway, without flushing all those tax dollars down the tubes.
Prersonally, I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself trying to get to Mars
Yes, but should we tax the living fuck out of the rich so a bunch of geeks can have their wet dreams fulfilled? Think of it this way: if we take away all of the money that Bill G. spends on (to name a few) getting rid of AIDS in Africa, we might have enough to go to the moon on. (Actually, I've heard some people advance similar arguments against private philanthropy.)
I'm not anti-big-government, because I'm a federally financed researcher and big government pays my salary. I'm happy to have my tax dollars spent on making our country a better place, even including (up to a point) bloated welfare and military budgets. I am not willing to see it wasted on programs that whose practical or scientific value is miniscule compared to their expenditure, and it's sickening to see so many Slashbots who don't understand either the economics or the science of manned spaceflight, but whose conception of space travel seems to be right out of Star Trek.
I've found this to be true too, but I was really shocked the next morning that I could even remember a specific song I liked, and a few of the lyrics from it.
So, wich one of these did you say isn't relevant to the US now?
Well, for starters:
crushed economy
Supposedly recovering, and regardless, a moderate recession like we've been going through isn't anywhere close to collapse of the German economy. Ever seen those billion-Deutschmark postage stamps?
bruised egos
Well, yes, a little, but everyone recognizes that we're still the most powerful nation in the world, and well capable of handing down a major ass-kicking at any time. You can't compare the effects of the WTC attack and what happened to Germany after WWI. For that matter, I doubt the mass psychological effects of 9/11 compares to the effects of losing in Vietnam, which dragged on for years.
people ripe for ideological exploitation
Not particularly more so than in previous generations.
scapegoats for existing problems
The economy was already having issues when 9/11 happened; nobody has tried to deny this. (And the attacks certainly made things worse.) Even in the case of the airline bailout, everyone knew that many of those companies were headed for the crapper anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I thought that Sean Astin, Sir Ian McKellen, Bernard Hill and Andy Serkis all did excellent jobs.
Well, McKellen at least got a nod for the first movie. Bernard Hill rocked my world - he was close to being my favorite in the entire series.
Johnny Depp's always good, but you have to admit that all he really did with the pirate was Raul Duke with an accent and more "savvy"s.
I may have been a little too high when I watched Fear and Loathing, but I don't think this comparison is valid at all. If you've ever read the book, the movie character is exactly right, someone who has lost almost all touch with society and reality. The pirate is merely somewhat addled. The entire speech patterns are different, their body language is different. . . both are, however, so over the top that I guess this leads people to confuse the two.
You could focus on a few of the key stories, although I think this would still require two movies. One of the central plot points from the Silmarillion that is important in LOTR is the heritage of Aragorn and Elrond, who have the same ancestors (Elrond's parents, Aragorn's very distant ancestors). Sticking to the tales of the human/elf unions would reduce the size and complexity immensely, without losing too much of what makes it important to LOTR as a whole.
A bigger problem, in my opinion, is that the gods digging Morgoth out of Thangorodrim and sinking Beleriand in the process, or Earendil and his flying ship taking out an immense dragon, just doesn't seem like something that translates well to a movie screen.
So the real moral is that there is no significant statistical correlation between quality of movies and the amount of awards they get.
No, the real moral here is that some people have a vastly different conception of good taste. I'm aware that many Slashdotters like to bash LOTR because they think it makes them look cool and different, but I suspect you're the only person here who thinks LOTR sucked but the Matrix sequels were good.
What were you smoking before you saw them that gave you that opinion? And did it make you hungry afterwards?
Funny you should mention this. I was drunk when I saw AOTC in theaters, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. In fact, I remembered liking it so much that I bought the DVD when it came out.
I don't combine movies and alcohol any more.
Besides which, comparing Gates to Carnegie is insulting to Carnegie. I won't explain my thinking about that here.
No, please do. I'm interested to hear how Gates' tactics compare with the ultraviolent union-busting employed during the Gilded Age.
Bill Gates is the greatest philanthropist in the history of the world.
It's also important to remember that people like Carnegie and Rockefeller were even more reviled in their time than Gates, and far outdid him for pure sleaze and avarice. But their principal legacy was a number of magnificent philanthropic works, which arguably did far more to improve society than their business practices did to debase it. Howard Hughes is an even better example; his fortune went towards medical research and is the basis for one of the largest private funding sources in the nation.
I despise Microsoft and refuse to buy, use, or support their products whenever possible, and I don't respect Gates for the way he acquired his money, but I think the fact that he's using his fortune to make the world a better place far is far more important than his past misdeeds. In fifty years, he'll be remembered for helping improve Africa, not for a collection of lousy but ubiquitous software. Larry Ellison, on the other hand, will be known as "that asshole with the yachts."
Or do we remember the WTO in Seattle?
Yes, because I grew up there, and my parents still live there and got to see what happened in '99. What actually happened is the city was massively unprepared for the protests. The mayor actually greeted the protestors initially, but once things turned bad he and the police overreacted. The police chief did the honorable thing and resigned; the mayor stuck around and got third place in the following election.
People keep trying to spin this like it was some corporate takeover of government, whereas what really happened was the city governmnet shitting all over itself. "Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice."
Honestly, I'm to the point where I wouldn't care more if LaRouche was elected.
Then you don't know enough about him. Go do some reading and come back when you're better informed.
Facism is a governmental system where the state nationalizes all industry.
That's an oversimplification. It's also usually based on some sort of supremacy, typically racial or nationalistic, perhaps class-based. And I'm currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and it's clear that Hitler opposed the Socialism part of National Socialism - support from big business leaders was very important to the rise of the party.
So, which is more nazi-like? White supremacist movements on the kook right? or rabid anti-white put them in the concentration camps WASP haters of the kook left?
I'm as distressed as you are that a lying racist demagogue like Sharpton is still getting attention, but I don't think he's nearly as noxious as the white supremacists, who have several hundred years of history to answer for. (Sharpton has a few ruined lives on his conscience, but not the systematic oppression of an entire ethnic group.) Prominent Republicans are still courting overt racists, like Haley Barbour taking a photo op with the CCC in Mississippi.
Regardless, I don't think either merits comparison the the Nazis, although I consider neo-Confederates to be among the lowest grade of trash this country has to offer.
but there is still no longer a need for the electoral college, which in practice has only been the carrot to attract smaller states to our union.
I'm not so sure I'd disagree with that. America is too diversified along geographical lines, which seems to me justifies a federal republic very well. I lived in CT for five years and now live in the Bay Area, and even though both are solidly Democratic they couldn't be more different. And they're both even more distinct from, say, the deep South. The Electoral College may seem undemocratic, but I'm not so sure that reducing state power is a good idea.
If you really want to make presidential elections more democratic, figure out how to get the current corrupt primary system abolished. How come Iowa and NH get to decide the major candidates for the rest of us? Maybe the initial primaries should rotate among states instead. . . make the candidates pander to Alabama or Oregon for a change.
You exagerate, or you are confusing LaRouche with Charles Manson.
From what I've read about LaRouche, the idea of him as president is almost as scary as Manson as president. The guy is completely apeshit. I've seen a lot of his cultists around the Bay area; until I moved here, I thought he was pretty much defunct.
Under that strategy the party would nominate 'Bush-Lite'
Careful there. Ignoring the war issue for a moment (although there were many liberals who supported it, at least in principle, Clinton being the best example), this sounds a lot like an echo of Ralph Nader's preposterous claim in 2000 that there was no substantive difference between the Dems and the GOP. We've all seen how well that prediction turned out, havent' we? Ralph was just bitter because moderate neoliberal Democrats like Clinton didn't share his antipathy towards capitalism.
At any rate, either of those candidates would have been capable of criticizing Bush on his record - and might have been better insulated against the inevitable RNC smear that they don't care about national security. (Note: I don't think this is a good reason for them to be president, however, nor do I support either candidate, although Lieberman's politics are closest to mine.) Personally, I would like to see a Democrat attack Bush from the right, and point out that we haven't yet captured bin Laden (but started another war anyway), he's ramped up the deficits, and the size of government (and spending) has actually expanded under Republican rule.
But Hillary did not ask for (at least) tens of billions of tax dollars to accomplish his explorations.
Try hundreds of billions, which is what NASA told W's father a Mars mission would cost back in 1989. There's no reason to believe that it would be any cheaper today.
The first argument is capitalism.
The second is fascism.
Hmmm. . . I would call the second part "Mercantilism", which is the predecessor to the modern concept of the free-market economic system. Government is intimately involved in commercial ventures and maintains restrictive monopolies by force. Old-school liberals like Adam Smith were opposed to it for a variety of reasons; they saw capitalism free of government intervention as a way to increase human freedom and prosperity rather than enriching a few well-connected merchants. Fascism applies to government, not really to macroeconomics.
In terms of US foreign trade relations, what happens abroad very often resembles something like Mercantilism, updated for a global economy. Again, neoliberals like Thomas Friedman or Clinton support freer markets because they honestly believe it will improve Third World economies, both by encouraging development and by reducing the ability of large megacorps to bully foreign powers.
When American companies are heavily subsidised by the US government, they are able to sell produce in other countries way below the production cost. Local economies, not benefitting from such protectionist support (since their government rarely has deep-enough pockets), are unable to compete, and are driven out of business. That is how American entities affect companies in other countries.
Fair enough, but although this applies very well to all sorts of agricultural products (and is a sad example of the moral bankruptcy of both political parties), it hardly applies to software. One might make this case against commercial products that derive from publically-financed research, but every country in the world accepts this sort of thing. (It's not intended as a way for government to subsidize product development, but as a way for useful innovations of academia to reach consumers.)
"Iran-Contra"
"I did not have sex with that woman"
Yes, but compare the amount of money spent investigating matters related to the latter quote, and the congressional response to it, with the former quote. The reactions to each seem to have been inversely related to their importance, because Americans seem to care more about blowjobs than national security. (Heh.).
(Actually, for a while I thought Clinton should resign, because I thought the whole mess was generally indicative of mental instability and inability to be trusted - not the personality type I wanted controlling our nuclear arsenal. However, Oliver North, Caspar Weinberger, and others should still be in prison. Bush. . . wouldn't have even made it to Texas governor if he didn't have a famous name.)
If you are a Senator/Representative from the state of Washington, well, tough luck.
Funny. Actually, the junior senator in Washington, Maria Cantwell, was a senior executive at Real Networks before running for office (again - she had been in the House before but was bulldozed by the Gingrich revolution). Not the background that would endear her to Bill Gates. On the other hand, the incumbent she beat, Slade Gorton, was known to be very friendly with Microsoft.
It just amazes me how theres always a comment about how Republicans are all for helping out SCO.
Republicans are actually well-known for decrying what they see as abuses of the civil courts by money-grubbing trial lawyers; this is one of their favorite slams on John Edwards. One wouldn't expect them to be sympathetic towards a company that has shifted their entire business model towards filing lawsuits against nearly every successful tech company in the country.
Frankly, I think IBM, RedHat, and the rest should counter with an aggressive pro-capitalism endorsement of the GPL. They should emphasize how collaborative software development and open standards are improving technology for both industry and consumer. Basically, just copy Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate" campaign, applied to Linux instead.
(And above all, keep RMS muzzled.)
How are the Linux drivers for this flavor of ATI? Most new ATI hardware is not supported - never mind support via 64bit drivers. Need a AMD64/NVidia laptop.
I attempted to configure a friend's Gateway M505 for Redhat 9; this has the same Radeon 9600. The XFree86 ATI driver does not support this chipset; the closed-source ATI driver for the desktop 9600 didn't work too well - I guess we finally got it working with acceleration and antialiasing turned off. I've heard some people claim that ATI cards are better supported under Linux, but this has certainly never been my experience, especially where laptops are concerned. . .
Note the distinction that is left unsaid but is fairly obvious from their wording (just based on these points - Groklaw is trashed right now).
SCO needs the more recent versions of AIX/Dynix to prove their case. This suggests that they cannot demonstrate direct theft of SVRX code by Linux developers. More specifically, it suggests that
None of this is particularly shocking, and people have argued this many times, but it's interesting to see their case collapse, and this is completely contrary to the brazen assertions they've made to the press.
In the meantime, millions upon millions of dollars are being wasted on pseudoscientific programs such as space-based protein crystallography. This is all in order to justify the bloated ISS (and shuttle) budget, since most laymen don't know a thing about protein crystallography and wouldn't understand that it's much better done here on Earth.
My point is, the spinoffs from manned space exploration do not by themselves justify manned space exploration and its absurd budget. Why not try to invent these advanced technologies without spending billions attempting to shoot people into space? If they're useful here on Earth, odds are they'll be available soon anyway, without flushing all those tax dollars down the tubes.
The 'public' might think that the money should be spent on domestic issues, but the 'public' is full of complete fucking morons.
Yeah, how dare they decide how their fucking tax dollars should be spent? Let's let a bunch of unemployed 20-something geeks decide it for them!
Prersonally, I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself trying to get to Mars
Yes, but should we tax the living fuck out of the rich so a bunch of geeks can have their wet dreams fulfilled? Think of it this way: if we take away all of the money that Bill G. spends on (to name a few) getting rid of AIDS in Africa, we might have enough to go to the moon on. (Actually, I've heard some people advance similar arguments against private philanthropy.)
I'm not anti-big-government, because I'm a federally financed researcher and big government pays my salary. I'm happy to have my tax dollars spent on making our country a better place, even including (up to a point) bloated welfare and military budgets. I am not willing to see it wasted on programs that whose practical or scientific value is miniscule compared to their expenditure, and it's sickening to see so many Slashbots who don't understand either the economics or the science of manned spaceflight, but whose conception of space travel seems to be right out of Star Trek.
I've found this to be true too, but I was really shocked the next morning that I could even remember a specific song I liked, and a few of the lyrics from it.
Oddly enough, her predictions in that book about America's future are starting to come true...
Which predictions, the part about women being used as child-bearing slaves? What state do you live in?
So, wich one of these did you say isn't relevant to the US now?
Well, for starters:
crushed economy
Supposedly recovering, and regardless, a moderate recession like we've been going through isn't anywhere close to collapse of the German economy. Ever seen those billion-Deutschmark postage stamps?
bruised egos
Well, yes, a little, but everyone recognizes that we're still the most powerful nation in the world, and well capable of handing down a major ass-kicking at any time. You can't compare the effects of the WTC attack and what happened to Germany after WWI. For that matter, I doubt the mass psychological effects of 9/11 compares to the effects of losing in Vietnam, which dragged on for years.
people ripe for ideological exploitation
Not particularly more so than in previous generations.
scapegoats for existing problems
The economy was already having issues when 9/11 happened; nobody has tried to deny this. (And the attacks certainly made things worse.) Even in the case of the airline bailout, everyone knew that many of those companies were headed for the crapper anyway.