In politics, every opinion is essentially a threat of violence. Why? Because everything government does and could possibly do is founded on coercion (meaning violence or threat of violence).
No, meaning force, which is very distinct from violence (unless you believe that any interference with a person and all their whims is an act of violence, in which case you have an interesting conception of interpersonal relationships). A government could say "If you refuse to follow the laws of our country, we'll deport you", and plop you down outside its borders. Many governments have done exactly that, in fact.
The use of violence to that end may serve a practical function -- if you resist, they beat the crap out of you until you stop resisting -- but it's not inherent in the desired outcome, which is "Play by our rules or you can't be here". (A teleporter could serve the exact same function, with no downside.)
Every community assumes the collective use of its force as a means of its own preservation, and while it's obvious how that would work against outsiders (e.g. moats and pikes), you also can't have a viable community without the collective use of force against insiders -- members of the community -- who act destructively too. If you don't have that, then the community member with the biggest muscles or the largest armory ends up forcing everyone to do his bidding anyway.
So there is no "pure" form of politics that renounces the use of collective force, because collective force -- the will of the community to impose its own rules of conduct on all members -- is exactly the thing that allows us to live side-by-side without killing, raping, and stealing from each other. Any political agenda (overt or covert) that claims to offer a way to transcend that basic human fact is, quite simply, full of crap.
Hydrogen would have gotten him a lot higher as the molecular weight is only 1/2 of Helium. Also, it would not have wasted a precious finite resource for little gain.
I had the same thought, but if WIkipedia is correct and I'm parsing the article correctly, the gain would've only been about 8% at sea level:
Thus hydrogen's additional buoyancy compared to helium is: 1.202 / 1.113 = 1.080, or approximately 8.0%.
Now, as the balloon gained altitude, that percentage difference would've increased until the surrounding atmosphere has the same density as helium, at which point hydrogen would give an extra boost. But by that point the amount of lift itself will have drastically diminished (though the expansion of the balloon compensates for some of that, yes?) so you're chasing smaller numbers, and I don't know whether other factors like leakage and momentum become more important than absolute buoyancy.
Uh, except that it's not specifically "non-smokers" that do those things; it's people in general. Singling them out as non-smokers (that's who you chose to name!) makes it sound like that's somehow relevant to their bad behavior, or that they're not returning your consideration with equal consideration across the smoker/non-smoker divide.
If you're talking about "the litany of what's wrong with mankind", that's on everyone's shoulders, whatever cylindrical objects they put or don't put in their mouth. (Stalin was a pipe smoker, Hitler hated tobacco, etc.)
I wish non-smokers were as considerate of the things I despise that they do.
What things do non-smokers do that you "despise", other than resenting your intrusion on their space?
I'm genuinely curious about what you have in mind, because I can't think of a behavior related to not smoking that invades other people's space in the way that public smoking does. It's a fundamentally intrusive pastime, like being loud or wearing heavy perfume. And in all cases the opposite behavior -- talking quietly, not wearing fragrances, not smoking -- doesn't trespass on other people's space.
Sometimes two forms of behavior really can't coexist. When that's the case, the one that takes up less space, and involves not doing something, should always be considered the standard for public behavior and public spaces (including the workplace). Normative quiet doesn't prevent occasional loudness, but normative loudness makes quiet impossible. If fragrance-free is normal, then perfume is an occasional novelty; if every consumer product is soaked in cheap perfume and masking fragrances, there is no neutral state anymore. And if every bar and office is filled with smoke, then everyone's a smoker whether they want to be or not.
I do have serious reservations about having people sign affidavits and so on -- that's going a bit far -- but I think it's totally appropriate to refuse to hire someone because you think their behavior is unhealthy and likely to be a liability to your company. That's a legitimate basis for discrimination, unlike race, sex, and religion, which we've collectively decided are not.
BTW I say this as someone who doesn't mind the smell of smoke (if it's fresh). But I hate the effect it has on people, the way that smokers make the world their ashtray, and the way their chronic coughing and lung issues make them excellent vectors for things like TB and the flu.
Oh sure, drop off colonists after raising them on "Jersey Shore" reruns and "Mythbusters" episodes...
You'll have a generation of resourceful, but unproductive colonists who spend their time doing things like:
- testing the myth that duct tape can be used both as a substitute for heat shielding AND as a quick way to remove unwanted hairs;
- trying to make energy drinks out of hydrazine;
- using the interstellar medium as an in vivo paternity test to identify one's "baby daddy";
- and figuring out whether a tan from Gliese 581 will have the appropriate carrot-orange hue, or will be more towards the reddish, dwarfy end of the spectrum (as seen in a 22-year-old viral video beamed in from Earth, natch).
The Atari 2600 had a one-button joystick, and you could buy models like the Wico Boss that had the fire button mounted on top. That should be pretty comfortable with one hand, especially if you add suction cups or duct-tape it to a table.
Or if you prefer something a little fancier, the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and most Amiga games also used the same joystick pinout & control scheme. And there are a bunch of other one-button platforms: the Odyssey^2, Tandy CoCo, TI-99/4A, most Apple II games, and plenty of MAME-able titles.
I don't know if there's a Sega Master System joystick that has both buttons mounted on the top of the joystick, but if there is, then that's another option. Some NES games, especially shooters, might be playable with a joystick that has one button mounted on the top and the other on the body. In games like Life Force and Gradius you're only using the secondary button once in a while, to buy new weapons/shields.
Oh and "thousands" in my marketing class taught me that is 1001 or more.;) Anything over 1000.00000 is "thousands."
Ha!:) Thanks for your detailed and good-natured reply. I think 1998 would make more sense, as it started to become more feasible then. Still, you were definitely ahead of the curve!
Oh, MP3 (and MP2) were certainly around in 1996, as well as a couple competitors that never went anywhere (anyone remember VQF?). But I don't remember MP3 taking off until the late 1990s, and I certainly don't remember anyone with consumer-grade HDs big enough to store the equivalent of thousands of CDs, even at 128kbps, until at least 2000. In 1996, a 2 GB hard drive was still a big deal.
And like I said, encodings from 1996-1998 are likely to sound terrible by today's standards, and I'd be inclined to re-rip them. The encoder I was using in the late 1990s was just awful -- you wouldn't need to be an audiophile to hear the way it totally wrecked the music's top end.
Around 1996, I converted my thousands of music CDs bought during the years of BMC Music club membership into MP3 files. It took me over a year doing about 5 CDs every day to finish. Usually 2 before work and 1-3 in the evenings. Computers were much slower back then, so doing a rip/lame was about 45 minutes per CD. It was like eating an elephant one bite at a time.
Every few years, I need to move those files to new storage media. Of course, they are backed up too - there's no chance that I'll be redoing all that time and effort again.
1996? Either you're off by a few years, or you were a very early adopter...and at an average of 50MB per CD, you would've needed at least 100GB for "thousands" of CDs (i.e. 2000 CDs minimum). Hard drives that large weren't commonly available for another five years.
Plus I'd imagine those encodings sound dramatically worse than what you could get five years later at the same bitrate. Moreover, 128k was the custom at the time (onion on belt, etc.), and the old 128k files I have from the late '90s sound truly horrible today. All the high frequency transients turn into jangling keyrings.
So, uh...are you sure that Clinton was in office when you started this project?
The problem you, and many others are missing is that the world has changed since you were at school.
Has the world really changed that much? Or is it that we're being led to believe it has?
There's a lot of money being made, and a lot of power to be grabbed, by trading on people's anxieties...and the more anxious they are, the more you can get.
So our news reports emphasize horrific crimes; our TV shows and movies depict the world as a dangerous place, full of perverts and angry minorities who want to destroy us and debauch our children; and our politicians respond with righteous indignation to horrible (but isolated) crimes, and pass new laws that are inevitably, by their nature, restrictions and prohibitions that add a new encumbrance to the lives of those whom they affect.
And so, on to the next stage: real estate developers make money on the suburbs built for people who are afraid of their fellow human beings. Auto companies make money from the people who live 8 miles from school instead of half a mile from a bus stop. Big pharma makes money on medication designed to keep kids under control. The government gets a tighter rein on things that are difficult to control, like the Internet, using the pretext of children's welfare.
It's important to think critically about the narratives we're given, and think about whom they serve. When we accept a fearful vision of the world uncritically, we always play into the hands of the powers that be.
I think you've nailed it (and hope you get modded up). Just to take one example: in my experience, one of the reasons a lot of highly creative people use drugs is because it offers a way of temporarily reducing the amount of sensory input they're getting from the world. Paradoxically enough, some drugs also offer a way of temporarily turning off those filters!
Most geniuses struggle to find the right balance between being overwhelmed by the intensity of their experience of the world, and being intellectually limited by the conceptual structures we use to filter that experience. It's a perpetual balancing act: tip too far one way and genius is blunted by banality and preconception; tip too far the other way and you get madness, autism, and other phenomena associated with malfunctioning "filters".
A white gang and a black gang killing each other isn't a hate crime, but a white man killing blacks for being blacks or a black man killing whites for being white is.
The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.
But the other side of the Kitty Genovese case is that the media constructed a narrative -- "38 people watched and did nothing" -- that demonstrably wasn't based in fact. There were maybe 2-3 people who (probably) knowingly ignored it, and at least one who tried to help. Most of them had no idea of what was going on.
It's worth thinking about why the story became what it did. From the media's point of view, mayhem sells -- "if it bleeds, it leads" -- and a ghastly, horrifying story is made all the more attractive when you add the "38 witnesses" angle. From a political point of view, there are certain...advantages...to making people feel fearful, cynical, and isolated. When you combine that with the right mix of anger and indignation, it can be very useful indeed.
Maybe if you believe no one cares, it's partly because the people who control the narrative want you to believe that no one cares.
Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture.
I think its importance is somewhat overstated. Albert Speer, who was practically Hitler's second-in-command during much of the war, eventually admitted that he'd never actually read it.
(Then again, plenty of self-described Christians throughout history have never actually read the Bible, either because they weren't literate in its language or because they only feel the need to internalize those parts of Scripture that reinforce their existing beliefs.)
How is racist whites going out and lynching a black man any worse than racist blacks goint out and lynching a white man ?
It isn't worse, and AFAIK, the law as written doesn't make any claim to that effect. If a white hipster moves into a poor black urban neighborhood, and a bunch of black teens beat the shit out of him and tell him "Your kind don't belong on this side of town", then they should -- they must -- be prosecuted under hate-crime legislation. Their lives should be destroyed; they should lose their youth, and a good chunk of their adulthood, to prison; they should be subject to the full power of the penal system.
And -- just to be clear -- the exact same thing should happen to white kids who beat up black newcomers. Racially motivated violence is a dagger thrust at the heart of a civil, egalitarian society; it endangers its very premises. So the point is to send a message to everyone who feels even the whisper of a temptation to pull this crap, and the message is: try it, and we will fucking wreck you.
Look, it's not a big secret that most people are reluctant to talk about the fact that a lot of black-on-white crime is racially motivated, or at least has a strong racial subtext. It wouldn't surprise me if police departments and DAs are reluctant to use hate crime laws against black perps for fear of touching off a shitstorm. (Not to mention that in some urban areas, a lot of the power brokers are black, not white.)
That said, it doesn't really have anything to do with hate-crime laws, which offer the same penalties regardless of the targeted race AFAIK. It'd be unconstitutional to write a law that said that white-on-black crime was "worse" than black-on-white crime, or vice versa. But as we all know, there are places in the US where people find every possible reason to excuse the behavior of black criminals, blaming everything they do on poverty or racism or whatever...
...and then, there are other places in the US where law-abiding, middle-class black citizens are openly threatened by the local authorities, and told that if they stick around after the sun goes down, their lives may be forfeit.
So maybe it all sort of balances out -- not that that means much to the victims of any of these crimes.
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There's no cure, there's no answer
Everything gives you cancer
Don't touch that dial
Don't try to smile
Just take this pill
It's in your file
Don't work hard
Don't play hard
Don't plan for the graveyard
Remember
(Refrain)
Don't work by night
Don't sleep by day
You'll feel all right
But you will pay
No caffeine
No protein
No booze or
Nicotine
Remember
(Refrain)
(Unfortunately, Joe Jackson's kind of a dick about cigarettes, inasmuch as he has a habit of going off on weird tinfoil-hat tangents about how their health dangers are imaginary and it's all a big scam. Otherwise a great singer and songwriter, though.)
Yes, one of these days our fearless mods will learn not to meddle. Me, I remember a day when things were different -- and it would be so nice if we could let there be more light humor and, well, free-for-all (when you're in the mood, anyway), and have fewer people burning bridges wherever they go. I'm just biding my time until then.
I think you're overreacting a bit with that wall of text. My point was simply this: if you look for the hole in the doughnut, you're always going to find it.
Your post makes a couple decisions in terms of perspective: you make a point of linking Buffett's charitable donations to doing penance for his infidelity, and you choose to look at the BMG's time limit as a bad thing. (One could as easily say that it prevents the board members from endlessly finding excuses to reinvest the money and dedicating their energies to the foundation as an end-in-itself, rather than doing the maximum good possible in the short- to medium-term.)
In short, you choose to put a negative spin on things. Fine, that's your prerogative. But what's the endgame for that mode of thinking? What good things come from taking that stance? It's worth thinking critically about the way we choose to talk about things, and exactly what we're trying to accomplish.
My post was directed at your words, not your person; I have no opinion on you, your merits as a human being, or your absolute or relative level of bitterness. Nor do I worship at the altar of "the great Messr Gates and Buffett". When they do good, I appplaud them; when they pull meretricious crap, I do the opposite.
I just find that there's a lot of purer-than-thou rhetoric going around in the world, most of which boils down to "Nothing anyone ever does is good enough, and everyone's actions can be faulted if we look hard enough". And TBH, I think the notion -- implicit in your post -- that "real" charity has to be anonymous is an example of that purer-than-thou attitude, and ultimately doesn't accomplish anything positive.
Slashdot Mirror
I taped a note on my locker saying "Jenny Arbuckle is a fatty". She didn't sue, but she said 'no' when I asked her to be my prom date.
Roscoe got a sex change, eh? I guess I'd want to turn over a new leaf too, given what happened...he really got a bum rappe.
Yeah, the first thing I thought of is "This is the saddest news I've heard in a while."
(Which is silly, but being human is also silly, so...)
In politics, every opinion is essentially a threat of violence. Why? Because everything government does and could possibly do is founded on coercion (meaning violence or threat of violence).
No, meaning force, which is very distinct from violence (unless you believe that any interference with a person and all their whims is an act of violence, in which case you have an interesting conception of interpersonal relationships). A government could say "If you refuse to follow the laws of our country, we'll deport you", and plop you down outside its borders. Many governments have done exactly that, in fact.
The use of violence to that end may serve a practical function -- if you resist, they beat the crap out of you until you stop resisting -- but it's not inherent in the desired outcome, which is "Play by our rules or you can't be here". (A teleporter could serve the exact same function, with no downside.)
Every community assumes the collective use of its force as a means of its own preservation, and while it's obvious how that would work against outsiders (e.g. moats and pikes), you also can't have a viable community without the collective use of force against insiders -- members of the community -- who act destructively too. If you don't have that, then the community member with the biggest muscles or the largest armory ends up forcing everyone to do his bidding anyway.
So there is no "pure" form of politics that renounces the use of collective force, because collective force -- the will of the community to impose its own rules of conduct on all members -- is exactly the thing that allows us to live side-by-side without killing, raping, and stealing from each other. Any political agenda (overt or covert) that claims to offer a way to transcend that basic human fact is, quite simply, full of crap.
...though on the other hand:
The Boston Molasses Disaster
Hydrogen would have gotten him a lot higher as the molecular weight is only 1/2 of Helium. Also, it would not have wasted a precious finite resource for little gain.
I had the same thought, but if WIkipedia is correct and I'm parsing the article correctly, the gain would've only been about 8% at sea level:
Thus hydrogen's additional buoyancy compared to helium is: 1.202 / 1.113 = 1.080, or approximately 8.0%.
Now, as the balloon gained altitude, that percentage difference would've increased until the surrounding atmosphere has the same density as helium, at which point hydrogen would give an extra boost. But by that point the amount of lift itself will have drastically diminished (though the expansion of the balloon compensates for some of that, yes?) so you're chasing smaller numbers, and I don't know whether other factors like leakage and momentum become more important than absolute buoyancy.
Conversely, I've never witnessed a definitively enlightened, non-standard, free thinker label anyone a troll, either...
Yeah, I've never seen a Scotsman label anyone a troll, either.
At least...not a true Scotsman.
Uh, except that it's not specifically "non-smokers" that do those things; it's people in general. Singling them out as non-smokers (that's who you chose to name!) makes it sound like that's somehow relevant to their bad behavior, or that they're not returning your consideration with equal consideration across the smoker/non-smoker divide.
If you're talking about "the litany of what's wrong with mankind", that's on everyone's shoulders, whatever cylindrical objects they put or don't put in their mouth. (Stalin was a pipe smoker, Hitler hated tobacco, etc.)
I wish non-smokers were as considerate of the things I despise that they do.
What things do non-smokers do that you "despise", other than resenting your intrusion on their space?
I'm genuinely curious about what you have in mind, because I can't think of a behavior related to not smoking that invades other people's space in the way that public smoking does. It's a fundamentally intrusive pastime, like being loud or wearing heavy perfume. And in all cases the opposite behavior -- talking quietly, not wearing fragrances, not smoking -- doesn't trespass on other people's space.
Sometimes two forms of behavior really can't coexist. When that's the case, the one that takes up less space, and involves not doing something, should always be considered the standard for public behavior and public spaces (including the workplace). Normative quiet doesn't prevent occasional loudness, but normative loudness makes quiet impossible. If fragrance-free is normal, then perfume is an occasional novelty; if every consumer product is soaked in cheap perfume and masking fragrances, there is no neutral state anymore. And if every bar and office is filled with smoke, then everyone's a smoker whether they want to be or not.
I do have serious reservations about having people sign affidavits and so on -- that's going a bit far -- but I think it's totally appropriate to refuse to hire someone because you think their behavior is unhealthy and likely to be a liability to your company. That's a legitimate basis for discrimination, unlike race, sex, and religion, which we've collectively decided are not.
BTW I say this as someone who doesn't mind the smell of smoke (if it's fresh). But I hate the effect it has on people, the way that smokers make the world their ashtray, and the way their chronic coughing and lung issues make them excellent vectors for things like TB and the flu.
Oh sure, drop off colonists after raising them on "Jersey Shore" reruns and "Mythbusters" episodes...
You'll have a generation of resourceful, but unproductive colonists who spend their time doing things like:
- testing the myth that duct tape can be used both as a substitute for heat shielding AND as a quick way to remove unwanted hairs;
- trying to make energy drinks out of hydrazine;
- using the interstellar medium as an in vivo paternity test to identify one's "baby daddy";
- and figuring out whether a tan from Gliese 581 will have the appropriate carrot-orange hue, or will be more towards the reddish, dwarfy end of the spectrum (as seen in a 22-year-old viral video beamed in from Earth, natch).
The Atari 2600 had a one-button joystick, and you could buy models like the Wico Boss that had the fire button mounted on top. That should be pretty comfortable with one hand, especially if you add suction cups or duct-tape it to a table.
Or if you prefer something a little fancier, the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, and most Amiga games also used the same joystick pinout & control scheme. And there are a bunch of other one-button platforms: the Odyssey^2, Tandy CoCo, TI-99/4A, most Apple II games, and plenty of MAME-able titles.
I don't know if there's a Sega Master System joystick that has both buttons mounted on the top of the joystick, but if there is, then that's another option. Some NES games, especially shooters, might be playable with a joystick that has one button mounted on the top and the other on the body. In games like Life Force and Gradius you're only using the secondary button once in a while, to buy new weapons/shields.
The TRS-80 model II was my very first computer, and I learned basic coding on it. I can't remember the language
Yes you can.
Somehow that's like a reverse-twist version of the panflute flowchart.
Oh and "thousands" in my marketing class taught me that is 1001 or more. ;) Anything over 1000.00000 is "thousands."
Ha! :) Thanks for your detailed and good-natured reply. I think 1998 would make more sense, as it started to become more feasible then. Still, you were definitely ahead of the curve!
Oh, MP3 (and MP2) were certainly around in 1996, as well as a couple competitors that never went anywhere (anyone remember VQF?). But I don't remember MP3 taking off until the late 1990s, and I certainly don't remember anyone with consumer-grade HDs big enough to store the equivalent of thousands of CDs, even at 128kbps, until at least 2000. In 1996, a 2 GB hard drive was still a big deal.
And like I said, encodings from 1996-1998 are likely to sound terrible by today's standards, and I'd be inclined to re-rip them. The encoder I was using in the late 1990s was just awful -- you wouldn't need to be an audiophile to hear the way it totally wrecked the music's top end.
Around 1996, I converted my thousands of music CDs bought during the years of BMC Music club membership into MP3 files. It took me over a year doing about 5 CDs every day to finish. Usually 2 before work and 1-3 in the evenings. Computers were much slower back then, so doing a rip/lame was about 45 minutes per CD. It was like eating an elephant one bite at a time.
Every few years, I need to move those files to new storage media. Of course, they are backed up too - there's no chance that I'll be redoing all that time and effort again.
1996? Either you're off by a few years, or you were a very early adopter...and at an average of 50MB per CD, you would've needed at least 100GB for "thousands" of CDs (i.e. 2000 CDs minimum). Hard drives that large weren't commonly available for another five years.
Plus I'd imagine those encodings sound dramatically worse than what you could get five years later at the same bitrate. Moreover, 128k was the custom at the time (onion on belt, etc.), and the old 128k files I have from the late '90s sound truly horrible today. All the high frequency transients turn into jangling keyrings.
So, uh...are you sure that Clinton was in office when you started this project?
The problem you, and many others are missing is that the world has changed since you were at school.
Has the world really changed that much? Or is it that we're being led to believe it has?
There's a lot of money being made, and a lot of power to be grabbed, by trading on people's anxieties...and the more anxious they are, the more you can get.
So our news reports emphasize horrific crimes; our TV shows and movies depict the world as a dangerous place, full of perverts and angry minorities who want to destroy us and debauch our children; and our politicians respond with righteous indignation to horrible (but isolated) crimes, and pass new laws that are inevitably, by their nature, restrictions and prohibitions that add a new encumbrance to the lives of those whom they affect.
And so, on to the next stage: real estate developers make money on the suburbs built for people who are afraid of their fellow human beings. Auto companies make money from the people who live 8 miles from school instead of half a mile from a bus stop. Big pharma makes money on medication designed to keep kids under control. The government gets a tighter rein on things that are difficult to control, like the Internet, using the pretext of children's welfare.
It's important to think critically about the narratives we're given, and think about whom they serve. When we accept a fearful vision of the world uncritically, we always play into the hands of the powers that be.
I think you've nailed it (and hope you get modded up). Just to take one example: in my experience, one of the reasons a lot of highly creative people use drugs is because it offers a way of temporarily reducing the amount of sensory input they're getting from the world. Paradoxically enough, some drugs also offer a way of temporarily turning off those filters!
Most geniuses struggle to find the right balance between being overwhelmed by the intensity of their experience of the world, and being intellectually limited by the conceptual structures we use to filter that experience. It's a perpetual balancing act: tip too far one way and genius is blunted by banality and preconception; tip too far the other way and you get madness, autism, and other phenomena associated with malfunctioning "filters".
A white gang and a black gang killing each other isn't a hate crime, but a white man killing blacks for being blacks or a black man killing whites for being white is.
Really? What Earth do you live on?
"A black Chicago-area teenager has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly beating a 19-year-old white youth during a robbery because he was angry about the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Chicago Tribune reports."
The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.
But the other side of the Kitty Genovese case is that the media constructed a narrative -- "38 people watched and did nothing" -- that demonstrably wasn't based in fact. There were maybe 2-3 people who (probably) knowingly ignored it, and at least one who tried to help. Most of them had no idea of what was going on.
It's worth thinking about why the story became what it did. From the media's point of view, mayhem sells -- "if it bleeds, it leads" -- and a ghastly, horrifying story is made all the more attractive when you add the "38 witnesses" angle. From a political point of view, there are certain...advantages...to making people feel fearful, cynical, and isolated. When you combine that with the right mix of anger and indignation, it can be very useful indeed.
Maybe if you believe no one cares, it's partly because the people who control the narrative want you to believe that no one cares.
Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture.
I think its importance is somewhat overstated. Albert Speer, who was practically Hitler's second-in-command during much of the war, eventually admitted that he'd never actually read it.
(Then again, plenty of self-described Christians throughout history have never actually read the Bible, either because they weren't literate in its language or because they only feel the need to internalize those parts of Scripture that reinforce their existing beliefs.)
reminds of the history about writing in zero-G.
NASA spend months and millions of dollars in researching a pen that could write without gravity. The Russians used a pencil.
False.
How is racist whites going out and lynching a black man any worse than racist blacks goint out and lynching a white man ?
It isn't worse, and AFAIK, the law as written doesn't make any claim to that effect. If a white hipster moves into a poor black urban neighborhood, and a bunch of black teens beat the shit out of him and tell him "Your kind don't belong on this side of town", then they should -- they must -- be prosecuted under hate-crime legislation. Their lives should be destroyed; they should lose their youth, and a good chunk of their adulthood, to prison; they should be subject to the full power of the penal system.
And -- just to be clear -- the exact same thing should happen to white kids who beat up black newcomers. Racially motivated violence is a dagger thrust at the heart of a civil, egalitarian society; it endangers its very premises. So the point is to send a message to everyone who feels even the whisper of a temptation to pull this crap, and the message is: try it, and we will fucking wreck you.
Look, it's not a big secret that most people are reluctant to talk about the fact that a lot of black-on-white crime is racially motivated, or at least has a strong racial subtext. It wouldn't surprise me if police departments and DAs are reluctant to use hate crime laws against black perps for fear of touching off a shitstorm. (Not to mention that in some urban areas, a lot of the power brokers are black, not white.)
That said, it doesn't really have anything to do with hate-crime laws, which offer the same penalties regardless of the targeted race AFAIK. It'd be unconstitutional to write a law that said that white-on-black crime was "worse" than black-on-white crime, or vice versa. But as we all know, there are places in the US where people find every possible reason to excuse the behavior of black criminals, blaming everything they do on poverty or racism or whatever...
...and then, there are other places in the US where law-abiding, middle-class black citizens are openly threatened by the local authorities, and told that if they stick around after the sun goes down, their lives may be forfeit.
So maybe it all sort of balances out -- not that that means much to the victims of any of these crimes.
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There's no cure, there's no answer
Everything gives you cancer
Don't touch that dial
Don't try to smile
Just take this pill
It's in your file
Don't work hard
Don't play hard
Don't plan for the graveyard
Remember
(Refrain)
Don't work by night
Don't sleep by day
You'll feel all right
But you will pay
No caffeine
No protein
No booze or
Nicotine
Remember
(Refrain)
(Unfortunately, Joe Jackson's kind of a dick about cigarettes, inasmuch as he has a habit of going off on weird tinfoil-hat tangents about how their health dangers are imaginary and it's all a big scam. Otherwise a great singer and songwriter, though.)
Breaking news: Vagina can cure a WoW addiction as well.
It didn't cure my friend who was addicted, but then again she'd had one since birth.
Careful with that downmod, Eugene.
Yes, one of these days our fearless mods will learn not to meddle. Me, I remember a day when things were different -- and it would be so nice if we could let there be more light humor and, well, free-for-all (when you're in the mood, anyway), and have fewer people burning bridges wherever they go. I'm just biding my time until then.
I think you're overreacting a bit with that wall of text. My point was simply this: if you look for the hole in the doughnut, you're always going to find it.
Your post makes a couple decisions in terms of perspective: you make a point of linking Buffett's charitable donations to doing penance for his infidelity, and you choose to look at the BMG's time limit as a bad thing. (One could as easily say that it prevents the board members from endlessly finding excuses to reinvest the money and dedicating their energies to the foundation as an end-in-itself, rather than doing the maximum good possible in the short- to medium-term.)
In short, you choose to put a negative spin on things. Fine, that's your prerogative. But what's the endgame for that mode of thinking? What good things come from taking that stance? It's worth thinking critically about the way we choose to talk about things, and exactly what we're trying to accomplish.
My post was directed at your words, not your person; I have no opinion on you, your merits as a human being, or your absolute or relative level of bitterness. Nor do I worship at the altar of "the great Messr Gates and Buffett". When they do good, I appplaud them; when they pull meretricious crap, I do the opposite.
I just find that there's a lot of purer-than-thou rhetoric going around in the world, most of which boils down to "Nothing anyone ever does is good enough, and everyone's actions can be faulted if we look hard enough". And TBH, I think the notion -- implicit in your post -- that "real" charity has to be anonymous is an example of that purer-than-thou attitude, and ultimately doesn't accomplish anything positive.