If you truly wish to understand non-Euclidean geometry, simply try putting those damn fitted sheets on a bed. No matter which way you rotate it, you always end up with the short side in your hands.
That's a fine example. Universal Healthcare is Socialist if you have the government controlling the health care industry. The British system, for example, is Socialist. Our Post Office is Socialist.
Obamacare though, is not Socialist. It's not very fair to individuals, but it's not Socialist.
>That's a pointless and irrelevant argument and it's just as pointless in this situation.
Yes, all government actions are enforced by the gun. Don't pretend otherwise. That's my point to the guy I was responding to, who wanted to pretend that government-enforced wealth redistribution was paid for by leprechaun gold and unicorn farts.
>If you like socialism you should move to Europe, every country is effectively socialist here.
We'll see how long it takes before they're all bankrupt. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium.... they're all in the shit.
Switzerland, though, has both one of the lowest tax rates in Europe, one of the highest per-capita incomes, and the Franc is so solid that people have been buying negative-yield bonds to get into it.
They have a strong welfare system, but still have a smaller government and lower taxes than the US.
If you were being sarcastic, I apologize, but I'm going to respond to you as if you are honestly the left-wing nutjob you appear to be.
>Any nation with a social security system, is socialist. It don't matter if it is a good system or a bad one. You got it, your a pinko. The US got it, so they are all pinko's.
No. Socialism is government control of industry.
Being forced to buy insurance (which is all Social Security is... and Obamacare, for that matter) is not socialism. It's not a bunch of other things either (involving words like liberty, freedom, etc.), but it's not socialism.
I really wish everyone would understand this.
>Any true capitalist nation, and there exist none, would not have a social system as it would be entirely private property with a tiny state collecting just enough by magic to do the bare minimum of centralized tasks, like the army. And even there, it would play a small role, relying more on private armies owned by those who can afford them to protect them. After all, why should I pay taxes to protect your property?
Not true. Capitalism simply means that private industry controls the means of production, as opposed to government control as with Socialism. There's multiple variants of Capitalism, it sounds like you're talking about some sort of extreme Randian / Libertarian laissez-faire system. But even those systems have an army, a court system, police, and so forth. Early America is as close to this as you'll find, and it wasn't some sort of degenerate wasteland. Even the Wild West, which is something you obviously know nothing about.
It's like you hate Capitalism so much you want to make the biggest strawman you can find so you can beat it to death.
>Far simpler to just organize a collective fire service payed out of common funds paid for by all according to their capability and service given to their needs. COMMUNIST!
What kind of crack are you smoking?
Communism is the collective ownership of the means of production. Government services are not really means of production, so you can have collectively funded fire stations in a fully laissez-faire capitalist society.
>It is no surprise that the fantasy land Romney and his kin dream about has never been realized, it can't be realized in a modern society.
It is indeed no surprise that that fantasy land can't exist, since it only exists in your twisted imagination.
Romney is hardly a libertarian fanatic. He's a big government Republican. Pull your head out of your ass, and stop smoking the crack all up inside your crack.
TL;DR - You need to read more. From sites outside of DailyKOS, Mother Jones, and HuffPo.
Marx doesn't get to magically define communism as rainbow farts and unicorns. The fundamental characteristic of communism is common ownership of the means of production. All the other consequents that I listed above fall out from this fact.
You or Marx or whoever can pretend that in your magical rainbow world that this leads to a stateless society, but I've already said above how it instead leads to a tyrannical dictatorship every time.
>I'd be perfectly happy for people not to pay taxes, as long as they were then happy to go without any of the protections afforded by being members of society.
No, that wouldn't make any sense.
> The problem with your argument is that you appear to believe that it's fine for society to enforce property rights, but that requiring active participation in society in exchange for this is a bad thing.
Nyet. What I'm objecting to is the GGP up there saying that government-run wealth redistribution isn't done at the point of a gun. It's just fairy-tale nonsense.
>You're an idiot who doesn't understand a basic concept. 'Nuff said.
You study this in college? No, of course you didn't.
If you study this subject in college, or otherwise get exposed to Marxist ideology in college or your local OWS protest, you'll become aware what social justice, a focus on income inequality, wealth redistribution, an open society, and so forth actually means, much like how our forefathers could easily read between the lines whenever someone suddenly started talking about the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, or alienation of labor, or worker control of production. They are code words that mean more than their face value.
>It's not like we ever had communism yet either. Every attempt at communism was just an elaborate tribute to Orwell's Animal Farm. It's not like capitalism is the clear winner, in terms of both economic and moral success.
This is a pretty standard communism apology. No matter how many times communism has been implemented in a state, tyranny results. But apologists always say, "Well, it just wasn't done right."
This is utter bullshit, and here's why. A communist economy is by definition managed by the state. Thus, by definition, you have a top-down, managed, economy, instead of a bottom-up economy which is what you get with capitalism. Top-down managed economies only work when they can make people do things other than what they want to do (which is what a bottom-up economy is). This force naturally comes at the point of a gun. Holding guns to people's heads and telling them where they can live (near their factory) and work (the shoe factory) is the definition of tyranny.
Therefore tyranny is not "communism done wrong", but the natural, logical consequent of communism being implemented in a country.
> People like you remind me that there is a growing subset of americans that think any call for responsibility is socialism, communism, marxism, etc
That is not what I said. What I said is that "Social Justice is a code word for Marxism", which is absolutely true in our modern society. You are reading far too much into an explanation of a code word.
>I don't know what you want to call that ideology, but it is morally debased and corrupt to its very core: There is more to life than money.
Again, amazing you can read so much into my explanation of a term to you.
>There's only solution I've found to the problem of people taking your disagreement as an insult
Well, this hides another issue, and the part that Dawkins doesn't really get. You can disagree with someone amicably, or you can disagree with them by being a total dick, and the whole spectrum in between.
Calling Sunday School "child abuse" (http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/1230-religion-and-child-abuse) for example is a way of disagreeing with someone by being a total dick.
I don't care even if you agree with the author there - it's being deliberately inflammatory and dickish, and that's why people like Dawkins and Hitchens have such a poor reputation when compared to atheist writers like Dennett.
>I didn't read anywhere that people should be forced at GUNPOINT to help society. You made that up in your sick fucking mind.
Only because you haven't thought through your own beliefs.
Earlier (assuming you're the same coward) you said that you supported redistribution of wealth by the government to charitably help the poor out. This redistribution takes place via taxes, which are enforced at the barrel of a gun by the government.
So you basically want to hold a gun to people's heads to force them to be charitable.
Maybe you think this is okay. Randians obviously do not. But don't pretend you are standing for anything different from what you are.
>>The rest is some pseudo-socialist rant. Move along, nothing to see here. >I think that's a hand wave on your part. You're just slapping a label on the author's assertions and then jettisoning them without analyzing it and providing a reasoned response.
The author said: "To fix it, we're going to need to work on social justice." Social justice is a code word for Marxism. 'Nuff said.
>> Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access...so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. >The current problem isn't that editors don't have direct access to the information; after all, most editors would rather edit than become subject matter experts
The key fact missing here is that Jensen himself has a large private library, and uses this fact (he has sources that other people don't have access to) to bully people when he gets into one of his hundreds of edit wars. "Well of course you're wrong, my source that you don't have access to says so!" Jensen is opposed to having any dissenting voices in "his" history articles, and will endlessly edit war competing points of view into the ground, even if they're correctly sourced.
> As a previous poster stated, it seems that there's about a 90% chance that any revision to any entry will be quickly redacted, whether it's a punctuation correction, a fact backed up by a reference, or just the addition of a reference. From the perspective of contributors with subject matter expertise, Wikipedia has largely become a waste of their time.
Correct, and experts like Jensen are part of the problem. They essentially claim ownership over certain articles, and will ruthlessly edit out any changes to "their" articles. I've added ISBN numbers to a page, to have it reverted by the page's goaltender less than 30 seconds later, no explanation given.
>Articles in regular Wikipedia on more advanced topicsâ"especially in mathematicsâ"could do with some work in that direction, too.
Yep. I've been studying music theory, and all the music theory pages on Wikipedia are written with the understanding that you already know music theory. It's a ridiculous situation. I once ran around in a circle of pages trying to just find the definition of some basic terms.
On a related note, I know Richard Jensen in real life, and have worked with him for a number of years. He's not a very huge fan of the "everyman" aspect of Wikipedia - he doesn't believe in citing all relevant sources, but only those related to "the truth" (i.e. those he agrees with), and will constantly trot out his history credentials in an edit war, and refuse to allow dissenting voices in that disagree with him.
The Tea Party howled when the GOP created a GOP.com/teaparty page. It was a reaction against both big-government Republicans and big-government Democrats.
But sure, keep smoking your HuffPo. Don't pay attention to history or facts.
And "girly boy"? They guy who broke into my car stole my karate pants, one of my shoes, and my black belt, so I drove around SF for a few hours (broken window and all) looking for a one-legged homeless guy with my name on him, so I could beat the crap out of him^h^h^h^h^h^h^h talk sternly to him and get my shit back.
I never really had too many problems with my AMD boxes. Bad drivers for the mobos being the most common one, but Intel mobos have the same problems. So with the exception of the very overclockable Celeron 300A back in the day, I've been a non-Intel customer since the early 90s.
But when we got to the Sandy Bridge generation, I just couldn't justify being an AMD customer any more. Intel completely cleaned their clock, and AMD has done nothing since then to answer it.
It's also a cop-free zone. When I got my car broken into there, I tried reporting it to the police, but they didn't want to hear about it: "We don't do police reports over the phone. You have to come in to a station." So I drive (broken window an all) to a station, and ring the damn doorbell for an hour until I finally get a cop to come out to talk to me. He doesn't care either, and says he doesn't understand why I'm reporting the crime to him. (I dunno - because it was a crime, dickhead, and you're a cop?)
A friend later explained it to me - San Francisco is basically Somalia.
> If they have to start giving up customers, you damn well better believe the ISPs are going to start fighting, kicking and screaming.
Not if they are "bad" customers that are torrenting heavily. The major ISPs been looking for ways to drop the top 5% of their data usage customers for years now.
Slashdot Mirror
If you truly wish to understand non-Euclidean geometry, simply try putting those damn fitted sheets on a bed. No matter which way you rotate it, you always end up with the short side in your hands.
It is enough to drive a man insane.
That's a fine example. Universal Healthcare is Socialist if you have the government controlling the health care industry. The British system, for example, is Socialist. Our Post Office is Socialist.
Obamacare though, is not Socialist. It's not very fair to individuals, but it's not Socialist.
>That's a pointless and irrelevant argument and it's just as pointless in this situation.
Yes, all government actions are enforced by the gun. Don't pretend otherwise. That's my point to the guy I was responding to, who wanted to pretend that government-enforced wealth redistribution was paid for by leprechaun gold and unicorn farts.
>If you like socialism you should move to Europe, every country is effectively socialist here.
We'll see how long it takes before they're all bankrupt. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium.... they're all in the shit.
Switzerland, though, has both one of the lowest tax rates in Europe, one of the highest per-capita incomes, and the Franc is so solid that people have been buying negative-yield bonds to get into it.
They have a strong welfare system, but still have a smaller government and lower taxes than the US.
If you were being sarcastic, I apologize, but I'm going to respond to you as if you are honestly the left-wing nutjob you appear to be.
>Any nation with a social security system, is socialist. It don't matter if it is a good system or a bad one. You got it, your a pinko. The US got it, so they are all pinko's.
No. Socialism is government control of industry.
Being forced to buy insurance (which is all Social Security is... and Obamacare, for that matter) is not socialism. It's not a bunch of other things either (involving words like liberty, freedom, etc.), but it's not socialism.
I really wish everyone would understand this.
>Any true capitalist nation, and there exist none, would not have a social system as it would be entirely private property with a tiny state collecting just enough by magic to do the bare minimum of centralized tasks, like the army. And even there, it would play a small role, relying more on private armies owned by those who can afford them to protect them. After all, why should I pay taxes to protect your property?
Not true. Capitalism simply means that private industry controls the means of production, as opposed to government control as with Socialism. There's multiple variants of Capitalism, it sounds like you're talking about some sort of extreme Randian / Libertarian laissez-faire system. But even those systems have an army, a court system, police, and so forth. Early America is as close to this as you'll find, and it wasn't some sort of degenerate wasteland. Even the Wild West, which is something you obviously know nothing about.
It's like you hate Capitalism so much you want to make the biggest strawman you can find so you can beat it to death.
>Far simpler to just organize a collective fire service payed out of common funds paid for by all according to their capability and service given to their needs. COMMUNIST!
What kind of crack are you smoking?
Communism is the collective ownership of the means of production. Government services are not really means of production, so you can have collectively funded fire stations in a fully laissez-faire capitalist society.
>It is no surprise that the fantasy land Romney and his kin dream about has never been realized, it can't be realized in a modern society.
It is indeed no surprise that that fantasy land can't exist, since it only exists in your twisted imagination.
Romney is hardly a libertarian fanatic. He's a big government Republican. Pull your head out of your ass, and stop smoking the crack all up inside your crack.
TL;DR - You need to read more. From sites outside of DailyKOS, Mother Jones, and HuffPo.
Marx doesn't get to magically define communism as rainbow farts and unicorns. The fundamental characteristic of communism is common ownership of the means of production. All the other consequents that I listed above fall out from this fact.
You or Marx or whoever can pretend that in your magical rainbow world that this leads to a stateless society, but I've already said above how it instead leads to a tyrannical dictatorship every time.
>I'd be perfectly happy for people not to pay taxes, as long as they were then happy to go without any of the protections afforded by being members of society.
No, that wouldn't make any sense.
> The problem with your argument is that you appear to believe that it's fine for society to enforce property rights, but that requiring active participation in society in exchange for this is a bad thing.
Nyet. What I'm objecting to is the GGP up there saying that government-run wealth redistribution isn't done at the point of a gun. It's just fairy-tale nonsense.
Correct. I pay for prisons, roads, military, etc., at the point of a gun. I don't pretend otherwise.
Pretending that government-run wealth redistribution *isn't* done at the point of a gun is what I'm taking issue with.
>You're an idiot who doesn't understand a basic concept. 'Nuff said.
You study this in college? No, of course you didn't.
If you study this subject in college, or otherwise get exposed to Marxist ideology in college or your local OWS protest, you'll become aware what social justice, a focus on income inequality, wealth redistribution, an open society, and so forth actually means, much like how our forefathers could easily read between the lines whenever someone suddenly started talking about the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, or alienation of labor, or worker control of production. They are code words that mean more than their face value.
>It's not like we ever had communism yet either. Every attempt at communism was just an elaborate tribute to Orwell's Animal Farm. It's not like capitalism is the clear winner, in terms of both economic and moral success.
This is a pretty standard communism apology. No matter how many times communism has been implemented in a state, tyranny results. But apologists always say, "Well, it just wasn't done right."
This is utter bullshit, and here's why. A communist economy is by definition managed by the state. Thus, by definition, you have a top-down, managed, economy, instead of a bottom-up economy which is what you get with capitalism. Top-down managed economies only work when they can make people do things other than what they want to do (which is what a bottom-up economy is). This force naturally comes at the point of a gun. Holding guns to people's heads and telling them where they can live (near their factory) and work (the shoe factory) is the definition of tyranny.
Therefore tyranny is not "communism done wrong", but the natural, logical consequent of communism being implemented in a country.
> People like you remind me that there is a growing subset of americans that think any call for responsibility is socialism, communism, marxism, etc
That is not what I said. What I said is that "Social Justice is a code word for Marxism", which is absolutely true in our modern society. You are reading far too much into an explanation of a code word.
>I don't know what you want to call that ideology, but it is morally debased and corrupt to its very core: There is more to life than money.
Again, amazing you can read so much into my explanation of a term to you.
> Gee! And here all this time I thought that Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, etc. were only concerned with "social justice".
Yes, I'm sure they all wrote long letters about Social Justice in Mother Jones magazine.
>There's only solution I've found to the problem of people taking your disagreement as an insult
Well, this hides another issue, and the part that Dawkins doesn't really get. You can disagree with someone amicably, or you can disagree with them by being a total dick, and the whole spectrum in between.
Calling Sunday School "child abuse" (http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/1230-religion-and-child-abuse) for example is a way of disagreeing with someone by being a total dick.
I don't care even if you agree with the author there - it's being deliberately inflammatory and dickish, and that's why people like Dawkins and Hitchens have such a poor reputation when compared to atheist writers like Dennett.
>I didn't read anywhere that people should be forced at GUNPOINT to help society. You made that up in your sick fucking mind.
Only because you haven't thought through your own beliefs.
Earlier (assuming you're the same coward) you said that you supported redistribution of wealth by the government to charitably help the poor out. This redistribution takes place via taxes, which are enforced at the barrel of a gun by the government.
So you basically want to hold a gun to people's heads to force them to be charitable.
Maybe you think this is okay. Randians obviously do not. But don't pretend you are standing for anything different from what you are.
>>The rest is some pseudo-socialist rant. Move along, nothing to see here.
>I think that's a hand wave on your part. You're just slapping a label on the author's assertions and then jettisoning them without analyzing it and providing a reasoned response.
The author said: "To fix it, we're going to need to work on social justice." Social justice is a code word for Marxism. 'Nuff said.
>I can deal with this as a "Requirement" to fly. I don't fly. Take a car, bus, or train.
Have you ever taken Amtrak across the country? I just punched in the numbers on Amtrak.com and Travelocity.
Train:
140 hours transit time, $600.
Air:
13 hours transit time, $300.
If you travel for work for a living, there's simply no alternative to flying.
>> Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access...so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard.
>The current problem isn't that editors don't have direct access to the information; after all, most editors would rather edit than become subject matter experts
The key fact missing here is that Jensen himself has a large private library, and uses this fact (he has sources that other people don't have access to) to bully people when he gets into one of his hundreds of edit wars. "Well of course you're wrong, my source that you don't have access to says so!" Jensen is opposed to having any dissenting voices in "his" history articles, and will endlessly edit war competing points of view into the ground, even if they're correctly sourced.
> As a previous poster stated, it seems that there's about a 90% chance that any revision to any entry will be quickly redacted, whether it's a punctuation correction, a fact backed up by a reference, or just the addition of a reference. From the perspective of contributors with subject matter expertise, Wikipedia has largely become a waste of their time.
Correct, and experts like Jensen are part of the problem. They essentially claim ownership over certain articles, and will ruthlessly edit out any changes to "their" articles. I've added ISBN numbers to a page, to have it reverted by the page's goaltender less than 30 seconds later, no explanation given.
>Articles in regular Wikipedia on more advanced topicsâ"especially in mathematicsâ"could do with some work in that direction, too.
Yep. I've been studying music theory, and all the music theory pages on Wikipedia are written with the understanding that you already know music theory. It's a ridiculous situation. I once ran around in a circle of pages trying to just find the definition of some basic terms.
On a related note, I know Richard Jensen in real life, and have worked with him for a number of years. He's not a very huge fan of the "everyman" aspect of Wikipedia - he doesn't believe in citing all relevant sources, but only those related to "the truth" (i.e. those he agrees with), and will constantly trot out his history credentials in an edit war, and refuse to allow dissenting voices in that disagree with him.
Now. Not at the beginning.
More importantly, the GOP itself shifted its platform to include more Tea Party goals, and put Paul Ryan as the VP nominee.
The Tea Party howled when the GOP created a GOP.com/teaparty page. It was a reaction against both big-government Republicans and big-government Democrats.
But sure, keep smoking your HuffPo. Don't pay attention to history or facts.
How what is legal? The police ignoring everyone?
You got me. I was just curious how I'd have survived for an hour on their doorstep if I'd been bleeding out.
I presume they are trying to keep crime rates low by under-reporting them.
I'm a Democrat?
Bwahahaahahahaha
Oh, you're funny.
And "girly boy"? They guy who broke into my car stole my karate pants, one of my shoes, and my black belt, so I drove around SF for a few hours (broken window and all) looking for a one-legged homeless guy with my name on him, so I could beat the crap out of him^h^h^h^h^h^h^h talk sternly to him and get my shit back.
I never really had too many problems with my AMD boxes. Bad drivers for the mobos being the most common one, but Intel mobos have the same problems. So with the exception of the very overclockable Celeron 300A back in the day, I've been a non-Intel customer since the early 90s.
But when we got to the Sandy Bridge generation, I just couldn't justify being an AMD customer any more. Intel completely cleaned their clock, and AMD has done nothing since then to answer it.
>San Fran is a "gun free" zone
It's also a cop-free zone. When I got my car broken into there, I tried reporting it to the police, but they didn't want to hear about it: "We don't do police reports over the phone. You have to come in to a station." So I drive (broken window an all) to a station, and ring the damn doorbell for an hour until I finally get a cop to come out to talk to me. He doesn't care either, and says he doesn't understand why I'm reporting the crime to him. (I dunno - because it was a crime, dickhead, and you're a cop?)
A friend later explained it to me - San Francisco is basically Somalia.
> If they have to start giving up customers, you damn well better believe the ISPs are going to start fighting, kicking and screaming.
Not if they are "bad" customers that are torrenting heavily. The major ISPs been looking for ways to drop the top 5% of their data usage customers for years now.