Bombing crap in order to make the enemy scared is terrorism.
Then all war is terrorism, and there's no need for the word "terrorism."
That's just idiocy.
Close. In fact, there is a distinction. "Terrorist" is the word used by governments to describe private individuals who use force in the same way as governments always have.
Governments resent that: they feel that killing thousands or millions of people is their job, and should be left exclusively to them. No one likes to lose a monopoly.
Being pissy and resentful will not change the fact that in the Twentieth Century, America has been a greater force for good than any other nation.
Now that is a truly ignorant thing to say. Have you ever heard of "values"? Especially the bit about how they are subjective? Who has been "a force for good" - and, indeed, what is good (or bad), is a classic value judgment. Indeed, you couldn't find a better case of a pure value judgment. To assert that such a value judgment is "a fact" is to disqualify yourself from rational discussion.
Bzzt. Assassination of another countries leader is forbidden. Taking out Osama wouldn't have been.
So if the Iranians are upset about McCain's and Hilary Clintons' threats to wage nuclear war against their country, by your reckoning they would be within their rights if they "took out" those politicians?
Or is it only Americans who are allowed to kill foreigners whom they don't like?
Moderators notwithstanding, parent was not a troll. Slavery was outlawed some time ago. If an employer offers conditions of employment that are equivalent to slavery, you would be foolish to work for that employer.
Pretty funny the US still has this. In the UK it was so if the King cut your head off for looking at him funny your relatives couldn't take him to court.
I.e. it was a hack in the judicial system that made the King formally above the law.
Thank goodness the USA is a nation ruled by law, where nothing like that could possibly happen. If the president were to take a dislike to any of us for looking at him funny and (let's say) declare that person an enemy combatant, his relatives could naturally take the president to court and get the person in question released immediately.
That's according to the ancient principle of habeas corpus. Which originated in, er, England. (Not that it applies there any more, either).
Absolutely correct! This post deserves to be a 5, IMHO.
Everything any government does is backed up by the ultimate threat of lethal violence. It doesn't start with that, of course, but the threat is always there.
For my money, that's the main reason they get so bent out of shape by "terrorism". As the dominant practitioners of terrorism, ruling politicians hate to face competition from non-government groups.
Is it just me, or is English communication being progressively subverted by an incoming tide of innuendo? Back in the 1960s (really) when I was at school, many of us were dirty-minded kids and would snigger at double meanings (real or imagined, we didn't much care). Then we hit 15 or so, and grew out of it.
Today it seems that practically every second word has a double meaning that's somehow obscene - and that's supposed to be funny. Maybe it's got something to do with the crowd of third-rate "comedians" who rely on that kind of "joke" to keep their audiences laughing.
How many men's names do double duty for body parts? How funny can that really be, and how long can it keep you amused? Even when I was about 9, and learned the names of the planets, it never struck me for a moment that there was anything funny about "Uranus". Nowadays, if we need to refer to that planet, we have a choice of "the 7th planet", "the planet between Saturn and Neptune" or perhaps the authentic Greek pronunciation (something like "Oo'ranos").
Couldn't we all just get over it, and agree that those jokes have been done? (Yes, I know - no way).
Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work.
The markets - and capitalism - go on working all right, but not along the lines of Adam Smith's fairy-tale "hidden hand". Oh no.
Free markets go either of two ways. Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM. Or else governments step in to regulate them, in a process that soon comes to resemble the Ptolemaic system of astronomy - adjustments to adjustments to adjustments, while the whole thing becomes steadily less stable and credible.
Our current system is a compromise between raw capitalism and socialism. You can argue that it has the strengths of both, or the weaknesses of both, or both. One aspect that has recently hit the headlines is the tendency to privatise profits and nationalise losses, thus giving rich speculators a free run at even greater wealth.
Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?
Thanks for your sincere, helpful reply (and those of the others who have offered advice). It makes a nice change from the complacent "it's all your own fault, you fat lazy greedy lying slob" crew.
But there's a logical flaw. I admit to a long history of trying to lose weight. I lost over 40 pounds in 1974 - and kept it off for over 5 years, until I got married, had children, and found myself too busy trying to earn a living to worry about my health.
What's this flaw, then? Simply that I have arrived at my present regime (diet plus exercise) as a result of 40 years' trial and error, plus wide reading. What I have described in my previous post is simply the least radical regime on which I can lose any weight at all. You guys are now telling me I am overdoing it, and need to go back to eating more and exercising less (or at least differently). But that simply means quitting. When I ate an extra 300 calories a day, or ate what I do now without exercising, I didn't lose any weight at all. There is no margin at all for backing off.
Thanks for the advice, but how does it fit in with the monotonous refrain of "eat less than you exercise - it's simple physics!" that I hear from everyone else?
When someone has difficulty losing weight, first they are told to eat less and exercise more. That having failed, now you tell me to eat more and exercise less!
Between them these two recommendations seem to cover all the possibilities.
Unfortunately, it turns out the parent has a point. My experience is similar, though less dramatic. Rising 60 years old (so with slower metabolism), I am 6 foot 4 inches and weigh about 245 pounds. Every day (unless the weather is really severe) I walk a fairly brisk 7 miles, occasionally increasing this to 10, 15, or even over 20 miles. I then eat 100 grams of muesli with a little skim milk (and at this time of year a few spoonfuls of mixed berries) and drink a glass of fruit juice. Later, I eat some more fruit - say a couple of apples, an orange, maybe a banana. For dinner I eat some fish, chicken, or occasionally a little red meat, with plenty of vegetables and occasionally wholewheat pasta. Never more than will fit on a standard dinner plate with room to spare. No seconds, no dessert, no sweets, cakes, or cookies. Apart from copious tea, coffee, and moderate alcoholic beverages, that's about it.
My goal is to consume no more than about 2000 calories per day, while my walk should burn up well over 1000. Net intake, therefore, should be around 1000. The UK government says a man of my size and age needs about 2300 calories to maintain weight; amusingly, the US government cites a much higher figure.
In the last three months, I have lost a grand total of 6 pounds. Exactly 2 pounds each month, by the way. According to all the "expert" information I have read, this too is impossible. My reply is the same as the bumblebee's when the experts proved it couldn't fly - "Eppur si muove"! If theory contradicts the facts, then the theory is inadequate - which, in this case, it plainly is.
Yes, but regular fingerprints are actually very good. That's why it's called "DNA fingerprints" and not "DNA shoeprints" or "DNA ballistics evidence".
Brandon Mayfield might disagree. Had he not been able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt (as in hundreds of eyewitnesses) that he was in Portland, Oregon when the FBI said he was killing people in Spain, he would have been in a peck of trouble.
Note the closing sentence of the following story: "an FBI fingerprint examiner told an expert hired by Mayfield the original print no longer exists".
Leslie Lamport famously defined a distributed system as "one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
In this vein, I would define cloud computing as "a computing system in which the failure of a network you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
...how will you justify killing more than half a million people (according to the Johns Hopkins university)
That's over a million by now. There have been two Johns Hopkins studies published in The Lancet, of which you seem to be referring to the first. There is also a substantial time lag (years) between events and the publication of such studies. The 2004 study referred to deaths up to 2003, and the 2006 one brought the figures up to 2005. That's three years ago now.
The following links are useful for rapidly getting an overview of the issues. The third link points to a more recent report that brings the total (as of 2007) above 1 million excess deaths - that is, deaths that would not have happened without the invasion.
Let's also not neglect religion, which is often taken very lightly in Western culture, but is largely observed in deadly seriousness in the Middle-East.
Yes, thanks for explaining that, AC. My mistake for confusing what Jefferson argued with what wound up in the US Constitution.
Thanks, too, urcreepyneighbour, for your urbane correction. I shall try to remember in future that being a "non-American" is functionally equivalent to being an ignorant sack of shit.
If 80 people were murdered on US soid, don't you think the army should come to investigate???
Actually, no. The police should come to investigate. Isn't there something in the US Constitution that says the armed forces must never operate within the USA itself? (I know, that's downright funny nowadays).
When any army "comes to investigate" there is always a good chance of lots of people getting killed. Much more so when it's the US Army, whose SOP is "rather 100 of them than 1 of us".
Slashdot Mirror
Bombing crap in order to make the enemy scared is terrorism.
Then all war is terrorism, and there's no need for the word "terrorism."
That's just idiocy.
Close. In fact, there is a distinction. "Terrorist" is the word used by governments to describe private individuals who use force in the same way as governments always have.
Governments resent that: they feel that killing thousands or millions of people is their job, and should be left exclusively to them. No one likes to lose a monopoly.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-R-J-Rummel/dp/1560009276/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218301290&sr=1-1
"Our" enemies?
Yeah, you remember the guys that trained in Afghanistan and then flew planes into the WTC?
Didn't they actually train in the USA?
Being pissy and resentful will not change the fact that in the Twentieth Century, America has been a greater force for good than any other nation.
Now that is a truly ignorant thing to say. Have you ever heard of "values"? Especially the bit about how they are subjective? Who has been "a force for good" - and, indeed, what is good (or bad), is a classic value judgment. Indeed, you couldn't find a better case of a pure value judgment. To assert that such a value judgment is "a fact" is to disqualify yourself from rational discussion.
Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-value_distinction
First of all, the Taliban were not the official govenment of Afghanistan. They were not recognized by the US as a government...
Oh well, that settles it. No government anywhere in the world can possibly be legitimate unless it's recognised by the USA.
Bzzt. Assassination of another countries leader is forbidden. Taking out Osama wouldn't have been.
So if the Iranians are upset about McCain's and Hilary Clintons' threats to wage nuclear war against their country, by your reckoning they would be within their rights if they "took out" those politicians?
Or is it only Americans who are allowed to kill foreigners whom they don't like?
Moderators notwithstanding, parent was not a troll. Slavery was outlawed some time ago. If an employer offers conditions of employment that are equivalent to slavery, you would be foolish to work for that employer.
Pretty funny the US still has this. In the UK it was so if the King cut your head off for looking at him funny your relatives couldn't take him to court.
I.e. it was a hack in the judicial system that made the King formally above the law.
Thank goodness the USA is a nation ruled by law, where nothing like that could possibly happen. If the president were to take a dislike to any of us for looking at him funny and (let's say) declare that person an enemy combatant, his relatives could naturally take the president to court and get the person in question released immediately.
That's according to the ancient principle of habeas corpus. Which originated in, er, England. (Not that it applies there any more, either).
In short, you can sue the government if an agent of the government commits a tortuous act
I think you mean 'tortious'.
The word you used is more like a definition of how government employees act. They could have a slogan - something like 'Tortuous R Us'.
(Also 'Torturers R Us' - but that's a different bunch of threads).
Dude, if your in the Military or work for the military, the military owns your ass 24/7.
The obvious reaction to which would be:
Don't work for the military.
I seem to recall a state whose title prominently featured both those words. Now what was it?
Ah yes... the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
It's what people do that matters - not what they say about themselves.
Absolutely correct! This post deserves to be a 5, IMHO.
Everything any government does is backed up by the ultimate threat of lethal violence. It doesn't start with that, of course, but the threat is always there.
For my money, that's the main reason they get so bent out of shape by "terrorism". As the dominant practitioners of terrorism, ruling politicians hate to face competition from non-government groups.
Is it just me, or is English communication being progressively subverted by an incoming tide of innuendo? Back in the 1960s (really) when I was at school, many of us were dirty-minded kids and would snigger at double meanings (real or imagined, we didn't much care). Then we hit 15 or so, and grew out of it.
Today it seems that practically every second word has a double meaning that's somehow obscene - and that's supposed to be funny. Maybe it's got something to do with the crowd of third-rate "comedians" who rely on that kind of "joke" to keep their audiences laughing.
How many men's names do double duty for body parts? How funny can that really be, and how long can it keep you amused? Even when I was about 9, and learned the names of the planets, it never struck me for a moment that there was anything funny about "Uranus". Nowadays, if we need to refer to that planet, we have a choice of "the 7th planet", "the planet between Saturn and Neptune" or perhaps the authentic Greek pronunciation (something like "Oo'ranos").
Couldn't we all just get over it, and agree that those jokes have been done? (Yes, I know - no way).
Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work.
The markets - and capitalism - go on working all right, but not along the lines of Adam Smith's fairy-tale "hidden hand". Oh no.
Free markets go either of two ways. Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM. Or else governments step in to regulate them, in a process that soon comes to resemble the Ptolemaic system of astronomy - adjustments to adjustments to adjustments, while the whole thing becomes steadily less stable and credible.
Our current system is a compromise between raw capitalism and socialism. You can argue that it has the strengths of both, or the weaknesses of both, or both. One aspect that has recently hit the headlines is the tendency to privatise profits and nationalise losses, thus giving rich speculators a free run at even greater wealth.
Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?
Thanks for your sincere, helpful reply (and those of the others who have offered advice). It makes a nice change from the complacent "it's all your own fault, you fat lazy greedy lying slob" crew.
But there's a logical flaw. I admit to a long history of trying to lose weight. I lost over 40 pounds in 1974 - and kept it off for over 5 years, until I got married, had children, and found myself too busy trying to earn a living to worry about my health.
What's this flaw, then? Simply that I have arrived at my present regime (diet plus exercise) as a result of 40 years' trial and error, plus wide reading. What I have described in my previous post is simply the least radical regime on which I can lose any weight at all. You guys are now telling me I am overdoing it, and need to go back to eating more and exercising less (or at least differently). But that simply means quitting. When I ate an extra 300 calories a day, or ate what I do now without exercising, I didn't lose any weight at all. There is no margin at all for backing off.
Thanks for the advice, but how does it fit in with the monotonous refrain of "eat less than you exercise - it's simple physics!" that I hear from everyone else?
When someone has difficulty losing weight, first they are told to eat less and exercise more. That having failed, now you tell me to eat more and exercise less!
Between them these two recommendations seem to cover all the possibilities.
Unfortunately, it turns out the parent has a point. My experience is similar, though less dramatic. Rising 60 years old (so with slower metabolism), I am 6 foot 4 inches and weigh about 245 pounds. Every day (unless the weather is really severe) I walk a fairly brisk 7 miles, occasionally increasing this to 10, 15, or even over 20 miles. I then eat 100 grams of muesli with a little skim milk (and at this time of year a few spoonfuls of mixed berries) and drink a glass of fruit juice. Later, I eat some more fruit - say a couple of apples, an orange, maybe a banana. For dinner I eat some fish, chicken, or occasionally a little red meat, with plenty of vegetables and occasionally wholewheat pasta. Never more than will fit on a standard dinner plate with room to spare. No seconds, no dessert, no sweets, cakes, or cookies. Apart from copious tea, coffee, and moderate alcoholic beverages, that's about it.
My goal is to consume no more than about 2000 calories per day, while my walk should burn up well over 1000. Net intake, therefore, should be around 1000. The UK government says a man of my size and age needs about 2300 calories to maintain weight; amusingly, the US government cites a much higher figure.
In the last three months, I have lost a grand total of 6 pounds. Exactly 2 pounds each month, by the way. According to all the "expert" information I have read, this too is impossible. My reply is the same as the bumblebee's when the experts proved it couldn't fly - "Eppur si muove"! If theory contradicts the facts, then the theory is inadequate - which, in this case, it plainly is.
The IOC should take this seriously. The air quality on the moon is probably better than at Beijing.
Well, there is certainly less air pollution...
Yes, but regular fingerprints are actually very good. That's why it's called "DNA fingerprints" and not "DNA shoeprints" or "DNA ballistics evidence".
Brandon Mayfield might disagree. Had he not been able to prove beyond a shadow of doubt (as in hundreds of eyewitnesses) that he was in Portland, Oregon when the FBI said he was killing people in Spain, he would have been in a peck of trouble.
Note the closing sentence of the following story: "an FBI fingerprint examiner told an expert hired by Mayfield the original print no longer exists".
Fancy that.
http://www.policeone.com/investigations/articles/88280-Newspaper-Faults-FBI-Examiner-in-Madrid-Bombing-Fingerprint-Case/
Note that it doesn't really matter whether the actual fingerprints were a perfect match or not. What matters is that the FBI lab said they were.
Leslie Lamport famously defined a distributed system as "one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/distributed-system.txt
In this vein, I would define cloud computing as "a computing system in which the failure of a network you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable".
Would you please point me towards an army whose SOP is "rather 1 of us then N of them" then, and specify the relevant N.
This is the point:
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff07072008.html
...how will you justify killing more than half a million people (according to the Johns Hopkins university)
That's over a million by now. There have been two Johns Hopkins studies published in The Lancet, of which you seem to be referring to the first. There is also a substantial time lag (years) between events and the publication of such studies. The 2004 study referred to deaths up to 2003, and the 2006 one brought the figures up to 2005. That's three years ago now.
The following links are useful for rapidly getting an overview of the issues. The third link points to a more recent report that brings the total (as of 2007) above 1 million excess deaths - that is, deaths that would not have happened without the invasion.
http://www.counterpunch.com/andrew01092006.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/26/europe/EU-GEN-Britain-Iraq-Death-Toll.php
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88
Let's also not neglect religion, which is often taken very lightly in Western culture, but is largely observed in deadly seriousness in the Middle-East.
Not to mention the Midwest.
Yes, thanks for explaining that, AC. My mistake for confusing what Jefferson argued with what wound up in the US Constitution.
Thanks, too, urcreepyneighbour, for your urbane correction. I shall try to remember in future that being a "non-American" is functionally equivalent to being an ignorant sack of shit.
If 80 people were murdered on US soid, don't you think the army should come to investigate???
Actually, no. The police should come to investigate. Isn't there something in the US Constitution that says the armed forces must never operate within the USA itself? (I know, that's downright funny nowadays).
When any army "comes to investigate" there is always a good chance of lots of people getting killed. Much more so when it's the US Army, whose SOP is "rather 100 of them than 1 of us".
No, the Gestapo taught them their SOP. (With a few extra wrinkles from KGB and GRU).