Hah! There are so many people in western prisons that should been execute already it's not even funny. Mass murderers, rapists, child abusers...etc. But we're civilized. Or so I'm told. No, we'll just keep them locked up and well fed all at the expense of the tax payer.
Unfortunately there are also a lot of people in western prisons who don't belong there at all, let alone deserve execution.
You mean like the US and Australia?... I am not an ozzie so I wonder about indentured servents.
There may have been indentured servants in Oz, but the big issue was its use by the British as a penal colony.
But this is how people came ot the new world and how slavery started in the south.
No, indentured servitude is when free persons agree to a longish labor contract in exchange for something, e.g. passage to the New World.
Slavery in the Americas started with the Spanish policy of repartimento, which was the use of natives for slave labor, rationalized as repayment for the favor of being saved from their pagan religion by their conquerors. But when they took people from the Mexican highlands and put them to work on the coastal plantations, they suffered greatly and died soon. So a certain Bishop Las Casas, somewhat enlightened for his time, but not by modern values, recommended bringing in African slaves, who would be more acclimated to that sort of work environment.
According to Wikipedia, he later decided that that wasn't right either, and took a stand against it. (Wikipedia also says he wasn't the only one who advocated it in the first place. My knowledge of this comes from Prescott's monumental History of the Conquest of Mexico, which is long and sometimes tedious, but well worth the read if you're interested in the topic. But it's ~150 years old now, so I'm inclined to lean toward the Wikipedia version. See the article on Las Casas, and while there click the link to the article about the import of African slaves.)
Britain and its colonies got in on slavery much later, becoming entangled with the Spanish in the slave trade. (The above was well before the British had the colonies that eventually became the USA and expended across "the south".)
No. Japan was losing the war badly, but vowed to fight to the last person rather than surrender. I'm no fan of nuclear weapons but I have to admit that the overwhelming show of force saved millions of lives.
Yeah, after seeing the movies of Japanese civilians on the islands (Saipan?) jump off cliffs with their babies to avoid capture by the Americans, the thought of an invasion of the home islands really makes you shudder.
And the Japanese were reinforcing the area where the landings were planned, bringing a number of divisions back from the mainland, IIRC.
Tradition says the US was expecting to take a million casualties. Heaven knows how many they would have inflicted.
Revisionist crap. The Japanese were hellbent on taking the pacific to a lesser extent, a large chunk of China. They managed to capture its east cost pretty well. Now that I think about it. Diplomatically, I really wonder how the Chinese government thinks of America in this regards. We bloody well saved their ass!
Nationalism keeps people from saying that other countries saved them, and before long no one remembers.
How many people in the USA remember that the French made the American revolution possible? Lafayette St in Durham NC is named after the French general who volunteered to travel from France to Virginia to fight the British at his own expense. In the height of the build-up the Iraq war, I was in a restaurant a few blocks away from that street. People at another table made a big show of ordering "freedom fries".
Yeah, people are dicks.
However, I wouldn't assume that French support for the US rebellion was a matter of charity or pre-Revolutionary enlightenment. France and England had been trying to gouge each other's eyes out since... oh, shortly after 1066.
It took the unification of Germany to convince them they could get into the same bed together.
If you want my personal opinion, Iran is a thinly veiled military dictatorship that uses religion as its unifying ideology much as the Soviets and the Chinese use(d) Communism. The Basij are all very swirly eyed, but I don't get the feeling the country is actually run by similar types.
Leaders who promote suicide bombings rarely wear the vest themselves.
They will build the bombs and they will use the bombs, no, they won't bomb anyone, but rather, they will use the bombs they have accumulated to blackmail the world
Blackmail the world into......not invading them?...letting them build nuclear bombs?...letting their politicians be dicks and say outrageous things?
Thank goodness, now that the Cold War is over we have the War on Terror, so we can still dismiss critics of more spending for unnecessary weapon systems as "lacking in common sense or patriotism".
I rarely hear this mentioned, but this is my second-favorite novel of all.
Not at all like Drake's other fare, which I find rather dull (except the Vettius and his Friends collection of short stories).
Birds of Prey is set in the later Roman Empire, with a science fiction twist. In any other book this would be too violent for my taste, but this is so good that I've re-read it several times anyway.
I posted above in this thread, but YES read this novel (Lyonesse but in the Integral Edition the preferred title is Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden). Highly recommended. This is my favorite fantasy novel of all time, and I've bought multiple editions of it (paperback, trade paperback, various hardcovers, etc).
The Green Pearl is my favorite novel, regardless of genre.
Kind of odd that I would like the second book in a trilogy, since that's usually the weak link.
Madouc was good too, but he seemed to rush to wrap up all the loose ends. Still well worth reading, though.
(For those who don't know, the titles above are the three books in Vance's Lyonesse trilogy.)
The very first democracy, ancient Athens, quickly turned into an Evil Empire.
Sill, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". An enlightened/benevolent monarch would be great, but there's no way to ensure the enlightenment and benevolence. Look what happened when Marcus Arelius made his son the next emperor. (And a million other examples.)
The last thing we need is ANOTHER country with nuclear weapons. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Yep. We need FEWER. Preferably NONE.
However, Iran has not signed any anti-proliferation treaties, so no one has a right to tell them they can't develop their own - *unless* you subscribe to the idea that the community of nations has a right to tell individual nations what to do. (And I'm guessing that the people most phobic about world government are the same people who are most keen on telling Iran that it isn't allowed to develop nukes. What would the USA do if the UN ordered us to eliminate our own nuclear arsenals?)
The good news - so far - is that since 1945 every nation that acquired nukes has found that they can't actually use them.
Iran with a nuclear weapon is a pretty scary thought.
The same can be said of any other nation.
I met lots of Iranian students at a US university, and most of them are thoroughly westernized and as rational as anyone else. The question is, is their president the crank he comes across as, or is he just a blowhard who gets political mileage out of saying things that make his country's extremists' knees jerk - like, say, a conservative talk show host or a Republican presidential candidate.
Given all the hate-mongering and war-mongering coming from that corner, I suspect that most of the world is more terrified of the USA's nukes than they will be of Iran's.
We need to keep saying this over and over again. All I see in the news is Iran, Iran, Newt Gingrich, and then some more Iran followed by a delightful yogurt commercial starring Jamie Lee Curtis.
But seriously, this is the exact sort of build-up they're trying to go for.
Some talking heads are saying that this is because the USA wants to "fix the Iran problem" so it can shift its attention from the Middle East to containing China.
Though I'm curious what kind of "fix" they think would last more than a couple of years.
And why they might think "fixing" Iran would fix the entire Middle East. In addition to all the other problems, by some accounts the Syrian rebellion is transmuting into an international Shia-vs-Sunni civil war.
Also, over the past week there has been a swirl of rumors that Israeli commandos already "fixed" the Iranian nuclear program sometime during the past few weeks. Story seems to depend a lot on the Stratfor leak, so you may want to salt it before consuming it.
And yes, the world would be a better place if all of the religious people, or at least the people who subscribe to one or more of the three monotheistic religions of the Middle-East, would drop dead on the spot. That is where the trouble lies.
I would be more content if the people who wanted to force others to believe what they believe at the end of a rifle or sword were singled out. Peaceful Christians, Jews and Muslims are not the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course. the government and NASA will help make sure the big corporations will lock out small business and startups from even getting going.
And your tax dollars will subsidize their profits.
Hah! There are so many people in western prisons that should been execute already it's not even funny. Mass murderers, rapists, child abusers...etc. But we're civilized. Or so I'm told. No, we'll just keep them locked up and well fed all at the expense of the tax payer.
Unfortunately there are also a lot of people in western prisons who don't belong there at all, let alone deserve execution.
You mean like the US and Australia?... I am not an ozzie so I wonder about indentured servents.
There may have been indentured servants in Oz, but the big issue was its use by the British as a penal colony.
But this is how people came ot the new world and how slavery started in the south.
No, indentured servitude is when free persons agree to a longish labor contract in exchange for something, e.g. passage to the New World.
Slavery in the Americas started with the Spanish policy of repartimento, which was the use of natives for slave labor, rationalized as repayment for the favor of being saved from their pagan religion by their conquerors. But when they took people from the Mexican highlands and put them to work on the coastal plantations, they suffered greatly and died soon. So a certain Bishop Las Casas, somewhat enlightened for his time, but not by modern values, recommended bringing in African slaves, who would be more acclimated to that sort of work environment.
According to Wikipedia, he later decided that that wasn't right either, and took a stand against it. (Wikipedia also says he wasn't the only one who advocated it in the first place. My knowledge of this comes from Prescott's monumental History of the Conquest of Mexico, which is long and sometimes tedious, but well worth the read if you're interested in the topic. But it's ~150 years old now, so I'm inclined to lean toward the Wikipedia version. See the article on Las Casas, and while there click the link to the article about the import of African slaves.)
Britain and its colonies got in on slavery much later, becoming entangled with the Spanish in the slave trade. (The above was well before the British had the colonies that eventually became the USA and expended across "the south".)
It is nothing but kabuki theater
Closer to bukkake, by most accounts.
Oh, come on.
If TSA is worried that this is new information they need to suppress to keep it away from terrorists, that horse may have left the barn years ago.
Isn't closing the gate behind the horse what the TSA was created for?
Heh. Today's Slashdot cookie: "The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity. -- Harlan Ellison"
Why not buy a million diamond encrusted toilets next? Idiots
I used to have one, but it wasn't very comfortable.
North Korea recently said they would give up their nuclear program in exchange for a substantial aid package.
Sheesh... the things that pass for 'blackmail' these days.
You'd think they'd threaten to blow something up, and demand the UN to hand over ... one million dollars!
Blackmail the world into... ...not invading them? ...letting them build nuclear bombs? ...letting their politicians be dicks and say outrageous things?
Oh, I am sure the Iranians have given it a lot of thought
They could blackmail the world to give them other high-tech stuffs that they do not currently enjoy - such as space technology
They could blackmail the world to give them the veto power on the UN security council
They could do much much more than what you and I can ever imagine, if they were to own nukes
Just like North Korea does, huh?
Wow, that's amazing. If Japan wanted to surrender, it wouldn't have taken TWO atom bombs to make them do so.
Sure it would... they needed to see the parity bit.
No. Japan was losing the war badly, but vowed to fight to the last person rather than surrender. I'm no fan of nuclear weapons but I have to admit that the overwhelming show of force saved millions of lives.
Yeah, after seeing the movies of Japanese civilians on the islands (Saipan?) jump off cliffs with their babies to avoid capture by the Americans, the thought of an invasion of the home islands really makes you shudder.
And the Japanese were reinforcing the area where the landings were planned, bringing a number of divisions back from the mainland, IIRC.
Tradition says the US was expecting to take a million casualties. Heaven knows how many they would have inflicted.
No kidding. The Japanese government didn't even surrender after Hiroshima.
And even after the second bomb, the warlords only surrendered because the Emperor told them to.
And even then they still managed to swing one exception to the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender.
Revisionist crap. The Japanese were hellbent on taking the pacific to a lesser extent, a large chunk of China. They managed to capture its east cost pretty well. Now that I think about it. Diplomatically, I really wonder how the Chinese government thinks of America in this regards. We bloody well saved their ass!
Nationalism keeps people from saying that other countries saved them, and before long no one remembers.
How many people in the USA remember that the French made the American revolution possible? Lafayette St in Durham NC is named after the French general who volunteered to travel from France to Virginia to fight the British at his own expense. In the height of the build-up the Iraq war, I was in a restaurant a few blocks away from that street. People at another table made a big show of ordering "freedom fries".
Yeah, people are dicks.
However, I wouldn't assume that French support for the US rebellion was a matter of charity or pre-Revolutionary enlightenment. France and England had been trying to gouge each other's eyes out since... oh, shortly after 1066.
It took the unification of Germany to convince them they could get into the same bed together.
If you want my personal opinion, Iran is a thinly veiled military dictatorship that uses religion as its unifying ideology much as the Soviets and the Chinese use(d) Communism. The Basij are all very swirly eyed, but I don't get the feeling the country is actually run by similar types.
Leaders who promote suicide bombings rarely wear the vest themselves.
They will build the bombs and they will use the bombs, no, they won't bomb anyone, but rather, they will use the bombs they have accumulated to blackmail the world
Blackmail the world into... ...not invading them? ...letting them build nuclear bombs? ...letting their politicians be dicks and say outrageous things?
Thank goodness, now that the Cold War is over we have the War on Terror, so we can still dismiss critics of more spending for unnecessary weapon systems as "lacking in common sense or patriotism".
The summary lists several popular languages as examples. Do her results hold if you include less popular, exotic, and experimental languages?
Just what I want - a Merc that people can't see in the parking lot.
OTOH, I guess scratches wouldn't matter so much on an invisible car.
I rarely hear this mentioned, but this is my second-favorite novel of all.
Not at all like Drake's other fare, which I find rather dull (except the Vettius and his Friends collection of short stories).
Birds of Prey is set in the later Roman Empire, with a science fiction twist. In any other book this would be too violent for my taste, but this is so good that I've re-read it several times anyway.
The Demon Princes (really, anything) by Jack Vance
Also Planet of Adventure.
These are space opera, but delightful reads. Vance is a stylist, and tends to focus heavily on character, dialogue, and whimsy.
Planet of Adventure starts kind of slow and conventional for my taste, but well rewards sticking with it.
For fantasy, his Lyonesse trilogy is mentioned in various threads below.
I posted above in this thread, but YES read this novel (Lyonesse but in the Integral Edition the preferred title is Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden). Highly recommended. This is my favorite fantasy novel of all time, and I've bought multiple editions of it (paperback, trade paperback, various hardcovers, etc).
The Green Pearl is my favorite novel, regardless of genre.
Kind of odd that I would like the second book in a trilogy, since that's usually the weak link.
Madouc was good too, but he seemed to rush to wrap up all the loose ends. Still well worth reading, though.
(For those who don't know, the titles above are the three books in Vance's Lyonesse trilogy.)
The very first democracy, ancient Athens, quickly turned into an Evil Empire.
Sill, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". An enlightened/benevolent monarch would be great, but there's no way to ensure the enlightenment and benevolence. Look what happened when Marcus Arelius made his son the next emperor. (And a million other examples.)
My bad - thanks.
The last thing we need is ANOTHER country with nuclear weapons. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Yep. We need FEWER. Preferably NONE.
However, Iran has not signed any anti-proliferation treaties, so no one has a right to tell them they can't develop their own - *unless* you subscribe to the idea that the community of nations has a right to tell individual nations what to do. (And I'm guessing that the people most phobic about world government are the same people who are most keen on telling Iran that it isn't allowed to develop nukes. What would the USA do if the UN ordered us to eliminate our own nuclear arsenals?)
The good news - so far - is that since 1945 every nation that acquired nukes has found that they can't actually use them.
Iran with a nuclear weapon is a pretty scary thought.
The same can be said of any other nation.
I met lots of Iranian students at a US university, and most of them are thoroughly westernized and as rational as anyone else. The question is, is their president the crank he comes across as, or is he just a blowhard who gets political mileage out of saying things that make his country's extremists' knees jerk - like, say, a conservative talk show host or a Republican presidential candidate.
Given all the hate-mongering and war-mongering coming from that corner, I suspect that most of the world is more terrified of the USA's nukes than they will be of Iran's.
This is Iraq all over again.
We need to keep saying this over and over again. All I see in the news is Iran, Iran, Newt Gingrich, and then some more Iran followed by a delightful yogurt commercial starring Jamie Lee Curtis.
But seriously, this is the exact sort of build-up they're trying to go for.
Some talking heads are saying that this is because the USA wants to "fix the Iran problem" so it can shift its attention from the Middle East to containing China.
Though I'm curious what kind of "fix" they think would last more than a couple of years.
And why they might think "fixing" Iran would fix the entire Middle East. In addition to all the other problems, by some accounts the Syrian rebellion is transmuting into an international Shia-vs-Sunni civil war.
Also, over the past week there has been a swirl of rumors that Israeli commandos already "fixed" the Iranian nuclear program sometime during the past few weeks. Story seems to depend a lot on the Stratfor leak, so you may want to salt it before consuming it.
And yes, the world would be a better place if all of the religious people, or at least the people who subscribe to one or more of the three monotheistic religions of the Middle-East, would drop dead on the spot. That is where the trouble lies.
I would be more content if the people who wanted to force others to believe what they believe at the end of a rifle or sword were singled out. Peaceful Christians, Jews and Muslims are not the problem.
LK
Seconded.