If you know what you're doing, your experience is not "irrelevant anecdotal evidence", it's "expert testimony". But since you seem to discount both broad studies and individual experience equally, one wonders what you base your judgements on.
Perhaps something truly unbiased -- say, a coin flip?
Well, you're the nth person making this comment, so you win the lucky prize of my reply.
The problem with your relativist reasoning is that while people do object to an MS-funded study showing MS products are cheaper, the basis of that objection is not just MS self-interest but also an argument from experience. Once you get used to having a massive number of tools available to you without a purchase order, or even just the superior scripting power of a typical default install, you're just not going to believe that straightjacketed Windows is cheaper to manage no matter who funds the study.
So the total argument is not merely a logical exercise in deducing the reliability of a study based on who funds it, but a practical one based on prior use of both systems. I may be optimistic, but remember that some people here still earn their fanboy blinders from real-world experience.
A nice, insightful parent post and you spin it back into a tedious little morality play. I knew it was too good to last.
Regarding porn, I remind you that there is more than one American and if one person loves Jesus while another stars in jizz flicks, this does not meet any definition of hypocrisy.
Saving Private Ryan was on TV, so it's difficult to sustain your argument that you can't show it on TV. Further, despite concerns from some stations, the FCC issued a preemptive ruling stating that there would be no fines for showing the movie uncut.
As for Janet Jackson, even the Ameriphobic Guardian cited a poll in which on 17% of Americans were "very concerned" about the Jackson incident -- the same percentage of people who voted for Le Pen in France. Neither is a sign of the impending apocalypse.
It's not the same, and it has nothing to do with images and words. In the first case you ban something, in the second, you ban debate on the policy of banning. The difference is enormous.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
No, it's a difference in kind, not just of degree. It is illegal in the many countries to access child porn, but it is not illegal to debate the merits of child porn on the internet. Democracy is not the legal form of government in China, and it *is* illegal to debate its merits on the internet.
Wow, Americans compaining about other country's human rights records!
Well, it's the West Coast and all -- do you reckon the protesters could have been Vietnamese? Let's check google...
Vietnamese Americans from around the Northwest are expected to protest tomorrow's history-making visit by Vietnam's prime minister, who will tour a Boeing plant and appear at a noon news conference at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Seattle.
"You're going to expect to see a large crowd," said Sai Nguyen of the Vietnamese American Coalition in Northwest America, adding that 500 to 1,000 people might attend rallies at the downtown Federal Building and at the hotel.
Wow, a bunch of refugees mouthing off about their birthplace. How dare they!
"You can't win with facts in the face of religion, patriotism, and manifest destiny. It's not logical, it's emotional. It's black and white, with no room for a grey area. Heaven and Hell, right and wrong. The simple yes and no that the human brain favors over answers that may branch of into a multitude of possible results."
I can't agree with you.
You're aping all the the typical talking points of the educated bigot. Your arguments have nothing to do with logic, either -- note that you started the post bewailing the failure of logic against emotion, and ended the post pulling your hair out and screaming. This should offer a clue that you've become what you beheld.
Why would you try to win with facts vs. religion, patriotism and manifest destiny? Why do you want to argue "versus" religion, patriotism and manifest destiny in a dispute about the Patriot Act? Or about anything else, for that matter. This is precisely the problem.
To win the argument, you must relocate the subject under debate on your opponent's own emotional map, and stop trying to get them to accept yours.
You don't need reason in your opponent, just in yourself.
Your trails of "almost by definition" to "by implication" to QED is ludicrous.
Sure, there are political disagreements but everyone thinks they work for the people, in particular to create economic prosperity.
I don't think I've ever met anybody who believes this. On the contrary, suspicion and mistrust of government is common to almost every political viewpoint anyone holds in this country. Why do you think every politician runs against Washington, no matter how long he's been there?
The simple truth is that people fail to oppose the patriot act because it has zero visible impact on their lives, not because they believe it derives from the heavenly benevolence of government. Argue along that axis (and please, with something less sci-fi than endless repetitions of "They came for...") and you will win every argument you have about the PA.
The stupidity of the right presents such a fantastic opening to its opponents, but they all seem to prefer to scream "brainwashed fascists!" instead of trying to actually win the debate. It's really pathetic.
No -- the problem is that your use of phrases like "it is the will of Nature to improve upon itself" puts you on the (currently) losing side of a long and bitter scientific dispute over the nature of evolution. But surely you must realize that your intuitive appeals to progress and directedness are the same as those made by the IDers. This is why you get lumped in with the thumpers -- you are making their argument!
Chordonblue, they say, it is so simple -- your unconscious force is my conscious force -- you say tomato and so forth. But it is not so simple. Evolution by natural selection cannot make a claim about a drive to higher, more complex life because it cannot produce a mechanism to provide such a direction. The end result of a man contemplating a lichen is not contained in the lichen plus evolution by natural selection. But he could be, if we introduced a hidden hand -- a god, or a drive of Nature to improve itself. Do you see the difference?
Here is a web page that describes the debate in more detail, even if it is more generous with certain kinds of arguments than it should be.
"Fitness" has no particular direction -- one day the white moths are favored, then conditions change and black moths are favored. This translates into a "drive to improve" the species?
I have never noticed any particular "will to live" in slime molds or bacteria. And even in higher animals, it is not a mystic will to live that confers the ability to pass on genes -- You stegosaurs just aren't *trying* hard enough, dammit! All that is needed for evolution by natural selection is reproduction, mutation and a limiting environment. Even in its broadest definition, the kinds of willing to which you may be referring -- sex drive, primate dominance, broad-canopy trees -- are the *products* of evolution, not its causes.
Thus the use of the word "will" as an analogy/shorthand is utterly misleading.
Nope, you still have it exactly backwards. There is no will, there is no force, there is no drive to improve.
That is what makes the idea so radical. It is not like referring to an aircraft as a she -- it is like trying to mate with an aircraft and expecting offspring. It is a distinction with a difference. The fact that you think you have this poetic license demonstrates that you do not understand the significance of your argument as well as the bible-thumpers do.
The consciousness or unconsciousness of your "will" is immaterial -- it is the directedness and drive that are objectionable. This is not a minor side-show, but almost the whole of the evolutionary debate -- is natural selection enough of a mechanism, or do we need some underlying vector, pushing upwards and forwards? Do we need an upwards and forwards at all?
There are tens of thousands of articles on the net about this very point. arose had you in his one-sentence reply, yet you persist in your romanticism. I guess he was just optimistic.
"Stop the ignorance" in the parent post seems to be a plea for you to stop spreading ignorant falsehoods.
The entire point of the natural selection hypothesis is to explain evolution without resorting to the hokey mysticism of "will". It is in fact this absence of will that makes the theory so threatening to the people you claim to despise, even as you spout their teleological hoo-ha under a differnt name.
Incidentally, UK unemployment rate: 4.6% and falling
Yes, but the UK has the kind of rational, liberalized economy that makes the Continentals tremble. Americans referring to Europe give the UK the same implicit asterisk that the British do when they refer to Europe.
How is it that I can sit at dinner with a few American's from back home, an American from here, and a foreign national or two, and it's one of the Americans who informs us all of what heathens we are?
If you go to an Ivy league school, surely you know where they learn this impulse?
He's not trashing America, he's not even trashing American companies, he's trashing *companies*.
Jesús Villasante, head of software technologies at the commission, said: 'The open source community today [is a] subcontractor of American multinationals.
I'm confused about what you (and the author) mean by "being treated more as subcontractors".
It looks to me like big companies are mostly using free software in accordance with the licenses those developers chose at the time they released the software. They're being "treated" exactly how they asked to be treated.
If you're suggesting that's not what the developers really meant, I guess they might change those licenses in the future. But I suspect that it is what they really meant.
Also, I like cheap resources, too, and I'm just a desktop user.
The writeup just lists two groups that might be motivated to make such an attack. It does not say that anti-globalizers were anti-American. In fact, if they were making that assumption, the sentence you cite would be redundant.
And yes, I know *you* aren't planning to attack anything. Neither are the vast majority of people who have strong feelings against the United States. But the possibility that someone in either group might interested in doing it is not beyond the pale.
Having knowledge as to the whereabouts of known sexual predators in your area...
Wait a minute...now banging a hooker qualifies one as being a sexual predator? Sorry, but I don't see what this transaction -- however seamy -- has to do with your two small children.
Not flamebait at all -- but I think you're missing out by casting the debate as legitimate Chinese fear of chaos vs. American ignorance, rather than simply distinguishing between two arguments.
What you're overlooking is the cost of the status quo -- the fact that the progressive misalignment of economic and political power can also cause instability. The value of free expression in China is not that they will suddenly decide to pull out of Tibet, but that they will develop the kind of political discourse needed to sustain progress. I think if you reread your own posts, you will see that the kind of social pressures needed to maintain a social consensus in the face of free content flows are already there -- "from my Chinese perspective...our Chinese concern for stability...[Chinese care about economic development, not Falun Gong]", etc. So in pointing out the concerns driving the need for censorship, you unwittingly point out why censorship is unnecessary.
Beyond that, you say, "wait until we're middle class and urbanized," but argue earlier that CCP abuses in the countryside are preventing this sort of thing from happening. This is precisely the kind of skew that poor information flows enable. And for as long as they're enabling it, you're going to be saying, "wait until we're all middle class and urbanized...".
So again, from my perspective, so have provided an illustration of a problem deepened and worsened by lack of open political discourse -- censorship may buy you time, but it won't make anybody *use* that time to solve the problems.
In sum, I think your attitudes towards fear of social chaos are reflected widely enough in Chinese society that while open content may shift the terms of the debate, nobody wants to ruin a good thing, economically. Further, I think the short-term expediency of censorship, by stunting political consensus-building on a broader array of issues, fuels precisely the kind of tensions you seem to fear most.
on one hand, I can't help but admire the constant moralizing and ideological rigidity that Americans are so fond of.
Unfortunately, this is a habit you seem to have taken to quite readily...
The abuses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are open grounds for public discussion. Chinese people are QUITE aware of their own history, thank you very much.
Great! But then why did China ban the book? Or is that just marketing hype?
Falun Gong...is a marginal issue to most Chinese.
Agreed. But this seems to underscore, rather than undercut, the stupidity of banning information about it.
I have no idea where you've been getting your information buddy...
Probably from hysterical Falun Gong practitioners. Unfortunately, overzealous control of information leads people to trust your loudest opponents over you -- witness the Bush administration.
That guy did have some balls but here's some news for you: TIANANMEN IS HISTORY.
Agreed again. And once again, since it is history, why ban discussion of it?
I'm afraid that in your zeal to point out how "ignorant" the original poster was, you have merely proved his point -- that censorship is ass. Comparing an internet post advocating freedom of expression in China to the worst abuses of the Communist Party is, in a word, silly. In fact, the people who argue against Chinese censorship are agreeing with the thread that runs through all of your arguments -- that the Chinese people can be trusted with full access to information. This seems like a simple proposition, but it is certainly difficult to state on Slashdot without being called ignorant, fat, arrogant American.
Sure, the OP seems to feel that free access to information would suddenly make all the Chinese agree with him about many issues, but is this more arrogant than all the Euros who think America would suddenly be like them if you replaced Fox News with Le Monde? I think it's just the same combination of wishful thinking and human nature.
Slashdot Mirror
If you know what you're doing, your experience is not "irrelevant anecdotal evidence", it's "expert testimony". But since you seem to discount both broad studies and individual experience equally, one wonders what you base your judgements on.
Perhaps something truly unbiased -- say, a coin flip?
Well, you're the nth person making this comment, so you win the lucky prize of my reply.
The problem with your relativist reasoning is that while people do object to an MS-funded study showing MS products are cheaper, the basis of that objection is not just MS self-interest but also an argument from experience. Once you get used to having a massive number of tools available to you without a purchase order, or even just the superior scripting power of a typical default install, you're just not going to believe that straightjacketed Windows is cheaper to manage no matter who funds the study.
So the total argument is not merely a logical exercise in deducing the reliability of a study based on who funds it, but a practical one based on prior use of both systems. I may be optimistic, but remember that some people here still earn their fanboy blinders from real-world experience.
A nice, insightful parent post and you spin it back into a tedious little morality play. I knew it was too good to last.
Regarding porn, I remind you that there is more than one American and if one person loves Jesus while another stars in jizz flicks, this does not meet any definition of hypocrisy.
Saving Private Ryan was on TV, so it's difficult to sustain your argument that you can't show it on TV. Further, despite concerns from some stations, the FCC issued a preemptive ruling stating that there would be no fines for showing the movie uncut.
As for Janet Jackson, even the Ameriphobic Guardian cited a poll in which on 17% of Americans were "very concerned" about the Jackson incident -- the same percentage of people who voted for Le Pen in France. Neither is a sign of the impending apocalypse.
But wait, in your previous post, you suggested it was Bush & Blair that "did this". Now you're saying it won't stop until imperialism goes away.
Are you saying Bush & Blair bombed London because of their outrage over imperialism?
"Moozlim ayrab terrists" don't want' more power?
It's not the same, and it has nothing to do with images and words. In the first case you ban something, in the second, you ban debate on the policy of banning. The difference is enormous.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
No, it's a difference in kind, not just of degree. It is illegal in the many countries to access child porn, but it is not illegal to debate the merits of child porn on the internet. Democracy is not the legal form of government in China, and it *is* illegal to debate its merits on the internet.
Do you not see the difference?
Wow, Americans compaining about other country's human rights records!
Well, it's the West Coast and all -- do you reckon the protesters could have been Vietnamese? Let's check google...
Vietnamese Americans from around the Northwest are expected to protest tomorrow's history-making visit by Vietnam's prime minister, who will tour a Boeing plant and appear at a noon news conference at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Seattle.
"You're going to expect to see a large crowd," said Sai Nguyen of the Vietnamese American Coalition in Northwest America, adding that 500 to 1,000 people might attend rallies at the downtown Federal Building and at the hotel.
Wow, a bunch of refugees mouthing off about their birthplace. How dare they!
"You can't win with facts in the face of religion, patriotism, and manifest destiny. It's not logical, it's emotional. It's black and white, with no room for a grey area. Heaven and Hell, right and wrong. The simple yes and no that the human brain favors over answers that may branch of into a multitude of possible results."
I can't agree with you.
You're aping all the the typical talking points of the educated bigot. Your arguments have nothing to do with logic, either -- note that you started the post bewailing the failure of logic against emotion, and ended the post pulling your hair out and screaming. This should offer a clue that you've become what you beheld.
Why would you try to win with facts vs. religion, patriotism and manifest destiny? Why do you want to argue "versus" religion, patriotism and manifest destiny in a dispute about the Patriot Act? Or about anything else, for that matter. This is precisely the problem.
To win the argument, you must relocate the subject under debate on your opponent's own emotional map, and stop trying to get them to accept yours.
You don't need reason in your opponent, just in yourself.
Sorry, but have you ever been to the U.S.?
Your trails of "almost by definition" to "by implication" to QED is ludicrous.
Sure, there are political disagreements but everyone thinks they work for the people, in particular to create economic prosperity.
I don't think I've ever met anybody who believes this. On the contrary, suspicion and mistrust of government is common to almost every political viewpoint anyone holds in this country. Why do you think every politician runs against Washington, no matter how long he's been there?
The simple truth is that people fail to oppose the patriot act because it has zero visible impact on their lives, not because they believe it derives from the heavenly benevolence of government. Argue along that axis (and please, with something less sci-fi than endless repetitions of "They came for...") and you will win every argument you have about the PA.
The stupidity of the right presents such a fantastic opening to its opponents, but they all seem to prefer to scream "brainwashed fascists!" instead of trying to actually win the debate. It's really pathetic.
No -- the problem is that your use of phrases like "it is the will of Nature to improve upon itself" puts you on the (currently) losing side of a long and bitter scientific dispute over the nature of evolution. But surely you must realize that your intuitive appeals to progress and directedness are the same as those made by the IDers. This is why you get lumped in with the thumpers -- you are making their argument!
Chordonblue, they say, it is so simple -- your unconscious force is my conscious force -- you say tomato and so forth. But it is not so simple. Evolution by natural selection cannot make a claim about a drive to higher, more complex life because it cannot produce a mechanism to provide such a direction. The end result of a man contemplating a lichen is not contained in the lichen plus evolution by natural selection. But he could be, if we introduced a hidden hand -- a god, or a drive of Nature to improve itself. Do you see the difference?
Here is a web page that describes the debate in more detail, even if it is more generous with certain kinds of arguments than it should be.
"Fitness" has no particular direction -- one day the white moths are favored, then conditions change and black moths are favored. This translates into a "drive to improve" the species?
I have never noticed any particular "will to live" in slime molds or bacteria. And even in higher animals, it is not a mystic will to live that confers the ability to pass on genes -- You stegosaurs just aren't *trying* hard enough, dammit! All that is needed for evolution by natural selection is reproduction, mutation and a limiting environment. Even in its broadest definition, the kinds of willing to which you may be referring -- sex drive, primate dominance, broad-canopy trees -- are the *products* of evolution, not its causes.
Thus the use of the word "will" as an analogy/shorthand is utterly misleading.
Nope, you still have it exactly backwards. There is no will, there is no force, there is no drive to improve.
That is what makes the idea so radical. It is not like referring to an aircraft as a she -- it is like trying to mate with an aircraft and expecting offspring. It is a distinction with a difference. The fact that you think you have this poetic license demonstrates that you do not understand the significance of your argument as well as the bible-thumpers do.
The consciousness or unconsciousness of your "will" is immaterial -- it is the directedness and drive that are objectionable. This is not a minor side-show, but almost the whole of the evolutionary debate -- is natural selection enough of a mechanism, or do we need some underlying vector, pushing upwards and forwards? Do we need an upwards and forwards at all?
There are tens of thousands of articles on the net about this very point. arose had you in his one-sentence reply, yet you persist in your romanticism. I guess he was just optimistic.
"Stop the ignorance" in the parent post seems to be a plea for you to stop spreading ignorant falsehoods.
The entire point of the natural selection hypothesis is to explain evolution without resorting to the hokey mysticism of "will". It is in fact this absence of will that makes the theory so threatening to the people you claim to despise, even as you spout their teleological hoo-ha under a differnt name.
So please, stop the ignorance.
Incidentally, UK unemployment rate: 4.6% and falling
Yes, but the UK has the kind of rational, liberalized economy that makes the Continentals tremble. Americans referring to Europe give the UK the same implicit asterisk that the British do when they refer to Europe.
How is it that I can sit at dinner with a few American's from back home, an American from here, and a foreign national or two, and it's one of the Americans who informs us all of what heathens we are?
If you go to an Ivy league school, surely you know where they learn this impulse?
He said *on* OpenOffice, not *with* OpenOffice.
Prepositions -- important with ravenous bugblatter beasts, important with labor distribution.
He's not trashing America, he's not even trashing American companies, he's trashing *companies*.
Shrug.
I'm confused about what you (and the author) mean by "being treated more as subcontractors".
It looks to me like big companies are mostly using free software in accordance with the licenses those developers chose at the time they released the software. They're being "treated" exactly how they asked to be treated.
If you're suggesting that's not what the developers really meant, I guess they might change those licenses in the future. But I suspect that it is what they really meant.
Also, I like cheap resources, too, and I'm just a desktop user.
Okay, forget I said that.
You could read it either way. Looks like they just chose the red team for maximum drama.
You are misreading it.
The writeup just lists two groups that might be motivated to make such an attack. It does not say that anti-globalizers were anti-American. In fact, if they were making that assumption, the sentence you cite would be redundant.
And yes, I know *you* aren't planning to attack anything. Neither are the vast majority of people who have strong feelings against the United States. But the possibility that someone in either group might interested in doing it is not beyond the pale.
Having knowledge as to the whereabouts of known sexual predators in your area ...
Wait a minute...now banging a hooker qualifies one as being a sexual predator? Sorry, but I don't see what this transaction -- however seamy -- has to do with your two small children.
It's called respecting other cultures, you know?
Yup, it's all about respect. Good thing nobody in Britain would every do that.
From ruling the waves to whining about disrespectful spelling. How the mighty have fallen...
Not flamebait at all -- but I think you're missing out by casting the debate as legitimate Chinese fear of chaos vs. American ignorance, rather than simply distinguishing between two arguments.
What you're overlooking is the cost of the status quo -- the fact that the progressive misalignment of economic and political power can also cause instability. The value of free expression in China is not that they will suddenly decide to pull out of Tibet, but that they will develop the kind of political discourse needed to sustain progress. I think if you reread your own posts, you will see that the kind of social pressures needed to maintain a social consensus in the face of free content flows are already there -- "from my Chinese perspective...our Chinese concern for stability...[Chinese care about economic development, not Falun Gong]", etc. So in pointing out the concerns driving the need for censorship, you unwittingly point out why censorship is unnecessary.
Beyond that, you say, "wait until we're middle class and urbanized," but argue earlier that CCP abuses in the countryside are preventing this sort of thing from happening. This is precisely the kind of skew that poor information flows enable. And for as long as they're enabling it, you're going to be saying, "wait until we're all middle class and urbanized...".
So again, from my perspective, so have provided an illustration of a problem deepened and worsened by lack of open political discourse -- censorship may buy you time, but it won't make anybody *use* that time to solve the problems.
In sum, I think your attitudes towards fear of social chaos are reflected widely enough in Chinese society that while open content may shift the terms of the debate, nobody wants to ruin a good thing, economically. Further, I think the short-term expediency of censorship, by stunting political consensus-building on a broader array of issues, fuels precisely the kind of tensions you seem to fear most.
on one hand, I can't help but admire the constant moralizing and ideological rigidity that Americans are so fond of.
Unfortunately, this is a habit you seem to have taken to quite readily...
The abuses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are open grounds for public discussion. Chinese people are QUITE aware of their own history, thank you very much.
Great! But then why did China ban the book? Or is that just marketing hype?
Falun Gong...is a marginal issue to most Chinese.
Agreed. But this seems to underscore, rather than undercut, the stupidity of banning information about it.
I have no idea where you've been getting your information buddy...
Probably from hysterical Falun Gong practitioners. Unfortunately, overzealous control of information leads people to trust your loudest opponents over you -- witness the Bush administration.
That guy did have some balls but here's some news for you: TIANANMEN IS HISTORY.
Agreed again. And once again, since it is history, why ban discussion of it?
I'm afraid that in your zeal to point out how "ignorant" the original poster was, you have merely proved his point -- that censorship is ass. Comparing an internet post advocating freedom of expression in China to the worst abuses of the Communist Party is, in a word, silly. In fact, the people who argue against Chinese censorship are agreeing with the thread that runs through all of your arguments -- that the Chinese people can be trusted with full access to information. This seems like a simple proposition, but it is certainly difficult to state on Slashdot without being called ignorant, fat, arrogant American.
Sure, the OP seems to feel that free access to information would suddenly make all the Chinese agree with him about many issues, but is this more arrogant than all the Euros who think America would suddenly be like them if you replaced Fox News with Le Monde? I think it's just the same combination of wishful thinking and human nature.