I don't really give a hoot about Sony getting hacked. What I do care about is Americans being threatened for lawful activity by agents of a foreign government. (That is, 9/11 style attacks for screening The Interview.) That threat made what was Sony's problem into a national issue that our government ought to deal with. Unfortunately I don't see much chance of the D.C. set showing any spine or defending any principles.
Yes, people really are stupid. Give them something to be angry about, and they'll vote against their own interests.
It's rather presumptive of you, and every other Democrat, to pretend to know people's interests better than they do. It's part of the unmistakable arrogance that comes from the left, and was perfectly displayed by Gruber. You and your fellow leftists are cut from the same cloth as every other human, but you whip each other up with flattery on how kind, intelligent and compassionate you are for simply being on the left. Whether ruin or prosperity follows your policy actions isn't terribly important. You had the best intentions, you see, and the books can always be cooked after the fact to hide any negative news that doesn't fit the narrative.
(I'm not studied up enough on the topic at hand- 'enhanced interrogation'- to condemn it or defend it.)
I realize this is a distracting thing to say, and I don't support torture, and it appears we've used it, and it's a crime that no one in power will unfortunately ever be held accountable to. My intent was more to say that I haven't RTFA or summary report; and I was responding only to the position of 'let's just ignore them because they're so terrible at killing us.'
There is no such thing as a terrorist. But it must be nice to see the world in black and white, saves you the trouble of having to actually think about or empathize with other humans.
"
If not terrorists, how about Barbarians who must be kept at bay? The people who think we need to empathize with barbarians are often under the following mistaken impressions:
1) Westerners are the only real evil in the world today.
2) Westerners are the only people who act; who have agency. All other people do not have their own plans, thoughts and ideals- they merely react to what westerners do. They are automatons we can control through correct choices.
Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".
More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?
I prefer to discourage people from attacking my countrymen, and simultaneously limit their capabilities to do so. That often means killing the people who are trying to kill us, until they get the idea that trying to kill us is a bad idea. Their incompetence in killing us does not erase the trespass. People who get into accidents have their insurance rates go up. People who try to kill us get killed. Actions have consequences.
If your neighbor was trying to kill you, repeatedly, would you tolerate it? Would you find the milk in your cereal curdled one day from poison, push it away, then look out your window and say 'Ah, nice try Mohammed! Maybe next time!.' I mean, you might notice that next crude tripwire before you set off the IED in your hedges.
You wouldn't tolerate it. You'd have him thrown in jail at the first try. Back to the national scale, if the people trying to kill us are in countries that will have them thrown in jail, great. If not, well, now we're back to the concept of war between distinct states or peoples. The fact that one side is weak and incompetent does not mean they get to keep trying without reprisal.
What you seem to advocate- ignoring attacks by barbarians as just another risk in modern society- is in it's own special moral vacuum. I'm having a hard time fathoming how such a dereliction could seem morally superior to you, and I can only guess your education has been a steady diet of 'Western civilization is the worst thing that ever happened to the world.' That sort of 'critical theory' rubbish has been all the rage in higher education for decades.
(I'm not studied up enough on the topic at hand- 'enhanced interrogation'- to condemn it or defend it.)
Has anyone actually borne the public's wrath over Rotherham scandal? I'm not sure anyone has even resign over it. No, just more tepid 'investigations of failures in processes.'
The problem with Rotherham wasn't that it went 'Undetected for years.' It was detected and ignored, by people who didn't want to seem racist for arresting sexually deviant immigrants. Either that, or they were on the take.
No, Rotherham represents an abject failure of people in society to act in order to protect the young. There's no slouching away the travesty by implying that sort of mass, long ignored child abuse in common elsewhere in the world. England is a country where people know better than to tolerate this, and once had the moral fortitude to do something about it.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
2. When building a power plant will involve hundreds of millions of dollars in lawyers fees to keep your sort at bay, that tends to increase cost over-runs. Which your sort then uses as a further argument against nuclear power. (Yes, there are plenty of non-lawyer related cost overruns.)
The more massive generalisations you make the less people should listen to you. You are merely projecting your own ideas of what an environmentalist is to you, and the battering it to death with a bizarre take on logic.
Who is listening to environmentalists these days? There's still a mass of laws and regulations they use to gum up the works constantly, but folks are starting to realize most environmentalists don't care so much about the environment as much as they hate their fellow man and his enjoyment of modern life.
Of course, you folks have your own tinpot dictator in the White House, who is a law unto himself and will probably service his ideological base with economy-crushing diktats.
I had this argument before w.r.t. affirmative action. I asked if they didn't want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, and was told - seriously - that quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., and he's "theirs," so I'm not allowed to use his quote in an argument. No,.. really.
As a matter of reasonable debate- and I'm not going to pretend that everything on the internet needs to be, or ever will be reasonable debate- using slurs when debating religion would be unhelpful and polarizing. There are, however, religions out there whose adherents are unable to weather any criticism gracefully- which means that said religions are fragile and should be subject to even greater scrutiny and criticism.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
Hayek wrote a book about this question- The use of knowledge in society. A quote:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
To put it another way, no communist politburo can centrally manage the knowledge necessary to make a modern economy work. There's simply too much to know. In a market economy, the participants know how to play their role, and how to get what they need to give their customers what they want. They need to know nothing more than that. Millions of such people quietly playing their own role delivers success. In a command economy, the politburo pretends to be able to manage all the knowledge and decision making required throughout the economy- and this is an impossible task.
Mayday PAC and their ilk don't want money out....
on
Mayday PAC Goes 2 For 8
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
....of politics. They want conservative money out of politics. With the entertainment industry in lefty hands and most journalists* little more than Democratic party operatives with bylines, the Democrats have plenty of influence already.
What they want to do is choke out conservative money, because that's the primary way Republicans get heard when leftists control the culture.
Mayday PAC is transparent in this regard- they ran a video contest accepting amateur-made ads supporting their cause. A video attacking Tom Steyer, the left's Koch, won the popular vote by a large margin. They picked another video based on the 'judgement of their panel of experts.'
How can the Americans allow their government to turn so rogue, so fast ?
We voted an incompetent, populist demagogue to be President. Then a sycophantic press covered for his failures & malfeasance for his entire first term, and called anyone who dared criticize the president 'racist.'
The republic can survive Obama. He is just one man. The republic cannot long survive a citizenry that would vote for Obama. He set his sights out to fundamentally change the United States, and he's doing that- but it's change for the worse. Hopefully our fellow citizens can learn from the experience.
\Cue angry responses from an unrepentant Obama voters and 'flame-bait' downmods.
When the people who say it's a crisis act like it's a crisis, then maybe I'll look into the matter. Until then, I have a hard time taking a finger-wagging jet setter seriously.
You know the type, they want to make everything more expensive so only the rich can enjoy the benefits of modern life.
"F*ck the poor people who want to stay warm, or get to a job. They should die off anyway, the earth is overpopulated!"
Americans like cars not buses thanks to decades of marketing getting shoved down their throats. That's led to a chicken/egg situation where it's hard to get around without a car because everyone has them.
Have you ever actually ridden a bus? You sound like someone with little experience riding a bus daily.
I really think school districts ought to start performing audits of the expenses associated with receiving federal money. Some districts have found, for example, that if they opt out of the federal school lunch guidelines championed by the first lady, the programs are quickly back in the black. Less wasted food, more purchases, and no time spent verifying compliance for grant money. The federal funds were insufficient to cover the losses associated with the mandates that came with the money.
I suspect a lot of federal school mandates would end up the same way. Ditching federal money might allow for a number of compliance administrators to be cut from a school district, and give teachers more time to do their jobs.
The power to destroy a habitat is nothing next to the power of Money.
One must really wonder what is so special about this location, that they A) feel the need to risk damage to the habitats to film, and B) could not be reproduced in a green screen environment like they do everything else.
Excessive use of green screen likely helped Episodes 1-3 be so terrible- wooden acting being one of the many problems. An actor's performance can only be improved by actually being in the environment their character is supposed to be in.
I'm sure GM and Ford have better lawyers, and I imagine they have more resources to throw at the affair as well. I also imagine that GM and Ford will team up for their defense, and make AARC cry.
GM and Ford's lawyers signed off on the system before it was even developed, let alone installed in cars. The AARC is going to waste millions and go home with nothing.
Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
No U.S. carrier has been allowed to fly over certain parts of Ukraine since the end of April, due to an FAA order.
So, under your logic, government agents can just stroll right into corporate offices, and take whatever they want, because a corporation has no rights?
Every American should incorporate themselves. It's the only way to guarantee you have rights. If you are a closely held corporation, your religious rights cannot be infringed, your property cannot be confiscated, you can commit heinous crimes and only face a fine (no jail time for CEOs); and furthermore, NSA "spying" can be sued over as industrial espionage or as copyright violations under intellectual property rights laws.
Basically you have way more rights as a corporation. If you're an individual or "citizen", you're screwed.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're someone who hates the recent hobby lobby decision; nonetheless, the opinion delivered by Alito directly addresses this 'corporations are treated like people and it's wrong!!!' outrage perpetuated by the left.
"As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form of organization used by human beings to achieve desired ends. An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.
In holding that Conestoga, as a “secular, for-profit corporation,” lacks RFRA protection, the Third Circuit wrote as follows:
“General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors.” 724 F. 3d, at 385 (emphasis added).
All of this is true—but quite beside the point. Corporations, “separate and apart from” the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all."
Unfortunately, communism has earned a fatally bad reputation after being misused by so many dictators during the 20th century.
The murder part of communism is a necessary component to deal with people who don't want to play along. That's why it happens all the time.
If you don't want to play by the rules of a society that has anything resembling a market economy, the outcome is well known: Your standard of living slides down to the lowest your fellow citizens will tolerate seeing.
If you don't want to play by the rules of a society with a Marxist economy, well, abject poverty is always an option there, too. A rather common one. But if you want to work for yourself, and keep a significant portion of the fruits of your labor? Well, sorry, that's where the murder comes in. Against the fundamental rules of the society, you see.
If you disagree, kindly tell me what you do with people in your ideal communist society who want to put in above-average effort, and reap the extra rewards. Besides murdering them. The communist societies that exist within larger market economies can eject slackers, and the motivated can simply leave. The societies that are entirely communist need other options. Exiling the motivated will simply rapidly impoverish those that remain.
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really give a hoot about Sony getting hacked. What I do care about is Americans being threatened for lawful activity by agents of a foreign government. (That is, 9/11 style attacks for screening The Interview.) That threat made what was Sony's problem into a national issue that our government ought to deal with. Unfortunately I don't see much chance of the D.C. set showing any spine or defending any principles.
It's rather presumptive of you, and every other Democrat, to pretend to know people's interests better than they do. It's part of the unmistakable arrogance that comes from the left, and was perfectly displayed by Gruber. You and your fellow leftists are cut from the same cloth as every other human, but you whip each other up with flattery on how kind, intelligent and compassionate you are for simply being on the left. Whether ruin or prosperity follows your policy actions isn't terribly important. You had the best intentions, you see, and the books can always be cooked after the fact to hide any negative news that doesn't fit the narrative.
I realize this is a distracting thing to say, and I don't support torture, and it appears we've used it, and it's a crime that no one in power will unfortunately ever be held accountable to. My intent was more to say that I haven't RTFA or summary report; and I was responding only to the position of 'let's just ignore them because they're so terrible at killing us.'
There is no such thing as a terrorist. But it must be nice to see the world in black and white, saves you the trouble of having to actually think about or empathize with other humans. "
If not terrorists, how about Barbarians who must be kept at bay? The people who think we need to empathize with barbarians are often under the following mistaken impressions:
1) Westerners are the only real evil in the world today.
2) Westerners are the only people who act; who have agency. All other people do not have their own plans, thoughts and ideals- they merely react to what westerners do. They are automatons we can control through correct choices.
I prefer this memo: http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/05/-versch-auml-rfte-vernehmung/228158/
Part of being the "good guys" means NOT being the "bad guys".
More people die in traffic accidents EVERY YEAR than the "terrorists" have ever killed here. So why give up a morally superior position to "fight" people who pose almost no threat to anyone outside their own countries?
I prefer to discourage people from attacking my countrymen, and simultaneously limit their capabilities to do so. That often means killing the people who are trying to kill us, until they get the idea that trying to kill us is a bad idea. Their incompetence in killing us does not erase the trespass. People who get into accidents have their insurance rates go up. People who try to kill us get killed. Actions have consequences.
If your neighbor was trying to kill you, repeatedly, would you tolerate it? Would you find the milk in your cereal curdled one day from poison, push it away, then look out your window and say 'Ah, nice try Mohammed! Maybe next time!.' I mean, you might notice that next crude tripwire before you set off the IED in your hedges.
You wouldn't tolerate it. You'd have him thrown in jail at the first try. Back to the national scale, if the people trying to kill us are in countries that will have them thrown in jail, great. If not, well, now we're back to the concept of war between distinct states or peoples. The fact that one side is weak and incompetent does not mean they get to keep trying without reprisal.
What you seem to advocate- ignoring attacks by barbarians as just another risk in modern society- is in it's own special moral vacuum. I'm having a hard time fathoming how such a dereliction could seem morally superior to you, and I can only guess your education has been a steady diet of 'Western civilization is the worst thing that ever happened to the world.' That sort of 'critical theory' rubbish has been all the rage in higher education for decades.
(I'm not studied up enough on the topic at hand- 'enhanced interrogation'- to condemn it or defend it.)
Has anyone actually borne the public's wrath over Rotherham scandal? I'm not sure anyone has even resign over it. No, just more tepid 'investigations of failures in processes.'
The problem with Rotherham wasn't that it went 'Undetected for years.' It was detected and ignored, by people who didn't want to seem racist for arresting sexually deviant immigrants. Either that, or they were on the take.
No, Rotherham represents an abject failure of people in society to act in order to protect the young. There's no slouching away the travesty by implying that sort of mass, long ignored child abuse in common elsewhere in the world. England is a country where people know better than to tolerate this, and once had the moral fortitude to do something about it.
Keep pushing that canard. No activist has stopped the construction of a new power plant. The problem is financing. Banks don't want to lend the money because of the cost over-runs. That's why the nuclear industry has been pushing the government to guarantee those loans.
1. Shoreham.
2. When building a power plant will involve hundreds of millions of dollars in lawyers fees to keep your sort at bay, that tends to increase cost over-runs. Which your sort then uses as a further argument against nuclear power. (Yes, there are plenty of non-lawyer related cost overruns.)
The more massive generalisations you make the less people should listen to you. You are merely projecting your own ideas of what an environmentalist is to you, and the battering it to death with a bizarre take on logic.
Who is listening to environmentalists these days? There's still a mass of laws and regulations they use to gum up the works constantly, but folks are starting to realize most environmentalists don't care so much about the environment as much as they hate their fellow man and his enjoyment of modern life.
Of course, you folks have your own tinpot dictator in the White House, who is a law unto himself and will probably service his ideological base with economy-crushing diktats.
I had this argument before w.r.t. affirmative action. I asked if they didn't want to be judged on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, and was told - seriously - that quote is from Martin Luther King Jr., and he's "theirs," so I'm not allowed to use his quote in an argument. No,.. really.
The proper response is to laugh in their face.
As a matter of reasonable debate- and I'm not going to pretend that everything on the internet needs to be, or ever will be reasonable debate- using slurs when debating religion would be unhelpful and polarizing. There are, however, religions out there whose adherents are unable to weather any criticism gracefully- which means that said religions are fragile and should be subject to even greater scrutiny and criticism.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
Hayek wrote a book about this question- The use of knowledge in society. A quote:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
To put it another way, no communist politburo can centrally manage the knowledge necessary to make a modern economy work. There's simply too much to know. In a market economy, the participants know how to play their role, and how to get what they need to give their customers what they want. They need to know nothing more than that. Millions of such people quietly playing their own role delivers success. In a command economy, the politburo pretends to be able to manage all the knowledge and decision making required throughout the economy- and this is an impossible task.
What they want to do is choke out conservative money, because that's the primary way Republicans get heard when leftists control the culture.
Mayday PAC is transparent in this regard- they ran a video contest accepting amateur-made ads supporting their cause. A video attacking Tom Steyer, the left's Koch, won the popular vote by a large margin. They picked another video based on the 'judgement of their panel of experts.'
How can the Americans allow their government to turn so rogue, so fast ?
We voted an incompetent, populist demagogue to be President. Then a sycophantic press covered for his failures & malfeasance for his entire first term, and called anyone who dared criticize the president 'racist.'
The republic can survive Obama. He is just one man. The republic cannot long survive a citizenry that would vote for Obama. He set his sights out to fundamentally change the United States, and he's doing that- but it's change for the worse. Hopefully our fellow citizens can learn from the experience.
\Cue angry responses from an unrepentant Obama voters and 'flame-bait' downmods.
"F*ck the poor people who want to stay warm, or get to a job. They should die off anyway, the earth is overpopulated!"
He didn't appreciate being questioned about his yachts and mansions.
Americans like cars not buses thanks to decades of marketing getting shoved down their throats. That's led to a chicken/egg situation where it's hard to get around without a car because everyone has them.
Have you ever actually ridden a bus? You sound like someone with little experience riding a bus daily.
I suspect a lot of federal school mandates would end up the same way. Ditching federal money might allow for a number of compliance administrators to be cut from a school district, and give teachers more time to do their jobs.
The power to destroy a habitat is nothing next to the power of Money.
One must really wonder what is so special about this location, that they A) feel the need to risk damage to the habitats to film, and B) could not be reproduced in a green screen environment like they do everything else.
Excessive use of green screen likely helped Episodes 1-3 be so terrible- wooden acting being one of the many problems. An actor's performance can only be improved by actually being in the environment their character is supposed to be in.
I'm sure GM and Ford have better lawyers, and I imagine they have more resources to throw at the affair as well. I also imagine that GM and Ford will team up for their defense, and make AARC cry. GM and Ford's lawyers signed off on the system before it was even developed, let alone installed in cars. The AARC is going to waste millions and go home with nothing.
Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
No U.S. carrier has been allowed to fly over certain parts of Ukraine since the end of April, due to an FAA order.
So, under your logic, government agents can just stroll right into corporate offices, and take whatever they want, because a corporation has no rights?
Every American should incorporate themselves. It's the only way to guarantee you have rights. If you are a closely held corporation, your religious rights cannot be infringed, your property cannot be confiscated, you can commit heinous crimes and only face a fine (no jail time for CEOs); and furthermore, NSA "spying" can be sued over as industrial espionage or as copyright violations under intellectual property rights laws.
Basically you have way more rights as a corporation. If you're an individual or "citizen", you're screwed.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're someone who hates the recent hobby lobby decision; nonetheless, the opinion delivered by Alito directly addresses this 'corporations are treated like people and it's wrong!!!' outrage perpetuated by the left.
The murder part of communism is a necessary component to deal with people who don't want to play along. That's why it happens all the time. If you don't want to play by the rules of a society that has anything resembling a market economy, the outcome is well known: Your standard of living slides down to the lowest your fellow citizens will tolerate seeing.
If you don't want to play by the rules of a society with a Marxist economy, well, abject poverty is always an option there, too. A rather common one. But if you want to work for yourself, and keep a significant portion of the fruits of your labor? Well, sorry, that's where the murder comes in. Against the fundamental rules of the society, you see.
If you disagree, kindly tell me what you do with people in your ideal communist society who want to put in above-average effort, and reap the extra rewards. Besides murdering them. The communist societies that exist within larger market economies can eject slackers, and the motivated can simply leave. The societies that are entirely communist need other options. Exiling the motivated will simply rapidly impoverish those that remain.
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.
Limiting spending in elections inherently favors incumbents. Keep that in mind when you're talking about getting money out of politics.