As far as the digital divide sound bite, well every other post you're complaining that only the economically advantaged can access the internet. If the shoe fits...
You didn't catch my objection. I objected that the term "digital divide" is an ideological euphemism. So which is the taboo term it gets off the center stage? Class war.
First of all, we're called Americans. Unitedstatesians is not a word.
You insist irrationally on being called "americans". But an american is someone from the continent of america, which spans from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
Second, your comment is a complete load of bullshit. The United States *is* a free (as in speech, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) country.
Tell that to the FBI. They seem to have forgotten it.
Anyway, the wealth of the US, and the "freedoms" that accompany it, are founded on economic exploitation and the support of murderous thugs in the third world. A beautiful idea of "freedom" you have, that stands on this basis.
"Megacorps" do not tell me when to wake up, when to eat and what to eat, when to sleep and what pillow to buy, and how many times a day I should pray.
Do you have a job at all? What do you eat and drink, and when?
Specifically, what you refer to with that statement is the content of the service. Unless they implement some kind of subliminal messages, I'm skeptical how many lives will be "shaped" by niche radio stations.
This is a truly stupid statement. Do you really believe that what you see and hear does not have any effect on you? Do you really believe that the way you interact with the people and institutions of your society has no effect on you?
The last statement in your comment is a rant about anonymous, unaccountable corporations making decisions for people. The company is hardly anonymous, and is probably accountable to investors who will no doubt closely monitor subscription rates.
You just proved my point. The corporation is not accountable to the listeners. And the decision making is anonymous and unexamined by the general public.
A corporation is a totalitarian organization. It is a private dictatorship. If you reject totalitarianism, you must reject corporations.
The fact that they will ultimately decide what the content is really isn't all that different from the current radio model. Listeners can call in and request songs, but the DJs and station owners still make the final choices of what to broadcast.
You have assumed that the current radio model is ok. And even worse, like a totally stereotypical slashbot "geek" with no social and communal conscience whatsoever, you have assumed that radio == music. Pathetic.
Yes, the Establishment. The handful of media corporations that overwhelmingly produce the content most seen in the world.
No one is stoping them, after all the USA is a Free country. If they want to get their message out they can.
Pray tell me how one gets one's message out as much as, say, Rush Limbaugh, when the big players in the media systematically refuse to carry your message.
You seem to be under the delusional capitalist idea of "private property". The idea that the means of production can be legitimately "owned" by corporations in the same sense as people own their personal possessions.
Think about your toothbrush and a factory: are they the same sort of thing? Are the effects on society of putting each of them under absolute control of some individuals the same? Of course not. Putting your toothbrush under your absolute control has no ill effect on society; however, putting the means of production under the control of a few divides society into a minority of powerful owners and a minority of alienated workers.
Same argument works for satellites. Do you really want communication, the activity that makes us human, controlled by a small group of people whose interests are contrary to yours?
What do you precisely disagree with me on, that you call me a troll?
Warning. This is a troll pretending to be a socioeconomically disadvantaged Hispanic fighting for the rights of those on the wrong side of the digital divide.
I come from a family which was socioeconomically disadvantaged. I'm not disadvantaged now, however.
"Estanislao Martínez" is just another priveleged middle-class net user, just like most of us here. Probably white with an upper-middle class background and living comfortably in suburbia.
Haha. I don't live in suburbia. I'm not white. My family is low-class. Most of my income goes to pay for my mother's needs.
I think you are a racist, and an insult to the people of the world who really are in need. Why don't you join Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity instead of trolling Slashdot?
Peace Corps? One has to be a USian to join, right? Well, that very much explains why I'm not in the Peace Corps, right?
And I have some serious ideologica differences with Habitat for Humanity.
But of course, you fear my message so much that you just deny that there's even a me that's saying it. Not to mention that no part of my post says anything about such ideologically charged euphemisms such as "digital divide", or about mi gente.
Last I checked, its a free country and nobody is forcing you to pay for this service nor listen to the music. If it were to turn out too many commericals, people would stop buying the service.
Were it so simple. Last I checked, the US (which is not a free country, since every aspect of life is largely controlled by megacorps) has never forced anyone to watch the total crap the networks put on TV, eat the crap food the food establishments like McDonalds advertise there, drink the piss-poor beer that dominates 85% of the market, and so on. Still, that's what most unitedstatesians do.
Even if people are not forced to take this service, what's put on it is of essential importance, since a huge public will be watching. Millions of lives could end up being shaped by this. Do you really want anonymous, unaccountable corporations to decide for you what's worthwhile seeing and/or listening?
the lack of non country stations in others annoyed me to no end.
You mean they didn't even have AM talk radio with local programs?
Anyway, if you live there, isn't it the natural thing to become involved with the community, learn what they do, what worries them, and such? Local AM talk radio is usually a great way to learn this kind of thing.
Now we'll have thousands of hack Dr. Lauras, Gordon Liddies, Rush Limbaughs, Michael Reagans, Joy Browns and Art Bells instead of a few.
Precisely-- because the establishment won't tolerate thousands of Noam Chomskys, Norman Solomons, Ralph Naders and Edward Hermans, instead of a few.
Then again, look at all the idiots who actually pay for Cable because they feel it's such a necessity that they'll croak without it.
Eh, what about people who actually have TVs?
A friend left her TV at my place while she's away for a long while. What a load of crap. The only chain I enjoy watching is SCOLA, and of course, I can only understand maybe 5% of their programming. Perhaps this is why I can enjoy it.
Course who the fuck needs another centralized behemoth?
You put it very succintly and effectively. However, this is/.; when the typical user sees the word "radio", he thinks "music". Remember when the FCC's microradio ruling came to discussion here? All they could think about was about running a music station in your neighborhood (to broadcast nothing but corporate-produced bad anglo pop music, of course), and of course, they all discounted the idea on the grounds that Napster was cooler.
The idea that radio might be a medium for all sorts of activities that build up communal ties and enhance democracy is just beyond them. They have been brainwashed.
The way this will play out is predictable. Now that it's starting, the pushers tell propaganda about how it will have "hundreds of channels" to please everybody. Then, when it is actually in place, it will all be commercials, paid programming and infotainment.
Remember the "information superhighway" and the promise of "hundreds of channels"? When was the last time you heard of this in the media? In contrast, when was the last time you heard of "e-commerce"? Apply the pattern.
The fundamental flaw behind this, of course, is that this radio service is being run by a corporation, which gets to decide on what is it that you and I should listen to. This is doomed to repeat the failure of the Web. The only way to make this technology really deliver is to make it accountable to the public-- say, make half of the channels public access channels (for a not very radical proposal). Why should the corporations get that much of a voice, and the public be forced to be silent?
When the auto industry started making Cars that were lower mantiance and mass producing them there was a drop at some point the average "car intelligence" of people dropped.
Cars are different than CS. It's one thing if the average computer user needs to know less about the workings of the computer nowadays; it would be a completely different thing if car builders thought that physics were irrelevant to what they do.
This has't affected our society that illfully.
It has. It has put more and more power in the hands of the auto makers.
It is true that there other issues such as copyright, licensing, and availability of sourcecode that end users are mostly ignorant of. However it is possible to explain these issues to the public without teaching them C.
You have sorely missed the point. Where did I talk about C? (BTW, C is a pretty horrible language.)
I was talking about fundamental things. Theory of computation. Formal language theory. Complexity theory. New models of computation. Parallel computing. Functional programming. Logic programming. Lambda calculus and Combinatory logic. That kind of thing that should be flourishing if this is truly the computer era.
"nVidia" is pronounced just like the Spanish word "envidia", which means, of course, envy. Why would a company name itslef after one of the 7 capital sins?
You obviously did not read my post with the care it merited. Let's go at your reply point by point.
however, in mandrin, a commonly used idiom remarkably resembles the american-english personal-worth-as-money idiom.
Which would only be relevant as a counterargument if I had claimed that the US is materialistic because of the idiom. Go, back and read, point out where I said that.
i wouldn't hang out with my friends if they were boring/useless. do you have an ethical problem with this?
Yes. You should hang out with your friends because you care for them, even if they are ocassionally "boring" or "useless". Suppose your friend was unemployed, was passing really bad times, and is reallu depressed, thus no fun at all. Under your logic, one would abandon him.
unlike some people, i don't pretend to be unselfish. this has some interesting side effects - for example: i think that making the world a better place is one of the most selfish things anyone can do. this does not make it bad. go read some ayn rand.:p
I obviously know more about Ayn Rand than you do, as this exchange does. You need to break out of that "objectivist" religion. It only ends up emotionally deforming people.
as for me - nothing is worth more then me, to me, because my existance is a necessary precondition for the existance of all forms of value. i'll never put my life on the line for anyone, if it can be at all avoided.
You are a truly sickening person. Change your ways, or you'll die lonely after living a really meaningless life.
i happen to live in the united states, and i think that money is a very useful tool, and nothing more.
Yeah, you certainly don't seem to be the economically sophisticated type, do you?
so yea. shut the hell up:p and don't use a little idiom as an excuse to lambast the population of an entire country.
Your reading comprehension and reasoning skills must be really fucked up from all that Rand. Where did I attack the people of the US in general? I attacked the culture of the US. These are very different things.
To begin with, computers are being so thoroughly integrated into all disciplines in college and high school and elementary school that there's less need to take any computer courses at all in order to be able to understand them fairly well and use them proficiently.
Wrong. It is very tough to gain a deep understanding of computers without doing something very like a CS program. You can gain a relatively shallow understanding of the workings of a von Neumann architecture, but computing is so much more than this.
The problem with CS enrollments declining is that it is happening just at the time when computers are becoming commonplace in our society. In a computer technology explosion, the natural thing to happen would be that more people would go into CS, and more fundamental research get done (parallel architectures, functional programming, etc.). But the contrary is happening-- more and more people are leaving CS, and going into a speculative job market that is bound to crash any time soon, doing trivial work on e-commerce and such.
Scene: Teen girl is sitting, writing into her diary. "Dear Diary. Today I realized I'm worth more than my parents."
This is a truly sickening quote, and symptomatic of what is wrong with the US.
If you study several languages, you might realize something: it is US English that originated that vile expression "Person X is worth Y", where Y is some amount of money. In Spanish, French, or German, there is no such expression: you have to say "Person X has Y". You can say that a person is worth a lot, but that means that he/she is a great person, and has no monetary implications.
This is deeply symptomatic of how shallow and materialistic the US has become; people are valued exactly by how much they own. What they do with their lives, their talents, the experiences they have had, their insight into life, the world, their relations with others, these are all set aside.
The other truly sickening thing about this quote is that we have a child saying that she is worth more than her own parents. WTF? This is so self evidently sick, that I find it tough to come up with words to denounce it without sounding too obvious. I mean, if one has had caring parents that worked hard to give you a life as good as they could, how could one think oneself any more than they are?
The worship of money is the great vice of the US, which costs lives daily all over the world. Please see this fact; stop that madness, that meaningless way of life.
Okay. Find out for yourself then. Do the research, and post here what you find.
Research? Is this the euphemism for what the US has done in places like Central America and the Caribbean, where they give women untested pills that result in their giving birth to deformed babies? Or when the expose political prisoners to strong doses of radiation?
A stupid man will believe everything someone tells him. Another stupid man will not believe anything anyone tells him. An intelligent man will find out the truth.
Considering the pathetically minimal impact on environment, I'm surprised you're even concerned. Myself, personally, I'd be more upset about the rapid urbanization in many of the cities than what's being done out in the unpopulated desert.
And we are to believe you?
The technology mongers have always lied to have things their way. Have you never heard of the story of the Haitian Creole Pigs? This is an important story everyone should know, and meditate on its consequences:
The history of the eradication of the Haitian Creole pig population in the 1980's is a classic parable of globalization. Haiti's small, black, Creole pigs were at the heart of the peasant economy. An extremely hearty breed, well adapted to Haiti's climate and conditions, they ate readily available waste products, and could survive for three days without food. Eighty to 85% of rural households raised pigs; they played a key role in maintaining the fertility of the soil and constituted the primary savings bank of the peasant population. Traditionally a pig was sold to pay for emergencies and special occasions (funerals, marriages, baptisms, illnesses and, critically, to pay school fees and buy books for the children when school opened each year in October.)
In 1982 international agencies assured Haiti's peasants their pigs were sick and had to be killed (so that the illness would not spread to countries to the North). Promises were made that better pigs would replace the sick pigs. With an efficiency not since seen among development projects, all of the Creole pigs were killed over a period of thirteen months.
Two years later the new, better pigs came from Iowa. They were so much better that they required clean drinking water (unavailable to 80% of the Haitian population), imported feed (costing $90 a year when the per capita income was about $130), and special roofed pigpens. Haitian peasants quickly dubbed them "prince a quatre pieds," (four-footed princes). Adding insult to injury, the meat did not taste as good. Needless to say, the repopulation program was a complete failure. one observer of the process estimated that in monetary terms Haitian peasants lost $600 million dollars. There was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural schools, there was a dramatic decline in the protein consumption in rural Haiti, a devastating decapitalization of the peasant economy and an incalculable negative impact on Haiti's soil and agricultural productivity. The Haitian peasantry has not recovered to this day.
Most of rural Haiti is still isolated from global markets, so for many peasants the extermination of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalization. The experience looms large in the collective memory. Today, when the peasants are told that "economic reform" and privatization will benefit them they are understandably wary. The state-owned enterprises are sick, we are told, and they must be privatized. The peasants shake their heads and remember the Creole pigs.
Thus wrote Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Thus we have the lesson: when the "experts" come telling you that you need new pigs, or that the huge laser they will put in your ancestral homeland won't hurt, they are lying.
Except for the fact that none of the radiation seeps. It's a laser - it would be collimated. People would have no idea that it is anything other than a large satellite dish.
Eh, you know, there is this little thing called the atmosphere through which the beam has to travel. There's all sorts of minuscule dust and crap on it that reflects and dissipates light.
No one worries about radio radiation - there are plenty of people right beside a radio tower - hell, some are built in the middle of cities.
You must work for the radio tower business. This is the standard line they give when communities complain about having antenna towers in them.
Besides, NASA isn't stupid.
Aha.
They'd probably build it in New Mexico, where it's flatter anyway and easier to build a directional array. People wouldn't be an issue.
Yeah, those people wouldn't be an issue, since they're just Mexicans, eh?
The air in New Mexico is particularly dusty, BTW, which means that the beam would reflect a lot in the low atmosphere, in unpredictable angles...
Anyway, I must warn you all against trying to use the Aztlán homeland for these schemes. We are organized, and we will resist you.
80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez
Hey miserable yank oppressor, learn to spell. It's Martínez, with an accent over the "í". Would you like it if I spelled "Kiernan" as "Quirnan"? I bet you wouldn't, eh?
And I'm not in Chiapas. I'm in the northernmost Latin American nation: Québec.
Slashdot Mirror
Helen Keller was a fellow socialist. Surely the FBI had a file on her just because of that.
Unitedstatesian who assumes everybody lives in the US. Need I say more?
Believe me, it is logically impossible for me to leave the US.
You didn't catch my objection. I objected that the term "digital divide" is an ideological euphemism. So which is the taboo term it gets off the center stage? Class war.
You insist irrationally on being called "americans". But an american is someone from the continent of america, which spans from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
Second, your comment is a complete load of bullshit. The United States *is* a free (as in speech, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) country.
Tell that to the FBI. They seem to have forgotten it.
Anyway, the wealth of the US, and the "freedoms" that accompany it, are founded on economic exploitation and the support of murderous thugs in the third world. A beautiful idea of "freedom" you have, that stands on this basis.
"Megacorps" do not tell me when to wake up, when to eat and what to eat, when to sleep and what pillow to buy, and how many times a day I should pray.
Do you have a job at all? What do you eat and drink, and when?
Specifically, what you refer to with that statement is the content of the service. Unless they implement some kind of subliminal messages, I'm skeptical how many lives will be "shaped" by niche radio stations.
This is a truly stupid statement. Do you really believe that what you see and hear does not have any effect on you? Do you really believe that the way you interact with the people and institutions of your society has no effect on you?
The last statement in your comment is a rant about anonymous, unaccountable corporations making decisions for people. The company is hardly anonymous, and is probably accountable to investors who will no doubt closely monitor subscription rates.
You just proved my point. The corporation is not accountable to the listeners. And the decision making is anonymous and unexamined by the general public.
A corporation is a totalitarian organization. It is a private dictatorship. If you reject totalitarianism, you must reject corporations.
The fact that they will ultimately decide what the content is really isn't all that different from the current radio model. Listeners can call in and request songs, but the DJs and station owners still make the final choices of what to broadcast.
You have assumed that the current radio model is ok. And even worse, like a totally stereotypical slashbot "geek" with no social and communal conscience whatsoever, you have assumed that radio == music. Pathetic.
Yes, the Establishment. The handful of media corporations that overwhelmingly produce the content most seen in the world.
No one is stoping them, after all the USA is a Free country. If they want to get their message out they can.
Pray tell me how one gets one's message out as much as, say, Rush Limbaugh, when the big players in the media systematically refuse to carry your message.
You seem to be under the delusional capitalist idea of "private property". The idea that the means of production can be legitimately "owned" by corporations in the same sense as people own their personal possessions.
Think about your toothbrush and a factory: are they the same sort of thing? Are the effects on society of putting each of them under absolute control of some individuals the same? Of course not. Putting your toothbrush under your absolute control has no ill effect on society; however, putting the means of production under the control of a few divides society into a minority of powerful owners and a minority of alienated workers.
Same argument works for satellites. Do you really want communication, the activity that makes us human, controlled by a small group of people whose interests are contrary to yours?
Warning. This is a troll pretending to be a socioeconomically disadvantaged Hispanic fighting for the rights of those on the wrong side of the digital divide.
I come from a family which was socioeconomically disadvantaged. I'm not disadvantaged now, however.
"Estanislao Martínez" is just another priveleged middle-class net user, just like most of us here. Probably white with an upper-middle class background and living comfortably in suburbia.
Haha. I don't live in suburbia. I'm not white. My family is low-class. Most of my income goes to pay for my mother's needs.
I think you are a racist, and an insult to the people of the world who really are in need. Why don't you join Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity instead of trolling Slashdot?
Peace Corps? One has to be a USian to join, right? Well, that very much explains why I'm not in the Peace Corps, right?
And I have some serious ideologica differences with Habitat for Humanity.
But of course, you fear my message so much that you just deny that there's even a me that's saying it. Not to mention that no part of my post says anything about such ideologically charged euphemisms such as "digital divide", or about mi gente.
Were it so simple. Last I checked, the US (which is not a free country, since every aspect of life is largely controlled by megacorps) has never forced anyone to watch the total crap the networks put on TV, eat the crap food the food establishments like McDonalds advertise there, drink the piss-poor beer that dominates 85% of the market, and so on. Still, that's what most unitedstatesians do.
Even if people are not forced to take this service, what's put on it is of essential importance, since a huge public will be watching. Millions of lives could end up being shaped by this. Do you really want anonymous, unaccountable corporations to decide for you what's worthwhile seeing and/or listening?
Once more. Another "1337 geek" that thinks radio == music. Come off it.
Public Access has largely failed anywhere it's been implemented.
You must mean "I don't like Public Access media, since I'm too 1337."
Public Access has to be promoted and encouraged more.
You mean they didn't even have AM talk radio with local programs?
Anyway, if you live there, isn't it the natural thing to become involved with the community, learn what they do, what worries them, and such? Local AM talk radio is usually a great way to learn this kind of thing.
Precisely-- because the establishment won't tolerate thousands of Noam Chomskys, Norman Solomons, Ralph Naders and Edward Hermans, instead of a few.
Then again, look at all the idiots who actually pay for Cable because they feel it's such a necessity that they'll croak without it.
Eh, what about people who actually have TVs?
A friend left her TV at my place while she's away for a long while. What a load of crap. The only chain I enjoy watching is SCOLA, and of course, I can only understand maybe 5% of their programming. Perhaps this is why I can enjoy it.
You put it very succintly and effectively. However, this is /.; when the typical user sees the word "radio", he thinks "music". Remember when the FCC's microradio ruling came to discussion here? All they could think about was about running a music station in your neighborhood (to broadcast nothing but corporate-produced bad anglo pop music, of course), and of course, they all discounted the idea on the grounds that Napster was cooler.
The idea that radio might be a medium for all sorts of activities that build up communal ties and enhance democracy is just beyond them. They have been brainwashed.
Remember the "information superhighway" and the promise of "hundreds of channels"? When was the last time you heard of this in the media? In contrast, when was the last time you heard of "e-commerce"? Apply the pattern.
The fundamental flaw behind this, of course, is that this radio service is being run by a corporation, which gets to decide on what is it that you and I should listen to. This is doomed to repeat the failure of the Web. The only way to make this technology really deliver is to make it accountable to the public-- say, make half of the channels public access channels (for a not very radical proposal). Why should the corporations get that much of a voice, and the public be forced to be silent?
Cars are different than CS. It's one thing if the average computer user needs to know less about the workings of the computer nowadays; it would be a completely different thing if car builders thought that physics were irrelevant to what they do.
This has't affected our society that illfully.
It has. It has put more and more power in the hands of the auto makers.
It is true that there other issues such as copyright, licensing, and availability of sourcecode that end users are mostly ignorant of. However it is possible to explain these issues to the public without teaching them C.
You have sorely missed the point. Where did I talk about C? (BTW, C is a pretty horrible language.)
I was talking about fundamental things. Theory of computation. Formal language theory. Complexity theory. New models of computation. Parallel computing. Functional programming. Logic programming. Lambda calculus and Combinatory logic. That kind of thing that should be flourishing if this is truly the computer era.
I smell a dead rat here.
Well, both his parents were jewish, certainly...
Still, there is quite a number of jewish linguists... don't know if many read /., though.
Just wondering, how do you know? My dictionaries fail to mention that.
Argh, saw it somewhere. Can't remember.
The: I don't think there are other grammar jews out there.
Eh... what about Noam Chomsky? ;)
however, in mandrin, a commonly used idiom remarkably resembles the american-english personal-worth-as-money idiom.
Which would only be relevant as a counterargument if I had claimed that the US is materialistic because of the idiom. Go, back and read, point out where I said that.
i wouldn't hang out with my friends if they were boring/useless. do you have an ethical problem with this?
Yes. You should hang out with your friends because you care for them, even if they are ocassionally "boring" or "useless". Suppose your friend was unemployed, was passing really bad times, and is reallu depressed, thus no fun at all. Under your logic, one would abandon him.
unlike some people, i don't pretend to be unselfish. this has some interesting side effects - for example: i think that making the world a better place is one of the most selfish things anyone can do. this does not make it bad. go read some ayn rand. :p
I obviously know more about Ayn Rand than you do, as this exchange does. You need to break out of that "objectivist" religion. It only ends up emotionally deforming people.
as for me - nothing is worth more then me, to me, because my existance is a necessary precondition for the existance of all forms of value. i'll never put my life on the line for anyone, if it can be at all avoided.
You are a truly sickening person. Change your ways, or you'll die lonely after living a really meaningless life.
i happen to live in the united states, and i think that money is a very useful tool, and nothing more.
Yeah, you certainly don't seem to be the economically sophisticated type, do you?
so yea. shut the hell up :p and don't use a little idiom as an excuse to lambast the population of an entire country.
Your reading comprehension and reasoning skills must be really fucked up from all that Rand. Where did I attack the people of the US in general? I attacked the culture of the US. These are very different things.
Well, why do you think I wrote: it is US English that originated that vile expression ... ?
What's up with the nick? Certainly unusual.
Wrong. It is very tough to gain a deep understanding of computers without doing something very like a CS program. You can gain a relatively shallow understanding of the workings of a von Neumann architecture, but computing is so much more than this.
The problem with CS enrollments declining is that it is happening just at the time when computers are becoming commonplace in our society. In a computer technology explosion, the natural thing to happen would be that more people would go into CS, and more fundamental research get done (parallel architectures, functional programming, etc.). But the contrary is happening-- more and more people are leaving CS, and going into a speculative job market that is bound to crash any time soon, doing trivial work on e-commerce and such.
This is a truly sickening quote, and symptomatic of what is wrong with the US.
If you study several languages, you might realize something: it is US English that originated that vile expression "Person X is worth Y", where Y is some amount of money. In Spanish, French, or German, there is no such expression: you have to say "Person X has Y". You can say that a person is worth a lot, but that means that he/she is a great person, and has no monetary implications.
This is deeply symptomatic of how shallow and materialistic the US has become; people are valued exactly by how much they own. What they do with their lives, their talents, the experiences they have had, their insight into life, the world, their relations with others, these are all set aside.
The other truly sickening thing about this quote is that we have a child saying that she is worth more than her own parents. WTF? This is so self evidently sick, that I find it tough to come up with words to denounce it without sounding too obvious. I mean, if one has had caring parents that worked hard to give you a life as good as they could, how could one think oneself any more than they are?
The worship of money is the great vice of the US, which costs lives daily all over the world. Please see this fact; stop that madness, that meaningless way of life.
Okay. Find out for yourself then. Do the research, and post here what you find.
Research? Is this the euphemism for what the US has done in places like Central America and the Caribbean, where they give women untested pills that result in their giving birth to deformed babies? Or when the expose political prisoners to strong doses of radiation?
A stupid man will believe everything someone tells him. Another stupid man will not believe anything anyone tells him. An intelligent man will find out the truth.
Precisely. Which involves knowing history, and knowing the nature of technology, and, more importantly, the nature of the technologies constructed by capitalism. This is the essential truth you have failed to grasp.
And we are to believe you?
The technology mongers have always lied to have things their way. Have you never heard of the story of the Haitian Creole Pigs? This is an important story everyone should know, and meditate on its consequences:
Thus wrote Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Thus we have the lesson: when the "experts" come telling you that you need new pigs, or that the huge laser they will put in your ancestral homeland won't hurt, they are lying.
Eh, you know, there is this little thing called the atmosphere through which the beam has to travel. There's all sorts of minuscule dust and crap on it that reflects and dissipates light.
No one worries about radio radiation - there are plenty of people right beside a radio tower - hell, some are built in the middle of cities.
You must work for the radio tower business. This is the standard line they give when communities complain about having antenna towers in them.
Besides, NASA isn't stupid.
Aha.
They'd probably build it in New Mexico, where it's flatter anyway and easier to build a directional array. People wouldn't be an issue.
Yeah, those people wouldn't be an issue, since they're just Mexicans, eh?
The air in New Mexico is particularly dusty, BTW, which means that the beam would reflect a lot in the low atmosphere, in unpredictable angles...
Anyway, I must warn you all against trying to use the Aztlán homeland for these schemes. We are organized, and we will resist you.
Hey miserable yank oppressor, learn to spell. It's Martínez, with an accent over the "í". Would you like it if I spelled "Kiernan" as "Quirnan"? I bet you wouldn't, eh?
And I'm not in Chiapas. I'm in the northernmost Latin American nation: Québec.
Liberté pour le Québec, asteur!