The reason the A-10 is not being replaced by the Air Force is that it's a death trap in any situation where the other side still has air defense because a) it has no stealth, and b) it's armor does a shitty job of protecting it from missiles.
So if they assume that there's air defense of some sort, the A-10 dies in roughly half a second and the F-35 wins even if it misses the target completely. If they assume the air defense system has been wiped out (in which case they're assuming the F-35 did the job it's actually intended to do) the A-10 wins hands down.
Honestly I don't know why they're doing this test at all. the Close Air Support role is being given to drones, not F-35s; so I suspect somebody wants to rig the test (by choosing whether to have air defense) and use the results to justify his pet budget concerns.
No, they're trying not to replace the A-10 with a human-piloted aircraft because the A-10 is a complete and total death trap in any environment where the enemy has missiles to shoot at it.
To the extent the A-10 is replaced, it will be replaced by drones, because nobody gives a shit if the Taliban knock out a drone or 6, but if they knock out six A-10s...
That really depends: Does the enemy still have an air defense system of any sort?
If the answer is yes the A-10 is completely and totally useless, because they're death traps if they might encounter a missile of any kind.
If the answer is no then of course the purpose-designed aircraft is better.
I honestly have no fucking clue why they're doing this test. F-35 is not supposed to be the plane that flies into the teeth of the enemy's bnti-aircraft guns 50 ft from the infantry. That's supposed to be done by drones.
If the Swedish Justice System was so bad why did he go to Sweden instead of some other country?
Answer: Because he has no clue how the Swedish system operates. He has no clue what the Swedish rules are. he simply assumed that since Sweden isn't in NATO, and is generally quite friendly to dissidents, that it was the magical utopia of free information and rape rules as pro-sexual assaulter as Australia.
Now that he's discovered that none of this is the case he's blaming the Swedes, including two women he chose to have sex with, and imagining a global conspiracy to silence him when in fact his entire problem was he tried to have unprotected sex with two women who were quite clear he needed to use a condom, which is apparently an extremely big deal in Sweden. Particularly if one of your sex partners is asleep when you start fucking her.
Which is what my original post said before the Assange-niks started down-voting it en masse.
The "questioning" they're trying to do isn't an interview. It's the last time the suspect has to defend himself prior to arrest.
Those other suspects were questioned in a place full of cops who were ready to arrest them if the Swedish Prosecutor said to do so. Ecuador's government has announced they will not let Assange be arrested. That is what Diplomatic Asylum means. Therefore the Questioning can't happen until he's left the embassy.
Two points: 1) This is an American site. Most readers don't actually believe the world existed before July 4th, 1776. Which means we really do not give two shits whether the Malays got there in 1500 or 630. Either way it's before time began, so they get to call it their country.
2) By making this argument you are helping UNMO. That is why I called you an UNMO Propagandist. As an American the only place I hear people make complex arguments about whether such-and-such a place was inhabited by such-and-such an ethnic group is when European nationalists start arguing about whom should be ethnically cleansed from where.
UNMO set up a ridiculous historical argument that makes them look bad in America (because they're divvying up government benefits by talking about shit that happened before time began), and then you followed then right down the rabbit hole with a sheaf of maps and a timeline. I'm probably not going to remember that they're crazy-ass racists who sincerely believe that shit that happened before 1776 actually matters, but I am going to remember a guy who opposes them and seems to be a Malaysian minority of some sort, is even crazier.
You did not have to follow them down the rabbit-hole. You could have pointed out that Chinese Malaysians are (on average) at least third or fourth generation and have no clue whether the cousins in China survived the Cultural Revolution.
3) Malays aren't neanderthals, of course they aren't the original population.
Assange's problem is he had no fucking clue how Sweden worked.
Their entire system of government is designed to set up a relatively reasonable set of rules. These rules are rigorously enforced, generally by some body that includes multiple people who all come from different interest groups/parties/institutions/etc. so that no one individual can get around the rules. Since the punishment for breaking the rules tends to be quite light (rape tops at 10 years, for example, so Assange will like spend more time in the Ecuadorian Embassy avoiding Prosecution then he would have in Swedish prison), it's unheard of for them to grant an exception.
Since Assange is accused by two living, breathing Swedish citizens they have to investigate. Since his statements to the police were a de facto confession to some of the charges, they have to try him this is the rule. They cannot say whether they'll agree to the extradition request, because they have not seen it and the rule is you don't pre-agree or pre-disagree with extradition requests. All they can do is guarantee that they won't let the US Execute him, because the rule is they don't give up people who might face the death penalty.
And yet friend Julian insists that he be treated super-special, that the Swedish government violate the rule and pre-judge an Extradition Request it may never receive; and in Sweden your justification for requesting special treatment has to be a wee bit more concrete then "A guy who committed a different crime then I;d be accused, in a Justice System that's completely separate from the one I'd be tried in got a really really long sentence and that sucks."
A retail establishment, that depends on maintaining good relationships with the Bobbies so that beat cops show up promptly when they suspect/catch someone stealing is letting said Bobbies use their building.
Julian, you may be right about some of the things you allege. Your problem is that you're too damn selfish to realize the rest of the world isn't going to stop just because you're in trouble. The Australian people are not gonna waste a Senate seat on your ass, Herod's isn't going to make some great to-do about fighting for your freedom and piss off the local constabulary, the Swedes aren't gonna completely ignore their laws (and the fact that two of their citizens are accusing you of rape) just to make you feel better about your odds of being deported, etc.
He's probably referring to the trouble they had getting cable operators to agree to carry them. That was a problem when they launched,. but at the moment they seem to be available in half the country.
I suspect he was trying to start a flame-war, and he picked on black guys because a) it's traditional for Americans to pick on black guys, and b) the Malaysian government is known for affirmative action programs, which are associated with black guys.
You sure about the "not thousands of years" thing?
Because their northernmost Sultanate, which would be the last one conquered by immigrants from the Archipelago, claims a history back to 630. Granted this starts with conquests by a Sumatran, but as an American I have to say 13 or 14 centuries is a pretty damn long time to occupy a piece of land. In many countries in Europe the dominant ethnic group of 650 AD or so is not the dominant ethnic group today, and nobody claims the Romanians have no right to their land, or that the English should turn the Western half of the island over to Wales. Over the landmass of most of Malaysia the Orang Asli are "Proto-Malays," who have been on the peninsula; since 1500 BC at the latest. There's some debate as to whether the Duetero-Malays represent a new wave of colonization much later, during the Iron Age, or merely the Malays who chose civilized city life over Jungle-based nomadism.
So it seems to me pretty clear that the southern bit of the peninsula, AKA the one that is currently Malaysia, has been ethnic Malay for thousands of years. The Chinese and Indian minorities have only been significant since the British Empire brought them in.
Frankly the fact you're debating this point is a pretty good indication you're either an UNMO propagandist or an idiot. Why? This is an American site. The entire country has been around for less then 250 years. If the Malays were the largest ethnic group on the peninsula in 1450 (when precisely 2% of us were on this side of the ocean) we're not gonna care whether the guy who said "thousands" was off by 600 years. To contradict him on that point is both technically correct, and completely and totally unconvincing to an American. Particularly since, in our experience, anyone who spends this much time figuring out precisely which ethnic group is native to a particular bit of land is gonna start talking about getting rid of those damn new guys.
You could get somewhere arguing that the affirmative actions programs run by UNMO violate your individual rights, and are racist or unfair; that their Islamic Courts are insane and violate everyone else's religious freedom; or that their corruption is ridiculous. But ignore it when somebody says the Malays are indigenous to Malaysia.
The Proto-Malays actually started out as Orang Asli of the southern half of the country. The current Malays may be descended from the Duetero-Malays who appeared in the Iron Age. Even the northernmost (and thus furthest from Sumatra) Sultanates have histories dating back to the 630s.
OTOH, the Chinese and Indian minorities on the peninsula are largely, but not entirely, a product of British Imperialism in the 19th century.
You can accuse Malaysia of doing numerous bad things to minorities, but keeping them restricted to their own little Chinese-only ghettoes and persecuting anyone found out late at night is not one of them.
It is impossible for an activist to effectively fight a problem if he can't even articulate what the problem is in a sensible fashion.
Partly because it's not Apartheid. The only state that is anything nearly as bananas legally as Apartheid* is Israel, and the Israelis actually allow quite a bit of inter-communal contact if you were lucky enough to be on their side of the border after the war of '48. The tricky bits come in the Occupied territories, where the Israelis make an argument that works fine for a few years. If you're militarily occupying another country you do get to run things, and they don't get to vote, but OTOH if it's lasting 50 years and you still can't/won't create a puppet government to govern things like zoning and water rights it's kinda hard to believe that you're actually doing this shit because you have to.
In Malaysia it really isn't apartheid in any meaningful sense of the term, because they don't stop all Chinese or Indians from doing much of anything. A Chinese kid can get into any university save one. He can (in theory) get almost any job. He is just much less likely to pull that shit off then a similarly qualified Malay, because Malaysian Affirmative Action works exactly like Conservatives think American Affirmative Action works. The other major issue for religious minorities is that the islamic Courts can be remarkably dickish. One renowned ethnic Indian athlete was declared Muslim on his death, so his family could not have the Hindi funeral they wanted, apparently largely because one guy said he was a secret convert to Islam. In another case the Malay word for God ("Allah") was banned from Catholic publications, because it's also the Arabic for God and thus used in the Koran, despite the fact that the Catholic God and the Arabic God are the same guy (Jehovah or Yahweh).
None of which is particularly good, but considering the country to their North is engaging in routine coups d'tat to prevent the repeatedly-Democratically-elected Shinawatras, the entire region is working itself into circles to avoid providing homes to the Rohingya, the people who are implementing the Rohingya genocide in Rakhine state are also very iffy on democracy at home, etc. it's very hard for me to believe that it is true that we should make this particular problem the center-piece of our human rights policy for the region.
*The legal justification for Apartheid was technically non-racial, or as close to non-racial as you can get while setting up a real-life race-based caste system. The claim was that all black citizens of South Africa were actually citizens of their original tribe, that the Apartheid government had righted a great historical wrong by recognizing them as sovereign states, and that as citizens of their tribal Bantustan blacks were immigrants to the white bits (read: the bits people actually wanted) of the country and should be treated as such. Of course the "foreigner" had in most cases lived in the big city for multiple generations, probably couldn't even speak the tribal language (heck, even if you spoke Xhosa language fluently, and went to family reunions in Ciskei, the authorities were likely to make you a citizen of Bophutswana or something for obscure bureaucratic reasons).
They do and they don't. They have somethings called their "Basic Law" that fulfill the role of the Constitution. These are Constitutional in the sense that they can only be changed explicitly (ie: if Bibi wanted to start seizing property without compensation he'd have to amend the Basic Law banning that), but can be changed by simple majority vote in the Knesset. This system is pretty much identical to the one used by the Brits.
The anonymous coward post below actually has pretty good info in it.
Then you're a moral relativist intent on seeing the transgressions of one side while ignoring those of the other. In sum a hypocrite. Spare us your moral judgements, you have no basis for forming any.
Question: If I denounce the Nazis, how much space do I have to devote to denouncing Stalin before you decide I'm a "moral relativist intent on seeing the transgressions of one side while ignoring the other?"
If you were truly looking to denounce racism you could not denounce Israel without also denouncing the far more virulent racism endemic in Islamic countries. Nah, you just think that your racism is justified.
Dude, when you're denouncing one injustice that does not put the onus on you to denounce every injustice.
Moreover you're insane if you think Islamic states are more racist then anyone else. India, for example, has institutionalized Affirmative Action that most American minority-rights groups would look at funny. The Chinese are racist enough that the Dalia Lama's people have been forced into low-grade rebellion and the poor East Turkestanis are in trouble (not that Israel's friends care: they're Muslim). Even in the US our law enforcement community makes a point of almost always coming down really hard on black teenage shenanigans (including shooting kids in the head for taking the orange rubber thing off the tip of their toy guns) while excusing many white teenage shenanigans as horseplay.
Even Mitt Romney had to pay 14%. Granted that gave him more in after-tax income then both of combined will earn over our life-times, but it also meant that his tax bill (of $2 Million) was more then I will earn over my lifetime. I suspect Obama will be in the $5-10 Million range once he no longer has to worry about a) political appearances, and b) Federal conflict-of-interest rules. He'll also be paying a tax rate of more like 35% because (unlike Mitt) his income isn't in stock he is selling off from years in finance (which is taxed at the long-term capital gains tax rate), it'll be actual income, and his income tax bracket will be the 39.6% bracket.
In terms of a Carbon Tax, that would be nigh-impossible to dodge. Each gallon of gasoline burned emits so many pounds of carbon, that means the gas tax is now higher and includes a carbon tax. Romney and Obama could dodge it by buying a Tesla, but getting their fleets of vehicles to emit less was kind of the point. Each kilowat-hour of electricity from Power Plant A emits so much carbon, the utility pays it and passes the cost on to you. The only way for them to bypass it would be for him to retrofit his home for energy efficiency, and/or power generation (solar is popular now, but Geothermal also works) which a) employs relatively poor (at least compared to either Mitt or Barack) class construction workers, and b) is precisely what the Carbon tax is supposed to do.
Rich people pay the carbon tax, too. Probably more then poor people (it takes a lot to heat a McMansion and fuel the SUV/sensible car/fun car combo) in absolute terms, if not relative terms.
The Carbon tax is intended to do a lot more then prevent floods. It also deals with droughts and forest fires. And guess who hunts a lot, and will be in trouble if there's a drought?
I didn't mean to imply it was, certainly not about the people. If we cared about the people the whole Katrina mess would not have been allowed to get so bad. The levee would have been fixed, the Marines flown in with a bevy of small watercraft to rescue people so the National guard could truck them to hastily set-up refugee centers on Day 2, etc.
What we care about is their property right to have a house on precisely the exact plot of land they have the deed to. We will not violate that property right by turning the entire damn neighborhood into a national park, no matter what.
Always remember, before Thomas Jefferson got to it the battle cry was "Liberty and Property."
1. I never said you were. I said white guys like them really don't get why anyone with a modicum of manners doesn't make up a word, apply to everyone who disagrees with them, and then act offended when they act offended.
Note that what they're doing is the same thing as you imply I'm doing with race: you're saying that whenever I hear something I disagree with I call it racist no matter what the actual argument is. What they're doing is whenever I say something they disagree with, they say "that's social justice bullshit."
Thank you for proving my point.
2. Who cares whether you "let me" do it. The fact is their slate got rejected by their own voters due to a combination of their over-aggressive tactics and Vox Day. That is what actually happened. Several were quoted at the awards ceremony saying they agreed with many Sad Puppy arguments but voted No Award anyway. The Sad Puppy point lost partly because it was being argued by a guy everyone hates. This is not uncommon. It is the reason nobody has asked Dubya's endorsement for anything since he left the White House.
3. The only social justice movements in the 60s were against sexism and racism. In fact they actually called themselves that back then. If you don't want me to believe you don't oppose the Civil Right movement don't a) say you want shit to be like it was back then, and b) deride your opponents as being Social Justice anything.
Hell if you want to actually have an exchange of ideas at any level don't use that term. You made it up as a slur, which means my response to hearing you say it is not gonna be "he's probably a nice guy, I have a moral duty to give him the benefit of the doubt." It's gonna be "fuck that guy." Particularly if that guy is in any way associated with Vox Day.
4. And what possible rule change can eliminate brigading at voting? It's trivial to do it in nominations. You could restrict everyone to three nominations and still have five nominees. You could eliminate the fan-nomination process completely and have a committee of winners determine the nominee list, or have the guy who runs the con write the nominee list. Any one of those rules makes the Sad Puppy system technique virtually impossible. But you can't have a rule that says "you can't vote for that guy for short story AND that other guy for novel because we found a website advocating both of them" without banning all fan voting or adding a whole bunch of by-laws to prevent the Sad Puppies from producing a bunch of fake internet slates combining all possible combinations of ballot that they dislike.
Which puts this in a completely different tradition: that of trolls dominating something for a short time period, getting themselves banned, and then declaring victory anyway because "we made our point, and we didn't want to not be banned anyway."
Because New Orleans and Miami are already mighty close to being drowned at high tide, and doing the logical and cheap thing (moving them to Detroit, which has perfectly fine water resources, is 500-600 feet above sea level, has plenty of space to build new housing, and no hurricane issues) is a political non-starter.
Moreover these estimates aren't really shrinking, so it's entirely possible that in 2115 mSparks43 III will read that comment and say "Geez, grandad sure was wrong about what would happen to Lady Liberty."
[joke] That bits on your side of the border. It's your problem. [/joke]
That was hyperbole. Niagara Falls does exist, but in terms of the bit of the lakes that the US uses, almost none of it is anywhere near the Falls. It's very easy for most American cities to use up their water supply because the place water goes is not a place you can easily get freshwater from. Phoenix's mostly goes to the sky as evaporation, and will come down somewhere that is not Arizona, LA and NYC send theirs to the ocean. Cities on rivers tend to send it downriver. But Chicago actually gets it's water from the same place it discharges it's wastewater. Detroit (which is downlake two Great Lakes, Lake St. Clair, and a couple rivers from Chicago) both gets it's water from the lake system and gives it back to the Lake system. You don't get to a point where the US Side of the border actually loses a gallon of water somebody uses until you hit Buffalo.
That means it takes a lot more water-use before we use up the lake.
But the question wasn't "Are they gonna be in some trouble?" Everybody's in some trouble (except Alaska and, mayhaps, the Great Lakes). It's "Are they in more trouble then everyone else?"
And the cities of the Pacific Northwest are probably fine, because that constant mist of rain off the ocean probably won't change, so in theory they don't *have* to ration water (they almost certainly will anyway because Portland). The interior is less fine, but it's not really more un-fine then Idaho, the Imperial Valley, or any of another half-dozen places.
1) Unlike many watersheds, particularly towards the coast, it's a closed system except for evaporation. Chicago water comes from, and goes to, the same lake. This water is then available for Chicago again, or (more likely) can be pumped into Michigan for irrigation, Milwaukee's water system, etc. And then it proceeds through Huron, Erie, and Ontario; and is usable by Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, etc. etc.
2) The lakes contain a fifth of the world's fresh water. The watershed population them contain much less then a fifth of the human race (by my count it's 1% or so, it's hard to do more precisely because the political borders do not match up to the hydrological borders).
Which means we'd have to be using as truly ridiculous amount of water before the fact it was in the fields irrigating Cherries (and not in the lake) started affecting the lake-level in any measurable way; and we'd have to keep doing it for literally decades before we got to Cali-levels of fucked by global warming.
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They don't need to do anything to the A-10.
The reason the A-10 is not being replaced by the Air Force is that it's a death trap in any situation where the other side still has air defense because a) it has no stealth, and b) it's armor does a shitty job of protecting it from missiles.
So if they assume that there's air defense of some sort, the A-10 dies in roughly half a second and the F-35 wins even if it misses the target completely. If they assume the air defense system has been wiped out (in which case they're assuming the F-35 did the job it's actually intended to do) the A-10 wins hands down.
Honestly I don't know why they're doing this test at all. the Close Air Support role is being given to drones, not F-35s; so I suspect somebody wants to rig the test (by choosing whether to have air defense) and use the results to justify his pet budget concerns.
No, they're trying not to replace the A-10 with a human-piloted aircraft because the A-10 is a complete and total death trap in any environment where the enemy has missiles to shoot at it.
To the extent the A-10 is replaced, it will be replaced by drones, because nobody gives a shit if the Taliban knock out a drone or 6, but if they knock out six A-10s...
That really depends:
Does the enemy still have an air defense system of any sort?
If the answer is yes the A-10 is completely and totally useless, because they're death traps if they might encounter a missile of any kind.
If the answer is no then of course the purpose-designed aircraft is better.
I honestly have no fucking clue why they're doing this test. F-35 is not supposed to be the plane that flies into the teeth of the enemy's bnti-aircraft guns 50 ft from the infantry. That's supposed to be done by drones.
If the Swedish Justice System was so bad why did he go to Sweden instead of some other country?
Answer: Because he has no clue how the Swedish system operates. He has no clue what the Swedish rules are. he simply assumed that since Sweden isn't in NATO, and is generally quite friendly to dissidents, that it was the magical utopia of free information and rape rules as pro-sexual assaulter as Australia.
Now that he's discovered that none of this is the case he's blaming the Swedes, including two women he chose to have sex with, and imagining a global conspiracy to silence him when in fact his entire problem was he tried to have unprotected sex with two women who were quite clear he needed to use a condom, which is apparently an extremely big deal in Sweden. Particularly if one of your sex partners is asleep when you start fucking her.
Which is what my original post said before the Assange-niks started down-voting it en masse.
The "questioning" they're trying to do isn't an interview. It's the last time the suspect has to defend himself prior to arrest.
Those other suspects were questioned in a place full of cops who were ready to arrest them if the Swedish Prosecutor said to do so. Ecuador's government has announced they will not let Assange be arrested. That is what Diplomatic Asylum means. Therefore the Questioning can't happen until he's left the embassy.
Two points:
1) This is an American site. Most readers don't actually believe the world existed before July 4th, 1776. Which means we really do not give two shits whether the Malays got there in 1500 or 630. Either way it's before time began, so they get to call it their country.
2) By making this argument you are helping UNMO. That is why I called you an UNMO Propagandist. As an American the only place I hear people make complex arguments about whether such-and-such a place was inhabited by such-and-such an ethnic group is when European nationalists start arguing about whom should be ethnically cleansed from where.
UNMO set up a ridiculous historical argument that makes them look bad in America (because they're divvying up government benefits by talking about shit that happened before time began), and then you followed then right down the rabbit hole with a sheaf of maps and a timeline. I'm probably not going to remember that they're crazy-ass racists who sincerely believe that shit that happened before 1776 actually matters, but I am going to remember a guy who opposes them and seems to be a Malaysian minority of some sort, is even crazier.
You did not have to follow them down the rabbit-hole. You could have pointed out that Chinese Malaysians are (on average) at least third or fourth generation and have no clue whether the cousins in China survived the Cultural Revolution.
3) Malays aren't neanderthals, of course they aren't the original population.
Assange's problem is he had no fucking clue how Sweden worked.
Their entire system of government is designed to set up a relatively reasonable set of rules. These rules are rigorously enforced, generally by some body that includes multiple people who all come from different interest groups/parties/institutions/etc. so that no one individual can get around the rules. Since the punishment for breaking the rules tends to be quite light (rape tops at 10 years, for example, so Assange will like spend more time in the Ecuadorian Embassy avoiding Prosecution then he would have in Swedish prison), it's unheard of for them to grant an exception.
Since Assange is accused by two living, breathing Swedish citizens they have to investigate. Since his statements to the police were a de facto confession to some of the charges, they have to try him this is the rule. They cannot say whether they'll agree to the extradition request, because they have not seen it and the rule is you don't pre-agree or pre-disagree with extradition requests. All they can do is guarantee that they won't let the US Execute him, because the rule is they don't give up people who might face the death penalty.
And yet friend Julian insists that he be treated super-special, that the Swedish government violate the rule and pre-judge an Extradition Request it may never receive; and in Sweden your justification for requesting special treatment has to be a wee bit more concrete then "A guy who committed a different crime then I;d be accused, in a Justice System that's completely separate from the one I'd be tried in got a really really long sentence and that sucks."
A retail establishment, that depends on maintaining good relationships with the Bobbies so that beat cops show up promptly when they suspect/catch someone stealing is letting said Bobbies use their building.
Julian, you may be right about some of the things you allege. Your problem is that you're too damn selfish to realize the rest of the world isn't going to stop just because you're in trouble. The Australian people are not gonna waste a Senate seat on your ass, Herod's isn't going to make some great to-do about fighting for your freedom and piss off the local constabulary, the Swedes aren't gonna completely ignore their laws (and the fact that two of their citizens are accusing you of rape) just to make you feel better about your odds of being deported, etc.
He's probably referring to the trouble they had getting cable operators to agree to carry them. That was a problem when they launched,. but at the moment they seem to be available in half the country.
It's an AC.
I suspect he was trying to start a flame-war, and he picked on black guys because a) it's traditional for Americans to pick on black guys, and b) the Malaysian government is known for affirmative action programs, which are associated with black guys.
You sure about the "not thousands of years" thing?
Because their northernmost Sultanate, which would be the last one conquered by immigrants from the Archipelago, claims a history back to 630. Granted this starts with conquests by a Sumatran, but as an American I have to say 13 or 14 centuries is a pretty damn long time to occupy a piece of land. In many countries in Europe the dominant ethnic group of 650 AD or so is not the dominant ethnic group today, and nobody claims the Romanians have no right to their land, or that the English should turn the Western half of the island over to Wales. Over the landmass of most of Malaysia the Orang Asli are "Proto-Malays," who have been on the peninsula; since 1500 BC at the latest. There's some debate as to whether the Duetero-Malays represent a new wave of colonization much later, during the Iron Age, or merely the Malays who chose civilized city life over Jungle-based nomadism.
So it seems to me pretty clear that the southern bit of the peninsula, AKA the one that is currently Malaysia, has been ethnic Malay for thousands of years. The Chinese and Indian minorities have only been significant since the British Empire brought them in.
Frankly the fact you're debating this point is a pretty good indication you're either an UNMO propagandist or an idiot. Why? This is an American site. The entire country has been around for less then 250 years. If the Malays were the largest ethnic group on the peninsula in 1450 (when precisely 2% of us were on this side of the ocean) we're not gonna care whether the guy who said "thousands" was off by 600 years. To contradict him on that point is both technically correct, and completely and totally unconvincing to an American. Particularly since, in our experience, anyone who spends this much time figuring out precisely which ethnic group is native to a particular bit of land is gonna start talking about getting rid of those damn new guys.
You could get somewhere arguing that the affirmative actions programs run by UNMO violate your individual rights, and are racist or unfair; that their Islamic Courts are insane and violate everyone else's religious freedom; or that their corruption is ridiculous. But ignore it when somebody says the Malays are indigenous to Malaysia.
Take a look at actual info on these people.
The Proto-Malays actually started out as Orang Asli of the southern half of the country. The current Malays may be descended from the Duetero-Malays who appeared in the Iron Age. Even the northernmost (and thus furthest from Sumatra) Sultanates have histories dating back to the 630s.
OTOH, the Chinese and Indian minorities on the peninsula are largely, but not entirely, a product of British Imperialism in the 19th century.
Dude,
Apartheid means "separateness."
You can accuse Malaysia of doing numerous bad things to minorities, but keeping them restricted to their own little Chinese-only ghettoes and persecuting anyone found out late at night is not one of them.
It is impossible for an activist to effectively fight a problem if he can't even articulate what the problem is in a sensible fashion.
Partly because it's not Apartheid. The only state that is anything nearly as bananas legally as Apartheid* is Israel, and the Israelis actually allow quite a bit of inter-communal contact if you were lucky enough to be on their side of the border after the war of '48. The tricky bits come in the Occupied territories, where the Israelis make an argument that works fine for a few years. If you're militarily occupying another country you do get to run things, and they don't get to vote, but OTOH if it's lasting 50 years and you still can't/won't create a puppet government to govern things like zoning and water rights it's kinda hard to believe that you're actually doing this shit because you have to.
In Malaysia it really isn't apartheid in any meaningful sense of the term, because they don't stop all Chinese or Indians from doing much of anything. A Chinese kid can get into any university save one. He can (in theory) get almost any job. He is just much less likely to pull that shit off then a similarly qualified Malay, because Malaysian Affirmative Action works exactly like Conservatives think American Affirmative Action works. The other major issue for religious minorities is that the islamic Courts can be remarkably dickish. One renowned ethnic Indian athlete was declared Muslim on his death, so his family could not have the Hindi funeral they wanted, apparently largely because one guy said he was a secret convert to Islam. In another case the Malay word for God ("Allah") was banned from Catholic publications, because it's also the Arabic for God and thus used in the Koran, despite the fact that the Catholic God and the Arabic God are the same guy (Jehovah or Yahweh).
None of which is particularly good, but considering the country to their North is engaging in routine coups d'tat to prevent the repeatedly-Democratically-elected Shinawatras, the entire region is working itself into circles to avoid providing homes to the Rohingya, the people who are implementing the Rohingya genocide in Rakhine state are also very iffy on democracy at home, etc. it's very hard for me to believe that it is true that we should make this particular problem the center-piece of our human rights policy for the region.
*The legal justification for Apartheid was technically non-racial, or as close to non-racial as you can get while setting up a real-life race-based caste system. The claim was that all black citizens of South Africa were actually citizens of their original tribe, that the Apartheid government had righted a great historical wrong by recognizing them as sovereign states, and that as citizens of their tribal Bantustan blacks were immigrants to the white bits (read: the bits people actually wanted) of the country and should be treated as such. Of course the "foreigner" had in most cases lived in the big city for multiple generations, probably couldn't even speak the tribal language (heck, even if you spoke Xhosa language fluently, and went to family reunions in Ciskei, the authorities were likely to make you a citizen of Bophutswana or something for obscure bureaucratic reasons).
They do and they don't. They have somethings called their "Basic Law" that fulfill the role of the Constitution. These are Constitutional in the sense that they can only be changed explicitly (ie: if Bibi wanted to start seizing property without compensation he'd have to amend the Basic Law banning that), but can be changed by simple majority vote in the Knesset. This system is pretty much identical to the one used by the Brits.
The anonymous coward post below actually has pretty good info in it.
Then you're a moral relativist intent on seeing the transgressions of one side while ignoring those of the other. In sum a hypocrite. Spare us your moral judgements, you have no basis for forming any.
Question:
If I denounce the Nazis, how much space do I have to devote to denouncing Stalin before you decide I'm a "moral relativist intent on seeing the transgressions of one side while ignoring the other?"
If you were truly looking to denounce racism you could not denounce Israel without also denouncing the far more virulent racism endemic in Islamic countries. Nah, you just think that your racism is justified.
Dude, when you're denouncing one injustice that does not put the onus on you to denounce every injustice.
Moreover you're insane if you think Islamic states are more racist then anyone else. India, for example, has institutionalized Affirmative Action that most American minority-rights groups would look at funny. The Chinese are racist enough that the Dalia Lama's people have been forced into low-grade rebellion and the poor East Turkestanis are in trouble (not that Israel's friends care: they're Muslim). Even in the US our law enforcement community makes a point of almost always coming down really hard on black teenage shenanigans (including shooting kids in the head for taking the orange rubber thing off the tip of their toy guns) while excusing many white teenage shenanigans as horseplay.
Even Mitt Romney had to pay 14%. Granted that gave him more in after-tax income then both of combined will earn over our life-times, but it also meant that his tax bill (of $2 Million) was more then I will earn over my lifetime. I suspect Obama will be in the $5-10 Million range once he no longer has to worry about a) political appearances, and b) Federal conflict-of-interest rules. He'll also be paying a tax rate of more like 35% because (unlike Mitt) his income isn't in stock he is selling off from years in finance (which is taxed at the long-term capital gains tax rate), it'll be actual income, and his income tax bracket will be the 39.6% bracket.
In terms of a Carbon Tax, that would be nigh-impossible to dodge. Each gallon of gasoline burned emits so many pounds of carbon, that means the gas tax is now higher and includes a carbon tax. Romney and Obama could dodge it by buying a Tesla, but getting their fleets of vehicles to emit less was kind of the point. Each kilowat-hour of electricity from Power Plant A emits so much carbon, the utility pays it and passes the cost on to you. The only way for them to bypass it would be for him to retrofit his home for energy efficiency, and/or power generation (solar is popular now, but Geothermal also works) which a) employs relatively poor (at least compared to either Mitt or Barack) class construction workers, and b) is precisely what the Carbon tax is supposed to do.
Come on now.
Rich people pay the carbon tax, too. Probably more then poor people (it takes a lot to heat a McMansion and fuel the SUV/sensible car/fun car combo) in absolute terms, if not relative terms.
The Carbon tax is intended to do a lot more then prevent floods. It also deals with droughts and forest fires. And guess who hunts a lot, and will be in trouble if there's a drought?
I didn't mean to imply it was, certainly not about the people. If we cared about the people the whole Katrina mess would not have been allowed to get so bad. The levee would have been fixed, the Marines flown in with a bevy of small watercraft to rescue people so the National guard could truck them to hastily set-up refugee centers on Day 2, etc.
What we care about is their property right to have a house on precisely the exact plot of land they have the deed to. We will not violate that property right by turning the entire damn neighborhood into a national park, no matter what.
Always remember, before Thomas Jefferson got to it the battle cry was "Liberty and Property."
1. I never said you were. I said white guys like them really don't get why anyone with a modicum of manners doesn't make up a word, apply to everyone who disagrees with them, and then act offended when they act offended.
Note that what they're doing is the same thing as you imply I'm doing with race: you're saying that whenever I hear something I disagree with I call it racist no matter what the actual argument is. What they're doing is whenever I say something they disagree with, they say "that's social justice bullshit."
Thank you for proving my point.
2. Who cares whether you "let me" do it. The fact is their slate got rejected by their own voters due to a combination of their over-aggressive tactics and Vox Day. That is what actually happened. Several were quoted at the awards ceremony saying they agreed with many Sad Puppy arguments but voted No Award anyway. The Sad Puppy point lost partly because it was being argued by a guy everyone hates. This is not uncommon. It is the reason nobody has asked Dubya's endorsement for anything since he left the White House.
3. The only social justice movements in the 60s were against sexism and racism. In fact they actually called themselves that back then. If you don't want me to believe you don't oppose the Civil Right movement don't a) say you want shit to be like it was back then, and b) deride your opponents as being Social Justice anything.
Hell if you want to actually have an exchange of ideas at any level don't use that term. You made it up as a slur, which means my response to hearing you say it is not gonna be "he's probably a nice guy, I have a moral duty to give him the benefit of the doubt." It's gonna be "fuck that guy." Particularly if that guy is in any way associated with Vox Day.
4. And what possible rule change can eliminate brigading at voting? It's trivial to do it in nominations. You could restrict everyone to three nominations and still have five nominees. You could eliminate the fan-nomination process completely and have a committee of winners determine the nominee list, or have the guy who runs the con write the nominee list. Any one of those rules makes the Sad Puppy system technique virtually impossible. But you can't have a rule that says "you can't vote for that guy for short story AND that other guy for novel because we found a website advocating both of them" without banning all fan voting or adding a whole bunch of by-laws to prevent the Sad Puppies from producing a bunch of fake internet slates combining all possible combinations of ballot that they dislike.
Which puts this in a completely different tradition: that of trolls dominating something for a short time period, getting themselves banned, and then declaring victory anyway because "we made our point, and we didn't want to not be banned anyway."
Because New Orleans and Miami are already mighty close to being drowned at high tide, and doing the logical and cheap thing (moving them to Detroit, which has perfectly fine water resources, is 500-600 feet above sea level, has plenty of space to build new housing, and no hurricane issues) is a political non-starter.
Moreover these estimates aren't really shrinking, so it's entirely possible that in 2115 mSparks43 III will read that comment and say "Geez, grandad sure was wrong about what would happen to Lady Liberty."
[joke] That bits on your side of the border. It's your problem. [/joke]
That was hyperbole. Niagara Falls does exist, but in terms of the bit of the lakes that the US uses, almost none of it is anywhere near the Falls. It's very easy for most American cities to use up their water supply because the place water goes is not a place you can easily get freshwater from. Phoenix's mostly goes to the sky as evaporation, and will come down somewhere that is not Arizona, LA and NYC send theirs to the ocean. Cities on rivers tend to send it downriver. But Chicago actually gets it's water from the same place it discharges it's wastewater. Detroit (which is downlake two Great Lakes, Lake St. Clair, and a couple rivers from Chicago) both gets it's water from the lake system and gives it back to the Lake system. You don't get to a point where the US Side of the border actually loses a gallon of water somebody uses until you hit Buffalo.
That means it takes a lot more water-use before we use up the lake.
But the question wasn't "Are they gonna be in some trouble?" Everybody's in some trouble (except Alaska and, mayhaps, the Great Lakes). It's "Are they in more trouble then everyone else?"
And the cities of the Pacific Northwest are probably fine, because that constant mist of rain off the ocean probably won't change, so in theory they don't *have* to ration water (they almost certainly will anyway because Portland). The interior is less fine, but it's not really more un-fine then Idaho, the Imperial Valley, or any of another half-dozen places.
Two points:
1) Unlike many watersheds, particularly towards the coast, it's a closed system except for evaporation. Chicago water comes from, and goes to, the same lake. This water is then available for Chicago again, or (more likely) can be pumped into Michigan for irrigation, Milwaukee's water system, etc. And then it proceeds through Huron, Erie, and Ontario; and is usable by Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, etc. etc.
2) The lakes contain a fifth of the world's fresh water. The watershed population them contain much less then a fifth of the human race (by my count it's 1% or so, it's hard to do more precisely because the political borders do not match up to the hydrological borders).
Which means we'd have to be using as truly ridiculous amount of water before the fact it was in the fields irrigating Cherries (and not in the lake) started affecting the lake-level in any measurable way; and we'd have to keep doing it for literally decades before we got to Cali-levels of fucked by global warming.