In my home state of North Carolina, there are some coastal regions where the dialect is often classified as the "Hoi toide" dialect--that is, roughly, how one would pronounce "high tide" there. Linguists seem to think that a lot of the vowel values and other vocabulary nuances make hoi toide english much more similiar to English of 300-400 years ago.
I've also heard that some British actors have claimed a greater ease speaking with a southern accent than some other american accents.
I would tend to think heart attacks come from sedentary lifestyles and fats rather than a lack of vitamins..
With regards to cancer--if it works, it works. I'm not convinced on the merits on homeopathic / chemo--I think few would argue that chemo is a fun thing to go through, and i think everyone wishes we had BETTER ways to fight cancer, but like I said, I'm not convinced.
And though I've said it before, while you're absolutely right about Vitamin C, the liver DOES have to treat vitamin A that way, and that's why too much vitamin A can cause liver damage.
I think at this point though, we're basically just flogging the same (dead) horses;-) I don't think I particularly have anything new or interesting to add to this conversation anymore.. I think I'll go take my nightly multivitamin though;-)
On the otherhand as a counter example, many people take an aspirin--or part of an aspirin--every day for good health reasons. Aspirin doesn't meet your natural definition, yet can be beneficiary on a daily basis. Likewise, there are plenty of natural things that if you consume on a daily basis, can do long term harm. I really don't think you can generalize like you are on this topic. I've even read some speculation that taking things like multivitamins don't really help us that much--that is, if you eat pretty well to begin with (ie, no HUGE deficiencies, which with modern diets we're not likely to have--think scurvy etc, 3rd world food deficiencies, etc) a multivitamin isn't going to do much.
I'm not at all sure that I agree with your assertion that people only get sick because we are lacking some vitamin or mineral or such.. I've actually read blog posts about this at a very interesting blog I read off and on at In the Pipeline, in which there is some debunking of that theory. (I can't claim to follow a lot of his posts, too technical..)
I'm still really not sure of the point of discussion though? Things have side effects? So what, this is known.. As we talked about earlier, vitamins can have side effects too. Like you even said earlier, no doctor is going to prescribe daily massive amounts of morphine to a patient for life. On the other hand, morphine--or similar painkillers--can be enormously beneficial in the right doses, at the right time. What's the problem with things possibly having negative side effects?
The simple answer, I think, would be the level at which something starts having negative+unintended consequences. Thus as you say with Vitamin C, our bodies can deal with it perfectly fine, so we can't overdose on Vitamin C (well, I assume we CAN at some huge level, but that's being somewhat pedantic). As I posted early, you might not want to do that with Vitamin A...
but really, I'm not sure about your greater premise--morphine is "natural" too--e.g., it's found in opium. So it's not like it's some synthetic drug from corporations..
Yeah, totally agree about M&M's--I mean, they're only an incredibly popular candy inside and out of America--what inedible crap. Way too proletariat for me.
The same can be said of Big Pharma's drug push. Again, look at VIOXX. Nowhere in the marketing did it say there's a chance you can get a heart attack.
And they got the crap sued out of them for it. What's your point?
The crazy sad thing is that I agree with you about choice--that's my dislike of the government speaking though, and not my drinking your anti-corporate koolaid though.
The world before modern medicine was a pretty shitty place if you got sick. Sure, there are local herbs etc that have been used--with HIGHLY varying success--in every part of the world, forever. This is as true of America and Europe than it is of China, though I take your obsession with China means you're "one of those" who think we can look east for all our answers, and believe this with near religious fervor. Do you HONESTLY believe that "Chinese herbs" have a better track record than Western medicine... REALLY?!
Vitamins--PURE NATURAL VITAMNS (that means they're good, right?)--can at most cause a "tummyache" you claim. Let's see... this is all from a VERY quick google.
Overdoses of... Vitamin A -- "can lead to liver damage, hair loss, blurred vision and headaches." Vitamin B3 (niacin) -- "Niacin can have life-threatening acute toxic reactions" (wikipedia) Vitamin D -- "can cause the buildup of calcium deposits that can interfere with the functioning of muscles, including heart tissue"
Ok, so you admitted diarrhea, nausea, upset stomach etc as vitamin sideeffects, from the list above we can add liver damage, and in some cases death. Well dang, what a SHOCK, those are almost the exact possible side effects you listed as coming from BIG SCARY PHARMA!!!
How ludicrous can you get. Really, I would think slashdotters should be able to be a little more questioning of things...
Incidentally... tobacco.. natural, bad DRUG. Marijuana? Natural drug. Alcohol? Natural drug. I think it's safe to say that natural things can have bad side effects, and can be called "drugs," friend..
George Bush Jr. was permitted, with less overall votes than the next candidate (Mr. Gore), to become President by way of winning a majority of college-electoral districts, which districts are (spoken cynically, I admit) fabricated by the Executive branch of government to preserve predictability and the marginalization of the regional voting trends(*). Phew.
knit one: college-electoral doesn't mean anything. You're thinking of the electoral college (or as homer called it, the eletrical college)
fabricated electoral college districts? You mean.. STATES? Each *STATE* determines how their electoral college votes go, it has nothing at all to do with federal laws.
Given that you have such a poor understanding of how the electoral college works, am I at all surprised by the rest of your post? Nope!
First and foremost--your theories work GREAT if everyone is 100% rational and reasonable and acts EXACTLY as you tell them to. Oh yeah--they also need to be able to know everything in advance.
Thanks for the ad hominem attack btw--classy.
I agree with the later poster who said basically, we're not going to convince you.... but I'd just leave with a couple thoughts.
What about if someone calls in a bomb threat. Now, seeing as we are human and have imperfect knowledge, we CAN'T know if it's real or not. Do we act? Do we shutdown business/governemnt/evacuate/whatever? Or do we do nothing. If we ACT and it's false, a huge amount of time, money, and effort has gone to waste. Has the bomb threat caller done anything? Is he responsible for what he has DIRECTLY caused? I don't see anyway you can deny a direct causal link there, even though nothing was actually done. Should the people who had to act be responsible for fake bomb threats? Is absolutely nobody liable in this situation? was no wrong done?
If you had to make the decision to act or not to act on a bomb threat--can you really tell me that you would not act?
1) Your worldview seems to completely remove "trust" as something that should exist--no one should ever trust another for any purpose, instead they should investigate everything on their own, scientifically, whatever. I don't think the world can work like that.
2) If you're fine wityh people being able to slander, libel, and defame others at will--with no consequences!--then, well, good for you--I think the world would be pretty terrible, and I think 99% of people out there would agree.
3) re: your pseudo legal response--there's that little thing called the Supreme Court that plays a role in how these matters are defined. There have been some big cases in the area...
Nothing of the sort happens. Words do no harm at all. Actions (such as trampling) do harm. Actions are where laws should concentrate under the current constitution. If you'd like me to completely demolish the "fire in a crowded theater" falsehood, I'm willing. It'll just take a few short paragraphs. Do you want to go there?
That's one of the most pedantic and silly arguments I've ever heard.
By that logic, if I shoot someone, I didn't hurt the other person, because the bullet did the damage not me. If I build a bomb, the chemical reaction/etc killed people, not me. What if tomorrow a major media outline ran a story on you--whoever you are--and said they had absolute 100% verifiable proof that you embezzled money, were a pedophile, kicked dogs, blah blah blah whatever. Those are words--do they, as you say, "do no harm at all" ?
Lets play out a hypothetical situation, step by step.
a) crowded theater b) someone yells "fire" (falsely) c) trampling ensues
C would not have been reached if B had not first happened. Are you claiming that the B actor has no responsibility for the outcome of his ACTION?
Where does it end? Would you be allowed to kill people if you can trick them using words only? Trick them into eating poison? etc. I just can't get over how ludicrous your assertion is.
Actions--be they physical OR verbal--have cause and effect.
In addition, back to the point at hand... You'll notice too the amendment says CONGRESS shall make no law... there are other sources of law than congress.
Yes, I understand that perfectly. What I am saying is that whether you say "95% of zipcodes has broadband" or "83% of ZIP+4 regions has broad" still doesn't tell me how many people have/don't have access to broadband. Going by residences would be more complicated, but would be more accurate.
The ISPs seem to already have this info--i mean, you can go to their website and type in your address--not your ZIP, not your ZIP+4--and find out if there is availability. Let's just have that info reported to the govt.
1) Colombia (NOT Columbia btw): You call them fighting a war on drugs, I call it assisting the government of Colombia against insurgents and kidnappers. Had any good beheadings there lately?
2) You say slavery didn't die after the civil war? Uhh, so you're claiming that slavery persisted in America after the war? That's news to me... Seems to me that the North did a pretty damn good job of shutting down the Southern slave state.
3) thousand/thousands--you're correct, I misread your statement. Let's look at your new one though: "The people of the region have been fighting non-stop over resources and religious sites." You must be referring to the Crusades, right? I mean, that's by far the largest conflict I can think of that was driven by fighting over a religious site--well, a religious AREA. I mean, unless you include the events since the creation of Israel in the past 50 years, which I GUESS you could classify that way.
Just where is this non-stop fighting you're talking about? The Iraq/Iran border was stabilized some 400-500 years ago. Egypt was fairly stable during a lot of that time--some fairly long lasting dynasties. Once you're talking Ottomans they ruled much of the region for maybe 500 years on the total. During the whole of that it wasn't a horrifically violent period. Certaintly no worse than in Europe during the same time periods. Heck, BETTER frequently. I really don't think I can categorize Middle Eastern history as non-stop fighting...can you help me out on this point? Where is the non-stop fighting?
Here's my favorite of your incedibly ludicrous statements--"Tell me, how many wars have their been in western Europe over the last 60 years". Ok, so you want to take a micro-region and compare it to...the middle east. and..Asia. And by using this 60 year barrier you get to conveniently forget about the biggest racial/religious genocide in the history of humanity, the most deadly war (60 million is the number i've last heard) and the most destructive war of all time? What a great comparison. Oh yeah, and if, since WW2, those countries are fighting elsewhere--it doesn't count. That's an incredibly flawed and quite frankly disingenuous starting point for a discussion. How many wars have been fought in Turkey in the past 80 years? How many wars have been in Saudi Arabia in the past 100 years? How many wars have been fought in Iran in the past 100 years? How many wars have been fought in IRAQ in the past 100 years? Oh right, it involves Western countries forces, so that doesn't count? I don't get it.
"Everywhere on the planet except for the middle east you're seeing less war, not more."
Africa? room for debate? be serious.. One of the few places in the world where there is actual country-country warfare. More dead in Rwanda in a year than across the entire Middle East in a decade.
Besides, where is this giant "war" you're talking about in the Middle East? Are you talking about Iraq? We kinda started that one... Israel Palestine? Is that a war? Well, we kinda started that one too. Let me see..Turkey, nope. Iran, nope. Egypt, Nope. Algeria? Well, they had to fight France for independence, does that count? Morocco? nope. Jordan? nope. Saudi Arabia? Nope. Oman? nope. Qatar? Nope. UAE? nope. The vast majority of those countries have no wars, have fought in no wars, etc. In fact, the biggest threat against most of them is al-Qaida, but of course that's the threat of terrorism that we can't fight by your standards.
You don't get it at all--you can absolutely fight ideologies. This has been true historically. They're not easy to wipe out, no. But you have effectively offered no counter other than saying "well, it took another 20 years for Communism to REALLY disappear" "well, fascism survived another couple years after ww2, so there!" That's not at all the point. Fighting in Afghanistan--where OBL is/was--IS going after source. Iraq not so much, I think we felt likke we needed to clean up our past mistakes there, and it's not t
But you're still missing the point. Ok, great, now you've got finer granularity, but it's still totally imprecise! One zip+4 can be an abandoned lot, a single household, multiple houses, or a highrise apartment complex. The data is equally meaningless except now you've got a lot more ZIP+4s to look at than you do ZIPs.
i think it's much better at this point to measure who DOESN'T have broadband access. Let's do households, ACTUAL places where people live. How many residences don't have access?
If the FCC switched to using ZIP+4 then it would probably be a much more accurate and comparable method.
Well then, I can report 100% broadband penetration for my parent's home ZIP+4. (Seeing as their home ZIP+4 is exactly one address).
I'm pleased also that my current apartment ZIP+4 seems to have 100% penetration (12 apartments)--I'm not sure about the other half of the building though, that's an entirely different zip+4!
Long and short is that ZIP+4 does not cover a lot of addresses--can be a single address, a single PO box, etc.
By historically always being in conflict I mean the region has never known peace. Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence. There have been exceptions and your point is valid that every region has had its conflicts but each conflict has been different as opposed to the middle east where its been pretty much the same conflict for a thousand years.
Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence? What on Earth does this mean? Let's take America (USA)--Revolutionary war. 20 years later, war of 1812. 20 years later, mexican american war. 20 years later, civil war. 40 years later WW1. 20 years later WW2. then Korea. then Vietnam. So do you mean by "known peace" known peace in 20 year increments?
Let's take a look at some of the larger European conflicts (dates are rough).. Reconquista in spain (~1000 AD), Byzantines vs Turks/Arabs/etc (800AD - 1500AD). 1066, Norman invasion of Britain. 100 Years war between France and England. Western European fighting versus Ottoman Empire (sometimes more, sometimes less, there for hundreds of years). World War I, World War II (How can you reconcile these two WORLD wars in the past 100 years with the claim that Europe has known peace for the majority of its existence??). Napoleon. Russia-Lithuania. Greek War of Independence. Spanish Civil War. War of the Roses. Visigoths. Roman invasions. Roman defeats. Crusades (Baltic and Middle Eastern). etc, etc, etc. These are all completely off the top of my head and cover a VERY large period of time.
Besides which, just what is this "historical" conflict in the Middle East that's been around for "thousands of years"? Islam's only been around for 1500, that can't be it... Shia/Sunni divide is even newer than that... Hmmm.. Beats me!
The Historian and anti-Orientalist in me is screaming:-)
We didn't win the war on communism, as you might recall China turned communist, fascism didn't end with Hitler's death. When you fight a concept or ideology you simply can't win. Look at the war on drugs. It's a battle you can't win because the activities have underlying causes. If you attack the symptom you won't solve the underlying problem and thus it will always resurface.
No, but in both cases the root was crushed at the core. Reagan's "Evil Empire" might be somewhat trite, but damn if he wasn't right about Russia and how hollow the core was. Attacking the "symptoms" of slavery sure worked. Attacking the "symptoms" of communism sure worked too--who is realistically left--Cuba? Fascism is as dead as a doornail too for that matter. The War on Drugs, as I said previously, is branding. There's no ACTUAL war--in all my other examples, including terror--there IS actual fighting going on.
Well, I think we agree to disagree about ID card. I personally would like a national idea for reasons of illegal immigration more than anything else..that and having to have like 10 other forms of ID / cards to prove who I am (birth certificate, social security, drivers license, passport, etc). Don't know if Real ID will solve that, but couldn't be worse than what we have now.
OBL deep thinker / not...beats me. Looking at what al-qaida has done elsewhere--or tried to do--in spain, london, algeria, philippines, etc--it seems fairly clear they want lots of casualties, and not a lot more. Tanking our economy? i think you're right, stupidass media sensationalism. They wanted a high-profile target, and they got it.
In regards to perhaps your more overarching point--no winning a war on a concept? I'm not sure I can agree with that. Ideology has been the root of MANY conflicts. Would the American civil war today be brand "War Against Slavery" ? would World War II be the "War Against Fascism" (Socialism/Totalatarianism/Nazism/whatever..) (I think I avoided Godwin here!!). What about the cold war--"War Against Communism"? It's all in the branding. This war is no more a war against a "concept" than any of the rest were--this is a war against global Islamic radicals.
My statement is in no way PC, and there certainly remains the question SHOULD WE BE FIGHTING this war, but the "concept" question merely obfuscates the reality of the situation.
I might add that your statement about a "region which has historically always been in conflict" is a little bit... well, ludicrous. Show me an area that HASN'T been historically in conflict. I can't think of any...
You're absolutely right--OBL is probably off in a cave somewhere cackling maniacally as we speak because President Bush wanted a national ID card. Yes, what fools we've been...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like your post is claiming that OBL wanted the 9/11 attacks to bring about national ID cards, to show us? I don't get it...what am I missing here?
At a site I maintain--not huge traffic by any means, largely university students+faculty from across the US--the stats for the past 2 months are roughly:
Firefox: 20% IE: 70% Safari: 5% others: ~5% (we still get Netscape 4 users in decent numbers......)
Of the IE numbers, about 35% over the past two months are using IE7, and that's going up a lot every day.
Also, FWIW, 5% of our visitors are dialup (as reported by Google Analytics)
I guess I don't really have any idea what defines an educated person then. You say people who reads book--not airport novels--for pleasure (and what makes a book an airport novel--merely being sold in an airport? that would seem to eliminate a lot of decent literature..). That's a pretty good chunk of people. I guess that rules out people that went to college, etc that don't enjoy reading in their spare time? Again, i think that gets rid of a pretty large chunk of people. I don't have a clue what % of the population would fit in that standard of educated.
So long and short of it, I guess if what you were saying was--the people who live up to your standard of being "educated" know the word "pidgin"--so i guess somehow the act of knowing the word pidgin is part of being educated at this point.:-P
It's not just American english, and it's not just English...half the languages around the world have terrible insults that are based around homosexuality. I guess you would say that displays t he deep-rooted homophobia of the world? (and I'm thinking here off the top of my head of some of the languages I've had experience with--Spanish, Arabic, Persian)
In any case, a different poster rightfully pointed how off the base you are about there being no other insults / negative words based around ethnicity.
This is just a common feature of languages--people appropriate words for their own usages. Like how in American "queer" is a word now mostly used by the gay community. And how amongst African Americans, the n-word that I prefer not even to write (!) is ok for them, but not for anyone else.
People--teenageers mostly, but everyone, everywhere--notice differences, and they all too frequently define community through differences. Nerds have jocks, jocks have nerds, sex-conscious teenagers have...well, everybody:-P
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard some similiar theories too.
In my home state of North Carolina, there are some coastal regions where the dialect is often classified as the "Hoi toide" dialect--that is, roughly, how one would pronounce "high tide" there. Linguists seem to think that a lot of the vowel values and other vocabulary nuances make hoi toide english much more similiar to English of 300-400 years ago.
I've also heard that some British actors have claimed a greater ease speaking with a southern accent than some other american accents.
I would tend to think heart attacks come from sedentary lifestyles and fats rather than a lack of vitamins..
;-) I don't think I particularly have anything new or interesting to add to this conversation anymore.. I think I'll go take my nightly multivitamin though ;-)
With regards to cancer--if it works, it works. I'm not convinced on the merits on homeopathic / chemo--I think few would argue that chemo is a fun thing to go through, and i think everyone wishes we had BETTER ways to fight cancer, but like I said, I'm not convinced.
And though I've said it before, while you're absolutely right about Vitamin C, the liver DOES have to treat vitamin A that way, and that's why too much vitamin A can cause liver damage.
I think at this point though, we're basically just flogging the same (dead) horses
On the otherhand as a counter example, many people take an aspirin--or part of an aspirin--every day for good health reasons. Aspirin doesn't meet your natural definition, yet can be beneficiary on a daily basis. Likewise, there are plenty of natural things that if you consume on a daily basis, can do long term harm. I really don't think you can generalize like you are on this topic. I've even read some speculation that taking things like multivitamins don't really help us that much--that is, if you eat pretty well to begin with (ie, no HUGE deficiencies, which with modern diets we're not likely to have--think scurvy etc, 3rd world food deficiencies, etc) a multivitamin isn't going to do much.
I'm not at all sure that I agree with your assertion that people only get sick because we are lacking some vitamin or mineral or such.. I've actually read blog posts about this at a very interesting blog I read off and on at In the Pipeline, in which there is some debunking of that theory. (I can't claim to follow a lot of his posts, too technical..)
I'm still really not sure of the point of discussion though? Things have side effects? So what, this is known.. As we talked about earlier, vitamins can have side effects too. Like you even said earlier, no doctor is going to prescribe daily massive amounts of morphine to a patient for life. On the other hand, morphine--or similar painkillers--can be enormously beneficial in the right doses, at the right time. What's the problem with things possibly having negative side effects?
I have to say, that's a really interesting take on the situation, and to be honest, I had never thought of it at all like that. Huh, interesting...
But the question is, what constitutes an overdose
The simple answer, I think, would be the level at which something starts having negative+unintended consequences. Thus as you say with Vitamin C, our bodies can deal with it perfectly fine, so we can't overdose on Vitamin C (well, I assume we CAN at some huge level, but that's being somewhat pedantic). As I posted early, you might not want to do that with Vitamin A...
but really, I'm not sure about your greater premise--morphine is "natural" too--e.g., it's found in opium. So it's not like it's some synthetic drug from corporations..
Now that I can give a solid "hear, hear!" :-)
Yeah, totally agree about M&M's--I mean, they're only an incredibly popular candy inside and out of America--what inedible crap. Way too proletariat for me.
De gustibus, non est disputandum...
The same can be said of Big Pharma's drug push. Again, look at VIOXX. Nowhere in the marketing did it say there's a chance you can get a heart attack.
And they got the crap sued out of them for it. What's your point?
The crazy sad thing is that I agree with you about choice--that's my dislike of the government speaking though, and not my drinking your anti-corporate koolaid though.
What crazy ass world do you live in?!
The world before modern medicine was a pretty shitty place if you got sick. Sure, there are local herbs etc that have been used--with HIGHLY varying success--in every part of the world, forever. This is as true of America and Europe than it is of China, though I take your obsession with China means you're "one of those" who think we can look east for all our answers, and believe this with near religious fervor. Do you HONESTLY believe that "Chinese herbs" have a better track record than Western medicine... REALLY?!
Vitamins--PURE NATURAL VITAMNS (that means they're good, right?)--can at most cause a "tummyache" you claim. Let's see... this is all from a VERY quick google.
Overdoses of...
Vitamin A -- "can lead to liver damage, hair loss, blurred vision and headaches."
Vitamin B3 (niacin) -- "Niacin can have life-threatening acute toxic reactions" (wikipedia)
Vitamin D -- "can cause the buildup of calcium deposits that can interfere with the functioning of muscles, including heart tissue"
Ok, so you admitted diarrhea, nausea, upset stomach etc as vitamin sideeffects, from the list above we can add liver damage, and in some cases death. Well dang, what a SHOCK, those are almost the exact possible side effects you listed as coming from BIG SCARY PHARMA!!!
How ludicrous can you get. Really, I would think slashdotters should be able to be a little more questioning of things...
Incidentally... tobacco.. natural, bad DRUG. Marijuana? Natural drug. Alcohol? Natural drug. I think it's safe to say that natural things can have bad side effects, and can be called "drugs," friend..
Do you know something else? I don't know anymore than the article, but it DOES say:
"and three misdemeanor marijuana possession and court order violation charges." in addition to the date rape drug charge.
~shrug~ I can't say if that' accurate or not though..
George Bush Jr. was permitted, with less overall votes than the next candidate (Mr. Gore), to become President by way of winning a majority of college-electoral districts, which districts are (spoken cynically, I admit) fabricated by the Executive branch of government to preserve predictability and the marginalization of the regional voting trends(*). Phew.
knit one: college-electoral doesn't mean anything. You're thinking of the electoral college (or as homer called it, the eletrical college)
fabricated electoral college districts? You mean.. STATES? Each *STATE* determines how their electoral college votes go, it has nothing at all to do with federal laws.
Given that you have such a poor understanding of how the electoral college works, am I at all surprised by the rest of your post? Nope!
First and foremost--your theories work GREAT if everyone is 100% rational and reasonable and acts EXACTLY as you tell them to. Oh yeah--they also need to be able to know everything in advance.
Thanks for the ad hominem attack btw--classy.
I agree with the later poster who said basically, we're not going to convince you.... but I'd just leave with a couple thoughts.
What about if someone calls in a bomb threat. Now, seeing as we are human and have imperfect knowledge, we CAN'T know if it's real or not. Do we act? Do we shutdown business/governemnt/evacuate/whatever? Or do we do nothing. If we ACT and it's false, a huge amount of time, money, and effort has gone to waste. Has the bomb threat caller done anything? Is he responsible for what he has DIRECTLY caused? I don't see anyway you can deny a direct causal link there, even though nothing was actually done. Should the people who had to act be responsible for fake bomb threats? Is absolutely nobody liable in this situation? was no wrong done?
If you had to make the decision to act or not to act on a bomb threat--can you really tell me that you would not act?
1) Your worldview seems to completely remove "trust" as something that should exist--no one should ever trust another for any purpose, instead they should investigate everything on their own, scientifically, whatever. I don't think the world can work like that.
2) If you're fine wityh people being able to slander, libel, and defame others at will--with no consequences!--then, well, good for you--I think the world would be pretty terrible, and I think 99% of people out there would agree.
3) re: your pseudo legal response--there's that little thing called the Supreme Court that plays a role in how these matters are defined. There have been some big cases in the area...
Nothing of the sort happens. Words do no harm at all. Actions (such as trampling) do harm. Actions are where laws should concentrate under the current constitution. If you'd like me to completely demolish the "fire in a crowded theater" falsehood, I'm willing. It'll just take a few short paragraphs. Do you want to go there?
That's one of the most pedantic and silly arguments I've ever heard.
By that logic, if I shoot someone, I didn't hurt the other person, because the bullet did the damage not me. If I build a bomb, the chemical reaction/etc killed people, not me. What if tomorrow a major media outline ran a story on you--whoever you are--and said they had absolute 100% verifiable proof that you embezzled money, were a pedophile, kicked dogs, blah blah blah whatever. Those are words--do they, as you say, "do no harm at all" ?
Lets play out a hypothetical situation, step by step.
a) crowded theater
b) someone yells "fire" (falsely)
c) trampling ensues
C would not have been reached if B had not first happened. Are you claiming that the B actor has no responsibility for the outcome of his ACTION?
Where does it end? Would you be allowed to kill people if you can trick them using words only? Trick them into eating poison? etc. I just can't get over how ludicrous your assertion is.
Actions--be they physical OR verbal--have cause and effect.
In addition, back to the point at hand... You'll notice too the amendment says CONGRESS shall make no law... there are other sources of law than congress.
Yes, I understand that perfectly. What I am saying is that whether you say "95% of zipcodes has broadband" or "83% of ZIP+4 regions has broad" still doesn't tell me how many people have/don't have access to broadband. Going by residences would be more complicated, but would be more accurate.
The ISPs seem to already have this info--i mean, you can go to their website and type in your address--not your ZIP, not your ZIP+4--and find out if there is availability. Let's just have that info reported to the govt.
1) Colombia (NOT Columbia btw): You call them fighting a war on drugs, I call it assisting the government of Colombia against insurgents and kidnappers. Had any good beheadings there lately?
..Asia. And by using this 60 year barrier you get to conveniently forget about the biggest racial/religious genocide in the history of humanity, the most deadly war (60 million is the number i've last heard) and the most destructive war of all time? What a great comparison. Oh yeah, and if, since WW2, those countries are fighting elsewhere--it doesn't count. That's an incredibly flawed and quite frankly disingenuous starting point for a discussion. How many wars have been fought in Turkey in the past 80 years? How many wars have been in Saudi Arabia in the past 100 years? How many wars have been fought in Iran in the past 100 years? How many wars have been fought in IRAQ in the past 100 years? Oh right, it involves Western countries forces, so that doesn't count? I don't get it.
2) You say slavery didn't die after the civil war? Uhh, so you're claiming that slavery persisted in America after the war? That's news to me... Seems to me that the North did a pretty damn good job of shutting down the Southern slave state.
3) thousand/thousands--you're correct, I misread your statement. Let's look at your new one though: "The people of the region have been fighting non-stop over resources and religious sites." You must be referring to the Crusades, right? I mean, that's by far the largest conflict I can think of that was driven by fighting over a religious site--well, a religious AREA. I mean, unless you include the events since the creation of Israel in the past 50 years, which I GUESS you could classify that way.
Just where is this non-stop fighting you're talking about? The Iraq/Iran border was stabilized some 400-500 years ago. Egypt was fairly stable during a lot of that time--some fairly long lasting dynasties. Once you're talking Ottomans they ruled much of the region for maybe 500 years on the total. During the whole of that it wasn't a horrifically violent period. Certaintly no worse than in Europe during the same time periods. Heck, BETTER frequently. I really don't think I can categorize Middle Eastern history as non-stop fighting...can you help me out on this point? Where is the non-stop fighting?
Here's my favorite of your incedibly ludicrous statements--"Tell me, how many wars have their been in western Europe over the last 60 years". Ok, so you want to take a micro-region and compare it to...the middle east. and
"Everywhere on the planet except for the middle east you're seeing less war, not more."
Africa? room for debate? be serious.. One of the few places in the world where there is actual country-country warfare. More dead in Rwanda in a year than across the entire Middle East in a decade.
Besides, where is this giant "war" you're talking about in the Middle East? Are you talking about Iraq? We kinda started that one... Israel Palestine? Is that a war? Well, we kinda started that one too. Let me see..Turkey, nope. Iran, nope. Egypt, Nope. Algeria? Well, they had to fight France for independence, does that count? Morocco? nope. Jordan? nope. Saudi Arabia? Nope. Oman? nope. Qatar? Nope. UAE? nope. The vast majority of those countries have no wars, have fought in no wars, etc. In fact, the biggest threat against most of them is al-Qaida, but of course that's the threat of terrorism that we can't fight by your standards.
You don't get it at all--you can absolutely fight ideologies. This has been true historically. They're not easy to wipe out, no. But you have effectively offered no counter other than saying "well, it took another 20 years for Communism to REALLY disappear" "well, fascism survived another couple years after ww2, so there!" That's not at all the point. Fighting in Afghanistan--where OBL is/was--IS going after source. Iraq not so much, I think we felt likke we needed to clean up our past mistakes there, and it's not t
But you're still missing the point. Ok, great, now you've got finer granularity, but it's still totally imprecise! One zip+4 can be an abandoned lot, a single household, multiple houses, or a highrise apartment complex. The data is equally meaningless except now you've got a lot more ZIP+4s to look at than you do ZIPs.
i think it's much better at this point to measure who DOESN'T have broadband access. Let's do households, ACTUAL places where people live. How many residences don't have access?
For slashdotters to whine about :-)
If the FCC switched to using ZIP+4 then it would probably be a much more accurate and comparable method.
Well then, I can report 100% broadband penetration for my parent's home ZIP+4. (Seeing as their home ZIP+4 is exactly one address).
I'm pleased also that my current apartment ZIP+4 seems to have 100% penetration (12 apartments)--I'm not sure about the other half of the building though, that's an entirely different zip+4!
Long and short is that ZIP+4 does not cover a lot of addresses--can be a single address, a single PO box, etc.
By historically always being in conflict I mean the region has never known peace. Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence. There have been exceptions and your point is valid that every region has had its conflicts but each conflict has been different as opposed to the middle east where its been pretty much the same conflict for a thousand years.
:-)
Europe and America has known peace for the majority of their existence? What on Earth does this mean? Let's take America (USA)--Revolutionary war. 20 years later, war of 1812. 20 years later, mexican american war. 20 years later, civil war. 40 years later WW1. 20 years later WW2. then Korea. then Vietnam. So do you mean by "known peace" known peace in 20 year increments?
Let's take a look at some of the larger European conflicts (dates are rough).. Reconquista in spain (~1000 AD), Byzantines vs Turks/Arabs/etc (800AD - 1500AD). 1066, Norman invasion of Britain. 100 Years war between France and England. Western European fighting versus Ottoman Empire (sometimes more, sometimes less, there for hundreds of years). World War I, World War II (How can you reconcile these two WORLD wars in the past 100 years with the claim that Europe has known peace for the majority of its existence??). Napoleon. Russia-Lithuania. Greek War of Independence. Spanish Civil War. War of the Roses. Visigoths. Roman invasions. Roman defeats. Crusades (Baltic and Middle Eastern). etc, etc, etc. These are all completely off the top of my head and cover a VERY large period of time.
Besides which, just what is this "historical" conflict in the Middle East that's been around for "thousands of years"? Islam's only been around for 1500, that can't be it... Shia/Sunni divide is even newer than that... Hmmm.. Beats me!
The Historian and anti-Orientalist in me is screaming
We didn't win the war on communism, as you might recall China turned communist, fascism didn't end with Hitler's death. When you fight a concept or ideology you simply can't win. Look at the war on drugs. It's a battle you can't win because the activities have underlying causes. If you attack the symptom you won't solve the underlying problem and thus it will always resurface.
No, but in both cases the root was crushed at the core. Reagan's "Evil Empire" might be somewhat trite, but damn if he wasn't right about Russia and how hollow the core was. Attacking the "symptoms" of slavery sure worked. Attacking the "symptoms" of communism sure worked too--who is realistically left--Cuba? Fascism is as dead as a doornail too for that matter. The War on Drugs, as I said previously, is branding. There's no ACTUAL war--in all my other examples, including terror--there IS actual fighting going on.
Well, I think we agree to disagree about ID card. I personally would like a national idea for reasons of illegal immigration more than anything else..that and having to have like 10 other forms of ID / cards to prove who I am (birth certificate, social security, drivers license, passport, etc). Don't know if Real ID will solve that, but couldn't be worse than what we have now.
... well, ludicrous. Show me an area that HASN'T been historically in conflict. I can't think of any...
OBL deep thinker / not...beats me. Looking at what al-qaida has done elsewhere--or tried to do--in spain, london, algeria, philippines, etc--it seems fairly clear they want lots of casualties, and not a lot more. Tanking our economy? i think you're right, stupidass media sensationalism. They wanted a high-profile target, and they got it.
In regards to perhaps your more overarching point--no winning a war on a concept? I'm not sure I can agree with that. Ideology has been the root of MANY conflicts. Would the American civil war today be brand "War Against Slavery" ? would World War II be the "War Against Fascism" (Socialism/Totalatarianism/Nazism/whatever..) (I think I avoided Godwin here!!). What about the cold war--"War Against Communism"? It's all in the branding. This war is no more a war against a "concept" than any of the rest were--this is a war against global Islamic radicals.
My statement is in no way PC, and there certainly remains the question SHOULD WE BE FIGHTING this war, but the "concept" question merely obfuscates the reality of the situation.
I might add that your statement about a "region which has historically always been in conflict" is a little bit
You're absolutely right--OBL is probably off in a cave somewhere cackling maniacally as we speak because President Bush wanted a national ID card. Yes, what fools we've been...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like your post is claiming that OBL wanted the 9/11 attacks to bring about national ID cards, to show us? I don't get it...what am I missing here?
At a site I maintain--not huge traffic by any means, largely university students+faculty from across the US--the stats for the past 2 months are roughly:
Firefox: 20%
IE: 70%
Safari: 5%
others: ~5% (we still get Netscape 4 users in decent numbers......)
Of the IE numbers, about 35% over the past two months are using IE7, and that's going up a lot every day.
Also, FWIW, 5% of our visitors are dialup (as reported by Google Analytics)
lol! Good point!
I guess I don't really have any idea what defines an educated person then. You say people who reads book--not airport novels--for pleasure (and what makes a book an airport novel--merely being sold in an airport? that would seem to eliminate a lot of decent literature..). That's a pretty good chunk of people. I guess that rules out people that went to college, etc that don't enjoy reading in their spare time? Again, i think that gets rid of a pretty large chunk of people. I don't have a clue what % of the population would fit in that standard of educated.
:-P
So long and short of it, I guess if what you were saying was--the people who live up to your standard of being "educated" know the word "pidgin"--so i guess somehow the act of knowing the word pidgin is part of being educated at this point.
Gratz on learning the word in highschool!
It's not just American english, and it's not just English...half the languages around the world have terrible insults that are based around homosexuality. I guess you would say that displays t he deep-rooted homophobia of the world? (and I'm thinking here off the top of my head of some of the languages I've had experience with--Spanish, Arabic, Persian)
:-P
In any case, a different poster rightfully pointed how off the base you are about there being no other insults / negative words based around ethnicity.
This is just a common feature of languages--people appropriate words for their own usages. Like how in American "queer" is a word now mostly used by the gay community. And how amongst African Americans, the n-word that I prefer not even to write (!) is ok for them, but not for anyone else.
People--teenageers mostly, but everyone, everywhere--notice differences, and they all too frequently define community through differences. Nerds have jocks, jocks have nerds, sex-conscious teenagers have...well, everybody