The readiness to kill is somewhat lower if you have to be involved face-to-face.
Yes, because wars never existed before the invention of remotely-operated drones. And FSM knows the kings of Europe in the middle ages and Roman consuls never led troops into battle; that would be madness!
The desire for war seems to go away only when humans are fat and comfortable. As long as there's anyone, anywhere, living a marginal existence, war is going to continue being a viable option.
True, but without boots on the ground, it's their word against ours, isn't it? And whom are the locals more likely to believe, the guys who right there telling stories to their face, or the ones situated half a world away?
we need for war to be hell. otherwise we'll just keep doing it for anything, never end them and stop fighting to win(which we've done in IZ. so much for learning from Vietnam).
Doesn't your latter statement negate your former? If we didn't learn the lesson from Vietnam that you have to fight to win, then what makes you think we'll ever learn the lesson not to go to war in the first place?
As brutal as your experience in Iraq may have been, it's no where near as bad as things were in WWII (I'm sure you didn't stack dead Americans like cord wood), WWI (no trench fighting this time), the Civil War (no massed infantry blocks shooting at each other), the English Civil War (some battles had tens of thousands of combatants on both sides, all with pikes stabbing each other), or the Roman-barbarian wars (again, tens of thousands of men in the muck and shit stabbing each other at only two feet away). If we didn't learn from those wars, there's no way we'll learn from this one.
William Tecumseh Sherman observed that "war is hell", and wrote in a letter after the Civil War that he was "tired of war". But that didn't stop him from pursuing a policy of genocide against the Native Americans. If someone like him couldn't learn from his own experiences, what hope does the species have?
First, my bona fides: I've participated in two wars, the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. By the time my ship got to the gulf in the first one, it was all over. And in the second, I was in a safe command center in Turkey directing air strikes against northern Iraq. So while I'm indirectly responsible for several hundred dead Iraqi troops (maybe a thousand, I really have no way of knowing, I just know I saw a column of trucks, passed the coordinates to a B52, and watched as they were blown up in real time while I sat in air conditioning drinking a diet Coke, not to mention all of the fire-support missions called in by teams on the ground). So I can speak about these drone pilots pretty authoritatively since I did a job very much like theirs.
They are not heroes; not in the least. What they're doing requires no sacrifice on their part. They have a nice, safe, 9-to-5 job, with absolutely no risk of injury beyond carpal tunnel. It may not be fair to call them cowards, unless they were offered the choice of piloting drones or piloting ships that would go in harm's way. But the choice may not have been theirs to make, they may have just been assigned to this duty for any number of reasons. But they are definitely not heroes and should not be labeled as such.
Since when has fighting a war ever had anything to do with fairness? The whole point is to kill more of the enemy than they kill of your own guys. Anyone who focuses too much on "fairness" in that situation is going to get a lot of his men killed.
...[T]he Middle East isn't Latin America. Different people, different culture, different values.
I don't think the OP was disputing that, they even said the acts were performed by "theistic fascists" which fits pretty well with your "different culture, different values" comment. If you look at the brand of Islam that the most violent terrorists espouse, it's rooted in military conflict against other religions (even other brands of Islam). One of the primary goals stated by bin Laden in the past is to re-establish the Caliphate and overthrow all Muslim governments around the world.
That said, one should be wary of listening to the words given as motivation for someone's actions. After all, Hitler claimed he invaded the Sudetenland and Poland to "liberate" the Germans living there. Just because a mad man says he's doing something for one reason, doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
Re:Tip of the iceberg or just another wing nut?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 1
I don't think it's accurate to label this guy a "wing nut" (in the sense that he was a right-wing fanatic). His manifesto contains several references to our "broken" health care system, and how the politicians are beholden to insurance companies and that's why we have the problems we do. That isn't exactly a right-wing talking point. He seems more like one of those disaffected loons that gravitate to any and all complaints about society, government, or other people; the kind of person who listens to Alex Jones and thinks he's right about anything. I bet it comes out he was both a Truther and a Birther.
You're forgetting the tax advantages of being part of an employer group. If you buy insurance on your own, you do so with after-tax dollars. If you buy through your employer, you do so with before-tax dollars, reducing your overall tax burden (and that of your employer, since their payroll taxes get a break). The Federal government caused the mess of a health care system we have, it strikes me as absurd to expect them to be able to fix it in any meaningful way.
I wouldn't exactly call Wikipedia a "success." Just because something is popular doesn't mean the world is better off for it to have been made. I submit as proof of concept: 4chan.
Since when is the question "Is the world better off for this?" a criterion for success? Using that metric, it's hard to see how Coca Cola was ever a success. I mean really, is the world better off with sugared drinks?
The only measure for success is, does the enterprise meet the goals set by the founders? Using that metric, both Wikipedia (make information freely available to the world) and 4chan (bring together socially-inept misfits and give them a common forum) are runaway successes.
Whoever modded this Flamebait never served in the military. Those of us who have know that the military's sole purpose is to kill people and break things. The fact that we, as a nation, have forgotten this important point is why we're failing so much at "nation building" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let the military kill everyone in their way, then send in aid groups after to do the rebuilding. You wouldn't send the Peace Corps to blow up a bridge, why send the Army to build one?
There's an old saying, nothing focuses the mind like a firing squad. When faced with imminent death, humans are famously adept at coming up with novel solutions to complex problems. To that end, I propose we gather a collection of prominent physicists and place them in a ship capable of accelerating to near-light speed over a period of some years. Put locks on the controls so that they are unable to halt or alter the acceleration, then inform they have X years to come up with a way to avoid being smashed to death by interstellar gasses. Either they come up with a solution and are all saved, or they perish in a fiery ball of glory. Either way, they'll probably all have high schools named after them.
You give two examples of how government interference in the market can be damaging, then proclaim the markets are broken and need governmental interference. Why should anyone take anything else you have to say seriously?
Well, when we have long-term evidence (not short-term anecdotal evidence) that climates aren't changing (15 years is nothing) and a model that explains why all the stuff we're pumping into the atmosphere isn't having an effect, we'll reconsider our theory.
In other words, once it's possible to prove two negatives you'll rethink your position. How is that different from creationists again?
The problem isn't so much the actual research being done, it's the IPCC being lax on the finer details of AGW
How is that not the exact same thing? If the IPCC was lax on this point, what else were they lax on? If we can't trust them to source their data properly in one instance, why in the world would we trust them to do so in others?
The function of the court system is to interpret the law in such a way that justice is served.
You can make that argument about a common law system, but Italy has a civil law system. In which case you are 100% wrong, the function of the court system there is merely to apply the law as written. Questions of justice don't enter into it.
He mentioned that possibility then shot it down because he feared people would share the credentials. Which some people almost certainly would. The question becomes, would enough people pay the subscription to offset the costs? I don't know the answer to that, but suspect it's probably "No" or you'd see proxy operators doing this already.
Re:So is this a /vertisement or a serious rant?
on
Power To the Pop-Ups
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· Score: 1
I thought your hands were more like a big truck, not a series of tubes?
For those who don't understand what the GP is saying let's boil it down to a car analogy (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy): MS was convicted for vehicular homicide. But Apple only has a Segway, and while they broke someone's ankle it's nowhere close to the same crime.
Whether you agree with that ruling or not (and it's obvious you don't), the rationale offered by the court was that restricting political ads, regardless of who's paying for them, is an infringement on freedom of speech. Throwing someone in jail for making something that someone else doesn't want to look at is also an infringement of freedom of speech, so I would hope the court would apply consistency and let the poor guy out (and gut "community standards" at the same time).
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should all hope Bennett doesn't have a private pilot's license.
My kingdom for a mod point! You just summed up in a single sentence what I was going to spend a paragraph explaining. Well done, sir, well done.
The readiness to kill is somewhat lower if you have to be involved face-to-face.
Yes, because wars never existed before the invention of remotely-operated drones. And FSM knows the kings of Europe in the middle ages and Roman consuls never led troops into battle; that would be madness!
The desire for war seems to go away only when humans are fat and comfortable. As long as there's anyone, anywhere, living a marginal existence, war is going to continue being a viable option.
True, but without boots on the ground, it's their word against ours, isn't it? And whom are the locals more likely to believe, the guys who right there telling stories to their face, or the ones situated half a world away?
we need for war to be hell. otherwise we'll just keep doing it for anything, never end them and stop fighting to win(which we've done in IZ. so much for learning from Vietnam).
Doesn't your latter statement negate your former? If we didn't learn the lesson from Vietnam that you have to fight to win, then what makes you think we'll ever learn the lesson not to go to war in the first place?
As brutal as your experience in Iraq may have been, it's no where near as bad as things were in WWII (I'm sure you didn't stack dead Americans like cord wood), WWI (no trench fighting this time), the Civil War (no massed infantry blocks shooting at each other), the English Civil War (some battles had tens of thousands of combatants on both sides, all with pikes stabbing each other), or the Roman-barbarian wars (again, tens of thousands of men in the muck and shit stabbing each other at only two feet away). If we didn't learn from those wars, there's no way we'll learn from this one.
William Tecumseh Sherman observed that "war is hell", and wrote in a letter after the Civil War that he was "tired of war". But that didn't stop him from pursuing a policy of genocide against the Native Americans. If someone like him couldn't learn from his own experiences, what hope does the species have?
First, my bona fides: I've participated in two wars, the Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. By the time my ship got to the gulf in the first one, it was all over. And in the second, I was in a safe command center in Turkey directing air strikes against northern Iraq. So while I'm indirectly responsible for several hundred dead Iraqi troops (maybe a thousand, I really have no way of knowing, I just know I saw a column of trucks, passed the coordinates to a B52, and watched as they were blown up in real time while I sat in air conditioning drinking a diet Coke, not to mention all of the fire-support missions called in by teams on the ground). So I can speak about these drone pilots pretty authoritatively since I did a job very much like theirs.
They are not heroes; not in the least. What they're doing requires no sacrifice on their part. They have a nice, safe, 9-to-5 job, with absolutely no risk of injury beyond carpal tunnel. It may not be fair to call them cowards, unless they were offered the choice of piloting drones or piloting ships that would go in harm's way. But the choice may not have been theirs to make, they may have just been assigned to this duty for any number of reasons. But they are definitely not heroes and should not be labeled as such.
Oh, and for the record, I'm no hero, either.
Since when has fighting a war ever had anything to do with fairness? The whole point is to kill more of the enemy than they kill of your own guys. Anyone who focuses too much on "fairness" in that situation is going to get a lot of his men killed.
...[T]he Middle East isn't Latin America.
Different people, different culture, different values.
I don't think the OP was disputing that, they even said the acts were performed by "theistic fascists" which fits pretty well with your "different culture, different values" comment. If you look at the brand of Islam that the most violent terrorists espouse, it's rooted in military conflict against other religions (even other brands of Islam). One of the primary goals stated by bin Laden in the past is to re-establish the Caliphate and overthrow all Muslim governments around the world.
That said, one should be wary of listening to the words given as motivation for someone's actions. After all, Hitler claimed he invaded the Sudetenland and Poland to "liberate" the Germans living there. Just because a mad man says he's doing something for one reason, doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
I don't think it's accurate to label this guy a "wing nut" (in the sense that he was a right-wing fanatic). His manifesto contains several references to our "broken" health care system, and how the politicians are beholden to insurance companies and that's why we have the problems we do. That isn't exactly a right-wing talking point. He seems more like one of those disaffected loons that gravitate to any and all complaints about society, government, or other people; the kind of person who listens to Alex Jones and thinks he's right about anything. I bet it comes out he was both a Truther and a Birther.
You're forgetting the tax advantages of being part of an employer group. If you buy insurance on your own, you do so with after-tax dollars. If you buy through your employer, you do so with before-tax dollars, reducing your overall tax burden (and that of your employer, since their payroll taxes get a break). The Federal government caused the mess of a health care system we have, it strikes me as absurd to expect them to be able to fix it in any meaningful way.
And the Big Macs will still be edible. Or at least, as edible as they are in our own time.
I wouldn't exactly call Wikipedia a "success." Just because something is popular doesn't mean the world is better off for it to have been made. I submit as proof of concept: 4chan.
Since when is the question "Is the world better off for this?" a criterion for success? Using that metric, it's hard to see how Coca Cola was ever a success. I mean really, is the world better off with sugared drinks?
The only measure for success is, does the enterprise meet the goals set by the founders? Using that metric, both Wikipedia (make information freely available to the world) and 4chan (bring together socially-inept misfits and give them a common forum) are runaway successes.
I've converted my diesel rabbit to run on snake oil.
Gotta love the irony in that one!
Whoever modded this Flamebait never served in the military. Those of us who have know that the military's sole purpose is to kill people and break things. The fact that we, as a nation, have forgotten this important point is why we're failing so much at "nation building" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Let the military kill everyone in their way, then send in aid groups after to do the rebuilding. You wouldn't send the Peace Corps to blow up a bridge, why send the Army to build one?
There's an old saying, nothing focuses the mind like a firing squad. When faced with imminent death, humans are famously adept at coming up with novel solutions to complex problems. To that end, I propose we gather a collection of prominent physicists and place them in a ship capable of accelerating to near-light speed over a period of some years. Put locks on the controls so that they are unable to halt or alter the acceleration, then inform they have X years to come up with a way to avoid being smashed to death by interstellar gasses. Either they come up with a solution and are all saved, or they perish in a fiery ball of glory. Either way, they'll probably all have high schools named after them.
You give two examples of how government interference in the market can be damaging, then proclaim the markets are broken and need governmental interference. Why should anyone take anything else you have to say seriously?
Well, when we have long-term evidence (not short-term anecdotal evidence) that climates aren't changing (15 years is nothing) and a model that explains why all the stuff we're pumping into the atmosphere isn't having an effect, we'll reconsider our theory.
In other words, once it's possible to prove two negatives you'll rethink your position. How is that different from creationists again?
The problem isn't so much the actual research being done, it's the IPCC being lax on the finer details of AGW
How is that not the exact same thing? If the IPCC was lax on this point, what else were they lax on? If we can't trust them to source their data properly in one instance, why in the world would we trust them to do so in others?
If your child is still paying attention at the end of that thought experiment, you know he's a scientist. Buy her a model rocket or a microscope.
And put a lock on the plutonium in the cupboard.
The function of the court system is to interpret the law in such a way that justice is served.
You can make that argument about a common law system, but Italy has a civil law system. In which case you are 100% wrong, the function of the court system there is merely to apply the law as written. Questions of justice don't enter into it.
Wouldn't the proxy service run the ads through its own network, obfuscating the client just like with any other site?
He mentioned that possibility then shot it down because he feared people would share the credentials. Which some people almost certainly would. The question becomes, would enough people pay the subscription to offset the costs? I don't know the answer to that, but suspect it's probably "No" or you'd see proxy operators doing this already.
I thought your hands were more like a big truck, not a series of tubes?
For those who don't understand what the GP is saying let's boil it down to a car analogy (with apologies to BadAnalogyGuy): MS was convicted for vehicular homicide. But Apple only has a Segway, and while they broke someone's ankle it's nowhere close to the same crime.
Whether you agree with that ruling or not (and it's obvious you don't), the rationale offered by the court was that restricting political ads, regardless of who's paying for them, is an infringement on freedom of speech. Throwing someone in jail for making something that someone else doesn't want to look at is also an infringement of freedom of speech, so I would hope the court would apply consistency and let the poor guy out (and gut "community standards" at the same time).