How it has anything to do with the possibility of a planet orbiting another star is an open question
That's easy: Christians hate science and think you're thumbing your nose at God if you pursue studies like this, instead of going to church and giving as much of your money as possible so that they can build athletic centers and buy private jets for their pastors.
air traffic control systems that are in desperate need of upgrades
No, they're not. The Republicans in Congress are currently working on legislation to private air traffic control in the US, so this will be completely fixed very soon./s
A sports stadium is essential infrastructure, unlike the others. That's why the others are usually outsourced to utility monopolies, or left to the Free Market as in the case of communications networks, particularly last-mile internet (and phone and TV) service.
The number is growing: evangelicals' numbers are on the rise, as people from other, more "mainstream" denominations convert. Also, one of those YECs is running for President and is very popular.
I base it on being an American and looking at the people around me. This place is full of fundies. Just go to any "non-denominational" Christian megachurch and listen to what they preach about. And keep in mind, these churches are *growing*, while the "mainstream" liberal sects are literally dying out.
Secondly, look at who we elect. The GOP controls most state governments plus Congress. One of its more popular candidates is a young-earth Creationist (and many of the others are likely Creationists too).
No, in fact the Wikipedia article says something about how the Casimir Effect might be able to be utilized for generating negative mass. But still, it's a little beyond current physics at best, and definitely not "doable". It may or may not be possible at all, we just don't know yet. We still don't even know if the EM drive works or is bunk; we'll probably have to scale it up and send one out in space to try it out, since our current tests aren't conclusive since (last I heard) the thrust measured is less than the noise threshold of the sensors we have.
Oh please: yes, the readership of WSJ and Forbes are much higher (for good reason: people like me read Forbes, since it shows up on Google News and I don't immediately ignore it the way I do Breitbart, even though I keep in mind the source and its bias when I do read it).
However, the actual content of those sites is far less extreme than BB or WND. WSJ/F are somewhat right-wing, and in a mainstream corporatist way. BB/WND are extremist right-wing, in a conspiracy-theorist and fundie Christian way.
Sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy, or something like that.
Basically, you're advocating for a very large, additional tax on people in the local community, so that some people can get rich, and then a small portion of their takings may be spent back in the local community.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just levy a 10% local sales tax on cars instead? (In addition to the regular state sales tax) That way, a lot more money would be spend in the local community, rather than just on a giant mansion for the dealership owner, plus his personal yacht or whatever.
As for rural areas, aren't rural people already having the problem of having much less disposable income in general? Why do you want to stick them with a giant tax for buying a car?
The problem is that listening to other people is mostly a waste of time, because so many peoples' views are just plain nuts.
For instance, you mention "right winger" with scary-quotes. That's a real thing; just look at all the right-wing sites like breitbart.com and wnd.com. Listening to their views is a complete waste of time, because they all think that FEMA is building concentration camps and that martial law is going to be declared soon and we'll have a dictatorship. Many of them also think the Rapture is going to happen any day now. Tell me, why should I listen to the views of people who are completely delusional?
It's no different on the left, it's just the issues that are different, but the craziness is the same.
Now you're moving the goalposts and making wild accusations. Either come up with real examples or shut the fuck up.
Why didn't they sign up like him? Maybe because they have a medical problem, they're too fat (like a lot of rural Americans), they got their 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant and are working at the local Walmart to support their family... that is just plain stupid.
The OP was talking about the National Guard assaulting **white**, gun-owning rural Americans, not black people. The Kent State massacre was about black people. Black people in this country are not rural gun owners for the most part.
Not only that, but things have changed since then. The NG and full-time military have a huge number of black people in them (alongside the typical rural white conservative gun-lovers). It was one thing to get a bunch of racist white people in the 60s to use weapons against an unliked minority (black people screaming for their rights), it's another thing to get a bunch of black people to use weapons against their cousins.
Against a bunch of Muslims, maybe; they're a rather unliked minority now, and most of them aren't even natural-born (they're mostly immigrants), so it's easy to marginalize them. But white rednecks and black people? Forget it. Those are the two main populations the military draws from.
You really don't understand American culture or the American military at all, do you?
The Nazis worked because they dehumanized the Jews, which were an unliked and relatively small minority in the country at the time. The Jews were also not part of the Wehrmacht.
In the US, who do you think the rural people with all the guns are, some unliked minority? And who do you think is the population that the military draws from? There's a huge overlap: white, rural gun-lovers. There's also a very large contingent of black people in the military. So the idea that the military would willingly go against either population is pretty ridiculous, but especially the idea that they'd round up and murder their own rural cousins in small towns across the heartland, since that's where so many military servicemembers hail from. The idea is just plain stupid.
If you really think you're going to convince some gun-loving white boy from rural Alabama that his hometown friends, who he goes hunting and "muddin'" with on his leave time when he's vising his family, are all "terrorist sympathizers", you are seriously deluded.
What do you expect from a country where people glorify the wild west.
Actually, from what little I've read about the "wild west", it was actually very common for town sheriffs to require everyone to check their guns at the police station while they were in town, instead of being allowed to keep them or walk around with them in public.
If the US government chose to disarm the people and establish a true tyranny (not a "mamma took my playstation" kind but a real one) there is absolutely nothing even a town full of gun toters will accomplish against the national guard armed with body armor, drones, tanks, etc... let's not forget the fact that the guard is properly trained, not a bunch of rednecks who pretend to be soldiers in their back yards.
The main problem with this idea is the notion that the national guard, who are a bunch of citizen-soldiers (they're not full-time professionals), would willingly assault and oppress their own countrymen this way. It's one thing to get soldiers to attack some foreigners, because they're been demonized, dehumanized, and made out to be an "enemy". It's another thing entirely to get them to attack their own people. The only way this would work is if the people were somehow made out to be rebels, but if it was plainly obvious that the government was indeed instituting a tyranny (suppose a President declared himself dictator), there's just no way the military is going to go along with that.
Anyway, I was mainly laughing about the conception that "middle east" == Sahara... or that Saudi Arabia is in the Sahara.
Yeah, that's some serious geographical ignorance there.
As for Cyprus, that seems like a pretty big stretch. It's not really that far from the middle east (as Americans understand it), but it's not really considered part of it just like Malta isn't really considered part of North Africa. Maybe they're thinking that Turkey is part of the middle east (the Asian side), and Cyprus is half-owned by Turkey.
A lot of us liked her voice. If you have a problem with her voice, perhaps you have the problem.
No, you're the one with the problem, because apparently there's a lot more of us than there are of you.
Do you remember when Picard was introduced? Super-asshole. Authoritarian, hated children, curt, short. Everyone loves him now
That's because all the characters in the beginning of the 1st season of that show totally sucked. It took two seasons for things to really settle into place, and most of that was because Rick Berman took over and sorted it all out, and Maurice Hurley left the show. Seasons 3+ are what everyone remembers about that show. I guess you're also forgetting how annoying Wesley was, how lame Data was, how forgettable Argyle was, how frazzled Deanna was, etc. All the characters were bad at first.
Yeah. It's because they have issues with strong women in charge.
Yes, that's correct. And no, Libya is not generally considered "middle east", that's definitely "north Africa". Basically, from the American geopolitical perspective, the "middle east" is everything immediately surrounding Israel, but only going as far east as Iran. Even Afghanistan isn't really part of it.
It's terminology. Go read the Wikipedia article about "Middle East". In America, we consider that region (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and also Egypt) to be "Middle East". It doesn't matter what you consider "east" or "middle" or "near", that's the term and that's what it means here.
After all, why do you guys call yourself "Europe" instead of "Asia"? Or "Eurasia"? It's all one land mass. You do it because that's the convention, and we use conventions so that people understand each other.
I don't know what they call it in the UK (and other European countries are irrelevant because they don't use English as the primary language), but here in America why do we have "driveways" that we park on, and "parkways" that we drive on? Who knows. But it's the convention, so that's what we use. I imagine every language has words like this that don't really make that much sense, unless you thoroughly research the etymology of the word to see the historical accidents which caused it to be used that way.
Then again, I liked the Xindi arc as well. I can't stand episodic series.
Then we have rather different tastes. One of the things I like about TNG is that I can just browse through the episodes on Netflix and pick one mostly at random and have fun watching it, without having to worry about keeping up with some story arc, and the only exception is if it's one of the rare 2 or 3-parters like "Unification" or the one with Mark Twain. Some arc shows are good, like Game of Thrones, but I'm sorry, the Xindi story just wasn't that good.
The other thing I didn't like about the Xindi arc was the militarism--the show went from "let's make friends and explore" to "let's go seek out these guys and utterly destroy them before they destroy us". It just wasn't much fun, and was too much of an obvious parallel to 9/11, except that the Xindi's motivation made no sense at all.
Well, no, I do understand the hate for Janeway. What I don't understand is the irrational hatred I see pretty much everywhere for a woman who isn't a supermodel to be top dog.
A woman doesn't need to be a supermodel to be top dog, in fact that makes it less believable. The problem with Janeway was just her grating voice and personality. For a counterexample, go back to TNG's 1st season episode "Conspiracy": at the beginning of the show, Picard meets up with some other Starfleet captains who he calls "Starfleet's finest". One of them was a black woman. I don't know who the actress was now, but she would have been perfect for a role like that. Strong, capable of command, but not annoying.
As for Hillary, a lot of progressives who don't like her were pushing for Elizabeth Warren to run until she said no and Bernie stepped up. Warren is no supermodel either. And Sarah Palin was generally considered very attractive, and she was an airhead. Point is, it's not looks, it's the personality. Maybe you liked her, but a lot of people just didn't like Janeway, and it wasn't because she wasn't a supermodel like Seven.
Slashdot Mirror
How it has anything to do with the possibility of a planet orbiting another star is an open question
That's easy: Christians hate science and think you're thumbing your nose at God if you pursue studies like this, instead of going to church and giving as much of your money as possible so that they can build athletic centers and buy private jets for their pastors.
air traffic control systems that are in desperate need of upgrades
No, they're not. The Republicans in Congress are currently working on legislation to private air traffic control in the US, so this will be completely fixed very soon. /s
Then you have your priorities screwed up.
A sports stadium is essential infrastructure, unlike the others. That's why the others are usually outsourced to utility monopolies, or left to the Free Market as in the case of communications networks, particularly last-mile internet (and phone and TV) service.
(/s)
The number is growing: evangelicals' numbers are on the rise, as people from other, more "mainstream" denominations convert. Also, one of those YECs is running for President and is very popular.
I base it on being an American and looking at the people around me. This place is full of fundies. Just go to any "non-denominational" Christian megachurch and listen to what they preach about. And keep in mind, these churches are *growing*, while the "mainstream" liberal sects are literally dying out.
Secondly, look at who we elect. The GOP controls most state governments plus Congress. One of its more popular candidates is a young-earth Creationist (and many of the others are likely Creationists too).
No, in fact the Wikipedia article says something about how the Casimir Effect might be able to be utilized for generating negative mass. But still, it's a little beyond current physics at best, and definitely not "doable". It may or may not be possible at all, we just don't know yet. We still don't even know if the EM drive works or is bunk; we'll probably have to scale it up and send one out in space to try it out, since our current tests aren't conclusive since (last I heard) the thrust measured is less than the noise threshold of the sensors we have.
Yep, this same shit happens to me too. I'm either a right-wingnut or a leftist/communist depending on who's responding.
Oh please: yes, the readership of WSJ and Forbes are much higher (for good reason: people like me read Forbes, since it shows up on Google News and I don't immediately ignore it the way I do Breitbart, even though I keep in mind the source and its bias when I do read it).
However, the actual content of those sites is far less extreme than BB or WND. WSJ/F are somewhat right-wing, and in a mainstream corporatist way. BB/WND are extremist right-wing, in a conspiracy-theorist and fundie Christian way.
Sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy, or something like that.
Basically, you're advocating for a very large, additional tax on people in the local community, so that some people can get rich, and then a small portion of their takings may be spent back in the local community.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just levy a 10% local sales tax on cars instead? (In addition to the regular state sales tax) That way, a lot more money would be spend in the local community, rather than just on a giant mansion for the dealership owner, plus his personal yacht or whatever.
As for rural areas, aren't rural people already having the problem of having much less disposable income in general? Why do you want to stick them with a giant tax for buying a car?
The Alcubierre drive requires negative mass. That might be a bit of a problem.
The problem is that listening to other people is mostly a waste of time, because so many peoples' views are just plain nuts.
For instance, you mention "right winger" with scary-quotes. That's a real thing; just look at all the right-wing sites like breitbart.com and wnd.com. Listening to their views is a complete waste of time, because they all think that FEMA is building concentration camps and that martial law is going to be declared soon and we'll have a dictatorship. Many of them also think the Rapture is going to happen any day now. Tell me, why should I listen to the views of people who are completely delusional?
It's no different on the left, it's just the issues that are different, but the craziness is the same.
No, but most of them in the USA *are* anti-science and do believe the earth is 6500 years old.
Yep, that too.
Fuck off, I'm not enabling dozens of trackers and other bullshit, which is the whole problem with 21st century web browsing.
Only a blank page.
No, I'm not going to enable Javascript on two dozen sites to see this shit. Post a real link or STFU.
Now you're moving the goalposts and making wild accusations. Either come up with real examples or shut the fuck up.
Why didn't they sign up like him? Maybe because they have a medical problem, they're too fat (like a lot of rural Americans), they got their 17-year-old girlfriend pregnant and are working at the local Walmart to support their family... that is just plain stupid.
What do "Muslims/liberals/homos/SJWs" have to do with this? Go back a couple of messages: we're talking about white rednecks with guns:
there is absolutely nothing even a town full of gun toters will accomplish against the national guard armed with body armor, drones, tanks, etc
Could you get the military to oppress Muslims? Quite likely. Their own family members from small-town America? Never.
The ignorance that Slashdot posters seem to have of American culture really astounds me.
The OP was talking about the National Guard assaulting **white**, gun-owning rural Americans, not black people. The Kent State massacre was about black people. Black people in this country are not rural gun owners for the most part.
Not only that, but things have changed since then. The NG and full-time military have a huge number of black people in them (alongside the typical rural white conservative gun-lovers). It was one thing to get a bunch of racist white people in the 60s to use weapons against an unliked minority (black people screaming for their rights), it's another thing to get a bunch of black people to use weapons against their cousins.
Against a bunch of Muslims, maybe; they're a rather unliked minority now, and most of them aren't even natural-born (they're mostly immigrants), so it's easy to marginalize them. But white rednecks and black people? Forget it. Those are the two main populations the military draws from.
You really don't understand American culture or the American military at all, do you?
The Nazis worked because they dehumanized the Jews, which were an unliked and relatively small minority in the country at the time. The Jews were also not part of the Wehrmacht.
In the US, who do you think the rural people with all the guns are, some unliked minority? And who do you think is the population that the military draws from? There's a huge overlap: white, rural gun-lovers. There's also a very large contingent of black people in the military. So the idea that the military would willingly go against either population is pretty ridiculous, but especially the idea that they'd round up and murder their own rural cousins in small towns across the heartland, since that's where so many military servicemembers hail from. The idea is just plain stupid.
If you really think you're going to convince some gun-loving white boy from rural Alabama that his hometown friends, who he goes hunting and "muddin'" with on his leave time when he's vising his family, are all "terrorist sympathizers", you are seriously deluded.
What do you expect from a country where people glorify the wild west.
Actually, from what little I've read about the "wild west", it was actually very common for town sheriffs to require everyone to check their guns at the police station while they were in town, instead of being allowed to keep them or walk around with them in public.
If the US government chose to disarm the people and establish a true tyranny (not a "mamma took my playstation" kind but a real one) there is absolutely nothing even a town full of gun toters will accomplish against the national guard armed with body armor, drones, tanks, etc... let's not forget the fact that the guard is properly trained, not a bunch of rednecks who pretend to be soldiers in their back yards.
The main problem with this idea is the notion that the national guard, who are a bunch of citizen-soldiers (they're not full-time professionals), would willingly assault and oppress their own countrymen this way. It's one thing to get soldiers to attack some foreigners, because they're been demonized, dehumanized, and made out to be an "enemy". It's another thing entirely to get them to attack their own people. The only way this would work is if the people were somehow made out to be rebels, but if it was plainly obvious that the government was indeed instituting a tyranny (suppose a President declared himself dictator), there's just no way the military is going to go along with that.
Anyway, I was mainly laughing about the conception that "middle east" == Sahara ... or that Saudi Arabia is in the Sahara.
Yeah, that's some serious geographical ignorance there.
As for Cyprus, that seems like a pretty big stretch. It's not really that far from the middle east (as Americans understand it), but it's not really considered part of it just like Malta isn't really considered part of North Africa. Maybe they're thinking that Turkey is part of the middle east (the Asian side), and Cyprus is half-owned by Turkey.
but people hate her.
A lot of us liked her voice. If you have a problem with her voice, perhaps you have the problem.
No, you're the one with the problem, because apparently there's a lot more of us than there are of you.
Do you remember when Picard was introduced? Super-asshole. Authoritarian, hated children, curt, short. Everyone loves him now
That's because all the characters in the beginning of the 1st season of that show totally sucked. It took two seasons for things to really settle into place, and most of that was because Rick Berman took over and sorted it all out, and Maurice Hurley left the show. Seasons 3+ are what everyone remembers about that show. I guess you're also forgetting how annoying Wesley was, how lame Data was, how forgettable Argyle was, how frazzled Deanna was, etc. All the characters were bad at first.
Yeah. It's because they have issues with strong women in charge.
Believe whatever you want, I really don't care.
Yes, that's correct. And no, Libya is not generally considered "middle east", that's definitely "north Africa". Basically, from the American geopolitical perspective, the "middle east" is everything immediately surrounding Israel, but only going as far east as Iran. Even Afghanistan isn't really part of it.
It's terminology. Go read the Wikipedia article about "Middle East". In America, we consider that region (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and also Egypt) to be "Middle East". It doesn't matter what you consider "east" or "middle" or "near", that's the term and that's what it means here.
After all, why do you guys call yourself "Europe" instead of "Asia"? Or "Eurasia"? It's all one land mass. You do it because that's the convention, and we use conventions so that people understand each other.
I don't know what they call it in the UK (and other European countries are irrelevant because they don't use English as the primary language), but here in America why do we have "driveways" that we park on, and "parkways" that we drive on? Who knows. But it's the convention, so that's what we use. I imagine every language has words like this that don't really make that much sense, unless you thoroughly research the etymology of the word to see the historical accidents which caused it to be used that way.
Then again, I liked the Xindi arc as well. I can't stand episodic series.
Then we have rather different tastes. One of the things I like about TNG is that I can just browse through the episodes on Netflix and pick one mostly at random and have fun watching it, without having to worry about keeping up with some story arc, and the only exception is if it's one of the rare 2 or 3-parters like "Unification" or the one with Mark Twain. Some arc shows are good, like Game of Thrones, but I'm sorry, the Xindi story just wasn't that good.
The other thing I didn't like about the Xindi arc was the militarism--the show went from "let's make friends and explore" to "let's go seek out these guys and utterly destroy them before they destroy us". It just wasn't much fun, and was too much of an obvious parallel to 9/11, except that the Xindi's motivation made no sense at all.
Well, no, I do understand the hate for Janeway. What I don't understand is the irrational hatred I see pretty much everywhere for a woman who isn't a supermodel to be top dog.
A woman doesn't need to be a supermodel to be top dog, in fact that makes it less believable. The problem with Janeway was just her grating voice and personality. For a counterexample, go back to TNG's 1st season episode "Conspiracy": at the beginning of the show, Picard meets up with some other Starfleet captains who he calls "Starfleet's finest". One of them was a black woman. I don't know who the actress was now, but she would have been perfect for a role like that. Strong, capable of command, but not annoying.
As for Hillary, a lot of progressives who don't like her were pushing for Elizabeth Warren to run until she said no and Bernie stepped up. Warren is no supermodel either. And Sarah Palin was generally considered very attractive, and she was an airhead. Point is, it's not looks, it's the personality. Maybe you liked her, but a lot of people just didn't like Janeway, and it wasn't because she wasn't a supermodel like Seven.
Let's see if I can post logged in this time.
Yeah, WTF is going on with Slashdot anyway?