Also, a significant amount of the weirdness with LDS is in the far past, now that Smith and Young are long dead, and they (finally) stopped saying that black people are subhuman. Most of CoS's weirdness and evilness is still fairly recent.
The Mormons have their problems too, namely how poorly those who leave the religion are treated, but that doesn't seem to have much, if anything, to do with the Church at all, just their society in general. It's much like how, here in the rest of America, back in the 50s when most people were Protestant, if someone came out as an atheist, they'd be shunned by their coworkers, family, friends, probably employers as well. This shunning wasn't directed by any church or preacher, it's just how the closed-minded people of the time acted.
The Philippines were over a century ago. The world doesn't seem to look too kindly on that kind of colonization any more. Don't forget, the European powers tried colonization in Africa around the same timeframe, and it was a complete disaster, and most of Africa is still a complete mess because of it.
IMO, the best policy is to leave those places alone, to their own devices. Give them access to information from the outside world so they can learn the ways of developed countries if they want, give them access to a certain amount of fair trade, but that's it. If they want to change, they will.
It'd be even easier if they retrained them on Linux Mint with KDE. Out of the box, KDE already looks and works a lot like Win7; someone familiar with WinXP/7 would have an easy time switching over.
That's ridiculous. If the margin is that close, there's no way to know who's going to win until you actually count the votes (and even then it'll be contested because it's so close).
In states like Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, etc., it's a foregone conclusion that the Republican candidate will win, so a vote for the Democrat candidate doesn't count; you might as well vote for the Green party because they're just as likely to get elected in those states. In Michigan, the opposite is true, so a vote for the Republican candidate is ineffectual there. It's only the swing states where your vote really counts, because the elections are close there and swing back and forth from election to election. The chances of a large portion of the Mississippi population suddenly deciding to vote for Obama are so ridiculously remote that we can accurately predict the outcome in that state, but the same is not true in Ohio.
The more populous states get more electoral votes, but the ratio of electoral votes per citizen in those states is significantly lower. The Founders designed the system that way intentionally, so that smaller states had more power than larger states; the states with the lowest population have disproportionately more power, so a Rhode Islander's vote counts more than a Californian's.
Might want to check up on news results for Syria, I don't think support is nearly as popular as you think it is.
You obviously know nothing of the situation there. Syria's government does have popular support; they wouldn't exist otherwise. It's just not the whole population that supports them. Just like Iraq, there's different ethnic groups there, and they don't like each other very much. The groups allied with the government support that government, and are happily fighting the "rebels" to keep that government in power. The rebels are groups which don't like the government, and don't like those other ethnic groups. When you have different ethnic groups in a country that hate each other and struggle for power over each other, you get what we call a "civil war". We saw the same thing over and over in Iraq, and it's still going on there. In case you don't recall, Saddam was well-liked by his people (the Sunnis). He just wasn't liked by the other groups (Shias and Kurds) that his people oppressed.
I dunno, you tell me- you're the only one who suggested that as a "solution".
No, that's the standard US solution, and that's the solution you imply in your previous post where you say "something needs to be done". If you meant something else, then spell out exactly what your solution is.
Complaining is the nature of the beast in a democratically-elected government. But there's a big difference between complaining because you don't like the 10 people on the ballot versus complaining that you don't like the 2 people on the ballot and the system which makes it so the "third parties" don't have a realistic shot at winning because of the way Plurality voting works.
Simple: it'd cost me $900 to be curious. I can find a lot of other things to satisfy my curiosity that don't cost $900. That's half a month rent (or even one month or more for a lot of people), or probably two car payments. This isn't quite the same as buying a $29.99 router so you can figure out how to install OpenWrt on it, unless you're loaded. And if you're loaded, you're probably not a software developer by trade; we don't make so much money that we can afford to buy $900 toys on a whim.
If I see the practice of artificially restricting what software the purchaser of hardware can run as heinous, then why wouldn't I try to crack the DRM?
Because you have to put $900 in Microsoft's pocket for the privilege of trying.
If you were somehow getting the thing for free, I could understand your reasoning. Maybe if the thing only cost $49 (and was a loss leader), I could understand your reasoning as well. But it's not free, it's not under $100, it's not even close. There's a lot of better things I could do with $900 than buy a piece of crippled hardware hoping to get Linux running on it and show MS that "DRM is just a waste of resources". Even if you do get Linux running on the thing, so that many more people could shell out $900 to do the same thing, Microsoft will just be laughing all the way to the bank.
If you really have that much spare time and money, why not work on something more productive, like fixing some of the many outstanding problems and deficiencies that Linux is still plagued by? There's lots of other hardware out there that Linux runs sub-optimally on; go buy some of that HW and fix the problems.
BS. The Citizens are perfectly happy with that menu, and will happily argue the virtues of the candidates offered, with very few people (who tend to congregate on places like Slashdot) actually complaining about the lack of choices.
Irrelevant. Why aren't there a bunch of people trying to put Linux on iPads? I don't see any Slashdot articles about that, so why all the interest on putting Linux on MS Surface? It doesn't matter what millions of people do; that doesn't mean we need to figure out how to install Linux on it. I don't see Linux hackers putting tons of energy into trying to get Linux to run (natively) on all the Apple hardware out there, despite how well it sells.
Not a problem: in 20 years, the USA will not exist in its present form, as its empire will have crumbled, and the nation itself will probably have broken apart just like the Soviet Union did 20 years ago. The actions of some court in backwards Texas will not affect anyone outside that region.
Why? This isn't some piece of hardware from a hardware company like Samsung or Dell or Asus or Acer or Lenovo; it's from Microsoft themselves. If you don't like the OS that's loaded on Surface, don't buy it. There's tons of tablets from companies like Samsung that you can run Linux on if you want, which don't employ such measures to keep non-MS OSes off. Purchasing this tablet is only going to put money in the hands of MS anyway, moreso than buying an Android tablet.
I'm sure that all those other people believe the exact same thing about their own opinions. Nearly everyone thinks their opinions are more valid than everyone else's.
What lie? There's no lie there, that's exactly how the Electoral College system works (in conjunction with first-past-the-post or Plurality voting systems).
In case you weren't paying attention, no, I'm referring to the election scheme where voters in any given US state only elect the Electors who elect the President, and worse, it's a simple majority, so that if Obama wins California by 51%, for instance, he gets all the Electoral votes for that whole state, rather than a proportion of them. Even better would be to just eliminate the Electoral College altogether, so that any US Citizens' vote counts the same as any other, rather than people from Rhode Island and Wyoming getting a bigger vote than people from California or Texas.
The only part of your "they like freedom too" idea is that if you look, the governments these people have set up after Arab Spring are largely even more fundamentalist and anti-equal rights than the ones they replaced. So no, they don't like freedom, at least not for everyone. They simply set up governments which more accurately reflected the cultural mores of their people.
500 years ago in Europe, people did like the iron rule of the Church and the burning of witches. That was changed because the attitudes of European people changed over time, not because a bunch of invaders came and forced their own values on them. In fact, a bunch of invaders did come; they were called Moors, and they took over the Iberian peninsula for a while, but were eventually thrown out. Their culture and values were mostly not adopted by the locals.
No one's (at least I'm not) saying that Islamic countries' human rights records are OK. I'm disagreeing with the ridiculous notion that invading them, slaughtering them by the thousands, and then forcing puppet governments on them is going to somehow turn them into believers of Western values. We've been trying that for decades, and it hasn't worked. Iraq is still an extremely violent country right now, far worse than it was under Saddam (who again, the US installed into power).
For one thing, many women do like it this way. They're taught this shit from the time they're born, so a lot of them believe it. It's sorta like Stockholm Syndrome, except worse when you're taught that you're good for nothing besides making babies from the time you're old enough to talk.
And of those who are smart enough to realize it's all bullshit, what are they going to do? Women are smaller and weaker than men. If they refuse to let their men have sex with them, they're going to be beaten to a pulp or worse. We used to do that here in America too, and the police were complicit. In some areas (Arizona City), they still are.
Women have zero power in those regions of the world. Women only have the power they do here in the West because society at large allows them to have that power, thanks to laws and a society that believes (more or less) in gender equality and equal rights for all. It took us centuries to achieve this; you can't force societal values like this on another society by force, they have to evolve it themselves. We've been trying to push our values on many places in the world like this for decades, and it's only made things worse. Iran used to be a very progressive place, probably the most progressive in the entire Middle East. Then their democratically-elected leaders did something to piss off the US government (didn't want to give them the best prices on oil), so the CIA overthrew them and installed the Shah, who was a brutal dictator. So much for Western values of equality and justice, huh? Well the Iranians got pissed off at this, overthrew the Shah (which the US is still mad about), and installed a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. This is what happens when people react to outside interference: they become extremists. The exact same thing happened in Afghanistan, which also was a rather progressive place with pretty advanced women's rights (for the region, compared to now), until the Soviets invaded. The Islamic extremism in that region of the world is entirely the fault of the USA and the USSR.
You still haven't answered how you're going to enforce these laws. In a country where the laws require a raped woman to have 4 male witnesses, how do you think you're going to enforce your new Western laws? The locals will not stand for it, and will not help you. We have similar problems here in our inner cities where the minorities will never talk to the cops; it's basically anarchy in those places as a result. You can't have effective policing without help from the community unless you erect a totalitarian police state, and that requires enormous resources. And where are we going to get people to be police in all these countries that we now have to conquer? It's not like we're going to have tons of Westerners lining up to go live in Saudi Arabia and Iran and be policemen there, living among the locals, learning their language, and enforcing unpopular Western laws. This is the same problem every occupying power has: it takes a LOT of resources to occupy a country and force its people to the occupier's will. Or are you one of those morons who really believed the Iraqi people would greet the American invaders as liberators?
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that things are like this in those countries because the people in those countries like it that way.
The "civilized world" has far fewer people than the rest of the world. Are you saying that your opinion on things is more valid than everyone else's? Who made you god? If the "civilized world" decided to invade every country where some minority was being oppressed (even if that means all females in that country), they'd end up having to kill most of humanity. How else are you going to enforce your new minority-protecting laws anyway? You'd have to have a policeman for every two people out there; that's clearly impractical, so the only way to enforce your laws is to kill all the oppressors, which probably means killing all men. Plus, what are you going to do in the many cases where the oppressed minorities are themselves oppressors of some other minority (e.g. oppressed Muslim groups themselves oppress the women in their ranks)? Finally, what are you going to do about all the oppressed minorities in the "civilized world" nations? These nations haven't cleaned their own houses yet; how can they tell others how to run theirs?
It doesn't matter if you vote or not; you're a Citizen, so the government is your responsibility, just like Arab countries' governments are those citizens' responsibilities, and when they got sick enough of them, they rose up and overthrew them. If you don't like your government, it's your responsibility to overthrow it.
No, not really. It depends on which state he was in. If he was in a Red state, he effectively voted for Obama; in a Blue state, he effectively voted for Romney. In either state, if it wasn't close to being a swing state, it really didn't matter, his vote wouldn't have affected the results anyway.
Regardless, it's the fault of US Citizens that this ridiculous election scheme persists.
So you want to what? Invade and install puppet governments? Yeah, that really embodies the ideals of freedom and self-determination, doesn't it?
The governments in these countries exist because they have popular support. Very few governments exist without popular support from their people; usually, the only ones that don't are ones which have military and/or financial support from outside powers. For those without outside nations propping them up (like the Shah in Iran), they usually don't last very long, as the people get sick of things and overthrow that government and install their own (just as the Shah was overthrown and replaced with Iran's current theocratic government).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, a significant amount of the weirdness with LDS is in the far past, now that Smith and Young are long dead, and they (finally) stopped saying that black people are subhuman. Most of CoS's weirdness and evilness is still fairly recent.
The Mormons have their problems too, namely how poorly those who leave the religion are treated, but that doesn't seem to have much, if anything, to do with the Church at all, just their society in general. It's much like how, here in the rest of America, back in the 50s when most people were Protestant, if someone came out as an atheist, they'd be shunned by their coworkers, family, friends, probably employers as well. This shunning wasn't directed by any church or preacher, it's just how the closed-minded people of the time acted.
The Philippines were over a century ago. The world doesn't seem to look too kindly on that kind of colonization any more. Don't forget, the European powers tried colonization in Africa around the same timeframe, and it was a complete disaster, and most of Africa is still a complete mess because of it.
IMO, the best policy is to leave those places alone, to their own devices. Give them access to information from the outside world so they can learn the ways of developed countries if they want, give them access to a certain amount of fair trade, but that's it. If they want to change, they will.
It'd be even easier if they retrained them on Linux Mint with KDE. Out of the box, KDE already looks and works a lot like Win7; someone familiar with WinXP/7 would have an easy time switching over.
That's ridiculous. If the margin is that close, there's no way to know who's going to win until you actually count the votes (and even then it'll be contested because it's so close).
In states like Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, etc., it's a foregone conclusion that the Republican candidate will win, so a vote for the Democrat candidate doesn't count; you might as well vote for the Green party because they're just as likely to get elected in those states. In Michigan, the opposite is true, so a vote for the Republican candidate is ineffectual there. It's only the swing states where your vote really counts, because the elections are close there and swing back and forth from election to election. The chances of a large portion of the Mississippi population suddenly deciding to vote for Obama are so ridiculously remote that we can accurately predict the outcome in that state, but the same is not true in Ohio.
The more populous states get more electoral votes, but the ratio of electoral votes per citizen in those states is significantly lower. The Founders designed the system that way intentionally, so that smaller states had more power than larger states; the states with the lowest population have disproportionately more power, so a Rhode Islander's vote counts more than a Californian's.
Ah thanks, that explains the discrepancy. I was just going off the figure that I saw in another post here in this discussion.
Might want to check up on news results for Syria, I don't think support is nearly as popular as you think it is.
You obviously know nothing of the situation there. Syria's government does have popular support; they wouldn't exist otherwise. It's just not the whole population that supports them. Just like Iraq, there's different ethnic groups there, and they don't like each other very much. The groups allied with the government support that government, and are happily fighting the "rebels" to keep that government in power. The rebels are groups which don't like the government, and don't like those other ethnic groups. When you have different ethnic groups in a country that hate each other and struggle for power over each other, you get what we call a "civil war". We saw the same thing over and over in Iraq, and it's still going on there. In case you don't recall, Saddam was well-liked by his people (the Sunnis). He just wasn't liked by the other groups (Shias and Kurds) that his people oppressed.
I dunno, you tell me- you're the only one who suggested that as a "solution".
No, that's the standard US solution, and that's the solution you imply in your previous post where you say "something needs to be done". If you meant something else, then spell out exactly what your solution is.
Complaining is the nature of the beast in a democratically-elected government. But there's a big difference between complaining because you don't like the 10 people on the ballot versus complaining that you don't like the 2 people on the ballot and the system which makes it so the "third parties" don't have a realistic shot at winning because of the way Plurality voting works.
Why would you be so against that?
Simple: it'd cost me $900 to be curious. I can find a lot of other things to satisfy my curiosity that don't cost $900. That's half a month rent (or even one month or more for a lot of people), or probably two car payments. This isn't quite the same as buying a $29.99 router so you can figure out how to install OpenWrt on it, unless you're loaded. And if you're loaded, you're probably not a software developer by trade; we don't make so much money that we can afford to buy $900 toys on a whim.
If I see the practice of artificially restricting what software the purchaser of hardware can run as heinous, then why wouldn't I try to crack the DRM?
Because you have to put $900 in Microsoft's pocket for the privilege of trying.
If you were somehow getting the thing for free, I could understand your reasoning. Maybe if the thing only cost $49 (and was a loss leader), I could understand your reasoning as well. But it's not free, it's not under $100, it's not even close. There's a lot of better things I could do with $900 than buy a piece of crippled hardware hoping to get Linux running on it and show MS that "DRM is just a waste of resources". Even if you do get Linux running on the thing, so that many more people could shell out $900 to do the same thing, Microsoft will just be laughing all the way to the bank.
If you really have that much spare time and money, why not work on something more productive, like fixing some of the many outstanding problems and deficiencies that Linux is still plagued by? There's lots of other hardware out there that Linux runs sub-optimally on; go buy some of that HW and fix the problems.
BS. The Citizens are perfectly happy with that menu, and will happily argue the virtues of the candidates offered, with very few people (who tend to congregate on places like Slashdot) actually complaining about the lack of choices.
Irrelevant. Why aren't there a bunch of people trying to put Linux on iPads? I don't see any Slashdot articles about that, so why all the interest on putting Linux on MS Surface? It doesn't matter what millions of people do; that doesn't mean we need to figure out how to install Linux on it. I don't see Linux hackers putting tons of energy into trying to get Linux to run (natively) on all the Apple hardware out there, despite how well it sells.
Not a problem: in 20 years, the USA will not exist in its present form, as its empire will have crumbled, and the nation itself will probably have broken apart just like the Soviet Union did 20 years ago. The actions of some court in backwards Texas will not affect anyone outside that region.
Why? This isn't some piece of hardware from a hardware company like Samsung or Dell or Asus or Acer or Lenovo; it's from Microsoft themselves. If you don't like the OS that's loaded on Surface, don't buy it. There's tons of tablets from companies like Samsung that you can run Linux on if you want, which don't employ such measures to keep non-MS OSes off. Purchasing this tablet is only going to put money in the hands of MS anyway, moreso than buying an Android tablet.
I'm sure that all those other people believe the exact same thing about their own opinions. Nearly everyone thinks their opinions are more valid than everyone else's.
What lie? There's no lie there, that's exactly how the Electoral College system works (in conjunction with first-past-the-post or Plurality voting systems).
In case you weren't paying attention, no, I'm referring to the election scheme where voters in any given US state only elect the Electors who elect the President, and worse, it's a simple majority, so that if Obama wins California by 51%, for instance, he gets all the Electoral votes for that whole state, rather than a proportion of them. Even better would be to just eliminate the Electoral College altogether, so that any US Citizens' vote counts the same as any other, rather than people from Rhode Island and Wyoming getting a bigger vote than people from California or Texas.
The only part of your "they like freedom too" idea is that if you look, the governments these people have set up after Arab Spring are largely even more fundamentalist and anti-equal rights than the ones they replaced. So no, they don't like freedom, at least not for everyone. They simply set up governments which more accurately reflected the cultural mores of their people.
500 years ago in Europe, people did like the iron rule of the Church and the burning of witches. That was changed because the attitudes of European people changed over time, not because a bunch of invaders came and forced their own values on them. In fact, a bunch of invaders did come; they were called Moors, and they took over the Iberian peninsula for a while, but were eventually thrown out. Their culture and values were mostly not adopted by the locals.
No one's (at least I'm not) saying that Islamic countries' human rights records are OK. I'm disagreeing with the ridiculous notion that invading them, slaughtering them by the thousands, and then forcing puppet governments on them is going to somehow turn them into believers of Western values. We've been trying that for decades, and it hasn't worked. Iraq is still an extremely violent country right now, far worse than it was under Saddam (who again, the US installed into power).
You're really naive if you believe that shit.
For one thing, many women do like it this way. They're taught this shit from the time they're born, so a lot of them believe it. It's sorta like Stockholm Syndrome, except worse when you're taught that you're good for nothing besides making babies from the time you're old enough to talk.
And of those who are smart enough to realize it's all bullshit, what are they going to do? Women are smaller and weaker than men. If they refuse to let their men have sex with them, they're going to be beaten to a pulp or worse. We used to do that here in America too, and the police were complicit. In some areas (Arizona City), they still are.
Women have zero power in those regions of the world. Women only have the power they do here in the West because society at large allows them to have that power, thanks to laws and a society that believes (more or less) in gender equality and equal rights for all. It took us centuries to achieve this; you can't force societal values like this on another society by force, they have to evolve it themselves. We've been trying to push our values on many places in the world like this for decades, and it's only made things worse. Iran used to be a very progressive place, probably the most progressive in the entire Middle East. Then their democratically-elected leaders did something to piss off the US government (didn't want to give them the best prices on oil), so the CIA overthrew them and installed the Shah, who was a brutal dictator. So much for Western values of equality and justice, huh? Well the Iranians got pissed off at this, overthrew the Shah (which the US is still mad about), and installed a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. This is what happens when people react to outside interference: they become extremists. The exact same thing happened in Afghanistan, which also was a rather progressive place with pretty advanced women's rights (for the region, compared to now), until the Soviets invaded. The Islamic extremism in that region of the world is entirely the fault of the USA and the USSR.
You still haven't answered how you're going to enforce these laws. In a country where the laws require a raped woman to have 4 male witnesses, how do you think you're going to enforce your new Western laws? The locals will not stand for it, and will not help you. We have similar problems here in our inner cities where the minorities will never talk to the cops; it's basically anarchy in those places as a result. You can't have effective policing without help from the community unless you erect a totalitarian police state, and that requires enormous resources. And where are we going to get people to be police in all these countries that we now have to conquer? It's not like we're going to have tons of Westerners lining up to go live in Saudi Arabia and Iran and be policemen there, living among the locals, learning their language, and enforcing unpopular Western laws. This is the same problem every occupying power has: it takes a LOT of resources to occupy a country and force its people to the occupier's will. Or are you one of those morons who really believed the Iraqi people would greet the American invaders as liberators?
The fundamental problem with your reasoning is that you don't seem to understand that things are like this in those countries because the people in those countries like it that way.
The "civilized world" has far fewer people than the rest of the world. Are you saying that your opinion on things is more valid than everyone else's? Who made you god? If the "civilized world" decided to invade every country where some minority was being oppressed (even if that means all females in that country), they'd end up having to kill most of humanity. How else are you going to enforce your new minority-protecting laws anyway? You'd have to have a policeman for every two people out there; that's clearly impractical, so the only way to enforce your laws is to kill all the oppressors, which probably means killing all men. Plus, what are you going to do in the many cases where the oppressed minorities are themselves oppressors of some other minority (e.g. oppressed Muslim groups themselves oppress the women in their ranks)? Finally, what are you going to do about all the oppressed minorities in the "civilized world" nations? These nations haven't cleaned their own houses yet; how can they tell others how to run theirs?
It doesn't matter if you vote or not; you're a Citizen, so the government is your responsibility, just like Arab countries' governments are those citizens' responsibilities, and when they got sick enough of them, they rose up and overthrew them. If you don't like your government, it's your responsibility to overthrow it.
No, not really. It depends on which state he was in. If he was in a Red state, he effectively voted for Obama; in a Blue state, he effectively voted for Romney. In either state, if it wasn't close to being a swing state, it really didn't matter, his vote wouldn't have affected the results anyway.
Regardless, it's the fault of US Citizens that this ridiculous election scheme persists.
So you want to what? Invade and install puppet governments? Yeah, that really embodies the ideals of freedom and self-determination, doesn't it?
The governments in these countries exist because they have popular support. Very few governments exist without popular support from their people; usually, the only ones that don't are ones which have military and/or financial support from outside powers. For those without outside nations propping them up (like the Shah in Iran), they usually don't last very long, as the people get sick of things and overthrow that government and install their own (just as the Shah was overthrown and replaced with Iran's current theocratic government).